Feeling Stuck? Early Career Product Manager
This post is primarily for early-career product managers who are trying to do something significant, but are feeling stuck in the day-to-day corporate grind. I experienced this very early in my career with my internships and co-ops. It didn’t help that most of the time, my coworkers had twice as much experience than I did. I wasn’t sure how to get unstuck. And I was headed back into a similar environment in my first full-time role.
As a 22-year old, early-career product manager, I had had enough. I was tired of going into unproductive and disorganized meetings and coming out feeling deflated, frustrated, and honestly like a failure. All I wanted to do, as a product manager in my first year of work, was deliver awesome customer experiences. I had no idea how difficult that would be. All of my teammates had different goals and perspectives and much more career experience than I did. Agile development was impacted by top-down company mandates. Customer improvements were delayed by tech debt. Design thinking was impacted by expedited delivery. Nothing was in-sync, process-wise. Nothing was in-sync, people-wise. Nothing was in sync, period. But everyday, my coworkers and I came into the office and did it all over again.
I decided that I was going to break the cycle of fighting, deflating, and failing. I was going to win. And I was going to win with my team. I forgot about all the things I thought were important and asked myself “What did my team think was important?” I learned that my teammates were all struggling with some sort of psychological safety or pride issues. Some were fearful of losing their jobs if they drew outside the lines or spoke up. Others were feeling the need to overachieve in areas where their leaders would recognize them with accolades and incentives. I was focused on launching a cool new feature to customers to increase the retention rate — something my manager thought was important. To better understand why we all had these different motivations, I sought to understand what was important to all of our managers. And their managers. I was hoping to find some connection in motivations or goals at the leadership level. But I didn’t. And I started to realize just how big of a problem I was facing.
I felt like I wasted so much time having one-on-one meetings with all of these leaders, until I realized that I had the keys to solve the problem. I gained knowledge of what motivated my dev lead, design lead, and scrum team. I knew what was important to each of our leaders, and I knew what was important to me. I had the fuel to create positive energy. So that’s what I did.
I created a challenge for my team that got everyone motivated. I pitched the idea of refactoring the homepage of our product. As we went, we would implement small enhancements that would make the overall user experience better. This was a win-win for the entire team. We were addressing a chunk of legacy code that hadn’t been touched in 10 years, so the engineering team was very excited. We chose enhancements that were likely to improve retention, which the product team was fond of. Since we were putting the homepage on a newer technology stack, the look, feel, and flow of the homepage became more consistent and user friendly, which was a big plus for the design team. I shared a reasonable delivery timeline with leadership which got them excited. And I was honestly excited to see everyone in a space that felt collaborative and supportive of one another. Leadership was so proud of the work our team had accomplished that they asked us to present our project to the company — and how we won together. From that point on, my team had a lot of trust in me. And it was easier for each of us to compromise and deliver the experiences we felt were best for our customers and our team.
How can this help you? If you feel like you’re stuck and your team is not on the same page:
- Make sure you understand your teammates’ motivations and goals. Every new project I start or team I join, this is one of the first things I do.
- Make sure you understand the goals of the key leaders and stakeholders involved or impacted by your team’s work.
- Try to find any opportunity, large or small, to achieve these goals. This is important as it gives your team confidence that you all can deliver together and helps build trust.
