The journey to becoming a Product Manager is often unconventional, but it becomes all you focus when you determine it is for you. Jon Morgan from Google discussed the two most common paths, MBA and startups, while also exploring alternate opportunities that have proven equally as successful. He included real world examples that focused on the unique benefits of each option, with an opportunity to answer your questions. Everyone's path is unique, and there is no one right way but there is a way that may be better for your situation.
15. 1. Be well-versed in the essentials
2. Practice your listening skills
3. Learn how to write code
4. Prioritize prioritizing
5. Demonstrate UX experience
6. Learn how to lead
7. Hone your analytical thinking skills
8. Consider how you would improve a product in
your current company
“
The best PMs I have worked with have mastered the
core competencies, have a high EQ, and work for the
right company for them. Beyond shipping new
features on a regular cadence and keeping the peace
between engineering and the design team, the best
PMs create products with strong user adoption that
have exponential revenue growth and perhaps even
disrupt an industry.
“
What about Product Management?
16. 1. Learn the skills
2. Build a
product portfolio
19. Doing Everything I do everything….product development,
marketing, finance, hiring, legal, pr, web, crm,
email mang, fulfillment, etc...
-Emily
Fedwell
Founder & CEO
Everyone has a limited amount of time and the
moment you figure out how to say no is the
moment you can really start to make a
difference.
-Cody
Facebook PM
Understand
what is takes
Prioritize
Prioritizing
Saying No Learn what you love
21. Be a leader I went to business school because I was
interested in understanding people more.
Being a PM you need to be able to form strong
relationships with people and earn their trust,
allowing you to know who to bring into the
right meeting.
-Sierra
American Well
PM Director
This is another thing that Product People
*MUST* do well, is make sure they feel in tune
with every single group. Everyone is important
and since you own product and businesses are
built around products, you will need their help
at some point.
-Clinton
Avis PM
Lead the
conversation
Understand the
People
Learn from family/
friends
Get people to like
you
23. Resourcefulness My role just evolved this way. I started as a
software engineer but we didn’t have a PM. I
filled the role and my managers kept giving
me more and more until I didn’t have time to
code only focus on product design work.
-Or
Google PM
Any org that rejected me only made me stronger.
Manufacturers dumped me leading to 10 months of
no product/sales. This lead me to figure out how to
stay in the game and helped me to solve some issue
the original recipe had.
-Emily
Fedwell
Founder & CEO
Being told no Life or death
Use your creativity
25. Communicating & Selling I realized that I was in a position long enough
that things in my head were no longer in my
head and I needed to write down more and
more so I can reference.
-Jesse
Kubos
PM Director
Skills came from my sales background, as PM
you are selling stuff and this gives you alot of
experience to actually tailor your message to
audience, how do you figure that out quickly.
-Mallory
Wayfair PM
Business school and consulting job taught me
how to communicate for emotional response.
Bringing users into the conversation usually
does it.
-Jeroen
Google PM
Pick your
Medium
Convincing the
execs
Door to Door &
Cold Calls
Sharing ideas
remotely
27. Look at the Meta
Make sure to think about the Meta. Ensure you
always surface to look around and see how
your project relates to the greater good (does
it still). Bigger than your project make sure
that your team and boss are also benefiting
from the projects success.
-Cody
Facebook PM
I felt like being a PM means bringing all aspects
of the job together. It is challenging to bring
people together and work between different
teams. I like facilitating these relationships and
bringing joy to people's work.
-Sierra
American Well
PM Director
Push up Focus on org
health
Check in every
month
29. Understand the User
Running a startup focused around project
management made it critical to understand
the users needs so we could help them reduce
costs without firing people. We talked with
customers at every company to be able to
tailor our product to their needs.
-Jeroen
Google PM
Working as a Corporate systems engineer gave
me the experience to understand customer
problems and route them to a PM to get fixed.
This was very reactive and often changes did
not happen, that is what led me to push hard to
become a PM.
-Ryan
DellEMC PM
Support calls
Cold Calls
Raw user
research
31. Be Creative
I wanted to be entrepreneurial and business
school gave me a lower risk time to take
chances with a side business around people
who had similar risk tolerance.
