Why I Sometimes Product Manage

tl;dr

Design is much easier with all the context, and getting all the context requires going to formative product strategy meetings, and since I’m there and contributing…

The first time I product managed

I was working as a senior product designer at O’Reilly Media (it was technically Safari Books at the time), and our development house on the mobile app side had just been purchased by Beyer. We didn’t have any mobile app developers on staff, so we needed to shift some resources around internally and hire folks quickly. Mobile usage was increasing compared to our web product, and the company needed to invest. First, they split the PM role into two making iOS and Android have separate PMs. Then they shuffled an existing PM into the Android role. And then the iOS PM suddenly left the team weeks later. At this point I have as much understanding of the apps as anyone on the team, so we shuffled again and I became an interim PM at the same time that I was designing.

This all happened within 5 months of starting there.

Being a PM at O’Reilly at the time meant that I was invited into the leadership team consisting of all the C-Level people save CEO down to me. We were about 10 people strong. What this afforded me was a complete understanding of the working of the business for the first time in my career. That access made it much easier for me to inform and direct product decisions that would run downstream into design. What started as a means to keep continuity in the mobile team turned into a way to make wise decisions that could be delivered on the other end of the pipeline. Design got easier, people were happier, and we could move quicker.

Early startups

My speed, flexibility, and ability to understand systems made me attractive to early startups. Early startups are generally cash-strapped and don’t want to invest money anywhere other than engineering, but at this point I was pretty senior and had some leadership exposure. I made a deal with an old client who wanted to hire me as the second employee and said I’d be both Director of Design and Product if they’d pay me market value. Stop, Breathe & Think accepted, partially because their new CEO had product experience as well (though more on the product marketing side). For the next three years I did all of the design work across 2 products and 5 platforms while building roadmaps, ICE scoring features, meeting with users, surveying, documenting, grooming tickets, and kibitzing with the founders within the consumer health & wellness space. I eventually hired and managed a PM as the work became too much for one person, but maintained leadership over it as we grew. The company was acquired by Meredith (Time Magazine, etc.) shortly after I left.

From there, I got a job with another former client at GoCheck in the same capacity. GoCheck is a FDA-listed medical device that uses light refracted off of a child’s retinas to check for early signs of specific eye conditions. They wanted to clean up their existing product and work toward a new product that would help children check their eyesight regularly if they were showing signs of rapid myopia. (This was becoming a major problem with the use of mobile devices.) The design work was relatively lightweight and somewhat constrained for regulatory reasons, but the product management work was much more involved. There were many competing needs for a small team that needed processes that weren’t in place. They also had me managing their controlled document system, which was an old, byzantine web 1.0 app. As before, when the work got to a point that I needed help, we hired someone. This time, we hired a Project Manager to help with the controlled documents and keeping the work running on time.

I then had the chance to work with someone I knew from Stop, Breathe & Think who was running product at StyleRow. In this role I was only supposed to lead design, but I did product manage our use of AI image classification since I had a good understanding of it from GoCheck days. I also helped the Director of Product in other ways, though not as extensively as other situations.

Where I am now

I like designing, but I also like product managing. I like leading both and managing people in both. And I don’t have to do both to be successful. That makes me hard to categorize, but it comes from the way I think about problems and my ability to see across functions. Building product is often finding hidden requirements and dealing with how to integrate them into an ever-more-complex product. That’s true across functions, and being able to see the issues coming early from a design and product view has benefited my work and my sanity.