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2. Do You Want to Be a Product Manager?

So far the role of product manager probably sounds pretty good. Maybe a bit broad and over-leveraged (scary!) but able to play a pivotal role in what actually gets done that expands the range of influence beyond all but the most domineering UX leader.

If you’re already practicing UX in the context of a product team, or if you’re preparing to transition to a product-oriented organizational model, or being asked to fulfill a quasi-product role in addition to your UX responsibilities, then you’ve got good reasons for wanting to understand what makes product managers tick and what product management is really all about.

Beyond that lies the idea of fully moving from a UX-defined role to becoming a product manager yourself, full time. Maybe you’ve started wondering if you want to be a product manager, or even beginning to think that yes, in fact you do want this, you do want to be a product manager. If that’s part of your reason for picking up this book, then this is a good opportunity to practice the old “Five why’s” method of inquiry invented by precocious children, starting with the basic question:

Putting aside the challenges involved in doing any of that effectively, there are a number of reasons why it might have occurred to you that product management might represent a viable career growth direction for UX practitioners:

Professional and career

Ambition

Evolving interests

UX career paths vary across organizations, for sure, but within the realm of design and related practices such as user research and UX writing the most common fork in the road is the matter of becoming a manager of other designers or aspiring to become a principal, leading by example as an individual contributor.

At least in some organizations, there is the possibility of a third path, one that might be thought of more like the “becoming a manager” path, and even less purely about design, which is becoming a product manager at some level and then climbing that ladder.

At Yahoo, before it was subsumed into Verizon, the VP of UED (user experience design) for the search product team, Larry Cornett, moved “up” into the role of VP of Product for that same team. Senior director of UED Luke Wroblewski took on a product role as well. This is the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach.

Figure 2.1: At Yahoo, I saw Larry Cornett and Luke Wroblewski made the leap from User Experience to Product leadership roles.

So there are times when the organization may steer you in this direction by offering more or better or richer opportunities on the product track than they do on the UX track. (Another option in such a situation is to fight for better career and professional opportunities for UX practitioners, mind you, but it’s always worthwhile to assess the realities of a given situation as you assess how best to maneuver through it, just as a rock climber will spend some time studying the rock face before plunging onward and upward.)

Take the time to examine these pressures, which are fundamentally external. Be aware of them but look also to your own internal and intrinsic motivations to make sure your chosen path aligns with all of them as much as possible.

Another driver for some is surely the opportunity to have the final say on some important things. Despite the stereotype of UXers answering every question with “it depends,” it can actually be frustrating for many to push hard for a strong point of view, stand up for users, make the case for research and design iteration, and still get overruled by someone in a different role who may or may not seem to fully understand the importance of user-centered design.

The urge to become the decider, at least on some things, the desire to be in the room when important things are being discussed and weighed, can also steer one’s thoughts toward product management. This temptation may strike one’s UX colleagues as a flirtation with “the dark side,” or even a selling out of UX ideals in the service of lust for power. (If only.)

There is nothing wrong with ambition. Wanting to have a say in things is also reasonable! At the same time, be careful what you wish for. There are two possible unintended consequences of getting more powerful in your org by wearing a product hat:

Neither of those things will necessarily happen, but if ambition is your sole reason for looking into product roles, the risk is a lot higher.

In his essay 44 Signs You Are Becoming a Product Manager, John Cutler (head of product research and education at Amplitude) gives a preview of the slings and arrows that go along with the decision-making responsibility of a product manager. He starts by asking “How do you know you’re on your way to earning your PM/PO wings? What signals progress? Your first release? Getting “certified” ? Putting together a pretty roadmap?” before saying No, it’s these 44 signs (reprinted with permission):

One side effect you are guaranteed to experience is the burden of all this decision making. Like the proverbial dog who caught the car, you’ll inevitably at some point feel overwhelmed by the weight of critical decisions landing in your in box. It comes with the territory. Mind you, some people thrive on it!

As you’ll see in Chapter 3, product work and UX work do exist on a spectrum with some overlap, some gray area, which tends to be at the strategic, system-level, big-picture, research and data-informed, concept model end of the spectrum.

For folks who already prefer that mix of tasks and specialties over the more production-oriented design craft end of the UX spectrum, transferring into product management can represent a way to continue moving in this direction, toward orchestration.

It’s also possible to become more interested in other aspects of making software that don’t bear on design as directly, even if they may still keep an intense customer focus. The business aspects of a product manager role rarely impinge on the creative world of user experience research, strategy, and design.

For sure, some UX leads end up getting deeply knowledgeable and wise about the business aspects of the experiences they are responsible for (and this in turn can lead to more informed choice down the road about whether to shift to a more business- oriented role a such as product manager or to stay in the UX lane and hang onto that savvy as yet another superpower in your kit).

Others among us are moving through a series of roles. There are engineers who become UX designers and then see in product management a way to combine those aptitudes in a single role.

In many ways, these are the best reasons for exploring a change of role, driven as they are by your internal and intrinsic needs and interests. At the same time they do not alone guarantee a successful satisfying transition if the organizational support is absent.

All these reasons are legitimate and as we’ve seen they all come with their own caveats and consequences. You don’t need a good reason to explore a potential opportunity to grow. But do take some time to think about the tradeoffs and opportunity costs involved in pursuing a product management career or in sticking with user experience.

Look especially closely at whether you are falling for a “grass is greener” fallacy that romanticizes the advantage of the alternative or the road not taken and minimizes the mowing, weeding, and manure spreading that produced your neighbor’s green lawn.

In particular, UX practitioners considering the fork in the career path known as product management need to understand the day-to-day realities of doing the job

As UX folks start to rub elbows with product people you become acutely aware of (and possibly even worried about) the gray area where responsibilities overlap. And, for sure, the two roles do share many values (user-focus! research! iteration! testing/measuring! etc.).

