How to Learn Product: Three Skills Every Product Manager Needs with Carlos González

Episode Transcription

Carlos Gonzalez:

There's a lot of demand for product management these days, but the reality is that not everyone has the potential to become a great product manager.

Christian Beck:

This is a Better Product, original series on how to learn product. I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. There are product managers all over the world.

Christian Beck:

Fact.

Anna Eaglin:

And the role of product manager is to be the CEO of the product. You've got to figure out what your roadmap is, identify those features as requirements, work with your teams to basically get that product built.

Christian Beck:

Also fact, or facts.

Anna Eaglin:

Well, here's the thing. Today, product management is in super high demand yet there is no roadmap for developing the skills required to become a product manager. See the conundrum?

Christian Beck:

I do, and I love the word. And this is why Carlos Gonzalez started Product School. It's the online learning platform offering product management training and certificates with 20 campuses across the world and online. To catch up on the conversation we had with Carlos, we need to take a step back. How did the idea for Product School come about?

Carlos Gonzalez:

I started my career as a software engineer and studied computer science. Nobody really taught me anything about how to build a business or build a bigger product. It was all about coding. And the expectation was that you start as an engineer, then you become a senior engineer, then a principal engineer, and so on, but there was nothing there for people who wanted to leverage technical background in a different way.

So I decided to go to business school. I started a Masters in Business in Berkeley, and I actually realized that there were the opposite crowd in there because there are so many people coming from a business background who also wanted to build companies or build software products, and they were feeling very intimidated because they didn't have a traditional technical background before. So there was a huge disconnection between the business and the technical world.

Anna Eaglin:

After those two experiences of being in engineering and then in business school, Carlos launched Product School. That was six years ago.

Carlos Gonzalez:

I decided to create a hybrid Product School right in-between that serves as a bridge in-between those two worlds and gets the best out of both. And practically speaking, the way I decided to create the school is to allow anyone to not have to stop their life or put their life on hold so they could continue with their full-time jobs and learn about product management on weeknights or weekends. This way we can also allow probably there's some top companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb, I know there's to teach on the side so they will keep their full-time jobs and teach the next generation of PMs on their side.

Christian Beck:

And when it launched, product management wasn't quite the thing it is now. He'll go into the changes he's seen since launching it in 2014, but to give you an idea...

Carlos Gonzalez:

But before that, it wasn't really that fancy, if you will. So we had to put a lot of effort into educating companies and the industry in general, on the differences between product management and project management. Why product managers are not just engineers, why product managers are not just MBAs. A lot of those things that today may be highly more mainstream.

Anna Eaglin:

Fast forward to today, when it comes to product management, there is no entry level position because you have to have experience. So how do you get that experience?

Carlos Gonzalez:

All of our students have full-time jobs. They have a minimum of three years of professional experience in something. In some cases, we also have product managers who maybe have legal experience and they also want to learn more about how other companies or industries build products. And this is an opportunity for them to think outside the box and have a bigger perspective.

Christian Beck:

With that context in mind, we asked Carlos what he thinks the future of learning product looks like. Will learning product always come from applying other disciplines? Will the role of product manager always be at a senior level?

Anna Eaglin:

And to that end, Christian, what does it mean to be successful in product management? What are the skills that you need to have?

Christian Beck:

So many questions. All of this we explore and more with Carlos. Here's the conversation.

Carlos Gonzalez:

So as long as these product people can prove that they know enough and they feel comfortable communicating with different stakeholders, it's fine. So we've had cases of people who don't have a lot of previous experience and they become great PMs. The same way, we've seen cases of people who may have a lot of experience as maybe software engineers or data scientists who don't succeed at making the transition because it gets to a point where becoming a better engineer is not going to make you a better PM. You also have to spend enough time learning about different disciplines and feeling comfortable in the middle.

Christian Beck:

For a product manager, it's kind of a nebulous, hard-to-define role. What are the key skills that you think, regardless of the type of product manager you are or where you come from originally, what are the top skills that you think actually are completely inherent to product management?

