Here comes the first installation of the ‘Day in the Life’ series. Why are we reading about what jobs other people have?

High schoolers graduate and go to college without knowing what jobs are out there. Freshmen pick their majors and change them over and over again without knowing how it affects (or doesn’t affect) their future. Graduates take an entry-level job, grind out 40 hours a week and come home to crash on the couch to binge reruns on Netflix, wondering if they’re the only one who hasn’t found their passion.

We want to know what you do, why you do it, how you got there and what makes you good at it. We want to know if it’s for us, why we’d like it and what we need to do to get it.

What is your name? How old are you and what do you do? How long have you been there?

Hi Max!  My name is Patrick, I’m 26 years old and I’ve been a Software Product Manager at a medical device company for about 3 years.

How did you find out about product management? Did you know that this job existed before?

I had never heard of Product Management, and it turns out not many people have. Business schools typically offer things like Accounting, Finance and Marketing. Not a major called Product Management. The closest thing might be found in an Entrepreneurial Business course, except from experience those courses typically help you practice “coming up with big ideas” instead of managing a series of product processes.

I usually explain it like this. Companies get big. Really big. Thousands of people working in a hundred different departments, each with a very specific task. Accounting manages the books. Sales takes orders. Development churns out product. It’s the most popular way to grow a business: hire quality people and let them do what they’re best at.

But as a company gets bigger and adds more and more products things go haywire pretty quickly. Suddenly the accounting team doesn’t know what they’re issuing an invoice for and they’ve never heard of that product. The Sales team has 30 things to sell and can’t remember the difference between Thing A and Thing B. So the company segments, and segments, and specializes, and specializes. Product Management is an attempt to beat the org chart. It’s about making someone in charge of a concept, not a task. If they own the concept, the tasks all fall in line beneath it.

What is a typical day like at work?

Most days it’s like trying to build an engine using parts that would much rather do their own thing. My products depend on a lot of cogs performing all the time – so my job as a manager is to paint a picture of what we want to do together, and then motivate the various parties to make progress. Kind of like being the only one with the instructions in a room full of mechanics.

A day in the office:

8:00 – Catch up on email from the sales team (requests for customer visits, questions about products). We have a large sales force working around the clock (from different countries) who often reach out to me to answer their potential customers’ questions about the products and the future of the products.

9:00 – Troubleshoot customer support tickets, and prioritize help from the development team.

10:15 –  Brief Scrum meeting with the development to team to discuss progress, followed by some direct work with the developers on writing or clarifying user stories and featuring.

12:00 – Usually some kind of sandwich. PB&J, typically. I get made fun of for eating like a 9-year old.

1:00 – Update to the management team. I present a lot, internally and to customers. Internally it’s often to our management team on strategy, commitments, costs, processes. Really any and everything. They look to me whenever my products come up.

2:00 – Sales Demo. Even though my job is to train the people who need to sell our products, I’ll occasionally do it myself when the stakes are higher and the customer wants an expert.

3:30 – Afternoons in the office I try to disappear to a conference room or something and get out of the weeds. I’ll focus on my 1-3 year product plan, read up on some clinical research, dig into sales numbers from the past year, tweak a cost projection or a revenue model in Excel, or work on requirements for the next sprint. I have to carve away time to do the really meaningful stuff, since much of my day can get consumed by the short term “urgent” needs of the product.

5:00 – Head home and let the dog out.

You mentioned customer visits and a distributed sales team. Does that mean that you travel to visit clients?

I travel for one of two reasons, typically. I’m either presenting or doing research. Sometimes that means I present in order to do research. In any case, I usually travel to visit our EMS and Hospital customers.

One great thing about my company is that we have a global product so our customers are all over North America, South America, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and now much of greater Asia. They all have the same goals of giving their patients better treatment and saving lives.

It’s my job to understand how our company can help. I’ll present our product plan or our existing product and gather feedback, or I’ll feverishly take notes while a Medical Director or an EMS Chief talks to me about a new initiative they’re working on or a study they’ve got planned for next year.

