Over the past year, I’ve made one of the biggest career changes of my career to date, moving from familiar development to unfamiliar products. Many friends around do not understand, after all, has been code for six years, why not continue to deepen the technology, and choose to transfer.

As a matter of fact, I have also thought about this question carefully, but I decided to transfer my job because I found myself facing a bottleneck in my career. As I grow older, MY energy is not as good as before, and the technological innovation is too fast, and I need to learn new skills at any time, so I decided to transfer my job.

The final decision to transfer to a product manager is a major decision I made based on my own situation:

1. I like and am better at dealing with people than I am at typing code every day

2. The development of products has natural advantages

3. The upper limit of product manager’s later development is higher, and it can even lay a certain foundation for self-entrepreneurship

However, the life after the post transfer was not as simple as I thought. I had been frustrated, confused and helpless, but fortunately I found a solution. In the past year, my mentality and thinking have been constantly changing, so I also want to share my transformation process, hoping to provide some reference for friends who are planning or in transition.

The technological advantage is self-evident

Development transformation to do product manager, advantages are self-evident.

The first is logical thinking ability, at least most of the technologies I have been exposed to, logical thinking is relatively strong. Often in the actual development process, the technology can point out boundary cases and logic holes that the product manager did not consider. After all, as a programmer, logical thinking is not strong, the function must be a bunch of bugs, so this can be regarded as a kind of “occupational disease”.

Another advantage is that tech-savvy product managers are better able to communicate with developers and design products that take into account the difficulty and timing of implementing a feature and don’t confuse themselves and their team with requirements.

Just because of these two advantages, I can accumulate confidence in daily work, so as to smoothly go through the pain period of transition.

Shift your mindset

After I transferred, I realized that my previous idea was too simple. Throughout the year, my mind has been broken and reorganized. To sum up, I experienced three shifts in thinking: engineering thinking, functional thinking, and product thinking.

A month after I switched my role to product manager, I found myself in a vortex of engineering thinking. Why do I say so? When I design products, the first starting point is the technical implementation level, and I define and design products by the difficulty of implementation. The biggest drawback of this is that it is divorced from reality, from user needs and actual scenarios, and becomes design for implementation. For example, when designing an e-commerce project, I first consider technical details such as high concurrency and payment security. It is easy to ignore the user experience, resulting in a poor overall experience.

When I solved this problem, I moved on to the second stage, functional thinking. Before, I always looked at products from the perspective of technology. Now when I started to design products from the perspective of users, I started to fall into a vicious circle of functional design. I always tangled in the function of products, while ignoring their business goals and values, resulting in poor practicality of the products I designed.

In the following six months, I gradually began to think about products from the perspective of business. I would seriously consider: on the premise of realizing a correct function, what is the business goal behind this function, and how to design to ensure the usability of the final product. So I entered the third stage, product thinking.

In fact, this stage is the way of thinking that a real product manager should have. The product definition and design should be completed on the premise of fully understanding the enterprise strategy, and the usability and ease of use of the product should be improved based on business scenarios, so as to improve the overall user experience.

It took me a whole year to change my mind, and now I seem to have a deeper understanding of the product.

Explore a suitable for their own product learning road

In this year, I gradually explored an efficient way to learn products. I can make two introductions: one is the professional skills of product managers; the other is to actively cooperate with the team to promote the implementation of projects.

1. In-depth business scenarios

When planning products, product managers need to make an overall analysis of business processes. Only after in-depth business scenarios can they ensure that the maximum value of resources can be realized in the later operation of the project.

, for example, the customer suddenly said need additional message community functions, only because of competing goods of this functionality, but you are offline store personally understand survey and interview after a large number of users, found that at present the most urgent and necessary function is online shopping page, if need to join community news, scattered resources, not only can also affect the launch schedule. For this reason, you finally convinced party A to suspend this feature.

This is the product manager’s professional advice on product functionality as he delves into the business scenario.

2. Improve my communication and coordination skills

This is a soft skill for product managers. As we all know, product managers need to keep communication with the boss/party A, and also need to coordinate with design, development, testing and other positions. In such an environment, product managers must exercise their communication and coordination skills to become the driving force for the successful landing of projects.

In my experience, I have found that putting the entire collaborative process online can move the project forward more effectively, making each step more specific and transparent. Using professional collaboration platforms can assist my work very well. I have tried to use all the collaboration platforms on the market, and most of the ones I have used recently are copycat collaboration platforms. With the help of copycat, I can not only clearly understand the progress of the current project, but also communicate with UI designers and technology more efficiently and succinct. In terms of overall experience, Compared with other platforms, Mike.com has more comprehensive functions.

For example, when the designer finishes the UI draft, I can complete the review and comment online, and when the design is finalized, the technology can independently obtain the annotation cut map in the platform, the whole delivery process can be completed online, for the product manager, can more quickly promote the project forward!

The last

During this year, I successfully transitioned into a product manager. Technology has introduced me to the industry and made me understand the logic and details of the industry, while products have broadened my horizon and brought me to appreciate more possibilities of the Internet. My product career has just begun, I will continue to go on this road, looking forward to harvest more possibilities!