Why Curiosity Matters in Product Management
Our post COVID world has encouraged us all to ask important questions: What is the value of formal education? How do our inherent biases influence hiring, pay and promotions? What does the future of work look like for me as an individual or, more broadly, for my organization, or for my industry as a whole? In my experience, the product manager community has always been a melting pot of diverse backgrounds, education, and pathways into the role. Entry points into product management can come through engineering, subject matter expertise, implementation consulting or even sales. We can do better - open up our hiring practices and further expand the pool of potential product managers - beyond a specific set of degrees, skills or backgrounds. We can develop great product managers by focusing on the underlying traits of an individual, which are equally, if not more important, when seeking product management potential.
With that in mind, one of the most critical traits I look for as a hiring manager is curiosity. Successful product managers have an insatiable curiosity about the world around them. They see opportunities that others do not, ask engaging questions to customers, users and stakeholders, and use their observational skills to continuously gather data and insights. A curious mind is a hunter-gatherer of information - seeking out insights from disparate sources and tucking these nuggets away for future reference.
We first see the signs of curiosity in children, uniquely expressed through their individual interests. There is the hand-on, tactile curiosity of budding engineers, chefs and scientists - those kiddos who can’t resist pushing buttons, mixing up ingredients, unscrewing home appliances -- leaving a trail of messy dishes, screws, food particles, batteries, and other mechanical detritus in their wake. Pro trip for parents of these curious kids - invest in many, strategically placed fire extinguishers throughout your home! For others, a more people-centric curiosity may fuel inquisitive minds - driving future psychologists, writers, reporters and philosophers to seek answers to what drives, motivates, comforts, and inspires people. They are effective listeners who pick up the small details - in conversation, in observed behaviors. As individuals develop and expand their world view, their curious nature may seek answers to bigger questions around how systems operate - from a business, a government, schools, supply chains, etc.
All of these flavors of curiosity pay dividends in a product manager who dives deeper to truly understand the way their customers work and the motivators of prospective buyers and end users. Curiosity spurs innovation as it opens the door to a new way of looking at things. It provides greater insight into constraints that must be accounted for when solutioning. With an inquisitive nature, product manager better understand context to tease out business needs driven by habit and precedence versus value and outcome driven approaches.
When looking to build your product management team, there are a few behaviors that signal a curious mind.
Dynamic Conversationalists
Curious people excel at the discovery process. With an open mind, the humility to drop their own preconceptions and biases, and a genuine interest in the how, what and why of the world around them, curious product managers listen carefully to what their customers say about their wants and needs. They don’t look for affirmation of their own beliefs, but look for others to teach them something new. They guide conversations into greater depths and will follow seemingly disconnected tangents to uncover unexpected needs. They do not mechanically work their way through a preset list of topics. Instead, there is a natural rhythm to their discovery conversations as they allow new questions to form, triggered within the flow of the conversation. For the curious product manager, any conversation with a prospective customer or user is a cherished opportunity to learn.
Diverse Content Collectors
Curious people light up when they happen upon new concepts -- actively seeking out additional data, new experiences, and a diversity of thoughts and beliefs. They gather and retain tidbits of data from seemingly disparate, multi-disciplinary and multi-sensory inputs - observing human behavior at a local park, stumbling upon an intriguing documentary after endless Netflix scrolling, or taking the long route home to finish listening to a thought-provoking NPR segment. They are able to draw connections between disparate information sources and turn these inputs into new approaches to solve existing product challenges or to find new product opportunities to explore.
Negative Space Visualizers
I began taking art classes as an adult, needing to feed my own creativity when my workload had become a bit stale. One artistic technique that was particularly relevant to my role as a product manager is “finding the negative space”. In art, negative space is the space around and between objects. Artists can produce more realistic drawings by analyzing the negative space and replicating the shapes produced by it. A curious product manager instinctively applies this technique, not content to see what is there and provided to them, but willing to explore what is missing - to see the negative space. In that negative space, they may find new problems to solve, or new markets to develop, and new solutions to old challenges.
A Call to Action
For the past several years I’ve been focused on the dual responsibilities of bringing talent management products to market and leading teams of very talented product people. In the intersection is what talent management and development means within the product management domain. I'd love to see the product management community, that has long welcomed people with diverse backgrounds, to lead the charge in opening the door even wider to non traditional hires. There are curious product managers out there, waiting to be found. Let's find them and give them the opportunity.
