An Actionable, No-BS Guide for Management Consultants (or Really Anyone) to Transition to Product Management
Product Management is a hard role with hard skills to master. This is an action-oriented guide for those looking to truly dominate in this career, and strategically differentiate yourself from others.
Product Management done right, on one hand is one of the most fulfilling career roles in technology: high ownership, entrepreneurial, strategic, continuous growth, a balance of left & right-brain. It’s no wonder that it’s quickly becoming one of the hottest “haven roles” for those planning to exit management consulting roles (oh us lovers of prestige).
On the other hand, it’s also one of the easiest roles to “do wrong”. Technology companies — realizing that just promoting a Product Manager role — draws a lot of eyes, promote a lot of jobs that shouldn’t be necessarily termed Product Manager, including those that are:
Pure PMO & business process: When you’re basically in an operations role — making slides and aligning stakeholders — disguised as a Product role to look more appealing; this can also be called “Business Product Manager”
Pure technical project management: When you’re chasing the team — engineers, designers, marketers — around to primarily meet deadlines; this can also be called “Project Manager”
Pure strategy: When you’re so high-level that you’re not really even “in the arena” feeling what it takes to coordinate, execute and deliver products with a cross-functional team; this can be also be called “Discovery Product Manager”
Especially for those looking to transition from a “generalist” consulting position — this hodge-podge of different definitions make it difficult to truly understand what it takes to succeed in the role AND in establishing a strong foundation to succeed as a product leader in the future (not just to get the PM role itself, but how to position oneself to grow into executive Product positions).
And I’m STILL seeing the most superficial PM questions circle around from consultants that are not the most important questions to answer when transitioning. No — you don’t need to know how to code (with nuances). No — consulting will not prepare you fully for the role (and you definitely should be prepared to learn new skills) although it does give you superpowers you should leverage. No — you will not work less (in fact, I’d say the job is definitely higher stress on aggregate).
Hearing these things continue to permeate over and over make me determined to write the Bible for how management consultants can ACTIONABLY transition to Product Manager roles, succeed in them, and set a strong foundation to be product leaders down the line. Here’s why I’m qualified to write this (just to be establish some footing and so you know I’m not BS-ing myself):
My academic background is in Mathematics and Computer Science (hence can reason from first principles technically, and understand how it benefits me).
I’ve had a short, but action-packed stint at Bain giving me wide visibility on the skills development present as a management consultant — where I worked across 8 due-diligences in the Private Equity Group, a strategy/venture case, and an organizational transformation case
I have traditional Product Management experience — doing a Product internship at ServiceTitan (a Series-C company at the time) where I worked on data infrastructure and customer implementations, and currently am working as a Product Manager for a new Teacher Communities product for GovTech Edu (working with the Ministry of Education in Indonesia) where I own end-to-end product development, strategy, and cross-functional coordination
I have entrepreneurial Product Management experience — building an education non-profit Cornerstone with 2 high-NPS product lines (and a lot of failed experiments). I’m also leading product for my Web3 startup focused on community-led growth and analytics.
With this out of the way — let’s get into the details. How can YOU as a management consultant succeed and thrive in Product Management?
I. Know your superpowers as a management consultant
The first thing to acknowledge is that your time as a management consultant does carry over to Product Management in highly differentiating ways. Consulting doesn’t prepare you fully for the role in terms of skillsets, but it does elevate you in certain regards, in particular:
You’re a well-rounded business professional: You know how to present / storyline well. You know how to take great notes and organize & communicate them across the team. You know how to lead meetings and engage in effective discussions. These are all surprisingly powerful assets to have, drilled down by your managers in your time in consulting that other professions might not have had drilled down as hard.
You’re highly structured and analytical: You understand how to tackle problems in a structured, systematic, and comprehensive way. You care about the details, and you make sure you drill down to consider all possible paths. This is vital for PM’s who need to make key decisions on a weekly basis.
You understand economics, finance, and metrics: Product Managers are not just responsible for making scalable products users love and value — but also for providing deep business value (in many cases this means $). As a management consultant, you’ve worked on models day-in and day-out. You know how to do scenario analysis, think clearly about unit economics, and think ten steps ahead about product growth and path to profitability. This puts you ten steps ahead of those who don’t hold business acumen, as great PM’s do not only care about adding value to customers, but ones who get promoted are the ones who add value to the business (what leaders actually care about).
