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After three years and five months of being a software engineer at Wikimedia, I decided to step into the role of a product manager at Wikimedia in April 2018. It wasn’t an abrupt change. I’d been toying with managing products since early 2017 and I was lucky to have a manager who was willing to give me a chance. There’s a lot of good advice out there about how to transition into product manager which you will undoubtedly find helpful if you’re looking to make the switch. In this blog post however I want to highlight one critical piece of information I was missing and how that affected me.
I was a regular attendee in product meetings and speaking up a lot. Coming up with good product ideas and questions. The team product manager gave me lots of good feedback and even at one point said to me “You’ll make a great product manager!". Great, I thought! I was sending out all the right signals. Of course I’ll be considered for the PM role, wouldn’t I? Wrong.
I was making the classic rookie mistake. I wasn’t outright asking for what I wanted. I was relying on the manager to somehow interpret my enthusiasm as an obvious ask that I wanted that role. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
A month later, my manager announced in a team setting that the project I’d been working on with him was being handed off to someone outside the team who was looking to get into product management and had asked for this project. I was devastated. How could they do this to me? Didn’t I prove myself capable of doing this project already? I thought about it over and over and finally mustered the courage to go confront my manager about it. His reaction was utter surprise. He had no idea I wanted the role! Once he realized that, my gem of a product manager went back to the other guy and explained the situation. Thankfully he understood and the project was mine.
My takeaways from this episode was: Be bold and ask for what you want. Even if you think it’s too late to ask for it, just do it. My life today could have been very different if I hadn’t had the courage to go up to my manager and ask for that project. The downsides to being refused are few but the downsides to not asking are tremendous.