Tag: recruiting

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!

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.