You can learn fast, landscape, and connect the dots between complex elements: As a management consultant, you’re used to parachuting into a new industry, distilling the core elements in a matter of days, and developing enough of an “edge” to add enough unique value that clients would pay the exorbitant amounts they do. This is to say that your appetite and ability to ingest and absorb and organize information is probably second to none. While you are only working on specific product areas — don’t underestimate the amount that you can actually deep-dive into them. Whether it’s doing competitive landscaping, building growth tactics, doing segmentation analysis, or crafting a product’s GTM — there’s always something new to refine, iterate, and perfect. Great PM’s know how to keep pushing the frontier.
You can bust ass, and probably work harder and faster than most: This one is less glitzy, but just a fact. Doing management consulting makes you prepared to be a workhorse.
By understanding your “superpowers” — you’ll know how to connect the threads of how this relates to a Product Management role in both hiring and when you get started in the job itself. You’ll waste less time feeling like an imposter, and can double down on your strengths while working on your gaps in an intentional way.
This brings me to my next point.
II. Actually take personal time to learn the most important foundational PM skillsets: Discovery, Delivery, Measurement, and Strategy
One of the funny things about “generalist” roles is that there’s an assumption you can come in with zero preparation and just learn on the job. This isn’t true for Product Management. It’s a hard job with hard skills to master. You HAVE to be willing to put in the additional work to learn and refine these skillsets (just like any job). You might be able to get by a year or two banking on your consulting and project management skill-sets to squeeze by (and even “look good” in the process — see this thread on optimizers optimizing for optics). However, in your path to product leadership, not working on these skills will directly blockade you from reaching higher positions. Consider this important friend-to-friend advice.
In particular — there are 3 foundational skillsets that will prepare you to succeed as a Product Manager from a management consulting background which are Discovery, Delivery, and Measurement. Note that these 3 DO NOT encompass the full breadth of potential skills to master, but that these are the CORE pillars that will define whether you will succeed at baseline. Other differentiating skillsets (like Experimentation / ML, Growth, Law) will matter only when you are able to excel at the foundations.
These foundations are also critical because a Product Manager has to also serve as the “primary translator” between functional roles like engineering, data, and design. Adequately understanding their functional language to be “dangerous” and to be able to offer them direct, peer-to-peer feedback and spark fruitful discussions is incredibly powerful to developing trust and amplifying the impact you have (instead of just taking this “as is”, which is when Product Managers fall into a Project Manager role).
I will cover exactly how you can build a baseline of knowledge on these 3 pillars. This will require you to do a bit of additional reading:
Discovery
Discovery is about risk-minimization and gaining enough conviction on the “one thing that matters”. As a Product Manager — what you’ll notice is that there’s never really a shortage of seemingly great ideas (even if they actually turn out to be terrible in actuality). What you want to make sure of is that you’re exploring these ideas in a prioritized, systematic way, and that you’re deeply aiming to assess value. Discovery is an art form as pointed out by the graphic above. You want just the right “Goldilocks level” of conviction on ideas to be meticulous, yet nimble.
As a management consultant, your ability to structure will prove valuable here in terms of landscaping potential ideas. However, your OVERLY “hypothesis-driven mentality” has an equally bad potential outcome of leading you to make decisions with biases already baked in (I wrote an article about this by the way). As a Product Manager, you want to have strong beliefs, loosely held. As a management consultant, you tend to have strong beliefs, strongly held. You have to flip this mindset.
In terms of skillsets — there’s really 3 that matter: (1) business alignment, (2) opportunity ideation & validation, (3) design & solution validation.
Business Alignment
Business alignment, firstly, is about making sure that the ideas are complementary to the product or business strategy itself. Remember that products are just a piece of the greater puzzle, and even a great piece from the wrong puzzle set won’t fit. Secondly, business alignment is ensuring that North-Star goals (e.g. monetization, profitability, growth) are aligned with the product idea. As a management consultant — this shouldn’t be too hard for you. So just double down on this.
I would recommend reading ONE of these books (at least in the beginning):
Opportunity Ideation & Validation
Opportunity ideation & validation is about scouring ideas, obtaining signals that the pain point or opportunity is really there — and ensuring that it’s the most significant opportunity to tackle right now (akin to what Steve Jobs mentioned: “If you could do only one thing, what would it be?”). It’s mapping, navigating, and exploiting the “idea maze” (a phrase coined by Balaji Srinivasan), with context below:
A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.
