🌞 From Marketing to Product Management

Steppen Product Manager, Ryan Van, breaks down his career and explains the differences between Marketing and Product.

Aug 16

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Farewell & Welcome 🌟

Been a busy week at EarlyworkHQ farewelling two legends and welcoming in a superstar this week!

Varun & Jarrad have been with us for the last 3 months and we couldn't be prouder of what they've achieved during their time at Earlywork 🙌

Varun is heading over on exchange to Canada while Jarrad is joining OwnHome and have no doubt they will both be future leaders in the ecosystem 🔥

Extremely stoked to also have Elaha joining us as our first full-time hire as Community & Ops Lead 💫

Have watched from the sidelines in awe as Elaha has crafted her superpower from an OG community keen bean to be in the top 1% of community builders locally and can't wait to see what we can do together 🔮

The Buzz 🐝

Here are the five biggest news stories across the tech & startup scene you need to know this week:

What bear market!? Adam Neumann is back with $350m in dry powder to his name for his new startup Flow 👀
Give that PM a raise! Snapchat+ doing $48m in ARR one month after launch 🚀
Sack that PM! COVIDSafe app abandoned after $21m spent 👎
Aussie cancer startup teams up with US telehealth giant in $9b deal 🤝
Still in denial. Starburst announced their departure from Australia 😭

💡Weekly Cheeky Tip

Are you currently a marketer but looking to work on the core product more directly?

Product management might be just what you are looking for 👀

At Earlywork, we’ve covered a lot about both the individual marketing and product management disciplines.

But how do the two stack up?

We spoke to Ryan Van (Product Lead @ Steppen, Founder @ The Marketing Insider) breaking down his career, key learnings and advice in moving from marketing 👉 product management:

A few months ago I made the “official” transition into product management. It was a carefully plotted plan that was years in the making.

OKRs were set, thousands of courses were consumed and many more product managers were networked with.

Finally, a once unattainable feat was within reach…

Just kidding, my transition was more of a coincidence than a masterminded plan 😅

I’ve actually always worked in tech and wanted to best equip myself with the skills to be a founder or early-stage investor.

So whilst marketing provided me with skills applied later in the product life cycle, I felt a gap in my product discovery and delivery acumen.

As such, becoming a product manager in a startup felt like the space to sharpen these abilities in a hands-on manner.

With that in mind, I implore any marketers interested in transitioning to ask themselves; why do I actually want to become a product manager?

Trust me, the prestige of saying you’re a product manager won’t get you through the feelings of imposter syndrome when talking to developers, the confusion of Jira (sorry Dan 😬) or the overwhelming feeling of setting and achieving a product vision.

You’re more of a Product Manager than you think 🤔

Let’s talk about 2 transferable skills between marketers and product managers in startups:

Bringing certainty to areas of uncertainty
An inherently experimental mindset

Bringing certainty to areas of uncertainty

Similarities lie in the problem-solving mindset

Apart from operating in different areas, product managers and marketers exist to solve business problems - rather than just maintaining an existing system.

After transitioning, I’ve found success applying this 4 step problem-solving process in both marketing & product roles:

Understand the root cause of a problem
Setting a north star metric to determine success
Brainstorming solutions
Effectively communicating which solution you choose and why

An inherently experimental mindset

Planning and executing rapid tests to de-risk the downside of a significant decision.

As a marketer, I was taught to run experiments before committing to a larger decision. For instance, I would run a series of A/B tests on email click-through rates to verify if new copy and design variations outperformed the old ones, before implementing a new email onboarding sequence.

Today, I still apply the same concepts as a product manager but in a different fashion. Showcasing lo-fi app designs to current users and iterating on the UX and UI before committing anything to our designer and developers.

Time to take action 💪

Here are 2 actionable points that I followed (very loosely) to transition to product management:

Making my own experience
Identifying great product roles in startups

Making my own experience

Building a side project did 2 crucial things for my career in product management
solidified my knowledge from the abundance of theoretical content
positioned me as an exemplary candidate

When building The Marketing Insider, I first identified a personal problem - that it was difficult to connect with other professional marketers at scale.

Then I applied product discovery learnings from a Product Go course to validate my problem and spoke to 10 uni students, settling on a persona and ideating potential solutions - which ended up being a website publication.

Between December 2021 and June 2022, I scaled The Marketing Insider blog from 0 to 2000+ monthly visitors.

Then showcasing my work through Linkedin and a personal website.

Questions to ask yourself:

What’s a problem that annoys me?
What resources can I use to learn about building a product from 0 to product market fit?
How can I showcase this work to prospective employers?

Identifying great product roles in startups

Get involved in the local ecosystem and have certain criteria in mind before applying for a role.

The same product manager role at Atlassian and Steppen have entirelyyyy different hours, mentorship opportunities and scope of responsibilities.

Before applying for roles, I looked inward and found that I learn best when given (1) autonomy and (2) a high level of responsibility.

Hence, I decided to go down the startup product manager route. However, I realised that startup product manager roles had sporadic availability.

As such, to stay across opportunities I got involved in the Australian startup ecosystem via;

Joining and participating in the Earlywork community
Subscribing to newsletters from Blackbird, Startmate, Smart Company and Startup Daily - then following featured companies on Linkedin that operated in a problem space of interest (I found Steppen off a capital raise announcement article!)

Three lessons from four months in product management 💡

1 - Peers > frameworks

I was obsessed with product management frameworks when I first transitioned over. Affinity maps, user flow mapping, the double diamond, RICE prioritisation…

Over time, however, I’ve realised that there are no identical product management roles, and these frameworks apply a cookie-cutter approach to problem-solving that’s more of an art than a science.

Hence, I’ve found more value in sharing product ideas and receiving tailored advice from (1) other early career product managers (h/t Earlywork) and (2) product managers who have solved a problem that I’m experiencing before (h/t ADPList).

2 - Don’t build features without a constant pulse on who’s using your product

As a marketer, I loved the autonomy and initiative I was given to pursue an idea.

I had trained a muscle for ideating, implementing and analysing a test or campaign by myself. As a product manager, however, I’ve learned that my ideas and decisions impact more than just me.

The best way to minimise the downside of a specific decision is to always talk to the people using the product.

3 - Metrics are for decision making, not optimisation

Metrics should be seen as a guiding north star, however, the path that’s taken to get there is flexible.

Being comfortable with not having a sequence of concrete solutions to achieve a goal is a muscle I’m still building.

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Team Earlywork (Dan, Jono, Marina, Elaha)

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