-Evan
HireME
COO
Working with Ocean Spray allowed me to get
experience with brand management, but my
husband helped me move to PM as it was a way
to get products to market faster.
-Mallory
Wayfair PM
Plan startup
business
strategy
Solve large company
problems safely
33. Beat imposter syndrome
If I cannot communicate the ideas to the team
then we can’t make products. I feel that I am
solidly ok at it now, but am always improving
and trying new things.
-Jesse
Kubos
PM Director
Business school gives you a safe environment to
experiment and get out of your shell. You have
a level of protection from edu setting in
conversations with executives which induces
confidence. Everything is about learning
overall, and confidence comes from knowing
you dont know all the answers.
-Sebastian
SunVessel
Founder & CEO
Meeting
Milestones
Presenting to
big names
35. Startup
▹ Build Product Portfolio
▹ Network of specializations
▹ Understand many roles
▹ Get down and dirty with the users
▹ Learn the hard way & find
solutions
36. MBA
▹ Credibility for Career Switcher
▹ Safety net to push yourself
▹ Network pre, during and post
school
▹ Confidence booster
▹ Push thought process upstream
37. Key Takeaways
▹ MBA is as much about networking as it is
education
▹ Startups foster a large, but often unfocused,
range of experiences and opportunities
▹ Planning two steps ahead is often the most
valuable
39. Part-time Product Management Courses in
San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles,
New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago,
Denver, London, Toronto
www.productschool.com
Notas del editor
When you checked in tonight, you got an email inviting you to join our slack community
In that community, we have 15k product people who have come through different companies like google, facebook, uber
Sharing information about events, job offers from our partner companies, and valuable online content
Please check your email and join - it’s free
In our PM Course, we teach how to build products and how to get a job as a software product manager
All our classes are 2 months, part time, and compatible with full time jobs. We have two options, Tues/Thurs in the evening and Saturdays in the morning
Instructors- are senior level product managers from companies like Google, FB, Uber, etc
In addition to our PM class, we offer our Coding for Managers class
Also two months and part time tailored for professionals who don’t come from a traditional engineering background
The goal of this course is not to make you a software engineer, but to give you enough technical background to build a fully functional website and pass the technical interview
Similar to our coding course, we also offer our Data Analytics for Managers
Tailored for people who don’t have a technical background but to give them enough knowledge of analytics to become product managers
Also two months, compatible with full time jobs
The goal of the course is not to make you a data scientist, but to make you technical enough to understand web analytics, learn SQL, and machine learning concepts
We are also live streaming our event to our online audience
If you want to share, please tweet @productschool and #prodmgmt for a free ticket to our next event
Hello everyone, today I hope to share with you all some of the insights that I have learned and those I know have learned going through startups or business school which can be valuable to get into Product management and to be a great PM
WPI - Project Based Learning
Babson- #1 entrepreneurship 24 years
Si Device - Startup in energy management systems for hotels/ offices at the early stages of iot
QinetiQ- Military Robotics understanding the most process you could ever have (good balance to startup where you can literatlly have none)
Google- Worked as both a software and a hardware PM, Started off working in internet security and transitioned in the HW PA working on large screen devices and the products that help support them. The team the just released the pixelbook.
Now who in the audience is an engineer? [raises own hand] I am an engineer by training as well.
So when deciding to be an engineer the path to get there for most was fairly standardized.
You get into college, study for 4ish years, graduate, land a job
And along the way you may have a summer internship, or try something on the side or have a standard summer job
While some of these options vary that seems to be the standard path that many of you in the room took or have seen others take in there lives.
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Who in the audience is in marketing?
While that is a different major entirely, the same high level education path exists as a common way to get into that field
Sure some of the opportunities outside of work may change or there may be increasing importance of the self starting or the social media following or the metrics
But at a high level the education path is well known and often very similar across established majors
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But what about product management. Before diving into the options here let’s talk about the phases everyone in this room has either gone through or is going through.
