Lori Edwards is Director of Product at Niche, where she leads the product strategy and roadmap for a marketplace that serves students and school partners. She has over nine years of product management experience in the edtech space. Lori began her career in accounting and finance and transitioned to a product management role while at InComm Payments, a global payments technology provider, before her previous role at InsideTrack.
In our conversation, Lori talks about the challenges that come with the transition from an individual contributor to a people manager, including rebuilding relationships with former peers, learning new skills, and having hard conversations. She discusses how change management has been a vital skill in her career, as well as how she utilizes the ADKAR model on her teams to make big changes smoother. She also shares how PMs can future-proof their careers against different macroeconomic markets.
It’s all about doing some self-reflection to understand what you enjoy doing and what you love about product management. When I was trying to figure this out for myself, people managers would tell me that the work is different. That wasn’t very specific, but the reality is that it’s true — it’s a lot of work you don’t fully do as a product manager. If you want to make the jump into people management, you’re moving from being a player on a team to being the coach of the team.
You have to spend conscious time on the people side and end up doing a lot less building of products. If you love that aspect, as well as taking those products to users and doing user research, you’ll have to give some of that up. Instead, you’re going to spend your time on things such as creating processes for your team, providing updates across the company, giving hard feedback, and coaching people along the way. It makes you tap into a different type of skill set that you may or may not enjoy using. That’s OK, but it’s worth taking the time for yourself to dive deep and understand what you enjoy.
One of the things that was tough for me was rebuilding relationships with people who used to be my peers. When you become your peers’ manager, you take on a completely different relationship with them. You have to rebuild that trust with your team from the perspective of your new role. I didn’t even realize this was necessary until I was talking to other people who made this same management transition. They said, “Maybe this employee doesn’t know how to work with you anymore because now, you’re not a peer, you’re their manager.”
As soon as I got that feedback, it made so much sense. I needed to go back to my team and set expectations of how they could use me in this role and how I could help them do their job better. This is challenging because it happens immediately when you make the transition. It’s not a gradual change.
The other challenge is that people management requires a new skill set. It still is hard for me to give myself a little bit of grace sometimes. Usually, when you’re moving up in roles, you are a fantastic product manager. When you make that transition to people management, it might be the first time in a while that you’re a beginner. It’s easy to get frustrated with yourself or feel a ton of imposter syndrome. Give yourself grace and tackle it with an open growth mindset. Get feedback from peers who have done it before you and learn from there.
There are a lot of transferable skills going from a product manager to a people manager, as well as those new skills you have to develop. A specific transferable skill that helped me was my knowledge of change management. In product management, we build a lot of things that we hope to change the world with. We’re also changing what our users do and improving the product.
This can apply to people management as well because you roll out a ton of changes to the people you manage, which requires strong communication. Those go hand in hand. Today, you might be a great communicator with your stakeholders — you’re going to need that same type of effective communication with your product team.
A new skill that you’ll need to acquire is the art of org structures. You’re going to be faced with hiring plans, career development plans, and also backfill plans if an employee leaves. As a people manager, you need to think about helping your employees keep growing. You need to make sure your team has the resources to be set up for success and to be able to tackle their goals. The other skill that you’re going to use all the time is having difficult conversations. You’ll need to provide feedback and set clear expectations of what you need from your teammates so they can be set up for success too.
When I first became a people manager, I read The Making of a Manager. It’s a great book that explains tangible scenarios that you’re probably going to face in your first few years. A lot of these are not unique to tech or product management, and there are a ton of great resources out there in addition to books. For example, I did a training through LifeLabs on how to give feedback. They provided templates for structuring feedback so that you can communicate it effectively to employees.
I also turned to people I know who are (or were) people managers. Those conversations helped me understand how to approach the work, and gave me a way to look at things a bit differently. For example, my husband and other members of my family own construction companies, and my mom owns a hair salon. These are very different industries, but they all require hiring plans and org structures. I’ve been able to learn from their perspectives.
Mentorship is important — whether you’re an IC, people manager, or even a CEO. One approach I take is coaching versus mentorship. The difference is that coaching is going to help you figure out what you should be doing. You’re the one providing solutions to your own problems. A mentor, on the other hand, helps give you guidance and advice, as well as provides you with solutions that you may not know about. I think it can be impactful to explore both of those avenues for yourself, regardless of your role.
