Product Management from Scratch: Part 1 — From 0 to PM
Setting a Curriculum to go from Industry Outsider to PM
This is Part 1 in a series on how I am moving from a non-tech background (with a Bachelors in Philosophy and a Masters in Subsea Engineering) to Product Management. In this article I will briefly describe my motivations and the curriculum I set. You can soon read Part 2 (Set Yourself Up for Success) in the series where I will outline how I structure my day to complete the work set out here.
Getting to Know You…
I started my career in the energy industry planning and executing large scale underwater inspection campaigns for multiple installations. Essentially our team was responsible for being the underwater eyes for the good (preventative work such as inspection and repair) and the bad (think something like Deepwater Horizon).
We faced many incredibly interesting challenges and worked with some of the world’s smartest people to develop tools and methodologies to meet a number of very unique problems. Problems you could only encounter 10–15,000 feet under water.
Throughout my time I was always interested in how to optimize our processes, make our workflows digital and how to design solutions (physical and digital) to our day to day and not so day to day work.
This work led me to an interesting startup creating 3D models from photos and video (also known as photogrammetry). I’ll talk a little more about my role there below (working to introduce a new piece of hardware). Throughout my time at this startup I became increasingly interested in optimization and design and began to branch out in my spare time into graphic design and specifically interface design. I knew that some day my future would hold some sort of career in digital products. It took a while to focus on what exactly I was interested in but I eventually discovered Product Management.
Over the past year I made a conscious decision to chase my curiosities and develop a skill set that could land me a career in tech. Initially this process didn’t start out with a hard timeline and the events aren’t exactly linear.
So what will you get from reading this? My account of the steps I have taken and will take to cover information sufficient to land me a Product Management position (as a Liberal Arts Major in Philosophy and Masters of Subsea Engineering). My hope is that this will prove useful to others. Enough of the background, let’s get stuck in.
From 0 to PM
To say I’m going from 0 to PM isn’t entirely true. In my previous position I was PM for a hardware product although at the time I didn’t really know it was Product Management and it also wasn’t involving a web or mobile based product. So I suppose to correctly label this it’s 0 tech experience to PM. As a small amount of background to frame the conversation the tool I worked on as a PM was a Video Laser Scanning system that was deployed by ROV (mentioned above). The purpose of the tool was to create a 3D model of objects below the sea either for engineering (building something new), reverse engineering (fixing something by means of creating an exact replacement) or diagnostics (in the case of a dent in a pipeline for example).
From this experience I gained the understanding that Product Management is the intersection of Technology, User Experience and Business and as the PM it was my responsibility to work within each of these areas to deliver a quality product to our customers. I enjoy this Venn diagram from Martin Eriksson to describe a PM.
There was a point during this hardware project that I discovered my intense interest for product management outside of what I was working on. Over the course of about 10 months I spent time in the evenings and weekends covering the topics represented by this diagram as they relate to web and mobile products in an unfocused way. I casually read articles on Medium, watched YouTube talks from product conferences and started to dabble in using Sketch to design simple products that solved problems in my life. I also decided in the beginning of 2016 to get a Scrum certification (CSM) as I didn’t quite understand what it was but it seemed like a good place to start! Looking back I feel like that initial dive into Scrum was probably a little pre-mature though it was certainly incredibly useful to get me into the right environment, get me thinking more about software development and to most importantly, to get me started on my learning path.
As I ventured through the vast wealth of information on Product Management I started to put together a sort of timeline for completing a few courses and then figured I would be an expert and could get straight into the job market. I realized soon after that I was slightly overly optimistic and would really need to create more of a plan to work towards. While it would be a long process I was convinced (and still am today) that it would be worth it to learn all of this in a bit more detail than the surface level that some courses seem to cover.
A First Iteration: My Original Curriculum
As you can see, this one is a little light on content. Not that this isn’t time consuming to complete, I just couldn’t help but feel that this was the tip of the iceberg of what I needed to learn. I came to this realization as I was working through and I wasn’t having a high enough level of comprehension on the topics covered in the product talks I was watching. So I went back to the drawing board and decided to have a look at the content of the major players in Product Management courses. (I have not personally sat any of the courses so I am not providing any sort of reviews of the content.) There were many areas of overlap between the various courses and I found that I could gather a formidable archive of information to work through.