Phase 1: Realizing you want to be a product manager
Phase 2: Doing everything in your power to figure out a path there (and never giving up)
Phase 3: Landing your first product manager job
Talk about my phase 1
Talk about some of the other phase 1s from interviews
-Even, Cody, Oooooo
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So now that you have decided product management is for you, the natural inclination is to look for the traditional education options. Unfortunately when you look down this path there isnt a PM major that you can go try to get…
So naturally everyone is still determined to become a PM and the look towards the internet
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Googling what is a Product Manager or how to become a product manager yields a plethora of descriptions and it is almost overwhelming. From ads for online classrooms like general aseembly to the product school, or how to guides claiming to have the answers there is so many suggestions out there...
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In trying to distill all the information about what makes a great pm and how to become one, we all gravitate towards the brands that we trust. For me that starts with Harvard business review and in this article it outlines what it takes to become a great product manager, they call our specifically having mastered “core competencies”, having high Emotional intelligence and finding the right company fit. That all and dandy but really doesn't help us move forward, so we move onto another reputable source with forbes, who has the 8 tips for landing your first pm job. Hitting on all the classics of coding, soft skills, ux, analytics...pretty much alittle bit of everything.
Now I have read a bunch of these in the past and newer ones while prepping for this talk and what i have found is that the can be distilled into two main buckets which need to be filled to some level in order to get a PM job.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2017/01/30/8-tips-for-landing-your-first-product-manager-role/
https://hbr.org/2017/12/what-it-takes-to-become-a-great-product-manager
The first is to learn the skils, now this may sound super general but everyone has a different variety of experiences which can make them a great PM. Some may be technically super strong and some may have amazing emotional intelligence or soft skills, while someone else may have a great marketing mind or the discipline to bring ux standards into everything. The skills are vast and each person will pick a different set which they feel makes them a great PM.
The second which is often harder to swallow is to build a product portfolio. As many of us have experienced or are experiencing its hard to get a PM job without already having a PM job. Often the hardest part is simple proving in some way that you can manage a product, no matter how big or small.
I am going to use this framework to dive into the specific skills that can be developed through startups and business school. When I first sat down to pull this deck together I was looking at my experiences and realized that while I have stories to share and lessons learned, often the most important are those you learn from others in your network. So I reached out….
The information that I will present comes from not only my experiences but the experiences of those in my network that took the time to share. I was able to talk with 13 PMs with backgrounds such as Software engineer, marketing manager, CEO, founder, non profit, government, sales, and more. Of the 13, 6 were engineers by training, 9 were directly involved with startups and 8 have their MBAs. Each of them has a unique story and I hope to help portray some of the similarities in the following slides.
Started off career in Engineering working on robots and autonomous cars for the military. But I kept running into a frustration, that frustration was that I didnt always agree with what was being built for our customers and I didnt have a “seat at the table” to provide input that would help change what we were making. I was working directly with our users to make tweaks to requirements, but often we would realize things could be done differently and there was limited ability for me as an engineer to cause that change.
At the same time I was talking with my buddy MIke from undergrad around the idea of IOT and power management to reduce the waist of phantom power (the power that chargers use when ur not pluggedinto them). We decided that there was a bigger question around iot for businesses that could be solved and started si devices (while we both were working).
Now we were both engineers that aspired to be more. Mike was alittle rough around the edges sometimes and I managed to be the person that talked to everyone. I knew that I could probably push forward and “make it work” but that there were things I could learn better.. Thats when I started to think about an MBA….and I was focused on only one MBA, getting an MBA from Babson. The number 1 MBA for entrepreneurship for over 2 decades. Now deciding to do a startup and MBA at the same time is something a few people I talked with chose and it came down to the ability to take a risk in a “safe environement”.
While I have a bunch to share about both of these experiences there is one other thing I would like to call out here that is potentially unique to my situation vs others that have gone the business school route. I went to business school full time for 2 years and the summer between the years when many were getting internships I was able to get my startup accepted into an accelerator program called the “summer venture program”. That experience was amazing and I probably learned more in those 3 months than the rest of my career and also met some amazing people.
And finally after business school I was asked to come help lead a commercial robotics division at a my old military robotics company. This opportunity was awesome and we really were pushing the company to diversify their products, but the CEO changed and a focus on diversification became a focus on expanding military programs. Needless to say my time there was done(on my own decision) and my job hunt quickly lead me to Google. Fast forward 3 years and I am here talking to you :)
I will use this timeline to share experiences that myself or others have experiences across these paths and how they apply to being a PM.