Mentorship can go a long way because it can help you navigate situations for the first time or even level up. It’s another set of eyes if you will — another perspective that you can get. Mentors can provide candid, honest feedback that you might need.
Historically, when you look at large economic swings, new companies rose up and in some cases became wildly successful. Problems come up in those economic ebbs and flows that perhaps weren’t critical before. Now that the environment’s changed, they’re critical now. For example, during COVID, interest rates were low so companies could literally throw money at a problem because it wasn’t costing them a lot to borrow. This changed product strategy because since money was cheap to borrow, companies could move faster. They could hire contractors or a third party to take on an initiative.
In the last year, we’ve seen that flip. Interest rates are rising so it’s harder for companies to borrow money or raise capital. For those who did borrow money when it was cheap, it’s now expensive to keep it because they’re paying high interest. As a result, companies are looking to reduce these costs now and tighten spending. They’re shifting from being growth-focused to moving back into profitability mode. That can change product strategy significantly.
The job market is also a huge factor. Hiring during the high growth period of the pandemic was insane. It was so hard to hire somebody because there were so many open jobs. Now that the economy’s slowing down a bit, there are more candidates to choose from. We see people posting videos online about how they have all the skills for this job and still have not been hired. It’s because companies can’t take risks right now. They want to know that you can do this job and will help achieve this goal immediately. These macroeconomic shifts change hiring in this way.
You can future-proof your career by understanding your experience and knowing how to tell your story. In a growth economy, there are lots of jobs and not as many candidates — everyone is trying for the same people. Money is cheaper, which means salaries can be higher. Go get your money, look for the place that you want to be at, and swing for the fences. You, as the employee, have a lot of say in what you want.
When you’re going after roles, speak to the heart of that company and explain why you care about its mission. Showcase how your skill set is going to help the company grow quickly. You need to be able to articulate why your skill set is the best for that role. In a growth economy, generalist PMs tend to excel because they’re adaptable.
On the flip side, when jobs are more limited, companies start looking for their unicorns — somebody who’s highly specialized and ensures that they can achieve their goals. The market switches to being an employer’s market where the company has more power in the hiring process. This all comes back to understanding your skill sets, what you are an expert in, and being able to craft your story of the impacts that you’ve made. You want to tell the company that you’re interviewing with that you can absolutely do this job.
Prosci is a change management company, and we apply their ADKAR model, which stands for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. It allows you to look at all five stages of a change that a person needs to understand for the change to be successful. Using this framework, you can figure out what part of the change is hard for the people and is holding them up. Is it because your team isn’t aware of why we’re changing something? Or is it because they literally can’t make a change because of time or resource constraints?
For example, when I first started at my current company, we had very few processes. They hired me and four other product managers at the same time, growing the team by 200 percent. Today, we’ve grown the team by another 150 percent. That was a significant number of people to add in a short time. On top of that, we were trying to double the company’s revenue year over year. Nothing was stable.
As a manager, change management and the ADKAR model allowed me to roll out changes to these bigger groups and understand why something isn’t working. When I started, we didn’t have any processes or documentation. Now, we have nine teams up and running. They understand what the other teams are working on and get regular updates. We’re almost a quarter faster than we were when we started. This framework helped us see how everything is working rather than just doing things for the sake of doing them.
The Women in Product Toastmasters Club is a group I started during the pandemic. I got feedback from my manager that I needed to work on my public speaking and presentation skills. I had no idea how to even learn that as an adult. When I heard about Toastmasters, I thought, “It’d be great to do this with other product managers. We all have to have this skill set and I can probably learn from others.”
I started the Toastmasters Club four years ago with an awesome woman named Erica. Women from all different backgrounds join us every other Sunday. We’ve even had people join from as far away as the Philippines and Australia.This isn’t just for PMs — we also have people from different careers who are interested in product. We talk about product-related topics, and it’s a place to grow and learn how to present without slide decks and get better speaking on our toes. We have some impromptu sections too, so it’s a really fun time.
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