How to Transition to Product Management: Strategy One - grow PM skills within your current company.

Last year, I surveyed a community of almost sixty thousand Product Managers (PMs). I asked them a simple question: "what was the main challenge for you when looking for a Product Manager role for the first time?". Not surprisingly, most of the replies were about lacking relevant product experience as the main obstacle to starting a PM career. 

Today I'd like to share the first strategy to build up this experience: grow PM skills within your current company. Depending on whether you already work in a product company or not, here is what you can do:

Scenario # 1 - you already work in a company with a Product function in place

Product function by nature is the one that connects other functions, so, likely, you are already working with PMs, and you are part of the product development process! You just need to become a slightly bigger part. 

For instance, let's say you work in Sales or Technical Sales or Customer Support. It means that you work with customers a lot; you most likely know their needs, wants, and expectations. You are probably the one who already works closely with a Product team and share customer requests and feedback. As a next step, you can analyze how your Product team prioritizes these requests and why not all of them eventually go to the product roadmap. Try to participate in meetings with your Product team to learn and give feedback based on your customer knowledge. There are plenty of opportunities for you to start contributing to the product development process, and the best way to discover them is to speak directly and openly with your Product team.

Let's take another scenario. What if you work in an internal function such as Finance, Legal, or HR? Is there an opportunity for you to gain product skills? Of course, yes, even though it will be a bit more tricky than in the previous example since you have less direct communication with the Product team. Think about internal product initiatives you can be a part of. For example, some teams test their products with internal users before releasing new versions to the public (in the product world, we call this "alpha testing"). You can volunteer to be part of the testing group. Doing so will allow you to know your company's products in detail and contribute to reporting bugs or improvement opportunities you discover. It is an excellent start to grow your product thinking and expertise.

I hope that the examples we just went through give you a pretty good perspective on how you can start acquiring product skills. To sum up, you need to find an opportunity to be closer to the PM's work in your organization, take the initiative - and rest assured, that kind of initiative would be well received! From my experience, I guarantee you that PMs always have tons of things to investigate and research, and they would gladly use the opportunity to delegate to someone eager.

Scenario # 2 - your current company don't have a product function in place

No worries, because you can get ahead with your product skills even in this case. 

First, I suggest you think about internal processes within your company you could improve. Think about your team or department - is there anything you could change in the existing methods to increase their efficiency? For example, imagine that you work in a Back-office department of a Trading company. Could you spot an opportunity to change a complex multi-step process of supplier's invoices registration to just a simple two-step procedure? If your idea is solid, you can put together a brief proposal on how to make the change. If the proposal is accepted, you can get an excellent opportunity to develop product skills and get your first product case in your portfolio. And of course, don't be shy to participate in idea implementation yourself! 

Yes, I know. This option is tricky. It involves a lot of uncertainty - you can't be sure if you would be able to spot an improvement or if your company will be willing to go ahead with its implementation - many pieces need to stick together for the whole plan to work. However, try this option before eliminating it - if you can make any progress, the story might become your killer selling point in your PM journey! 

Let me tell you a secret. Often, PM is the driver of change in the companies and faces issues with people understanding and getting on-board, so any story where you tried and made progress despite obstacles would benefit you as a PM!  

The second path you can consider is to check if your company has a Business Transformation department or team. These groups are in charge of introducing new digital technologies through changing existing business processes, and now they exist in many companies. The Digital Transformation groups do tasks very similar to what Product teams are doing - they create new products or services to delight their customers (in this case - the company's internal users). 

For instance, the Digital Transformation group might be in charge of replacing a time-consuming manual process of supplier's invoices registration with an automated one, when a special software type called RPA (Robotics Process Automation) will read an invoice and extract the data.

You can think of a Digital Transformation team as an internal product team within an organization. And by the way, the team structure somewhat resembles the structure of a "traditional" product team - it is cross-functional and consists of Solution Architects, Business Experts, Agile coaches, UX/UI Designers, Software Engineers, and more. 

If your company has this Digital Transformation team, try to create an opportunity to work with them since it can move you ahead with your product career. 

All right, we just covered the first strategy of getting product management expertise within your current company. In the next post, I'll share the second strategy you can explore.