My name is Kalia Aragon, Senior Product Manager at Flatiron Health and former Product Manager at Disney Streaming Services. I started my professional career in the nonprofit space. I studied political science and wanted to change the world and fell into product by accident.
Fast forward to today, I consider myself to be a living breathing product chameleon. A product leader who can assess, adapt and thrive in most companies and product teams!
In this article, I’ll talk about how to adapt to anything and how to be a product chameleon.
Here’s our main talking points:
- Assessing what kind of product manager a company needs you to be
- How to be the product manager the company needs
- What are the perks of being a product chameleon?
Let’s get to it 👇
Assessing what kind of product manager a company needs you to be
Storytime: My first product interview
When I had my first product interview, I was transitioning out of the nonprofit space. I was working at a consulting agency where I had large clients such as Footlocker and Google.
The company I was interviewing for was a small startup agency that worked in the artificial intelligence space. I thought because of my skills, working on the client side and managing the operations, I would be able to pick up product without much of a problem.
During my first phone screen with a hiring manager, I was asked “what is the difference between an SDK and an API?”. I had no idea what the right answer was. Now, of course I do, but the Kalia who studied transitional justice and worked on building texting tools, and customer databases didn’t.
At that moment, I felt like a failure. How could I not even pass an initial phone screen?
However, what I've come to realize is that my real mistake was not being able to assess the product culture of the company and see what kind of product manager they wanted.
Taking a beat and doing the kind of assessment we're going to talk about here throughout your career is really important.
The biggest factors to consider when evaluating a new company/job
Here’s a couple of questions to think about when evaluating a new company:
- What is the makeup of the company?
- What is the size of their staff?
- What kind of roles do they hire?
- What's the financial stage of the company?
For example, if I would have done a little bit more research into the company and the kinds of roles they hired, I would have discovered that they didn't hire any of the supporting functions you see in product organizations like technical project managers and program managers.
Therefore, it could be assumed that all of those roles would have rolled up to product managers who are working directly with engineering and other cross-functional teams.
I would've also been able to figure out that the main tenet of their business or their tech stack was their proprietary AI technology.
Going into an interview, I would have been more prepared for the more technical-minded questions, because I know that was a big part of their company's ethos.
Every startup or corporate company isn't always looking for the same thing, but companies do reveal what their culture is like and you can always ask to verify. We have tons of community resources to be able to research companies about what it's like to work there (like Reddit and LinkedIn).
How to get insights on what the company needs a product manager to be
To give you a starter, here are a few sets of questions that will give you good insights into how the company functions, and what product managers are expected to do there:
- What are the top skills of a successful product manager at this company?
- What's in your tech stack?
- How important is the Agile or Scrum framework to this company?
- Do you have KPIs?
- Who are your key stakeholders?
This isn't an exhaustive list but no matter what, all of these questions will start to give you a sense of what the company needs a product manager to be.
How to be the product manager the company needs
Storytime: Building a net new product with limited resources that serves a broad audience
The short answer is you have to adapt and just do it but since that isn't helpful, let me give you an example from my past. I used to work at a privacy company called Ghostery.
The company was a small startup of about 15 people. When I first joined, I was the second product manager to be hired.
My manager at the time was the de facto president and had lots of competing priorities for his time. It was clear to me I would have to wear a lot of hats and would have a lot of independence, but limited support.
At the time, the company was moving to a subscription model. Safari, one of the platforms they supported, was going through an update that would make their previous product obsolete. My task was to launch a new product that would support Safari users taking advantage of the newest Mac operating system.
I ended up with a very small staff: one UX/UI designer in New York and one developer in Munich, Germany.
Since my only developer was based in Munich, Germany, while I was in New York, the earlier I went to the office, the more time I had with her. This is a great example of how being accessible to your team is an easy way to adapt to a given culture.
With this extra time, I was able to dig through developer docs on the Apple site for her, stock Stack Overflow for ways to solve our challenges, and just be there for her. Being accessible is a powerful way to be a great product manager.
In this instance, I knew we had aggressive timelines that couldn't slip so it was important for me to do anything possible to enable my team's success.
Doing more isn't always the best solution
In smaller companies, you'll be met with less resistance but in larger ones, you might be entering some political territory so in some cases, doing less is the better way to adapt.
In larger companies that rely on cross-team collaboration, a big part of the culture is being mindful of who plays what roles. Knowing how to maneuver that space is almost more important than getting the credit for being the person to do the job.
Sometimes you have to go back to step one and assess the culture. It could have changed over time and the role you played at that same company could be someone else's responsibility.
