All Roads Lead to Product Management | by Ryan Jugdeo | Apr, 2024

In 2018, I switched careers from medicine to product management. I was in my mid-30s. Between undergrad, med school, clinical rotations, observerships, and seeing patients, I spent over 10 years pursuing a medical career. This was a bold move. Friends and family were confused. They couldn’t understand why I would leave medicine and had no idea what product management was. To this day, they still ask, “So… when are you going back to seeing patients?”

The tech industry was also skeptical. I landed interviews as a curiosity, but hiring managers would look at my resume, look at me, and say, “Let’s not waste each other’s time, you’ll hate product management and head back to medicine.” I can’t blame them, they had been burned before by healthcare professionals turned product managers turned back to healthcare professionals.

With the support of my loving fiancee (now wife, hooray!) and the belief that I was making the right choice, for me, my family, and our future, I jumped in with both feet. No parachute. No exit strategy. Even though, back in those early days, I only vaguely understood product management, all theoretical, learned through books and the internet, I was confident that, at the very least, my soft skills would translate to something useful. And I was right.

Over the next five years, I grew a lot as a product manager. I started my tech journey as a subject matter expert at a very early-stage startup (pre-product/pre-revenue). I very quickly took on the product manager title because there was a need and I wanted it. I learned through trial by fire. Every day we teetered between breakthrough and disaster. We endured and succeeded. Years later, I became a group product manager (player/coach) at an enterprise organization with millions of users across the globe. The opportunities are vast and the stakeholders are endless.

As a product manager, I’m not an expert. I’m ever-evolving the same as all of us. Through my writing, will I be unraveling the mysteries of the universe, instantly unlocking all your hopes and dreams? Nope. Will I dig into my experiences to help us grow incrementally as product managers? Hopefully. Will there be bits of truth expressed with honesty that resonate with your product management journey? Absolutely.

The Many Faces of Product Management

As a product manager, your role is constantly ebbing and flowing to fit the demands of the product, the company, and the industry. At a 10,000-foot view, product management is about understanding a market, digging into a clear pain point (or job to be done), and delivering a solution with a higher value than existing options. Driving value requires market/user research, product discovery, cross-functional collaboration, defining features, prioritizing work, creating product roadmaps, tracking metrics, managing stakeholders, and more. Product managers do what needs to be done at any given time. No two days are alike. No product management role requires every possible skill, and no product manager is an expert in every possible aspect.

To further emphasize the point, a product manager in a business-to-consumer (B2C) social startup and one in a business-to-business (B2B) enterprise health tech organization may have the same title, but they have very different roles. The social startup product manager might focus heavily on user engagement metrics, virality factors, and community building. Stakeholders may be founders and venture capital firms. Meanwhile, in enterprise health tech, the emphasis could shift towards regulatory compliance, integration with existing healthcare systems, and ensuring the highest privacy and security standards. Here stakeholders might be upper management internally and enterprise customers externally. These roles require very different skill sets, mindsets, and approaches.

Leveraging Your Superpower

The journey to product management is as varied as the products themselves. My path to product management was anything but direct, but the diversity of the product manager role allows different backgrounds to shine. Everyone has a fresh perspective and skillset uniquely suited to a challenge. Everyone has a superpower. Here are a few examples:

• Medical professionals leverage empathy and root cause analysis to prioritize user needs.
• Engineers bring problem-solving skills and technical expertise to bridge the gap between the product vision and its technical execution.
• Scientists apply a rigorous experimentation mindset, using data-driven approaches to validate hypotheses and inform product decisions.
• Project managers optimize processes and efficiency, ensuring development stays on track and aligns with business objectives.
• Business analysts employ strategic thinking and research to identify opportunities and guide the product strategy to meet market needs.

Understand your superpower. Leverage what makes you uniquely you.

The Unwritten Syllabus

In recent years, I’ve noticed bachelor’s and master’s product management programs. I’ve never met someone who entered product management directly as a professional product manager, so I can’t comment on the value of this route.

There are certificate courses like Product School, which can be a good introduction to the industry but have diminishing value the longer you’ve been in the field.

All educational paths can help, but no one is required.

I can recommend books to read and podcasts to listen to, and I will in future articles, but the truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all curriculum. Product management is learned through hands-on work experience and life experience. These diverse experiences remove biases and lend to creative problem-solving.

Final Thoughts

Product management is about leading with vision, empathy, and a deep understanding of human and market needs. There is no one-size-fits-all path to product management. Embrace your unique journey, it is your greatest asset.

And always remember, all roads lead to product management.