The first skillset I want to share is that of Doing Everything...now yes that does sound daunting….
Doing Everything (Startup)
Understand what it takes
Prioritize Prioritizing
Saying No
Learn what you love
Be a leader (Startup and MBA)
Get people to like you
Understand all the verticals so they feel heard
Family
Resourcefulness (startup)
Being told no
Communicating & selling (both)
Verbal
Written
Internal
External
Meta (MBA)
Engineers dive deep, MBA teaches you to look up and push up
In startups you need the user focus and what needs are being solved, but sometiem can get lost in the tech
User Research (startup)
Cold calls, on site visits, deep user research
Creativity (Both)
Case Competitions
Startup Planning
Beat Imposter Syndrome (Both)
Startup: Success
Business School Is pushed
Startup
Build Product Portfolio
Network
Open mind to non-conventional bakgroudn (need deeper network to get in door tho, know your name)
MBA
Network
Safety net and risk aversion
Name Credibility for career switchesr
It is one of the quickest ways to really refine some core PM skills which often will take years to hone in a established company.
Doing Everything (Startup)
Understand what it takes & Learn what you love
As a PM one of the hardest things to do is to ensure you can relate and understand what the cross functional teams needs are and the level of difficulty that need will be. What better way to get this understanding than to have exposure to all of the different tasks that may need to be completed.
For many startup founders or early employees this will mean you are doing things out of your wheelhouse. For Emily this meant that she was doing everything from strategizing and fundraising to licking the stamps to fulfill the orders. She learned that she loved the product development and is working to optimizer her work flow so she can do more of it.
Prioritize Prioritizing & Saying No
In the list of things that must be done, there is always another request or another deliverable that is asked of a PM. In a startup you are often faced with the task of do I do this task or do I try to do it and stretch myself to thin and in turn not be able to suport the whole company.
With my startup I have a somber story to share which is probably the toughest and most important decision I made when it comes to saying no. INSERT BACK STORY
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The next valuable PM skill which can come from both startup and business school is the concept of being a leader...
Often PMs are defined as the CEO of a product, quarterback, cat herder….while I dont want to dive into which analogy is most appropriate there is a common thread through them all. The idea of being the leader, the person that people look to for guidance and direction.
Be a leader (Startup and MBA)
Understand the People
In a startup you are committed to not only your users, but you are committed to your team. As clint points out the success of the product relys on the ability of cross functional teams to work together towards a common goal. I would add on top of this that understanding your user requires a similar skill and is often the one that gets all the attention here.
Lead the conversation
The standard be a leader comment is often to lead the conversation. One of the things that business school does extremely well is force you to step up as a leader and work to build confidence in that leadership. Many of the projects that are done in business school are with external companys (view as consulting project) and each of these projects allows another opportunity to lead. For example I was able to lead a team which worked with fraunhoffer integrating AR into their green building in Boston to show unique building techniques. Effectively being a PM for this consulting project.
Learn from family/friends & Get People to like you
I have to call out the ability for everyone to learn though life experiences around how to be a leader and how to get people to like you haha. The biggest one for me that I cant say enough good things about is the fact that I am an eagle scout.
Looking at the work that is required in a scrappy startup we can often talk about the resourcefulness as a skill even the most veteran PM will used to get shit done
In a startup you are always out of time, out of resources, out of money and it is on you or your team to find creative solutions that challenge the ways things are traditionally done.
Resourcefulness (startup)
Being told no
Emily shared with me some of the aspects that made her a better CEO for her startup. She told me that anyone that rejected her made her stronger. She had distributors drop her in the 11hr and manufacturers go back on contracts, but she never stopped pushing forward.
Life or Death
Sometimes these rejections lead to a life or death moment for your product. I will continue to share Emily’s story here as I just am so excited to see where she is going with fedwell. Having a national distribution channel decide no after months of work at the last minute really makes you rethink what your sales plan is. Yes she still had sales channels but this was the big break.
Use your creativity
Pulling her wits about her, she used her creativity to figure out another path. This push has lead her to partnering up and creating a entrepreneur sales marketplace in boston based around the idea of multiple startups selling together.
