How my architecture career prepared me for product management
Turns out the skill overlap is pretty darn high.
When I made the career shift from landscape architecture to technology, I was self-conscious about entering the technology industry with a background that seemed quite different from what I thought was the norm. However, over time my perspective has evolved, and I now see my design expertise as a valuable differentiator and a source of pride. This appreciation has matured with the confidence of launching quality work and creating real value for my company. At the same time, I believe that technology teams have evolved to recognize the real value that diverse skill sets and viewpoints can create.
A talk by Leslie Witt, Chief Product Officer at Headspace, helped crystallize my thinking. She spoke about her own transition from architecture to product, and how it informs her leadership style, process, and values in insightful ways. Leslie was part of the speakers at 2023 McKinsey Product Academy, a series I continue to enjoy.Â
With reflection on the transition, I also feel immense gratitude to the clients, partners, and team members who I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from in both careers. This post is about my journey and the skills that I carried forward from my career in landscape architecture into my career in product. This post mostly has to do with the transfer of skills. I’ll save most of the personal details for another post when I feel braver.
Design thinking
Because I was trained as a landscape architect, design thinking is intrinsic to how I approach problems. I begin with an effort to deeply understand user needs, and then rapidly ideate solutions and iteratively refine concepts with a range of stakeholders. In my work in product, I rely on those same techniques to make sure we’re building things of value by prototyping and testing hypothesis efficiently. My architecture toolkit – problem analysis, participatory charrettes, mockup studies – laid the foundational skills that allow me to integrate user perspectives into tangible products and to build consensus among large and diverse professional teams and stakeholder groups.Â
Graphic communications
Graphics were my fundamental medium as a landscape architect – I used sketches, diagrams, renderings and physical and digital models to communicate ideas, solve component relationship and hierarchies, and problem-solve at both the macro and micro scale. Distilling complex spatial and organizational relationships into intuitive graphics was crucial for getting buy-in from clients and government agencies to advance complex projects. Technical drawing also requires a keen eye for structuring information into a rapidly understandable and industry-accepted format. In my current work, attention to graphic composition such as structure, line-weight, colors, and text has been valuable in conversations across functions.
Who knew that all the years I spent studying, creating, and marking up drawing sets would help crystallize tools I rely on every day in product?
Geospatial understanding
Understanding the lay of the land across all scales was everything in landscape architecture. I needed to understand a project’s coarse dimensions, like latitude, longitude, and general climatic zone, and also site-specific dimensions like aspect, canopy coverage, and micro-climates. While my current work is within buildings, it's still essential to understand the geometry of a space, including building composition and typical movements of the equipment and people within them. This understanding plays into both designing IoT (internet of things) solutions and evaluating emerging technologies. I anticipate that this skill set will be even more valuable as indoor and outdoor location technologies become more seamlessly integrated.Â
Multidisciplinary team leadership
When I had a firm, nearly every project involved experts across disciplines, such as structural engineers, construction managers, and city officials (to name a few). I often led these multidisciplinary teams – facilitating workshops, building consensus, finding compromise, and reconciling competing priorities. Today, my core competency is to act as the conductor of information across siloed disciplines while maintaining fidelity to the product vision. I find this role thrilling, being a jack of all trades but the master of the one that brings people, ideas, and skills together.
Grand vision
Architects have, ahem, a reputation for their Grand Visions. But the Grand Vision serves an important purpose. It’s the North Star that creates a shared value lens to help a cross-functional or multi-disciplinary team make complex decisions over an extended period of time. It’s a banner to fly under, together. It’s a moral beacon. As the director of product at my company, my north star is simple: I want to make the best and most versatile software possible for our customers to provide better patient care and staff working conditions. There are many other stars in the constellation, but they all cascade down from this vision and support it.
Planning at broad scale and time dimensions
When I worked on landscape architecture projects, I forced myself to think expansively in terms of scale and time when conceptualizing and executing designs. I needed to consider how my projects would interact with the surrounding context, environment, and community for decades to come. This demands thinking beyond the present and imagining how the projects will be used into the future, while also designing structures at a broad scale to account for access, circulation, and urban connections. This is a juggle of visionary ideas with pragmatic considerations, with the goal of the work’s quality and relevance standing the test of time. These considerations are no different in product. Although the landscape of technology changes quickly, the goals of durability, flexibility, relevance, and ability to adapt in the future are the same.
Technical specifications
Most people think of architectural documents as drawings. Drawings are a critical part of the contractual documents, but the lesser known part of design deliverables are the project specifications (specs). As the technical lead at my landscape architectural firm, I managed our technical specs library and came to deeply enjoy the structure, specificity, and craft needed to produce this part of the contract documents. In product, I’ve found this training and experience to be very valuable as it has allowed me to apply the same level of rigor and language specificity to product documentation, from product vision all the way down to bug-fix development tickets.Â
In researching this post, I discovered this quote that I quite resonate with:
Your background in architecture has taught you to break problems down into logical chunks and think about them in sort of a 3 dimensional way. I have learned over time that most other people approach tasks in a 2D or linear fashion (first do this, then do this, etc...). In my experience, this will give you a huge advantage when it comes to problem-solving and bringing creative ideas to the table. The leap from architecture to product management seems like a natural one in my eyes. In architecture we already are product managers for the structures we are developing. We know them inside and out, answer questions about the design, advise on changes, and contribute to broader solutions by using our product as a tool.
source: https://tinyurl.com/muhd742j
Final thoughts
I like the term carry forward because it recognizes value and applies a generous lens to how we can learn from our past experiences and apply that learning to our current state. I will continue using the term while continuing to ask myself what skills I can carry forward into my life and work.
A few years ago I did not anticipate a pivot into product. I am grateful for all the friends and colleagues who have supported my journey.
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