Becoming a Product manager being Accountant
By: Macarena Suarez
Tags: Accounting, Product Management, Product, Women In Tech, Girls In Tech

Do accountants and Product managers have things in common? I can say yes without hesitation.

Most of the people in different job meetings were surprised when I told them that I am an accountant.

I have been working as a Product Manager for the last 4 years. In my experience, it is not common to find people without technical backgrounds working in positions like mine. Luckily this has been changing over the years and hopefully, this work could inspire more girls and boys without a technical career to join us in the fantastic product and tech world.

Believe it or not, accountants and product managers have many things in common. I will try to explain the most important points for me in the next paragraphs.

Firstly, I want to talk about Numbers. At least in the country where I am from (Argentina), when you ask someone about what an accountant does, they say that accountants love maths and they enjoy solving numerical problems. This is not true because different types of accounting activities exist, not always with numerical problems around. But at the end part of these statements are true.

The Accountants have to make sure that the financial statements are correct and they should deal with incomes and costs. But in the end, they work with a lot of numerical data to help others to make good decisions. They help the owners of a company to invest or a worker to have the correct use of the rent.

Something similar happens with product managers. We use info, different kinds of data, to make better decisions. We have to analyse and understand metrics to be a good product manager. How can we prioritise a feature if we don’t know if it is valuable?

Something is valuable for the business and the customer when it helps improve metrics and achieve goals. You could see that metrics and goals are very close to numbers.

Moreover, we can list another important point in common: customer experience. Why does an accountant have to think about customer experience? to understand who you are working for. It is not the same work as an accountant for a self-employed person as a big company.. is it?. As an accountant, you have to be empathic with your client’s problems and needs.

This is the same in product management. You have to know your client, have full knowledge about what they need. Is important to know how you could help your client, what problems are your product available to solve. You have to be close to them. To do this you should be able to recollect feedback as soon as possible to make changes quickly.

Furthermore, both as an accountant and as a product manager must be good communicators. In both cases, our stakeholders did not necessarily have the specific knowledge to understand technical requests. It is essential to be able to translate complex definitions into clear and easy-going explanations. We have to be good in both verbal and written skills.

All in all, In both roles We must be good at teamwork and be close to the teams to reach the company aims. We are not specialists in everything but we have to understand the big picture about different industries and how they work to make the most valuable contribution in each case.

I’m sure I could list at least a couple more things in common between accounting and product management, but I think with this brief summary I can show that anyone who sets out to do so can venture into the IT world.

What other things do you think we could add to the list?