Product: Breaking into Product Management

Product management is probably the most talked-about domain right now. With a plethora of new opportunities floating around in the industry, it is the best time to be PM for a tech company. But, how to break into PM given the job requirements and competition in this field? Even entry-level PM jobs that are posted on LinkedIn mention that 2–3 years of PM experience is needed for the role.

This is a never ending loop!

Even if we keep this aside for some time, the competition in this domain is fierce. There are a lot of PM aspirants that are trying to break into PM (or transition to PM from their current tech or design roles, transitioning is a bit easy when you have already been working in a Product based company.) People trying to get into product management can be majorly divided into these personas:

1. Persona 1: Those who are already working in a Product role (in a Product based company) but not APM/ PM. It may be a Product Analyst/ Analyst, Product Engineer, etc. If you are one among them, you will find it relatively easy to transition into an APM/ PM role (you can try to take up product management tasks in the companies you are working with currently and eventually land at a PM role).
2. Persona 2: Those who are working in roles that are closely related to Product development. These roles include technical and UI/UX roles.
3. Persona 3: The ones that have discovered that PMing is their true calling but are unfortunately working in an unrelated role currently. This persona requires the most intense preparation for PM roles because most companies prefer prior Product experience of some kind (Persona 1) or are interested in hiring folks related to persona 2.

Apart from these personas that have some work experience, there is one more category that companies love to hire — fresh graduates for APM and PM fellowship roles who later transition to PMs. This is because these people are easy to groom and most companies are looking for long-term commitments from their employees. As for me, I belonged to persona 3 and on talking with various Product leaders I realised that breaking into Product Management will be extremely difficult — but not impossible.

There is no one right way to prepare for a Product Management role. This post will serve as a guide to everyone who is trying to get their foot in the door. I’ll try to cover all the things that I discovered one needs to kickstart their PM preparation.

Skills Needed

If you are reading this, I am assuming that you already have a basic understanding of what Product Management is (for a refresher, check out this tweet by Shreyas Doshi.)

There is, however, not a defined set of skills you can gain in a definite amount of time to become a Product Manager. You can be a great fit for an entry-level PM role in an organization whereas you might not fit in for some other organization. This is because of the nature of this role. Every organization has a varying set of roles and responsibilities for its PMs. There are a plethora of skills that mostly include soft skills rather than hard skills. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list.

1. Understanding Product Management & building a Product Sense: This is essentially the top skill you will need to acquire. Entry-level roles expect you to understand where a Product Manager fits in the organization, what are their roles and responsibilities and how do they function. Again, this differs for different organizations but various blogs and books will give you a fair idea about this topic. Watching Product Management interviews can be a great starting point as they mostly cover the entire overview of a Product problem (Exponent YT has a variety of interview cases on Product Management to help Product aspirants).
2. Empathy: The major part of a Product Manager’s job is to get into the user’s shoes and think about their overall journey — what the users think & how they feel when they are using the product. PMs are also expected to figure out what else the customers want from the product that will eventually delight them. A product manager has to be free from biases and ship products that will satisfy (and delight) the user base.
3. Business Acumen: PMs are known as the mini CEOs of the product (there’s a huge debate over this topic but let’s just assume that they are). Therefore, these mini CEOs must have a clear and detailed understanding of the business they are shipping products for. However, at the time you are interviewing you are only expected to know about the business, their work, and an understanding of their products. Also, note that the requirements for entry-level PMs are different for every company. APM requirements at AWS will starkly differ from APM requirements at Uber. You will have to study about each company and the products you would be interviewing with.
4. Communicate: A PM is a connecting thread between various BUs of the company. As far as I have observed, it’s not that all PMs have to be outgoing and extroverted but they are expected to have clear communication with various stakeholders of the company including the tech team, UX and design team, marketing team, CXOs, etc. One should be ready to identify and communicate with the right set of customers — for whom the product is being built. When you are designing a park you will have to learn to communicate with dog walkers as well as athletes (and many more).
5. Leadership: PMs usually need to take initiative and lead conversations at a basic level. Experience in leading a cross-functional team can be a plus but it is not mandatory.
6. Technical Skills: When I was conducting my research about breaking into product management for people who had no prior formal product experience, I found out that most companies don’t require hardcore technical skills (you won’t be expected to write code, design systems, maintain databases) but everyone expects a basic understanding of data analysis because most companies like to make data-driven decisions for their products. Technical skills to an extent where you can converse with folks from the tech team are always helpful.
7. UI/UX: There will be instances where you will need to pictures your thoughts using various wire-framing tools. Wire-framing and the ability to build mockups are also desirable as they help you showcase your skills to potential employers either during interviews or various cases of product tear-downs. Some companies have a take-home assignment in their recruitment process which will require you to create some mockups as part of the exercise.

