This Week - #3 Is UX a good stepping stone to Product?
Welcome to the weekly Product Hustle Stack newsletter. Each edition, we provide an update on what’s new on the site and more importantly will use this as a shared space where we can share advice on a variety of product management topics, from general leadership questions to getting unstuck to how to create that roadmap.
CALL TO ACTION: Looking to get into product management and don’t know where to start? Are you at the begining of your journey and are stuck with something at work related to product, team topology or communication - simply reply to this email and let us know - We’ll keep it anonymous and we’ll do our best to answer it from our perspectives and experiences.
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Q: If my long term goal is product, but in the short term, I’d like to add UX skillsets. Is that the right move?
There are many paths to becoming a product manager and I’ve hired folks from very different backgrounds, including design, tech and program management. My own (Sean) path to product management started with first being a senior User Experience practitioner, so this particular question was especially gratifying to receive.
My answer to this question can be separated into several folds.
First as a discipline, user experience continues to evolve, be dynamic and be very much in demand in a number of industries and regardless of whether the company is a startup or a mature organization. This increases the chances of going from certificate or school to practical experience. In addition to the health of the discipline and its employability, an important consideration is that it will help build empathy with UX or design teammates. Knowing that you were of the same ilk should make establishing and solidifying relationship with your design peers much easier. There is nothing that generates good will and the benefit of the doubt like knowing that the product manager was a UXer.
Another great advantage is that there are a ton of UX skills and habits that will very much translate as is to a product management position. This includes:
Honing competitive analysis skills. Although Peter Thiel believes that competition is for suckers, being able to seek and review the strength and weaknesses of the competition (and your product by extension) both within and outside of your direct industry is an invaluable skills that to this day gets overlooked.
Developing and improving your user empathy skills is another benefit of UX training. This is critical in eliminating ego, and understanding a key player in the value equation ie the user.
Lastly, there are many more skills and habits, a focus should be exercised on honing in on User research. That skill of understanding the needs, wants and impression of a product by users will be invaluable to product management. Knowing how to interview stakeholders or users, knowing how to run a usability session and understanding the role of design or prototype fidelity have always proven to be critical.
Please keep the questions coming, as answering them is our favorite part of this passion project
Q: What is new on the Product Hustle Stack?
No new stack this week. However we added 5 new resources to the site bringing us ever closer to the 50-resources total
Harnessing the Power of Emergent Behaviors by David Packles is a great talk about surfacing the behavior of a subset of your users to your entire product is a great shortcut to have in your product toolbox.
Gmail OKR Approach (Confidence Meter Too!) an interview by Jeff Patton examines how OKr helped propel GMail to 1 Billion users. But in this interview its apparent that while extremely helpful OKrs are not a magic bullet.
Career.pm by Greg Prickril and Daniel Zacarias is a website with lots of great info dedicated to the PM career
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here by Stewart Butterfield details the memo sent to Slack employees 2 weeks before their preview launch. In it, the CEO details that they are indeed not looking for their product to fit into an existing market but rather trying to use their product to create a new market. It’s a great great read.
Martin Hacks Product Growth is another great website for templates. Not just any templates but templates that cover growth, strategy, agile and leadership.
TL:DR
Too Long: Didn’t Read is a section where we’ll post happenings that are noteworthy for Product Managers to understand. We may not feel their impact immediately, but these events will have an impact on our roles and the users we advocate for.
On this Sunday, Sir Richard Branson aboard spacecraft VSS Unity flew into space. This is just the beginning of the private company passenger space race, but the human race will be better for it. Listen to his inspiring words