So you want to be a product manager
Lately I’ve been talking to more people who are eager to get jobs as product managers. How do you become a product manager? How do you become a PM at xyz company? How do I get a PM job?
Here’s some of my advice on the subject. I plan to revisit this every now and then to update it.
What this isn’t is a discussion of what product managers do. That’s different from what people are looking for when evaluating product managers.
As for me, I’ve been a PM for 10 years, and I’ve hired or have been a part of hiring about 20 product managers.
Whether you’re looking to get into product management from another discipline, or you’re entry level, I hope you’ll find some of this helpful.
OK! So, people want to talk about three things with potential PMs:
- Strategy/Business acumen
- Technology
- Execution They’re going to be asking themselves…
Strategy
Does this person understand what we’re trying to do as an organization? Do you understand how this product portfolio succeeds? Will you be able to develop new ideas for getting us there, and more importantly, will you be able to tell a great idea from an OK one? Do you have a sense of balancing priorities in a way that matches our culture?
Technology
What sorts of products or platforms (or websites or whatever) have you been a part of building? How well do you understand what was built? Do you understand the technologies we use and the technologies we’re trying to build? Do you understand the risks and benefits of using different technologies here?
Execution
Can you work with teams to get things done? Can you do it consistently, and on timelines that work with our organization? Can you get things done with shifting priorities, resource allotments, and politics? Can you do all that and ensure the outcome is high quality? Without role power?
As they’re assessing these, the people who are deciding whether you can become a PM on their team are also going to be looking to hear:
- This person can research. You know how to get answers (or close to answers) in situations where knowledge/information doesn’t exist or is ambiguous.
- This person can communicate. You understand how to understand people and get them to understand you. This includes communicating with different types of people and people with different expertises. Most of the time you have to communicate with people who know more about what you’re talking about than you do.
If this sounds easy
Let’s say you have a PM role in mind and you are confident you can speak on these things. That’s great. What you need to do is talk about it in the language of results and **examples✱.
These are different. Results are the measurements, the metrics, or the change in the world that happened because you did the project. Examples are the artifacts in the world where people can see or use what you’ve done.
Where you can’t share examples (say, most of the work you want to talk about is transient, inaccessible, or abstract) focus on results. Use numbers and put those numbers in context.
Where you can’t share results (e.g. the results are confidential or incomplete) try to show examples. Screenshots work, but the actual thing is better.
Hopefully you have a mix of both, and if you have examples and results for the same project so much the better.
If this sounds daunting
That’s OK too, no one was born having all this under their belt. If you feel you’re not there yet with most of the questions above try these things.
Self-directed learning
Take some of the questions above you’re interested in and hit the books, listen to the talks, take courses. Learning alone isn’t going to get you the results or examples you’re going to need during an interview. It is essential, though, for getting you comfortable with how the product business works.
Form opinions on what you’re learning. Make connections to the work you do or have done. Write all this down.
Get the job that gets the job
You may not be in a PM role now, but you can move closer to product management by looking for jobs with organization similarity or role similarity.
Org Similarity
Roles with org similarity are the jobs in companies with strong product teams that work closely with the product team. Think engineering, marketing, design, customer service, content development. If you have the experience to land a job on a related team, you can be better positioned to transition to a PM role. I’ve seen many people move internally from their team to product management group. They’re the ones who’ve worked with and gained the respect of the product teams and leadership.
One of the most successful PMs at the last company I worked at was in product marketing when I got there. There was some turnover in the corporate product vertical and she jumped at the opportunity. She’d been been marketing the product for years already and knew the team, the product back and forth, and how to get things done at the company. She moved over to lead that team as a senior director and not only rocked the role but brought a knowledge with the customer that was really fantastic.
Role Similarity
While they may not have the ‘product manager’ as their title, digital strategists, business analysts, and digital project managers do work like those of product managers. With a role like this you can start building the results and examples that will help you fill in the rest of the story. There are many titles like this out there.
This is how I got into product management. I’d been doing strategy and client management in consulting and digital marketing agencies for a chunk of my career. When I broke into product management I found my stakeholder management, systems thinking and a broad knowledge of different technology solutions were exactly the same muscles I needed for product management. I was fortunate the hiring team saw the overlap too.
Build something
Build something digital, or diagram something. Share it. Try building a website. If you’re comfortable doing that, build something more complex. Create a topic-oriented Instagram or design a system for making decisions. Show it to people, get feedback, and improve it. You’ll find it’s fun (or you’ll hate it in which case you may not like being a product manager).
You don’t have to build a native iPhone app with the goal of getting VC funding, just start where you are.
But if that sounds interesting you could also take the entrepreneur’s path.
Give yourself the job
Make a company of your own and name yourself head of product or head of everything. Do all the things you think are fun or interesting about being a product manager. Start to make some money. See if you can make the company go. Can you make a company that can support you? Can you create a company that can employ multiple people?
A lot of successful product managers at big companies were founders before they ever held a PM job title.
So think about it. You probably don’t have to do all this, but doing more than one of these will help more than doing any alone. Consider what interests you about becoming a product manager and explore that.
And good luck! The world needs more good product managers. PMs who have experience in other disciplines have an edge in understanding how things work (if they have a handle on the strategy, technology and execution, of course). You probably already know more than you think.
I’d love to hear if you put any of this into practice, which parts resonated and what fell flat. Let me know!