9 lessons from my first six months as a product manager
Over the past 15+ years, I’ve had pretty much the same conversation with every new college grad I’ve had the opportunity to mentor. It goes something like this:
Me: “The first six months of working is the hardest. You can expect to be tired all the time, and things are going to be tough. But don’t worry, it gets better; your body gets used to it. You get used to it.”
And over the following six months, they go from ignorant to overwhelmed to recognizing the wisdom of that observation. In almost every industry (education excluded: that’s a solid three years of exhaustion), the first six months of adjustment to a new career is often the most trying.
I recently embarked on a new journey as a product manager on the project I’d been working on, Adobe XD. I came to the realization a couple of days ago that something had profoundly shifted. After eliminating a number of false reasons (Daylight Savings Time and a brief respite from rainstorms chief among them), I came to the sudden realization that I had hit that magic six month mark.
I’d survived.
I started Bullet Journaling back around Thanksgiving of last year as a way to keep track of the many initiatives I was trying to track. One thing I love about the system is that it allows you to be incredibly flexible with what your system looks like. Like something? Do it again the following week. Hate it? Adjust or ditch it.
Just after New Year’s, I came to the end of a particularly trying week and asked myself, “Did I really accomplish anything this week?” I realized that one thing I’d been missing was a process of reflection, a true recap of what had happened that week.
I scribbled onto the page everything I’d learned, everything I’d accomplished, every major decision I made, and a couple of messages for myself for the next week. I was genuinely surprised that I had accomplished something that week… in fact, a number of large somethings. I just hadn’t recognized it.
Four months later, I have a trail of lessons learned and a lot of things to say about my first six months as a product manager. Here they are, in no particular order.
Reflect regularly.
Reflection helps me contextualize what I’ve accomplished and to see organizational patterns. I use this as a tool to help grow my productivity and ensure I’m working on the right things.
Manage your breath.
Product management is day after day of intense context switching. When I get into rapid-fire context switching, my brain gets into a zone where I start breathing really shallowly. In stressful situations, I react in a fight-or-flight (what we call “firefighting”) response instead of remaining calm.
I’ve started taking a couple of deep breaths when I find myself tensing up (practicing prānāyāma) in order to clear my brain and respond to everyone the way I’d like to respond to them: kindly, and with my full focus.
Use every organizational trick you can.
I’m not a naturally organized person, but I pretend to be one at work. My Bullet Journal stands as a testament to just needing everything to be in one place, and forcing myself to evaluate whether something was important to do and when. I sort through my Email in chunks and leverage my evening commute as offline Email response time. I make lists, shuffle items into lists to be taken care of later, and do things one at a time. Switching into this role forced me to up my organizational game. It’s the only way I’ve been able to not only survive, but succeed.
The best part about organizing and writing everything down is that when I put it away, I can really disengage, knowing that my systems will be there to get me on the right trajectory as soon as I hit the office.
Prioritize.
I constantly play the game of balancing the important things with the urgent. Often, the urgent things are not important, and can be safely shuffled to another time. Sometimes, I have to prioritize my own needs over the needs of others. Most times, I just need that extra hour of sleep.
“What is without periods of rest will not endure.” — Ovid
Know how you work and manage your energy.
Energy management has been a huge theme over the past six months. It’s been a constant battle of getting enough sleep (something I know I need), enough exercise (same), and enough work done. Lately, this has meant taking off at 4:30pm on days I have an evening commitment to ensure that I get an opportunity to eat, a chance to wrap up at the end of the workday at home, and ensure that I get to put everything aside before meeting friends or working on a creative project at home.
Keep your eye on the big picture.
This is basically the job. I’ve had to fight the temptation to live a polarized life — either down in the details or up in the stratosphere — but being a product manager means melding the two into a coherent whole. It’s a beautiful challenge.
Sometimes, the solution is a process.
I’m a problem solver at heart, which made me a fairly decent engineer. But one big lesson I learned, after a long conversation that spun in circles for about an hour and a half: sometimes the solution to your problem isn’t just getting the thing done. In fact, most times it isn’t. It’s all in how you enable those around you to do things so that you won’t have to. It’s about scaling through the people around you and focusing on the things you do the best.
“As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” — Bill Gates
Teamwork is not a zero sum game.
I feel fortunate in that my current teammates are all excelling at their jobs, and there’s not a sense of my loss if they succeed. In fact, if they succeed, the project succeeds, because our strengths all lie in different areas. Without each other, we’d be flailing a lot more.
Every day is wildly different and is ridiculously unpredictable.
I could be working on a roadmap and vision statement one day, writing marketing copy the next, stopping to give a product demo on Facebook on my way to chat with an engineer to clarify a feature. I could be evaluating a design and mapping out a feature workflow, then holding a massive horse trading session where I negotiate a four-way resource bid. The following day, I could be visiting a customer site, doing customer support on Twitter, then returning to edit a blog post, making sure that I check in with my engineering teams, setting up my next business trip for customer research, and planning my next talk at a major conference.
I love it. I love every crazy, random moment. My engineering buddies may laugh (or groan) at my schedule, but it’s an incredible feeling to know that any which way I turn, there’s an opportunity to learn, to grow, to connect, and to serve.
Six months down, many more to go.
I’ve got this.
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Elaine is a product manager at Adobe. You can find her on Twitter at @elainecchao. All statements in this essay are her own and do not reflect the opinions of her employer.