Carlos Gonzalez:

You're right. Product management is a hard-to-define topic because everyone has their own definition. Some people say that this is the mini CEO or the CEO of a product. Regardless of all of those cliches, I would say, especially when we talk about software products, so mostly websites, mobile apps, we're talking about a generalist, someone who is going to be in the middle between technology, design, and marketing. And this is a constant iteration. It's not like you... It doesn't matter what your background as long as you understand enough about all these different disciplines.

So when we teach product management to our students, we always treat this as a constant iteration. So you start with the business opportunity, understanding problem, and really the market size for these opportunity. And then you have to come up with a plan that you probably have to put on a roadmap that needs to get the buy-in from the different stakeholders. In this case, it's usually engineers and designers.

Once everyone is on the same page, then the PM is in charge of working directly with engineers and designers to make sure that we are executing according to that plan in shorter sprints because things can change and it's important to have that type of flexibility. And once this product is about to go live, then we go back to business because we need to understand how do we define success. What it is that we want the market or the users to do in order to prove that what our engineers and designers have been working on is good. And then based on that launch and then the results that we get from our users, then we decide what the next move will be. So yes, that's kind of PM 101 applied to software.

Christian Beck:

All right. So that's PM 101. Let's see if this is a PM, I don't know, 401 or 400-level course. So based off of that, how do you determine what makes a good PM? It feels like it's a very hard thing to kind of categorize, and I don't know if you can. But for example, my background, designer, and as a designer, I think you can kind of look at the designs, and you can judge the interaction, and you can judge the visuals, and make a pretty good assessment on whether I'm good at design or not. From a PM perspective, how do you figure out what actually makes someone good at those things?

Carlos Gonzalez:

We've actually graduated over 10,000 PMs, and the answer I'm going to give you is based on data. It's based on where some of our graduates are and what made them the most successful. So it comes down to three top skills. One is technical acumen, which this, you don't have to be a software engineer, but you definitely need to feel comfortable with software, and speaking with engineers, and having a deep enough understanding of how technology works, architecture, and some of the trade offs that you need to make in order to make certain technical decisions with your engineering data.

The second space... business acumen. So the same way, you don't have to be an engineer in order to make a good PM. You also don't need to have an MBA or a traditional business degree in order to make a good PM, but you definitely need to know a lot about your customers, about your market, about how marketing works, about how the entire organization operates, because there's a lot of inputs that you're going to be collecting from so many different people who are not engineers, and you need to translate those into the engineering role and vice versa.

So the number three is industry expertise because you need to care about your product a lot. And I'm not saying that you need to be a customer of your own product, obviously that's bonus points, but you can definitely be a great PM even if you're not a customer of your own product. With this, you really have to inspire and get everyone on board. It's a lot of moments in the life of the product or the life of your company where nobody really going to believe more in the product than yourself, and it's all about how you communicate your ideas or your decisions to your engineers, how you take feedback, how you make corrections, and this type of leadership or communications skills if you will, are critical. And that's something that it's hard to learn by reading books or watching movies. It's something that you are going to learn on the ground. But I think it's kind of a triangle between technical skills, business acumen, and leadership, and communication skills.

Anna Eaglin:

Those three are so kind of deeply rooted in the role that you have, but also the technical acumen and business knowledge, as you know, can be careers in and of themselves. So how do you teach someone to be a great product manager through these online courses?

Carlos Gonzalez:

All of our trainings are 40 hours long and they're always on weeknights or weekends. This way it's important that all of our students keep their full-time jobs.

With that being said, there is an application process. So we specifically approve students who have the potential to become good product managers. We can't teach, as you can imagine, there's a lot of demand for product management these days, but the reality is that not everyone has the potential to become a great product manager. So we try to create a strong enough application process to pick the students who we believe will have the most chances to succeed as PMs in the midterm.

Now, obviously in the same class, there are going to be engineers. They're going to be management consultants. They're going to be designers. There are going to be people who don't even come from tech. And that's the beauty of it because we are all going to be learning from each other, and you really want to be a good product manager, you need to remove a lot of their biases. The number one lesson I will teach to our students is, "Hey, what brought you here is not going to make you a great PM. So you're an engineer, you have to assume that in this class, we're not going to teach you more coding. You have to stop coding. If you're a great designer, in this class, you're not going to design more. If you're a great consultant or marketer, in this class, you are not going to start working that much on a strategy or high-level numbers. It's all about being uncomfortable, being in the middle, and spending enough time with the other two groups that you are not an expert."

