My Product School Experience

If you are reading this article then I assume you probably fall in one of the following categories:

• A software engineer/data scientist interested in transitioning to a PM role
• Someone who wants to explore product management as a potential career part

I fell in the first category. I finished my M.S in Computer Science at Columbia in 2016 and was working at Oracle as a software engineer in an enterprise SaaS product team since then. Fortunately for me, I liked software development and I enjoyed working in that role. Nonetheless I also realized that I wanted to do something different in my future- I was not interested in pursuing a technical manager/staff engineer role.

I had the opportunity to work closely with Product Managers in my engineering role and I had the curiosity to learn more about it. I started reading articles online and there are several online communities geared around product management. Product School is one of them. I read through several blogs and saw quite a few of their speaker sessions on Youtube. I got a copy of “The Product Book” — written by the founders of Product School which is available for free on Product School’s website. This book is the crux of the curriculum taught in the Product Management Certificate course. I found the book to be a great introduction to what PMs do and how. I attended a number of Product School’s speaker sessions in their Santa Clara campus and I decided to enroll for their Product Management Certificate course.

The course structure is well planned. You get a very good idea about what PMs are expected to do and how they do it. The course covers the entire product lifecycle including product discovery, engineering, GTM strategies etc. Through the course we also partook in several hands-on exercises that make these concepts clearer. Product Management involves a lot of communication to various stakeholders- customers, engineers, management and this course helped me a lot in learning how to tailor my message according to the audience its meant for.

I had Debankur Naskar as the instructor for my cohort and he did a very good job making concepts clearer, giving helpful feedback for all our exercises, helping with my resume and most importantly demonstrating the clarity and structure with which PMs are expected to convey design ideas — There was this one time in class when I presented an idea for a product enhancement and I could not explain it well enough, Debankur then proceeded to structure my idea, white boarded it and made it crystal clear. That was the moment when I thought “I want to be as good as this and I need to really work for this”. I also had a great cohort, a special shoutout to Jor Amster, a senior PM himself who brought a lot of value to all of our class discussions and demonstrated the skills senior product managers use.

I joined this course knowing well that a PM role is tough to break into. It’s even tougher if you are an engineer trying to cross into a PM role at another company. No course is going to change that but this course gears you up to understand what is expected out of you in a PM role and how to do those tasks well. The best way to describe this course is to call it an excellent “Product Management 101” course. I found it worth the investment, I would consider it to be as good as some of the best courses I took at Columbia and it was cheaper.

Learning from this course made me confident enough to ask for product management responsibilities at Oracle. I was lucky to have a supportive team and they let me handle a number of product management tasks for a couple of months. I was able to do well and I officially became a product manager at Oracle last month.

If you are someone looking to transition into product management, Product school offers a great course and you can continue learning as you build on that foundation.