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Product Management

STEP 1: WHAT’S PRODUCT MANAGEMENT ALL ABOUT?

  • Overview: Product Management leads the development of new products. Given that tech companies are usually organized around products (e.g., Gmail, Google Maps), this is often the most important role within the company.

  • AKA: PM

  • Example project: Lead a new app from the initial vision to customers downloading it to making it even better!

  • What you do all day: Learn about your audience, develop new concepts, create product blueprints, manage a cross-functional team to bring the product to life, review metrics

  • Roles: Associate Product Manager (more junior), Product Manager (more senior), Technical Product Manager (focused on more technically-complex products)

  • What they look for: People with technical backgrounds (since you’ll work so closely with engineers), UX/design understanding (since you’ll need to make a technical product easy for actual customers to use), and business/leaderships skills (since you’ll be responsible for coordinating a cross-functional team to deliver business results)

STEP 2: WOULD YOU BE A GOOD FIT FOR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?

Ask yourself if you’d love doing these kinds of common PM activities:

  • Learning about current and prospective customers

  • Developing a vision for a new product based on customer needs

  • Translating that vision into detailed specifications to be built out

  • Motivating cross-functional partners (engineers, designers) to solve challenges and ship your product on-time

  • Evaluating key metrics to share with execs and optimize performance

If your answer is “Yes” to the majority of activities, you’d likely be a good fit for PM.

STEP 3: WHAT SKILLS DO YOU NEED FOR PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?

For each major activity, we’ve listed the most common keywords from across dozens of job descriptions, as well as a sample resume bullet:

  • Learning about current and prospective customers

    • Keywords: usability studies, research, market analysis, competitive position, pain points, personas

    • Sample Bullet: Conducted usability study with inactive users to identify the top 3 reasons they’d stopped engaging with the site

  • Developing a vision for a new product based on customer needs

    • Keywords: ideation, product vision, roadmap, product lifecycle, value proposition

    • Sample Bullet: Set the vision for a new photo sharing app, from high-level concept to roadmap and milestones

  • Translating that vision into detailed specifications to be built out

    • Keywords: product requirements, specifications, user interfaces, wire frames, mock ups, release plans, go-to-market, user stories, prototypes, test plans, release checklists

    • Sample Bullet: Built out detailed product specifications for viral sharing feature, leading to a ship date one month earlier than expected

  • Motivating cross-functional partners (engineers, designers) to solve challenges and ship your product on-time

    • Keywords: collaborate, daily workflow, leadership, shared vision, consensus, engineers, designers, ship on time and within budget, milestones

    • Sample Bullet: Led daily standups with engineering and design team to overcome roadblocks, achieving 90% feature functionality after just three months of development

  • Evaluating key metrics to share with execs and optimize performance

    • Keywords: metrics, dashboard, SQL, A/B test, presentation, senior leadership

    • Sample Bullet: Ran A/B test to determine the most effective onboarding flows, increasing new user sign-ups 75% month over month.

STEP 4: WHAT ARE THE PATHS TO A PRODUCT MANAGEMENT JOB?

While business schools are mostly known for turning out consultants and bankers, many of the largest public and private tech companies turn to MBA programs for the leadership skills they seek in their newest crop of PMs.

Just know that an MBA by itself is no guarantee that these firms will consider you. While companies like Amazon are known for hiring MBA PMs no matter their background before school, more technically-driven firms like Google often look for MBAs who also have an engineering background