Replace the term “founder” with Product Manager and you get to the essence of the job and why people love it in the first place: the high sense of ownership and creativity. However, similar to how there’s a distinction between good and bad founders — there’s a massive distinction between good and bad Product Managers. One of the important gaps between the two is the ability to distinguish between good and bad ideas.
There are 3 foundational ways you can build skills to navigate the idea maze:
You nurture a keen sense of user sensibility: You deeply can empathize and put yourself in the “user’s shoes”. We do this through regularly immersing ourselves in the lives of our target customers (on a WEEKLY basis), and analyzing product insights & data. As a management consultant, what you need to develop the habit of is thinking of this as a continuous habit (hence the term “nurture”). You’re not trying to get an “answer” so you can develop a slide. You’re not speaking to an experts, recognizing a pattern, and never revisiting the pattern again. We as Product Managers live in a world of assumptions — and it’s our job to continue challenging and refining these assumptions.
You develop a keen sense of where the world is going: I absolutely love this video outlining the strategy of Shopee and how they dominated Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market from an underdog position to become the market leader (watch it). One of the things to highlight is that they focused on a mobile-only user experience — with the hypothesis that Southeast Asian consumer would shift predominantly to mobile-first habits — while competitors were busy optimizing for web. This lowered their cost structure and allowed them to move faster in early days. As a Product Manager having ownership over the realm of ideas — it’s your job to develop a theory of the future and the place that your products have within that future.
You develop a nose for inspiration: You should always be building a log of inspiration to draw ideas from. If your idea has been tried before (and almost all good ideas have), you should figure out what the previous attempts did right and wrong. You can also build the maze by analogy to similar businesses. If you are building a “peer economy” company it can be useful to look at what Airbnb did right. If you are building a marketplace you should understand eBay’s beginnings. In the screen at the bottom, I share a very actionable thing that I own for my products: an Inspiration Board. In this Board, I capture screens of competitive, adjacent, or inspirational products that capture certain jobs-to-be-done or product elements — and I constantly refresh this to capture further inspirations as we progress deeper.
Married with the skills on business alignment, developing this skillset will allow you as a Product Manager to add tremendous value. The funny thing we start to realize is that the quote “ideas are cheap; execution is what matters” is not exactly true in the PM role if you truly want to grow as a leader. Great ideas matter. And once you have great ideas — narrowing them down even further matters.
I would recommend reading these (choose 2 to start):
Books that are relevant for the industries you’re applying towards (as we stated above — PM jobs are highly contextual towards the product areas and understanding them as deeply as you can is vital if you are to truly OWN your product space); if you’re going into FinTech — you should be reading things like Bank 4.0 and Anatomy of a Swipe; if you’re going into public EdTech as I was — you should be reading Power to the Public and Empowered Educators)
Design & Solution Validation
Navigating the opportunity space is one part — but actually designing the best solution to tackle that opportunity is another. This is where design and validation skillsets come into play.
What is MOST important for Product Managers to understand as a skillset is to find the “quickest, least expensive way” to test an idea. Management consultants transitioning in overcomplicate this process with technical definitions of what a “prototype” or “MVP” is or isn’t. Stop it. You should remember three words: (1) Test, (2) Cheap, (3) Fast. This applies to both software and hardware products.
We’re littered with hundreds of examples of product innovation failures that could have prevented with proper design & validation. Take Iridium for example. It was a promising satellite phone that took billions of fixed costs to build infrastructure for, with immense marketing promise — and ended up with a fraction (<2%) of its market captured. Among the reasons why it flopped was because the phone was literally the “size of a brick”, and had a variety of technical issues including not being able to work indoors (which didn’t make sense for the “office worker” persona it was intending to target). In contrast, take Tim Cook, for example, who supposedly made a fake iPhone prototype and walked around with it for a couple weeks in order to assess whether it “felt right”. Management consultants — as lovers of perfectly polished slides and well-structured, comprehensive problem solving — tend to have difficulty with this more rapid, iterative part of Product Management.
The other part of Design & Solution Validation that will undoubtedly come up in the job itself is on user interface and user experience design. Are the users able to seamlessly use the product? Does the product experience maximize moments of delight? Does this align to our design principles? All of these questions are extremely important, but my suggestion if you’re not already familiar with these topics (either through mental models like Design Thinking or Human-Centered Design), is not to over-index too much on this, especially if you have a designer on your team. Focus your specific leverage on understanding what assumptions you need to test, and how to test them in the cheapest and fastest way. That’s the foundation for everything else.
