Episode 105: Answering Questions About Navigating Your Product Career

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about how to pivot from product management to a career as an independent product consultant, how to handle coaching roadblocks when working with new product owners, and the ins and outs of book publishing. 

Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.

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Q: My question is around how to pivot my career into an independent product manager, for example, a freelancer consultant or coach or a combination of any of those…Since you became an independent product consultant, what would be your guidance based on your experience and considering the current market conditions?

A: I didn't set out to be an independent product consultant, it kind of happened, and I just kept going with it. Here’s how I would approach it if that’s the direction you want to pursue, and some questions to ask yourself to set yourself up for success.  

Q: When coaching product owners, I bring a variety and volume of techniques to add tools to their toolbox for product thinking. How and why do the product owners tend to stick with what they know and not shift towards building new experiences as much as they could or should?

A: If you bring [new product owners] a bunch of tools, it might be overwhelming. It's really easy to overwhelm people with a lot of different techniques while they're still trying to figure out what their job is. My first approach is to help them explain what their job is and what the purpose is. Listen in to learn what to do next.

Q: I want to write a book. Do I self-publish it, or do I go with a publisher?

A: Book writing is incredibly hard, but if you do want to write a book, I encourage you to do it. It was the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Here’s what to know about both publishing options, so you can make the right choice for you.

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

Transcript:

Melissa:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, I've got a little bit of a different episode for you and a lot of it is about navigating your career. If you want to become an independent consultant or coaching people in product management like I do, I get a lot of questions about this. Everybody wants to know how do I get started, how do I build a clientele? Should I write a book? So I'm gonna answer all of those questions today and also give you some tips about coaching as well. So with that, let's go to our first question.

Dear Melissa, my question is around how to pivot my career into an independent product manager, for example, a freelancer, consultant or coach, or a combination of any of those. I'm a senior product manager with about seven years of experience in product and I've been doing mentoring, coaching, and even facilitating product certifications on the side. I really love the opportunity to teach and I draw lots of energy from it. I also see a big opportunity as product management is gaining more attention and more and more people are interested in the function. Since you became an independent product consultant, what would be your guidance based on your experience in considering the current market conditions? Okay, so I'll tell you a little bit about how I got started being independent. Um, product consultant, I didn't set out to be independent. I just kind of happened to keep going with it. <laugh>. So I started teaching when I had a current job. Um, so I was doing Skillshare classes at night, teaching people about what I called lean product management at the time, which I believe is just really good product management now, but <laugh>, we always had to slap a little label on it so that people knew we weren't talking about waterfall back then.

But my boss was like, Hey, a lot of people are not doing this data-driven, hypothesis-driven product management. You should teach people what you're doing. And that really helped me set out to figure out what should I focus on and how to get into it. So I started very specifically around teaching MVPs. I didn't teach end-to-end product management for a while after that, but I had a lot of experience doing minimum viable products. That's what I was really, really good at, and that's what my boss said, Hey, there's a need for this, why don't you try it? And I did and I experimented with first, you know, doing little classes and seeing if people would show up and pay me 20 bucks <laugh>, and going from there.

So my biggest piece of advice around here too is you know, what aspect of product management do you wanna concentrate on? Do you just wanna teach it end to end? In which case that's very broad. Um, there's a lot of people doing it. There is a need for good product coaches out there. So I will say that's, that's definitely needed. Um, but you might wanna think about what you concentrate in. Do you concentrate on discovery? Do you concentrate on delivery? Do you do it end to end? And for me it was MVPs. So from there I started growing into more, uh, teaching that was end-to-end product management. But I ended up going freelancing, going, um, a consultant because I had been looking around for another opportunity, um, after I was building a startup in Italy and the people I worked with at Open Sky started calling me and saying, Hey, can you come to our company?

I left, I left Open Sky, I went to another company, can you come teach my product managers how you did it? Because they're not doing it the same way. And I kept getting calls and calls and calls and more opportunities because people saw the way that I worked and they liked the way that I worked. And that is how I started. So it was a combination of that, a lot of word of mouth, um, from a teaching perspective too, I learned a lot from my friends, uh, Jeff Gothelf and some other people who were out there teaching at that time. And we were running. I would, I would do what Jeff was doing, which was basically running, uh, weekend workshops or partnering with people around the world to find a space and try to sell tickets for the workshops. And like I said, I did mostly MVPs or lean product management techniques, which was a lot of discovery work and hypothesis.

