Tag: hiring

How to get a job in Product Management

How to get a job in Product Management

Wherever product managers gather, by far the most common question I get is “how do I become a product manager?”  No surprise there – product management is a highly visible, intensely exciting, and enormously creative job – but it’s not the kind of job you can land straight out of school, through a coding camp, or via an executive MBA program.

Still, people find their way to product management from a diverse set of backgrounds, and as a veteran of the industry who has hired many, many PMs, I’d like to demystify the path to product.

So, straight from a senior leader in product: here’s how to get a job as a product manager.

1. Master Your Current Role

No one starts out as a product manager. It’s a role that comes after you’ve developed expertise in another area of product delivery. Whether you’re in business strategy, marketing, support, customer success, development, or testing, your current domain will form the first pillar of competency upon which your product management career will be built. The key is to master what you’re doing now. This not only builds your visibility organizationally but also provides you with a core of experiences you can lean on as you engage with other functions of the business.

Pro tip: While mastering your current role, it’s also essential to gain as much exposure to customers as possible. Product management is a customer-centric role, and the more you understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and behavior, the better equipped you’ll be to make decisions that will drive product success. Seek opportunities to interact with customers directly, whether through support calls, user interviews, or market research. This firsthand experience – and the customer anecdotes! – will be invaluable as you make the case for your move into product management.

2. Understand your Market

One of the critical shifts in moving to product management is transitioning from understanding individual customers to understanding the broader market. 

Many successful product managers got started by going deep on specific customer problems, capturing the critical nuance that a surface overview would miss. (This is why many product managers have a sales engineering background—they’re professionally competent at understanding and articulating customer needs.)

However, to be an effective product manager, you need to go beyond individual customer problems and think about the market as a whole. What are the common pain points across different customer segments? What gaps exist in the market that your product can fill? Understanding the market means seeing the bigger picture, anticipating the needs of potential customers, and articulating that market understanding in a clear and consistent manner.

Product managers aren’t the voice of the customer; they are the voice of the market. You’ll be advocating for the needs of communities of customers and ensuring that the product serves the broader market effectively. This requires getting away from over-reliance on your knowledge of a specific customer, and instead developing a broad-based understanding that is backed up by data and market analysis.

Start talking about the parts of your market you can reach today, the ones you can reach tomorrow with some new capabilities, and your estimates of the size of the populations you aim to address – this will show that you’re working with a growth mindset.

3. Focus on the Future, Not Just the Present

It’s easy to point out what’s not working in a product—missing features, bugs, usability issues—but that’s not where the true value of a product manager lies. The real challenge is identifying the right next steps for product development. What should the team build next, and why?

As a product manager, your job will be to prioritize the most critical features that will drive the product forward, and to say no to all the tempting features that aren’t strategically relevant. 

This involves understanding the product’s long-term vision and aligning it with current market needs. It’s about making tough decisions, often with incomplete information, and justifying those decisions with clear reasoning and data. Being able to articulate why one particular feature should be built next over all the others is a key skill that separates great product managers from the rest, and demonstrating that skill will put you on the product manager shortlist.

4. Use Data to Back Up Your Decisions

Storytelling is a powerful tool in product management, but it’s even more compelling when backed by data. While anecdotes and personal experiences can help illustrate a point, quantitative data provides the evidence needed to make a convincing case. Whether you’re estimating the potential market size for a new feature or analyzing user behavior, data is your ally.

However, you will rarely be able to get all the data you want, or as much precision as you’d like. Realistically, estimates and extrapolations are usually sufficient to guide decision-making, as long as you’re transparent about the assumptions and guesswork involved. The goal is to use data to support your ideas and show that your decisions are grounded in reality, not just intuition.  

Demonstrate that you bring the data to the discussion, that you’re transparent about what you know and what you’re extrapolating, and you’ll quickly garner the trust of those around you.

5. Socialize Your Ideas and Seek Feedback

Product management is not a solitary role. It requires collaboration and partnership with multiple stakeholders across the business. One of the best ways to ensure your ideas gain traction is to socialize them early and often. Share your thoughts with colleagues, seek feedback, and listen to different perspectives. This not only helps refine your ideas but also builds support across the organization.

Getting feedback is particularly important because it helps you see potential blind spots and improves the quality of your decision-making. Moreover, when you have the backing of other teams, it’s easier to push your ideas through and get the necessary resources to bring them to life.  

Work your internal network, expand it where possible, and when it comes time to make an internal transfer into the PM organization, your name is likely to come up from multiple corners.