A Second Iteration: My Data Informed Curriculum
First off, I should note that my goal is not to become the world expert in these topics. I want to gain a working knowledge and understanding to allow for communication with other practitioners and to decrease the overall risk to any future employer of hiring me. I need to speak the language(s) of UX, Technology and Business in the context of Product Management and to understand how these topics work together and challenge each other in order to make myself a valuable player on any team. Easily said, right?
So that’s what I planned to cover, not to a level of Mastery, but at least to a level where I can talk to someone about what’s going on in any of these topics and understand the context and strategy as it relates to these topics. I always leave room for the addition of relevant new topics as this document is a living document and I am finding new areas of info to study on a regular basis. Some of this I had been working on already and some such as Photoshop/Sketch and wireframes I was already familiar with. In order to complete this in the next decade I had to set myself some goals and a rough plan of how to get through this information.
How’s about a product roadmap for my Product (Me)…
Roadmapping the Process
I broke down the features and estimated the effort for each of them in order to be able to create a roadmap. I’ve included this effort estimate below. Once I had completed this initial step I created an account on ProductPlan and started to roadmap.
You can have a look at the Roadmap as it stands at the time of writing.
Making it Happen
It was a slow start to get going along this path, getting comfortable with new information, trying not to get too distracted by the many avenues each link you click can take you on (In this sense I can see how the Product courses can be beneficial as they are focused to theoretically help you avoid this). Eventually you find a groove and can make it a habit to just get up and grind.
I’ve been lucky enough to have basically 2 days every day to work; from around 9:30am — 4:00pm followed by 7:30pm — 12:00am as well as full days on the weekend. I’ll explain more about my schedule in Part 3 of the series. Please do join me for that and I look forward to hearing about your own plans and journeys!
Resource Links
Below I have listed out all of the specific content I mentioned in the post. I arrived at this list of content by synthesizing the content from various curriculums, blog posts and speaking with developers, designers and a couple of PMs. There are many other tools/books/courses available ranging in cost from Free to Expensive and that likely go into much less or much greater depth, please feel free to provide comment below to help improve the list. I also have a visual learning bias so a large amount of the content I consume is video based.
Helpful Note: If you live in Los Angeles, the LA Public Library provides FREE access to Lynda.com and a few other online learning platforms. If you don’t live in LA and don’t have a LinkedIn premium account check with your local library system to see if they offer something similar, you may be surprised, I certainly was!
PM Training
Software Product Management Specialization — Coursera
Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job — Udemy
Complete Product Management Course — Udemy
Master the Product Manager Interview — The Complete Guide — Udemy
Technology Training
Foundations of Programming — Lynda.com This one isn’t listed on the roadmap as I took it a while back. I love this guy.
Technology Literacy — Team Treehouse
Git Basics — Team Treehouse
Github Basics — Team Treehouse
Front End Web Developer Track — Team Treehouse
Foundations of UX — Lynda.com
Sketch Crash Course — by Pablo Stanley
Principle App Crash Course — by Pablo Stanley
Flinto Crash Course — by Pablo Stanley
Agile Training
PSPO Certification — Note: Since I had already obtained the CSM at the time I took the PSPO certification I decided to get a copy of The Scrum Guide, Buy this incredible ebook (Scrum: A Pocket Guide), watch this video covering PO vs. PM, read this article/watch the webinar on the recent updates to The Scrum Guide, take multiple mock assessments here and purchase just the exam rather than take the public courses. I’m not necessarily advocating this approach as I found the CSM course to offer me an incredible introduction to something that was completely foreign to me at the time. Had I tried to do this with no team/person interaction it would have made no sense to me. I also had introduced Scrum at my previous organization and so had some experience with it.
Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction — On Amazon
Books
The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management
Tools
As with any of the articles in this series I am not prescribing an approach to land a job in Product Management. (At the time of writing this I am searching for a role in Product Management.) Everyone’s story of how we got here and where we are going is different. I am documenting my approach in the case that the content and tools can help to motivate anyone looking to take this journey to make the first steps, or keeping making steps if you already started. I wish you all the best of luck and look forward to talking about your path and learning from you.
If you enjoyed this story I would truly appreciate you clicking the ♡. I’m planning a number of additional articles on my personal journey, articles from the community we will build together and guest articles from PMs in the industry who made a similar transition. Consider following My Product Path to see more of this content.
