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Product managers have critical roles in media. But what do they actually do?

In San Francisco, MIE invited a panel of product managers — three of whom have degrees in journalism — to discuss their jobs and expectations, what it’s like to work with developers and designers, and how they spot raw talent in entry-level PMs.

The panel featured:

This discussion was edited for length and clarity:

Tom: I don’t know if you’ve all heard this before about product managers — it’s a very glorious description: A good product manager has the head of an engineer, the heart of a designer and the tongue of a diplomat.

Another way to talk about product managers, less glorious, is that for Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility, but for product management, with great responsibility comes no power.

With that caveat, could you first share how you got interested in product management?

Jenny: I was a documentary producer, so I didn’t see the product management job as very different. You’re still doing a lot of coordinating, you’re trying to get to know what the audience wants, and you do a lot of user interviews. When you’re a producer, you’re probably the voice of the people you interview. When you’re the product manager, you’re the voice of your users.

China has a lot of censorship, so when we produced a really great documentary, I loved it and thought it would change the world, but the documentary would get censored and I thought this life goal of mine was not going to make an impact. At the same time, Alibaba was doing really well and doing a lot of social stuff, and I thought technology could make a difference. Instead of leaving journalism, I switched to the technology and business side.

Somer: I went to J-school, and at my first newspaper the youngest employees built the website and launched the paper online, and I didn’t look back. It combined the creative side of my design and photo skills with the tech side — I was coding since the sixth grade — and then put all that together. It was the perfect format for where journalism was going to be able to reach as many people as possible. I came to Silicon Valley in 1999, doing all kinds of different things, but never staying in nor getting too far away from publishing.

William: I’ve been interested in websites for as long as I can remember. I remember around sixth grade building my first website, and then in college I started learning about content management systems. That led me to my first job, doing marketing at Mozilla Firefox, where I made basic marketing websites and campaigns. I liked the website building part and the product piece much more than the marketing aspect, so I was able to switch teams.

Tom: What do you think is people’s biggest surprise about product management, between what they think it is and what it really is?

Somer: This is funny because when I interview new product managers, I always ask them why they got into product management in the first place. If they say it’s because they want to be the one making decisions about the product, they’re out because that’s a bad reason to want to do it.

You should want to solve the problems and make things better for your customers. Your passion is about people and the problems they have.

William: The biggest surprise is being able to have strong opinions or beliefs on behalf of the customer or user, but also being willing to drop them very quickly. That’s something I experience over and over probably every week — having an idea I am very passionate about and because of new circumstances or new information, I have to drop the idea to pursue something different.

Two other surprises for me would be the number of meetings I have and the amount of time I spend debugging technical issues.

Tom: Speaking of technical issues, what characterizes the relationship between a product manager and the engineering team or the technical team that they work with?

Jenny: For me, I love each of the developers — they’re super amazing, they each have an expertise, and they know a lot about design. Instead of delegating, it’s more like a conversation. You learn from them, they learn from you about the user, and there’s a really strong collaborative relationship.

Somer: At Quantcast, we do AI-driven analytics and advertising targeting. We’re little startups within the company, so every product team has a product owner, product manager, a lead engineer and a number of engineers. We do everything together — we plan together, we brainstorm together, we interview customers together. One of the tenets of our company is to be a CEO, all of us taking ownership, making decisions when we have to, and functioning together.

William: The two traits that stand out to me working with the engineering team is understanding expertise and general understanding of each other. I count on my engineering team to know about different technical solutions to problems we’re trying to solve, and they rely on my team to know about the business problems, the priorities, and the tradeoffs we can make. Product managers have to deal with tradeoffs between quality, speed and functionality. So, they count on us to know what those are going to be, also knowing the voice of the customer.

Tom: And since we mentioned one side of it, which is engineering, what about working with design? What do you love about working with designers, and what are the challenges?

Somer: Part of product management is about empathy, and the obvious part of it is being able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, and really empathize with them and understand. But I think you also have to be that with your teammates, and you find that it’s so much easier to work with people when you understand their challenges and perspectives.