I would recommend reading these (choose 2 to start):
Delivery
If Discovery is a practice in systematically navigating the idea maze — then Delivery is the pursuit of actually building and releasing the product into the world. This is what most people think about when they think of the Product Manager job, and the responsibility of working with engineers (hence the constant questions about whether it’s necessary to learn coding).
In practice though — getting something out there to the world involves much more than just the engineering build itself. Product Managers need to be attuned to distribution strategy and execution (making a great product is only one part of the puzzle), as well as being able to collect actionable insights to refine the product. We consolidate the foundational skillsets into three pillars: (1) the build itself, (2) measurement, and (3) launch management.
The Build Itself (Developing & Testing)
When most think about building as a Product Manager — most think about writing PRD’s and conducting effective sprint cadences through Agile. You will experience this directly working in the job itself, so I won’t overemphasize this too much. However, let me emphasize 3 important things:
Learn how to communicate effectively through writing or storytelling: Great Product Managers are able to clearly communicate the “why” and the “how” of the decisions they choose to influence. As a result, people trust their decision-making and perspectives — and the team can deliberate on first principles rather than by intuition or “the boss told us to”.
Learn the foundations of Agile: While Agile is only one spirit of project management, it is the most common in most technology companies. Understand the basic terminology (recommended book User Story Mapping below) — and you’ll learn the spirit of why engineering teams run in sprints, how to maximize these opportunities, and how to lead through them in the most effective way.
Learn how to reason technically: While you don’t need to know how to “code” per se — you should be confident enough to reason and discuss technical trade-offs with the engineering team. The foundations are everything, and I lay some resources to build the mastery of the basics below. You might also be in a specialized PM role, where it’s even more vital to be somewhat technical. But again, focus on the foundations rather than on the niches (especially if you’re non-technical). For instance, as a Web3 PM, you should know foundational blockchain and smart contract architecture, but you don’t need to go too far into zK-proofs or layer-2’s.
Focus on the foundations. Repeat that over, and over again. At the end of the day — the leverage you have as a management consultant turned Product Manager is likely not in being able to be a technical thinking partner for the Engineering Manager, but rather empowering them with strategic context, the ability to make strong trade-off analysis and decisions, and strong alignment skills so delivery is as smooth as possible, and we prevent late-stage blow-ups.
I would recommend reading these:
And if you want to develop your technical acumen, explore these:
Technically — a Substack that explains software and hardware in an easily explainable way
CS50 — an introductory foundations course for Computer Science, the field of programmatic and computational thinking
The Odin Project — a tactical, programming-first course that will walk you through the foundations of front-end and back-end web programming
Measurement (Instrumentation & Analysis)
Given that one of the core aspects of the Product Management role is to make great decisions — the role requires you to be fluent in the foundations of data. As a management consultant you’re probably already pretty strong at data analysis and thinking about metrics, but your core understanding of how data is produced, managed, and maintained is probably pretty poor. So let’s focus on that.
High-quality data is produced by “instrumenting” the ability to track events occurring in the product in a way that generates context-driven insights. Within these events, a PM’s job is to specify the contextual parameters or properties that would enable them to make decisions.
For example, for Uber, in the event that User Orders a Ride I want to know:
What type of ride they ordered e.g. Uber Black, Uber X,
What kind of user they were (their demographics, their previous monthly spend)
What influenced their decision to order (e.g. how many drivers did they see in the map screen before ordering, were they offered any coupons)
If you don’t specify that you want to track this contextual data — it’s just not going to get tracked IF it doesn’t need to be tracked. Data is expensive, and if the engineering team does not need it to operate the product itself, it’s a “cost” to track. Therefore, it’s on you as as a Product Manager to be able to specify the context, and tie these back to how it will influence your decision-making.
The process in which you drive the understanding of what data to track through what events is oftentimes an eye-opening process for first-timers, and it’s a SKILL to refine through practice. Don’t be one of those people that assumes that data is there for you through some sort of “data lake”. It just doesn’t work that way, and you run the risk of wasting a lot of engineering effort if your boss suddenly asks you for pieces of data that you forgot to instrument.
