How do I become a Product Manager?
Longer post designed as practical and actionable advice for someone wanting to move into building a career as a product manager.
“How do I move into product”
I get this question multiple times a week through LinkedIn so I thought I’d share my thoughts.
At Travelperk we built one of the best 'product schools' in southern Europe. Every position in the Associate Product Manager (APM) program had over 2,000 applications. This took a long time to establish and was one of our secret weapons to scaling effectively (see my blog on 3 lessons, 3 unicorns).
There can be an assumption, due to the perceived soft skills that somehow Product is more accessible than engineering or other functions. You rarely get people outside of engineering asking “How do I become a principal engineer”. They know there is a technical path, often connecting back to formal tertiary education. With product management, the skills are just harder to identify from the outside. You also have a 6:1 ratio of engineers to PMs so competition is intense. I’m going to try and unpick this a little and give people some structure and hopefully, some actionable steps they can take.
Where do you even start?
My starting point is to work on fundamental skills rather than on searching for a golden introduction or opportunity to open a magic door. Building competencies make you more hireable and will ultimately increase the altitude you can rise to. If you get an APM role at a great company, take it, but most people want to know what they can do today, without a perfect job opportunity sitting on their LinkedIn feed.
So let’s start with the outcome. Great PMs need 4 things:
They need to understand how technology works so they can craft exceptional experiences and coordinate well with engineers.
They need to be exceptional communicators. So they can listen to and coordinate the business around them.
They need to be able to rapidly and intuitively analyze new domains, problems, products, and people. So they can ensure they are solving the right problems and coordinating with designers.
They need to be able to get results. So they can execute effectively and drive a team forward.
Most of these need to be learnt while doing and are highly practical. The exception is technology which I will come to. This is why “product degrees” are not really a thing.
So how do you learn these skills?
1/ Technology
In many ways, this is the simplest to learn. The internet is awash with resources boot camps and self-guided paths. Pick a real project, a problem, or a goal and drive towards making something real. When I started learning to code I wanted to make a simple way to analyze, index, and search legal documentation at work. This objective forced me into Ruby, rails, java, JavaScript, night classes, IDEs, deploying code, GitHub, etc.
If you want the high-speed route, Le Wagon or these coding bootcamps turbocharge you. I made all APMs graduate one of these courses as a minimum. Do this early and you are ahead.
Ultimately your job is to build stuff people want. So get building. making your own products end to end is the very best home workout you can do.
2/ Communication
This is far more applied in that you need to polish it in the industry at work. While there are fewer structural paths, you can actively make learning this a priority. Take every single opportunity to speak, to write, and to relay information. Analyse execs, and unpick their presentations their emails. If you cannot move people, you cannot be a PM.
Slow it down and say fewer, better things. Think upfront and give people simple, structured output.
Write. Even if it’s just for you, start building the muscle. Structured prose irons out your thinking and radically improves the quality. It lets you get feedback loops as you read it back. Do it every day. Ask for feedback constantly on how you could make it more engaging and get your point across.
3/ Analysis
Much like engineering, this is highly accessible, start with Excel, move into Python, this is an awesome place to leverage AI as it can analyse and teach you at the same time.
In nearly every element of your work if you “why is this happening?” enough times there will be a hypothesis that you can unpick with data. Get hold of the underlying 2,500 rows of raw CSV data dump it into Python, excel and start building data-informed communications. One sentence, one simple graph.
“Our performance on x has improved by 30% month on month for the past 3 years”
Analyse other products. Pattern matching is the secret weapon of PMs. To this day I spend hours going through and benchmarking products, making notes. How does their search work, why did the PM do that? What is the advantage of that approach of X.
The number 1 mistake I see people make in this domain is that they are far too theoretical and have not spent enough time actively thinking about existing digital products while they use them.
4/ Execution
Start setting goals, write down what you (or the team you manage) want to achieve on daily, monthly and annual horizons.
This really has two universal elements.
A) set and prioritize your personal goals. I started using an Eisenhower matrix (priority matrix) and daily/weekly curation. You then just scale this up.
B) Reflection and improvement. Put time aside to work on your system and think about how you could be more effective. There are hundreds of agile frameworks etc, I would largely ignore these for now and focus on the time behavior of saying where you want to go and getting there. Scrum and planning tools are easy to learn at a later date.
Set real-time aside to analyse how effective you and your team were at getting to them and start to build a mentality for getting things done. Build your personal playbook.
What are the most common Entry points?
I see 3 common avenues that people take to get into the function.
1/ APM
Associate product manager programs. Are typically 2 years long, and have a curriculum, rotations, and mentorship. If you are serious and it’s a good school this is an amazing way to get a structured lesson and you will end up a very rounded and polished product manager. Cons are that it’s hard to get into and many people who want lateral moves are not happy to take one step back to take two forward. In my view, it’s nearly always worth the title and pay cut (if you are moving laterally) to learn the craft.
2/ Tech Entrepreneur
If you have to build a business you need to learn most of these skills. Talking to clients, fighting competitors, it’s all there. You have the bonus that survive or die is an accelerator and forces you to get good quickly. You will maybe be more “spikey” than a classically trained PM but you will be very effective, outcome-based, and a bit of a bulldozer who will get things done. This will be a superpower over time.
3/ Horizontal shift
An engineer, a customer success agent, and lawyer, etc. Here your superpower is domain knowledge so you might be able to shift over and be lighter on the above competencies because the product you are working on requires more domain specialism. This is a hard shift as often you don’t have the bandwidth to backfill some of the other gaps and are thrown in the deep end. So it’s critical to carve out the time to get familiar with the engineering or nail your comms to ensure you land.
Preparing your application
Finding a great transition into product is in part luck. But the more you build your baseline of competencies the luckier you will get.
Good luck ;)
Great piece ross. agree with every word