With designers, they’re organizing information so that it’ll be easy to use and functional. You have to understand how they’re trying to solve the problem, and the direction they’re coming from.

Jenny: Sometimes the designer can design something super cool and fancy that you think the user would love, but it would take half a year to build when you need to deliver it in just a month. A product manager needs to decide whether to make the tradeoff between the fancy design, whether it will really help us make money or benefit the user, and the cost to developers.

As Somer said, you really need to understand everyone, where they’re coming from and what efforts they made, and to be the person to make sure your people don’t end up fighting or upset.

William: The designer I work with doesn’t get to spend too much time talking to customers or going through recordings of user sessions, so I need to be able to explain those key points, what problems we’re trying to solve, the technical tradeoffs, and what is the easy solution versus a more complex amazing solution.

Tom: What’s your experience of the growth trajectory for a product management career? What are the traits that you expect someone from an entry-level PM and how do they grow over time? What are the base line attributes of raw talent in an entry-level product manager?

Somer: Number one is curiosity. Are they the kind of person who always wants to know more and really understand the problems? Are they able to be insightful and take what they’ve learned and turn it into insights? Are they passionate about customers and solving problems? The other aspect is being able to think technically. It is a different way of thinking to have these conversations with engineers, even if you don’t know how to code, but to understand the big ideas and the concept.

William: Being able to learn on their own or to find ways. I’m learning new things every week, working on new features or talking with people. For someone who’s just getting started, being able to learn some of the technical pieces and some of the business pieces.

Jenny: Being a product manager requires being a good person. We draw empathy because you have to coordinate so many people, making sure everyone is aligned with each other, so personality is really important. Skill-wise, if you can show that you’re good with data or you really know the users, I think those two skills would really help.

Tom: Speaking of data, how do you use data in your day-to-day jobs, and how do you synthesize it into your decision-making as a product lead?

Jenny: For example, if marketing gives us a goal, you need to look at how many people are actually using certain parts of the product, how you actually converted users and identify where the opportunity is. In the second phase, we do a lot of usability testing through user interviews. After you build the product, you need to A/B test it — even the color of a button can make a big difference.

William: I work on a website that does consumer reviews about products, so we use data on an operational basis to know what people are purchasing, how many people are clicking, and how many will come back. We also do A/B testing to improve user experience and increase how much time people spend on our website or see how good of a job we do at teaching them about the products.

Somer: We have ridiculous amounts of data flooding in, but we have to be careful with data. A lot of people will use data to back up an argument that they already have in their head versus letting the data tell the story. As much data as you can get never replaces sitting down with the customer, watching them do a task, and understanding how you can make it better.

Tom: Could you all tell a story about a recent experience that utilized your product management expertise to navigate something?

William: On our website, we’ve always highlighted the five best products for any category, and we recently started asking people if they would like personalized recommendations. We had to go through the whole process of understanding how to ask the right questions, scoring them, and iterating on the whole user experience to find out the best way possible. We’re going through a series of six different usability tests to find out what performs best.

Somer: About a year ago, the European Union passed the GDPR. As an advertising company with a lot of business in the EU, we were concerned about losing business because we can’t use cookies to track people.

We were on the [Interactive Advertising Bureau] working group, which was crawling slower than a turtle. I grabbed my team of five engineers, got in a room, laid out the problems with our chief privacy officer, and then we designed a solution to collect consent from consumers in the EU. After we got consent for it, we were the first to go to market with a consent management solution and started rolling it out to publishers. By May 25, the whole framework was launched and we were the largest consent management platform with 69 percent market share. That’s what product people do — we get everybody together, and then we take a chance and just make it happen. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Jenny: One of our products is Gumtree, something really similar to Craigslist, where you can post ads and sell secondhand stuff. The website was really ugly, but when we redesigned it, the page views started dropping. In South Africa, users are in our grandparents’ generation and don’t care if it’s pretty — they just want the basic links.

We learned you need to do a lot of user testing before making big changes, especially with users who have been with you for years.

We had to revert all of the code back after the developer worked for half a year on it. Now we need to decide how to scale back the amazing new functions. We definitely need to enhance the site with more features, but we learned our lesson.

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