Preparation

Product books: These can be a great starting point. A book like Inspired (by Marty Cagen, though written for PMs but can prove extremely helpful for beginners as well) covers a lot of things that one needs to do as a Product Manager.

My Top 10 Books for PMs

Blogs: Follow newsletters of all the Product leaders you can find who actively write in this domain. Some names that are a MUST — Shreyas Doshi’s Twitter & LinkedIn, Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter, Marty Cagan’s blog, Ravi Mehta’s newsletter.

Mock Interviews: These helped me the most. When I was figuring out about PMing, I was extensively watching PM interviews on Exponent’s YT channel. They have majorly helped me shape my understanding of Product Management. They are fun to watch and walk you over what real PM interviews look like. You can find a peer who is also preparing for Product roles and do mocks.

Exponent

Peers & Network: This goes without saying. Take full advantage of various networking tools like LinkedIn and join Product communities. Reach out to product leaders on how you did a teardown of their product and what were your findings. Please note that you might receive a single reply out of the hundreds to leaders you are shooting your cold messages to or worse, you might not receive any. Keep trying. You can also reach out to peers who have recently joined as an entry-level PM and ask about their journey.

Showcasing your skills

This is the most difficult step if you have no previous product experience. As I mentioned earlier, most companies prefer Persona 1 and Persona 2 for their entry-level PM roles and hence, think that people belonging to Persona 3 aren’t a good match. But, there are some ways you can show that you can be a great PM if given a chance.

1. Work on a side hustle: This can include anything from creating content and scaling it up, working on business ideas, building an app, and launching it. If you have no “real” product experience, this can be very advantageous to you as it shows that you worked on your idea from scratch — ideation, competitive analysis, working with a team (or alone) for designing & coding, and then successfully launching it. Having something tangible on your resume that you can demonstrate to your potential employer usually initiates an interesting conversation.
2. Look out for opportunities where you can improve an existing product: This is also one of the favorite questions of interviewers during product interviews. Think about how you can add a new feature to a product that you use daily and how it would improve that product. Work on it end-to-end. Prepare a deck that includes a problem summary, your idea, mockups, GTM strategy among other things. Next, send this to product managers/ leaders who are responsible for these products. Tell them that you are an aspiring PM looking out for opportunities and ask them for a review of your deck and how you could have improved. Most of the time, they’ll redirect you to a place they think you will benefit from.
3. Participate in Product tear-downs: Many product communities conduct monthly product tear-downs which offer product roles for the winners. Participate in these tear-downs frequently. Even if you are not able to make it in the top quartile or so, you’ll get to learn a lot and improve your product sense.
4. Personal branding: When I was preparing for product roles, one mistake I committed was not being serious about the potential of personal branding. I have seen a lot of people get immense benefits from this approach. Document your learnings and post them somewhere you think you can make potential employers see your work. Put your product decks here, write about your learnings, etc.

Landing interviews (Resume, interview preparation, and questions)

This part was where I lost my hopes of getting a product role many times. Out of hundreds of job applications that I was filling, I was getting rejected by every single one of them. I thought of changing my path to a product role by thinking of getting an analyst role first and then transitioning to a product role (I had seen many peers doing this) but something stopped me from doing this.

I realized very late that reaching out to product leaders for their advice is very essential in one’s journey of finding a product role. Once I started having these conversations, they made me see my mistakes and I rewrote my resume from scratch and changed my strategy of showcasing my skills (I wasn’t following the steps that I wrote above in my initial days). Once I corrected these mistakes, I asked for referrals from people by presenting my case and showing them what I can bring to the table. I failed to convert these referrals to interviews many times but this made me hopeful that though it will take time but if I keep trying, I might succeed. Eventually, I saw one opportunity where I was lucky enough to convert a referral from a friend to an interview and that interview to a full-time position.

From what I have observed and from my own experience, it takes about 4–5 months of preparation for a persona 3 personnel to land an interview. For Persona 1 and 2, it comes a bit early in most cases. But whatever time it takes, believe me, it is worth spending your efforts on.

All the best!