And I would sell tickets on Eventbrite to those classes. So that's how I would test that and really figure out did people want what I was selling? Was it good? And then I do a lot of analysis after this classes as well to find out if what I was teaching was hitting the mark. Um, from there a lot of, uh, I started getting a lot of inquiries about speaking at conferences, about lean product management and MVPs that got me exposed to a wider audience I was writing. And I think this is incredibly important if you ever want to kind of go off on your own as an advisor, as a consultant, as a coach. And this is actually incredibly important I think for people too who have been in the C-suite for a long time. I know there's a lot of people who are getting up towards retirement age and they're like, I just wanna advise.

I wanna do these things. If you wanna set yourself up to be able to do that after you retire from work or even before, you need to make sure that people know what you stand for. So in any of these cases, um, people needed to be able to find what I was all about, what I talk about, what I do. So blogging was the biggest thing that helped me with that. So I started a blog at melissaperri.com and I started writing about these things and I haven't blogged in years, but people keep sharing those posts, which is great. But I decided to condense that into a book. Um, writing for me has gotten a little harder as I gotten busier, but that was really what I spent all my time doing at the beginning of this independent career. So you need to make sure people can find what you're about.

And now I point them to talks, I point them to podcasts, I point 'em to a lot of different things because see may have noticed through this podcast, talking is easier for me than writing, but That's okay. Whatever you are going to do to make sure people understand what you stand for and what your skillset is and what you've done and what your experience is and what you really groc to teach, that's how you get the word out there. So find your platform, find your voice and start talking. Start showing people what you're about. That is incredibly huge. Now there's also a question about, there is a difference. Let me put this out there instead. There is a difference between doing the work and teaching the work. And I've met a lot of people who can do the work, who are great at it, and they're really awful teachers and that's okay.

Some people are not cut out to be teachers and that's all right. I'm just gonna, it's, it's kind of harsh, but I'm gonna say it. Some people are not cut out to be teachers. And the thing about teaching is it's a very different skillset than it is for doing. There are things that I do that I have a really hard time putting into words to teach. So if you've been sitting there being like, wow, why hasn't Melissa put out their roadmaps course yet? It's because it's taken me years <laugh> to figure out how I want to teach it because there's gotta be a simpler explanation. I can build a roadmap with my eyes closed. Teaching how to build a roadmap is a very different things and I experiment with it for years until I can actually teach it. So that's, that's actually one of my goals this year is to get a roadmap course out there for you.

But it takes a really long time for you to sit back and look at things and figure out how do I actually explain what I'm doing in a way where somebody who's never done this before can pick it up and run with it. And that's a very different skillset. So I teach because I'm good at doing that. And that's something that you should look at too. Teaching can give people energy, but you also have to make sure that you're good at it. And if you're not, there are ways to get better. There are courses out there on how to teach better. Uh, you wanna make sure that you can explain your thought process very clearly. Writing helps me with that. So when I'm trying to figure out, you know, things for myself, even like, I'll start writing and I'll start writing it down and then I'll give it to people to read and be like, does that make sense?

Does that help you think through it? And when they say yes, I keep iterating on that until I get to a point where I can explain it to a bunch of people and I get the same results. So you really need to make sure that you are clear in your thought process and clear in, um, you know, being able to turn that into something actionable for other people if you wanna go into teaching. And it is a very much a different skillset and I've read a lot about teaching and I've done a lot of teaching over the years, uh, to get better at it. It was something that I was good at at the beginning, but I need to learn how to get a lot better at it. So I spend a lot of time learning how to be a better teacher. So I think that's important to remember too.

And if you find that you're not doing the teaching part as well as you are with the actual doing of product management, that's okay. You can still be a freelancer sometimes you can still be a coach cuz you can help people think through things. Um, you can still be a consultant because you can help do the work and explain why it worked, like that's okay. Um, teaching is about distilling something down and then, you know, making it available for a wide audience. Sometimes one-on-one coaching is a little bit easier than full fledged teaching to wide audiences because you can work through a problem with one person and you don't have to have your message as concretely clear as you do with a very wide audience. So with coaching too. I would highly recommend looking into coaching certification courses because that will make you better if you don't know where to start.

