Principle of Product - Be An Industry Agnostic PM

As a Product Manager, I want to have skillset that allows me to manage software development in any industry, no matter what my precious experience might be.

An old boss of mine (now a successful tech exec at a unicorn ) once (roughly) uttered the following words.

To be a good product manager, it should not matter at all what industry they are building tools for. You should be able to jump into any problem, identify the dynamics at play, pinpoint the needs of the users, and execute.

Many in product find this a hot take because, as a product manager, you’re literal job description has a bullet point stating you are a subject matter expert to the business you build for.

What my old boss, who we’ll refer to as brown belt, spoke to here are the core skills of product are universal - they have nothing to do about the subject, and have everything to do with the process.

Subject matter expertise¹ is a lower-order need and can be learned on the job.

Let’s dig in.

Deconstructing any problem

At the core of all product management work is the deconstruction of the underlying dynamics of any “Issue” needing to be addressed. It’s the very first step of any product work - understanding what is really going on.

This can happen at a small scale such as when a single user complains about a particular bug, or at a large scale when your company is attempting to break into an entirely new vertical².

You must define what the user is attempting to accomplish with your tool. It’s the universal first step of any good product work.

Where SME comes in handy is in your innate orientation on how the user thinks about a problem - perhaps you were the user at one point! This saves you time, as you can intuit the process another PM might need to go and figure it out from scratch.

In the words of product, however, this is a nice to have, and not a must-have. 

A great PM is resourceful, and the first step to building any feature is the fact-finding mission. When conducting discovery³, be prepared to walk in completely blind with the first task at hand of simply figuring out who to talk to. Once you know who, you must track them down, entice them to speak, and extract as much info as humanly possible.

This will result in some dead ends. It could even result in you realizing your proposed feature needs to be thrown out! It does not matter where you start, it matters where you end up. You must go into the dark and shed light.

A Sample Method to Deconstruct User Workflow

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**Programming Break**:

The rest of this article is for paid subscribers only, where I’m getting into a live example of deconstructing a process, and other universal skills of product management.

Additional White Belt Services

1. Got a product resume you need to up-level? I’ll review your resume, then talk tactics on a call.

2. Are you struggling with a product problem today? I’ll hop on a call and help you put forth the game plan to solve your issues.

3. Got a big interview you want to nail? I’ll act as a hiring manager and conduct a mock interview, with a follow-up after to review your performance and improve tactics and strategies.

Now, back to the article