Transitioning into a Product Management role - it's a journey not a switch

I’ve been a product manager and leader for 8 years now, but I didn’t start here. I actually started as a cable systems engineer - yes, those cables that run outside your house delivering video, voice and internet to your house from Comcast, Cox and the like. I spent the first 15 years of my career in this role and industry. But I wanted something different, more challenging and with potential for growth.

I transitioned to cloud in 2016 when I joined AWS and very quickly fell in love with data and analytics. I felt like this is where I will spend the rest of my career and should find a role that I really enjoy and can feel useful and impactful.

That role was product management.

I frequently get asked from people in engineering, consulting, sales and marketing, give my own journey, what are my suggestions for them to transition into product management. Of course there is no one answer and I’m sure there are many alternatives to my approach I figured I’d share and let you decide.

It’s a journey not a switch

When people talk about moving to a PM role they often ask “do you have a suggestion to quickly move to a PM role”. Emphasis on quickly. I’m sure they understand this is a process that takes time. I also assume they’ve been thinking about this for a long time. At the point they are asking this question, they’ve already been going through the process in their heads, or tried applying to some jobs, for some time. Now, they are ready to make the move.

Before you even start on this journey, I urge you to pause and do some research. Don’t get swept up by social media and sensational posts about product management - positive or negative. Talk to other PMs in different industries and size companies. Understand their day to day responsibilities, incentives and career ladders in those environments. Ask about their happiness and personal and professional growth progress. Only then do your own work to compare all of those aspects against your expectations from a PM role.

Talking to other PMs will help build a strong mental model to help you decide. Ask them these questions:

1. What 2-3 tasks you love to do in your job and 2-3 tasks you can do without?

2. How are you measured? How does your boss know you delivered value?

3. How do you expand your scope? What do you need to do to get more responsibly?

4. How do you make difficult decisions in your role?

These questions are designs to give you insight into what a PM needs to do to be successful and happy at their job - common tasks to be done, gauging success, growth and bureaucracy. Pay close attention to the answers. People have difficulty talking about themselves and often will switch to talk about “us” and “we” and “the team”. Stop them and ask them to be specific about what they do in those situations.

I encourage you to listen 95% of the time and only speak when you’re asking questions. It will be hard but try to be aware of this. Silence is ok, it lets people collect their thoughts.

Once you have a solid understanding of the PM role, what it looks like in different companies and industries, you should consider whether it’s a good fit for you. Talk it out with loved ones, friends, co-workers, etc. It shouldn’t be a solitary decision.

Understanding the market

Product management responsibilities are different across industries - software, manufacturing, pharma, finance, etc. and functions - vendor, customer or service provider.

It’s important to pick an industry you find interesting and be proactive to dive deep and understand it from all sides. As a PM, understanding your industry, customers, competitors, what’s hot/what’s not, pain points, trends, etc. is critical to being successful.

When I started my journey into Product, I was new to data and analytics. But when I decided on this path, I spent 5-8 hours every day (of my own time) reading, watching, and interacting on social to build my view of the industry and layout of the market - winners, losers, trends, and common pain points.

When someone wanted to know who has the best solution for running Apache Spark in the cloud, I had the facts. And I knew the gory detail to support my position.

To understand the market you need to dive in and spend time. This will take a few months. You need to get engaged and over time you’ll build own point of view based on lots of collected knowledge. As a PM, this knowledge is crucial to being successful.

Knowledge about an industry and the market landscape is your key to open the PM door.

Stepping into a PM’s shoes

Combining the knowledge you gained from researching the market, popular products and common challenges with the answers you got from other PM’s, you can now start operating like a PM.

When I started my journey, I spent a lot of time helping two of my customers migrate from Hive to Spark. In particular, I was their guide for Spark, given it was very new at the time. I did all of the technical research, testing and integrations on my own. I became the expert that they could rely on to speed up their migration. This knowledge allowed me to identify areas of improvement in our Amazon EMR product that would make using Spark simpler and more reliable. I used this knowledge and opportunity to reach out to the EMR product team, present the challenges I encountered, the impact they had on my customers and what I did to overcome them. I did this a few times over a period of 3-4 months. Each time I was exposed to more folks on the team. They got to know me, hear my point of view and work with me. I built trust and confidence with the service team, the one that will eventually open up the door for me to move into product management.

