Jack of All Trades, Master of Product

“What’s your vertical?”

I know. The question that Product people like you and me dread to hear. And by you and me, I mean those Product people who don’t sit comfortably in one vertical.

Product roles are increasingly looking for domain depth, but our careers don’t always align. So what do you do when asked what you specialise in, or worse, told to ‘pick a lane?

The Myth of the Product Specialist

Hiring managers and recruiters that are looking for a strong vertical in applicants CV’s, have their reasoning. They’re relying on traditional understanding of the hiring narrative.

Let’s start with the obvious - lower risk hires. The belief that this is the candidates wheelhouse, and therefore they are more likely to stay, do well and progress internally. They also have to consider onboarding, it is implied there will be a much smoother and faster transition into a role for those with parallel backgrounds and ‘relevant’ vertical experience. There’s also industry familiarity, providing the candidate with credibility. Companies want low risk, fast learners, with a strong foundational understanding. Or do they?

The question is: is it vertical experience or transferable skillset that is valued at these companies? I would say it depends on the problem they hope to solve.

From Fast Fashion to Counter-Terrorism

Some start their Product journey in a non-academic way - I didn’t study Agile or take any courses at university for these roles, I ended up here via a different path. Start ups meant working evenings and weekends, sleeping at the office some days, tv interviews and Forbes features every week. It was chaos, it was hard work, it was exhilarating. It was my first taste of start-up life, and I was hooked. Although I wasn’t yet a product manager.

My next role brought clarity. I joined three founders building an automated animation software, as someone who would help with socials and marketing. I was there through its growth and a few years in I had made myself the expert of everything it did, its customers, and where it could go. An NED at the time said “you must be the PM here” - the what now?

It began. My love of the Product world. Proactive not reactive. Build, release, improve, repeat. Being the translator in a business that needed teams on the same page to succeed. From there my roles varied, moving between fast fashion, large ecommerce

“Product fundamentals are industry-agnostic. The product doesn’t change. The constraints do.”

Becca Jaye Sharples, Product Consultant and Founder of Forge

From there my roles varied, moving between fast fashion, large ecommerce brands, internal tooling, white labelled products, high security network platforms - and they all brought new knowledge and new challenges that I relished. I felt like a little skill goblin, collecting as I rallied through each industry.

What Actually Transfers

Not everything transfers everywhere. I approached roles now not as a checklist of what Product should be, but what Product should be at that company, at that time, and how it fixes a problem they have.

When looking at roles, take a keen eye to identify what they really want. Are they looking to build a team, someone to teach and promote agile methods, build a product led environment, work closely with engineering and UX where they've previously been ignored, do they need someone with the ability to put their hand to all sized tasks when required? Or are they set up, ready, and just need a good product person to get stuck into their well established foundations? It’s for you to decide if the challenge they have, matches the direction you want to go and are happy to tackle.

But what can come with you no matter what?

• User empathy works everywhere.
• Clear framing solves any problem.
• Stakeholder management is needed in all companies.
• Prioritisation frameworks don’t care about the sector.
• Metrics thinking transcends verticals.

Product fundamentals are industry-agnostic. Put simply: the product doesn’t change. The constraints do.

The Power of Being the Outsider

Fresh eyes challenge industry assumptions. If you’ve never worked in a sector before, you’re very likely to ask more curious questions. You’ll want to route down into why something is conducted that way, built like that, protected by things. And when you ask the question of “why”, you’re not constrained by “that’s how it’s always been done.” It’s the perfect time for you to introduce the concept of “constructive naivety.”

It’s then when I would urge you to consider a cross-pollination of ideas from your background (what fashion taught you about speed; what security taught you about risk; what creative startups taught you about ambiguity).

This fresh eyes approach gives you a great USP - the ability to avoid stagnation.

The Risk of Staying Too Long in One Vertical

Fear not, I am not here to attack specialists, I’m here to offer nuance and give hope to those mixed sector product people. If you’re a single sector individual, here are some landmines you can avoid should you be that product specialist.

Industry echo chambers can create repetition in roadmaps. Hearing solely payments news in payments land can give you a blinkered view. Consider looking elsewhere for news and opinions on your landscape

Recycled playbooks become the norm, you run the risk of avoiding innovation because every product person in your sector picks up from the last person in your role, or someone adjacent they spoke to over drinks at the payments networking meet.

Comfort vs growth is one of the most common pitfalls - easy to drop into and hard to climb out of. Consider expanding your understanding of what this sector can be, and what kind of a product person you can be, too.

Remember, these are risks, not rules.

Learning Fast Is a Product Skill

One of the biggest skills of those moving between verticals is their ability to get up to speed

Every new role required accelerated learning, like starting a Netflix show on season 3 and needing to catch up, fast.

One of the easiest ways to do this is pattern recognition across industries. Taking what’s been learnt from other verticals and applying it to a new one. Users may share problems, and preferred solutions too.

Those who can do this are using adaptability as a competitive advantage.

What Hiring Managers Might Be Missing

The big questions for hiring managers… are we optimising for comfort or innovation? Do we mistake familiarity for capability? Does domain expertise reduce risk - or reduce new thinking?

There’s a phrase “jack of all trades, master of none”. It has a lesser known second half though, “jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. So is being versatile more impactful than a narrow specialist? The increasing openness of hiring managers is encouraging.

The future of Product may reward range more than we think.