I really needed to read this. After having done several PM internships, I was always left with many insecurities. “Was I a good leader?” “Why didn’t I get more done?” Because of those insecurities, I began to hold myself in a certain way to make others (and myself) believe that I knew my product inside and out (even though I had been at the company for 3 weeks) and that I loved to socialize (I am extremely introverted). What I have learned about a product manager’s job from those experiences and from the reading however, is that being a product manager is not always about building and shipping the most features and products. It’s more so about the communicating with other teams, supporting your team members to do their jobs well, and facilitating the work.
I like to think of my most recent manager who always told me to make sure the engineers had work to do and that they felt comfortable coming to you about their work concerns. His work schedule was always clear, yet he was always talking to someone on another team, addressing our newest feature’s marketing and customer support needs (literally every question that came our way), and thinking 3 steps ahead on how to best support the team next. He did everything that the team didn’t want to think about, and he always viewed the team’s success as his own. He really just liked working with smart people! And with that, I’ve always viewed him as someone I strive to be like. We lead very differently, but his passion for his team and for his team members was something I always admired. I had a lot to learn from his initiative to reach out and talk to people who didn’t necessarily always want to talk to him.
Coming into these internships, I was terrified of ambiguity (and still am), and it’s taken three internships in product management with a good manager to finally let go of only some of that fear. I saw a product manager’s job as an obligation in the past, and now I’m able to see it as a challenge. I believe being able to lead a dance team I had a lot of expertise and seniority in helped, but in the future, I’d like to be able to lead a team the same way I do now without letting my insecurities about being the youngest person in the room sway me.
My question is this— leading with a lot of responsibility and power is hard. With associate product management being a much bigger field nowadays, what do you say to very young product managers in the beginning of their career? I specifically struggled in discussions with very senior management, but any advice would interesting to hear especially since many PMs I know transferred into the role after many years in industry doing something else.
Woohoo,
Annabelle
