3 proven paths to becoming a Product Manager

Digital product managers play a key role in any modern company. Despite their importance, there are hardly any straightforward ways to become one. During my career, I have supported dozens of product managers (PMs) in making their move to product management and progressing in their careers. In this process, I have done more than 300 job interviews with (future) PMs. Based on my six years as a digital product manager, I have identified three dominant paths to become a PM: joining as an associate PM, making an internal transition, and joining an early-stage startup.

Here is a short comparison of the three paths:

#1: Joining as an associate product manager

One common way to become a product manager is to join a company that has a dedicated associate product manager (APM) program or is open to hiring associates in a product role.

I have rarely seen early-stage companies hire APMs.
In the first three years at N26 we didn’t explicitly hire APMs but rather transitioned the strongest product management interns into a full-time role. At Circ, we hired one associate, but it was rather an opportunistic than a strategic choice because he had an exceptional profile. I advised one of our PM interns at N26, to whom we couldn’t make an offer to, to follow the APM track at a large, mature product organization, which he did. He became a great product leader in one of the cutting-edge product organizations in Europe.

I have mostly seen grown-up startups with 20+ product managers hire PM associates. Many traditional companies tend to lack the understanding for modern software product management. Small companies or tech organizations, however, tend to miss the structures or leadership capacity for more than a few, if any, APMs. Their product managers often lack the time, structures, or experience for mentoring and coaching. For smaller and medium companies, every project can feel like a make-or-break project. Thus, they often struggle to hand over ownership to new joiners.

Larger product organizations, however, are more likely to have advanced career tracks and established processes for performance management, and knowledge exchange. These companies have more projects that are important, but not necessarily critical for the survival of the company. Such lower risk projects provide the opportunity to allow less experienced PMs take end-to-end ownership of a product.

Applying to a regular PM job can work out as well.
Search for companies with an advanced product organization. If they don’t have a job posting for an associate PM role, apply to a regular PM position and clearly state in your CV and interview that you are open to join as an associate. Don’t expect that anyone will read your cover letter, focus on your CV. During the application process, make it obvious why and how your previous background relates to product management. Also highlight which gaps you will need to close during your time as an APM.

Become familiar with the terminology, best practices, frameworks, and the modern mindset of product management.
Start as soon as possible to grow your product knowledge and don’t wait until you are hired. See a list of reading recommendations to get started with below. You will also need to work on your performance in interviews. Apply also to companies that are not on your short list to practice. Run trial interviews with friends and use online interview preparation to think through tricky questions. You need to become comfortable with the stress during interviews. PMs have to deal with a lot of unfamiliar, stressful, and uncomfortable situations, and need to stay calm and focused. If you can’t do this during the interview, most likely you will also not be able to do it during the day-to-day job.

Be prepared for a salary cut and boring projects to start with.
Entering into product management may start with a cut in salary if you had a more senior position in a different role before. Don’t let this discourage you. Understand the salary ranges for more senior product roles and the requirements for a promotion. Make your future salary expectations for more senior roles clear to avoid any surprise.

After you join a company, be ready to work on less exciting projects and don’t be picky. Take what you’re given. Crush them and repeat. This is the way to build trust and respect. You may only get one opportunity before people pass on you. Watch the offers for more interesting projects come in. In the end, how you do anything is how you do everything. If you follow this advice, you will end up having more and more options within the company.

It isn’t easy to find a company, but once you are in, you are all set.
In particular in Europe there are not many grown-up startups with product focus and an advanced product organization. Once you join a company, the APM path can be less stressful and still offer a good growth curve. You will receive more guidance, structured learning, and support from your peers. You need to rely a little less on self-learning. On the flip side, it can come along with a salary cut and can provide a slower learning curve due to the maturity of the company and organization.

#2: Making an internal transition.

In my last six years, I have seen many people transition to product management within the company when internal needs met personal skill. These colleagues transitioned from business development, marketing, customer service, operations, design, or engineering.

Valuable knowledge, relationships, and an urgent need can form an opportunity.
This path became obvious to me when we had a reorganization at N26 and dissolved the business development team. Some former business developers joined our product management team. They had been familiar with the company, the product, and the people as well, and had convinced us with their soft skills and ability to learn. Over the course of 3–12 months of coaching and support, they became fully fledged product managers, owning major products end to end.

Internal transitions to the product team can be significant opportunities for companies. First, because someone who works in a department that has regular touchpoints with the product team can build valuable internal knowledge and trust within the organization. Second, closing a gap can be urgent and it can save the company recruiting cost as well as valuable hiring and on-boarding time.

Apply for a role of your expertise and transition 3–12 months later.
Join in a role where you have significant experience and competence and set transitioning to product management as your mid-term goal. Pay attention to determine if this role has regular touch points with the product and technology team. For example, you might be an important day-to-day stakeholder for the product team as a business developer, a partnership manager, or a finance manager. Or you might join as a project partner to enable cross-department initiatives, such as end-to-end CRM, tracking implementations, or operations process optimization. Or you might be close to customers and as such an important source of feedback for the product team, for example as a 2nd or 3rd level customer service agent, a sales manager, or a key account manager.

