Breaking into product seems impossible. How to change that.
By: Tara Goldman
Tags: Leadership, Product, Associate Product Manager, Product Management, Career Growth

This is, hands down, the most common question I get asked. Aspiring PMs who are entering the workforce and folks who are looking to make a career shift into product constantly struggle with the typical catch 22 answer. You see, a product manager role is not an entry level role, and hiring managers are looking for experience. At the same time, if you can’t break into the field and gain experience, it can feel as though it’s near impossible to penetrate the force field around the PM career.

If I’m being honest, my response to this question has never been stellar. I sort of cringe and sigh in my response. The truth is it’s hard AF to do this unless you target:

FAANG companies with established and operationalized associate product manager programs Enterprise companies who have the resources and mentoring in place to hire junior PMs Smaller stage companies who are willing to take a bit more risk on with someone who needs to wear multiple hats. Growth stage companies where you can take on a tangential role and eventually make a lateral move into the product team (though this is not guaranteed and can delay career aspirations)

But I learned something. There is another way.

Thinking differently about breaking into Product

It’s much harder and requires effort and commitment on behalf of the individual and the company, but it’s possible, and I wanted to share that with others who can potentially learn from our experience here at Electric.

Before I get into the details, let me rewind back about a year to when I started at Electric. Naturally, as a new Exec to the organization, my initial time was spent learning about the business and my team so that we could hit the ground running in 2020. As I ramped, I aimed to spend time with as many people as possible across the organization to learn about them, how we sell, support our customers, and ultimately operate our business. About a month in, one of our helpdesk agents, Mustapha Allanah, asked to put time on my calendar to meet. I figured this was a great opportunity to learn more about our level 1 agent processes and what was working / not to inform our product strategy as well as meet a fellow colleague.

When we got into the conference room, Mustapha got right to his pitch. He explained that he’d been passionate about product management for years, had spent considerable time with the existing product team soaking up any and all information he could, and had consumed as many product related books he could get his hands on. He knew I was still ramping in my role and expected nothing in return except to hear him out, become aware of his passion to be a PM one day, and seek support and advice from a product leader.

I was immediately impressed. It was clear to me that there was something different about Mustapha versus the many conversations I’ve had with folks who want to break into product. He was confident, passionate, and driven. (By the way, he was already a top performer in his existing role.) He wasn’t looking for me to give him step by step instructions on what to do next nor did he ask for a role. He had taken his product learning so far on his own and was curious if there was more he could do.

I chatted with our VP People, Jamie Coakley, and pitched an idea. While I understood we were a growth stage Series B startup without considerable learning and development budgets, I wondered if it might be possible to sponsor Mustapha for a product management course with General Assembly (yes, I worked there but I also knew the quality would be high) so that he could continue his learning and get more formal training while I focused on building out my team. While he did so, he could shadow a product manager on my team and support product development efforts that required heavy cross functional support with our service desk. I was shocked that she didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Jamie believes that regardless of our company stage, it’s important to invest in our people early and often.

“While we are still a somewhat dynamic and small team, there is no doubt we can take the same flexible approach to creating roles out of need as we do to creating roles to solve a need and develop our people. Startups often get to a stage where they need experts across all teams, the jack of all trades people get burned out learning on the job and we start to hire over them. Doing just that, is just lazy. Teams and companies will save more money and retain more people if they work to identify skill sets that are transferable across roles, and devote time to training and development to get people up to speed in a new path. Retaining an employee and keeping company knowledge and history inside the company is a huge competitive advantage not many organizations see when they hear the words “rotational program.”

Mustapha’s part time course coincided with the start of Covid-19 shut downs. On top of his hectic daily duties supporting our customers as we transitioned to remote work, he decided to roll with the change of the in person course to a remote one and spent his spare time on his capstone project.

“The product management course that was set to take in person quickly shifted to remote. Although I was disappointed with the lack of opportunity to build in-person connections with my peers, I decided to make the most of the experience. I was able to couple what I already knew about our customers, product and core services from my 2-years of experience working on the service desk with what I was learning by shadowing the product team and attending the GA course and quickly began applying that knowledge and contributing on a number of projects at Electric. I was even able to see a feature through from ideation to launch.”

Mustapha not only excelled in his abilities to learn new skills but was also incredibly grateful to Electric in providing him with this opportunity. Following his completion of the course and shadowing with our team, I knew that on the job learning was the only way he would truly learn the PM skill set and that it couldn’t be done at half capacity. It became a mission of mine to find a way to create horizontal mobility so that someone with such determination and passion for the role could gain access to a real opportunity. I was also not naive. Creating a new role that required backfilling an existing one costs money. When operating lean teams at a growth stage startup, this is a luxury and would require buy in not just from Jamie but also with our CFO and CEO. It was a no brainer for them — of course we would invest in our people and would find a way.

At the same time, Black Lives Matter was beginning to pick up steam and Mustapha took on a leadership role founding our Black ERG, The Black Bolts. Being viscerally aware of the lack of diversity in tech, it was even more important to me to create opportunities for more diverse talent to enter the tech sector. I was now in an Executive position that allowed me to do this, so if not me, then who?

Jamie was equally receptive to this idea and we quickly began to co-create a rotational program that we would roll out in Q4 whereby Mustapha would be the first to participate. Given the many hats we wear in product, I thought the best approach would be for Mustapha to rotate his time, spending a quarter with each of our product tribes as an associate PM to gain different PM skills along the way as well as learn from many different product managers (we all have our own flavors of how we like to PM after all). After his 1 year rotational program, the intent is to have Mustapha take on a more dedicated role within one of our pods.

Electric will continue this rotational program with potential moves from Service to Engineering, Customer Success to Sales and Service to People by the end of 2021. Each department is responsible for developing a program that people can experience new positions in and learn new skills, and individuals are responsible for bringing to the table their game plan to get the foundational experience under their belt while performing in their current role.

I’m proud to share that Mustapha officially joined the Electric product team in November 2020 and the team couldn’t be happier to welcome him onboard. I’m excited to see the great things he will do as well as learn about his journey which he plans to document.

As we round out this bizarre year and I hit my 1 year anniversary with Electric, I’m reminded of a quote I’ve heard often when taking my quarantine inspired Peloton yoga classes. “Everything you could possibly ever want, have, or need, is right here inside of you.” I’m grateful to Mustapha for showing me that is possible and for the Electric team for always supporting people first.