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Strong communication skills: A product manager has to spend significant time talking to all sorts of internal and external stakeholders, from supply chain to finance to sales. The best product manager who worked for me was able to bring the product discussion to the level of the person(s) in the room to get maximum engagement. How? By knowing her audience and communicating clearly and concisely.

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A product manager’s specific role will vary from one company to the next. Still, all product managers must balance many aspects of their job, including customers’ needs, a vision for new products, and the project team. So what tools and strategies are needed to create a successful career as a product manager? What are the “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Product Manager”? In this interview series, we are talking to Product Managers, founders, and authors who can answer these questions with stories and insights from their experiences. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Paumelle.

Charles Paumelle is Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Microshare, a leading smart building technology and sustainability data firm. Based in the UK, he leads both the company’s product and business development. Prior to launching the Philadelphia-based startup in 2013, he led Accenture’s Business Process Management (BPM) practice across Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers find it fascinating to trace the evolution of a person’s career trajectory. Can you give me a brief rundown of your career history, from your very first job to the position you hold now?

I started my career whilst I was still at university in France and then Ireland, doing business development across Europe for a then-pre-IPO enterprise software company called Pega. After spending six years there in several sales and marketing roles as a vendor, I wanted to experience the client side, so I took a global role for Shell running e-commerce pilot projects in the early 2000s, then spent three years running large-scale e-business operations at Dell. I got the opportunity to go back to a smaller, fast-growing operation by becoming the European managing director for a Pega consultancy called Knowledge Rules, working with Ron Rock and Tim Panagos, among others. We grew that company organically to about 60 people globally, then sold it to Accenture where it formed the nucleus of their global Business Process Management practice — now over 7,000 people. After a couple of years at Accenture, Ron, Tim and I co-founded Microshare, a smart building technology and sustainability data firm, in 2013.

Most of the product leaders I’ve talked to sort of “fell into” product management and have become passionate about the job. What was the main event in your life that led you to this path?

When we started Microshare, we had a clear vision around the need to develop a technology solution that would solve the apparent paradox of securing and sharing data simultaneously — offering a way to securely store enterprise data with full personal privacy whilst at the same time being able to share all or some of that data with trusted third parties. A classic example of that need for data sharing is medical information, which is both highly private and may be shared between multiple medical providers as well as with family members with the consent of the patient. We spent a few years working with various partners and customers to establish a use for it and had some success, but no real combustion. Our ‘Aha!’ moment came in 2016. We were working with several property developers and got chosen by a new division of Comcast called MachineQ to develop an app for tourist bus tracking. This app would leverage Internet of Things (IoT) GPS trackers and could be used by many different constituents. It became apparent to me that we could use other IoT sensors to bring new data to our property clients, which they would in turn want to share with their facility managers, tenants, insurers, etc. It is at that time that I took on the role of Chief Product Officer as we now needed to combine lots of third-party hardware and software with our own software to create simple products our customers could understand and deploy. As someone with ADHD who could never do the same thing day after day, this role has turned out to be a great fit for me as IoT requires many different skills and constantly challenges one to find a new use for exiting components or new components for new use cases.

I’ve often heard from people who work in the product manager capacity that it’s hard to explain what they do to family and friends. What do you say when someone asks, “so, what do you do for a living?”

Products are by definition the result of combining several things and processes together into something that people or organisations want to buy or use. This means that a product manager must be competent in many seemingly unrelated or contradictory activities, such as:

• • being creative/aspirational AND practical AND cost-conscious
  • thinking about the customer ‘unboxing’ experience, as well as regular usage and end-of-life recycling
  • looking at how the product will be supported by all parts of the company, from design and manufacturing to logistics, finance and support

So, when people ask what I do, I usually respond that my job is to come up with sustainable, repeatable solutions to problems people have, using as much as possible off-the-shelf components to make them affordable and easy to use.

Let’s pretend money and social status don’t exist — what is most important to you about your work? What is the North Star in your career?