Obviously there is a process and a methodology that we all follow that is approved by most of the companies, but at the end of the day, up to each of these students to take those learnings and apply them to the industries where they are the best at, because there's a certain market or business acumen that each student brings to the table and that's unique, and that's great. So we try to teach them the fundamentals and the best practices that are common across the board, but then we also encourage them to identify industries, products, or companies where they are actually going to try based not only on the general knowledge that they would teach them, but also their own specific experience they bring to it.

Christian Beck:

I would love to stay on that because I think about this a lot. And as you've been speaking with your three skills, I couldn't help but notice how industry expertise and even the business acumen being tied to your customers, two of those three skills seem highly tied to either your product or industry that you're in. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on how portable are PM skills across different industries or across completely different products? Or do you think that people who want to get into product management are better off staying in product management within a certain area, or do you think that they can develop key skills that could be portable to many different industries?

Carlos Gonzalez:

The way we like to think about this is as a matrix with two different dimensions. So my advice is different depending on if you are an aspiring product manager or you're an existing product manager. Let's speak on aspiring product manager for beginning. Let's say you're a software engineer working at a company that is a marketplace that sells shoes online and you really want to become a product manager. Well, there are two variables to consider here. One is the role that you can be a product manager somewhere else, but another important variable is the industry. If you try to become a product manager at an industry that you've never worked at, it's going to be almost impossible because there's nothing in your resume or in your background that can prove that... I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible, but it's really, really hard. You are going to be set up for success if you try to consider this move into steps.

Let's say one option will be to become a product manager at a company that is within your same industry. Could be, first of all, your current company. And that's something very, very logical. So if you know someone within your current company that can give you a chance, ask, but even if that's not an option, and there's so many other companies in say marketplace, where there's so many other companies that sell something online, so I'm sure you've learned a lot of stuff about how those mechanics work and you can apply them to similar companies.

Now let's say you really want to switch industries because you hate what you do. Well, that's another option too. Maybe in that case, you can consider a horizontal move where you can become a software engineer, so a similar role, but at a different industry. And then from there, try to make that move from software engineer to PM. I'm saying this because we've seen that trying to change two things at the same time, it's really, really tough, so I'm trying to be honest. And I always recommend students to try to do this one step at a time.

Now, if you're an existing product manager where you've proven that you are successful at working with teams and shipping something to the market, then you have more options. I think at that point, you can leverage that experience to switch industries if that's what you want.

Christian Beck:

That makes sense. I think that's a really good distinction to make too, because if you're starting out, you almost want to minimize the number of things you've got to learn. I almost think too, if you become good at product management in your own industry, I think there might even be advantages to trying to switch industries, or switch business model types, or do product management for maybe a non-tech company if you're skilled at it, because I think then you can bring a new way of thinking somewhere else. But based on what you're saying, it's probably best that if you're starting in product management, take baby steps towards there. Don't set yourself up for failure. Get better at it before you really start being able to apply new frameworks to new situations.

Carlos Gonzalez:

We got a load of students who come to us, say, "Hey, I want to be a product manager at Google or Facebook," and we say, "That's great, but let's take a look at your current background and what are your realistic options to get you to where you want to be, maybe not within the next two to six months, but maybe two to six years. And if you approach this as a marathon instead of a sprint, and you really focus on learning instead of just hacking your resume, really learning how to build products, how to collaborate with different teams, how to really add value to the company that you want to work at, then it's going to happen."

Anna Eaglin:

Do you see that there are different flavors of PMs and people who are better at being this type of product manager versus this type of product manager, like a B2B product manager versus a B2C, or anything like that?

