Typically working from the bare bones of an existing resume, along with anecdotal career information and hopefully, a largely completed questionnaire, I start to assemble the structure of a brand new document.
Each effort is just a little bit different, but they all share a certain kind of fact-finding mission in common. In our work here at Resume Professors, I like to think of what we do to help our clients reassess and rebuild their resumes as a certain form of pseudo-forensics. So, the biggest “Aha moment” for me was probably finding out that the product manager role existed, and that I wanted to be one.Early Career: “The Aha! Moment” – October 1, 2018 Their job sounded interesting, so I started more research, consuming online courses like a madman, and reading/watching everything I could about what PMs do. This led me down a rabbit hole of research, mind maps, and hassling people on LinkedIn, until I ended up speaking to a product manager. So, I sat down and finally had a think about what I enjoyed doing, what I wanted from a role, and what kind of company I wanted to work with. I’d come away knowing with a burning certainty that there were some parts of the job that I never ever wanted to do again, but no clear idea about where I wanted to go next. I’d just finished 8 years working as a start-up CEO, doing the classic long hours, and wearing too many hats. “My move to Product Management has been pretty recent, and I only properly found out about the role in the summer of 2020. Thus – always, always start with a customer!” Product is just a channel to solve the problem. As a product manager I realized that the customer is more important than the product alone. What makes the person happy or sad? What problems customer is facing and trying to solve? What are his or her desires? So, shifting the focus from product to customer was my “Aha moment” back in the day. Instead, a good product manager’s obsession should be the customer. Yet, knowing all the details about the product does not make you a good product manager. For example, if the product is a car, you should know all about cars. Why not, if the role speaks for itself – “product”? It also has been my understanding about product management for many years.
A good product manager’s focus and expertise is the product. A good product manager is a product guru. So overall I’d say my experience as a product manager has been a constant stream of micro-aha-moments rather than a few big ones.” That is why product people who do this well usually succeed in gathering support for the things they’re working on. Stories also reach us on an emotional level, rather than analytical level, and these emotions propel us to act. It’s such a critical and often overlooked skill which helps us to make sense of the complex products we work on. They all have one thing in common – they are excellent story tellers, which is a toolset I’m always looking to improve on. One general “Aha” that I learned a long time ago from the best PM’s I’ve worked with.
“Aha” mindset needs to be built into the product manager’s DNA. As a product manager you must be in love with continuously learning. So, whilst I could sight a whole range of theoretical learnings, for me the real “Ahas” are more likely to be small evolutionary ones rather some epic eureka moments. I reflected on all the things I’ve read which have really stuck with me (everything from Clayton Christensen’s work on “Jobs To Be Done”, to Don Norman’s “Design of Every Day Things”). “When thinking about my greatest “Aha moments” over the course of 12 years in product management, I started searching my brain for that one incredible epiphany, but I failed to find it. I learned early on to always take donuts to planning sessions and retrospectives.” The way to get things done was to inspire and motivate the engineering team I worked with was to create a compelling vision and value proposition that demonstrated how we were going to help meeting our customer’s needs. “Realizing early on in my career that the product manager is not the ‘mini-CEO’ as some of the product theory books tell you.
We asked our product people: “What was the greatest “Aha moment” during your Product Management career?” Here’s what they say. How does the dictionary define an “Aha moment?” It’s when you suddenly understand something, realize something important, have a good idea, or find the answer to a problem. What matters even more? The way you turn your “Aha moment” into opportunity.
0 kommentar(er)