This focuses more attention on these shared concerns, and can somewhat obscure the ways in which the roles differ, so you should know that the jobs are quite different indeed.

Anybody considering product management as a career should ask themselves two questions, first:

This is because product management is not a design job. It requires some familiarity with design of course and a deep sensitivity to user experience concerns, but the day-to-day tasks and craft work of product management rarely involve pushing pixels.

Oh, there’s a bit of diagram-making for sure, and there are a lot of PMs out there making wireframes and even prototypes, but even those folks spend the vast majority of their time working with words and data, not pictures.

So if you love spending your days in Figma or Sketch or Swift, then you might not enjoy giving most or all of that up for the product role and responsibility. Instead of living inside creative art-making software packages, you’re likely to spend the bulk of your time using agile scrum project management tools such as Jira (with Confluence usually), doing things like:

Where else will you spend your time? In email (or Slack, but definitely writing and replying to a lot of messages), and in your calendar software, scheduling meetings that don’t interrupt makers from their most productive times of day, facilitating agile rituals typically on bi-weekly cadence (planning, daily standups, demos, retrospectives), and reporting to the larger company, leadership, or board on roadmap updates quarterly if not monthly.

And that’s just the writing part.

You really do have to like numbers, math, analysis, spreadsheets, and databases to be a great product manager. It’s a very metric-informed, evidence-based practice. Some of the most valuable signals you get about what to ship next and how the things you’ve already shipped are faring comes in the form of massive waves of data that yield up their insights only through manipulation, reframing, study, and deep familiarity.

For UX designers, the material you work with is the substance of the experience: the words (copy), the visual metaphors, the interactions, and the broader experience. Just as a potter develops out of necessity and aptitude a subtle and sophisticated feel for the texture, granularity, and performative properties of their clay, a UX practitioner develops a similar feel for the digital software materials with which they craft affordances.

For product managers, in a very real sense, the material you work with is this welter of data (alongside qualitative signals, of course), which has its own texture, granularity, and informative properties. It requires deep immersion for sustained periods to develop the necessary feel for your own product’s data.

Much in the way (I imagine) a farmer might notices something amiss in the sounds of the livestock in the yard or the number of eggs produced today or this past week, a product manager develops very sensitive antennae (or if you’re a pop culture enthusiast, call it a “Spidey Sense”) that react fast when the morning report on key northstar metrics herald an unexpected dip in daily active users or a spike in sales.

If you love charts, graphs, visualizing multi-dimensional data, numerical analysis, sleuthing, and “living in your data,” then you’re going to love product management.

So you know what your days are like now doing UX. Depending on your role you may spend time conducting and analyzing user interviews and other forms of research and discovery, sketching, exploring and iterating on design solutions at a high or detailed level, critiquing and reviewing the design work of colleagues, developing and testing prototypes, crafting production ready interfaces, and so on.

You may spend entire days with minimal human communication and maximum time with a drawing package filling your large screen, lost in the creative flow of finding ever more satisfying solutions to challenging problems.

Not all days are the same, but there are recognizable patterns.

Similarly, product manager workdays change depending on where you are in the rhythmic development cadence, on the role you play on the team, and on the approach to product management pursued by your organization.

But there are recognizable patterns.

So, for example, across multiple product management roles I can synthesize a generic typical day that would fit many real days across those years, something like this.

At home / before official workday starts

4:30 am — wake up in the middle of the night and remember something important that nobody else is tracking. Either jot it down on the night-table or get out of bed, move to the home office, and update a jira ticket or reply to a message before getting some water and going back to sleep. (Maybe answer a few other overnight messages from remote teams first, while you’re up.)

6:30 am — get out of bed, look at Slack on phone, reply to some messages. Do morning routine: coffee, shower, dress, coffee, breakfast, email, Slack, Jira, coffee.

7:30 am — review daily update of northstar metric data. If anything seems interesting, dig into the source data and try not to lose track of time. If anything turns up that is threatening or promising and immediately actionable, notify other people of the issue and start a process of figuring out how to address it in time.

At work / real “workday:

9:00 am — facilitate daily standup with team (developers, sometimes the UX folks but they don’t always show up, other contributors), in this case functioning as a defacto PO (product owner):

9:30 to about 2:30— A patchwork of:

2:30 to about 5:30

At home again / after “workday”

6:30 to ??

Finally have time to

But that’s just me, so for the rest of the book, you’ll hear from other product managers sharing a typical day in their lives, to give you a broader perspective on the various flavors of product management and environments in which it’s practiced.

Whether you came into this merely curious or were on the fence but now you are positive that UX is the life for you and the siren song of product management no longer sounds so sweet, it will still behoove you as a UX practitioner to understand product management as well as you possibly can, among the many respected adjacent disciplines you work with and might even feel relieved that somebody wants to do that part of the work that you appreciate without feeling a desire to do yourself.

If you’re still unsure, the rest of the book should help provide you what you need to better inform that career decision.

And regardless of where you feel you are headed in the long term, you can still derive benefits from absorbing the product frame of mind, one in which you view yourself not just as a UX or user-centered designer but also as product designer (or researcher, strategist), working alongside PMs and product engineers.

Likewise, if you’re one of the many UX folks being pressed into fulfilling some of the non-design aspects of product work without having (or wanting) a PM title, working either in the absence of PMs, filling in as best you can, or in an organization that distributes more product work to UX people, these insights can prove helpful to you.

So even if you merely seek to understand the product point of view and work more productively with product managers, read on to foster that deeper understanding and better collaboration.

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What is Diabetic Retinopathy?

2. Do You Want to Be a Product Manager?

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