Ijaola David
So I have been a product manager for a while and I moved from wanting to be a front-end developer to doing UX research and now product management. I found product management because of Nigeria, the product managers handle most of the research and I actually totally enjoy the role. I put this article out here as a guide that reflects the steps I have taken so far.
What is Product Management?
Product Management is a field popular in tech that is not very mature. We are not exactly doctors or engineers that have existed for centuries. Product management is probably just 2-3 decades old and shares similarities with project management. There are various kinds of product managers and they range from Core Product Manager, Product Growth Manager, Platform Product Manager, etc.
Let’s focus on core product management The primary goal of a core product manager is to discover products, manage the development, launch and ensure the effectiveness of the product for its users. What makes the product manager important in all of this is the need for strategic alignment throughout the product’s lifecycle.
Let’s break it down!
Discovery: User Needs and Business Goals
Before we design frames and write code for a product, we discover these products. It all starts from an Idea or in more ideal cases; a problem. During this phase, the team comes up with a hypothesis and it can be a simple statement (e.g The cost of Uber is becoming unbearable and there needs to be an alternative, there need to be better ways of sending money).
The next step is to validate your hypothesis, and this means to ensure you are out to prove that the problem you are solving is significant enough that people would buy a solution. When validating, I like to look at two things and that is the market, the customer, and the user. Most times, the customer and user might be the same. Your output as a PM should be a research brief or case study doc.
Development: Stories, Wireframes, Screens, Code, and Tests
The development process starts with writing user stories and mapping out the requirements to communicate the product specifications. You can draw out wireframes or create a user journey flow that will pass down to the designer, the next thing to do is pass down the screens to developers and test the product.
The output for you as a PM is Product Requirement Documents, Business Requirement Documents, Functional Requirement Documents, System Design Docs. It all depends on where you work and their preferred way of communicating the product specifications.
Launch: Sell, Collect Feedback and Keep Shipping
At this point of ”producting”, you need to get your product out there and involve as many people as possible. At this stage, you will have to meet with the growth and marketing team, let them know what the product can do, agree on feedback channels, and get recommendations from there. In this case, your output as a PM is a demo or a deck.
Strategic Alignment
This is a very important aspect of your job, you find that there are a lot of processes and people to interact with during the product lifecycle. It is our job as PMs to ensure everyone understands why you are building the product, why you are using the frameworks you use, why it’s going to be web or mobile, why it’s going to react native or flutter. You constantly have to make people understand why, and the best way to do this is to make them contribute to the why.
So from ideation, involve your team and leverage their experience and creativity. The product manager has no authority and that is why it’s never good enough to just tell people why they should build stuff or what they should build. There are methodologies and frameworks that help streamline the work, one popular methodology is the Agile methodology in which you have the scrum framework.
How To Get Jobs
Get An Education: Whether it’s a nano-degree, a youtube playlist or a newsletter. Try to get consistent and structured learning that will introduce the basics but please keep in mind that product management is only structured at a basic level. The nitty-gritty of the work requires work experience.
Create Content: Start a blog, newsletter or do Tik Tok videos on products, about the field. Just make sure you prove somehow that you know what you are doing and are ready to get your hands dirty. You can start by summarising articles that you read and maybe connect them to a product you fancy.
Connect and Network: Join a community, message people in your favourite companies, enter group chats with your peers, jump on clubhouse and grab the mic to ask questions even if the answer is obvious, just try your best to make people in the field remember your name or your handle.
Start Creating Solutions: I did this by recommending solutions to problems using hypothetical PRDs, articles, etc. Explore gaps that might exist in a product or company and come up with solutions to these problems. Recommend the solutions to the companies. It’s a long shot and you might be aired but it adds to your content and sooner or later someone will see your worth.
Volunteer to work or Intern: I hate to do free work but the truth is that it works because people can start recommending you. Make sure you are doing free work in the field so that you can easily move up the ladder in that same field. Internships are another great way to get started because they provide a high chance of retention. I interned at Helium Health and no matter what happens, I can always shoot my supervisors a mail.
Conclusion
In product management, experience is everything. The steps above are quite linear and fluid but it gets complicated. It never works in the exact way you expect it too which is why as a beginner, you need to be very decisive about where you start your journey as a product manager. Always look for a team that does good work or reach out to industry leaders that know where they are at. If you don’t feel fulfilled at a company then please move but ensure that you work with people that you can rely on and ensure you are doing meaningful work because your ability to leverage experience and data from past successes or failures will set you up for product leadership. It’s not going to be an easy ride to get your first role but nothing good comes easy and soon enough your biggest worry won’t be getting jobs but doing good and impactful work.
This is a product cycle special and we are a community of product people in Naija that discuss strategic issues in the African tech space. If you are an engineer, designer, marketer, product manager, VC analyst, etc. The product cycle community is for you. If you are looking to break into Product Management. Do join us.