Applying a Product Mindset to Your Product Career and Job Hunt

Job Search and Interview Advice for Product People

(I originally published this post 3 years ago, and but it has more relevance now)

Looking for a new role can be intimidating. Especially because the reasons you’re looking for a new role most likely stem from something wrong at your existing role. Whether you’re feeling underappreciated, unrecognized, overworked, burned out, or simply ready to grow and need to move to take that next step, you are moving into the unknown.

How should you approach your job search? What about applying, interviewing, and following up?

Let’s zoom out for a moment and talk strategically about your career, then talk about some tactics involved along the way.

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A Product Mindset

We’re all about product thinking here, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to start with that. When approaching a problem, we should step back and understand it, explore possibilities, and then create and iterate on solutions. So let’s explore that idea.

A Product Mindset for Your Career

It is important to step back, whether or not you’re searching for a job, and think about your overall career.

As much as we’d like our careers to progress in a nice, linear fashion, most of them won’t. We will see many twists and turns. We may take some detours. We may find some unexpected opportunities we weren’t looking for, but change the course of our careers and lives. That’s why it’s important to constantly reassess where we are, where we’re going, and where we want to be. It won’t always be the same.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Understand

If you haven’t taken time to think about your career, now is an excellent time to reflect on it. Often we choose a career path, or at least a general direction, when we’re younger, in our late teens and early twenties. Unfortunately, that is a time when we’re still discovering who we are. Our personalities are not yet fully formed and while we may have a general idea of some things we may want to do, it’s hard to imagine you’d let 20-year-old you make decisions for your entire life.

There is a Japanese term “ikigai”, which translates along the lines as “life’s worth” or “reason for being”. It is the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what it will pay for.

So what are your current interests? Do they still align with your career direction? What are your likes and dislikes? What do you really like about your job? When you have free time, what do you gravitate toward? What do you put off until you can’t avoid it any longer?

What have you learned over the past few years that can inform your future career path? What areas within your field (or outside of it) have the best opportunities, both for earning and for making a difference?

What skills can you build on from your current role (or past roles) that will allow you to move forward into new opportunities with the best results? In a podcast episode, author Cal Newport tackles the question about switching careers to pursue your dreams. While not necessarily bad, we should ask some questions about how and why we are doing it.

What are you really good at? I’ve always enjoyed writing. I wanted to go into some sort of writing career, but didn’t. But I still hovered around the edges of writing for years within my career. Until I realized I didn’t need to stay outside. I wrote more and realized I was okay at it. And I got encouragement both at work and from other platforms. What are you good at and how can you expand on that?

Before thinking about your next role, take an inventory of where you are and where you’d like to be now. Not based on what others say, but what you care most about.

Explore

Now that you’ve taken time to understand yourself and your career, explore the possibilities.

If you are on the right path, what can you do to advance along that path? In product and design, we consider this ideation. It’s time to brainstorm ideas. Map out all different ways you could move forward. Nothing should be off the table, no matter how crazy. Propose a big new product initiative and lead it. Apply for a promotion. Take on additional responsibility. Look for new roles.

Maybe you find you aren’t on the exact right path. Maybe it’s time for a pivot. That may be a minor change or a completely new direction. Either way, we should always explore and preparing for those types of changes (see the link to the article above).

Go through the same exercise, mapping out ideas and exploring possibilities. Maybe you are a business analyst but find documenting processes mind-numbing now. Your genuine passion is in uncovering user problems and designing solutions for those. Or maybe you are an engineering manager who has grown weary of all the people management and drama of startup life. Explore all the ways to solve those problems, from small pivots to complete career changes.

Create/Implement

Once you’ve explored the possibilities, it’s time to implement and create a new reality.

For the business analyst above, it sounds like a move into product management may be a good change. So getting involved in the product team and taking on product-like roles may be the next step. Or finding an associate PM role. Or pushing her company for a chance to take on a development team as a product manager. Create the opportunity.

For the engineering manager, once she has assessed her passions and likes/dislikes, she can decide the right direction and make it happen. It may be as simple as moving into a non-management role (not uncommon for those who find that managing people isn’t what they wanted). Or maybe her passion is helping younger engineers, but without the weight of management or difficulty of a startup environment. She may want to pursue some sort of teaching or training program.

The exciting part is she could do that on the side. Maybe develop some courses for an online platform. Or create a mentoring program. Test out the idea and see if that’s what works. And scale or pivot again from there.

We’re in the beginning of a creator economy. A podcast with the founder of Patreon touches on this topic. While it may seem like we’re at the height of side-gigs, I believe we’re just seeing the beginning of a true creator economy. So if this appeals to you, there is no better time to get started exploring it.

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The future will belong to those who can reinvent themselves the fastest and most frequently. As technology and societies change, each will require a new set of skills. We will have to pivot more frequently and more dramatically. Start now to prepare.

A Product Mindset for Your Job Search

We should use the same mindset for our job searches.