My first product management gig was in high school, long before I ever knew what a product manager was.
When I became the programming lead for my high school’s FRC robotics team my senior year, I was left with a team emerging from years of drama, a lack of organization, with more members than ever before. How was I going to manage a 20 person software team, made up of people who had never coded before, in a competitive and time-sensitive project, when the only precedent for team organization had been a large group of people huddled over one person’s computer?
As months of training began before the intensive build season started up in January, sexier topics like computer vision and autonomous path planning became less important to me than the granularities of how our code and libraries were structured, how our IDEs were setup, git branching structure and, most fascinatingly to me, how we delegated tasks. I dove into kanbans and gantt charts, learned how to use pull requests and make unit tests. It shocked me how little I was actually coding anymore — at the time, I had no idea a product manager could be its own role.
I think what drew me to all of this most of all, however, was that it was the closest I could interface with my teammates in a programming role. I didn’t want to retreat into a corner with a mechanism for a few hours — I wanted to walk around and answer questions, discuss ideas, connect people to each other and provide resources. I often wonder that if it weren’t for an internalized stigma that if I wasn’t coding, I wasn’t doing work, I would’ve simple taken on product managing my team fully. I know that I felt the biggest gratification seeing the successes of not the components I worked on individually, but the components I taught how to make or supported in their process.
Sometimes, those components were not robotic at all, but the community and family that had formed. It’s a great expression of how the definition of a PM changes from team to team, company to company — I think who your team is shapes that definition more than any company mission or strategy. Sometimes (maybe more metaphorically in the real workforce), that definition includes just being a friend.
Question for the author: as a fellow musician, I’m no stranger to the power play and politics that can occur in a band setting. Have you found analogues and transferable skills as a product manager? What’s the hardest thing about being in a tech job from being a musician?
-Nathan Sariowan