I would recommend reading this article by Crystal Widjaja to start, and try to apply and take Reforge’s “Data for PM” course once you start in your job (unfortunately, Reforge does not take management consultants into their programs).
Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch
As I mentioned before, building a product is one thing, but actually distributing it is another that is equally as important, if not more so. As many great entrepreneurs and company-builders have stated: “If you have a great product but no distribution plan, then your startup (or product) might be doomed” — Zero to One
Thus, preparing yourself to launch and managing that launch process even after it happens is essential to your success as a Product Manager.
The first skill is pre-launch and launch. We can liken this process to climbing the summit of a mountain. It’s ticking the boxes, making sure that stakeholders are aligned, understanding your positioning and messaging to the world, and finding your best-fit channels. This process favors the meticulous and the prepared. As a management consultant, you’re probably the most primed for this type of work.
However, when a product has launched, it’s not over. Remember the instrumentation you’ve built? Now it’s time for you to pore over those leading indicators. Do things seem off? Are there any instantaneous customer reactions (positive or negative)? You have to be ready to respond to these in a thoughtful way. Again, as a management consultant, you’re probably primed for this type of work. You’re meticulous and strategic — allowing you to engage and prepare for whatever comes in a proactive rather than reactive way. Leverage this as a strength and don’t forget about this.
For those who want to think deeper about channels and distribution, read (choose 2 to start):
Extra: Continuous Mindset & Managing the Roadmap
If you’re made it here, you’ve likely read all of this and are thinking to yourself: “How the heck am I going to manage all of this?” And to that I say — welcome to Product Management! This is why the role is difficult to excel in, paid well, and sought after.
The skill that great Product Managers are able to embody is that of a continuous mindset. You’re able to manage both effective discovery and delivery in a simultaneous, and seemingly seamless way to the outsider (although you know how frickin hard it is to do so).
When you start in your Product Management job, I encourage you to never lose sight of these dual tracks of discovery and delivery. Ensure that you’re putting in enough effort on both ends on a continuous basis (even if some weeks are going to naturally sway more heavily towards one side). To do so, I maintain what I call a “Dual Track Calendar” (shown below) that easily marks up the effort I put towards the tracks, and allows me to plan forward to what’s ahead:
III. Understand whether or not the company is really promoting a true Product Management role, and think deeply about the
Ensuring you’re actually going to be a Product Manager
I’ll keep this short and simple. If your role is not empowering you to get the exposure to at least a significant portion of the skillsets I discovered above (e.g. it’s pure delivery where you’re simply just managing the roadmap of your boss, or pure discovery where you have no interaction with the engineering team) — you’re probably not in a true Product Management position. If you’re still shooting for entry level positions — even the best Associate / Rotational Product Management programs should expose you to both tracks.
As someone who’s recruited for Product positions across a variety of companies and geographies — I can tell you this: many companies are putting the name Product Manager on a role to either entice people to join the company, or they don’t really know what they’re doing. Try to avoid these companies if you can.
Simple things to ask in your conversations with the folks that allow you to gain huge insight on the culture of Product in the company:
What’s your team’s culture on speaking to users? How frequent / often does this happen, and how does user voice play into decision-making? Can you tell me the last time when a decision was made based on user insights?
Who are the main stakeholders I’ll be interacting with on a day to day basis? How closely will I be working with the engineers and designers on the team?
What are the must-have skillsets that you expect out of someone on this team?
What are the boundaries of this position? What is outside of the jurisdiction of a Product Manager?
How much autonomy does the team get in shaping its roadmap? How far ahead does the roadmap get built up, and is there flexibility in it?
How much do you value the “obligation to dissent”? When was the last time a leader’s opinion was challenged and won over by a team’s arguments?
Ensuring you’re going to thrive in your respective industry or specialty
As I’ve alluded to in the sections on Discovery above, in order to navigate and dominate the idea maze — you’re going to have to be obsessed about the space of the product you’re in. That’s the way to be great. This is why people sometimes compare the role of a Product Manager akin to doing a PhD.
In order to “get obsessed”, you have to have a genuine interest, or the ability to develop a genuine interest, in the industry or specialty you’ll be in. If you’re recruiting for a FinTech PM job — but learning about payments, credit, crowdfunding, raising capital, and blockchain puts you to sleep — you’re probably not going to thrive in that position. If you’re recruiting for EdTech — but going deep into pedagogy, psychology, sociology bores you — you’re probably not going to thrive in the role.