6. Be Bold in Advocating for Your Ideas

Product management is not for the timid. If you have a vision or a strong belief in a particular direction for the product, you need to make your case and be willing to stand by it. This doesn’t mean being inflexible, but rather being confident in your ideas and advocating for them assertively.

Being bold also means taking calculated risks. Product management involves making decisions with imperfect information, and sometimes you’ll need to take a leap of faith. The key is to have a well-thought-out rationale for your decisions and to be prepared to defend them.  

A reputation for ambitious moves will definitely get you noticed, if those moves are well-founded.

7. Know When to Let Go

Not every idea will gain traction, and as a product manager, you need to know when to let an idea go. It can be frustrating to see a concept you believe in not getting the support it needs, but persistence isn’t always the best approach. Executives and leaders are often aware of your ideas, even if they don’t immediately act on them.

If you’ve made your case and it’s clear that your idea isn’t going to move forward, it’s better to let it go and focus on your next concept. Patience is a critical trait in product management, and sometimes the best course of action is to wait for the right opportunity rather than pushing too hard.  

Demonstrate your ability to work professionally, to pick your battles, and to change your position based on new information, and you’ll be modeling the ideal product manager mindset for those around you.

8. Be Mostly Right

Finally, one of the most challenging aspects of product management is the need to be right most of the time. There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and every decision carries significant consequences. While it’s impossible to be right 100% of the time, great product managers have a knack for making the right calls more often than not.

This ability often comes from experience, intuition, and a deep understanding of both the market and the product. It’s about making informed decisions, learning from mistakes, and continuously improving your judgment.

However, it’s crucial not to confuse the need to be right with the need to be seen as right. Product management is about making the best decisions for the product and the company, not about ego or personal validation. The focus should always be on achieving the best outcomes, even if it means admitting when you’re wrong.

To sum this all up: becoming a product manager is a journey that involves mastering your current role, understanding the market, and demonstrating leadership potential for product development.

Landing a job in product means showing you can make data-driven decisions, socialize your ideas, be bold in your vision, and know when to let go. If you take these eight steps to heart, you will position yourself as a strong candidate for a product management role, and you’ll be on the fast-track for the next step in your career!

Why Dual CTO/CPO Roles Are a Terrible Idea

Why Dual CTO/CPO Roles Are a Terrible Idea

Yesterday, I had a chat with a recruiter about a hybrid, dual-titled CTO/CPO role. It wasn’t the first time—in the past few months, I’ve spoken with several CEOs and executive recruiters on the hunt for hybrid CMO/CPOs or CTO/CPOs. It’s a growing trend (see here: Leadership Revolution: C-Suites Journey into Hybrid Territory and Combining CTO and CPO Roles).

And it’s a terrible idea.

Why the strong reaction to combining engineering and product or marketing and product into a dual-titled executive seat? I’ve actually worked with and for executives in hybrid roles—a CMO who doubled as CPO, a CTO/CPO, and even a CRO/CMO. None of these setups worked well, and none lasted more than a year before either the executive left or the role devolved back into its original, distinct forms.

Turning that role into a dual-titled mashup

There’s a solid business reason why product, marketing, and engineering need separate leaders—the tension between these roles keeps messaging accurate, roadmaps realistic, and prioritization ruthless. Combine two functions under one leader with a single set of goals, and the balance can easily tip.

You see this in “founder syndrome” when startup CEOs hold onto product ownership for too long. Since the CEO always wins debates, marketing and engineering end up taking a backseat, often to the detriment of the product. Similarly, an engineering leader who also manages product often creates roadmaps that lack ambition and focus too much on technology iteration. A marketing leader who owns product is likely to produce appealing roadmaps that are unachievable or lack a deep understanding of the user.

This isn’t always catastrophic—plenty of healthy organizations have product under engineering or marketing. But the real issue for me is acknowledging the need for a CPO and then turning that role into a dual-titled mashup with another existing role.

What’s the function of a C-level role?

Let’s take a step back. What’s the function of a C-level role? Throughout my career, I’ve seen a common organizational theme: C-level roles are about organizational priorities, giving a function a seat at the table when company strategy and goals are being set. C-level leaders advocate for their function’s needs, commit to goals and metrics, and allocate resources to achieve those goals.

C-level roles are not about promoting a great VP, or indicating membership in an executive staff, or attracting specific talent. Choosing which C-level roles exist in a company is about what priorities are critical to the organization at a given stage of its growth.

And: the typical C-level roles in an organization evolve over time. This can be seen in the rise of the Chief Revenue Officer in the late 2000s (combining new business sales and customer retention), the emergence of the Chief Customer Experience Officer in the early 2010s, and the rise of the Chief Data Officer in the late 2010s (highlighting the critical role of data and intelligence).