Carlos Gonzalez:

Absolutely. And I think that's the beauty of it. Part of your learning process is to really understand your options, is to know that product management has a different definition depending on the type of product that you're going to be building, or the industry, or even the location where you are. So really understanding how different companies think about product, what are the different options we've seen our product team? Because it's not just about being a product manager. We know that there are product marketing managers, product designers, project managers. So really showing students that there's life beyond just being a product manager, and that, yes, that could be a valid option too, but there are many more options that they couldn't even think about. It's really powerful because that also helps them understand that a lot of the things that they've done can count towards that goal, even if you don't have the official product management title yet, because a lot of the stuff that a lot of people do related to product, but maybe they didn't have the title, and that's okay. But it's really important for them to know that they can leverage that too.

Christian Beck:

You've been doing this Product School since 2014. What has changed the most between then and today in terms of the demands put on product management or the skills that are needed to excel in today's environment versus six years ago?

Carlos Gonzalez:

Everything has changed. So just to give you a more specific answer. First off, the good news is that this is now mainstream and there's much more appreciation for product management in general. We can see a lot of CEOs that come from a product management background. We can see a lot of companies hiring product managers and understanding that it is critical to have product managers in-between all these different groups of engineers, designers, and marketers, but also specifically speaking about the actual product development cycle, we've seen that it became much more data driven, much, much more.

Before, I think it was really more about inspiration and the ideas of the product manager. Now, it's all about running experiments, testing ideas with a user, then implementing them, testing again, implementing them. So there's much more technology as well that allows us to do this because before there weren't that many tools for product managers. We were piggybacking on all the teams' tools such as CRMs for sales people, spreadsheets from finance teams. Now there are tools specifically built for product managers that allows us to build powerful roadmaps, collaboration tools between engineers and designers and others, AB test and experiments that in general are empowering us to do our job better, and that's exciting for all of us.

Anna Eaglin:

I 100% agree, and I think you're echoing what we're hearing a lot of people say, that the needs of being a product manager is so much more data driven than it used to be, and that's kind of a really big thing that's changing. How do you see that translating into skills? Like how data literate is a product manager expected to be, and how do you enable your product managers to be like that?

Carlos Gonzalez:

That's a great question. And I think before the misconception was that you had to be a software engineer in order to be a good product manager because there's a lot of data that you could only get if you were very, very technical and could run SQL queries and figure out a lot of technical tools. These days, there are so many visual tools that allow you to drag and drop boxes and really get the information that you need without really having to know a lot of technical things. So, that's helping people who don't come from those backgrounds to really jump into this role.

The same way, now, a lot of engineers have the potential to really understand what's going on in design or marketing just by using all the tools that are not really designed specific [inaudible 00:18:59]. Today we know there are a lot of design collaboration tools that allow anyone in the company to provide feedback or gather feedback. That is amazing, and they're not really that complicated.

So part of the learning process is really giving those students and showing them the tools and the different frameworks that they can leverage. Which again, it's not rocket science. I think before everyone believed that, "Oh my God, in order to be a product manager, you pretty much need to be Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg." Well, not anymore. You can really learn these. There are tools out there; they're not complicated. There are frameworks out there; they're not complicated. And the best part is that there are a lot of product leaders out there who really want to give back to the community because they didn't have something like this before. And this is a very powerful statement for all of them. And it's exactly why I started this company. So it's exactly why all of our instructors want to teach at Product School. They don't do it for the money. They keep their full-time jobs and they're well off. They really do it because they want to help train the next generation of product managers.

Christian Beck:

I have a very serious question to ask that I've been wanting to ask. So I'm looking through your Twitter feed and you work with a lot of companies. Which company has the best product managers?

Carlos Gonzalez:

Wow. Put him on this spot here.

Christian Beck:

Oh yeah.

Carlos Gonzalez:

It's hard to answer.

Christian Beck:

We're trying to get something controversial here.

Carlos Gonzalez:

Well, I can tell you that the company that will have the best product managers are the ones who really have strong product mindset. What I mean by this is that you can look at companies that were built by engineers, and in those cases, it's really hard for product to have a voice because at the end of the day, engineers are always going to rule that. The same way, there are other companies that are more design driven, which is also harder for product managers to have a voice. So in general, the best product teams are in the companies that really appreciate product management as a mindset and give them the room. And a good way for anyone out there to test that is like, take a look at the C-level group in any company and see if that company has a chief product officer or vice president of product that reports to the CEO. That is critical because if you still see product under marketing or under engineering or under design, it's probably not a good sign for you.

