2. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT IS ALL ABOUT FILLING IN
THE EMPTY SPACE
ANY EXPERIENCESYOU’VE HAD CAN MAKEYOU A BETTER PM
3. • TheVenn diagram of PM Skills
• Examples of how different roles have built up those skills
• How to build the missing skills
• How to find a company and role that’s good for you
• How to use your unique skills to succeed as a PM
Overview
4. Design a great product Ship It
Strategy & Vision Leadership
Customer Focus
Product Design
Analysis & Synthesis
Action Oriented
Prioritization
Project Management
Technical Skills
Communication
13. CUSTOMER FOCUS
• Spend time with people
• Watch them use products and look for where they run into problems
• Learn what their goals are
• Practice framing products in terms of customers and goals
• Build up some compelling anecdotes to make the customers real for you
• Check out the IDEO Human Centered Design Toolkit
14. PRODUCT DESIGN
• Use a lot of products
• Always think about how they could be improved. Double check your
improvements for customer focus
• Stay on top of new trends, notice what you like and don’t like, and why
• Consider ways that you could apply something that works well on one
product to another kind of product
• Read some books on product design
15. ANALYSIS
• Learn the fundamentals of data analysis
• Check out Lean Startup and the KISSMetrics blog
• Practice if you can
• Sit in on data analysis meetings
• Play with the data yourself
16. TECHNICAL SKILLS
• Take some courses
• Optimize for learning skills that you could actually apply at your job: CSS,
Scripting, SQL
• Discuss technical issues with engineers
• Ask them to help you ramp up
17. BEING MORE ACTION ORIENTED:
SCRAPPINESS
• Be Brave
• Make a habit of stepping up
• Do, Delegate, or Decide you don’t need it
• Look for times you or a teammate feels blocked - that’s a sign there’s an
opportunity to be scrappy
• Yes, this is hard work
18. PRIORITIZATION
• Get comfortable with the need for prioritization
• If you waited until the product was perfect it would never ship
• We’re not always right about how important things are
• Once the product launches you’ll learn much more from your customers
• Decide what you’re optimizing for
• Are you testing a hypothesis? Making a use case possible? Aiming for a
quality bar?
20. • Consider making the transition at your current company
• Consider going after a TPM or EPM job
• Look for a role where your skills will be valued
• “How do you split the work with designers and marketing?”
• “What do you look for in a PM?”
• Look for a company where you’ll be able to learn a lot
• You might want to pick a company with lots of PMs so you can learn
from them
22. • Use your skills to identify areas where you can be helpful
• eg. put together a marketing plan, do some data analysis
• Especially great if you can use your skill to be helpful early
on
• Pick up experience and ask for advice in the areas you don’t
know.
• Ask how to learn, don’t just pass questions along
• Share your skills
• Build up your credibility by teaching other people what you
know
These are the slides from a presentation I gave at the PM Fast Track Meetup. The target audience is mostly people who are looking to transition into the Product Manager role, or people who recently became PMs and are looking to build their skills.
PM Skills will generally help you figure out the right product to build & design it, or help you actually ship that product. Technical Skills and Communication can help you with both. Take a look and identify your strengths so that you can emphasize them.
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
As an example, if you’re an engineer, you might be really strong at technical skills and analysis. You probably have less experience with Product Design. And you might have some great opportunities to pick up Project Management for the projects you’re working on.
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
GREEN = Skill to Emphasize, YELLOW = Skill you can easily build, RED = Skill that interviewers/coworkers might think you don’t have
If you’ve built up knowledge about the customers in an industry, you’re at a big advantage to become a PM building software for that industry.
You can really know the customer. Take any opportunity you have now to learn more about your customers - read tickets, go on a site visit. Find out what really motivates them and what their days are really like and be able to tell stories about them.
Here’s a link to buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0984782818/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0984782818&linkCode=as2&tag=theartofproma-20
