Product Management: Let’s Go!
Four months since being laid off, how's it going? Well, I took a month or so to decompress and think about what happened. It was hard to really treat it like a vacation, because this fear-mongering voice in the back of my head kept saying things like, "Apply for new jobs now!" "The job market sucks and you should get your resume out there before companies stop hiring!" "We may need to move if you don't get a job soon!" ETC. 🥹I felt guilty for not actively thinking about updating my resume (even though subconsciously, the thought pervaded). But I knew I wasn't in the right mindset for that, and I really needed to rest and not think about work, because as much as I was trying to deny it, I was burned out from my old job. There were times when the burnout subsided, but it was not a full recovery. So I took the month to grieve, detach from being a Googler (reminding myself to stop thinking about the work tasks that were in progress at the time), and be. It wasn't as refreshing as I would have liked (see nagging voice mentioned above), but it did help me reset a bit.
Near the end of that month, or roundabouts, I got a generous and helpful invitation from someone I know online, who unfortunately was also recently laid off. She and a group of former co-workers established a "job search council" modeled by Phyl Terry in their book, Never Search Alone (NSA). At first I was hesitant, as I normally am about interacting with strangers, but I read through the first few chapters of the book and thought it would be good for me to job search with the support of others. So I pushed myself to say yes. Thanks, Annette!
There's a structure that the job search group follows for the regular weekly meetings, reading one or two chapters in the NSA book, maybe a supplemental chapter from another relevant, recommended book, and doing group activities. One of the key concepts from this book is to slow down and really think about what your candidate-market fit is, and craft everything in your job search around that. The candidate-market fit is an intersection of what you like to do and are good at, and what the market needs or will pay for. This sounds like common sense, but in this economy and job market, it's hard not to jump in immediately and try to latch on to whatever you can find. But this would likely lead to an unfulfilling role.
At this point in my career, I knew I wanted my next role ideally to be something as fulfilling as I found my previous role to be, at least in the early years, and not just settle for whatever I could get by "spraying and praying". I'm exceedingly grateful that I am in this privileged position for the time being. So I slowed down and considered what I wanted, keeping the "apply now!" nagging at bay, kinda.
I actually came to my conclusion while journaling about other things. I won't quote my entry, but looking back at it, I now realize I wrote it on Feb. 20, the month "anniversary" of being laid off. So I guess I had this idea even before the whole "never search alone" thing came up or at least before I officially joined. I'm burying the lede: I tentatively wanted to explore product management. I knew almost nothing about the role's specific responsibilities, but I had the inkling that it was what I wanted to do, and related to what I had been doing throughout my career. As a senior UX solutions consultant I helped improve developers' mobile app and game "products". I also contributed to many Android product launches in various ways, officially and unofficially (i.e. dogfooding apps and hardware), but always in a cross-functional manner. I want to join a product team and contribute to its success from the inside.
It still took me a long time to really put all my eggs into the product management basket. I was (and still am) worried that I would be making my job search harder by pivoting to a role I'd never performed officially before. But as I learned more about the PM role, I realized that there's not one set way to get into product management. And the desired qualities for a PM -- curiosity, problem solving skills, understanding of technology, advocating for solving user problems and providing great user experiences, to name a few -- are all qualities I have demonstrated in my work and my normal way of being, in varying degrees. I can't really turn them off! (It's tiring sometimes. 😅) Semi-related tangent: I'm pretty sure one big reason I got my first role at Google as a temp for the team I eventually joined full-time was because I told the hiring manager that I reached out to mobile app developers and gave feedback to help improve the UX, of my own free will. 😀 I still do this.
Anyway, despite having a fair amount of related experience, I was still concerned about going this route. But a step in the Never Search Alone process is to lock down what you want to do and describe it in your candidate-market fit statement, because it doesn't help if you present multiple options in your resume, LinkedIn profile, etc. It won't be easy for people in your network or recruiters to know what role you're really going for. Therefore I'm pushing past my comfort zone and am taking a chance on product management, and hope that a team takes a similar chance on me.
If you've gotten this far in the post, thank you so much. I appreciate you choosing to spend your time reading this. And if you happen to know of a team hiring a PM for consumer or developer-facing products -- mobile apps, web services, or even consumer electronics hardware -- open to taking on an enthusiastic end-user advocate and product excellence person who's a quick study, I'd love some intros.
