A Practical Guide on how to break-in to Your First Product Management role
Inoticed there are a lot of people seeking advice on getting a good understanding of how to prep for their first Product Manager role and what to expect in this role. Often touted as the “CEO of A Product”, the Product Management role can be very ambiguous and yet very powerful role where you “Do What It Takes” (Do WIT) to ensure
- You validate that your Product has a substantial Market with an under-served Problem
- Your users’ unspoken and spoken needs are captured, internalized and understood by all stakeholders
- Your Product has an ultimate vision and a strategy that drives to acheive it
- Your Product is aligned with the Organization’s strategic goals as well as making financial sense
- You prioritize various decisions by evaluating tradeoffs on level of effort, return on investment(this could be goodwill/customer satisfaction, competitive leverage or financial benefits)
- Your users understand the product and most importantly the value that it brings
- You define success for the product, are tracking and measuring against it.
There are a lot of articles and books that go over what a great PM should do. In this post however, I wanted to provide my first hand account of the Product Management role and what to expect during your first 30–60–90 days.
DISCLAIMER: This is based on my experience so take it with a grain of salt!
I got this opportunity to be a Product Manager for an incubating Open Source Product - VMware Event Broker Appliance(VEBA) that was released as a VMware Fling at VMworld 2019. VEBA aims to extend vCenter Actions to make new Integrations and Automations possible with a focus on being event-driven and providing a readily deployable Function as a Service platform.
As someone who’s passionate about automation and aims to spend every second on this earth effectively, I was immediately drawn onto this product which provides a simple to use platform that enables fast innovation! It was a great opportunity to interact with different teams within VMware and learn more about different technologies at VMware (Kubernetes, Containers, Virtualization etc). This also provided a great platform that would help me put into practice what I had learned around Product Ideation, User centric Design and Go to market strategies from my Product Management certification with University of Washington.
Breaking in..
Here is my breakdown of how I broke into a new technology and a new role with practical examples…
30 days — Learn
The first 30 days of my Product Management experience was busy, busy, busy… I spent a lot of time on the basics —
- Installing our product (over and over again). Breaking it, Building it, Inspecting it granularly and providing feedback
- Learning from the team and understanding the team dynamics (who does what, what is their time commitment to this project, key players vs participants etc.)
- To understanding the technology, the persona and the domain, I invested in a homelab to put myself into the shoes of a System Administrator
This helped me get a good understanding of the technology, its constraints and its capabilities as well as familiarizing myself with the team.
60 days — Introspect
As I started to get the hang of the technology and its constraints, I jumped right into analysing our Product from a Product Management lens. It was research time —
- I honed in on problem that we are trying to solve and getting a foundational understanding of the problem space.
- Who are our Users (using our product) vs our Customers (decision makers)? What is most important to them?
- What are some of the existing solutions that exists or existed? Where do they excel and what are some of their gaps?
This helped me build out user personas, come up with internal and external enablement decks, build the pitch, talk about our product in webinars and build demos.
It was also during this time that COVID-19 took a hold and rocked our world. This widened the “chasm” as enterprises started preparing for the lockdowns.
90 days —Deliver
At this point, I got comfortable with the product and the technology that I started practicing “Do WIT” to dive right in, make contributions and increase our go to market effort —
- To enable our function developer persona, I built my first function to share my learnings through an article on how to build your first function
- Added valuable features through my first PR that got merged which allows integration of PagerDuty with vCenter
- To enable our function developer persona build functions faster, I made templates available to remove several layers in the process
- To further enable our users leverage the Product and its core value easily, provided a function that enables extensibility by allowing easy integration to any System with a Rest API.
- Built and launched our website to enable our users quickly learn and use our product as well as improve the discoverability of our product.
NOTE: These experiences may be specific to a PM for an OSS B2B product
Do What It Takes (Do WIT)
My ultimate message is that you Do What It Takes to contribute and ensure success for your Product. As you can see, I focussed on building credibility by getting up to speed on the technology, understanding and empathizing with our users’ painpoints, pitching in where needed to produce value for our users and most importantly — HAVING FUN! I must note that looking back, I put in a lot of hours during the 30–60–90 days but it never felt like work because I was enjoying myself by contributing, learning from my incredible team and from our customers!
Hopefully this retrospective helps give you a practical overview of what to expect as a new PM or when you transition into a role that tackles a new Technology or Product!
Keep Doing WIT!
