How to Become a Better Product Manager While at Home This Summer

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MProduct

7 min readMay 14, 2020

Welcome to MProduct Education. The primary function of this series is to consistently provide product managers (PMs) with valuable tools, frameworks, and resources. Whether you have just learned the operating functions of a PM or are well into your career within the realm of product, our educational content will always be created for those hungry to become a better PM.

This piece’s focus: How to Spend Your Free Time This Summer

This summer, we are faced with an abundance of free time. Many of my friends and teammates in MProduct have unfortunately lost internships, are working from home and no longer need to commute, or have other cancelled plans. A large percentage of us have watched a summer’s worth of Netflix in the last month alone. After many questions regarding how to use this free time more effectively, we had the idea for this article so that you and everybody else can have an answer.

If you’re into product management or want to learn what it is, we encourage you to spend just a little of your free time each day upgrading your skills with the resources outlined in this article. Below, we’ll break down many possible ways to spend your time, with time estimations for each task. Feel free to pick as many as you’d like, since the time you put in determines the learning you get out. These small chunks of time will accumulate, and by the end of the summer, you’ll have become a far better product manager.

We won’t be discussing how to recruit for PM in this article; that will come closer to fall. However, the knowledge you gain about the field will absolutely help in interviews.

What is Product Management?

Understanding what a PM is and what they do is confusing. How are you going to broaden your product management knowledge if you don’t know what the role means? The role is not clear-cut and varies from company to company. There are Product Manager, Project Manager, and Program Manager roles, and they’re all similar yet different.

Product management and program management are the two main roles sought after by undergrads. Here and here are some valuable tips for how to become a great product manager, while here are tips for becoming a great program manager.

What You Can Do to Increase Your Product Knowledge

There are too many resources to reasonably list, but this compilation should serve as a great starting point. Each of these resources tends to point to even more content for further learning, and we recommend taking a deep dive into areas you’re most interested in.

Read. Apply.

Gain Knowledge by Reading or Listening

Perhaps the lowest hanging fruit, you should sign up for a product-related newsletter, which will only take ten minutes each day out of your morning that you’d instead spend checking social media. A more general newsletter that’s sent to your email every day is Morning Brew, which also has an even more applicable sister newsletter Emerging Tech Brew. Some of our favorite product-oriented newsletters are Lenny Rachitsky, Kevin Shah, and Stratechery.

There are also many books to read. We asked the community and got their top picks:

Try and read 10–20 pages a day, and by the end of the summer, you’ll have read over a thousand pages of product management-related content.

Additionally, online articles related to product management have seen a large surge in the last few years, and sites like Medium have a plethora of articles on the topic. Here are some additional articles, posted by various members of MProduct in our #articles-and-products slack channel. Each of these articles should only take between five and twenty minutes to read.

Customer Feedback from Slack
Product Roadmaps
Addiction by Design
Customer Discovery (this is more of a mini-book)
Status Signaling
Giving Design Feedback

Finally, if you’re looking for an alternative to reading, podcasts are great, especially when you’re on the go and not able to pick up a book. Some podcast examples include:

Solidify Your Knowledge by Applying It

All this new knowledge through consumption of content is great, but nothing solidifies learning like taking action.

One of the first things that you can do is try to build a website or product. Building a personal website can be done simply through Wordpress or Google Sites, while if you would also like to learn how to code, Vue, Angular, or React along with Bootstrap are great options. We encourage you to really focus on the design process of creating a pleasing, functional website, and most importantly, get something launched! This will likely take around an hour each day for a couple weeks, or somewhere around 5–20 hours in total. In the end, you’ll have built something you can easily show off to employers come recruiting season or to friends.

To further understand product design, you should check out design tools like Figma and Sketch. Figma even has a free premium account for students! We encourage designing a new product as an exercise, even if you don’t plan to build it. Who knows, maybe you’ll like the product enough to build it and get it in users’ hands, potentially even bringing in some cash as a side project.

If you’re struggling to ideate a new product, there’s plenty of existing products that you can try and replicate to strengthen your design skills, or you could design smaller components like a calendar selector or a todo list for practice. There’s a daily UI challenge at dailyUI which sends a mini design challenge to explore each day.

Try to lower expectations and eliminate the barrier of only pursuing projects that you’re sure will be successful. The most important thing is to start doing something. Learn by doing, not by theorizing. Just 30 minutes a day executing and experimenting will produce more learning than you’d expect.

Being a product manager also involves skills like coordinating teams, customer discovery, and writing technical requirements and specifications.

It’s hard to gain experience with customer discovery without actually conducting it. Thus, you could use your product that you created and designed and talk to potential “customers” such as friends to ascertain their wants and needs. This involves using open-ended questions to get candid information from them that you may not have considered when designing your product. This is going to be uncomfortable for many, but it will make you a better PM.

To really apply your skills, try to get a group of friends together to hack an idea into a product that you can actually put into people’s hands. In our spotlight piece on Microsoft PM Philip Ruffini, Philip says that “it’s all about coming up with an idea and trying something,” and this couldn’t be more true. After doing this, you can make your product even better through customer discovery and hopefully find product market fit.

Finally, if you want daily product questions in your email to solve, check out Daily Product Prep.

Make Learning a Habit: Start Small

Everything in this article works best when done consistently. If you start taking action today, in a month or so the process of learning content and quickly applying it can become a habit and can result in a side project. The goal is to have learning as part of your routine: process over product. You don’t even have to think about what to do, you just do and learn along the way.

We learn the concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as the first iteration to launch a product, but how can you create a learning exercise for yourself that’s minimally viable? To get started, reduce your scope, expectations, and fear of failure by starting small. What’s one action you could take right now to learn something new? Once you’ve done that, consider how you can apply that new learning, especially in a way where you can share your results with others in the form of a product, decision, or initiative.

I suspect that if you’re reading this article, then the resources suggested here will be useful to you. If you’ve ever tried to make working out a habit, you’ll probably know that you can’t just go from nothing to 5 days a week with much success; most people who manage to make it a habit start small and work their way up. Similarly, try and start with only twenty minutes a day total between the reading and action-based tasks in this article. Once you can become consistent with that over a week, increase the time you spend the next week, and so on until you’re at your ideal time spent per day, whether that’s one hour, two hours, or more.

Good luck growing your knowledge and have fun!

As always, we are committed to creating the next generation of Product leaders. If you’re someone passionate about product management, we hope you will join our community. If you want to keep up with MProduct, follow us on Medium and LinkedIn, or check out our website!

Go Blue!

MProduct Links:

Medium: https://medium.com/mproduct

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mproduct

Website: https://www.mproduct.org/

Written by Rohan Prashant, with help from Austin Haag, Sean Stapleton, Jeremy Segal, Atharva Talpade, and Stephanie Shoo

Rohan is a junior at the University of Michigan College of Engineering studying Computer Science with a possible minor in Entrepreneurship.

He enjoys all racquet sports, cars, gadgets, weightlifting, podcasts, Rocket League, and reading.