Transitioning to tech with a non-traditional background
Lessons from two years of Product Management at AWS
I was a Sr. Product Manager (PM) for two years on one of Amazon Web Service’s most technical teams. I was even promoted to Sr. PM — Technical, after a year with this team. Would you be surprised if I told you that my background has nothing to do with computer science or engineering? In fact, I studied biology in university and genetics in grad school. Let me share some lessons I learned, being a Product Manager at AWS, and how you can succeed as a Product Manager even if you come from a non-traditional (non-computer science/engineering) background.
Product management has quickly become one of the most sought-after roles in the last 5 years, with Glassdoor listing Product Management as the 4th best job in the US in 2023 (source). If you are curious about what it takes to be a product manager (at Amazon or other companies), especially if you have a non-traditional background, here is what you need to successfully break into the PM role.
As a Product Manager, your engineering partners are counting on you to be the voice of the customer. One of your major responsibilities will be to prioritize the many tasks the team could be working on, based on what is most impactful to the customer. In my two years at AWS, I found that there are three main skills you need to develop, if you want to succeed in a Product Management role:
1. Talking to customers to understand their needs: The main role of a Product manager is to talk to customers and understand their needs. We bring these needs back to the engineering team, and communicate the customer need, with data and examples. If you are interviewing for PM roles, be sure to highlight any experience you have talking to customers, and being a bridge between the customer and the company. If you are interested in becoming a PM and have not had the chance to work with customers yet, try moving to an internal role within your current company where you can talk to customer, to gain that experience, before applying for a PM role at another company. If you are just starting out as a new Product Manager, talk to your top customers and find out what their feedback is about your product. This will help you understand what you need to prioritize, as you build your product’s roadmap. The best Product Managers I worked with, were really great at talking to customers and drawing out their needs, by digging deeper into their wants.
2. Influencing without authority: As a Product Manager at a large company like Amazon, a lot of times, you have to depend on other teams to do things for you. These could be simple changes that could be done in a couple of weeks, or complex changes that require multiple stakeholder teams to work together for months. In most cases, it is up to the Product Manager to provide the evidence needed to convince the other team to take action. In places like Amazon where roadmaps are planned out a year or more ahead, asking a team to do something for you instead of what they had already planned for, is not an easy task. Ensuring that you build relationships with different stakeholders across other teams is very important, as you cannot accomplish things by yourself.
3. Telling a story with data: As the product manager, you own the metrics that communicate how successful your team has been in achieving their goals. Whether it is communicating status updates, success stories, or launch announcements, it is important to learn to tell a story using data that can be understood by leaders and collaborators who may not have all the nitty gritty details. This is where my non-traditional background in research really helped, because as a researcher, you learn to tell stories through various formats – written material like papers, visual material like posters and presentations etc.. Any experience you can gain in telling a story through data is going to help you in Product Management.
To summarize, the key skill required for a product manager is communication. If you can communicate highly technical content in an easy to understand fashion for various audiences — customers, engineers, managers, leadership; you should be able to do your job, even if you don’t have a coding background. In my time at AWS, I worked with some great PMs who had a technical background, however, it was not their technical skills that made them great PMs, but it was their ability to build relationships, earn the trust of their teams and dive deep into a problem that made them great PMs.
Finally, the best advice I received during my two years was from a former manager, who encouraged me to go after the tough projects and not settle for the “easier” ones. Becoming an expert in the more challenging projects will set you apart. Once you master these, you can make a greater impact for your customers and in your team.
So whether you are thinking about becoming a product manager, or just started out as a new Product manager, lean into those communication skills and seek out challenging problems. Try to enjoy the journey, no matter where you are. Although I eventually moved into a role more suited to my life sciences background within AWS, I am grateful for my time here as a Product Manager. I worked on super challenging problems, made an impact for a lot of customers, and got to know some really smart people. Remember that each step in your career is a chapter, and while all the twists and turns in the story may not make sense at the moment, in the end, it will be worth it.