Travel isn’t consistent. I might be in the office for a solid month, then on the road for another month. Or it might be that I’m gone a handful of days across the month. (I know, you’re worried about my dog. Well don’t- I have a wonderful network of people who take care of him when I’m gone. I’m very lucky.)

What do you think are the best and worst parts about being a software product manager?

At the risk of sounding like I’m stuck in my terrible two’s, I’d have to say that ownership is the best part of my job. I’m completely responsible for the success or failure of my products, which means that I’m responsible for everything from strategy and design to the sales process and the eventual support process. I write user stories, I participate in our Agile development process, I set pricing, I create marketing platforms, I create a sales channel, and I report our success or failure to the people who run the business as a whole. It’s a lot like running a business within a business.

It turns out that’s the worst part, too. The back hand of ownership is pressure. First of all, I’m expected to be an expert in the healthcare industry. I work with people who were healthcare providers for 20 years before coming to work on the product development side. They can probably still perform an emergency operation if they had to. That can be intimidating when the topic becomes clinical.

Also, I own the pressure of the product. When my product doesn’t meet a customer’s needs we might lose a big sale. If I set pricing wrong or don’t anticipate usage correctly, the company loses. My name becomes synonymous with the product so it’s really me losing.  It’s just too fun for me to stress about the failures. Those happen, you move on and make better decisions next time.

What did you study in college? Do you think what you studied in college helped you get this job? Any specific classes or skills that helped you? Is there anything you wish you would have studied in college that would have helped you in your job today? Is your degree necessary to be a product manager?

Don’t laugh… I was a Journalism major in college (Advertising, actually). It was all about branding and customer empathy. Much of my coursework dealt with market research, customer profiling, and writing. Lots of writing. It turns out I use all of those skills every day. I need to create user stories that capture a problem clearly enough for other people to act on it. Anyone with experience developing software knows how important that simple statement is. Companies spend thousands of dollars teaching their people how to articulate a simple idea to a team of solutions builders. It helps that I had that experience.

I work in very technical spaces with lots of computer science majors, paramedics and cardiologists. They live and breathe database schemas, network architecture, and boundary services or waveforms, published studies, anatomy and physics. I could have ten PhDs in different subject matter and still find myself lost every day in one conversation or another, so I’m not sure I would have gone back and done my formal education any differently. That’s not really the point.

The point is that learning is a part of the job. Every day, all day, being hungry to unravel the next three-letter abbreviation or therapy you just heard. That’s what eventually makes you an expert in any field, and it’s what makes you capable of owning a product.

Did you have internships in college? Were those valuable?

I had an internship at a mining software company that did underground imaging. Really, really technical product that was about 20 years beyond my mental acuity. Seriously, the technical manual would bruise your thigh if you forgot about it on your lap for too long. I did some basic marketing work for them. Market sizing and research.

But the most important thing I got from that experience, and what anyone should look for, going into an internship, is a sense for my learning curve. How long does it take me to feel comfortable with an initially daunting concept?  Can I feel like the idiot in the room and still be OK?  It turns out you’re never going to feel like you’re an expert. At some point, someone will call you one, and you’ll think “What?! Me?!” and you’ll go on knowing that there is a lot more out there to learn. Knowing that puts a whole new perspective on starting a career. I used to feel like I needed to be an expert as soon as I could, and that when it happened I would know and I’d be satisfied or something. That internship prepared me for a lifetime of (more humble) learning.

How did you get the interview? What was the process like? Why do you think you were given the job offer?

Have you ever taken one of those personality tests?  There are plenty of them out there. I’ve been characterized as a Process Challenger, something else about Initiative, Self-Motivated, blah blah blah. They told me why they hired me a few months into the job. They said “because you’re not like us.” Ha! One of my managers here said “we hired you because this takes a lot of energy. And optimism.”

I had no idea how important those things would become.

What did the first 90 days on the job look like? How has that evolved to today?

