Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.
What does it take to get into product management?
What’s the requisite experience?
Are certificates worthwhile?
Do you need an MBA?
As a hiring manager, I’ve hired half a dozen product managers, as a consultant, I’ve evaluated many more. I don’t care what your experience is. I don’t care if you have a certificate. I don’t care if you have an MBA.
I only care about one thing: Can you do the job?
Too many people think product management is idea generation and requirements gathering. But to be a good product manager you need to know how to do so much more.
You need to be able to:
- understand and work within the business context
- work with engineers
- think strategically AND get into the details
- estimate the impact of a feature
- know when to say no
- make the case of why something should be on the roadmap
- predict release schedules with unreliable engineering estimates
- use data to inform your decisions
- know when talking to someone trumps data
- find another way when you hit a roadblock
- advocate for the user
- focus on benefits not features
- know the difference between your user and your customer
- conduct an ad hoc usability test
- get to the root cause of feedback
- be the product expert on customer and prospect calls
- distinguish between bugs you can ignore and bugs that must be fixed
- be ruthlessly focused on your product’s core value
- guide a designer to not just create your vision but build upon it
- write user stories that communicate the what and the why
- ensure high product quality even if you don’t have any QA support
- understand what drives revenue, if not manage the P&L for your product
- identify the most important thing to do right now (not always the most urgent)
- experiment with everything
- get in the heads of your users / customers
- identify a pricing strategy
- iterate until the end of time
- and so much more
Many of these things require experience. You have to learn them somewhere.
But I don’t care if your experience is at a big company or a small company. Or if you were a product manager, a business analyst, a designer, or an engineer.
I want to know how you think, how you make decisions. Show me.
Show me on your resume. Show me in your cover letter. Show me on your blog.
Because there is no one path to product management, don’t waste time deliberating about the right experience or the right certificate. Show off the product management skills you already have and relentlessly build the ones you don’t have.
If a certificate, degree, workshop, conference, specific job, etc. helps you build those skills, by all means pursue that path. But focus on skill-building not credentials.
This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.
I think hiring managers should take this approach with ANY position they are hiring for. If the candidate can prove that they can do the job (through examples of past experience or otherwise), then nothing else matters. They may have 25 years or 1 year of experience. They may have worked in software or avocado farming. They may have an MBA or a high school diploma. As a hiring manager, I care about what you have done and what you can do going forward.
Colin, exactly!
What a great post. I have written a few postings on the types of backgrounds that are fertile for product management recruitment, but you have stripped it down to the essence.
Can you do the job? (and the job is a big, hairy, nebulous, and often ill-defined role)
Perfect. Now if I could just get recruiters to pre-screen with this.
No kidding. There are a lot of open product management jobs and not enough people with traditional experience. Hiring managers are going to have to get a lot better at evaluating skills rather than past work experience. A good percentage of my consulting practice is doing exactly this for product teams and I suspect it will only grow in the future.
hi,
I am an enginieer & wanted to get product manager job
I love this list. Most product managers can’t check all of the items…
When I’m hiring product managers, though, I start with the obvious first question: have you ever been a product manager before? In my experience, the top indicator of newly-hired PM success is understanding the role and having some hands-on, no BS, lived-through-several-releases-on-the-same-product, not-a-newbie, seen-and-dealt-with-that experience. Great product managers make it all look easy.
That does make it harder to fill open PM slots, and I’m open to the right candidate showing initiative and relevant related experience that maps well against product management. But I’d still strongly prefer someone who’s actually done it.
Heaven knows that front-line PM roles aren’t sexy (despite portrayals in the movies), and I’ve had a variety of newly-minted PMs realize that it was less fun than it appeared from afar. And challenging organizationally. And demanding of the people skills Teresa lists here.
So I might extend the headline to “You don’t need experience to become a Product Manager, but it helps a lot in both the hiring cycle and living up to the role.”
Hi Rich,
Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a thoughtful comment.
I would agree that in many cases, if I’m considering two candidates with similar skill sets, the one who has been a product manager before probably has the edge. But the key distinction there is that they have similar skill sets.
Just as there are many people who have never been product managers have many of the product management skills there are product managers who lack many of these skills.
I think my key takeaway is that it shouldn’t be about the title you hold but the skill set you bring to the table. I know many designers (whether it be UX, IA, ID, or any other flavor you prefer) who look an awful lot like product managers, even though they have different titles. Same could be said for many sales engineers and account managers , depending on the company.
Agree 135%.
Hi Teresa
Thank you for the post. It is definitely encouraging to read this for someone like me who is trying to get into product management. I am a software engineer with an MBA degree and currently in the role of sales for a tech company. I was focusing more on certifications etc as there are so many tech product managers out there who have better chances of making it for product manager position than I do.
My question to you is – Is it possible for someone to move from Sales to Product Management ? What kind of skillset finds resonance in prod mgmt?
Hi Annalise,
Please see this series: https://www.producttalk.org/2012/09/so-you-want-to-be-a-product-manager/
It includes stories of people who moved into product management from both engineering and sales.