Searching for clues: Why would anyone want to be a Product Manager?!

It’s a fair question, and one I’ve heard a few times over the years. It often comes from Engineers, mystified about where the satisfaction in Product Management lies, given that they’re the ones actually ‘building’ something. I can see their point. On the face of it, Product Managers spend an awful lot of time in meetings (which frequently don’t feel all that productive). They have to negotiate between competing stakeholders in a way that makes a makes everyone feel heard, even when the PM is saying ‘no’ a lot (is it too much to draw a parallel with hostage negotiators!?). PMs are ultimately responsible for the product, and it’s often their neck on the line for key decisions, but when things are going well, they usually step back and hand the credit to the team that’s actually built the product. So why would anyone choose to be a Product Manager!?

If you ask a group of PMs this question you’ll get a lot of different answers, but a common one is likely to be ‘the satisfaction of solving customer problems’. I only half buy into this. Not because it’s not a worthy goal (it is) and not because it isn’t satisfying (it definitely is), but solving a customer problem only happens when you’ve shipped the product. If you only really enjoy being a PM when the product gets shipped and a customer starts using it, you could find yourself with a very long wait for satisfaction between inception and delivery. I know, I know - hopefully you’re iterating rapidly and getting customer feedback along the way, but it can still be a lengthy process until you actually ship a finished product that truly solves anyone’s problem - particularly if you’re working on an early stage product.

So, seriously… why would anyone be a Product Manager?

I love coaching and mentoring PMs. I find hiring them fascinating and I thoroughly enjoy getting my teeth into the vision and strategy side of PM work. But there’s a reason I keep coming back to hands-on roles, working directly as a PM within a product delivery team.

It’s because I get to play Detective.

As a child, I loved a good Agatha Christie book (until I realised the culprit was always the least likely person that had cropped up for only half a sentence in chapter one… but that’s an issue for another day). That process of piecing together the puzzle - a throwaway comment here, an intriguing piece of evidence there, until the bigger picture becomes clear and you know ‘whodunnit’… well, there’s a reason that crime fiction and drama have always been so popular!

Being a Product Manager is a lot like being a Detective (stay with me here…). In order to get to where they need to be, they need to talk to many witnesses (customers and stakeholders), to understand their motives and the meaning behind what they’re actually saying. They need to sort out the signal from all the ‘noise’ they hear and to piece together the jumble until it all makes sense. They’re both working backwards: tracing a clear path back from crime scene to culprit and motive, or from finished product back to the necessary first item in the backlog.

So what makes a good Detective… or Product Manager?

Ask any hiring manager what they look for in a PM and you’re likely to get a worryingly long list of attributes! But there are a few that stand out near the top of most lists:

Detective skill number 1: Curiosity / Nosiness

Good PMs have to be curious - about everything from their customers, to the market, to new technologies - they have to be the kind of person that’s always keen to know more. They’re a sponge for information and they take every opportunity to learn. In particular, they have to be curious about people. If I was being less generous, I might admit that a lot of us PMs are just plain nosey! We enjoy finding out what makes people tick. We ask lots of questions (mostly beginning with ‘why…?’) and we’re usually pretty good at retaining that information. Like a Detective, we’re trying to understand motive - what do our customers really want, even if they tell us they want a faster horse…? We’re also relationship builders. We spend a lot of time getting to know people, understanding their skills and interests, building a network inside and outside a business, because we know that often within this network lie the answers we’re looking for.

Detective skill number 2: Empathy

As they ask their hundredth question for the day, PMs need the questioning skills of a Detective but also a high degree of empathy. They need to be able to put themselves in the shoes of their customers in order to figure out how the product will work for them, just as a Detective needs to think like a criminal in order to catch one. They need to really buy into whatever their customer is trying to achieve in order to communicate these needs clearly to the development team, and also to motivate them - why does it matter if this problem gets solved for the customer or not? It’s not by chance that Product Managers are often fascinated by people and by psychology - ultimately, building products is a people problem, with people-based solutions.

Detective skill number 3: An eye for both the detail and the big picture

Sometimes as a PM you’ll hear a little snippet of information that’s not particularly relevant to your current work. Then suddenly, you’ll hear another, seemingly unrelated conversation and, remembering the snippet, you’ll be able to connect two dots where nobody else had seen the connection, and solve a problem. Just as when a Detective solves a case, these connections are often invisible to most other people in the business - it’s the Product Manager that’s in the right place at the right time and with the right mentality to spot the connections, join the dots and see the whole picture. To do this well, they need to have an eye for both the tiniest detail and a macro vision of where the business is trying to get to, and they’ll spend their time yo-yoing between these two states all day, every day. It’s probably no coincidence that Product Managers often have visual ‘boards’ on Miro or similar, that look very like a Detectives ‘clue’ board (minus the red string) - helping them to piece together the all information they find until they can stand back from their ‘discovery’ work and see their way forward.

Product Management: it’s not just about the big reveal.

I firmly believe that to love Product Management, you have to love the process. It’s not enough to find satisfaction in seeing your customers use your product - it’s the day-to-day, step-by-step process of piecing it together that needs to give you a buzz. Once I realised this was what I enjoyed about the role, I could see elements of it in other parts of my life too. As a member of a Mountain Rescue team, I’m often called out on searches for missing people. I’ve just started the process of learning to be a Search Manager, and I can already see that it’s something I’ll probably really enjoy. It’s all about piecing together the incoming information from all the search parties out looking for the missing person and turning that information into the bigger picture that shows where that person might be. It’s about putting yourself in the missing person’s shoes and coming up with scenarios around their state of mind and motive, in order to better direct search teams to places where they’re likely to be found. The information can sometimes be drip fed into the Search Manager in ‘Control’, or it can come in like a firehose, with all the teams looking for radio airspace to give an update, while the Search Manager tries to keep on top of where they all are, what they’re all doing and, crucially, how their eyes on the ground are leading towards the ‘find’. It’s exciting and challenging in equal measure.

Product Management can be very stressful: coping with tight deadlines, many constraints and rapid changes in direction. It can also be lonely (the chain-smoking, film noir Detective up at 3am pondering a nagging, half-remembered clue is a closer representation of many of us PMs than maybe we’d like to admit!). I’m not sure I’d be cut out for a life of pitting myself against criminal masterminds, and I’m sure the Detectives out there can think of countless skills they possess that are rare in the average Product Manager! But if, like me, you love finding the clues along the way as well as the big ‘reveal’ at the end, then hopefully you’d find Product Management a rewarding career - even if we’re yet to be the hero in a nail-biting Netflix drama. Who knows - maybe that day will come…