Becoming a T-Shaped Product Manager

Hello and welcome into another episode of Lessons in Product Management. I'm your host And on today's episode we're gonna talk about

shaped product manager. So, what is a T-shape product manager? You may have heard that expression, you may have seen stuff written about it online, but what is it? Basically, the T represents depth and breadth.

Every PM starts out with some type of knowledge or some type of strength, right? Whether that's customer focus, whether that's being technical, whether that's having a strong business acumen. We start somewhere. And in certain areas we're able to go deep. Right. Whether that's, you know, deeply technical, uh deep customer centricity with a strong product taste, uh deep on research, there's there's other areas that we can go deep.

Right within our job was the But b before we go too far, let let's let's take a step back and define the core responsibility of a PM, right?'Cause I think things are changing ever so slightly and and maybe drastically with with Gen AI.

But what is the core responsibility of a PM? Well, I always define product management as creating customer value in a way that drives a business objective. Right. I used to say solving a customer's problem, but that's not always the case, right? There's there are other ways to create value that's not necessarily solving a problem. But you're still creating value. I think of like entertainment. You could say that the problem is boredom.

But that's not always the case, right? So let's just define it as creating customer value in a way that drives a business objective. That's number one.

How do you do that? Well you have to work with a team because, you know, at least for now, uh until vibe coding actually gets us to production quality software, which it's not quite there yet in my opinion. You still need to work with a team. Uh you still need to have someone who has the ability to design and has the context and knowledge of design to create good designs and interaction patterns. and everything that goes into the discipline of design.

So you still have to work with the team for now. Uh getting buy-in and alignment, that's core to a PM's job, prioritizing amongst a plethora of competing Uh things that you could do. I'm not gonna say competing priorities because the plurality of priorities is not an actual word. It's an oxymoron. There can only be one priority. If there's more than one, you have no priority. That's my soap box for the day.

Um, but then synthesizing a lot of information is also pretty critical as well. So let's go over like the top five things, right? Creating customer value in a way that moves the business in the right direction, working with the team, getting buy-in. prioritizing and synthesizing a lot of information.

And y if you want to throw in being in a ton of meetings, sure, but that kind of goes into all those other things. You hopefully you're doing some of those things in in meetings and not just having meetings for meetings sick. So those are areas where you could go deep. But that is core to a PM's job, right? So what are some of the adjacencies that we could look at to say we could go deep in these areas or we could go broad?

But we have to do a little bit of both, right? There's areas where we need to go deep and there's areas where if we're not gonna go deep on them we at we at least need to have enough of a competency to have a conversation, speak the language of these other areas, right? And be able to dabble, right?

So increasing your technical competence if you don't have a technical background, this is still critical. Um y you will work on products that are more technical in nature. You'll work on products that have a lot more to do on the back end with APIs and or infrastructure or setting up new data schema. You won't always be building new customer features. Right, I've come across this in my career. It drove me to do the skip level course.

I highly recommend skip level if you um are looking to up level your technical chops. Go check it out at skip level dot co, I believe it is. Just type in skip level, all one word. It'll it'll get you there. Um gaining competence in UX and research I think is critical. Research is where the insights come from and understanding the principles of good user experience.

is also critical. You could go deep in those areas or take a broad approach. Understanding the go-to-market function with marketing sales, CS, and especially how do you work with your product marketing counterpart?

And if you don't have a product marketer at your company, you are the product marketer. So it's vital that you understand The role, um creating story brand, uh absolutely or no obviously awesome. Those are some good books to check out for messaging and positioning. Um there's some really good pricing books like monetizing innovation. There's a lot of things you could look at for some of the product marketing discipline. Data and analytics.

Is another critical one. So do you have some sequel proficiency? Do you know how to tell stories with data? Do you know how to get stories out of data and understand what data's telling you and not telling you? And do you know how to question data in the right way that leads you to follow up research. Do you know how to take qualitative data and validate or invalidate it with quantitative data and vice versa?

And then you have some adjacent functions like compliance, legal, regulatory. Are you in healthcare, insurance, banking, fintech? Are you in any industry where there is a high level of regulation and compliance that needs to be considered?

You should probably figure out what some of that stuff is. Use ChatGPT, Google it. do something to figure out what in your area Should you be concerned with or aware of? And that also bleeds into product ethics. Like could we do this versus should we do this?

