3 things I WISH I knew before becoming a product manager

hey everyone elisa here and welcome to my channel where i talk about a lot of different things but in this video i'm going to specifically talk about product management and even more specifically i'm going to tell you the three things that i wish i knew before becoming a product manager but first i have a special request for you so turns out only 18 of my views are coming from people who are subscribed to my channel so how can you make a difference well let me tell you all you have to do is watch this video and if you enjoy it give the video a thumbs up and please subscribe that's all i ask super easy anyway let's move on all right so let's talk about the things that i wish i would have known before becoming a product manager so first things first i wish i would have known just how hard it is to be a young and inexperienced product manager so when i started product management i was 24 years old and although i had a couple years of professional experience my career was definitely in its nascent stages now if you are a product manager yourself or you've watched any of my product management youtube videos you probably know that one of the key qualities for a product manager is that they need to be able to lead without authority now on the most basic level of project management this means that a product manager needs to be able to at least lead their engineering team so that the engineering team builds what the product manager wants them to now when you're more seasoned and experienced product manager it's much easier to get people to trust that you know what you're doing but when you are a very inexperienced product person it's hard to get that trust especially from your engineering team i mean if you think about it you might be telling a group of very senior engineers what they should be doing and they probably have a lot more professional experience than you and it's kind of likely they've been at the company longer than you have so understandably they're going to question some of the decisions that you as a brand new product person might be making now i have been extremely lucky in my product management career because i have worked with pretty much exclusively extraordinary engineers but in the first year of my product management career there were multiple times where engineering team members would question my direction and sometimes they would even go above my head and confirm direction with a product director now this was super frustrating for me as a young product person but as i step back and look at the situation i realized that it's really just human nature for people to doubt or question the abilities of someone who's so brand spanking new at their job so if you are a young product manager or you are thinking about getting started in product management just know this in the first year or so of your career you are going to have to do a lot of due diligence to convince your engineering team that you know what you are talking about also you can't be upset if the engineering team wants to hear some direction from maybe your manager or a product director they want to confirm that they are building the right things and you might not have that much experience so it makes sense that they might want a little backup from someone higher up the second thing i wish i would have known before i became a product manager is this being a product manager is a huge responsibility if you are working at a tech company and you're a product manager you are literally responsible for the product that your company revolves around so if you build a product feature that is a complete flop and maybe it leads to churn or some bad press that product flop will fall on your shoulders when i was brand new to product management i was not at all used to this amount of responsibility and visibility i was experienced in a more peripheral role that probably would never have a super large impact on the company and honestly my work in that previous role probably would have never been top of mind for the ceo or for any of the board members so when i became a product manager that additional weight of responsibility was really palpable and sometimes felt overwhelming i started to feel like every single thing that i did as a product manager could end up being scrutinized by the ceo so i started getting really stressed out about just how much visibility my work was actually getting but here's the thing i like having that level of visibility i like having more ownership and feeling like i can actually make a significant impact at a company so as i became more experienced and comfortable with product management this increased responsibility and visibility actually became one of the things that i liked most about product management the third thing i wish i would have known before i became a product manager is the fact that as a product manager failure is inevitable seriously i am relatively certain that there are no product people out there with a perfect track record so as a product manager you are going to be responsible for product features that just don't hit the mark maybe customers don't like the feature as much as you thought they would or maybe they're just not willing to pay for it or who knows maybe the implementation of the feature just wasn't that great whatever the reason may be you will very likely experience failure in your product management career and this failure can have a really big impact on your product management going forward in fact i still remember the first release where i felt like i failed the release was a poor user experience it was kind of buggy and it really wasn't solving a customer problem like i hoped it would so the feature just got very low adoption and i took this as a failure and i didn't like that feeling i was pretty devastated to be honest that i failed at a product release i felt like i let people down and more importantly i felt like i was going to lose the trust of people that i worked so hard to gain but you know what i used that failed feature release to guide me in every single feature release i've done since that time i learned from that product failure and right now my product management is better because of that failure even apple has had their fair share of product failures and i mean come on no one associates apple with their failures you associate them with their massive successes so if you fail you're in the same company that steve jobs is in so you're in good company is what i'm trying to say so if you're a pm or you're an aspiring pm just know that failure is going to be part of your career but you can think of that product failure as a necessary step towards becoming a highly experienced and seasoned product manager so there you have it those are three things i wish i would have known before becoming a product manager i hope this was interesting for you and if you're an aspiring pm i hope this you know helps you know if you actually do want to pursue product management if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and if you want to hear more from me please subscribe thank you so much and i will talk to you next time bye friends [Music] you

Channel: Alisa Works

Views: 31,803

Keywords: product manager, product management, new product manager, what does a product manager do, what you should know about product management, what is product management, product management 101, what i wish i would have known, product manager role, product management in tech, what is a product manager in tech, product manager career, women in tech, career advice for teenager, career advice, career development, product manager roles and responsibilities

Id: XQg1a5vjSTw

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021