The question I constantly ask myself is: ‘Can it be simpler?’ We live in a complex world, and we all have limited attention spans. The yardstick by which the success of a product must be measured is its adoption. To achieve adoption, you need universality and simplicity so as many people as possible need your solution and find it easy to use. My mother started a contemporary art business when I was 11, so in my formative years I met many great French artists, some of whom were world-class leaders in minimalism and conceptual art, such as François Morellet, or in monochromatic art, such as Pierre Soulages. This taught me the value of removing the unnecessary and focusing on the primary purpose of a product. Just because you have a whole palette of colours at your disposal doesn’t mean you need to use all of them to express what you’re trying to say. Similarly, just because a device can have all sorts of add-ons, it’s important to stay true to the primary purpose of a product and think about what can be removed — just as great contemporary artists are able to stir our emotion with just one line or one colour.

Can you tell me a story from your professional experience that makes you a little emotional — a moment when you knew you were in the right line of work?

At the start of the pandemic, demand for our existing line of products to monitor activity and occupancy in buildings was completely wiped out as offices became deserted when everyone was told to work from home. This was a difficult and highly uncertain time as we didn’t know how long it would be before that demand would return. We got contacted out of the blue by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to help keep their factories open by adapting a piece of technology we’d previously used for tracking hospital wheelchairs. We were able to repurpose the wireless badges for human contact tracing, offering a more universal and anonymous solution than smartphone-based trackers. This was an unprecedented situation in many ways: new client, new use case, global need, completely remote development. In a matter of weeks, I pulled together both hardware and software resources across China, Malaysia, France, the UK, and the US to produce a brand-new product. One day, a journalist got in touch to interview us for a story on the innovative devices. A few days later, I was blown away to find our product highlighted on the front page of the Financial Times, one of the most trusted newspapers in the world! This unexpected recognition made all the long days and nights worth it and helped raise awareness of our solution. The product ended up being deployed to tens of thousands of employees across the world in just a few months, and we received several testimonies from clients saying we had helped prevent deaths among their employees. That was deeply moving and affirming to hear.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about creating a successful career as a product manager. For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly articulate what precisely a product manager does?

A product manager oversees the entire product lifecycle. It starts with listening to customer needs, translating those needs into engineering requirements, identifying suitable components, seeking funding (internal or external), assembling and motivating teams, managing the project, communicating progress to all stakeholders, assisting in selling to customers or partners, and continuously improving the products based on feedback and competition.

I think that being a product manager is like being a chef in a restaurant: You design a menu and recipes using available ingredients. You must design them to be enjoyed by your customers, but they must also be easy to prepare by the kitchen staff, easy to deliver by the serversand easy to clean up afterwards. And you need to be ready to get your hands dirty!

What are the qualities that you think make someone a great fit for product management? And conversely, what are some traits that would make you hesitate to recommend this profession?

Product management is not a one-size-fits-all kind of role, so there are many people with different strengths who can make great product managers. Common qualities for all product people include always focusing on creating value for the end-customer and on delivering a quality product in a timely fashion. Where I see differences is in the lifecycle of a product: At the beginning, when a product is just an idea, you need ‘explorers’, people who can bring their creative thinking, their curiosity, their ability to deal with ambiguity and to communicate across all parts of an organisation or ecosystem to bring people on board on something new. Once a product has been defined and alpha-tested and needs to be industrialised, you need ‘settlers’. These people have good project management, a process mindset and the political instincts to negotiate the inevitable compromises needed to embed new products and processes within internal and external organisation(s) that will deliver the product to customers.

When you think of the strongest team you’ve ever worked with, why do you think the team worked so well together, and can you recall an anecdote that illustrates the dynamic?

I currently have the best team I could hope for. Being able to leverage a variety of expertise and skills towards a common goal is the ultimate test of a good team. A can-do attitude and agile style of working are equally important to encourage people to try new things even if it’s never been done before. Nothing great happens when people are all the same, so I’ve always looked in my teams for as much diversity as possible in many aspects: age, primary skillset, tech savviness, culture, personal history, etc. This diversity of backgrounds and agile way of working were particularly important during the early months of the pandemic, when lockdowns forced us to create solutions for environments that were very different from our usual clients and with different constraints. Because our products involve physical hardware as well as embedded software, everyone suddenly had to roll up their sleeves, learn a new set of tools and invent processes which enabled us to roll out a critical innovation in a matter of weeks.