Recruiting for Product Management Roles from UX Design
Whether you are a current college student or recent graduate with a UX design background, it’s common for some designers to think of making the switch to product management. While recruiting for product management is hard from any role, here are some tips to help you land a job as a PM using your design emphasis.
Prioritizing UX Improvements for a Product
Knowing how to prioritize features and tasks is critical to the function of a product manager. Typically on a team, UX designers will provide low/high fidelity mockups and possibly prototype a feature based on product requirements. Now, if you are the product manager, it is up to you to come up with these requirements and prioritize which ones are key for your team. You can use your design background to create more comprehensive wireframes as part of the product requirements, and leverage those skills to help communicate to your team what is the minimum feature set for shipping a product.
As a product manager, understanding product design and how to improve UX is super important, so from this perspective, it can be an easier way to transition from design to product management since you already have some exposure to thinking about UI/UX.
Think of Strategic Design Initiatives and Vision
This point may vary from role to role and company to company, but generally, designers will focus more on designing either minimally viable features or end-state visions for products set out by the product manager. In order to make the switch to product management, you will have to start thinking more about what the end state for products will look like and gather quantitative metrics as well as qualitative feedback for defining the long-term vision. In some companies and roles, this work is done by design leads and senior designers as well, so for people that fall into this bucket, the switch to product management is even easier if this is the case.
Focus on Honing Your Knowledge of Frontend Development
This is an underrated skill that a lot of designers can definitely capitalize on. In many teams, UX designers work with frontend engineers to design reusable components and make sure any design choices are technically feasible. It may be a good idea to learn a little bit more about how your engineers build these components on the client side to give you a better understanding of how software engineers systematically build things.
Because one of the key functions of a product manager is to be able to communicate with engineers on technical topics, it is a great bonus to have some technical knowledge yourself, albeit it is 100% normal for product managers to rely on engineers to provide guidance regarding feasibility during execution. The reason for learning more about engineering fundamentals is to make it easier for you as the product manager to make better decisions, and starting with frontend development (HTML, Javascript, and CSS) is easier since it is more closely related to UI/UX design.
Conclusion
Ultimately, my goal was to cover tips that show it is definitely feasible to make the transition from design to product management. However, there are certainly some areas you may need to read up on such as how to execute and make data-driven product decisions as well as learn more about how PMs interact with other stakeholders such as data scientists, legal, finance, etc., but ultimately, these are things that can be learned on the job.
Check out my budding youtube channel if you are interested in more free content related to product management, data science, or consulting. If you are a current college student looking for an overhaul or your resume/LinkedIn for PM roles among other things, check out my services at https://collegeconsulting.me/.
