The Old Start Problem
For folks who have just finished reading Andrew Chen’s ‘Cold Start Problem’ or have munched on Andrew Bosworth’s ‘The Career Cold Start problem’, this might seem radiate some similarity but believe me, it’s totally different. The reason I was tempted to write this blog is over the past few years I’ve been trying hard to talk to product leaders and mentors who have had a formidable career in product management in B2B or B2C. If you look at the quintessential career curve of a product leader, you’d usually find they came from engineering backgrounds or business backgrounds and worked in product management roles for close to a decade before they switched to a leadership role in products. This famous blog by Product Plan outlines the following as the career path for a product manager
This is a seemingly simple representation as it happens in the Bay area or some other similar destinations but it might be overly complex too if its a large organisation. Here’s another one from the product school blog which is also insanely relevant
Most organisations catering to enterprise customers tend to employ product owners too who not only handle the product management tasks but also act as a product owner for the scrum process(quite important these days for faster shipping). The point I am trying to make is product management like any other profession isn’t any different and one has to organically grow in order to understand the tips and tricks of the profession.
Keeping that logic in mind, some 8 years back I tried finding folks who have spent a good majority of their career in product management in India and have graduated to become product leaders. Sadly to my utter surprise and dismay, I couldn’t. Most folks who were touted as product leaders were general management folks were holding fancy positions in the Indian technology industry but had absolutely no exposure to product management or had never gone through through the whole shebang. It was borderline strange but it was what it was. Most of the gyaan thrown by such leaders did not make any real sense when it came to products. I had to resort to literature written by senior product leaders like Nikhyl Singhal of Facebook fame whose blogs and videos teach a lot about what one should do to graduate to a product leader’s role or how does compensation work for product leaders?I followed that and bunch of other folks mostly American, European or Chinese who had written a lot on the product trio-product management, product engineering and product design. The only sigh of relief for me was this singular article by Product Folks, a vibrant and proactive community run by product managers in India which outlined the top 100 product managers to follow in India. Unfortunately as I followed most of these said folks, I realised that most of them save Anshumani Ruddra who was then product head of Hotstar, no one was writing anything on product management. I followed him for a while but I found out that there is a large deficit when it comes to content around product management.
Then there was also the danger of consuming wrong knowledge or as I have come to call it ‘Misgyaan’ given by general management leaders sitting in product leadership positions devoid of any actual product management experience. I scrapped the web for traces of any literature emanating out of India which might help product management aspirants or newbie product managers or mid level product managers with their daily problems, career progression et al. As I did all the above to expand my worldview on product management, I was also interested in understanding why there is a deficit of product management leaders or said literature in India. As I spoke to multitude of folks over the next few weeks I realised few anecdotal pieces of wisdom. Product management as a discipline or a profession is anew to India. It just popped out of nowhere some 15 years back in mainstream tech. Before that it used to be an enigmatic discipline and most of it would happen in the secret corridors of Enterprise tech companies.
I still remember my days with an enterprise tech company where it would be some kinda cardinal sin to ask what product managers did in their secret chambers. No that’s not true at all. I was just messing with you at all :). The bottomline was that it wasn’t heard of and was still a mystery to folks like me and in a country where everyone post 2004 was going for a PMP certification, it seemed like an enigma. Only after Flipkart appeared in the mainstream media and with the advent of the consumer internet companies, product management got a different meaning altogether and more and more folks started to talk about it.In no time it became the hottest profession in technology. Also because most folks who were coding by virtue of their engineering degrees discovered a newfound love for product management as it didn’t explicitly require one to code and more so because if Amartya Sen is to be believed we are pretty much a talking nation and this job requires loads of dialogue with different stakeholders. Soon there were articles covering the dawn of product management in Indian consumer tech startups and the rest we know is history.