Um, I've heard from lots of people that that makes them a better coach. It helps 'em really understand how to, you know, coach somebody rather than telling them what to do, how to empathize with them, how to distill that information we were just talking about in a teaching perspective down to be actionable for somebody else. So that could be a good place to start too. Um, so really think about like what is your skillset? Where do you, where do you thrive? What are you good at? What are people say you're actually good at? And then use that to start your, you know, your career is an independent product manager or independent consultant. Um, and you know what, you don't have to do it the same way as everybody else. Like Lenny and I talked on his podcast and on my podcast about how he does his newsletter and he helps break down strategies to people and explain them in ways that they can actually crack.

Uh, but he doesn't teach courses like I teach and I chose to go course route. He chose to go newsletter route. You can do a bunch of different stuff like this. It doesn't have to look the same as everybody else. So remember that and think about what gets you up in the morning and what makes you excited. Also, something else to consider is, uh, where do you want to coach? There is a huge need for product management coaches at large companies that are doing big transformations. Uh, do you have experience with that? Do you, are you able to navigate the bureaucracy and the <laugh>, the messiness that is a large transformation to help people in that environment? Or do you thrive more in startups or smaller companies? You need to think about where your audience is and where your skillsets match up to. So that's really what I would look at.

As for the current marketing conditions, I don't know, I don't have a lot of advice on this one. Um, I've been doing this for almost 10 years now and yeah, I'm gonna tell you too, like when you work for yourself, no, no holds back here. Like it's scary because the only person who's making money here is me, <laugh> for myself. Like, and if I have a bad year, it's not like I have a, you know, a safety net that is my job because I'm doing this on the side. Like you're all in, once you're working for yourself, you are all in. And this stresses a lot of people out. I know a ton of independent coaches and this stresses them out, especially when you're getting started. So I would really think about that.

And one way that a lot of independent coaches get started is by doing longer term contracts. So you have something set up for six months to a year, those can really help if you can find those. Uh, you wanna make sure that you're not doing something that can get canceled in two weeks after you do one or two assignments. Like that's a really big part of making sure that consulting and coaching, you can keep doing that for a while. So that's what I would look for is like what are the longer term, you know, if, if there's opportunities for you to do longer term assignments right now in the current marketing conditions, like seems like a great place to get in, but I would really feel that out for a while before you make the leap and just know, hey, every December, um, I'm like, you know, worried about getting the work in for the next year.

It, that's how you run a business. It's just the same as doing like a SaaS business where you're like, let me close all my close all my business in Q4 and make sure we're geared up for q1. Like, that's a thing. So you are also going to be a salesperson, you're gonna worry about those types of things. So it's a really different type of environment to work for yourself. Now here's another route that some people should consider as well. What if you are not independent just for yourself? Maybe you have the desire to just be independent at work for yourself, that's totally fine. Maybe though you just wanna be a coach or consultant. There are a lot of consultancies and coaches out there and they're not necessarily McKinsey. There's also a lot of smaller, really good independent, um, firms that do product management consulting. There's a lot of agencies out there that are getting more into coaching and consulting to maybe look at one of those first to like have the steadiness of a job, um, get all that experience coaching, do some of that consulting before you think about heading out on your own.

That could be a really great way to just ease into it. So that's my advice. I know there was a huge mouthful of a lot of different things, but I love being independent. It's been really great for me. I love when other people wanna take this leap too. So I hope that helps. But I also wanna be realistic about what it takes to run your own business. So just think through, I'd really hone in on like what are you good at, what are you really good at, and what makes you stand out and make sure people know that get out there, like get on the Twitters, get on the LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is probably more relevant than Twitter these days, but I started off on Twitter, you know, make sure people know what you stand for and that's how they're gonna find you. So make sure you're visible and that's how you start to build your clientele and get into that.

All right, next question. This one comes from a coach. Dear Melissa, when coaching product owners, I bring a variety and volume of techniques to add tools to their toolbox for product thinking. How and why do product owners tend to stick with what they know and not shift towards building new experiences as much as they could or should? I hope this doesn't seem harsh. Uh, well this is the reality. So in a lot of places, especially ones going through transformations, and I'm gonna assume that's what you're talking about right now here. Two, because you're coaching new product owners, um, one if you bring them a bunch of tools, it might be overwhelming. So there's that, it's really easy to overwhelm people with a lot of different techniques while they're still trying to figure out what their job is. So what I try to do in my approach is first approach it like, hey, let's explain what your job is and what the purpose is, and then let's explain the main activities of your job, like discovery work, working with engineers, delivery work, strategy work, these different buckets.

