9 lessons from my first year as a product manager

2017 marked my first full year as a product manager, and I recently returned back to the post I wrote at the six month mark. What struck me was not the content, which was valuable, but the sheer difference in the lessons I learned in the latter half of the year. If the first six months was about trying to hang on, the second six months was learning how to work strategically and not reactively.

This theme was hard for me to grasp, and I had more than one frank conversation with my manager as I grappled with some of the intricacies of making the shift. I’m still not confident I’ve mastered the skill, but I’m at least aware of both the importance and my own struggles with the concept.

With that, here are the 9 lessons I learned in the second half of my first year of product management.

#1: Stay focused on the big picture.

I spent a majority of the year focused on Adobe XD’s 1.0 launch at Adobe MAX, our annual creativity conference. However, we began to plan the broader strokes of XD’s long term strategy, I began to see what I was doing in that context, not just the context of the next release. While this had occurred to me in theory, matching up our short-term plans with the long-range plans and seeing where it hung in the constellation of initiatives we’re working on as a team (and as a company) challenged me to focus my efforts on accomplishing the long-term goals, not on short term wins.

This continues to be a struggle for me, as I often find myself responding to the tyranny of the urgent, reacting instead of planning.

“Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”
― Charles E. Hummel, Tyranny of the Urgent

#2: Optimize for your strengths; work strategically.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post about diversity on XD’s product management team, part of the benefit of working on a large team is the ability to rely on specialized skills to help attain group goals. By identifying my own strengths and working on those, I can help my team achieve its goals quicker. The application of my strengths toward long term goals is working strategically instead of reactively.

#3: Rely on your business partners.

It’s physically impossible to get everything done yourself. By relying on and trusting my business partners in design, engineering, marketing, and program management, I can both retain my sanity and still get our common goal accomplished.

#4: Reflect, but don’t get paralyzed.

As someone who has learned the power of reflection, I fell into the reflection trap: paralysis due to the sheer amount of things to be processed. Sometimes, decisions have to be made with insufficient information just to keep you moving forward.

#5: Have an opinion.

Sometimes, I’ve forgotten that I have common sense. I fell into a pattern of setting strict boundaries for design and process that allowed myself no opinions about the two areas. However, I learned (probably the hard way) that I could have asserted my opinion earlier in a couple of cases that would have saved the entire organization from some painful lessons.

#6: Scale, even if it means suffering through control issues.

Sometimes, scaling means allowing failure. In my pursuit of making sure the team succeeded, I fell into the trap of plugging all of the gaps I saw instead of letting others step up (or let the ball drop). One of the struggles I had was not just optimizing for my own strengths, but doing so strategically and allowing others to pick up the slack.

#7: Ask good questions.

One of my successes in the year was learning how to ask better questions of our customers. Through some well-designed surveys, I was able to get some key information to shape XD into a product people enjoyed using. With each interview and survey I ran, I was able to further hone my skills in this area.

#8: Know the limitations of your tools.

I’m a pragmatist when it comes to tools; I’m not thoroughly convinced about the silver bullet methodology of any particular technology, no matter how enthused people are about it. Knowing the strengths and limitations of toolchains, and advocating on behalf of my team was something I tried to do this year, which yielded mixed results.

However, despite that knowledge, I was able to bring the same skepticism into my product research. By knowing what tools would yield what type of results (and how much confidence to put in each one), I was able to gather better data to make better business decisions.

#9: When it comes down to it, it’s all about the people.

I’ve become very aware that some of the harder problems I’ve been trying to solve have been much less about concrete issues and more about things like process, organizational structure, and fundamental human issues like hurt feelings, miscommunications, and my own brokenness as a human being.

Some of these lessons were painfully learned, involving a fair amount of stress and conflict with coworkers. The second six months of my product management career has been marked by both successes and struggles. Despite the latter, I remain confident that — similar to my martial arts training — awareness is the first step to mastery, and humility and teachability remain my greatest strengths in this new career.

I’m looking forward to new challenges and new lessons in this upcoming year. More to come!

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“Chess” courtesy Riccardo Cuppini, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0

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.