How To Introduce Yourself At Parties

All Product Managers have been there. You’re at a party, you’re meeting new people, they ask you what you do for a living, you tell them you’re a Product Manager… They glaze over, what could that possibly mean?

It’s become a bit of a joke and trope in Product spaces and in interviews. How do you explain Product to someone who doesn’t work in tech, who doesn’t even know what Agile is? What’s more, how do you know if what you’re doing in your day to day job is “real” Product Management. You only need to have a look at a job board to see very different requirements for the same job title.

So, to try and answer the question, what do you say? Do you just give up with a “I work in IT”? Do you dare to try and explain the full thing? You only have a few seconds, remember….

As you’ll see a lot on this site, let’s start with “Why?”. Why are you being asked? Knowing the Why more or less universally tells you how to answer.

In this case, people generally want to carry on the conversation, they want something they can engage with easily to latch onto. As a bit of extra, the more gauche might be trying to place you in an imaginary pecking order (if you keep that kind of company).

So, what are the key things to communicate?

• Your job title or area – Product Management – no one cares about your seniority, and saying “junior” always feels like selling yourself short from the off.
• Product Managers work with Customers and Users to identify their problems and goals.
• Product Managers agree and prioritise lots of different changes to make the things they’re working on the best they can with available resources.
• Product Managers work with other techies and the wider team on how to deliver agreed upon items.

That’s it. No, I mean it.

I can hear the sound of agile coaches and scrum masters clutching their agile pearls at this. Not mention Agile? Not mention delivery, or user stories? I can also hear some Product people gasping about North Star metrics, return on investment, influencing people….

To be frank, it’s these sounds of clutching and gasping these articles are for. There’s a huge, complex, wonderful ecosystem for Product Managers, but what I hear most of all from other Product Managers (especially those starting out), is how to bridge the gap between the guidance in books on Agile and Scrum and what they see on the ground.

Many organisations are still new to Agile ways of working, Scrum may be a novelty, or poorly implemented. Cross functional, independent teams might be completely contrary to company structure or culture.

By remembering the core principles of Product Management, and not getting too bogged down in the frameworks which produced them, the goals of the change you’re trying to lead, and the way to introduce the role to anyone should be clearer – “I’m a Product Manager, I work with customers, developers and the business to design and build and improve technology that customers need” (Individual wording may vary).