My first three months were like drinking from the fire hose. I quietly consumed information about our customers, our products and the way things happen at the company. It was a lot. I visited customers, asked a lot of really stupid questions and got kind, understanding answers. When people know you want to help, they love talking. I listened a lot those first few months.

Unfortunately for the people I work with, I started talking eventually. When I realized I had an opinion, it was almost as surprising as realizing I just said it out loud at the managers meeting. Pretty soon my opinions became a vision. Not like a spirit quest thing, but I mean that I knew what I wanted for our customers and what that meant for our products. Pretty soon people started listening, pretty critically at first, but eventually they listened as a matter of course. Today my job is to listen, and listen, and listen and then create a coherent plan for other people to follow.

If a freshman in college asked how they could prepare to get this job after graduation, what would you say? Do you have any advice for aspiring product managers?

I would say they should look for chances to own something. Run a club. Start a cause. Get a common group together. Make sure it’s something you’re passionate about and get a lot of practice owning the fate of a cause you love. That way you’ll know how to invest yourself in something you believe in. Your products should become that motivation someday.

Oh and practice presenting. Seriously. Get to a public speaking class, and don’t half-ass it. Stand up as often as you can to speak. Don’t worry, you stop shaking with enough practice.

How do you think your job prepares you for the future? What’s next?

My own product or products, someday. This job is about building something from the ground up, rallying a group of people to the cause and delivering your product to the ones who need it. When the time comes to create my own product, I’ll have the skill set to do it.

What are the three skills necessary to do your job well?

Influence. I don’t mean that your dad has to be a senator, I mean you need to like inspiring other people to act. As a Product Manager, the success of your product hinges on how much everyone else cares. Since nobody actually works for you, you have to make them believe that the vision you’ve created is the right one, and that it’s the most important thing they can do for the company today.

Drive. Everybody has on and off days. People can go to work every day and “do their job,” the needle moves a little, nobody can blame you for anything, and you go home. Product Managers don’t last long like that. I recently discovered that I want to win. A lot. I want my product to win. I want customers to look at my product, then look at the competition, and make an easy choice. A no-brainer. It’s selfish, but that’s where energy comes from in Product Management.

Those first two are more values than skills… sorry. The truth is that skillsets of Product Managers are all over the board. Some are really technical. Some are market-focused. You can be good no matter what you’re good at, basically. As long as you meet the intangible requirements.

Here’s a skill.

Learn how to be wrong. That’s a skill because it takes practice. You’re going to fail. You’re going to make the wrong decision. You’re definitely going to piss people off. If you’re NOT doing those things, you’re a bad Product Manager. Learn to be wrong gracefully. Admit your mistakes, and learn how to come back from them. Train your temper. Tolerate people being mad at you. Realize that they will be mad even if you make the right decision, because they would have made a different one. Learn how to be wrong.

What are the biggest things you’ve learned from being in this job?

I’ll spare you the expanse of things I’ve learned about myself, because who cares, everyone is different. Of course you’re going to learn a lot about what you like to do and what you don’t like to do, what you’re good at and what you aren’t. That’s what first jobs are really for.

Instead, I’ll tell you what I learned about the corporate world since I’ve gotten a chance to hear all my coworkers from a wide variety of corporate and non-corporate backgrounds talk about their work experience.

First, all businesses face the same challenges. Bigger companies (a few hundred or more employees) feel the need to departmentalize and allow their people to specialize. Which makes sense, until you get stuck with silos that still somewhat depend on each other to succeed. Suddenly you’ve got slipping deadlines, the politics of blame, and a kind of heads-down, just-do-your-own-job culture that makes everyone feel like a cog.

Most people reflect happily on their time in small startup cultures but insist they would never return, now that they have families and completely different risk profiles.

Here’s your takeaway: ownership is the key to breaking the cycle. Blame and stagnation are products of feeling like you’re not the master of your own project. “I did everything I could, but that other department… well… you know.”

Product Management is just my way of focusing on a concept, rather than a project. Success is defined for me at the highest possible level. Did we win? Not “did I turn in my report on time?”

Whatever you do or wherever you do it, find a way to own concepts instead of tasks.