Define Your Career North Star as a Product Manager
“I’m not sure what I want to do next in my career.” “I’m not happy in my current role and want a change.” “I don’t feel like I’m in the right industry and I’m not sure how to switch.” As a Product Coach these are some of the top things that clients have expressed as their biggest challenges in the last few weeks. Many product managers are feeling stressed out, boxed in, and confused, and are overwhelmed thinking about where to start to make changes.
I’m the type of person who has made a lot of career transitions, based on my personality, how I think, what I want to learn, and the things I care about. I’ve been a biomechanics researcher, journalist, colour commentator, and a product manager on a number of crazy cross-functional teams, I have been one of 15 in a startup and also employee 100,000+ at Google, I have focused on product areas including software, hardware, product sizing/fit, in Junior and Senior roles, in wearable technology, digital healthcare, and ergonomics.
I’ve also experienced many “life slapping me in the face” moments that I am now incredibly grateful for. These things, which were quite traumatic at the time, like living through a shooting, being in a bus accident, my aunt passing away after being hit by a car while cycling in Toronto, having my partner contract lyme disease that caused bilateral facial paralysis, finding out my dad had cancer, and my mother-in-law passing away, really forced me to get my ducks in a row and figure out what is the most important to me in life and why.
I’d like to lay out some of the things I have learned along the way, starting from having my resume be ripped to shreds and hearing things like, “This girl has no idea what she wants — she’s bounced around way too much” to defining my why, understanding my common underlying thread, knowing where I want to go, and owning my story.
1) Figure out the person you want to be.
This is the nucleus of everything — if you have a clear idea of this, it will help to clarify many decisions tenfold. A lot of people talk about this but don’t actually do the work to figure this out, tangibly. Some of the things that really helped me were reading The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and Who Will Cry When You Die — these books made me think about what I want people to say about me at my eulogy (depressing, I know, but looking at things through this lens REALLY helped me focus), what’s important to me, and who I want to be, deep down. Not the things I want to do or accomplish — but BE. It sounds very nerdy, but I wrote out an outline of the kind of person I wanted to be and read every day — if something felt off, I would update it. This clarified who I want to be and helped me relate every decision I was making NOW to this very clear picture of my future self. Something else I learned through doing this is that everything you are capable of will be amplified if it is aligned with your personal values.
2) Understand where you are at and who you are RIGHT NOW.
I did this in a couple of ways — I asked 5 close friends and family members to answer 3 questions:
- When have you seen me the happiest/the most energized?
- What do you think my natural strengths are?
- When have you seen me really frustrated/had my energy taken away?
I also did this at work, through self-driven 360-degree feedback, where I asked colleagues and stakeholders in various roles I worked with:
- What am I doing that I should keep doing?
- What am I doing that I should stop doing?
- What could I be doing more of?
Consolidating all of this really helped me understand, holistically, where I was at, and where some of my immediate gaps were in terms of the PERSON I wanted to be.
3) What problem(s) do you want to focus on solving?
Going through school, I was asked hundreds of times what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was taught that I had to pick the right classes, and do very specific things to work towards the goal of landing the one role that was right for me. Skills and the things we were good at or liked were immediately linked to potential known jobs. I didn’t even know what a product manager was until I was in my 20s!
Rather than focus on what you want to do and picking one thing for the rest of your life, choose a problem you really care about solving. There is a great TED Talk about this by JP Michel. He talks about how having a challenge mindset can help clarify your purpose and understand how your array of skills can make an impact that is aligned with this. It also provides room to grow in unrestricted ways. The main question for you is — what problems do you really care about solving? Make a list. Prioritize this. Make it as tangible as possible. If you’re not sure where to start, many super intelligent people have put together some of these lists already.
What you like may change and evolve over time, and we are constantly forced to adapt and grow as the world around us changes — but with this you have a lens with which you can view the world and make decisions. This is your common, underlying thread. As Michel says in his talk, “There are lots of things that are broken in the world that need fixing. The world needs you.”
4) How do you want to live your life, day-to-day?
What kinds of things do you want to spend your time doing? Why are these things important to you? Who do you want to spend your time with? Why them? I’m not just talking about work here — I’m talking about things like spending time outdoors, with family and friends, and writing the book you’ve always wanted to publish. What you do career-wise should fit into how you want the rest of your life to look.
Writing down a brief description of my ideal day and week really helped to clarify what I wanted things to look like for me — not based on what society or my education or other factors external to me had programmed me to think about how things needed to be. It was based primarily on what I, as a person, actually need. This was initially very challenging for me — one thing that really helped was applying a design thinking mindset to this. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’ Designing Your Life and Designing Your Work Life, based on a popular class of the same name at Stanford University, helped me to figure out how to do mini experiments with my life to prototype different options to figure out what I need to be happy. I still do this as I keep learning and being excited about new things around me.
5) What parts of product development do you enjoy the most?
There are so many different types of roles that exist for product managers. You could be a rockstar technical product manager at a large, well oiled machine kind of company. You could specialize in working with early-stage startups and taking things from 0 to 1. You could be amazing at growth, product ops, product marketing, or data analytics. Early concept work could be where you feel the most at home, or you could be outstanding at optimizing funnels and making things more efficient. You may want to focus predominantly on developing the product, or you may want to move into a leadership position where you can focus on developing and growing a larger product team.
Asking this question will help you define your niche and also the unique things YOU bring to the table in this niche.
6) What is your ideal role based on all of this?
I spent a lot of time researching roles I got really excited about, and questioning why I felt that way — was it the company? The team? The structure? Was it the product focus area? The types of customers? I figured out what things overlapped which helped me to narrow down what I was looking for.
Then, I went deep — I looked at the skills required for those roles, reached out to people who were in those positions and asked them questions to better understand what it was like and if it was a good fit for me.
7) Use all of this data as your compass
Cross-reference who you are, what your ideal role is, and where you current gaps are to figure out exactly where you need to focus. This helped me get out of the “paralysis by analysis” mindset, and even prompted me to make a roadmap for my own life. I literally created a document called “Energy Focus” and outlined my purpose, objectives, and the things I needed to learn/improve and organized like this:
- “Now” (Most tangible, lowest risk)
- “Next” (Still needs some defining, slightly more risk)
- “Future” (Most abstract, highest risk)
This gave me the flexibility to learn new things about myself and keep adapting the roadmap as I go along. If I learn something new that makes me excited or have a new idea about a project I want to work on, I add it to the “Future” column. What I have found is that I feel lighter knowing I wrote it down and offloaded it from my endless loop of ongoing thoughts, and usually thinking about it for a longer period of time helps me see a lot of areas that overlap and actually add more value than what the original idea would have resulted in if I had dropped everything to work in that direction immediately.
More than anything, don’t be afraid to experiment, and treat your own, personal development like product development — something that needs to be iterated upon and refined, while leaving space for discovery.
You got this.
- Lisa ✨
Follow me on Twitter: @lisazane15
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