Setting a foundation for your PM career in the first 6 months
Three key areas for first-time PMs to focus on in their first 6 months
Starting your very first product management job?
Whether you’re joining a rotational Apprentice Product Manager (APM) program or starting a Product Manager role, it’s both an exciting and potentially overwhelming time.
In the first 6 months, you’re likely facing a firehose of information, meet-and-greets, and skill-building sessions. The goal is to set a strong foundation for your PM career: this means building your execution experience, building domain expertise, and a roster of cross-functional teammates that trust you.
Both managers and first-time PMs have a role to play in setting a strong foundation for a product management career that could potentially span decades. For managers, it’s a big responsibility to be supporting someone at the very beginning of their PM journey. For first-time PMs, it can be challenging to maintain and drive an an ongoing career conversation with your manager while you’re drinking from the firehose.
Here are the three key areas for first-time PMs to focus on in their first 6 months:
1. Learn on the job: Get execution reps and don’t worry about how to lead a giant/ambiguous/strategic project. Start with projects that are already in the “build” phase.
Projects that are in the “build” phase will already be resourced and prototyped. Jump in at this point, and you will quickly learn what it takes to ship something, keep stakeholders up-to-date, and ask good questions. You’ll also learn how to evaluate that thing once it ships (through something like a post-launch analysis).
Since you will likely be the least experienced person from any discipline, you will learn what it’s like to lead from behind—I like to think of this as servant leadership. In a digital by default (i.e. all-remote) environment, it’s the cherry on top that you can get help from your manager or mentor if you don’t know what to say. Don’t expect that you’ve “found your PM voice” yet — it takes many, many reps to find that.
2. Actively manage your project portfolio: Make sure there’s always at least 1 project that is 100% under your control.
6 months is a very short window of time, and you want to ensure that you have impactful achievements when you go to write your self assessment. Work with your manager to ensure there is at least 1 project that is 100% under your control — that means that there are minimal outside forces that will derail the project from being completed as expected. It might have less immediate user impact but would help the team make better decisions, like a competitive landscape analysis or an analysis of merchant feedback. Or it might be super tactical — like improving your help docs, going through the product and identifying bugs or content improvements, or jumping into the support channel or issue backlog.
For every project that you work on, write down your deliverables and learning outcomes, and ask your manager to share relevant context and resources (I use a template — subscribe and comment below for a link). Do this at the beginning, middle, and end of working on that project. The dedicated time to write down learning outcomes at each phase of the project will pay dividends when similar challenges arise on future projects. Plus, you can bring this with you to your next rotation or use it for your self-evaluation.
3. Expose your craft: It might seem scary at first, but try not to operate in the safe world of direct messages (DMs).
Try to do your work in the project and team channels. This way, you expose your work (and your thought process) to others. Those people are going to become advocates for you when your lead asks 3–5 people for feedback at the end of your rotation or during your review.
There are definitely times when DMs are appropriate! But, when you’re doing your product work, chances are that your questions and work-in-progress snippets are relevant to things that others are doing. At a minimum, you’ll instill confidence in your teammates that you are making progress and thinking critically about what they’re building. Operating in the “safe” world of DMs will limit your impact. If you’re doing this now, you can start small by first noticing how often you use a DM instead of the project or team channel, and work up to it over time.
Don’t worry about sitting in on “big meetings,” working on 1 big project from end-to-end, or being the person who knows the answer to every single question. These things will come (except the last one!).
In the first 6 months, first-time PMs need to build a foundation of that nitty-gritty execution experience, relevant domain expertise, and a roster of cross-functional teammates that trust you. To do that, you will need to learn on the job, actively manage your project portfolio, and expose your craft.
What did you do during your first 6 months as a product manager to set yourself up for a successful PM career? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
