The most FAQs about Product Management

As an experienced PM, I hear the same questions again and again about my role. These range from the basic — what does a Product Manager do, to the existential — like am I fulfilled. Whether you’re a student considering a career in product management, or a professional pondering a career switch, I hope this post addressing the most frequently asked questions will help, or at least point you to another great article that can.

• What is a typical day like for a PM?
• What is the difference between project managers and product managers?
• So wait, what is the difference between a product manager and a product owner?
• How do you get your first PM job?
• How does one go about cultivating the thoroughness needed to be a PM (e.g. in designing comprehensive experiments, mockups, ideation domains, etc.)
• To be an effective PM do you need to work as a designer/engineer first?
• How do product managers work with product counsel?
• When is it time to leave product management?
• What was your experience like at Google?
• Do you feel fulfilled by your work as a PM?
• How do you come up with new ideas for your product?
• How do you get inspiration to improve established products like Google Maps?
• What does usual work life balance look like as a product manager?
• When it comes to prioritizing items in your backlog, what methods do you consider using? How do you say no to someone who has items that are not as high priority?
• If you had advice for your younger self in regards to product management, what would you tell yourself?
• Do you think you would have ended up in a similar position if you’d started off at a new grad APM program instead of starting a company?

Courtesy of DALL·E 3

What is a typical day like for a PM?

Here are some great overviews

• What does a typical day for a Product Manager look like? — high level overview but accurate in my experience
• A day in the life of a product manager -very detailed, you might need a Medium account to view but worth it
• This article on how to get a PM job also talks about some of the pros and cons of the job

Note that a lot of articles out there use the term “product manager” to describe “product owner” or “agile project manager” roles, which tend to involve more project management. This leads me to another question I hear often:

What is the difference between project managers and product managers?

The simplified answer is product managers focus on what should be built, and project managers focus on execution, especially deliverables and timelines.

Here’s how my non-tech friends remember the differences. If a company has a very opinionated CEO who makes ALL the decisions about what gets built, then the company only has project managers. They may call them “product managers” on paper, but if they don’t get a say in what gets built, their work is mostly project management.

However it’s worth noting that different companies use different names so any kind of general answer will never be 100% accurate. Also sometimes project managers find themselves stepping into the duties of a product manager and vice versa, so this also varies on an individual level. This is why the content of your resume matters even more than the job title (also check out my blog post on common PM resume mistakes).

So wait, what is the difference between a product manager and a product owner?

The main giveaway I look for is any job description that mentions SCRUM (a common framework for project management), a sure sign the company is looking for a product owner, or at least 80–90% of your day to day will be product owner type work, often leaving very little room for longer term product strategy. This article provides one of the best overviews of this topic I’ve found.

How do you get your first PM job?

The article How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive) provides a good overview of the most common paths to PM, and how to navigate the role once you’re in it.

• Transition within a company from a different role — this is the most common path in
• Apply for an associate (AKA entry-level) PM role
• Get hired as a PM by a startup that needs your domain expertise
• [my path] Transition from entrepreneur/CEO*

*My path is less common, but if you are considering this transition yourself I recommend you check out Hannah Yang’s excellent book on the subject.

How does one go about cultivating the thoroughness needed to be a PM (e.g. in designing comprehensive experiments, mockups, ideation domains, etc.)

It takes time, but the most important thing is for you to be interested in these details. Talk to the experts in these topics at your company, try your hand at each yourself, then get feedback from the experts. The internet has many good sources on all of the above as well, but you’ll need to figure out what works best for you.

Sample exercises for different skill sets:

• Usability — take screenshots of all the pages that fall under your domain, ask around about why certain decisions were made, look at similar products to see what they did differently, develop opinions on which approach you like more. Consider your use case for the product and try to imagine if something you don’t like might be better for someone with a different use case, or if this was just a bad decision for everyone. If you aren’t at a company yet, you can still do this for any group of apps/products you are interested in, but you can focus more on the differences.
• Mockup practice — try editing some of these screenshots in a tool like Figma (there is a free version!) to see if you can make something better.
• Ideation — try keeping a “bug” list for a week. Write down anything you encounter (in the real world, a digital product, a physical product, etc.) that isn’t working well, ex the experience is subpar, inefficient, causing confusion etc. Then at the end of the week think about one or two of these bugs and come up with a solution to them. Write a 1-pager on how you would improve this.