In that meanwhile a lot of things changed drastically. Companies namely startups moved away from 4Ps of marketing to more creative theories that could give results. Digital became the fifth pillar of democracy. Concepts like growth emerged out of nowhere to deal with problems arising out of post product market fitment situations. Strategy was taught from Game of Thrones , Breaking Bad became a playbook for Entrepreneurship and Peter Thiel became the new Friedrich Nietzsche. In other words everything changed real fast. Not many folks namely product leaders could catch up and in due time they became irrelevant. Now if you look at the career curve of most of these product leaders you’d find that they did great things in product engineering or QA in their careers, went abroad and proved their mettle and after spending close to few decades in tech namely in engineering with degrees from Ivy League Universities in Europe or US, held key management positions in Indian tech companies. Sadly they did not do product management and when they sat on these glorified product positions , most of what they thought the role demanded was quite different from the actual expectations. I have heard such leaders speak and most of their narrative comprises of general management stuff, stuff picked up from books or blogs or podcasts mixed with their innate understanding of what product management is. At the same time I completely empathise with their situation because at a point in a person’s career when he has already spent 3 decades doing something, trying to relearn something from scratch needs real effort and perseverance. It ain’t easy.
I heard this statement in a podcast I was listening to where the product manager made a quote,”Are you smart enough to know how dumb you are?”. I thought it was an amazing quote because not many folks have the power of realisation. At a senior leadership position some amount of God Complex engulfs a leader and with high flying egos it becomes practically difficult to realise if one has flaws or not. Most leaders tend to suffer from Dunning Kruger effect at some stage in their careers where they have no idea about the degree of incompetence they suffer from. Cognitively speaking they live in their dissonance till a life changing event happens that forces them to see the truth in its purest form, chances of which are seemingly low. Also at some point in their prestigious careers, leaders tend to lose the proactivity they had shown and become agents of conformism. They no longer wish to challenge the status quo and almost always follow the path to least resistance. A gargantuan jump to learning the tips and tricks of products by doing it seems like an almost impossible option and to some extent that is the point where they relinquish. Now this might be absolutely fine for their respective careers but as a thought leader if they were to state things which would be absorbed by product management aspirants, most of it not being relevant if we talk about actual product management, might actually be detrimental to the learning curve of an aspirant or an associate product manager who might actually buy all of it at face value only to discover he is nowhere close to the reality. Take a look at the following picture. Ignore the ugliness of the image and focus on what the image is trying to say
If a product aspirant follows leaders who have had a great product management career where they started from scratch and made their way to leadership positions or product entrepreneurs who started several product companies and built every product from scratch facing all that entropy could throw at them, then what they would articulate would be quite close to reality and we can use the terms ‘perceived reality’ to denote them. Their learnings are somewhat closer to reality but as the saying goes, one has to write his or her own reality. Every product leader’s journey is very different from each other and there is no playbook that can spoonfeed one to glory. One has to face the perils of entropy to come out as a seasoned product leader and there isn’t any shortcut to that. However as one listens to such product leaders who have had no experience doing product management, one steers away from the reality to the zone of danger where misinformation forms the crux of perception a person develops. That unwanted , unnecessary knowledge or information might actually backfire since it has no base in reality.
I remember reading an interview where Gayle Laakman McDowell author of the famous book ‘Cracking the PM Interview’ spoke about how choosy and careful she was while finding a co-author with whom she could write the said book. After speaking to hundreds of folks she decided to write the book with Jackie Bavaro who herself was a great product leader like Gayle. Similarly while choosing one’s product leader one has to be extremely cautious because if you screw up you’d enter a zone of dissonance till a time you actually realise that and that would mean wasting time over irrelevant things that won’t really create a big bang in your career. I would term this phenomenon as the ‘Old Start Problem’. Experience signifies wisdom undoubtedly but it also has to be quite relevant to a said topic.
So the next time you get fascinated by a senior leader with a jazzy designation and are at the verge of following the person, do spend some time to figure out his career curve and if you don’t find anything substantial around product management, abort ASAP. That’s all for now folks. Hope you end up following the right guys.