“Be the Product” — A better way to approach your career
Like it or not, you are a product. After leaving school, you are expected to “sell” yourself for thousands of dollars per year to employers. As an entrepreneur or product manager (PM), you would never spend 18+ years developing a product before talking to customers and figuring out who will buy it. Figuring out what your customers want is often called finding “product-market fit.” It’s only once the hard and time-consuming work of finding product-market fit is complete, that entrepreneurs and businesses move toward more efficient production methods.
My advice to you is: Rather than thinking of the goal of your education as getting a degree, think of it as developing a product (you!) for the market.
Now that you’re in the product mindset, let’s explore some tools I use as a product manager to make sure I’m building something customers will love and happily pay for so you can use them to find a career that not only pays but also is a good fit for you.
In 2011, a book called The Lean Startup popularized a key principle in product development which can be summarized in three words — build, measure, learn. The underlying point is to shorten the time to get through those steps and then repeat this cycle as many times as needed to find product-market fit. You can apply this in many aspects of life. And the good news, is that you’re probably already doing this! Here are a couple examples…
- Cooking: Make up a recipe (build), taste what you made (measure), identify what will make the recipe better (learn)
- Sports: Go to practice (build), participate in competition (measure), watch film and adjust practice to fix in-game mistakes (learn)
What’s great about the examples above, is they naturally are repeated many times over. You can continue to refine a recipe to make it better just as you can always grow as an athlete. Your career is the same way. It rarely happens overnight, but throughout your career, you can always continue to home in on work that’s more fulfilling, you’re better at, and you get paid more for.
Product development teams have tools to help us quickly build, measure, and learn. You can apply these same tools to your life to figure out a fun, fulfilling career for you. The best part is that it’s actually really fun to do this stuff. You should be exploring what’s most engaging for you because, most likely, there’s someone out there who will pay you to do it!
To help us along, I created a set of examples called Financial Frankie to explore the career “wealth manager.” Use Financial Frankie as a guide and copy the contents to a blank document to use as a template for any of the exercises.
Online Research
As a PM, early web research is about exploration and discovery, not finding “the answer.” I follow links and recognize that the first search probably isn’t where I need to end up.
How to apply this to career readiness: Online research is about following your nose. Articles and blogs are a great place to start but don’t forget about TED talks and YouTube. You shouldn’t be afraid to go down wormholes and see what attracts you. If you’re so excited about something that it pulls you off your course, you may have hit a goldmine.
Pro tip: take note of what you do when you stop “doing work.” What naturally draws your attention? Financial Frankie — online research
Interviews
As a PM, interviewing customers provides different insights from online research because I get unfiltered information and I get to see the details, not just what people decide is interesting enough to write about. Often, it’s those seemingly irrelevant details that prove most insightful.
How to apply this to career readiness: Take the time to go interview mentors, teachers, coaches, friends’ parents or friends of your parents (the list goes on and on so ask your guidance counselor if you need some help). The key is to ask open-ended questions and not be afraid of silence. If someone stops speaking, give them a few moments and usually, they’ll just start again. This is when they say the really interesting stuff.
Pro tips: you don’t need to set up an interview to conduct one. Most of my customer and user interviews come through the course of normal interaction. Be on the lookout for opportunities to ask a few questions if someone’s job sounds interesting. You’ll learn and adults will find you more interesting. They might even offer you a job one day!
There are lots of online tools you can use to simulate interviews. Try exploring Nepris! Financial Frankie — informational interview
Personas
As a PM, I get into customers’ shoes by creating fictional characters, called personas, that represent the commonalities among potential customers. These prevent my team from losing sight of what the customer is feeling and cares about.
How to apply this to career readiness: Create personas for people in the careers you are interested in. Building a career persona includes answering the following questions: What do they do on a typical day? How does the world see this person? What are their fears? What are their simple pleasures?
Pro tip: if you don’t know where to start, looking at a job posting will help you understand what people who work in the job are “like.” This doesn’t just mean their skills and abilities (though those are important) it also means what are their stresses, what do they do after work and on the weekends. Is their life, something you aspire toward? You can also model your personas off of your general impression of the career. Don’t worry, this will be a “living document” because you can expect things to change as you learn more (and some parts may even be left blank for a while). Financial Frankie — persona
Paper Prototype
As a PM, before investing time and money into building a working product, I use paper prototypes — literally drawing the product on a piece of paper or quickly building a model — to show people what it might look like so they can give real feedback. It’s quick and dirty but works really well.