Once you are in a role close to product, make sure you perform extremely well and build relationships across the company.
If you cannot perform or convince in your initial role, the company won’t be open for the transition. Thus, make performance a priority, and don’t see it only as something you have to do. Hence, do apply for a role in which you can actually deliver. Don’t shoot for more if you want to transition to product management.

Also, having strong internal relationships is key to become and succeed as a PM. Make building relationships with the product team a priority, especially if you end up not working as closely with the product team as you initially had hoped for. Meet product people over lunch and other events. Try to find ways to support the product organization and create value for them. This will require extra effort before and after working hours.

Keep your eyes open for upcoming opportunities.
There are two options here: Either a PM is leaving the company and creates a gap, or the company needs to hire more PMs. Approach your team lead and the product management lead with the desire to transition to a PM role. Explain to them how you can help to close the gap and how you will ensure that your current role won’t suffer. Be open to join as an associate PM or for a 3-month trial in this role. This reduces the leaders’ perception of risk by making it a softer commitment.

You should start to grow product management knowledge while you still work in your initial role. First by reading, but also by exchanging ideas with PMs of your company over lunch and by observing them in their job. For example, you can ask to join certain workshops, or scrum meetings as an observer. This will help you to build empathy and knowledge about product development.

If you make a transition, it will be a very intense time for you.
You will need to put extra effort into your job to ensure that you don’t leave a large gap in your previous role. Meanwhile, you need to get up to speed in the new role. Time-box some of your focus to build a continuous learning and reflection process. You can deliver additional value by creating empathy within your previous department towards product and vice-versa, for example, by explaining issues and improving communication between the two departments.

Don’t expect a salary cut, but a slower salary growth.
If you transition from a role you have been fully qualified for, companies aren’t likely to reduce your salary after this transition. However, your salary increase in the next 1–2 years might be slower than if you had stayed in your old role. This is because your PM experience matches the experience of an APM or a regular PM, while your current salary might be that of a senior PM. You first need to close the experience gap before you can expect your salary to grow again.

If the company does not grow the product department any time soon, no roles will be available.
Thus, make sure you join a company with clear growth ambitions and capabilities. If you make this path work, you will receive quite a lot of PM responsibility right away. Filling an important gap often means working on things that are essential for the company. Thus, this path to become a PM can be quite intense and stressful, in particular during the transition period.

#3: Joining early and taking the opportunity

In almost all early-stage companies, one of the co-founders takes the product management role, as the key challenge in that phase is to build a product that can reach product-market fit. However, founders will soon be immensely busy with many other things and need support around countless operational product topics. This can be your opportunity.

This is the path that worked for me.
During my early career, I designed and developed websites for several years, studied business, started my company (a restaurant with electronic menus) and built the operating software for it. Nonetheless, the path to becoming a product manager was not obvious to me. At that time, I was not even familiar with what it means to be a PM. It just sounded like the right job for me. Therefore, I decided to join N26 as an “entrepreneur in residence,” basically being an assistant to the founders. It was only a few weeks before the initial launch, when the CEO asked me to make sure we could launch the Android app in time. With this clear task, I was already heads-in into product management. I became connected to the product team and fell in love with the job. After an intensive two months, the head of product decided to leave and I got the chance to take over the lead in product management. With this internal transition, I ended up in a position with a steep learning curve. I needed to learn product management by heart, or drop out. Since then, I have worked for several companies, but I never have left product management again.

Find a promising early stage startup and build trust with the founders.
You have to approach it like an investor and figure out what chance this company has to become somewhat relevant. Look out for a startup with good funding, excellent founders, great product/market potential, a meaningful business model and strong investors. The main risk of this path is that the company might never grow out of the early stage of 5–20 employees. Then you will never end up doing a real product manager job. In fact, most companies get stuck in this stage and never find true product-market fit.

Convince the founders about yourself and join them as a founder assistant, entrepreneur in residence, project manager or anything similar. Build trust with the founders by executing in great quality whatever needs to be done. These can be boring tasks like finding a new phone provider, but remember - how you do anything, is how you do everything.

Offer your support to help with projects close to product and technology.
This will require significant extra effort, but early-stage startups are usually not a nine-to-five job anyway. You can support with setting customer feedback cycles before, around and after the launch of the product. Help the engineering team to solve upcoming problems such as: release management and coordination; quality assurance, in particular manual testing, bug reporting, and prioritization; support running scrum meetings as the team grows and needs more structure; document processes and product specifications; provide support in defining key business metrics and set up the data and tracking tools. You can also support the founders with gathering and writing specifications for upcoming features.

While you build trust with founders and work on different things to help the company grow, spend some time learning about product management, engineering, data, and design. Spend time reading, join meetups, and exchange ideas with the existing technology team to learn from them.

