GE 7: Considering becoming a product manager? Try these roles first.

Product management is a diverse, challenging and ultimately rewarding career. But like politics, it might be good to get a “real” job first. Here are some roles that I believe will make you a better product manager when the time comes.

Customer Service Analyst

The customer should be placed at the centre of product decisions and strategy. Spending time as a customer service representative will give you true empathy with the customer. You will hear them articulate difficulties in their own words and feel the impact of product behaviours on their day to day job and even their emotional well-being.

Hearing this feedback first hand and with the accompanying emotion is invaluable. These conversations and experiences will stay with you and when the time comes to move into a product role — you will remember them vividly. Not only will these activities help you build empathy with your customers, but also with your service teams. They will make you drive up product quality and keep ease of use and supportability high up on the priority list when designing new features.

Finally, you will have a built a book of contacts and relationships that will be extremely useful when you are looking for feedback and opinion on the latest feature candidates.

Implementation Analyst

Larger, more complex products often require the services of an implementation consultant. These roles help the customer configure and roll-out the product. Spending some time in this role will provide an appreciation of how easy or difficult it is to configure the product and train different types of users. Software implementations can be stressful and they carry risk for all parties until they are fully completed.

After living and breathing multiple implementations of different sizes, complexities and success levels, you can utilise these experiences in your product career. You will appreciate the importance of an effective on-boarding process, the need for data migration tools and portability of product configurations from test systems to production.

Developer

If you have a technical mind, spending time in development either coding, as a business analyst or tester can be an excellent pre-cursor to a product management career. You will have credibility with your development team, be able to ask the right technical questions at the right time and have a gut feel for how long new features may take to implement.

Having a development background also helps you spot growth opportunities. How existing features and technical capabilities could be leveraged to open up a new market or provide a competitive edge. You will also become much more proficient during product demonstrations and be able to field a number of technical questions from prospects and investors.

Technical Support Analyst

The technical support analyst is responsible for installing, upgrading and managing the day to day hosting of the product. Spending evenings and weekends performing upgrades or dealing with the stress of outages or security incidents will leave an indelible mark and can be later summoned as a product manager to make the case for prioritising infrastructure related work.

You will inherently understand the importance of an automated deployment process, building in the highest level of security, sticking to best practices and including good performance and instrumentation into your product.

Sales Engineer

Sales engineers help the sales team make sales. They demonstrate the product to prospective clients, complete RFP/RFI documentation and respond to technical questions and objections. Sales engineers get to the know the product intimately including what gets prospects excited (and what turns them off). They also get to understand the market and which competitors are the most dangerous and why.

Moving to a product role from sales engineering will fast track your market research efforts and enable you to cull items from the product backlog and roadmap that users just don’t care about.

I spent a good deal of time in all of the above roles before my product management career and think I was a better PM for it. If you are struggling to recruit a product manager perhaps look first in your internal client facing teams — you may already have a star candidate that can bring their current experiences to the product team.