Why Thinking Like a Product Manager is Not For Products Alone

Product management is a role responsible for the business strategy, development, and final launch of, well, a product. There are many stages that go into managing a product: discovering user stories, gathering requirements, creating roadmaps, product architecture, allocating and managing resources, task management, steering launch, and overseeing a go-to market strategy.

While these specific stages are for product management from introduction to launch, there is a case for thinking in this way in other aspects of professional and personal projects.

In being flexible about thinking in a product mindset, we can discover similarities in how we create goals and the process to achieve those goals. I am discovering that the process of product management and its practices are applicable in other ways.

As we are in a new year, I wanted to think about new ways to develop ideas and practices for my personal and professional growth. What I found was right under my nose, well, rather in the work that I get to do now.

Being a product manager is a lot of asking questions, listening, and then processing findings to create the requirements necessary to achieve success, which in product is actually launching it. Product management is more importantly, guiding resources to complete the requirements and launching a successful product.

These questions can be internal questions. If I look inward and do a discovery session on what would bring my success and fulfillment, I could create milestones (like product requirements or goals), allocate and manage resources (time, materials needed for milestones and goals), and project management (daily goal reminders, task or process).

Product managers also use sprints and kanban methodologies to manage task completion and milestone achievement. That said, we can use the same methodologies to manage our processes and tasks in personal and other professional endeavors outside of product. Not many things are more satisfying in a day by day context than moving a card on a Wrike or Trello board to Complete.

Roadmaps, which ultimately are made up of resources and tasks, can be applied to any goal we have personal, professional, or otherwise. In fact, if you can create a roadmap for all of your goals, you can see the finish line, and still have the day to day process of moving incrementally toward that goal.

Now, we are not products, but, I encourage you to take a product management course on LinkedIn Learning or Coursera and see if you can find the tools from product management and apply them in completing your goals. Yes, there are tools on our smartphones like Reminders or Keep, but, you don’t get the weekly check in, or a daily standup, or other valuable tools and methods that can keep you and I on track to reaching our goals, intentions, and purpose for 2021 and beyond.

I intend to dive deeper into this way of managing my goals for the year, and I’ll update this blog on that progress. With that, good luck this year, and may we all find health, safety, and if we haven’t found it already, purpose.