8 things I learnt in my first year as a Product Manager at Google

Reflections and advice for when you’re taking on the next big thing in your career

I’ve just wrapped up my first year working at Google and in spite of the fact that I haven’t left my house for most of it (thanks to the pandemic!) it’s flown by. Taking the next step in your career often feels like starting from scratch, with so many mysteries and questions to answer. Starting work on Android I felt that to the extreme, considering the wildly different users and their needs, the downstream impacts of even small changes, and the endless lists of things we could build. Working on complex problems with very smart people has me constantly aware of how much I have yet to learn! But hitting this milestone and looking back, I realise I’ve learnt a surprising amount already. These are my biggest takeaways so far — my reflections and advice for when you’re taking on the next big thing in your career.

1. How to drink from the fire hose

When you start a new role or project, you can be overloaded with new information and it can be tempting to try to learn everything. When I joined Google I was amazed at the amount of documentation I could read on pretty much everything related to my work, and I found myself clicking link after link until I was many layers deeper into the detail than was useful at this point. The truth is that you’ll never be able to know everything, and you can’t spend all your time trying to! Stay relatively surface level at first, and keep a reading list of things you want to dig deeper on.

2. You don’t need all the answers, just the right questions

Sometimes I still can’t believe that I’m responsible for a little part of Android. It’s such a complex product, used by so many people for myriad purposes. It’s easy to feel a stab of panic when someone makes you responsible for something complicated. My manager taught me to cope with that feeling by telling myself “It will be OK, because I’ll find a way to deal with it”.

Being a Product Manager isn’t about being some all-knowing genius (although maybe some lucky people are!). You are the one who finds a way, who asks the right questions. You do this by:

• Finding the right person to ask questions of
• Reading around the subject
• Asking for help
• Even just taking some time to think about it

3. Just because you’re responsible for a decision it doesn’t mean you’re going to sit in a dark room deciding alone

This is something the engineering lead on my team said to me, when I’d said something like “I suppose I’m responsible for that” in a way that must have been tinged with dread!

You are not an island. The decisions about your product will be based on the expertise you seek from your team and wider stakeholders, and the research and analysis you do. Remember, you are the one who asks the questions, so you’ll be analysing and presenting the different options and arguments.

4. If you get overwhelmed, write it all down

Balancing all these open questions, potential solutions and controversial debates in your head can be draining. Write them down. Recently, when working on a project I felt I could never find a solution for, I wrote a document called “All my problems (and ideas for how to solve them)”. Its contents were exactly that. First of all, I wrote down all the open questions and risks. Then I went back through the document, writing ideas for next steps on all of them. My original intention was to prepare to ask my manager for a lot of help, and I didn’t want to do that in a way that made me seem like I was giving up! But actually, as I wrote the potential solutions I realised hey, some of these might work!

There are so many benefits to doing this. Not only do you get to rest your brain a bit by holding the problems in a document rather than whirring around in your mind, you also have ideas for ways forward and a way to ask for specific help.

5. Ask for specific help

And that brings me to my next lesson: asking for specific help, especially when you’re looking for the expertise of a busy person. If you have particular questions, that’s easy. But what about if you don’t? What do you ask then?

• “I propose the following solution, what’s your take on this?”
• “Can you leave some comments on my document?” (make sure it has a TLDR, or direct them to a bookmark for the relevant part)
• “I’d summarise the situation as follows — can you confirm whether that’s a fair representation?”
• “What was your approach when you were in my position?”

6. A compromise is a compromise

When you’re creating a solution that caters for diverse and maybe even competing use cases and requirements, accept that you will never be able to make everyone 100% happy.

The best thing you can do is (again) ask all the right questions and balance out the different perspectives. Clearly call out the benefits and drawbacks of different solutions. Map out the user journey under the different proposals and put them side by side. Get input from all interested parties, and if possible get them to provide data in their rationale for supporting one proposal over another or to clarify their requirements. If your options all have significant risks, flag it to leadership and understand whether those risks are acceptable.

Bring everyone along for the journey. Let them know what competing priorities there are, what constraints you’re dealing with and what the decision-making process is.

7. How to structure greenfield thinking

Working on a totally new area is so exciting! You get to let your imagination run wild and consider what the future might look like, plus you don’t have the worry of breaking things (since you’re not changing existing functionality) — good times!

But when the opportunities are endless, where do you start?

First of all, I write down what I wish I knew. What data or insight would help me define whether this is a worthwhile area to invest in and what is most important to customers? Some of this may exist already (data, research etc) and you just have to find it. If it’s not out there yet, do your own research. Write surveys, collaborate with your user researcher, look at market trends and think about where they might be heading in the future. New products take time to create so don’t just think about what your market looks like now but what it might look like in the longer term, by the time your product would be able to come to market.

8. Have fun!

Don’t keep your head solely in the future, only thinking about what questions might come up next, what people will say about your new features or what your next-next new feature will be. Remember to also be present in the moment — how cool is it to shape the future of your product with so many different kinds of experts?! Have fun.