The Product Management Starter Kit; For Every Aspiring Product Manager.
Have you been considering product management as a possible career path, but you don’t know how exactly to start the journey? Perhaps you have even started somehow, but you got stuck along the line.
Yes? Then this article is for you.
If you generally need clarification about the role of a product manager and how to build a career as one, then relax, you are in the right place.
This article would be a mix of sharing of resources as well as sharing my personal experiences to help you kickstart your journey as a product manager.
Let’s go!
Why product management?
This is the first question you’ll need to ask yourself if you have thoughts about becoming a product manager.
Understanding who a product manager is as well as what the role entails would help you in deciding if it’s a field you’ll be interested in exploring. Hence, it’s recommended that you start from here as an aspiring product manager.
Below are resources to help answer the questions of ‘what’ and ‘why’ of product management.
Why is product management important?
Why choose product management as a career?
Product and Project Management
In the product space, you’ll find out many times that the roles of product and project managers are frequently debated, and are sometimes used together. This makes it necessary for an aspiring product/project manger to have a firm understanding of what these roles individually entail, what their differences are, and where they intersect.
Product Manager vs. Project Manager: What’s the Difference?
Product Manager vs. Project Manager- Product Plan
Reading Product Books
This is one of the fastest ways to get deeper knowledge about product management. Here, I’ll be sharing the top books I recommend and their links.
- Product Book — This is the book I mostly would recommend to be read by anyone interested and new to product management. Every beginner/ aspiring product manager should read this book. It brings together different elements of product management and explains them in simpler terms that can be easily understood. By reading this book, you would be getting answers to majority of your questions about what the role entails, and on what a product manager does on a day-to-day basis. And, you can get it for free here.
- Cracking the PM Career
- Hired; How to Get a Product Management Job — This is also another free book.
- The Product Management Toolkit
- The Product Manager’s Survival Guide
Binging Youtube Videos
My best youtube videos in product management are those that are centered around ‘a day in the life of a product manager’. It helps to see in a more practical sense what a product manager does, and what their daily tasks are like. Below are some of the links.
A day in the life of a product manager (Mircosoft)
A day in the life of a product manager
You can get more of these videos when you go to youtube.com and use this keyword — ‘a day in the life of a product manager’
Here are some other youtube videos about product management in general that make a great watch.
How to become a product manager with no experience
Product Management for Dummies
Taking a Product Course.
I recommend that you should have done your bit in the other sections above if possible, before proceeding to take a course in product management.
Why?
- You would have gotten to understand on a foundational level, what the role of a product manager entails
- You can decide from your reads if it’s a career path you would be interested in exploring.
- Taking a product course would be easier and you would find some of the terms used easier to assimilate.
Note: It isn’t cast in stone. It’s what I believe would be beneficial. Below are some of the product courses I recommend that’ll be very helpful at a foundational level.
Become a product manager; Learn the skills and get the job
Exploring a product management career
The complete product management career
Product School; Product Manager Certificate
Udacity — Become a product manager Nanodegree
Google Project Management Certificate
Join Product Communities
Joining communities is the best way to network with cool people who are already in the field. Beyond joining a community, staying active in one at least would help a lot.
Skills to Learn as a Product Manager
1. User Experience (some foundational courses in UX design should help here)
2. Product Strategy
3. Project management — here you’ll need to learn to use project management tools like Jira, Trello, Asana, etc. to manage tasks and workflows
4. Stakeholder management
Getting your first Product Role — An Internship/Junior role
I am sure this is the part many people are waiting to see. Sweet, anyway! It was set intentionally as to the last section of this article because the things you do in the other sections would help you faster in getting results here.
A Blockbuster — There are hardly entry-level, internship, or associate opportunities for beginner product managers.
This isn’t to discourage you at all, but rather to let you see that it may not be a walk in the park. I am hoping that your process of finding a job is easier and faster.
Below are the different ways through which product managers get their first job.
- Apply via a job advert/board. Here are some of the recommended job boards. You can set job alerts/subscribe to their newsletters to get updates on a new opening — LinkedIn, Flexjob, Indeed, Glassdoor.
- Cold messaging recruiters/founders — This is my personal best approach, and it is how I have gotten a majority of the roles I have worked. I use LinkedIn mostly to send a cold message. How do I do it? Connect with the founder/hiring manager of a company. If they accept my invitation to connect, it means I can send them a message. Send them a message where I introduce myself, give them a brief compliment and state the purpose of my message, which is to request an internship/job opportunity. You may get a low response rate, so it’ll be nice if you follow up.
- Referrals from friends — This works very well. It just depends on if you have access to the right people that’ll refer. If you do, please don’t be afraid to ask them if they know anyone that is currently open to hiring a product intern/associate and wouldn’t mind pitching you to them.
- Shadowing a Senior PM — Via the cold messaging approach, you can get to reach out to more senior product managers and request to shadow them to get an internship experience.
- Transferring in-house from another role — If your company is a tech company and you are in maybe a customer support role, by learning the right skill and running it through your human resource team, you could be able to get transferred to being a product manager in the same company. I have seen this work for some persons, so there will be no harm in trying.
I wish you the very best in your product management journey. I am rooting for you.
If you would like to connect with me to ask specific questions. You can do so on Twitter and LinkedIn.