When one executive wears two titles, it’s impossible to recreate the healthy tension between two separate roles.

Individual C-level leaders create clear priorities and ownership within the executive team. But when one executive wears two titles, it’s impossible to recreate the healthy tension between two separate roles—one role will always dominate, lacking the balance that discrete leaders provide. It’s like playing solitaire against yourself – and cheating.

Moreover, consider the motivations behind such roles. For a CEO, it might signal the blending of two previously separate positions – although there are better ways to do this. But for the executives advocating for and taking these dual roles, there’s often an undercurrent of resume-building. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find no solid thesis on why the two roles should merge—just a desire to add both titles, like merit badges, to their experience.

In fact, some CEOs have admitted to me that they combined CTO/CPO or CMO/CPO roles because they were struggling to attract top talent. The allure of holding two C-level titles attracts executives eyeing a future CEO role, often from VP-level positions at public companies. The offer of dual titles can be a deciding factor when compensation or company reputation falls short.

There is a natural way to add a healthy product function to marketing or to engineering – that’s what a VP of Product is for.

There’s a legitimate way to merge two functions in the executive team—create a new title and clearly communicate the change in priorities. And there is a natural way to add a healthy product function under marketing or engineering – that’s why you hire a VP of Product under a CMO or CTO. But tacking ‘CPO’ onto an existing role and expecting one person to function effectively in a hybrid capacity is unrealistic.

And – most importantly – it doesn’t work.

Why Forcing Product Managers to Manage People is Crushing Your Team

Why Forcing Product Managers to Manage People is Crushing Your Team

If you’ve lived through any annual reviews with a product management team, you undoubtedly know that familiar moment when your high-performance, high-potential, individual contributor product manager utters the dreaded phrase: “When do I get to manage somebody?”

Budding managers don’t ask that question – but talented ICs who are thinking about their career prospects sure do. And you can bet good money that an urgency around people management is a sign of ambition, but it’s a terrible indicator of success.

If you are lucky, you can mostly keep the outstanding ICs engaged with increasingly valuable work (and pay packages), while picking the talented people managers out to lead the group. More often, you’ll lose good PMs to management opportunities elsewhere, or promote them into roles in which they are unlikely to thrive. But why do we keep setting up this situation in the first place?

It’s high time for all of us to be using dual product management tracks that don’t force product managers to become people managers. If your organization already does this, great! If not, you should consider whether you’re getting the best out of your product managers and at the same time ensuring effective people management.

Why we should distinguish people management from product management

People management is challenging. It’s a distinct skill set, separate from the vision and leadership qualities that serve product managers so well. While great product managers are often natural leaders, they may not be interested in or suited for management roles.

One reason is that core product management skills, such as empathy with users and ad-hoc problem solving, can sometimes mislead new managers when dealing with team dynamics. I’ve seen talented product managers struggle early in their careers when asked to manage junior PMs, because they’re trying to problem solve rather than nurture.

Another significant reason many product managers end up disliking management is the time commitment—people management consumes a lot of time. Balancing time between team members and product responsibilities is extremely difficult, and it can be a let-down to have to pause product work to have yet another coaching 1:1.

The perverse incentives that pressure product managers

Yet despite these and many other excellent reasons not to follow a people-management path, virtually every product manager wants that career track. Why? Because individual contributor is seen as an early stage of career progression, and management the route to recognition, growth, and access to leadership (not to mention more money!)  So talented product managers advocate for promotions to team management, and often find themselves unhappy with the switch.

If we didn’t do this – if we used a dual-track approach to create managers where needed but also create space for meaningful promotion and growth for those who want to keep managing products – we’d be better equipped to match our inventory of talent to our needs.

Convinced? I hope so! Let’s look at the next step. To implement dual-track product management, there are a few requirements we need to meet.

What you’ll need to build an IC ladder for product managers

First, we need one track for people management in product—because the Chief Product Officer can’t manage everyone personally—and a separate track for ICs. These tracks should be parallel in terms of seniority and compensation, eliminating the incentives to pick one track or the other for personal reasons.

Second, the IC track needs measurable criteria, with both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks that ICs can work on with their managers. These measures must be relevant at each level, avoiding messy changes in how we evaluate PMs over time, and we should have as few measures as possible, to avoid creating large matrices that make evaluation difficult.

