My trip to Product Management Land

Over my Product Design career, I have always wanted to take a sneak peek into Product Management. Fortunately for me, Reece has turned out to be a wonderful place to take the steering wheel and control my career journey, giving me just the opportunity I needed to explore Product Management Land.

Being transparent about career aspirations

Starting from the initial stages of interviewing for the UX Design opening, I was transparent with my manager Cam about my aspirations to be an entrepreneur in the future. I have always seen Product Management as intrapreneurship and an obvious starting point for me to hone my skills before I eventually go into the business jungle. To my surprise, this was well received. My career aspirations aligned perfectly with several of Reece Core Values including supporting an experimentation mindset (Innovate Big and Small) and allowing us to take ownership of our career (Own It & Discover Your Best).

Keeping an eye out for the opportunity

During the first 90 days, I spent most of my time understanding the business through our Branch Time onboarding, participating in various research activities and internal software delivery team rituals. I got a glimpse of all the projects in flight, based on our long term vision of being the tradies best partner in the digital world. Together, Cam and I kept an eye out for projects seeking product & design thinking and looked out for opportunities for me to help the organisation grow our Design capability. I was juggling a few research activities for teams working on Product & Pricing and Supply Chain Management in the beginning. Soon I got the opportunity to define the user experience for a project that got kicked off from our innovation lab NEXT. I started on the Actrol Virtual Engineer project as a Lead UX Designer. Then I got bitten by the complexity bug and challenge of solving commercial refrigeration system design. When our amazing Product Manager Aseel was seconded to tackle an emerging Product opportunity, the pathway to Product Management Land opened up in front of me.

Flexibility for secondment

My fear of failure has always stopped me from leaping into a career transition or entrepreneurship, the sound of a secondment helped overcome this. The secondment plan instilled a great deal of confidence to try out a new role as I had the bread crumb trail back to my established UX role, and a supportive team of Product Managers and Designers in place to help guide me along the way.

Mentorship and coaching in a safe environment

The best part of this transition has been the mentors that I seeked out. I had access to Product Management experts who had worked in high growth startups, scale-ups, enterprises and within our business from various backgrounds. I picked a couple of experienced Product Managers (George and Aseel) and setup up weekly catchups intending to understand what success looks like in this role and how to get there. In addition, Aseel as the transitioning Product Manager guided me for a couple of weeks until I felt confident to take on the main tasks myself.

Getting into the PM Camp

I started hanging out in the Product Management team camps like channels in Slack and MS Teams platform to find a curated list of reading resources, references to frameworks and articles. I hunted down learning material available inside like the Reece Group Learning platform which has self-paced courses that you can take and apply to projects in flight.

I also raised my hand for coaching through courses, conferences and learning resources. Raised my hands to attend Leading The Product in 2020 and 2021(Thanks Kiel Johns), took part in Future Leaders 360 feedback (Thanks Pieter Hanekom) and got exclusive access to new tools trials like ProductBoard with fellow PMs (Thanks George Tsigounis).

I am a slow and deep learner and reading books has been my go-to method to understand the foundations, I added the books PMs were referencing to my library.

Learning the PM lingo

As I started owning more decisions for the project, a few areas challenged me out of my comfort zone.

Defining business outcomes, objectives and measuring impact

As a Product Designer, my experience and training in User Research helped here. In collaboration with Alan Sharvin - Head of Digital Products, Adam Szlawaski - Operations Leader and Rafi Chenzian - Application Engineering Team Lead, we outlined the near term and long-term business objectives. We could then map it to end-user problems uncovered through contextual research. We used OKRs and JTBD frameworks to outline the problem space so we could align, reflect and come to a shared understanding of what success looked like for the project.

Outlining the value of the initiative

Our Head of Digital Products (Alan Sharvin) challenged us on defining the value of the project and questioned us to answer why we should invest in this effort. This was great as I have come across investors asking the same question during fundraising rounds.

Again, research came to my aid, looked at sales numbers, quote lead times, conversion rates and size of quotes helped us define metrics that impacted the sales cycle. We traced back indicators that had an impact on the quoting process for our users. There were new tools and techniques that I got exposed to during this exercise. I still get the nerves when it comes to finances and this is an area I would have struggled with if I went solo into the entrepreneur land as a designer.

Building the team, showing progress and managing stakeholders

One of the other challenges that I have faced in my side hustle initiatives also surfaced in this project, building a team. The team consisted of an Engineering Lead, a Product Manager and a UX Designer. During the kick-off, the team forecast was to be 3 Engineers, 1 UX Designer and 1 Product Manager. I had to do few things to bring attention to the optimal size of the team and how fast we can run. With guidance from my mentors, I put together a 3P plan, focusing on People, Process and Product. I worked on bringing the stakeholders into a monthly steering committee, helping gauge the pulse of the project and its future. I tweaked our release cycles to a mix of fortnightly cadence and milestone releases. Helping our team, end-users and stakeholders set expectations that complex chunks took more time and incremental improvements take less time.

The users of our system have relied on various tools and rules of thumb derived from industry experience over the years. As non-domain experts building the new system, we had to gain the trust of our users to increase the adoption of the new system. We formed a subject matter expert panel, sourcing talent from the user pool. We set up regular knowledge transfer sessions and software testing phases to make sure what we were building met industry standards.

The journey of taking our users from physical manuals and fragmented tools to a consolidated online tool has been quite a learning experience.

Creating opportunities for others

As part of the UX to PM transition, Cam and I discussed internship programs that would benefit new starters and the project. We scoped out sub-projects that could complement the work in parallel to the core delivery track. As the project vision broadened to target more user segments, we hired Serena Wong through the internship program to conduct a full-time contextual enquiry in the branch to surface user problems. The opportunity also helped me build my mentoring skills whilst I helped Serena transition into the UX industry.

What’s next?

The last six months have been immensely rewarding from the learning and mentorship point of view. It has been a great project to showcase how a focus on UX can improve staff satisfaction and open doors for new talent. My main takeaway has been that it is important to have a project that we can practice on to take that next step. It could come in the ways of secondment, side hustles or a strategically important project. What has worked is to take control and show your fire to people who trust in you.

I find that there is a lot of overlap in the UX/PM role but PMs definitely have a lot more things to consider and I have a greater appreciation of the PM/UX/Technology triad now.

I must say a huge thanks to my mentors and team for the support and patience while I practiced things I learnt. Thanks a lot Cam, Aseel, George, Indu and Stavros.

I enjoy playing the dual track of product management and product design for now, and who knows which camp I side in the future.