Special Issue: Feeling Twenty-Five

Twenty-five years ago this month, in July of the impossibly futuristic sounding year 2000, I landed my first official product job: a role titled Online Product Manager working on the website of a major daily newspaper in a tier 3-A (but tier one in our hearts) American city.

I took the job—and, shockingly, the leaders offered me the job—even though I didn’t quite know what a product manager was. Of course, I figured I’d be managing (leading and guiding) a product (the sections of the website that I’d be assigned). But I didn’t exactly know what that job did—even though I’d be the one doing it. I quickly (or in some cases, slowly) learned that for that product at that organization, the job meant understanding complex content management issues, integrating physical and digital experiences, and prioritizing the competing needs of many different types of people (readers, advertisers, journalists, and even community leaders).

Before I landed that first product manager job, I’d spent several years writing and designing online documentation for a manufacturing software company, where I’d also gotten involved in the company’s presence on a new platform called the World Wide Web. I suppose my experience of hopping into this product manager job from another path wasn’t unique. See, product is often a job we come to sideways. It’s not a step on a linear path you pursued with clarity from the beginning; it’s instead a kind of fortuitous collision of your experience and talents against an opportunity. There may not even be such a thing as an entry-level product manager role (though Marissa Mayer may have cracked this puzzle at Google with her APM training program; see below). And I usually advise younger professionals that the best preparation for managing a product is to serve effectively in some other role on a cross-functional product team. In my case, I’d been a technical writer and web content guy. But others might arrive at the role from paths in software engineering, business analysis, UX design (a great path, by the way), product marketing, or even corporate finance.

In one of the articles I recommend below, Brandon Chu’s “The Black Box of Product Management,” Chu explores an existential question: What does a product manager do, anyway?

I’ve been thinking about that question for twenty-five years. So this week I gave myself a little challenge: how would I, in twenty-five words or less (one word for each year in the career), answer Chu’s question?

Here’s my response:

That’s twenty-five words, on the nose. I won’t explicate my entire response, but I’ll point out that it emphasizes solving problems for people and generating value for a business. That seems right.

This issue of The Pollinator features several reflections from across the product-sphere on product as a career path. While the Pollinator usually emphasizes current writing, this one includes several older pieces that are still deeply relevant.

I confess I don’t love the word product to describe the things a company produces to satisfy its users and put its mission into the world. But our language and our industry doesn’t have a better word meaning “what you make, why you make it, and who you make it for.” So product it is. Here’s to another twenty-five years of figuring product out.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Get with the program

Check it out: How to make the star employees you need, by Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale podcast, with guest Marissa Mayer

In this podcast from 2018, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, argues that one of Google’s greatest products isn’t a technical innovation at all: it’s Google’s training program for associate product managers (APMs). He’s got a point.

The program, started in 2002 by legendary Googler Marissa Mayer, herself an early product manager at Google, trained hundreds of product managers who went on to great heights at Google and in other companies. In this podcast, Hoffman interviews Mayer herself. She describes her own career’s interesting origin story, explores how she uses data to make decisions, and explains why she made certain moves after Google.

The episode’s thesis: good product managers can be made. This might be challenging for companies who lack Google’s resources, but a lesson any of us can apply is to start with people of exceptional curiosity, versatility, and talent.

Reflecting pool

Check it out: How to Hire a Product Manager, and Reflecting on a Career in Product, by Ken Norton, Bring the Donuts.

These two articles by product leader and consultant Ken Norton make a good matched set. The first, which Norton published in 2003, explains his thoughts on hiring new product managers. It includes nuggets like “I’ll take a wickedly smart, inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and years of experience any day” and “much of the time your job is to be the advocate for whoever isn’t currently in the room—the customer, engineering, sales, executives, marketing.”

The second post, which Norton published in 2021, as he passed his 50th birthday, shares some things he learned throughout his long and impressive career. “Art vs. science” is an overused and even misleading binary, but The Pollinator appreciates that Norton realizes that “the art of product management matters more than the science.” Most of his reflections are based on this understanding.

Some of Norton’s wisdom product managers have heard before, but are still worth the reminder, like “fall in love with problems, not solutions” and “if you want to become a PM, look for ways to start PM’ing in your current role.” Others are new thoughts that will help the entire profession, like “hold the door open behind you.”

More blossoms

The Black Box of Product Management, by Brandon Chu, Shopify

Brandon Chu of Shopify explores the question “what does a product manager do, anyway?” Chu introduces a memorable analogy: the product manager as an API.

The article has some sweet diagrams, too.

9 lessons from my 8th year as a product manager, by Elaine Chao, Adobe

Elaine Chao, a product leader at Adobe, has established a habit of periodically posting a reflection on lessons she has learned as a product manager. This is the most recent essay, from September 2024. Our favorites of her nine lessons: “#4 Cultural change requires consistent work and reinforcement,” and “#5 Always seek to define the next level of clarity.”

Once you’ve read it, check out Chao’s other articles in the series. She does this every year. It’s a living record of an active product career.

5 women share their journey into product management and advice for others looking to enter the field, by Nancy Wang, Jenny Wolochow, Melody Liu, Terri Czerwinski, and Saummya Kaushal, The Coursera blog

This is a transcript of a wide-ranging roundtable discussion among five women working in product management careers. Four are from Coursera, the professional learning platform. The other, Nancy Wang, is an executive at Amazon Web Services. Reading the interview is like eavesdropping on a lively conversation among wise people who are doing deep work and who care about their profession.

How to Become a Product Manager and Bring Value to Your Customers, by Jessica Kent, Harvard Professional and Executive Development

Jessica Kent covers the basics here—and that’s a high compliment. This is not a reflection from a product manager; it’s a how-to guide for a product-manager—or for someone trying to become one. This piece promotes a Harvard-backed professional development program, but even if you aren’t interested in building skills through formal learning, it clearly describes the role, enumerates the skills it requires, explores the job market, and lays out the many paths to and through the career.

Product Renewal: Getting Back to Basics, from Solution Design Group’s Digital Innovation North podcast, with host Molly Doyle, featuring guest Jason Scherschligt

Solution Design Group (SDG) has started a new podcast series called Digital Innovation North, with host Molly Doyle. Pollinator editor and SDG Head of Product Jason Scherschligt is one of the first guests. Hear us talk about getting back to basics as you embark (or proceed) on a product journey.

Outside the Box

Walt Disney stole my metaphor—or did I steal his?

This YouTube video has been making the rounds lately. It shows an animatronic Walt Disney from a new exhibit at Disney World that opens later this month. Animatronic Walt describes an interaction with a child like this:

Pollinator readers will recognize the metaphor. Since its founding, The Pollinator has used pollination as a central motif.

I promise you I had never heard this Walt Disney quote when I started using the bee and pollination metaphor to describe our work. But I cannot promise you that the Disney folks haven’t read The Pollinator.

Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt4V81_LLk8

About the Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue features an opening reflection and a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants and other technology and business professionals includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.