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that's really what I saw even when I started my career as a designer 15 years ago, where if you didn't see someone with a leadership position in design, you know that it's going to be an uphill battle working there. And I definitely agree. I see that with product today.

Now on the bright side is, especially as we look in the Midwest where we work a lot, I would definitely say product is way more prevalent. We see product being in the first four to five hires for startups in the Midwest. I call it the Midwest just because we aren't as mature as the coast markets. But I definitely agree. I think you have to have top down leadership for this to work.

Carlos Gonzalez:

Absolutely. In my case, even though I come from an engineering background, I was always very curious about everything else even though I didn't know how to call it. Like I always believed that I started working in product before it was a thing. So it was very refreshing for me to realize that, oh my God, there's a label called product and that's exactly what I feel like I've been doing for a long time.

So we can see more and more companies developing that appreciation. It's either because one of their founders or early employees did that, but also because if you look at the market these days, if you are looking to raise money, you are looking to just grow your business in general, you really need to get input from customers. And the only way you can do so is by being closer to them and really understanding that this is a holistic approach. It's not just, "Oh, I code," or "I design," or "I sell." It's all about, "I get design. I interpret it in a different way. I communicate this to different teams, and we push in the same direction."

And these days, without a product person in the middle who's trying to coordinate these efforts, it's going to be almost impossible. I get that in smaller startups, you don't need to hire a product manager yet. Maybe one of the founders can act as that product person per se. But it's going to get to a point where let's say you have at least five or seven engineers where you are going to need a full-time person coordinating all of those efforts, otherwise, it's not going to work.

Anna Eaglin:

What's next for product management? Where do you see the position going, the role going, or what kinds of big trends do you see affecting it?

Carlos Gonzalez:

Well, I'm glad you asked me this question because last month we released a report called The Future of Product Management, which is the first annual report on this industry.

Anna Eaglin:

How timely.

Carlos Gonzalez:

And so a couple of data points there. One is that over 75% of the companies that we interviewed, and we interviewed over 1,000, they mentioned that they were going to hire at least one product manager within the next 12 months. And I think that says a lot, because now this is not an option anymore; this is a must for a lot of companies. And this is not just about high tech companies. Again, this is not just, "Oh, I work in tech and I need to hire a person." No. Every company out there, doesn't matter your industry, I'm pretty sure if you have more than one employee, you're using some sort of software to collaborate internally and you need to optimize that to work more efficiently. Not to say most of those companies will also have websites to deliver their services, and so on. So this goes way beyond that, which is good for all of us in the industry.

Christian Beck:

Carlos, can I ask, why do you think that? Why is it having PM not an option anymore, and what's driving that even outside of tech?

Carlos Gonzalez:

It's because before, let's say a company that is not even high tech that just had a piece of software to coordinate a couple of employees. This was kind of an out-of-the-box solution that everyone had to try to figure out and nobody was really paying attention to it. These days, it's a must. Like you can't really compete in the marketplace if you don't have the right tools, if you don't have the right software to coordinate logistics or other parts of your business with your employees, you can't really compete in the marketplace. And there are some detail skills that are very, very specific like engineering, design, marketing, and so on, but product sits right in-between. If you don't have the right person to coordinate all of these efforts, this is not going to work. And I think now more and more companies are realizing that without someone in the middle who can coordinate these efforts, then the house of cards is going to fall.

Christian Beck:

I don't know if you have a good answer for this, but I'm curious. Almost the flip side of that question of what are you worried about that's facing product or tech that might need to be concerned about in the realm of product?

Carlos Gonzalez:

Well, I think what's important is that here as a product person, you don't get too attached to the name, because yes, these days product is a keyword. That's hot. If you want a product manager or want to become a product manager, that's really cool. But what if we call this in a different way? What is the future it's called growth manager or brand manager or use of manager? Who cares at the end of the day, what's critical is that you need people who sitting between all these different teams of specialists. It's kind of a generalist who can understand the use there, can transform that information, and communicate that to different teams. In the same way, all of these different teams will speak kind of different languages. We need to communicate with other teams. So being that type of translator, it's critical regardless of the title.