Here are four key categories that I’ve used with success in the past:

  1. Hard Skills: Mastery of core product management skills is essential. These include leading customer interviews, performing market analysis, defining product scope and audience, writing requirements, prioritizing features and bugs, and collaborating with engineering.
  2. Cross-Functionality: Effective product managers must work across different functions to deliver a complete product. This involves collaborating with engineering, marketing, pre-sales, post-sales support, operations, and leadership. As product managers take on larger projects, their ability to work across organizational boundaries should improve, and this can be measured through feedback and outcomes.
  3. Leadership: Product managers must be able to project a complete product vision and influence others. This includes enrolling individuals, managers, teams, and other leaders in their vision. The extent of their influence within the organization is a key measure of their leadership.
  4. Accountability: This measures how much responsibility a product manager can handle without requiring much oversight. It’s about delivering features, themes, projects, and products independently. The more they can handle, the better. This is often assessed by their manager but is easily measured by outcomes.

By focusing on these categories, we can create clear paths for advancement within product management without forcing individuals into people management roles. This approach ensures that product managers can excel based on their strengths and preferences, ultimately benefiting both the individual and the organization.

Third, we need level descriptions that are defined in terms of our measures, and explain how at each level we should be interpreting and evaluating the measures. What does this look like in practice? Here are three real examples of product management levels defined by these four criteria.

Examples of Product Manager Levels, Measures and Criteria

PM1

Hard skills: You’re coming in from another discipline and you’re in your first 12 months of Product Management.  You bring your expert skills from another discipline (analyst, designer, engineer, SE) to the table and have great instincts for what would improve the product fit with its users.  You are responsible for taking technical needs – from customer requests, engineering input, competitive analysis and use of the product – and turning them into product requirements.  You track feature development through engineering and reliably report on the delivery of new functionality.  You participate in prioritization and advocate for the urgency of your requirements. 

Cross-functionality: You partner readily with engineering and work with the team to get your questions answered and develop feature specifications. You have relationships in the support and SE organization, developed primarily through building feature requests or answering questions for specific customers.

Leadership: You have internalized the company positioning and our overall product vision, and you deeply understand the user personas around which our products are built.  You can clearly frame for engineering and for sales and support which personas benefit from your requirements and how those requirements enhance the product fit.

Accountability: You are accountable for individual features and bugs, from documenting requirements through development and to delivery.  You take responsibility for finding, reporting, tracking and closing out any customer issues with your features. 

Senior PM

Hard skills:  Writing requirements is second nature to you; you deliver expertise and product planning for your themes whenever we put together strategic plans.  You prioritize features and bugs efficiently and without oversight. You are able to present the entire product roadmap to customers and you understand the stages of the sales process well enough to scope what information you share.

Cross-functionality: Engineering, pre- and post-sales consider you a critical partner.  You put together technical enablement content for sales engineering and support, and work together with them routinely to support customer requests and technical sales calls.  You work with marketing on persona-specific or theme-specific narratives, and contribute to product strategy content in your themes.

Leadership: You fundamentally understand our product strategy and vision, and you define how your product themes fit into that vision.  Within a product theme you are perceived as being synonymous with the market need.  You spread enthusiasm and market thinking across engineering and technical sales. You mentor more junior (and newer) product managers in the processes and methods used at Periscope Data.

Accountability: You are responsible for multiple product themes for Periscope, and you own enablement for your themes as well as feature delivery.  You lead sales, support, and SE briefings on your product themes and you ensure that documentation, marketing materials and collateral that touch on your themes are accurate and consistent.

Staff PM

Hard skills: You have the experience to take top-to-bottom accountability for product managing an entire product – vision, market fit, strategy, roadmap, features, mvp, narrative, competitive analysis, enablement, and measurement.  When working with leadership you present proposed decisions for approval, and talk about tradeoffs rather than expounding on details.  Data and rationales are always at your fingertips.  You know an immeasurable amount about your market, and are constantly tracking what competitors are up to in their products.  You own the internal roadmap for your product and you write the external roadmap that is shared with customers.

You are deeply connected to what the engineering teams are building.  Experience in delivering product has made you efficient rather than distant, and you are on top of each iteration and have an opinion on every bug and tradeoff.

You’re responsible for producing all the content required for the product management process – from market requirements through product plan.  You contribute to GTM and sales strategy, help build sales decks, partner with engineering architecture to make the tough implementation tradeoffs. You pitch new product initiatives for your product with the leadership team, and report on your product KPIs. Reporting on customer usage is second nature and you can identify when an initiative or the whole product needs a strategy reset.

Cross-functionality: You spend a significant fraction of your time meeting with stakeholders and contributors to your product across the company.  You have an inherent understanding of how to engage with people managers when advocating for resources, and you lead by influence and reputation.

Leadership: You are synonymous with your product across the organization.  You mentor more junior product managers, and help new hires in other departments learn how to engage with product management.  You are a capable presenter and speak at public events about your product.