How to apply this to career readiness: Pick one of the daily activities that someone in the job you’re interested in might do. Then go do that thing. For Financial Frankie, I had a conversation with a neighbor about her financial goals to simulate one of the activities that you’d spend lots of time doing should you decide to be a wealth manager.
Pro tip: your goal is not to focus on the result. Rather, understand if it’s an activity you enjoy and may even have some natural skill in. Financial Frankie — paper prototype
SWOT
As a PM, I use SWOTs to analyze competitors. SWOT analysis means using their product or reading reviews to identify their company and product’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
How to apply this to career readiness: Build a SWOT for careers you’re considering by answering the following questions.
- Strengths — What are the benefits of this career?
- Weaknesses — What are the negative things about this career?
- Opportunities — What awesome things might this career lead to? What could you add to this career to make this better for you?
- Threats — What risks are associated with this career?
Pro tip: your interviews and online research come in handy when building a SWOT, but this is another living document that will change as you learn more. If you’re stuck, this is a great tool to bring in as questions in an informational interview! Financial Frankie — SWOT
Roadmapping
As a PM, I know what steps I will need to take to get from idea to product success with a strong roadmap. It starts off with a lot of small, well-defined steps and becomes increasingly grand as the timeline gets longer.
How to apply this to career readiness: Write your possible roadmap through this career. What will be your very first steps (they might be listed in this article)? Where would you like to be a year from now? five years from now? 30 years from now?
Pro tip: I’m often wrong about the roadmap that I initially create but taking time to think through where I am going from the beginning pays off. Generally, I expect to deliver 90% of the things in my roadmap next month with 10% decreasing predictability each month thereafter. Financial Frankie roadmap example
Using “The 5 Whys” to deal with failure
Product managers use these tools every day to develop the right products for customers. One huge benefit of this lean approach to building products or your career is that when you fail, and most people fail at this before they succeed, your investment of time or money was likely small and it created an opportunity for reflection and learning so you are more likely to succeed the next time. Each of these activities is only as useful as the learning you derive from it. Take the appropriate time to think and don’t expect things to work in a neat, straight line. That’s not how careers (or products) are built. There will be setbacks. There will be moments of panic. There will be failures.
In moments of panic, failure, or confusion, a product management strategy called “The 5 Whys” is extremely effective. Think back to when you were a child and try to imagine a time where you responded “why” to everything someone said. The conversation may have gone something like this:
Mom: “Ethan, go read your summer reading book.”
Ethan: “Why?”
Mom: “Because it’s your assignment.”
Ethan: “Why?”
Mom: “Because it’s important that you become a better reader.”
Ethan: “Why?”
Mom: “Because reading is a skill you’ll need throughout your entire education and will be a key skill for you as an adult.”
Ethan: “Why?”
Mom: “Because I read every day for work and in my personal life. I read emails, reports, books, blogs, and articles. Without the ability to read quickly and with high levels of comprehension, I wouldn’t be able to provide the life that I provide for you.”
Ok, maybe I was being a 10-year old brat when I had this conversation… but I was on to something. And it’s the same process that product companies use around the world. In fact, “The 5 Whys” was developed by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota and is often credited for the company’s success.
Notice that there wasn’t much substance until the fourth and fifth time I asked why. Usually, it takes some time to get past the obvious and to the insight.
When facing a moment of failure or panic, asking yourself “why” several times can be a very powerful way to get to the root cause of what’s causing your panic or why something didn’t work.
Pro tip: Use ”The 5 Whys” when things are going great. Why are you enjoying whatever it is you’re doing? You can also substitute in different questions to dig into your reflection.
Failure is often a signal that you’re doing this right.
Recognition of failure means you’ve moved onto the next step in the build, measure, learn loop. Recognize that failure is your result for the measure step! Once you recognize that you’re struggling, you can use techniques like “The 5 Whys” to quickly advance your learning and start the next cycle. The better you become at knowing where in the loop you are and accelerating your progress toward the next loop, the more quickly you can find your market fit!
