One-on-one with Aneta Gola

Gola shares why product management is her ‘happy place’ and stresses the importance of communication.

On Aneta Gola's LinkedIn page, her cover photo features an Albert Einstein quote: "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." This sentiment fittingly captures Gola's approach to product management, and the way she approaches her life in general. 

As a product management director at manufacturing company Robertshaw and adjunct lecturer at the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Northwestern’s MBAi program, Gola (MBA ’18) emphasizes that curiosity is fundamental to success in the field. While the role certainly involves technical sensibilities, she believes genuine curiosity is what enables product managers to connect effectively with engineering teams, customers, and other stakeholders.  

This passionate curiosity has guided Gola's own journey from marketing to product management, where she's discovered that asking the right questions and digging deeper can unlock solutions that technical skills alone can’t provide. 

Below, Gola shares her perspectives on product management, teaching, and communication. 

How did you transition into product management? 

Unlike most product managers, I come from a marketing background. I stumbled into product management and didn’t really know it existed. It wasn't really a formal career at the time. You didn't go to college to be a product manager in the early 2000s.  

When I started working in marketing, I was doing things like building websites, developing collateral, things that today we would call content marketing. I found that my coworkers were saying, “Hey, you're really good at writing and breaking down these technical concepts, can you help us with these spec sheets?” So I started helping our product team with their market and product requirements documents. And from there I got more and more engaged with our products, quickly transitioning into product myself. 

I got my bearings when I worked for Emerson Electric, a Fortune 500 company. I learned the formal processes used in product management as well as what a product manager’s role really involves and how to interact with other project members that you have to lead when you don't have direct authority over them. It was a great learning experience and really helped me home in my skills as a product professional. 

What are the most important skills students should develop for product management careers? 

One of the biggest things is being able to communicate with different types of stakeholders. As product managers, we are at the intersection between the technical people, the marketing and sales people, the executive teams, and the customers. And this requires you to be a flexible communicator that can not only dig into the details with your technical teams but also simplify technical concepts and tell a story to executives and customers.  

Technical people want to understand the specifications of what they're building. They often don’t need to know the marketing story. That's a very different communication style than if you're communicating with a customer or an executive. If you're a terrible communicator, you're really going to struggle in this job because it's really what you do 24/7.  

The second piece is a genuine curiosity. If you're curious, you'll ask the right questions, you'll dig in, and you'll get to a point where you can really understand the customer problems you’re trying to solve and then translate that to the engineering team. 

What misconceptions do students have about product management? 

Usually, it centers on the technical piece. I have a lot of students who start in my class believing that because they have a technical background as an engineer or software developer that the course/product management should be easy for them. But product managers are not exactly part of the engineering teams and generally don’t execute the actual development of the product. A product manager’s job is to make sure the teams know what they’re going to be building and why that’s important. So, while a technical background is helpful, its really not required.  

The other thing I think people always misconstrue is that product managers, because they have the word “manager” in their title, have authority over other people’s work. But you need to influence engineering team members, executive team members, and customers without any direct authority over them. They don't have to do what you tell them to do, and that can be challenging. 

How is the product management field evolving? 

In the last 15 years, product management has become much more important. Companies are recognizing that product managers serve a very specific and unique role that is required in a business. 

More and more companies are also identifying that there's a need to differentiate between different types of product management roles, like a product marketing manager and a product manager or a product owner. There are all these new roles being created to support the work of product management. One of these newer roles is called product operations. In 2018, there were about 5,000 people who had product operations as their title on LinkedIn; today it's more than 100,000 people. It's such a fast-growing role. 

I think there's also this interesting trend happening where product managers are developing niches. If you're a medical device product manager, you have a specialized skill set because you understand regulatory constraints and design controls for development, versus a product manager who specializes in in software versus a product manager who specializes in hardware products. Each of those roles has unique skills it requires, and some product managers have found they enjoy working in one of these specialties. 

What types of students take your product management class? 

We see students from all different majors and backgrounds. The biggest portion of the class is people who either want to go into product management at companies like Amazon and Google, or there's those people who want to be an entrepreneur, but don't really know how to get there and they know they want to build products. 

I have quite a few medical students, students who are psychology majors, I even had an art major in my class who said she’s learned so much about how to talk to customers and think about how she designs things. And I love that because product management doesn't just teach you frameworks and Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint skills. Students can still take so much away from the class even if they don’t want to be a product manager, especially skills like communication, problem solving, prioritization, and the ability to make decisions when there is ambiguity.