And then let's talk about the tools that go into those tool boxes. What I find too is nobody's going to try a tool, adopt a tool or push themselves unless they need it right at that moment. So it almost comes from, you know, necessity of, hey, I'm building an mvp, that means I need to learn how to do an experiment. They're gonna start looking through their toolbox. Then that's the moment in which they go, Hey, let me go find out, you know, what's going on here. So you need to make sure that they know what the different tools are when they're ready for it at that moment, right? That's a good point for you to insert yourself and be like, Hey, by the way, here's a bunch of different tools, let's sit down and do this. And that's gonna get their attention. They're gonna put it into practice and they're gonna learn it.

So actually introducing people to a bunch of tools really quickly doesn't work because they're not gonna rock it. They're not going to have the chance to actually like experiment with it or try it or use it in context. And that means usually that it doesn't stick, they'll forget about it and then they'll go back to their old ways of working. The second piece too is understanding why they're using those tools is really important as well. So if you introduce somebody to like, uh, and we're, I was just having this conversation on LinkedIn, so this is really relevant, but if you introduce somebody to let's say a canvas and say, Hey, let's take my product strategy canvas for example. Hey, here's a product strategy canvas. Um, here's what these things mean, go fill it out. That's not really explaining the purpose behind it. So when I introduce a product strategy canvas, I'm basically saying, Hey, here's the, here's what I do to boil down and distill our product strategy into something that's readable and memorable.

Memorable, yeah, something that you can remember <laugh> and you want to, you want to basically explain to them though that each bucket on here takes a lot of work to figure out before we can just pop it on the canvas. So when we're looking at strategic intents, sometimes it takes a month or two months to actually pull out all the information to figure out what the strategic intent is. And if there is no clear vision, we gotta do that first. So all the things that fall on this canvas have a purpose, have a moment in time and when that are useful and they need a lot of work to be able to be put onto that canvas. So I try to explain to them like, the purpose of this tool is to align people, but it's also to help you understand the cascade of product strategy.

So when we start with strategic intents, we're basically saying how do we break that down into product initiatives? But in order to figure out what the product initiative is, we need to go do X, y, and Z work. You really have to explain to them the context behind why they're using what they're using and why it would be relevant at that point. And I think that starts to help them understand when they should be adopting new tools. But at the end of the day, I can give you all this advice and if the culture of your company does not support them in trying these different ways, if they're not holding them accountable for trying different ways and those measurable outcomes and all of this should really be to get to an outcome at the end of the day because what is the tool useful for if not to get to that outcome?

If your company's not rewarding that, they're not gonna use it. So a lot of this just becomes culture, right? It becomes you trying to figure out how to build an environment for them where they feel like they can try these new experiences. They should be trying the new experiences because they'll help them grow. They can see a career path for them where if they try all these different things, they will get better at their job and they can go up the ladder. All these things play into each other and that's really important. So if you're finding that there's resistance, it's almost always a cultural issue. A lot of times it's not a coaching issue, it's just a cultural issue and that's a really big thing to break down. But more often than not, that's what I see as a problem.

All right, last question. Dear Melissa, I wanna write a book. Do I self-publish it or do I go with a publisher who a lot of people have come up to me lately and asked me about book writing? Um, book writing is incredibly hard, but if you do wanna write a book, I encourage you to do it. It was the most rewarding thing I've ever done. It was really, really hard <laugh>, but I learned a lot from the first time I did it. Honestly. I am self-publishing this next book, product ops or product operations book with Denise Tills. Uh, we are doing it self-published because of all the things I learned about a publisher. If you self-publish it, you have to do a lot of stuff on your own.

But that's okay because there's a lot of companies out there that will help you with it or consultants that do these types of things. But you are basically finding somebody to do the layout. You have to copyright it yourself. You have to find an editor, you have to get somebody to do the illustrations, you have to find somebody to do the cover work. Um, there's a lot. You have to market it yourself. All these things, you put it on Amazon, you upload it, tons of people out there that'll help you with it, but you're doing all that stuff yourself. Now with the publisher, they do take care of some of those things, but there's a lot of stuff you're gonna do yourself too. Uh, where the publisher comes in is they will get an editor for you. They will help you with the cover art.

