It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
In David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College he used “This is Water” as a metaphor for the conscious awareness of others. The anecdotes follows, two young fish are swimming along and they meet an older fish who asks “Morning boys, how’s the water?” One fish turns to the other and asks “What the hell is water?”
The point of the fish story is that the most obvious things about life are often missed. Adjusting our awareness and empathy to others requires attention and effort because there is no experience in your life that does not revolve around you. You are the center of every memory. Hell, even the moon follows you. Being “well-adjusted” is adjusting your focus away from yourself towards others.
A good product manager is one who constantly reminds herself or himself “This is water.” You are swimming along with other fish (designers, engineers, researchers)to ship a product. You are an arm chair psychologist for engineers, designers, and cross-functional teams like sales and marketing. All too often, the qualities of a good product manager lists: act as “CEO of a product”, codes, manages engineers—focusing more on the “me” part instead of the “we” part.
The strongest product managers I know are the ones who remember “This is water.” They communicate with respect to engineers and designers. They don’t “manage” engineers but work alongside them in parallel work-streams (pun, intended). They don’t go in with a prescriptive solution or “right way” to code. Instead, they are humble and listen to the advice and opinions of designers and engineers. They have enough technical acumen and language fluency to communicate credibly with engineers. They empathize with users and aren’t afraid to talk to them directly. Surprisingly, sometimes they are liberal arts majors.
Liberal arts major product managers are a rare breed to come by because we don’t fit the Silicon Valley mold. We don’t code. Often I felt like a salmon swimming up stream against the roaring currents while building my own fish ladder.
Because I don’t have a computer science degree or MBA, I had to overcompensate by working ten times harder, teaching myself to code, and building things on my own time. But along the way, I found myself carrying a chip on my shoulder, brewing resentment, and feeling like an outsider.
Two lessons learned only in retrospect:
- A liberal arts degree lends itself to product management
Good qualities of a product manager from my friend Rohini Vibha:
- Make tough calls with little information
- Facilitate cross-functional team work
- Communicate — speak and write to inspire your team and build influence, not direct authority
- Empathy to your team and users
- Business acumen: bridge the gap between the business and user needs
Qualities of a liberal arts education
- Researching, questioning assumptions, and expanding on very little concrete information in the world.
- Bouncing across the different disciplines and frameworks of a liberal arts education is similar to addressing the cross-functional needs of marketing, sales, and engineering. A liberal arts major love delicious ambiguity. You are an interstitial agent. You are comfortable with ambiguity because if anything, the social sciences teach you to never draw absolute conclusions.
- Philosophical discourse — I will never forget the amount of thought experiments and debates we had in my metaphysics class. Philosophy challenged all my assumptions and helped me assert and strengthen my ideas through friction. Super helpful in lengthy UX and design debates!
- Being well-read cultivates empathy and shared humanity. Realizing there is so much suffering in the world translates to empathy and awareness of others.
- Interdisciplinary studies like neuroeconomics (psychology and economics) help us understand the “hows” and “whys” of human behavior. You find yourself often bridging the gap between two disciplines, cultivating hybrid vigor.
Surprisingly, the first set of qualities on what makes a good product manager overlaps with the liberal arts education. All too often liberal arts majors are ignored when it comes to product management and technical positions. It makes sense, you hire technical people for technical roles. I get it. On that same token, let’s not forget product management is a very murky field and varies from company to company. So why not open the doors to people who think creatively and learn quickly?
2. It is okay if you are uncertain about your future, just keep swimming
Like most good Asian child, I started college pre-med on a full-ride scholarship. After advanced chemistry kicked my ass on the first midterm, I marched into my pre-med counselor’s office where he drew me a Venn diagram. He said I should explore the intersection between what I am good at and what I like. So I spent my remaining undergraduate years taking art history, photography, philosophy, psychology, economics, law, and neuroscience. My course transcript up until junior year made no sense to a college counselor so I was dubbed “pre-law.”
When other girls were partying at their sororities, I was reading Foucault and Kant in USC’s Mudd Hall of Philosophy. Those four years were spent exploring one discipline to another, one philosophy to another, and one framework to another. To all the liberal arts majors who may be lost, I hope you don’t stop reading, ruminating about consciousness, or writing esoteric senior thesis topics like human decision-making under asymmetric information. Don’t stop exploring, keep swimming. All this miasma of uncertainty will lift when you find something that resonates with you. Really.
A liberal arts degree taught me to tap into the body of works from great minds before me and find creative solutions. At my first solar finance start up, when angry customers yelled “rip this sh*t off my roof” over the phone, I drew on empathy of Oliver Sacks in An Anthropologist from Mars to deescalate matters. When sales was making bad deals with new customers, I tried to dissect the false positives from the false negatives using decision-making biases in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. When feeling suppressed by a chauvinistic marketing executive, I found liberation in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish changing my perception of power. Books taught me to think differently, inspire me, and creatively problem solve.
I hope this sense of possibility, insatiable curiosity, and ability to cope with uncertainty will never go away.
My suggestion to recruiters and product managers out there is simple— give the liberal arts majors a chance. We talk a lot about building diversity in companies (gender and ethnic parity) so why not also foster diversity of thought? Liberal arts majors know a lot more than you think and we think more than you know. We can be groomed to do great things when given a fighting chance!
My advice to liberal arts majors is this—consider a career in tech early on. As an undergraduate, you are a swiss army knife of potential. The liberal arts framework is great at diversifying but not converging on a specific field, trade, or specialization. Consider taking an intro to computer science class, try your hand at accounting or finance, and dabble in the hard sciences. Ground all that theory with hard skills because at the end of the day hard skills and soft skills are equally important. When you find yourself swimming up against the currents, lost—remember—this is water. You will find your way even when all odds are against you through exploring the Marketplace of Ideas, challenging your existing views, and learning new things. The liberal arts major is not afraid to try new things and think boldly because we know no boundaries or constructs. The liberal arts degree provides endless untapped potential, it is up to you to build your own fish ladders.
Keep on swimming. Don’t forget, this is water.