Adapting to an ever-changing process can be fun if you lean into it. A large part of my personal success comes from being able to thrive in ambiguity, learning how to embrace it, and excel in it is a powerful way of adapting as a product manager.
Real life example at my current role
The Disney streaming company and the Walt Disney family is one of the biggest companies I've ever worked for. When it first started, I learned all these new functions I had never interacted with before. I'll call out two in particular I learned how to work with: TPMs and EPMs.
In our company, a TPM stands for a technical project manager. They focus on the action and on the execution work with engineering directly. They interact with them daily and manage things like JIRA delivery and timing.
This was a role I had played in the past so I wasn't used to giving up that responsibility to someone else. The EPM team, or the enterprise program manager team, focuses on the high-level execution of work.
They work across teams, support communication (escalation when necessary), and deliver tracking for leadership. Again, this had rolled up into my role and I had to learn how to adjust.
It was important for me to figure out how I could uniquely bring value to these teams. These folks are some of my favorite humans to work with at the company and in regards to being able to propel your career, they also ended up being some of my biggest advocates.
The first thing I did was drop the ego. If I focused too much on what I had done in the past, and how I was losing that responsibility, that would be a futile fight I would never win.
I decided to instead focus on solutions and ultimately make friends. If I wanted to interact with all these new teams, it made more sense for me to have positive relationships with them. In short, I adapted to figure out how I could uniquely bring value and allow my teammates to do the same.
What are the perks of being a product chameleon?
A chameleon reflects their environment as a form of survival, but you could say they’re also comprised of the environments they have been in and use that experience as a skill to their own personal benefit.
For me, this has meant being able to reflect on my time working in smaller companies, where I was given more independence and freedom to try new things on a smaller scale, and flex things like my technical acumen without oversight, or complication.
Then, working at larger companies, my impact is arguably smaller but I get other benefits like working with a large product organization and having peers I can learn from.
Asking questions about what kind of environment you want to work in, or what kind of teams you want to be a part of, can be really important.
Despite all the changes I've experienced in my career and the different places I've worked, I've always been able to fall back on my ability to adapt, survive and thrive in my product career.
Product being so different wherever you go, with just a little bit of awareness and intention, you can find the perfect place for you, someplace that excites you and where you can uniquely bring value.
Bonus Q&A
As a really new product manager, what are the key skills to focus on first?
My advice would be to focus on the Triple Threat of product management: stakeholder management, prioritization and business intelligence (or business acumen).
One of the biggest challenges all product managers are faced with is how to do more with less because we always want to do a million things but we never have the time or resources to be able to do it.
The earlier you become more competent in your prioritization skills, the better off you'll be.
The second area is around stakeholder management. A lot of newer product managers get intimidated by working with large teams and having to sometimes say no.
Listening to your stakeholders is very underrated. A lot of people will tell you everything you need to know about them if you just listen. Being able to build relationships and not being afraid to ask for help also falls into this stakeholder management category.
A lot of early-stage PMs don't have as much experience being responsible for the revenue-generating part of a product. Becoming more familiar with how your product could generate revenue is a great place to spend your time.
Did opportunities seem to come to you or did you track them down for what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go?
I'm a woman of color so opportunities definitely don't just come to me, you definitely have to work hard for them. I play a very active role in being able to navigate my career, I dedicate a significant amount of time to building my personal brand and presence.
My reputation is probably one of the most precious things I have. I take care of how I talk to people, how people perceive me and the quality of my work.
For folks wanting to take a more active role in navigating their career, I would suggest getting mentors. However, sometimes I made decisions in opposition to their advice because ultimately you have to trust your gut and do what makes the most sense for you.
If you just want to wait for stuff to happen to you, you're gonna have a very successful career.
How much autonomy do you have within your own individual product or dev teams vs. the monolith of Disney overall?
This is a universal answer for companies of this size. One of the biggest differences between a smaller company and a big one is the amount of autonomy and the size of your remit.
At the Walt Disney streaming, we work as a cross-functional entity. In my specific role, I was supporting marketing technology and once you get further down that funnel you can have a bit more autonomy.
How would you know you're missing skills and how would you enhance them (both personal and technical skills)?
Constantly ask for feedback. If you're not asking for feedback from your manager on a regular basis, from your stakeholders, or the executives at your company who interact with you, you're missing opportunities to grow and develop.
If you could go back to the start of your product career and give a single piece of advice, what would it be?
Trust yourself. When you get overloaded with information and see the incredible people you work alongside, you start to get a little bit intimidated. However, you really do have to trust yourself and we're all in our spaces for a reason.
