My Path To Product Management
My journey from electrical engineering to product management
I’m Jack Moore. Now I’m a product manager specializing in data platform and machine learning products, but 4 years ago I was a bright-eyed electrical engineer who was staring down a big wide world of possibilities. Here’s how I bushwhacked my path from electrical engineering to product management…
These questions were originally sent to me by the fine folks at howigotjob.com
How was your university experience?
I went to the University of Notre Dame, in Northern Indiana, where I majored in Electrical Engineering. I’ve always been a fairly technical person, when I was little I would take apart old appliances around the house, and so I gravitated towards engineering.
The 2 greatest things that my engineering education did for me was
- Teaching me how to break down a complex problem into solvable pieces, often working with a team to do so, and
- Introducing me to the power of machine learning. Seriously, ML is really neat.
All of this equipped me to do what I’m doing now — working with a team of data scientists and engineers to create powerful tools.
Why did you seek out a career in product management?
I like to say that I fell into product management, that product management “just happened to me”, but that probably isn’t accurate.
What is probably more accurate is that I knew that I wanted to find a career where I was building cool stuff that helped people, and product management happened to be the name of the role that I best fit into.
If I were to give an aspiring product manager advice, it would be to consider learning about product management in their current job. Anyone who builds products in a way that centers around user impact is doing some form of product management.
How has your first job impacted where you are today?
My product management journey started in an unusual setting. I was working at Pacific Gas & Electric, a large electric and gas utility, headquartered out of San Francisco. I say unusual because large utilities don’t necessarily have a reputation for harboring the sorts of teams that need product management.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give is to treasure the leaders at your company that are willing to help you grow. I credit the leadership in my group at PG&E for creating an environment where I could learn about what product management was, and ultimately finding a calling that has been the object of my passion for the better part of the last 4 years.
Find an environment that can live up to your appetite for learning, and then learn as much as you can.
How do you prepare for an interview?
First, a quick anecdote:
A traveler came upon three men working. He asked the first man what he was doing and the man said he was laying bricks. He asked the second man the same question and he said he was putting up a wall. When he got to the third man and asked him what he was doing he said he was building a cathedral.
When I interview anyone, especially product managers, I look for cathedral builders — people who care about the importance of the stuff they’re building. Make sure to talk not just about what you’ve built, but why it’s important that thing exists.
Other things to mention in a product management interview are:
- Collaborating with engineering teams — conducting retrospectives, experimenting with changing product processes, looking for ideas from engineers.
- Focusing on data — looking for trends that allow you to develop an idea of whether the thing that you’re working on would be successful, and figuring out ways to measure whether it ended up working.
- Talking to users — seeking out 1 on 1 conversations with users and customers, and a desire to share those experiences with your team.
Finally, 99% of interviews will include some time to ask questions, and the quality of those questions is what ultimately makes the difference between a good candidate and a perfect one. Come ready with good questions.
Ultimately, the best interviews I’ve been a part of are ones where I legitimately had fun, so be friendly and try to enjoy your conversation.
What books have helped you?
- User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton — An amazing book that taught me the importance of viewing product through the frame of a users’ experience, rather than a bunch of functional pieces.
- The Elements of Scrum, by Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson — This book teaches what I like to call “textbook scrum”, and is a great foundation for understanding what it means to be a part of an agile team.
- Inspired, by Marty Cagan — Marty Cagan is one of the foremost voices in the product management world, and his book is one of the quintessential guides to practical product management.
- Lean Startup, by Eric Ries — Ideating & building products quickly and efficiently are one of the most important things that a product manager can push towards. Lean Startup Circle does an amazing job of showing you how you can quickly and easily figure out whether a product is going to be successful.
- Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman — People have some incredible built-in biases and tendencies. This book will guide you through some of the nuances of human thought and how use them to your advantage.
Those are the highlights, but If you’d like to see a full list of the books that I recommend for product management, I’d invite you to check out my website.
What can you recommend on a cv?
Product Management is a mile-wide, foot-deep sort of job. By that, I mean that it’s your job to fill in the gaps of your teams’ product development process. User research, design, testing, data analysis — these are all potential areas of responsibility for a product manager.
The best thing you can do in a product management interview is to make a case for why your past experience fits into what a prospective job is going to ask of you.
Use your CV to tell a compelling story about how you make the perfect candidate for the job that you’re interviewing for.
What advice would you have for someone looking for a job as a product manager?
Product Management is all about furthering a company’s mission. Going back to my notion of the cathedral builder, focusing on a few companies whose mission you truly believe in (whether they’re hiring right now or not) will yield better long-term results than a shotgun approach of applying to every opening under the sun.
Reach out to the people at companies you’re truly interested in and figure out what you can do to be of value to them.
Why do you think you were selected among other candidates?
I think that I interview well. Practicing interviews is really important, even if it’s just in a mirror.
Find a friend who’s also interviewing for new jobs and switch off interviewing each other. Look online for common product management interview questions.
Additionally, I think that my background and interest made me a more attractive candidate for roles that dealt in a particularly heavy way with data science or data platform projects.
“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses “ — Marilyn vos Savant
Play to your strengths and you’ll go far. Try to pretend like your weaknesses aren’t there, and you’re going to fail.
Things are changing very fast in the product management field, how do you keep yourself up to date?
I love a good meetup. Product Management as a practice can move fast, so hearing from the experts at some of the top companies is a great way to keep a finger on the industry’s pulse.
Publications like Hackernoon, Product Coalition, and Product School are great ways to keep up to date on the happenings around tech, and are valuable both in terms of learning about what’s going on, but also connecting with experts who are doing what you want to be doing.
I’ve found that people tend to be much more approachable than you might assume. Just because someone’s written a book doesn’t mean that they won’t reply if you DM them on Twitter.
All-in-all, I can’t stress enough how amazing I think product management is as a career. It’s a great way to exercise an entrepreneurial spirit in a wide range of environments, and it offers the opportunity to understand the impact of technology on real peoples’ lives in a way that no other position does.
Thanks for reading! I’m Jack Moore, and I love writing about product management.
