It’s a dream come true to come to work at Adidas 2.5 years ago. After navigating through a one-year Global Brands traineeship, rotating through 4 different functions within the brand- strategy, head office, brand communication, and product marketing, I landed in my first official role at Adidas, Assistant Product Manager at Men’s Training Apparel team. Another 1.5 years fly by and now it’s time for me to make my first move within the company and embark on a new challenge. However, I can’t have a proper farewell with it without recounting the 3 key things I’ve learned in my first role and experience at product marketing. I mean, at adidas, all great things come with three ;)
1. Be patient and trust the process
When I first started the role, it was a smooth transition as I was already a trainee in the team. I was eager to learn more and even wanted to start having ownership of products that I manage and create with the wider team.
However, I also know that I’m still lacking a lot of technical knowledge about performance apparel design and development. I was thrown into the materials library and swarmed by all the technical terms of fabrics, trims, and all the different technologies. Let alone all the different sustainability standards, which is a key thing at Adidas.
Coming from a business management and marketing degree, I thought I could easily handle whatever comes my way and rely just on my strategic thinking and consumer research skills. However, as a product manager, it’s equally important to be business-centric but also understand having the technical knowledge of our products.
Fortunately, I have an attentive and patient line manager who really took the time to educate me on all these technical and remind me to be patient in the process of learning and upskilling myself through the process of product creation.
I can’t say I’m an expert now that I’m in the role for more than a year but I’m sometimes impressed by myself on how far I’ve come and how I could understand and communicate with my designer and developer counterpart way better than when I first started.
It takes time and patience but if you stick with it and learn at every moment, you’ll get there.
2. It’s as important to look at the big picture as within the details
A product manager is an interesting role that needs to think big but also small.
On the big picture, you need to think about the overall brand, category, and team strategy and financial planning to start off the season to bring the strategy to execution. At the same time, this strategy and planning need to be carefully maintained and reminded throughout the whole creation process.
Flip to the small details, a product manager needs to take care of all details of a product, carefully coding every single detail of a product in the system to make sure when it goes to all the downstream systems, it’d all link perfectly. Otherwise, you risk making an error or wrong communication when it got presented in front of the markets or the end-consumer.
Not only for the business side it’s mixed with big and small but also on the collection a product manager manages, you need to look at the overall design language and range focus whether it connects back to the strategy but also look at all technical details on a garment, e.g. materials, trims, logos, colors, technology…etc., and how each component cost and provide benefit to our consumers.
After this, I have whole new respect for every product manager out there and I can never shop the same way as I used to. I just can’t stop thinking how many details and hundreds and thousands of hours it must have been to come up with the end product I see in the store or online. But also I have a more sharp eye when I see another brand's products that I can look at the holistic offer and try to understand what their strategy is but at the same time dissect the product and look at each element separately. I really enjoy this newfound learning and skill that I wouldn’t be able to learn from other roles.
3. Always try to think from the consumer’s perspective
As a business graduate and working in a business corporate world, we always remind ourselves of the importance of consumer centricity because it’s as well the toughest thing to do when you got bombarded with decisions to make and alignments to meet.
Throughout a product creation process, a product manager has multiple milestone meetings to go through. A strategy becomes a brief, a brief turns into a concept, a concept turns into a collection of products. Lots of decisions on how the concept should be aligned with the strategy and how the products should be aligned with the whole collection.
By making so many decisions and changes, sometimes it becomes blurry on what we’re really creating and what we really want to offer to our consumer and whether they’d really understand this product and want to buy it.
However, as product managers and every person in the product creation team, we always try to remind ourselves to “think from the consumer’s perspective” and make decisions that would be relevant, understandable, and perceivable to our end consumer. It’s definitely key learning for any consumer-facing business role and learning I should carry with me in my future career.
Even just being able to reflect on the experience of a product manager and write this article makes me aware of how grateful I am for the whole experience and to be able to be in the team I am in.
Big thanks to my line manager, Carla, and our team lead, Bernhard, who has given me the opportunity to learn, grow and become a product manager.
Even though I’m stepping on a new journey within the brand, I won’t forget what I’ve learned here and I won’t forget the kindness and opportunities I’ve received. Time to embark on the next chapter! Let’s go!
