PhD to Product: Journey between two unknowns
When I embarked on my (mathematics) PhD, I did not have a career in mind. I certainly did not expect to head up a small product team at a growing EdTech company. I barely knew what Product Management was back then. Hell, I’m still not entirely sure.
But I’ve now spent almost four years working in Product, which means I’ve been in the game for around as long as I was a research student. The transition has been challenging and exciting in equal measure. Here is what I’ve learned along the way, and how the two experiences have compared.
Without doubt, the toughest transition of all from a PhD to Product Management is the shift from specialism to generalism.
Doctoral research is based on a niche area of study. It demands a single-minded focus within a narrow domain. Knowledge outside of your field does little to enhance your research goals. Contrast this to the multi-faceted nature of Product. My favourite definition of Product Management is the one that places it at the intersection of Business, Technology and User Experience. That is already a wide remit — wider still when you break down each of these areas.
A Product Manager will often have particular expertise, but to be truly effective they need to be disciplined in not diving in too deep into any one area. The Product Manager must traverse between all aspects of their role. And since the deep dive is precisely what characterised my four years as a PhD student, this discipline was not something I could take for granted.
Product Management is not an exact science. It’s not even a science. This took some getting used to. Success in a PhD is markedly different to success in Product. The former is largely a matter of logic and objective judgement. Products, on the other hand, do not exist in a silo, and the success of a Product Manager partly depends on the opinions and behaviours of multiple stakeholders. It’s a stark contrast between an absolute measure of success that leaves no room for compromise and a subjective measure based on a range of uncertain factors.
The formality and rigour of mathematical proofs made way for a more holistic approach to my work in Product.
The Product Management literature is replete with frameworks that promise intellectual depth and models of guaranteed success. There’s a lot of snake oil going around. A book or training course will usually contain nuggets of insight but should never be taken as literally as a research paper (even then it should not be swallowed without scrutiny).
Product Management is a deeply personal affair; every individual must develop an approach that works for them, aligns to their organisational culture, and is sensitive to their industry and end users.
Just because Product Management can not be codified, this does not make it a free for all. Too often, that’s exactly what becomes of it.
Product Management is set up as the perfect game: easy to play, difficult to master. Everyone has an opinion.
Whereas a PhD research question will only draw participation from a small handful of collaborators, it seems everyone has something to say when it comes to questions of product design and strategy. That makes the job of Product Managers more fun — work should always be social and collaborative, and these folks will often find themselves at the heart of the organisation, managing feedback and opinion of from every department.
But it also means there is a lot of information — and often misinformation — to manage.
It takes experience, intuition and deep empathy to understand what is best for a product’s end users. Very few people can bring all three together; that is the distinction of the Product Manager. Perhaps the toughest job of all is managing the expectations of multiple stakeholders who presume they have a key role in co-creation of new product solutions. This is rarely a concern in academia, where only a hatful of people will ever read your work with interest and scrutiny.
The PhD prepared me for ‘real’ work in several ways (shameless plug). Every (good) Product Manager is a problem solver, and what better preparation than a doctorate built on open problems? But perhaps the most direct link of the PhD with Product Management is in the uncertainty of outcome. In both cases there comes a point where you commit to a solution path without knowing for sure if it is going to pay off.
Sure, taking a Lean/Agile/Whatever approach can reduce the odds of failure, but there is more random variation in Business and in Product than most practitioners would care to admit.
Whether it’s a particular research methodology or a killer feature that you are convinced will raise user engagement, there’s an extent to which you just have to roll the dice. Research prepares you for the possibility of failure. In this way it may be the most entrepreneurial of affairs, and one which this Product Manager has certainly benefited from.
I never meant to be a Product Manager, I swear. But when it keeps me up at 2am, I know it’s for all the right reasons. I am hungry to solve problems, prepared to fail, and keen to make a difference in the real world. The PhD paved the way (for the first two anyway) but the transition has been marked by adaptivity from one unknown to another.
Originally posted on my personal blog.
I am a research mathematician turned educator working at the nexus of education, innovation and technology. Come say hello on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you liked this article you might want to check out two of my other pieces: The Teacher of Tomorrow and I No Longer Understand my PhD Dissertation.
