How I landed my first Product Management job 🧑🏻💻
Hi, my name is Alex 👋, I currently live and work in Bristol, UK as a Product Manager for Kaluza, an energy tech company part of the OVO group.
Reading this, you may or not know, Product Management is notoriously hard to land a job in without any prior experience. There is not a clearly defined pathway for landing a Product Management role, and people wind up here in different ways.
I applied to many Product Manager jobs without success. I realised it would be difficult to land a Product Management role without any direct experience in the role, but how would I ever get this illusive Product Management experience if I can’t get a job?
I wanted to share my experience, and some top tips as to how I landed my first Product Management role.
1. Find the right company 💚
I started by identifying companies that were a good cultural fit in terms of supporting career development and progression as well as having a strong and established product community. In my search, I came across OVO and I realised early on they were ticking the boxes in these criteria.
As I had experience working as a Business Analyst (BA) I found a BA role at OVO and was successful in my application and was placed in a position as a BA embedded in a product team. You could follow a similar approach and consider applying for roles where you have experience with the goal of transitioning into a Product Management role internally.
Upon joining OVO and through the application process I was very open from the outset that my intent and my career development goal was to move into Product Management. I was lucky that I had managers who supported this and helped me shape my career development plan and find opportunities for me to develop my skills.
If you have a career development goal, share this with your manager, hopefully they will support you.
2. Build up experiences & transferable skills 💪
My approach was to look at Product Manager job descriptions, the skills required for the roles and group them into themes. Once I had defined these themes, I did a self assessment to build up a picture of where I thought I was currently; strength areas I could demonstrate or skills I might be lacking as development/growth areas. I used Trello to keep a track of this with a particular focus on the growth areas.
This helped inform my career development plan and the areas I wanted to increase my skills and experience in, for example, I got involved in user research with the UX team at OVO as I identified this as an area I wanted to gain some skills and experience in.
Using my Trello board I could capture experiences and work examples based on the themes/skills needed of a Product Manager to then draw on in an interview (p.s. PM Starter Pack was a super useful resource for job interview prep).
3. Never stop learning 🤓
Besides building up your skills and experience on the job, there are loads of great resources to read to learn more about Product Management.
Books 📚
- Inspired by Marty Cagan
- Sprint by Jake Knapp and co
- Hooked by Nir Eyal
- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Podcasts 🎧
- The Product Experience from Mind the Product which has some great interviews with many product celebrities
- Jake & Jonathan — Jake Knapp and Jonathan Courtney having some light hearted product chat
- How I Built This from NPR, telling the stories of how some of the worlds biggest and best companies and products were built
There are also many courses and talks available for free across the web. One example is a free Google Product Design course on Udacity which I found really useful.
This is by no means an exhaustive list but besides these resources, Medium and Twitter and great places to go to follow some of the brightest minds in Product and get an insight into their thoughts, my go-to is John Cutler, who regularly tweets out some great stuff.
4. Network, network, network 🗣
It can be daunting at first to step out of your comfort zone, but just do it. The product community is super friendly and supportive and who better to learn more about product management from than the people who live and breathe it every day.
There are loads of great events/meetups running around the world, for me, notably those run by Mind the Product. In Bristol we are lucky to have ‘Product Tank’ which runs regularly (approximately every 6 weeks) and ProductCamp, an annual “un-conference” (and are both free!). Hopefully there are similar events near you.
A couple of chaps and I who met at the ProductTank events in Bristol even started the Product Lunch Club meetup where we meet regularly to discuss various product topics on a lunch time — please do join us!
There are also lots of great Slack groups that you can join for free and engage with the product community such as:
These are all great places to meet people, talk about Product to learn and grow (whatever stage of your journey you’re at), this was certainly hugely valuable for me when trying to break into Product.
Recap! ⏮
- Consider applying for roles where you have experience with the goal of transitioning into a Product Management role internally
- If you have a career development goal, share this with your manager, hopefully they will support you.
- look at Product Manager job descriptions, the skills required for the roles and group them into themes
- Capture experiences and work examples based on the themes/skills needed of a Product Manager to then draw on in an interview
- Never stop learning and building your network
Thank you for getting this far and I hope this has been useful to you in some way, if you have any questions or feedback, please drop a comment or get in touch with me on LinkedIn!
