How to Break Into Product Management

 
Product management can be a rewarding career move–but how do you make the shift? You may have a background in design, marketing, sales or engineering–all great foundations for a product manager position. Next, it’s a matter of reapplying your skills and experience in a new way, and filling in any gaps. Finally, you’ll need to win an opportunity for a company to invest in you by offering you your first product management job.   

It can feel overwhelming, as you’ll need to understand new product management tools, frameworks and integrate the best practices into your organization. Or you may be the first ever product manager in your organization, and you’ll be building the discipline at your company from the ground up.

Either way, I’m here to help you along the way. Start by taking these five steps toward your first product management role.

1. Teach Yourself the Tools of the Trade

It will be key to understand frameworks and tools product managers use every day. As you become more familiar with these, you will know when to use them. There are all kinds of books on these topics and I can also help train or coach you. Here are some frameworks to know:

_^■  Lean Start-up 
_^■  Design Thinking
_^■  Jobs To Be Done
_^■  Financial Modeling
_^■  Product Development Stage Gate
_^■  Business Model Framework
_^■  Go-To-Market Strategies

These tools will help you answer important questions about how to approach challenges and develop proof of concepts.

_^■  Market Research
_^■  Competitive Landscape
_^■  Product Lifecycle
_^■  Product Roadmap
_^■  User Journeys
_^■  User Persona 
_^■  Stakeholder Maps

2. Learn from Others

There’s only so much you can learn on your own. Absorb as much information you can from peers and seek any educational opportunities that you can afford to invest in from time and financial standpoints. Depending on your current level of skill, you may consider a certification in product management, or you may want to pursue a Masters in Business Administration tailored to the knowledge base you’ll need to grow into a product management role.

Don’t have time or money for an MBA right now? A mentor is the perfect real world way to learn. It’s also flexible. Find an experienced product manager who would be willing to mentor you. Offer them coffee or lunch at regular intervals (much less expensive than a college course!) and try to bring focus to each get together. Have a topic to discuss and questions ready to go so you can make the most of your time. Bonus: this will also help you build a relationship. Nurturing a strong professional network can open you up to a world of opportunities–maybe even your first product management next job.

3. Cultivate Your Soft Skills

Your interaction across the organization will empower you to succeed. Here are some soft skills to focus on first.

• Communication: Develop strong communication skills as product managers need to convey their ideas clearly to cross-functional teams. Over time, you’ll understand the nuances between “marketing speak” and “engineering speak” and translate between the two.
• Leadership: Hone your leadership abilities, as product managers often lead teams without direct authority. That means that you’ll need to get people to follow your lead because they want to.
• Influence: Lead with patience and desire to learn from others so you can influence at an individual level. 
• Presentation: Develop presentations that tell a compelling story and bring in your audience into the journey of developing the right product for customers. This is a professional role, but moving people to action takes a truly propelling proposition and emotional motivation too.
   

4. Understand the Market:

The market will drive your products’ success. You can’t control the market, but you can control what you understand about it so that you can plan accordingly. Get acquainted with these concepts and study the market in which you’re interested in pursuing.

• Market Knowledge: Gain an in-depth understanding of the market by knowing the trends, customer behavior and the competition.
• Listen to Customers: Since you personally are not selling anything to customers, they may open up to you about their needs and desires. Be prepared to spend time with the largest customers to form a partnership that may extend to testing prototypes in the future.
• Observe Customers’ Behaviors: Customers can’t always articulate what they do and why. Prepare to spend time shadowing them to understand the steps they take, their interactions with others and how they use technology. 
  
  

5. On-the-Job Learning:

Once you secure your first role, that’s when your education truly begins. You can learn, apply and understand what works and what doesn’t with the products you now manage. Continually look for ways you can add value for your team and across the organization. 

Schedule regular meetings with different executives to continually learn what the organization may need from you as a product manager. Since product management is central to multiple departments, it may be helpful to have regular meetings with directors to talk about product management and hear feedback. If product management is new to your company, seek the advice from leaders to align business and role expectations.

Looking for more help to grow as a product manager? Here are some ways I can help.

Posted in Starting out in Product Management  | Tagged Professional Development, Skills, Behavioral Changes

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