Usually they have designers there. They, um, will copyright it for you. They will, uh, do the layout and all that stuff and then they'll upload it to Amazon or their book or the have it staffed in bookstores depending on what the publisher does. And each publisher is different. Not all publishers get in Barnes and Noble. Not all Barnes and Noble will order your book either way. So think about that. Um, one thing I learned from the publisher too is that once you go with a publisher, you no longer have any control over your book. I do not set the pricing for my book. I cannot get the book myself without paying for my book. Think of that. I would love to give people out free copies of the book because I didn't do it for money. I did it so that you could have a copy of the book, but I can't even get a copy of my book for free.

I can get one or two, but I can't get 'em enough to give 'em out to people. So I have no control over that. I can't buy them for cost. I buy them for 50% off the cover price. That's the deal with the publisher. So think about that. I do not have any control over the way that we make derivatives the audio book, I did not get asked if I was okay with somebody else reading the audio book or if I even wanted to read it myself. I had no idea there was an audio book until it was out. Somebody else told me, I didn't know my book was published until it was out. Somebody else told me they downloaded it on Kindle. So you will lose control over that book. I have no control over it. The publisher owns it and the money too gets split mostly in the publisher's favor.

So I did all the work to write it. I still market it. The publisher does no marketing for me. That's something to remember too. No publishers really do any marketing for you unless you're like Michelle Obama and writing one of those bestseller top ones. They don't do that. I market my own book. I sell my book, I have to put 'em in touch with the publisher. They have to negotiate if they can get discounted rates or whatnot and then they ship it from the publisher. But I really have no control over it. I just do all the marketing, try to push my book as much as possible and hope that it sells. And at this point, it's really just for an awareness and so that you can learn from me. I barely make any money off it. And I've sold a lot of books. I've sold quite quite a lot of books.

But the publisher, if you're wanting about distributions, um, publishers usually get about 90% of the profits off the book and you get about 10% with a, uh, physical book. And then with electronic, it's sometimes 50 50. So those are the numbers we're talking about. Like I said, I'm self-publishing for a reason. My big desire is to have control over the book and do whatever I want with it. That is something that I really wish I knew beforehand. And I would like you to know that there are some pros to going with a publisher if you feel like you need some credibility behind your name and you want to, and this is why people told me to go with a publisher a long time ago when I wrote this. If you feel like you need credibility, publishers sometimes can lend credibility to your name. And that is the one and biggest reason that a lot of people do.

Publishers do work with publishers. I would tell you to negotiate, uh, make sure that you have, you're putting things in your best interest when you're signing that contract with them because it is binding. Uh, but know all the facts going in and definitely shop around. So that's what I would think about. Do you need credibility or do you wanna have control over your work in your book? If you can negotiate with them and, you know, be able to come out on top or feel like you're on top, go with the publisher. It does make it easier because you don't have to find all the pieces to put it together, but it is, you are losing control to a degree of what you're writing and what you're building then. So definitely think about that. Um, I will be self-publishing books from now on and that is something that I would like you to consider as well, <laugh>.

So I would just encourage you to, to think about do I need a book or is there other ways for me to get my work out there? If you really wanna write, go for it. I mean, do it. I'm writing a second book, never thought I would, but hey, Denise asked me if I, I wanted to write something too, and I said, all right, let's do it again. And I'm, I'm enjoying it. I will be excited when it's out again, but it is a lot of work. I will also tell you that a lot of reasons people go with publishers, although I did not do this, is they give you an advance sometimes so that you could take time off to write, but you do have to pay back that advance from the book sales and from your portion of the profits of the book sales.

So think about that. Um, so if you need time off, a publisher could also be good for that if they are offering you an advance. But unless you're really like a known quantity, a lot of times they don't offer you a really big advance. So I didn't want the advance, I just wanted to not have to pay anything back. Um, so I wrote it off, you know, while I was working full-time. That's very hard as well. So think about your timing and when you'll be able to write things too. All right, well that's it for dear Melissa this week. If

You have any questions for me, please go to dear melissa.com. Drop me a little voicemail and let me know what you are thinking about. And I hope this advice was helpful for any of you out there trying to get into the consulting or coaching world or book writing world. Um, come join us. That would be awesome. And we will see you next time on our next episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.