To be an effective PM do you need to work as a designer/engineer first?

I don’t think so. A lot of PM domain knowledge in these areas can be learned on the job. If you are coming from one of these roles, having first hand experience is great! But it’s expected that the vast majority of PMs learn this on the job working alongside your team’s experts.

How do product managers work with product counsel?

When launching a new feature or product, PMs work with the product counsel (in-house company lawyers with expertise on their particular product) to weigh in with legal considerations on product decisions. The feedback might touch on anything from the language used in promotional copy to how data is shared between apps to country specific marketing opt-ins.

This article provides a good overview of what product counsel does.

When is it time to leave product management?

This is worth a longer post sometime, and will vary a lot by individual. In many cases, when people are unhappy in product management roles it’s because they are on the wrong team, or at the wrong company. I’d say if there’s any other job in tech (or outside of tech!) you’d rather do then that’s a good sign it’s time to leave.

What was your experience like at Google?

It was good! The work was interesting, the people were smart, and only a few of them were jerks. My experience was unique to my teams (Google Photos, Google Brain and Google Maps) and the projects within those teams. During my tenure, Google was one of the better run companies out there, although I’ve been away for nearly 2 years and I hear a lot has changed since then (namely LAYOFFS). I left because most work happened on very mature products so there were almost no remaining startup-y teams in 2022 compared to 2016 when I first joined.

Do you feel fulfilled by your work as a PM?

Most days — very much so. If I ever reach a point where I no longer feel this way, I’ve always been able to make some adjustments in my projects or team to correct this.

How do you come up with new ideas for your product?

Use the product, look at how existing users are trying to use your product (in data), talk to users, see what you can learn from other companies by trying out very similar products, or only somewhat similar products. This list is far from exhaustive, but hopefully it’s a good start. Usually coming up with ideas is the easy part of the job :) Deciding which ones to pursue, convincing others, and deciding the best way to execute is the real work.

How do you get inspiration to improve established products like Google Maps?

See above :)

What does usual work life balance look like as a product manager?

PMs will always have more work than they could possibly do, so deciding where to set your own boundaries is critical. How much of that potential work you absolutely must do will depend on the company, the team and the individual role. I have been able to have a very good balance (defined as very few late nights) for the last 5 years, but I also set clear boundaries at work and only consider roles where this will be respected. When you are just starting out in the field I’d recommend most people to take whatever role you can get, getting that first role can be difficult! However, once you have some launches under your belt you can find lots of great companies with good work-life balance, although you may feel less comfortable doing this (and often with good reason) if your company is going through a string of layoffs.

When it comes to prioritizing items in your backlog, what methods do you consider using? How do you say no to someone who has items that are not as high priority?

I haven’t really worked on a product where we answered to clients (I think this is more typical in product owner roles). Anytime I did have to say no it was typically to another internal team, where I could explain our team’s priorities in the context of the company or the organization’s goals, which usually were understood, and/or partially shared by this other team.

The art of saying no to an external client is a different skill set entirely, and some might argue client facing PM roles (like you might find in an organization like Google Cloud) should be classified as its own sub-type of PM.

If you had advice for your younger self in regards to product management, what would you tell yourself?

In any discussion about the product, don’t worry about “winning” the argument. Focus instead on making sure the team is doing the right thing and everyone understands why this is best.

Do you think you would have ended up in a similar position if you’d started off at a new grad APM program instead of starting a company?

Probably yes. Although there have been tradeoffs to taking a less straightforward path. Some employers don’t count my time as a Presidential Innovation Fellow or as a CEO as “PM experience” when it comes to leveling, but this is rare. On the other hand, some hiring managers really liked my startup founder and government experience, so it’s possible I wouldn’t have gotten to work on such fun projects like I did at Google Photos and Google Brain.

Do you have a question about product management I didn’t answer? Drop me a line on LinkedIn! And don’t forget to check out my other articles on product management.