What Does a Path to Product Management Look Like?
By: Christian Bailey
Tags: Design Thinking, Startup Lessons, Product, Design, Product Management

I’m happy to share a few details about my career path given the increased demand of the Product Management role, and provide insight to people that are seeking the position without having formal education or experience. I suspect that many of you might already have the experience that you need, but you’ll have to highlight the appropriate bullet points of your resume that display your strengths as a product leader.

My experience includes entrepreneurship, design, data analysis, basic web app development and deployment, and critically important, a passion for creating new things. Having a technical background is helpful, but not necessary. I’ve heard from other product leaders that having deep technical experience is often a disadvantage, narrowing the scope of focus for the PdM and missing the other aspects of the development process that make a product successful, notably: customer engagement, UX/UI design emphasis, and being mindful of the business impact your product is able to deliver.

Before I start the story, here’s a brief understanding (from my experience and self-education) of what true Product Management is. PdM’s are the “drivers” of developing the vision, design, strategy, and execution of the product — not the “owner.” PdM’s make sure nothing falls through the cracks in the product development process, holding ultimate responsibility for the success of the product with little authority on “how” it happens. PdM’s focus on the “what” and the “why.”

PdM’s are strong cross-collaborators with designers, engineers, architects, customers, and stakeholders. PdM’s centralize information from those aforementioned parties, and align these groups to a clear vision while holding the delivery team accountable for executing tasks according to the product roadmap. PdM’s are able to identify dependencies and roadblocks, and productively steer the boat in the right direction with everyone on board.

Now the story…

Since I was a child, I’ve had an innate urge to create the things I wanted that I didn’t have. From making my own super hero costumes at 5 years old, to making my own battle card game in the 4th grade because I couldn’t buy Pokémon cards.

My ventures matured over time, and at 17 led me to found an apparel company that was sold in a few local retail chains in Ohio. My interest in art, design, and business management allowed me to get hands on experience. I owned the profit & loss management of my business, as well as building soft skills like productive networking, hiring graphic artists, communicating with manufacturers, and negotiating with retail buyers in order to produce and sell quality apparel.

As a first generation college student I majored in retail merchandising to deepen my understanding of the retail market and customer decision making. After taking a course in inventory planning, I learned about basic analysis and forecasting, all of which was done in excel — this is when I fell in love with data.

I took it upon myself to quantify every aspect of my life in excel sheets: diet, budget, schedule, and decision matrixes. Through some business forecasting and factoring in scaling, I found out it would take me years to make a reasonable enough profit from my bootstrapped business to sustain myself financially.

I decided to shift gears, and focus on my education to become a college grad with a professional career. This led to me becoming the first student in the retail merchandising program to have two corporate internships. After graduating, I was able to successfully land an e-commerce analyst role at JC Penney in Plano, Texas.

I ended up automating about half of my job through a combination of learning jquery and making formulas in excel for a much simpler markdown decision making process. Though the ecommerce business was growing, overall JCP was steadily declining, so I departed and was fortunate enough to land an entry level vendor management role for Amazon.com, in Movies & TV (physical DVDs and Blu-ray).

Being in my early twenties and tasked with managing ~$100M in business was extremely daunting, with a heavy dose of imposter syndrome. However, I was lucky to have a strong cohort of co-workers that became close friends to help soften the stress, and applying lessons from the brilliant people around me helped me become successful. I learned deeper quantitative analysis skills, was able to build a solution to a large business problem, and continued to grow more comfortable and confident speaking to senior leadership + leading initiatives horizontally.

I’ll skip over AWS for a bit, most of that time was me continuing to build on the prior Amazon experience while learning more about cloud services, and working using an agile framework.

I decided to re-engage in the startup world by working on my own project with several awesome engineers and designers to build a web application. I was also director of marketing for a fin-tech startup, and continued to mentor other business owners looking to establish or grow their businesses.

After scratching the startup itch, I carefully evaluated my past experiences while applying for new roles, and that is when I was first introduced to product management. I began to do more research and digested the methods of human centered design and design thinking, reading articles upon articles related to product, and diving deeper into the history of notable successful products and platforms ever built (as well as notable failures).

Being able to connect the dots and tell my story resonated with several companies, and I chose to work at Capital One as a PdM in Cyber working with a team of phenomenal engineers and strong senior leaders to build SOAR (Security Orchestrion, Automation, and Response) solutions.

If you’re someone who dives into the details of successful entrepreneurs/products, and have hands on experience with building products or services, I’d say product management is a great fit for you! My takeaways would be for you to connect the dots from your experiences, self-educate (showcase through practice), and authentically tell your story.

I have some notable resources below. I hope that me telling my story and insights about product management was helpful, best of luck!

Great Books

Zero to One, Hooked, The Power of Habit, Storyteller’s Secret, Principles: Life and Work, and Range.

Podcasts to Browse

How I built This, Impact Theory, and Freakonomics

Educational Videos

Product is Hard, Basics of a PdM Role (Google), Paving your Path to Product, and How to Succeed as a Non-Technical PM

Other References

Design Thinking, and Agile Methodology