Christian Beck:

It makes sense. It just dawned on me because we talk with product marketers on this show, and even in our own agency, we have product marketing managers, so PMMS. And we've noticed the overlap between, especially with growth and revenue-oriented functions of product, we've noticed a greater overlap between marketing and product through product marketing. I'm curious, how do you see product marketing fitting within product management, or do you think that it's more complementary?

Carlos Gonzalez:

This is actually another trend that we identified in the annual report that we did on the future of product management. We say product is not just management. Now, product is product marketing; it's product design; it's product operations; it's product growth. So just to make sense of all of these different terms. First of all, most of the cases when you start and you start small, the product manager is wearing all of those different hats. You are doing everything related to product. You will get to a point where you will have multiple products. let's say you have a website or a mobile app, or you have multiple websites, or your team just grows to a point that you need more than just one person to be in the middle, then you have options. What is important at the end of the day is what I said in the previous questions, to really understand what you need and what is the person in the middle of going to be doing regardless of their title?

Because if we try to just create definitions for every single title out there, we can go crazy. I'm sure there are companies who have product marketing managers who do something very different than product marketing managers at other companies. Just to give you one definition, for me, the product marketing manager reports to the product manager at the beginning and at the end of the iteration. At the beginning because they are going to be gathering data and interviewing users and really understanding what we should prioritize in our roadmap. And then once the decision is made and engineers and designer are working on the next sprint, then the product marketing person is going to collaborate with all the different teams that need to be prepared for that launch. So it's kind of a liaison in-between business and product, and it's especially critical at the beginning of the iteration to be said what to do, and then at the end of the iteration to decide how we're going to promote this to the market.

Anna Eaglin:

So Christian, that was a great conversation with Carlos. He gave us such wisdom around product management, product marketing, while future forecasting for it. Without breaking all of that down, I want to stay true to the essence of this series, so let me ask you, how does one learn product?

Christian Beck:

First of all, I love the phrase future forecasting and I hope someday I am interviewed on a podcast where I am called a future forecaster. Now I just need to figure out what the domain will be, because it won't be product. Carlos has that link.

So Carlos did a great job answering that question of how does one learn product. And if you remember when you listened to the kickoff for the series, that was sort of how we started, and I think almost every sort of social gathering we have with like entry level product managers starts with that question of how do you learn product. So I think what I heard is that you learn through experience from other roles, which we've touched on a little bit. So, customer success, it could be UX design, it could be engineering. And then second, it really requires business acumen or industry expertise or technology acumen. I think actually within those three, there are different paths for the type of PM you can be.

In fact, in my discipline of design, I was taught really early on that you had to learn how to connect design to business. So sort of once you do that, you sort of see where product manager really comes in. It's that intersection of business, industry, and technology.

And then third, a product manager has to be a generalist who collaborates across teams. So you have to be good at communicating, working with people. I'm pretty sure most product managers have to read the book Crucial Conversations at some point to deal with challenging conversations. And then lastly, you have to live and breathe the product. And I think, Anna, you would agree that when we talk to really good product managers, they always seem like evangelists for the product, like almost indistinguishable from sales. And I think that that isn't necessarily a hard skill you have to have, but I think to be successful, Carlos sort of indicated that too, that you have to really live and breathe the product.

This was a great kickoff to the series with Carlos. Join us next week as we continue this series on how to learn product. I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna. And this is-

Christian Beck:

... Better Product.

Anna Eaglin:

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Until then, visit Innovatemap.com/podcast and subscribe to learn how you can take your product to the next level. As always, we're curious, what does better product mean to you? Hit us up on Twitter @innovatemap or shoot us an email at podcast@innovatemap.com.

Christian Beck:

I'm Christian.

Anna Eaglin:

And I'm Anna, and you've been listening to Better Product.

Christian Beck:

Better Product.

Anna Eaglin:

Drop mic.