Being able to have discernment and discipline and a distinction between things we could do and things we should do. What's right for the business might not always be right for the customer, and vice versa. Who do we prioritize? Where's the line that we draw? That's important.

Then you have kind of the financial and accounting pieces, right? You might not always be responsible for pricing, but you should have opinions of the value that your product is creating and how might you charge for that value in a way that's optimal for the customer and for the business.

You should have some familiarity with revenue models. You should understand the concept of ROI, return on investment. If we're gonna invest a hundred thousand dollars worth of dev time for something that could only ever generate fifty thousand dollars, it's probably not a good idea. You should understand the concept of value versus cost versus how we charge for this and the pricing and pricing model versus price point. You should understand those differences.

Okay. There there is no end to what we can learn. And being a product manager, we are literally at the center of everything that goes on in our organization.

And as that center, as that person that needs to get buy-in from all these other functions to make the world go around, if you can't speak their language and understand what they care about, you're at a disadvantage. So I say all this to say like that this shouldn't be overwhelming. This is a a journey. This is not a sprint. Our careers need to be agile, but we are not working in two week sprints. Um

It it's a marathon. And you know, if if we want to continue with the analogy, you may work in two week sprints and go all in on one topic and learn another topic and continually build your competencies, but you don't need to learn everything in two weeks is what I'm trying to say. You have time. You need to figure out where are you strong, where are you weak.

And in those areas that you're strong, lean on those strengths and in the areas that you're you're weak, try to figure out like What which one of these things that I'm not strong in is actually holding me back in my career? Am I in a highly regulated space and I have no idea what compliance gotchas are right in front of me? You should probably figure that out.

Are you working on highly technical products, but you like don't know how to ask the right questions to engineers and you have no idea what the difference is between cloud and on-prem? You don't know the difference between a relational and a non-relational database? You don't know what a post from a put from a Git request is on an API or how the internet works? You should probably figure some of those things out so you can become a better partner to your engineering counterpart.

Okay. So Part of this is understanding Like what is the range of things that I could or should be learning? What's what am I good at today? What am I not? What's relevant for today? What's not? And then creating a learning roadmap for yourself so you can become more and more valuable.

I in the age of generative AI, there's gonna be more expected of the uh throughout time there's been consolidation of roles, whether it's in manufacturing and automation or farming with uh consolidation of small farms into these large uh large farms.

uh you look at the industrial revolution to the technical revolution to now Gin AI, any time there's massive leaps in technological advances There's consolidation, and that's likely going to happen to us at some point as product managers where things will get consolidated, whether we agree with it or not. Organizations and their leaders will make decisions that may or may not be good for us or for the business. But as a byproduct, we're gonna have to live with it.

And so if you're expected to do more things than write PRDs and have a few meetings, hopefully you're doing more than that today. and prioritizing a backlog that's handed to you, which like that that world of PM is going away. Being handed a backlog, saying prioritize this and write a PRD that engineers don't understand because you're not technical and you don't know how to like write it in a way that's actually useful.

Like, if that's all you're doing today, there's cause for concern. You should listen to this podcast, you should um figure out what other PMs are doing that have more responsibilities and that are taking on a broader role and scope and figure out how to start doing some of those things. Cause If you're not, you're not going to be competitive in the market as a PM.

So th this isn't too cause alarm or panic, but it's just th this this episode is to be more informative of the the desire from organizations and the demand of us as PMs. is to become more T shaped. And I think there there are inflection points like with just force it upon us whether we want it or not. And your ability to land a job, keep a job, get promoted is going to be dependent on your ability to go deep and to go broad on a mix of these things that we talked about.

So I hope you go back and listen to it again, kind of take some notes and figure out, hey, where where am I killing it today? That's great. Where am I weak? What do I need to work on? And build yourself a career growth roadmap. And if you want help on that, please. Reach out to me, John at pathtoproduct.io. I love this stuff. Like I want to be a professor. I love teaching. I love coaching. Uh what sports, careers, anything. Like I'm happy to help.

John at pathtoproduct dot IO. I'll drop it in the show notes. You can you can email me. If you want help creating a learning roadmap and just like an honest assessment of where you are today.

Let's get on a Zoom call for thirty minutes and talk. Like I'm happy to help. Uh I I spend a lot of time helping aspiring people. But if you're more junior or Stuck and you haven't gotten that promotion and you're wondering why? Let's chat. Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed this lesson in product management. And until next week, go out and kill it.