Product Management & Passion
How to survive when you work in your passion field as a Product Manager?
Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash
As far as I remember I was always big into music. As a kid, when my parents asked me what job I would like to do as an adult, I said singer. As a teenager I played in 2 bands and did more than 50 gigs.
2 years ago something amazing happened to me: I was lucky enough to join Deezer as VP Product. Deezer is a worldwide music streaming service built with love in Paris.
Beyond the personal achievement I wanted to share what does it mean exactly as a Product Manager to work in his passion field. Because as fun as it sounds like, it also comes with some strong challenges.
The Good Side
The first thing that comes in mind is how awesome the onboarding is when you join your passion field. It’s like going backstage after a show:
🎸 You meet with people that you value and respect.
🥁 You are eager to learn every day.
🎤 You understand how the things you love are built.
Obviously you also have a ton of empathy for your product from the start. To me Empathy is Product Manager soft skill number 1. As a PM you need to be able to feel what it’s like to be in your user shoes. When you work in your passion field you are one of your user. It makes thing definitely easier for you.
Another awesome thing is that you have a lot of ideas. How to improve your product, how to delight your users, how to differentiate will be easy questions for you.
Like a lot of your users you have a clear idea of what should be your roadmap to improve your app.
The Bad Side
As exciting as it sound to work in his passion field, it has some dark side. And the first issue that came in mind is that you have a lot of ideas.
Yes, what was a strong asset few sentences ago is now a weakness!
Of course you have ideas but they are only your ideas. Are you the only persona around? Obviously no. One thing to always remember is that in any case you are not your users.
Picking your own ideas will introduce strong bias, generation bias, location bias, consumption bias, etc …
My advice to overcome this is to focus on problems.
Because if ideas and solutions are controversial or debatable, problems and issues are not.
If you feel that something is really annoying on your product, let say slowness for example, everyone will agree that it is annoying. But the solution to fix it? People won’t have the same.
You soon understand as a Product Manager that the value of your job is being the best to understand problems, not the best at finding solutions.
The second bad thing that you will face as PM working in your passion field is that passion is fun while product is tough.
I always have music in my ears, so music is a source of happiness and motivation to me. But in the meantime, my daily work means dealing with: Acquisition, retention, conversion, scalability, reliability, etc …
Nevertheless you can turn that around.
What you need to do is to boost your game as a Product Manager and use your passion as the icing on the cake to make your point even more sharp.
I am a true believer of the 3 third rules to define your roadmaps. Every items you push should be fueled by 3 things of equal importance:
🎷 Your own expertise | As Product Managers we should develop a strong product expertise.
🎺 Data | We need to be data informed PMs but never forget that data is only one side of the story.
🎻 User Feedback | This is the second side of the story and it is key to understand what your users think and experience.
The Ugly Side
There is one side of this story that is not pretty at all. When you are a Product Manager in your passion field, the one thing that is really annoying is that Every coworker is a Product Manager.
If you are passionate with your product there is a huge chance that it will be the same for your coworkers, so everyone will come to you with ideas, will criticize your decisions, etc …
To overcome this the first thing to do is to listen to your users at scale. All ideas should be validated by prototypes and user interviews.
If you do this at scale, crappy ideas, even coming from the top management, will be turned down easily.
Your Turn?
We pretty much all have passion and companies that can help us grow within this passion are plenty. Now is it your turn to work as PM in your passion field? Please reach out to me or comment this story I would love to hear from you and your journey.
Before I go here are my key takeaways:
And the more important advice of all:
Best Product Managers are passionate people, not always for the field they work for, but for their product. Whatever it is.