4 Lessons I Learned Moving from Marketing to Product
4 Lessons I Learned Moving from Marketing to Product
Since 2020, I’ve been a teacher, a copywriter, a marketer, and a product manager—change requires learning.
I’m still new to the technology industry, so consider these personal lessons not claims of best practice.
For some of these lessons, I’ll give some kind of example or context. But in some cases, I’m just going to express what I’ve learned. That’s the nature of writing about work I’m currently doing.
Let’s dive in.
Have strong beliefs, held loosely. This is one of those truisms that sounds like a cliché, but I now believe it’s another skill to practice. Bringing a feature, product, or story into the world requires conviction, almost an unwavering version. This doesn’t mean you don’t adapt. But it means you need to pursue each hypothesis with a temporary state of certainty. Assume that everyone else will believe in the work much less than you, so you need to come in with a high watermark, knowing that everyone else will (rightfully) fall below until their skepticism is disproven.
Maybe I’m getting abstract here, but working with conviction also allows you to have better ideas. When you deeply explore the implications of a certain perspective, you unlock new possibilities that you can then express in term of designs or functionality.
Don’t just learn skills, learn to transfer them. For example, if you mastered the process of balancing a checkbook, you have to be able to transfer that skill to managing a budget and accounting. I’ve gone from teacher to copywriter to marketer to product manager. Now, I’m doing a mix of product and marketing. It layers on top of each other. If I’m writing UX copy, I can take some of the principles of copywriting - be concise, for example - but need to apply it to a new context. How can you practice this? Look for where you are holding on to the old way of doing things when you try to bring an existing skill into a new context. Be willing to abandon something you’ve considered a best practice when its needed to support your new goal.
This is especially valuable in startups or smaller teams, where there are opportunities to participate in a more diverse array of projects. As a side note, the meta skill of communication has been the most important at every stage, though the audience and method has changed over time.
“Personality” is often a lack of certain skills. Public speaking, charisma, organization, time management, brainstorming, focus. Each of these skills (or lack thereof) is sometimes attributed to one’s innate personality. Sure, our natural talents in these and other areas fall into some kind of distribution, but you can most likely move yourself further to the right on that graph than you think.
Product management has required, at different times, attention to detail, charisma, organization, and patience. These are traits I did not previously view myself as having. Other parts of the job, like listening, written communication, creativity and adaptability did align with an existing self-view. But I’ve improved at the first list through bringing my focus to where I was lacking, finding people or processes I could copy, and practicing.
(Still have a long way to go in the charisma department, but I’m reading The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and working on it.)
Don’t build a better horse. I’m referring to the famous Henry Ford quote where he points out that learning from customers is not as simple as following their orders blindly. In marketing, I found this to be almost the opposite. Feedback and stories from customers are enjoyable to gather and relatively straightforward to implement. .
In product, data and interviews are also critical, as you need to know what’s happening with your product and hear from users to learn what you can’t see in the numbers. But the next steps are often much less clear. There’s an in-between step of interpretation, synthesis, and decision making. Our favorite technology products do not exist in their current forms, and were likely not built in the first place, because founders asked their target market for a list of features that would solve a problem. People can describe their problems well, but they are less good at imagining solutions.
Conclusion
When I was a teacher and then began a side business, I realized the immense lack of ownership I felt about my work in the classroom, and the de-motivating impact that had on me. This is because I suddenly had something to compare it to.
I had such energy for my own projects due to the autonomy and responsibility that came with them, and that was unfortunately missing in the public education world. I don’t blame any particular people for this, by the way. I had a lot of room to teach as I saw fit, but the system has limits.
Today, because I work in the education technology industry, I feel some of the same impact (or potential for it) that drew me to teaching, but with more ownership and autonomy in the daily work.
There is value in occasionally zooming out and considering the general lessons you’ve learned, or are learning, from whatever you’re working on in life, career or otherwise. Reflection is the free, always there form of personal development available to all of those willing to take a look.