“Nothing can work out without effective influence on collaborators. When I was a Release Manager, I made sure I earned respect from the rest of the organization as the party handled release timelines. Same for now, I always ensure respect between my PM team and stakeholders. “
Justin Washington (BSE ‘10) is currently a Principal Product Manager at Apple. He started his career at Apple as a iOS Software QA Engineer after he graduated from University of Michigan College of Engineering in 2010. After two years at Apple, he moved to Twitter in 2013, where he took QA Engineer and Release Manager positions. The initial years of experience at Apple and Twitter led him to a four-year journey at Snap, where he started as a Release Manager and transitioned to a Product Manager position. Bounced around startups for years, Justin is now back at Apple again, working on Apple TV products.
1 Tell us something that is not on your resume.
My motivation for getting into tech was my pursuit of music and photography. If I could not enter the entertainment industry as a music producer, songwriter, and photographer, I would at least want to build tools to encourage creativity.
That drove me to pursue computer science as a domain of expertise to build creative software for people like me. I always look to integrate my creative pursuits into my career in tech. I’m happy to be at a company now that prides itself on creativity, technology, and arts.
2 How did you hear about product management, and why did you decide to get into PM? What was the transition like?
In the summer of 2007, after my first year of college, I worked as an intern at Microsoft in their “Explorer” Internship Program as a Program Manager (their equivalent of “Product Manager” title). That summer internship of 2007 lit the fire of what would become my career pursuit. I was someone who struggled with coding in school. The Program Manager role opened an alternative door to the tech industry without having to write code. I never stopped finding my unique place in this industry. I then interned at Apple twice during college and then decided to return to Apple post-graduation. But at that time, Apple did not have an entry-level PM position. The closest two positions were Engineering Program Manager and Product Marketing Manager. So, I kicked off my career as an iOS QA Engineer there. It was always in my sight to transition into PM. After bouncing around several companies and building rapport with the team, I got my first PM title at Snap in 2017.
Many skills in QA and Release Management were transferable to the Product Manager role. We applied them at different stages in the product life cycle. In QA, you’re qualifying things, stepping into the user’s shoes. As a Product Manager, you’re doing the same thing, but from the beginning of the product life cycle.
3 You have lots of interesting titles on your resume, such as Mobile QA Engineer and Release Manager. What does a Release Manager do? How did you transfer your skills from these positions to PM?
Even though my titles varied from QA to Release Manager to PM, they all required me to step out and influence other stakeholders. I prioritize respect in all my jobs, showing my respect and earning respect from others.
The release manager is someone who is responsible for ensuring all product updates. This is especially true for companies that have regular product update cadence, such as Twitter and Snap. The iOS team (in Twitter and Snap) provided updates to software every two weeks. At different stages in the two-week turnover, there were additional responsibilities. From a technical sense, engineers will commit their code to repositories and branches based on where they were in the lifecycle and the release that was coming up.
As a Release Manager, I had various duties of triaging bugs from internal code collaborations. You’re responsible for communicating stages of release with the engineering team, like “Hey, we’re two days away from new version updates; please make sure your codes are committed to the repository by today.” or “There are these many bugs left to be closed that are targets for release.” You’re responsible for making sure by the time we’re ready to close the door for updates for that two-week interval release, and there should be no blocking or critical bugs. If there are, you need to decide if we’re going to fix those or kick them out in the next release. There’s another logistics responsibility of submitting updates to the App Store. You need to correlate release notes to those updates, ensuring Apple reviews and approves the version. You become the hub of communication, project manager, and liaison between internal and external teams. All these responsibilities are shared with the Product Manager position I had later on.
Nothing can work out without effective influence on collaborators. When I was Release Manager, I made sure I earned respect from the rest of the organization as the party handles release timelines. Same for now, I always ensure respect between my PM team and stakeholders. While you don’t have direct authority over engineers and fixing bugs, you want to present information in a way that is easy to understand. You’re not there to make them do things, you’re there to help them see their place and their responsibilities in the overall process of delivering an update to customers. You want to ensure everyone has enough time, proper resources and tools to make the release successful.
4 It sounds like a PM involves lots of soft skills, such as translating customers’ needs into stakeholders’ languages. What do you think are critical skill sets of a PM?
Empathy
The most important skill a PM can have is empathy. It is empathy for customers, where you put yourself in their shoes so you can build a solution that meets their needs. It is empathy for stakeholders and cross-team collaborators. You empathize with them when you understand what they must do to get their jobs done. In any cross-functional collaboration, it brings people together.
Curiosity
For a PM, having the right answer is less critical than having the right questions to ask. You always work within a team, and you can never do your job effectively in a silo. You need to pose the right questions to the right audience at the right time to get others who are experts in their discipline to the right solutions. That, combined with learning and developing great taste, will yield great results when delivering results meeting customers’ needs. You can be creative if you’re curious about how things work and eager to challenge the status quo. Your curiosity will drive your empathy. For example, if you are curious about technical complexity, your engineers will have more respect because you can talk with them on a level that shows them you respect what they do. They feel respect as you are not asking them to do a job you have zero knowledge of. You are setting up an opportunity for yourself to collaborate with (engineers) rather than throwing crazy ideas at them.
Prioritization
At Apple, we say no to many things to say yes to the right thing. It’s not about “can you do it”. It’s about “if you should do it”—minding things like timing, sources, costs, and impact. Having prioritizations and knowing when to tackle things at the right time is crucial. As a product manager, you’ll probably be updated with requests from many collaborators. You have to be able to make the call on when to pull back on things and lean into something.
Storytelling
The last skill set I want to bring up is being able to convince and sell a position in the form of a logically thought out story from start to end with reasoning, objectives, proposed solutions, and measurement of solutions. Aside from tactical storytelling, you know how to pull on the emotions and focus of people based on what they care about. Draw a connection between what people care about and what you offer. Storytelling is vital because you have to know your audience well. You would not tell an executive the same story as your peers. They care about different things at their respective altitudes and levels of foresight.
Empathy, curiosity, prioritization, and storytelling are all soft skills that can be refined hand in hand with hard skills. All of these are really celebrated at Apple (laughter).
5 When you were in college, how did you find your passion and career?
Going through school, I knew it was vital for me to figure out my passion. But there were lots of difficult moments during my college years. I had been on academic probation twice, which became difficult. Even though I was able to stick through and turn around, that was not a straight path for me either. I struggled with coding since day 1. And I debated countless times whether I wanted to stay in the College of Engineering/Computer Science.
If I had not had the Microsoft experience, I would not have the opportunity to know technical skills can be applied in a non-direct way. I chose to be exposed to several different disciplines early on to assess and tie back to my personality. The internship I got every summer helped me to reflect on my passion and skill sets. From a development standpoint, everything I learned from school was carried over to the real world. I just think that in an academic environment, you worry too much about passing classes so you don’t retain lots of information. Since there are many pressures and deadlines, it’s unclear how your learning can be applied to the real world. All those pressures and deadlines are also valid in real-world situations. But internship or real-world practice indeed emphasized on getting hands dirty, gaining experience, and connecting learning to practicality. Their emphasis on learning and real-world examples make them more intriguing. It gets folks less pressure on trying to get through and decide how they exactly fit in the space/industry.
I would credit myself for having these internship experiences early on to help me figure out my strengths and weaknesses. I encourage folks to attend career fairs, and talking to recruiters. Try applying what you learned to potential career paths and decide whether you want to stick with it or make a change. I would also credit my friends and counselors for support through college.
Everyone has limited capacity. Allocate your capacity to meaningful things rather than following norms.
Do you have any questions about product management that you would love us to cover in the coming episodes? Tell us here.