I became a parent in February of this year. It’s the full time job that nothing you learn, hear, or read can truly prepare you to do. You fail fast but you also learn fast. You share a title many have held but your duties are so unique and specific to one individual who is still learning who they are as well. The responsibilities are incredibly demanding and unlike jobs in the workforce your motivation to keep performing your duties is not tangible. You place added pressures upon yourself and suddenly strangers feel inclined to share their subject matter expertise with you. Overtime hours are clocked everyday and your meal breaks often go missed or are rushed. You learn how ambidextrous you truly are and the minimum amount of sleep you can get while still being somewhat functioning. The pace of change is so rapid that every day you feel like you are a noob.

The term “blowout” no longer brings to mind an expensive hair treatment at the salon and despite your closet full of darks, light colored clothes are suddenly your go to because they hide the spit up better. You feel a sense of accomplishment from a burp and your KPIs are set by the World Health Organization and plotted on growth charts depicted as percentiles. Forget annual performance reviews try every 2–3 months for your first year on the job. Your phone is now used primarily as a camera where photos and videos compete for storage space. Milestones may have been target estimates in previous jobs but hitting them is now very important and often results in excessive celebration and bragging. Your 1:1 discussions always seem to rhyme or at least pair with a melody and you are doing most of the talking, which is encouraged. Your presentations are never digital, very animated, and inundated with high contrast imagery. It seems that everything I learned in school or the workplace did nothing to prepare me for my hardest job to date. And in spite of my lack of qualifications and knowledge, this tiny human has entrusted me with perhaps my most important job yet.

When I say I was unprepared it wasn’t because I didn’t try. I spent late nights going down rabbit holes trying to prepare for everything. I researched what to pack in my hospital bag, what must haves to add to the registry, what exercises to do for an easier child birth experience, what to expect our first days home after the hospital, what herbal teas to avoid, and the list goes on. I washed every piece of clothing in the special detergent for newborns. I prepped her room by placing all her books on shelves, organized all her clothes by size, put together the crib that she wouldn’t need for at least 4 months, and set up diaper and feeding stations everywhere. What I know now is that in this job, things are not going to go as you expect and that is okay. I also realized that this was my first mistake. It’s a mistake I’ve made as a product manager as well. I’m going to steal a phrase from an engineer I work with that has stuck with me, “try to boil the ocean and you will fail.” I approached parenting like I was going to be able to know and predict everything ahead of time rather than leaning into learning fast through iteration and user feedback. So, this brings me to how being a parent has actually helped me realize that the lessons I have learned as a parent are also relevant to product management.

Cultivate Empathy

As a parent, you feel empathy for the tiny human who has just been forcibly evicted from their nice warm and cozy home. Not only that but they are also completely dependent on you to survive. As a product manager, we need to have empathy for our users. If we aren’t user centered, then we can miss the mark when trying to solve their problems. If we don’t see the product from their perspective, we will end up letting our bias influence what we build. And if it doesn’t actually solve a problem for them or if it adds more problems for them, they won’t use the product and we just wasted engineering hours for nothing.

Don’t Try To Boil the Ocean

As a parent, your child is an individual. That means that even if you were able to read every single parenting book on the planet you would still need to allow yourself the time to learn from your circumstances. As a product manager, when we can get a feature out to the market fast and then learn from it, we set ourselves up for success that we will actually ship something useful. If we ship something simple that we can iterate on, it prevents us from producing an over complicated product that no one understands how to use. Learn as you go so that you can be smarter every time you release an update. Strip away unnecessary clutter and produce something that meets the users’ needs but allows you to adapt as their needs change, the market shifts, or a competitor comes into play.

Never Forget the Importance of User Research

As a parent, you are now responsible for keeping a fairly blind, completely nonverbal, and relatively immobile tiny human alive. Your observation skills and ability to A/B test become very adept. As a product manager there is no substitute for observing users as they use the product. You can learn so much just from watching someone as they click through a prototype. And if you don’t have enough data to be able to choose a solution, experimenting and getting that data from users will save you time and money. If you want a place to start for cultivating empathy, watch users struggle with confusing areas of your product. It’s painful and will make you want to fix all those problem areas quickly.

Be Present

As a parent, the tiny human requires undivided attention. And your lack of sleep really only allows your brain the ability to focus on one thing anyway. As a product manager, your time is valuable. If you find yourself able to multi task during a meeting, ask yourself do I really need to be here? It’s very easy especially when working remotely to keep your camera off and get distracted by email, Slack, texts, Jira, Confluence, etc. When you do get caught during a meeting not paying attention, it never sits well. As someone who has been on the giving and receiving end, it’s something I am trying to be aware of and change. I equate not paying attention during a meeting on Zoom to falling asleep during a meeting in person. If you aren’t comfortable doing that, then we shouldn’t be with multi tasking when we aren’t in person. Just be honest with yourself and if the meeting is not providing you value, don’t attend it.

Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

As a parent, it is really easy to get caught up in the milestone race where if your child isn’t hitting those milestones as early as someone else’s child you think something is wrong. Trust that your tiny human will develop at the pace they are meant to so long as you are providing them the tools and support they need to do it. As a product manager it is really easy to get caught up in trying to climb the career ladder as fast as possible. If your environment is a competitive one, then suddenly your focus is on beating out your peers. You get wrapped up in what other people are doing better than you and worry that you’ll be left behind if you don’t start performing as well. Even if you aren’t in a competitive environment it can be easy to fall into a compare and contrast mentality. I think that the best thing we can do as product managers is to prioritize our professional development and instead of looking at peers as competition see them as teachers. What can I learn from my peers to add to my knowledge base, so that I can be a better product manager?

Ask Questions

As a parent, you are going to be asking a lot of questions. You are going to ask questions to Google, your pediatrician, your friends with kids, your parents, your baby (these are always rhetorical). As a product manager, it’s so important to start with asking questions. A question prevents you from making assumptions. A question helps others think through what they think they need. A question will help you see through the fog and get to the root of a problem. Asking questions also helps you reason through your own thoughts. Asking your users the right question can unlock some very exciting discoveries. Questioning the data will help you avoid confirmation bias. Questioning a feature’s value can prevent you from building something that is not worth it. In my opinion, curiosity is a product manager’s super power and asking questions is how to channel it.

Becoming a parent has been a whirlwind and that’s honestly how I felt becoming a product manager. I was a user experience designer for a quick second and jumped into product management having no idea what I was doing but never stopping to look back again. I love being a parent and I love being a product manager. I have a renewed appreciation for product management, and I hope that this article provided at least a good laugh and maybe some helpful reminders whether you are a parent, a product manager, or just a curious individual.