They will need a full-time PM to run the operational product management at some point.
The strategic aspects will stay with the founders for a while. You can use the opportunity to make the official transition and find an external mentor who can help you accelerate your growth. Further down the line, the company will need a product leader who will also take care of more strategic aspects, product team building and leadership. Depending on the company’s and your individual growth and previous experience, you can grow into this leadership role. It can also be meaningful to hire an experienced product leader from whom you can learn. In this case, it is most important to stay open-minded. It does not make sense to push yourself into the leader role when you are not ready for it. This will damage you and the company. Therefore, stay open to seek advice from experienced product leaders and founders at this point, and put your ego second.

Lower salary compensated with shares and learnings.
Depending on your previous experience, the position may come with a salary cut, as early-stage startups have lower base salaries. This can be compensated with share packages that can go beyond your imaginations. In addition, you will pick up valuable learning beyond product management, which will prepare you to become a successful founder one day. You will experience various challenges in all departments at the different growth stages of the company. Being a PM at this early stage means close interaction with the whole company. Hence, you will experience a steep learning curve.

Other Options: Relationships, Luck, and Internships.

Of course, there are more than three ways of becoming a PM and many combinations of them exist. Above, I described three options that can be used as a clear strategy and do not depend too much on luck or external factors. In real life, I have seen three other ways that worked for people. However, I would not bet on them, as they are less reliable.

Strong relationships with a product leader.
If you have been friends or colleagues with a product leader for many years, they might be a quick door opener into product management for you. Do not expect that a few meetings over lunch will do the job, though. In fact, I have done this a few times, but only with people who I already knew for several years. Thus, their soft skills, mindset, ability to learn, and relevant background knowledge were not in question for me. I decided to give it a try and opened the door into product management for them. In most cases, it worked out quite well. Yet, as a product leader, you can do this only for a small number of people. Otherwise, you will have a team of great people with little experience in product management.

Get hired as a regular PM right away.
There can be companies that offer you a PM position right away, even though you have no real product management experience. When this opportunity opens up, be cautious. The company might not understand what product management actually is and rather needs a project manager. In the worst case, you end up not doing product management at all. It can happen that you end up in a massive conflict with the company’s leaders. Or you adapt to a different role and don’t learn about real product management.

Internship in product management.
Product management internships are a promising path for people early in their career. This path is similar to path #3. I have seen many great PMs starting their career as a PM intern in a company, although mostly in early- to mid-stage startups. Companies can build product management talent and it involves little risk for them. They can get to know someone without having the obligation to offer them a full-time position in the end.

One path that definitely does not work is only to rely on certificates and formal education.
Of course, the more you know, the better, and these programs can help you to become familiar with the terminology, mindset, and some theory. You should not expect to be hired because a sheet of paper says you are a product manager. Good product managers are made and tested in everyday life. Education is a bonus, but education alone will not get you far.

Conclusion

When we look at the three options described above, we see that there is no “right” or “wrong.” Each way comes with its advantages and disadvantages. For example, starting as a PM associate is a slow but safe path. Internal transition is more challenging and requires some good opportunities. Joining an early-stage startup can quickly get you into product management, or out of it, as it is the most stressful and challenging path.

No matter which (if any) of the ways above you choose, first you need to understand whether product management is the job you want to go for. It is a great and satisfying job with many opportunities, but it is also very challenging and stressful. During the last few years, I have seen many people becoming PMs in all the three ways described above. Find the one that fits your personality and preferences the best. I hope this article is helpful on your journey. Feel free to share your experience and thoughts in the comments below.

Reading Recommendations

The requirements on product management are different in the various stages of a company. Understanding these different needs will help you to understand where to apply, how to plan your career, and where you fit best. Thus, I recommend you to read “How to Craft Your Product Team at Every Stage” in addition to this article.

No matter which path you choose, building a continuous learning and reflection habit will always help. Make regular time for reading and find a mentor if you can. I often see PMs not taking enough time for self-reflection and learning because they are too busy or stressed. This is a critical mistake. Remember “All leaders are readers, but not all readers are leaders.” The following books and articles have helped me on my journey:

Books*:

• The Lean Product Playbook
• Inspired
• Building Better Products and other books from Rosenfeld

Newsletter:

• https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-management-newsletter/

Articles:

• Some basics about user research you need to know
• An intro about experimentation
• You need to understand “product discovery”
• Basic “problem first” mindset
• To foster your “problem first” mindset
• Some input on roadmapping
• One of my favorite frameworks
• Scrum vs. Kanban, what do you think?
• Defining goals and objectives is key. It starts with a clear north star.
• A practical flow charting technique I like
• Questions to exercise for you PM interview
• Running planning meetings sounds easy, but isn’t
• Understand what type of PM you want to become
• Important, basic mindset
• “Decision making” is a skill, often being forgotten
• Some basics about working with data
• Basic mindset about prioritization
• 20 prioritization methods you should have heard of
• Overview on the PM career track and skills
• About PM hiring, understand what they are looking for
• Great advice for stakeholder management
• A long, but true list about what a PM does

*Book recommendations contain Amazon affiliate links