Doing a thing…
After working on my startup while at university, I realized I wanted to live out similar experiences throughout my career. This is when I set out to become a Product Manager! As I learnt about the role, I realized it provided me the opportunity to work with diverse teams to build out a vision that creates value for users. I’ve been doing this for about 2 years and the most frequent question I get is “How did you get into product management?”.
I had over 30 conversations last year answering that same question. I thought about it the more it came up and wished there was a centralized resource I could point people to. I also found it challenging to describe a clear way to get a PM job without any previous experience. This is when the idea of a “school course” started to build up in my mind. I then spoke to my friend Helen about the idea and told her the motivation around it. She felt similarly about the ambiguity of the “path to product” career path. However, she wasn’t completely bought into the concept of an educational course specifically.
Despite that, we agreed to work together and had a conversation about the problem space to get clarity on what exactly we were trying to solve. As we started conducting research into the space to see what information was readily available, we quickly learnt that online courses were not the best vehicle. Unlike programming which you can learn from books and online courses, the bestway to learn product management is actually by building products. Creating a course centered around the theory of practical product development sounded interesting, but it didn’t feel like the best use of our spare time. While doing research and speaking to others, we also learnt about the unconventional paths to a PM role. Hearing stories were very inspiring and learning how people transitioned provided valuable insights. Ultimately, there is no one way to become a PM. So knowing that, Helen and I decided to take on a storytelling role, to share and vocalize those stories of how people transitioned to a PM role (Product/Project/Program Manager).
The current plan is to focus on industry professionals who have had prior work experience either in a technical or non technical role. Then showcase their journeys on when and how they successfully made the switch to their current PM role in a technology company. We will be conducting interviews with those who fit the criteria and the questions we will be asking will be related to the following:
- Educational background and first full time role
- Key motivators for the decision to switch careers or industry
- Job search strategy
- Learning and growing into the role
Once we have abundant information on various transition stories, the goal is to publish our findings in a book and share it with the community. This is our first step in the attempt to solve the problem to make it easy to transition into a PM role. We believe the combination of unique stories will help readers form their own strategy to get to their end goal through the inspiration and proven paths of others.
In addition to this book we are also starting a podcast. The podcast is centered around how we intend to achieve our goal of writing this book, emphasis on the how. In our first couple episodes, we were still figuring out how to set up this podcast. We will speak about our processes behind the work that produces the final output that you will eventually see. The episodes will involve talking through what we are currently working on and you will get to experience behind the scenes of the decisions we make.
By doing this we want to be totally transparent on how we bring this proposed book to life. This way, we get to share our wins and challenges as they come, as well as how we react to them. This is also a great way for others to provide feedback on the structure of the book. We don’t quite know how this is going to end up and some guidance from our audience will be helpful. We have our first episode out and you can listen below.
We are also available on itunes, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher
Helen and I meet every week to discuss progress and to plan for the following week. We typically have action items and record every call. These calls are the episodes you will be listening to. We are trying to make this process very organic and you will get to experience all this with us as we are trying to do this thing. You can follow our facebook page for more updates.
About us:
Sefunmi: I’m currently a Product Manager at ecobee where I lead the software development for the thermostat products. I’ve had previous product internship roles at Microsoft & Apple. I’ve also previously attempted to start my own company which was also fun. Fun fact, I spent the last 15 months off social media and now i’m coming back to talk about this project. Connect with me on Instagram, Twitter or Linkedin
Helen: I’m a Program Manager at Microsoft, having had product internships previously at Microsoft (surprise surprise), and Zynga. Currently I work on driving metrics around developer productivity, though as an intern I’ve worked on Microsoft Edge and Word Streak by Words with Friends! Outside of work I do things like proof-read Sefunmi’s articles, be forced into calls with Sefunmi, and conduct interviews for a project I’m working on with Sefunmi. When Sefunmi isn’t around, I wait for him to get back. Connect with me on Instagram, Facebook or Linkedin