Again, you could pass by as a Product Manager and just be “mildly interested” in what you’re working on. But that’s not what this article is for. This article is for those of you who want to thrive and be great.
IV. Launch a “product”, any product. It’ll teach you what genuine user-centricity is, and how to have skin in the game
One of the things that you can do immediately to raise your abilities — especially before you transition to a Product Manager role — is to release a product or service of your own to the world, something that people can react to and interact with. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be a newsletter (like this), a freelance service, a tool, whatever you can think of. Think about something that you can do to add value to a group of people’s lives and intentionally put effort into not just releasing the product — but iterating through multiple versions of it, improving over time.
Better still: attach your name to it in a public format. Own that product or service on your social media or your LinkedIn — even if it’s small and potentially embarrassing if it fails. The reason why you want to do this is to feel as much skin in the game as possible. When you put it out there, you have an obligation to fulfill. And if you fail to fulfill, then you must face the consequences (even if it’s as small as embarrassment). If you succeed, then you reap the rewards.
An example from my own life is running an education non-profit called Cornerstone Education for the past two years — and that I’ve been extremely public about (as shown above). Over these two years — we’ve built 2 high-NPS programs that have been iterated through multiple versions: a study-abroad mentorship program for scholarship-seeking students in Indonesia, and a job-seeker bootcamp preparing undergraduate students to excel at the job search process.
I won’t bore over the details — but point blank the process of running my own “products” taught me the following lessons:
How to captivate and sell a vision: Knowing how to tell a compelling story and drive a sustained strategy to recruit team members and drive people to join our programs
How to lead and coordinate a medium-sized team: How to ensure that the 40+ people in our teams were fulfilled, personally growing, and contributing to their potential
How to be viciously user-centric: How to get honest user feedback and use that to refine your products to maximize impact over time
How to build products (and how difficult it is to do so): How talk is cheap. How the details matter. How building anything is hard f**king work, and requires time in the arena.
How to think about GTM and growth: How building products is only one piece of the puzzle. Distribution can be a killer differentiator in and of itself.
How to build a competitive advantage and strategic roadmap: How to focus on the “things that you do exceptionally well in that no one else can”. For us: this was our curriculum and our ability to actually teach — which was unparalleled. We killed the rest.
Obviously — not many of you as management consultants will have the time or energy to stand up something as time-consuming as a non-profit. But it doesn’t have to be that big for you to gain similar lessons provided you take it as seriously. Take a newsletter like this (or a YouTube) for example. If you take it seriously, through the process of building one up you’ll learn: (1) what target audience your writing resonates with most and how to target them more effectively, (2) how to creatively spread the word about your articles beyond your personal social media bubbles, (3) how to build a roadmap and strategy, and (4) how to be consistent and refine the writings to be better over time. The point is that you release something of intentional value to others out to the world, and that you take the effort and ownership to ensure that it continues to add increasing value to their lives.
There is no better preparation in being a Product Manager than in immersing yourself in the job of Product Management. Doing this before you even transition into the role will not only allow you to learn differentiated skillsets, but also embed a sense of ownership that is hard to lose once you know how it feels.
V. Devour products and learn about how businesses get built. Go into DEEP rabbitholes on sectors or product archetypes you love.
It’s crazy to me that there are Product Managers that are not deeply in love with the process of discovering new, interesting products, ideas, or applications. F***, it’s your job to do this! If you want to really succeed in Product Management — you have to continuously inspire and push yourself to see beyond the silos of your own company.
There’s a beautiful application of this that I love: the fact that we live in an Amazon age where people expect seamless search & recommendation, payment integrations, and extraordinary user experience in every single product. What used to be passable for products in 2015 is now seen as terrible (if it doesn’t meet a certain standard).
It’s your job to be in love with the art of products (in whatever field that you’re in) and draw inspiration from a variety of sources (even IF they are not exactly related). Just as a musicians look for inspirations in art or poetry, or a certain type of athlete gains from how athletes from different disciplines optimize their training — Product Managers can and should look for inspiration in products beyond their immediate scope, or whatever is the immediate need for research at the moment.
A concrete fun “rabbit-hole exercise” you can try out (that should be fun for a management consultant to do):
Pick a product type that potentially interests you: Let’s say you’re exploring the realm of software no-code tools
Landscape the space; understand the types of products and segments that exist within that particular product category. For no-code tools, it could be website builders like TypeDream, database builders like AirTable, workflow integration tools like Zapier, payment tools, the list goes on.
