For a good time on a Saturday night, look at the career path of product managers, product directors, heads of product, and the like. Seriously: just fire up LinkedIn or the “writer profile” blurb of a product blog or discussion, find someone in a product leadership job, and look back through their career paths or even their pre-career training and education.

Here’s what you’ll notice: very few started in some kind of entry-level or junior product management job. Indeed, while some big tech firms, like Google or Meta, have formal associate product management career pathways, for many companies, an entry-level product manager is an oxymoron, like an entry-level CFO would be.

Instead, you will see coding backgrounds, data science backgrounds, marketing backgrounds, finance backgrounds, and design backgrounds. Software developers, business analysts, customer service professionals, and UX designers all make excellent product managers. Personally, I started my technical and business career doing software documentation, web content management, information design, and even some journalism. When I entered the workforce as a greenhorn technical writer, I didn’t know what a product manager was. I will even confess that when I got my first product manager job, twenty-six years ago, I wasn’t totally sure what a product manager was!

When people who are early in their careers ask me what path to take to become a product manager, I advise they start by participating as a member of an effective cross-functional product team, using whatever skills and job role you have now. You might be a developer, copywriter, a designer, a project manager, a financial analyst. But when you find yourself on a product team, use your skills to help that team make better decisions about value, priorities, vision, and user needs. Contribute both through and beyond your named role. Do that enough, and you’ll have the opportunity to lead some decision-making about the product. That’s probably the surest path to a product career.

No, it’s not linear. Product is a job you probably come to sideways.

But at bottom, the skills are durable. Communicate well. Write well. Observe users with empathy and respect. Help people succeed. Collaborate effectively. Simplify the complex, and challenge the apparently simple. Contribute to better investment decisions.

In this issue of the Pollinator, we feature recent writing from people with different backgrounds, all of whom are now leading product teams or product thinking. I have included brief notes about their paths. It just took a little research. Yeah, I did it on a Saturday night.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Escape velocity

Check it out: PM Escaped the Product Team, by Falk Gottlob, on falkster.com

Falk Gottlob’s early career in product: software engineer track at Microsoft

Entrepreneur and technologist Falk Gottlob articulates something important for product managers to understand: the traditional duties held by a product manager are, in many organizations and industries, “escaping” the product management job function. The cause, of course, is the power of AI and agentic development. As Gottleib puts it:

Maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist, but I see this escape as an opportunity for seasoned product folks like the Pollinator’s readers. If, say, the financial analyst or corporate lawyer now is trying to tackle product challenges, surely our skills and experience are even more useful to our companies. Step one: schedule a lunch with that financial analyst and corporate lawyer.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Check it out: Empathy and Delight Mean Nothing When the Software is Disrespectful, by Pavel Samsonov, product designer and manager

Pavel Samsonov’s early career in product: graphic design, HCI, UX design, product design

Oh, this article hit close to home. “Empathy” and “delight” are among the product and UX buzzwords I’ve thrown around often in my product work. Pavel Samsonov, a consistently excellent writer and thinker on design and product, has me rethinking this. He explains that these terms mean nothing when we don’t respect our users. Without respect, empathy becomes pity.

One of the more provocative ideas here is that friction—which product makers have often tried to eliminate—may in fact have value in a digital product experience.

So before (and after!) empathizing with a user, respect them. Don’t infantilize. Don’t overwhelm them with AI-generated stuff you didn’t carefully edit and condense (or write yourself in the first place). Show your users care.

I’ll remember this one.

Loop-de-loop

Check it out: How I AI: Designing Agent Loops in Claude and Codex, by Claire Vo, ChatPRD

Claire Vo’s early career in product: interactive design, social media, marketing, branding

Recently, I’ve been engaged in conversations and even experiments at SDG about loop-based techniques for product management and product development. Maybe it’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or maybe loop-based AI techniques really are having a moment. Either way, I've been seeing them everywhere.

This post from Claire Vo explains loop techniques in a product manager’s language. Vo is the founder of ChatPRD, a popular SaaS product for product managers. She knows both AI and Product well. Her post includes a Youtube video where she describes using loops in great depth. It’s a thoughtful, well-sourced examination of a technique we’ll all be hearing more about.

More blossoms

• Skill Issue: How We Built an OS for PMs at Figma. A YouTube video from the team at Figma about their internal product management AI stack, which they call PM OS. (To be clear: here, as in just about anything we mention at the Pollinator, “PM” stands for “Product Manager,” not “Project Manager.”)

• What Watching People Taught Me About Product Development. A Product Coalition post by Ruairi McGuinness on the value of spending time with your users, in their environments. “When I see an unexplained variation in the data, I now resist creating an explanation from the dashboard alone. I go to the environment where the behaviour is happening, watch how people interact with the product and speak to those closest to the work.”

• Who Made This? Allie Paschal explores the notion of creative provenance, disclosure, and transparency when AI is increasingly involved in creation. “…the more a piece of work is tied to human expression, authorship, and originality, the more the audience tends to care about how it was made.”

• The Three Ps That Shaped Me: Product, Project, and Poet. Beatrice Aderayo Adekanye describes how poetry shapes her business and tech work, and vice-versa.

• The Skills That Actually Matter in the Age of AI. Graham Mann outlines 6 skills that mattered before, during, and (probably) after this Artifical Intelligence-dominated moment. “When everything accelerates, the instinct is to chase the acceleration. Learn the new framework. Master the new tool…The counterintuitive move is to master the skills that sit above the acceleration: learning quickly, adapting to change, forming real relationships, exercising judgment under uncertainty. These aren't "old skills" you're retreating to. They're the stable platform that lets you navigate whatever comes next.”

Outside the Box

Floor 796 reminds me of a compelling jigsaw puzzle illustration, or maybe a children’s book. It’s a vast interactive animation that is filled with little scenes and characters from pop culture. The organizing idea is that it’s this big floor of a giant space station, divided into rooms where crazy stuff is happening. Look for the members of KISS making burritos, or Robocop and Krusty the Clown entertaining the Rugrats poolside. Click on each character for more info and links. The creator adds to it regularly. That’s seriously a labor of love.

Check it out at https://floor796.com.

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.