Chapter 19
IN THIS CHAPTER
Thinking ahead about what your career goals are and how to reach them
Building important industry expertise
Over a long career, product managers can work on many different products in vastly different fields. One product manager we know started in computer hardware and is now vice president of product management at a health insurance company. The great news is that the process for remaining employable and up-to-date in skills and your domain knowledge is the same for any product manager. In fact, over time and with practice, you can make the transition from one industry to another relatively painlessly if you have to or want to. This chapter shows you how to set appropriate product management career goals and achieve the best career results possible.
It used to be that companies would create career paths and development plans for their employees. These days, very few companies do this, so you as a product manager need to take the initiative and be responsible for your own career advancement. By setting goals with target dates, and creating a specific plan for where you want to go and how you want to get there, you increase your odds of success dramatically.
The first step in setting your career goals is to determine where you want to go. Do you want to become a CEO, general manager, or vice president? Or do you want to become a great product manager and spend your career working with innovative teams building great products? Are you interested in managing people and helping your employees become great at what they do? Or do you prefer being an individual contributor?
There is no right or wrong answer here. It really comes down to what motivates you, what you enjoy, and what you’re good at. Many product managers thrive without ever moving up into management and becoming corporate executives. And you can find many examples of people who started as product managers and became CEOs, such as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Scott Cook, founder and former CEO of Intuit; and Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer.
Product management is a great training ground for moving up because it requires you to learn, interact with, and understand all parts of the business. Figure 19-1 gives you the stepping stones of the base level of product manager to CEO.
When you set your goals, make sure that they’re ambitious yet achievable. If you’re a brand-new product manager, you won’t be a vice president of product management in one or two years unless you work for a very small company. In a larger company, you may be able to achieve that transition within five to seven years. Your goals have to inspire you and at the same time be completely believable and achievable.
Here’s an example of a SMART goal: Within one year (time-bound), I will attend a product management training class (measurable) that addresses every step of the product life cycle (specific) to increase my skill level as a junior product manager. I am prepared to attend the class regardless of whether the company pays for it (achievable and realistic).
When you’ve set your goals, you’re ready to build the plan for how you’re going to get there. Figure 19-2 shows the components of a typical career plan for a product manager.
Here is a breakdown of the career plan components:
www.svpma.org
.Becoming active online: Having an online presence and participating in online activities are important for staying current in product management and keeping your name in front of colleagues. A good place to start is by creating a LinkedIn profile (if you don’t already have one) at www.linkedin.com
. You can check out LinkedIn For Dummies by Joel Elad (Wiley) for help with creating a profile. After your LinkedIn profile is in good shape, start to connect with as many people as you can, beginning with the other product managers and executives at your company. Then every time you’re at an event or are networking, invite the people you meet to connect.
Become part of product management groups on LinkedIn, such as the 280 Group: Product Management & Product Marketing group, which has over 35,000 members and hosts great discussions. These are great places to learn best practices and ask others about how to solve difficult challenges that arise. Join the Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM) at www.aipmm.com
and participate in its monthly webinars.
You can take your career plan and turn it into an action plan. By writing it down, you can mark specific steps and make yourself accountable. Break your plan down into three milestone points one, three, and five years out. Here’s an example of such a plan:
An important success factor in moving forward in your career is to genuinely care about others and to help them out without hesitation. People who are willing to go that extra mile for someone else find that the reward always comes back tenfold. For example, if someone you know is looking for a job and you connect him with an opportunity he lands, chances are he’ll go out of his way for you in the future if you need help.
In addition to becoming great at product management skills, it is also important to increase your knowledge of your market and any technologies that your products will rely on. These need to be part of your goals and career plan. For example, are you going to pursue a growing market and make your mark in terms of your career in that particular market? If so, you’ll want one of your goals to be to learn more about that market than anyone else.
Mastering the foundational and advanced skills of product management is critical to being a successful product manager. But that’s only half the equation. To build your credibility and become a product leader, you also have to become the de facto expert in your market, and you’ve to have enough technical knowledge to be credible.
Here are some tasks you can work into your routine to increase your expert status in terms of your market and customers:
For some product management jobs, you don’t need to have technical expertise. If you’re working on a nontechnical consumer product, a service that requires no technology development, or other products and services that have no technology component, you may be able to do the job without establishing a base level of technical competence. You should, however, be known as the subject matter expert in the area that your product serves.
No, you don’t need to have an engineering degree or know how to write software. But you have to understand enough about the underlying technology, standards, jargon, and acronyms being used to be able to talk intelligently with your engineers.
You can get up to speed in these areas in many ways. You can take courses at a local college or junior college or look for free online courses from organizations like Coursera. You can read books on the most important technologies for your product. One great idea is to ask your engineers to explain the basics of how the technology works. Engineers like being experts and are often more than happy to help you, but take good notes. They won’t want to do it on a weekly basis.