How I Tested My Fit for Product Thinking Without Burning My Career
- Tushar
- Dec 8
- 5 min read
Before I formally entered product management, I did not announce to myself or to anyone that I was “transitioning into product.” In fact, for a very long time, I resisted even calling it a transition.
I was coming from a world where decisions were immediate, consequences were direct, and ownership was absolute. As a founder, if something worked, it worked because I made it so. If something failed, the responsibility ended with me. There was a certain raw honesty in that life.
Product management, on the other hand, appeared from a distance to be a world of:
Meetings.
Alignments.
Dependencies.
Slow-moving consensus.
Invisible wins.
I was curious about it. But curiosity is not the same as readiness. And I was not willing to burn years of my life on a romantic assumption. So, before I ever changed my designation, I began testing something far more important than “skills.” I tested whether I could live with the inner reality of product work.
Table of Contents
The First Realisation: Product Does Not Reject You Intellectually, It Rejects You Emotionally
Most people think product management is hard because:
You need to understand tech
You need to talk to many stakeholders
You need to balance business and users
Those are learnable. What is not easily learnable is this: The emotional nature of product work. In product, you often:
Put in weeks of thinking before anything moves.
Watch your ideas get reshaped by others.
See outcomes that are not directly credited to you.
Carry responsibility without having command.
I had never lived like that before. So the real question I needed to answer was not: “Can I become a PM?” It was: “Can I become a person who is okay with this way of working?”
How I Started Testing Myself Without Knowing I Was Testing
At the time, I was still deeply involved in my business. On the surface, nothing had changed. Internally, everything had. I began shifting the way I approached problems. Earlier, my default behaviour was to move from problem to solution very fast. Speed had always rewarded me.
Now, I began to slow myself down deliberately. I started speaking to customers without trying to fix anything. Not because I suddenly became philosophical. But because I realised I had never truly listened without an outcome in mind. For weeks, I only tried to understand:
Why they chose what they chose.
What they ignored.
What they were silently tolerating.
What they had stopped complaining about because they had lost hope.
This was the first time I experienced something very uncomfortable: Listening without acting. That discomfort was my first brush with true product thinking.
When I Removed Execution, My Thinking Was Exposed
There was another subtle shift. Earlier, the moment I saw a flaw, I would change it. Now, I began forcing myself to not change anything immediately. Instead, I would sit with questions like:
If this step disappears, what actually changes for the user?
If this cost reduces, what behaviour will shift?
If this friction remains, what workaround will they adopt?
At that point, I was not building features. I was building future narratives in my head, and waiting to see which ones came true. Many of my confident predictions failed. A few surprised me. All of them humbled me.
This phase quietly broke one very deep habit in me: The belief that experience guarantees correctness. Product thinking does not reward confidence. It rewards wagered humility.
The Hardest Test Came When I Took Power Out of My Own Hands
As a founder, my biggest privilege was authority. As a future PM, my biggest challenge would be influence without it. So I began putting myself into situations where I could only propose, not decide.
I would document broken processes. Speak to people across roles. Present what I thought should change. And then I would wait. Sometimes, nothing moved. Sometimes, my suggestions were politely ignored. Sometimes, they were shut down directly.
There is a unique kind of frustration that comes from being responsible but not sovereign. That frustration is the daily companion of a product manager. This was the phase where I learnt the difference between:
Being right.
And being accepted at the right time.
Founders learn the first. Product managers survive on the second.
My Relationship With Ambiguity Changed Slowly, Then Permanently
In business, ambiguity exists only briefly. The market answers quickly. In product, ambiguity is long-lived. It lingers. It mutates. It rarely vanishes completely.
I began noticing this shift in myself:
Earlier, lack of clarity made me restless.
Now, lack of clarity made me observant.
Instead of asking: “Why is this not resolved yet?” I began asking: “What am I still not seeing?” This quiet internal transition did not happen in a week. It happened over months of slow, invisible work. No applause. No milestones. Just a different way of responding to uncertainty.
That, more than any certification or interview, told me I was changing at the right depth.
The Moment That Removed All Doubt For Me
There was a phase where I had spent weeks working on:
User understanding.
Internal alignment.
Process restructuring.
There was no launch. There was no announcement. There was no visible metric spike. Then, almost two months later, something happened quietly: A recurring operational breakdown simply stopped occurring. Not dramatically. Just steadily.
Support escalations reduced. Manual overrides dropped. People stopped complaining about that part of the workflow. No one attributed it to me. No dashboard celebrated it. Life just became smoother. And I realised something deeply personal in that moment:
Earlier, I needed visible wins to feel successful.
Now, I felt fulfilled by invisible stability.
That was the clearest internal signal I ever received that I could live inside product work without needing constant validation.
What This Entire Phase Taught Me About “Testing Product Fit”
Looking back, I did not test product management by:
Reading about it.
Talking about it.
Preparing for it.
I tested it by changing how I:
Handled ambiguity.
Responded to resistance.
Related to authority.
Sat with delayed outcomes.
Detached from personal credit.
Product fit is not a career decision. It is a psychological adaptation. Most people never test that adaptation. They only change job titles.
If You Are Standing At a Similar Edge
If you are currently: An engineer thinking of moving closer to business. A designer frustrated with only shaping screens. A QA professional who sees systemic failures. A customer success professional tired of fixing the same root issues. A business professional drawn toward building systems instead of chasing numbers.
Then what you need right now is not a roadmap. You need an honest mirror. Not to tell you what to become. But to help you see how you already behave under pressure, uncertainty, resistance, and delayed rewards. Your answers there matter far more than your resume.
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