You may not be a PM yet, but you know (from the research) what a PM does, what’s most important to them and what makes them look good in front of their boss. Use that knowledge and solve a real pain point. If you do a great job, this is a shortcut to a PM role.

In my case, I made it easier for Amazon EMR customers to deploy new versions of Spark painlessly. Customers benefited and the PM got a new enhancement to launch and an “I did this” email to their boss :)

Promoting your experience

Your customer obsession, understanding of the market and its pain points, and bias for action and ingenuity to solve one of those pain points is the ticket to a PM job. However, no one really knows you or what you did or what you know.

You need to promote yourself and your work to be noticed by more potential employers. As with any marketing, after you identify what topic to cover, and know your target audience - PMs and PM managers, you need to create the content that will get them interested in you.

Write a blog post, record a video, build a demo, post on social media. Talk about what you did, why you did it and what impact it had. Even if it doesn’t get much reach or engagement, you created assets that you could use to promote yourself.

With content in hand, there are two common paths to promote:

1. Your personal and professional network. If you’ve been in the industry for a few years, you’ve inevitably met and connected with people. And if you haven’t, you would (or should) have connected with industry people on LinkedIn, X and Reddit - if you haven’t, get started now. Use your network to promote your content. Include a call to action (CTA) that’s not “give me a job”, but is collaborative and helpful - chat with me to learn more, let me help you implement this solution.

2. A curated list of professionals. Curate a list of PMs and PM managers at both companies and vendors that would benefit from your solution and promote your content to them. Try to research how your solution impacts them and call it out in your personal message to them. Include a helpful CTA.

In my case, after I solved the problem with Spark on EMR, I wrote a blog post explaining the process. I included step-by-step instructions for others to replicate as well as common issues and solutions. It took a few months for EMR to release the feature so there was plenty of time where my solution was needed. Every time I heard someone asking about this, I shared my post and offered to get on a call with the customer to help them through it. I got a few bites, joined calls, answered email - promptly, and learned a lot in the process. Always thinking like a PM, I improved the solution, reshaped my point of view and developed a new mental model around simplicity and ease of use that I still use today when making product decisions.

I kept plugging away. Found a way to run genome sequence analysis on EMR and wrote a blog post that even to today I still get asked about. I got 2 job inquiries from biotech firms directly from this - I didn’t take them, I don’t understand biotech at all.

Build a portfolio of thoughtful work you did to solve important pain points that would impact a user and a vendor. Develop clear messaging around why and how, then talk about it publicly for all to hear. Promote it.

Taking the leap

To this point, you’ve done a lot of work to build up your knowledge, experience, network and in the process developed mental models to help you thoughtfully create and improve products. You’re operating as a PM already, but don’t yet have the coveted title.

Hopefully following the promotion of your work you will start having conversations with PMs and PM managers. Maybe you’re not getting any offers yet, but at least you’re talking to the right folks.

Many times managers will not just offer you a job off the cuff. They will wait for you to signal interest and availability. If you’re ready, make sure they know it.

Step into the opportunity and offer to join their team to help bring your solution to more customers. To work on some new improvement ideas you have. To give them market experience and knowledge that could help build a stronger and differentiated roadmap. Sell your experience and knowledge, not just your skills.

Remember to be honest. Although you did a great job, you still lack experience with day to day PM tasks and processes. Make sure the hiring manager knows that you have this gap, but also knows you are working hard to close it - and do it. There are no excuses with all the content available online these days.

I didn’t get a PM job with the EMR team, but I was asked to support EMR and Athena as a specialized solution architect - a big step up from my original role. Then the opportunity came to take a partial-PM role with Amazon Athena. I took it and learned a ton. Finally, I was given the opportunity to be the lead PM for AWS Glue when it was first launched in 2017. Since them I kept climbing the PM ladder and couldn’t be happier with my decision to move into Product.

Final thoughts

This journey worked well for me as I changed industries (service provider —> data/analytics) and roles (systems engineer —> PM). I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but hopefully there are a few things in my journey that could help you. I understand finding a job is much harder than it used to be. As a hiring manager myself, I’m a strong believer in people who have:

1. Bias for action

2. Eager to learn

3. Deliver results.

You don’t need a university degree for those.

I encourage you to invest your time and energy on things that matter to those you want to join, and make sure they know you are the one they need.

Good luck!