[UMN MSBA] New York Meet-up Note: How to transit from analytics to product management
Brief intro
During the trip to NY, I was very lucky to sign up and participate the meetup held by Product School. The talk was given by Nikil, the former business analyst from Amazon and current product manager at WeWork. He shared his transition process from business analyst to product manager, some tips that better the transition and suggestions for those who have same career plan. For I have such career aspiration of being a product manager in the long run, I found it super helpful for me as a student with business analytic major.
What does a business analyst do in Amazon?
The responsibilities of the business analyst in Amazon are not beyond my expectation.
- Define key success metric. Nikil said it was important for business analyst to define metric for weekly and monthly business review. He had to provide the recommendation for the team and business partners to better their performance.
- Identify trends and patterns. Working in the sales team, he also needed to discover and conclude trends and patterns for the next step.
Most of the time, they used Tableu and SQL to build the dashboard for the team in order to provide more insight.
When did the transition happen?
The transition happened when he started taking charge of Amazon Video. He kind of came across analytics and product management at the same time. Amazon Video was quite a new service then. While defining the key metrics, he had to look over different features on different devices. He started to look the product not only in the analytic perspective, but also in the product management viewpoint. The transition happened quite naturally, and by asking a lot of question to stakeholders, he sped up the process of transferring to a product manager.
Ask a lots of question
He shared his experience in asking questions. Asking questions was somehow the way to find a mentor too. He categorized four kinds of stakeholders he asked and specified what kinds of questions he would ask to them.
- Product manager: By engaging more with other PM, an analyst can get more understanding what the responsibilities are and justify if he likes what a PM do daily.
Questions like:
a. How did you get into product manager? It’s the process of background check, to determine how a PM become a PM and what kind of skill sets he or she require before becoming a PM.
b. What does PM’s day-to-day look like? It is a good way to distinguish the tasks held by business analyst and product manager. The scope for these two positions is quite different. PM tends to see the overall picture of the product development, while analyst focuses on certain feature and recommendation.
c. What are most valuable skills of a product manager? Nikil shared some key skills a product manager should have, including experimentation, data-driven decision-making, product insight, and user research. He also mentioned that the user research is the field that a business analyst may not be familiar with, for instance, the user’s feedback loop.
2. Leadership: In this section, I didn’t put down many notes. I interpreted this part as a business analyst needs to manage the expectation of his or her manager. While a BA performs the best he or she can do, he or she can discuss with the manager about more exploration in the PM career path.
3. Current Business Analyst
4. Former Business Analyst
Asking questions to these two groups of people gives the status quo and future prospect for the business analyst. What parts does a BA love his job? Why does he change career path to PM? What is the biggest attraction to BA to transit to PM? Are there any difference between business analyst and PM? Does the job you did match your expectation? Most importantly, we are able to find mentor during the process, who can guide you to the right track of being a capable PM.
Last Note
After participating the meetup, I will conclude that PM is kind of methodology. As a product/ business analyst, I can consciously think as a product manager to the team, see the process and project in a more bird-eyed view, put down more documentation of the process, and learn how to do trade off based on the resources limitation and goal.
Ushering in the fall semester, I hope I can conduct more self project on products and seek more chance for winter and upcoming spring. In the final run, I will land on the product analyst position that perfectly matches who I am.