Spend a weekend and zone in on one of the segments above (let’s say website builder). Play around with the products, capture some screens (paste them on Miro), and understand what works and what doesn’t. What are the different trade-offs different products make based on their target customer? What are some moments of delight you noticed, or even some pain points?
Doing something like the above is fun, makes you more attuned to how products are built, and allows you to gain a ton of inspiration. At the end of the day, as a Product Manager — you should optimize to stand on the shoulder of who came before you.
VI. Explore and expose yourself to diverse ideas. Connect with people and build a community of like-minded builders, risk-takers and optimists.
“You are an average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with.”
I’m a massive believer in this quote — which is why I’m such a staunch advocate for putting yourself out there to meet as many optimists, risk-takers and builders as possible. As I’ve said many times before in this article: the job requires you to draw inspiration, be able to navigate the idea maze, and then use that to inform your decision-making. If you want to be a great PM you have to have vehicles for inspiration — which are likely from people pushing the frontier.
As a management consultant, you probably hang out with other consultants (which makes sense given the fact that you pretty much work endless hours with each other). There are a lot of dynamic, interesting consultants with diverse passions and interests — but make sure that you step outside of the comfort zone a little bit to meet people who might not be like you. There are equally smart, intellectually curious, brilliant people who chose to go into art, or entrepreneurship, or research, social impact, engineering, the list goes on.
Concretely, this affects you as a Product Manager because you don’t silo yourself to one mode of thinking. Additionally, interacting with builders and optimists also affects how you view life. A recent experience I had with a friend — where we brainstormed and jammed on the idea of creating a “Venture Bootcamp for Indonesian Entrepreneurs” over an impromptu coffee chat on Sunday captures this experience well. Meeting another successful entrepreneur and jamming on a Web3 idea (even though he wasn’t fully in the space) was another example of this. He offered critical, strong feedback in a way that was exploratory and conducive to nurture further thinking.
Being able to have the networks to jam on experiences like this with other intellectually curious people pushes you to be a better builder yourself. If you don’t have this, take the effort to build this.
VII. Learn how to make damn decisions
Product Management is ultimately the art of making hard, informed decisions — and executing on those decisions. When you boil the job down to its core essence, that’s really what PM’s are paid to do.
If there’s something generalizable about early-stage management consultants — it’s that “not knowing exactly what I want to do” and preserving optionality is probably the reason a majority of people are still in the career itself. The job itself is also about presenting options and recommendations to clients — rather than owning the decision-making itself. There’s a massive difference in this — especially for HARD decisions that have no seemingly right answer. This may differ when you’re a Senior / Partner-level consultant and you’re a trusted liaison with more ownership in the way you aid in decision-making.
Given that the job itself naturally does not provide many avenues for you to practice actual ownership in difficult decision-making, here’s what I suggest you do:
Hold strong opinions in cases, even when it’s not your job to do so: Most cases you will undergo as an early management consultant do not necessarily require you to have a comprehensive “answer” on the decisions to be made. You likely have a view on one or two workstreams, and you know how those affect the answer in principle, but you’re not assessed on the integrity of how the answer is affected holistically throughout all workstreams. If you want to be great at decision-making — it’s time to change this up. A concrete action you can do to practice is to review the analysis that’s been done and hold a strong opinion about the overall answer in a way that a Senior Manager has responsibility for.
Practice decision-making in other aspects of your life: It could be within a product/small business that you have, it could be with your investments, your relationships, whatever. The more you’re able to practice direct decision-making and facing the consequences of your actions — the more prepared you’ll be as a Product Manager.
On this — I highly recommend that you read the following:
In summary…
Transitioning to a Product Manager job, and being able to thrive in the career, takes a lot of hard work. However, I hope that this article elucidates some of the more actionable things that you can do beyond just the fluffy BS that circulates around. I hope this positions you to not only be successful in getting the job itself, but actually understand what it takes to succeed in it and hopefully become a leader within it.
I’ll be posting a LOT of fire, in-depth, meaningful content just like this (especially on Product Management in Web3 & Data, life reflections, and Southeast Asia entrepreneurship and startups), so be sure to follow me on Substack, Twitter (https://twitter.com/playmatenate) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathangunawan/) for more.
Thank you all for reading and see you in the next one :)