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July 27 - October 18, 2021
If you want to be a product manager, what do you do? There are no schools for product management. There’s no formal training. It’s also not a role you typically get promoted into, exactly.
Product management shouldn’t be this elusive role, accessible only to those who are lucky (and connected) enough to have someone explain what PMing is all about. Greater accessibility is a good thing for candidates and employers alike.
I learned how little information there was about getting a product management role. Lots of people talked about how to be a good product manager, but few people talked about how to actually break into that field.
Career step?
But in one of the most important ways, the description of product manager as CEO misses the boat: product managers don’t have direct authority over the people on their team.
When companies make this split, they call the engineering-focused person the technical program manager or technical product manager (TPM), and they call the business-focused person the product manager (PM).
Depending on the scope of the role, a big part of the product manager’s job in this phase is creating or proposing a roadmap. This means figuring out a cohesive long-term plan for the team.
Since the product manager’s role in product design can vary so much across teams, it’s a great thing to ask about during your interview. Ask about who you’ll be working with on your core and extended team. Find out how much of your time will be spent writing specs and how much you’ll be working with designers. Learn where the balance is between PMs, designers, and engineers in making product decisions.
Larger companies usually have a user researcher, who develops and runs the study with some input from the product manager. At smaller companies, the PM might run the studies.
Prioritization is one of the product manager’s most important functions at this point; if the team were to fix every bug and build every new feature idea, the product would never launch. The PM needs to consider all of the new requests and decide if they should be prioritized for the current release or punted to a later time.
PMs who are good at project management and have good communication skills do well working on shipped software. Shipped software can also be great for people who want a good work/life balance, since there aren’t usually urgent issues that need to be fixed within hours.
Because companies in online software collect more data, it’s important that these PMs are skilled with data analysis and designing experiments. It’s also important to work well under pressure, as servers can fail at any time and PMs often have to make quick decisions.
Data-driven PMs can do very well working on consumer products because they’re able to make a strong case for their proposals, and they often can come up with features that will make a difference to the core metrics the company cares about. Consumer products are also great for people who want to be able to explain what they do to their parents!
PMs who like doing customer research and market analysis could enjoy working on B2B products. These are also the products where PMs tend to exert the most influence, so they can be a very satisfying place to work.
PMs who want to work on products used by millions of people would enjoy working on mature products. Mature products are also a great place to learn from the people who were able to make the product succeed.
Product managers are responsible for identifying problems and opportunities, picking which ones to go after, and then making sure the team comes up with great solutions, either by thinking of the solution themselves or by working with the designers and engineers.
Marketing folks focus on getting users into the product, while product managers define what happens once the user is in the product.
Some people think that a PM’s job is just to get the key stakeholders in a room together to make decisions. Good product managers don’t just serve as passive conduits of other people’s opinions. Instead, PMs research the area and come up with their own point of view and frameworks for making decisions.
PMs do need to meet with the key stakeholders and understand their opinions and priorities, but then they synthesize those perspectives, lay out the tradeoffs, and come up with a recommendation that will satisfy all of the stakeholders.
As Nundu, a PM at Google, says, “PMs don’t set dates. Engineers set dates.” As a PM, you can tell your team what you want them to build, but then they’ll tell you how long it will take to build it.
Not trusting the engineers’ estimates and promising other teams that the work will be done sooner than the engineers agree to is one of the fastest ways to ruin your relationship with the team.
On the other hand, some companies, such as Apple and Amazon, have a culture where employees are proud of how hard they work. At these companies, it is expected that employees work long hours, and frugality is valued. Employees at these companies are so inspired by the company’s mission that they’re happy to work weekends or take calls late at night. Building an amazing product isn’t meant to be easy.
Yikes
Often, a PM’s first project at Google is to figure out what they should be working on.
An MBA isn’t a requirement for product management, and at some startups it might even count against you. On the other hand, teams with more of a business focus consider an MBA a real asset, and some companies, such as Amazon, explicitly focus on hiring MBAs.
Companies tend to use technical experience as a proxy for the real qualities they’re looking for:
Able to form a relationship of mutual respect with engineers.
Good intuition on how long engineering work should take.
Scrappy and Self-Sufficient.
?
The work is less tangible
You become a focus point for criticism
You don’t have time to do it all
As a PM, the biggest measure of your success will be the products you launch. More so than any of the mocks you drew or specs you wrote or bugs you triaged, you’ll be recognized for how well your products do in the market.
If you’ve mostly worked on improving a mature product, consider joining a team building a new, unlaunched product. If you’ve always worked on consumer-facing products, consider trying something business facing.
If you have trouble getting to “Inbox Zero” (no messages in your inbox), try learning a time management system like Getting Things Done.
Look around your team to find some grunt work you can take off of someone’s hands, or do some research that people have been putting off
Infrastructure teams often don’t sound like a fun place to be a PM, but they’re critically important to the company. The improvements you make as an infrastructure PM can be magnified throughout the company, so they can be a great place for career advancement.
Unglamourus vs unnecessry
First, you need to meet all the requirements for the next level before being promoted into it. Second, you need to have earned a reputation for consistently and repeatedly delivering work at that level.
A resume isn’t read; it’s skimmed. A resume screener will glance at your resume for about 15 seconds (or maybe less) to make a decision about whether or not to interview you.
Rule #3: Accomplishments, Not Responsibilities
Consider the difference between these two bullets: Responsibility Oriented: Design features for Amazon S3 and oversee development of the features across software engineers and testers. Accomplishment Oriented: Designed the SS Frontline feature, managed its development, and led its integration across three products, leading to an additional $10 million in revenue.
For the first few years out of school, you should list your GPA if it’s above a 3.0 / 4.0. If you are more than about five years out of school, the minimum goes up to around a 3.5. The reason for this is simple: don’t list something from a long time ago unless it really makes you stand out.
Red flags: For example, asking about vacation time in an interview can come off the wrong way. Just how much vacation are you planning on taking?
#america
Best Answers The answers below show some relevance to the job by highlighting the candidate’s leadership abilities, technical talent, or initiative. All of these things make the candidate well suited to a PM role.
Barf
To see if you even have a plan: Successful people tend to know where they’re going in life. If you don’t have a plan, an interviewer might worry you’re not very serious about your career.
This book is full of red flags imo (which i think is a reflection of american tech culture more than tHe auhor's specific opinions)
One physical “offline” product. Interviewers love to try to “stump” candidates by asking them to assess a physical product.
???
I’m not sure I’ve ever met a 1% PM,
You sir dont know what words mean