Communication & sales are the skills that every PM will fall back on as their key skills, ensuring everyone is on the same page and people are behind their vision….This skill can be developed through both startups and business school, but in unique ways...
Being the communicator, the translator is key to being a successful PM...and selling these ideas both internal and external will lead to a successful product.
Communicating & selling (both)
Pick your medium
When trying to communicate understanding the right medium be it email, meeting , pamphlet, etc will bring success. Jeroen shared with me that he uses skills learned from both business school and his job in corporate strategy to create empathy in communications. Recently he brought users to talk at a conference to really portray the pains they had such that the team could see why they were working so hard.
Convincing the execs
Some say influencing up and communicating to execs is learned over time, and while that is true there is a base level learning that can be taught. In business school there are often classes which focus on this, for example I took a management consulting class were one of the key skills taught was understanding different types of executives and the topics that they were concerned about most and how to relate. Seems like something you could read online but I promise you having a class in this is priceless.
Door to Door
A skill that can not be taught is sales and how to tailor your message to get through all the Nos or slammed doors or hung up phone calls. Working in a startup will undoubtably give you an opportunity to experience this. I know that I have done thousands of cold calls and Mallory has done Door to door sales, and we both love to share stories about how trying new things and understanding what people were looking for has made us better product managers both for selling ideas internally and working with marketing to sell the products externally.
Sharing Ideas Remotely
One of the last communications skills which i want to cal out is the ability to share ideas remotely. Mastering the written form of communication, be it email or documents is critical in the global society we work in. Jesse shared this as referencing ideas not only from past but globally is simply easy to do from written text (and bonus is you never forget a document)
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Often junior pms or engineers who are transitioning will find themselves diving super deep in the details, and one of the skills that is learned quick is to look at the meta reasons why something is going on. While this is a skill that can be learned through experience it often is quicker to understand these questions through schooling...
Meta (Both)
Push up
Engineers are taught to dive deep and get to the root of a problem then creat a solution and execute. Whiel this is great from problem solving, without undersanding why a problem is being solved can lead to unnecssary problems or worse the wrong problem being solves. An MBA teaches you to look up and push up. A skill that was taught in many class was to ask the question why. The most meta of these questions for most companies is “how do I create shareholder value”
Focus on org health
Now pushing up and focusing on pushing forward is important but without a happy team nothing can be built. Cody summarizes this well. You need to understand not only how this benefits your user, but how it benefits your boss and your team and yourself. Without everyone having an incentive thing will not move.
Check in every month
Another thing that is often forgotten about is to take a step back every month or so and check in. In business school they teach a concept called the balanced scorecard. This approach sets areas of focus and milestones, but most importantly requires a check in on a regular basis to understand how things are going. In startups you are pushing so hard often this is overlooked.
You all knew that this was coming. The tag line of any PM is understanding the user...
While many schools will claim they can teach user research, anyone who has done it can affirm that you need to actually try it to fully understand it. Startups create a great opportunity to dive deep on user research...
User Research (startup)
Raw user Research
First and foremost direct user research and working with users will help you to understand how to not only ask questions, but learn user needs. A startup lives or dies based on its users so there is no way you will not be workign closely with users at a startup.
Cold calls & Support Calls
Indirect user interaction is also incredibly useful. I touched on cold calls as it relates to sales, so want to dive deeper on support calls. Often in a startup everyone is on deck to be support (at least in early stages) and having to deal with confused or angry customers will add a level of realism and importance for what you do. Ryna shared that working on the support team prior to going into product management helped him to understand the gaps in the products he was working on and really see the value these products were and could be bringing to the users.
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While creativity comes from within, both startups and business school can help to encourage you to be creative.
Creativity (Both)
Plan startup business strategy
Solve large company problems safely
Case competitions
Consulting project talk about JMCFE
An area that is often not talked about until someone has landed a PM job is the idea of imposter syndrome. Many PMs who are great at their job will have a feeling of doubt that they are doing a good job or that they should even be in the job at all. Both startups and business school can help to curve this feeling in unique ways...
Beat Imposter Syndrome (Both)
Startup: Success
Business School Is pushed
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As you can see there are benefits from both startups and business school which span a variety of skills. At the end of the day the path that you chose will be based on what skills you think you need to develop and the opportunities that present itself. To summarize...