Accountability: You own the strategy for your product, and you are responsible for getting it implemented and delivering on its KPIs.  You are accountable for ensuring that your product strategy fits into the company strategy and vision.

The progression on each of our four measurement criteria is visible in these three examples.  As ICs progress, they have familiar categories to be measured against, but the scope and scale of the measurement changes at each level, appropriate to the breadth of the role.

Your approach doesn’t have to stick to the four attributes above – you probably have your own criteria that’s a better fit for your team. Regardless, I hope you consider adopting a dual-track career ladder.  It’s high time we leave the legacy of up-or-out management behind and focus on what’s best for our teams.  

By focusing on what makes product managers successful, organizations can create clear paths for advancement without the unnecessary pressure to manage others. This approach not only enhances product development but also allows managers to thrive in roles that align with their strengths, and improves quality of life for everyone!

Struggling with hiring top-tier product managers? It’s a challenge many of us face.

Struggling with hiring top-tier product managers? It’s a challenge many of us face.

Making the wrong hire isn’t just a hit to the budget and the calendar—it can shake the very foundation of your product, costing you users, customers, and that all-important product-market fit. But let’s be real, interviewing product managers is a whole different ball game compared to, say, hiring a good Customer Success Manager or a stellar engineer.

Why’s it so tough? Well, for starters, product managers are masters of storytelling. They can spin a yarn that’ll have you nodding along in agreement. But separating the talkers from the doers, especially when it comes to nailing down solid requirements, is a whole other story.

So, here’s a game-changer: a simple test that can weed out the real deal from the smooth talkers. 

The need for a reliable testing method

I stumbled upon this gem back in my days at an early-stage startup. We were on a hiring spree for product managers, sifting through five to ten candidates daily. Our interviews covered everything from culture fit to creativity, but we were missing a crucial piece: a way to put their hard skills to the test.

Think about it—would you hire an engineer based solely on their description of coding prowess? Heck no! You’d throw them a practical test to see if they could walk the walk. And that’s exactly what we needed for product management.

Despite the inherently subjective nature of product management, certain core skills—like creating user personas, delineating use cases, and documenting requirements—can be objectively assessed.

Enter the structured assessment framework. We crafted a concise scenario, handed it to candidates before their interview, and invited them to tackle it on a whiteboard during the session. Our focus wasn’t on the perfect solution, but rather on their approach. Could they distill complex requirements? Stay true to the scenario? Navigate the problem-solving journey with finesse?

A self-contained capsule scenario

Picture this: a bite-sized problem that anyone can understand, with multiple solutions that don’t require a PhD in our product space. We’d give this scenario out to candidates a week before their interview, no pre-work required. Then, during the interview, we’d slap it on a whiteboard and say, “Let’s tackle this together.”

Take a look! (Google Docs link) 

Given the concise scenario, a candidate should be able to tackle it live without any trouble. Importantly, our focus wasn’t on the perfect solution, but rather on their approach. Could they distill complex requirements? Stay true to the scenario? Navigate the problem-solving journey with finesse?  Or did they freeze like a deer in headlights? The key was to see if they could keep it simple, stick to the scenario, and get the job done efficiently.

Evaluating candidate results

This approach gave us invaluable insights. Candidates who breezed through the exercise demonstrated a deep understanding and practical application of product management principles. It wasn’t just about what they delivered, but how they got there.

As we put the test into practice, we noticed a few common candidate stumbling blocks. Surprisingly, quite a few were a bit green when it came to developing requirements—a more common issue than you might imagine! Others dove straight into the weeds, obsessing over intricate details like security and permissions from the get-go. Those candidates routinely ran out of time without making much headway, which was a red flag for us.

A savvy product manager could breeze through the task in under 10 minutes, including all the brainstorming and explaining. If it took them between 30 to 60 minutes, that was still within the ballpark, but it often signaled a hiccup along the way—either forgetting their own process or getting bogged down in a tangent. And those who hit a wall on time? Well, they typically either lacked familiarity with crafting solid requirements or veered way off course early on and never recovered.

The impact of a structured assessment framework for product management 

This test has become my touchstone for identifying strong product managers.  It gives me a clear-cut way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  By providing a reliable metric for assessing candidates’ suitability for the role, it removes one of the big risk factors in product hires, and lets me spend time on the strongest candidates. And its simplicity made it easy for interviewers across the team to adopt, fostering consistency and objectivity in candidate evaluation.

This test dramatically sped up our hiring process, and it enabled us to make same-day decisions on promising candidates.  So, if you’re grappling with hiring top-tier product managers, give this approach a shot. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.