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Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager – Part Two

by The Cranky Product Manager on February 17, 2009

in Guest Posts,Your Career

Paco continues his guest post arc (see part 1), allowing the Cranky Product Manager to rest yet another day

Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager – Part Two

In the previous installment, I blathered about how bad the job market is right now. Think Les Miserables except less French people and ten times the drama.

Your mileage may vary, especially depending on your location. But don’t be surprised if you don’t get a call-back about that PM job that seemed absolutely tailor-made for you. They may agree that you’re the exact candidate they’re looking for, it’s just that they might not want to fill the position anymore. Be patient, and when possible, talk directly to the recruiter to see if the position is still approved.

Learning to Drink Dirt

If the well for PM jobs has obviously run dry, you gotta change your plan and consider other positions. Personally, I recommend trying roles that are related to your current experience and I DON’T recommend trying to train for a completely new role. More on that later.

So, as a PM, what are some related roles you could look for?

1. Sales Engineer
2. Consulting as a Business Analyst

Yeah, you probably could fill a marketing, QA, or customer support position as well, but honestly, they’re not in-demand right now. These are the best bets in my book. Again, gotta think about jobs that are closer to the revenue stream. If you think you could work as a straight-up salesperson with a quota, go for it, but an SE role would take advantage of your technical aptitude better.

The Sales Engineer role is essentially what a PM does every time they parachute into a deal to fill-in all the technical details. You’re just doing that every day instead of once in a while, and you’re doing it for all sorts of customers, not just the big accounts. Shouldn’t be too hard. Plus, you get to be the Cranky Sales Engineer who pisses-off the Cranky PM ;)

If the Business Analyst route doesn’t seem obvious, this is a climate where companies are frequently outsourcing work to consultants rather than hiring full-time employees. It’s a much safer route for them because they can calculate a one-time cost to get a project completed.

And a Business Analyst is essentially a person who interviews customers, collects requirements, and writes specs. It’s a subset of what most PMs do anyway, so it should be an easy transition.

I did a gig as a BA for a major corporation just a little while ago, and it was actually fun! You get to talk to customers, cook-up insights, document them, and then you walk-away with a job well-done. Some other schmo has to worry about getting it resourced and implemented for a change :)

Any other positions you think a PM is a natural fit for? Brain surgeon you say? Bar bouncer you say? I see many little minds reading this with thought balloons that have “bounty hunter” written in them. What do YOU think? In the next installment, we’ll talk about ways to pimp yourself on paper, not the street corner.

Also in The Product Manager's Guide to Unemployment

  1. Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager – Part One
  2. Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager – Part Two
  3. Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager, Part Three
  4. Guest Post: A Short Guide to Being an Unemployed Product Manager, Part Four
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Guest Post: A Journey to the Dark Side – How a Cranky Engineer Became a Product Manager

by The Cranky Product Manager on January 23, 2009

in Guest Posts,The PM Profession

The Cranky Product Manager is feeling a bit burned out on blogging this week. DysfunctoSoft is in slash and burn mode and it’s a total bummer, dude. Anyway, to help keep the Blog Beast fed, today we have a most excellent guest post by “A Cranky Ex-Engineer.”

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When I started my first software job, still wet behind the ears from grad school (note 1), I had never heard of “product management.” Sure, when I interviewed at Voice-A-Roo (note 2), I saw people who weren’t wearing t-shirts. There was the HR guy. There were obviously some accountants or something. I even interviewed with one of the shirt-and-tie people … a “Professional Services Manager.” (Never mind that the only thing I could really associate with “professional services” usually involved back alleys and guys with fur coats and big shoes … and I still can’t … ba dum dum, rimshot.)

Not long after starting, though, I encountered my first “Product Manager.” She showed up at a team meeting, which … okay, the Cranky PM made me promise not to be sexist, but “she” was a “she”, which was obviously not one of “us” (note 3). (Like many engineering organizations, yes, this was a boys’ club.) I wasn’t really sure about this one –- we already had a “Project Manager”, an old guy (like, 35 or something, jeez), and then there was a “Program Manager”, who, like, what the hell, already? I’ve been here a week and now there are 3 “PMs”. Only one of them had a role I actually understood, namely, to make Gantt charts.

I wanted to believe that there was a business going on. Even though no one seemed to be buying our product, I felt the need to know that there was a method to the madness. As it turns out, that was her. I wound up a traitor to my engineering brethren and believed in her decisions. But PM and Voice-A-Roo were not long for this world; we were laid off on the same day. The oldest of the code monkeys stayed on, as did the douchebag VP of Marketing and the other shirt-and-tie people (note 4).

After the layoff, it was the great Silicon Valley career guru Patti Wilson who guided me onto my next path. She knew that I wanted to be near the technology, but not spend my days compiling java.hack.wank.DOMImpl. I wanted to be near the business, but wasn’t an extrovert (note 5) and just couldn’t deal with the glad-handing that went along with it. But … product manager? I didn’t have an MBA, not even a business degree. Bullhockey, says Patti Wilson, and sends me on my way, but not before sharing this gem: you can stay in the same industry, and change your role, or you can say in the same role but move to a different industry. You seem to really like the subject matter of what you do, but not the role. Figure out another way of doing it.

I spent five years and two companies after the layoff figuring it out. Part of it took me through consulting and professional services roles, pimping myself out (see above) to customers, but at least having a chance to hear what they actually wanted. Part of it took an amazing mentor, a VP with a technical degree and a big smile who could write demos in Python and then walk into a meeting with the investors. Mostly it meant learning the market players, the products, the technologies, the personality types, and lots of intangibles. It meant not loathing the sales droids, in the hope that one or two of them might end up having some valuable feedback. Worst of all, it meant learning PowerPoint.

But “net net,” as one of my least favorite business adages goes, it comes down to Patti’s advice. If Aspect-Oriented Programming jazzes you, and you don’t care whether your company sells cigar boxes or software, by all means –- do it. If you have an MBA and an obsessive personality, be a product manager, and learn everything about your market, whether it’s ICBMs or RDBMs. But if you love your subject matter and you have an obsessive personality, if you’re a compulsive but an articulate know-it-all… like it or not, you’re going to be a product manager.

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Note 1: Not that kind of grad school – I have a technical degree.
Note 2: Maybe not 100% obviously a fictitious boom-era startup.
Note 3: Might I also note that of “The 7 Types of Engineers,” only one is caricatured as female? I can’t speak for “Offshore.”
Note 4: See recent Cranky PM post on layoffs.
Note 5: I’m an INTJ (“The Strategist”), see recent Cranky PM Facebook poll on the topic.

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