Survey a fresh batch of business school enrollees about their desired career post-MBA, and you’ll get the expected titles of management consultant, investment banker, and private equity associate.
But in the past decade, a new challenger has entered the fold.
Long coveted as a career path for the technical Silicon Valley crowd, Product Management has exploded in interest from non-technical pack as well.
So much so that it has quickly eclipsed stalwart roles like consultant and banker, as the most sought after job after getting an MBA.
What’s the big hype around Product Management?
You may have heard of the term “mini CEO” when describing Product Managers — popularized by Ben Horowitz’s Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager blog post.
And while that term has gotten a severe amount of blowback (and rightfully so) in the recent years, the ethos of the statement still holds.
Like a CEO, PMs are responsible for coordinating a lot of disparate pieces of the company together — harmoniously coming together for a product launch or, on a smaller scale, a version release.
This requires a good sense of leadership, collaborating across different teams and prioritizing the needs and requirements that each team has (e.g., a fintech product with business goals, engineering constraints, and compliance considerations).
Side note: however, unlike CEOs, PMs do not have final decision making power, nor do they have de facto respect and authority. That’s something that PMs need to earn from their team. That’s a big difference — amongst a myriad of others that I’m happy to discuss through DMs.
Being at the center of all the activity at the company, PMs get to be in the proverbial driver’s eat, and they can see the clear path that the company is going down.
And as a result, the PM knows — at a high level — everything about the company: the sales pipeline, the M&A deals, the tech stack, the 6–12 month strategy, the user personas.
The analogy I like to give is that PMs are the pilot of the Gundam — those futuristic giant mecha-suits that you see in anime and recently in Hollywood movies.
While there are other members in the Gundam manning the guns and arms and legs, the pilots get to sit at the head of the giant machine, seeing the whole battlefield and coordinating actions between all the other body parts.
Skills you need as a PM
Unfortunately for some MBA grads and other non-technical job hunters, most tech companies will want to see a diverse set of skills from their Product Manager candidates—with some skills being really hard to obtain for certain candidates.
The reason is that, because PMs sit at the nexus of so many workstreams and functions, they need to be able effectively communicate with each function and translate requests between teams.
From my experience, PMs need to simultaneously be in the weeds with certain teams (e.g., speccing out an API response format with Engineering, making a go/no-go call if a feature satisfies an international regulation with Legal), as well as super high level with others (e.g., 2–3 year user projections for the Finance and Strategy teams).
At a high-level, PM candidates will need to exhibit an understanding of the three tenets of design centricity: Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability.
Desirability: knowing and solving for what users want. This is a coordination with:
- the Design team (who are our personas + pain points / what are our jobs to be done?);
- Data team (is there drop-off in our activation funnel? where are our users? what are they doing in our product?);
- and Strategy (are our users going to our competitors + why?).
Feasibility: navigating constraints and making a judgment call on trade-offs. A lovely dance with:
- Engineering (we have X engineer hours before launch — what’s the best way to allocate that time to achieve our goals? do we want something janky and quick, or something polished but long?)
- Legal and Compliance (how can we build something that is compliant with regulations?)
- Finance (we may need more money for this, is that cool?)
- the Executive team (do we need more headcount on this? do we want to become a company that has X product?)
Viability: creating products to achieve the company’s business goals — whether it be:
- engagement. more interactions on our product per user
- activation. more sign-ups for every $ ad we spend
- users. more people using our stuff
- revenue. more sales/ads/whatever monetization lever
For most non-technical PM candidates, it’s the Feasibility part that is the hardest to showcase — “how do I show that I can effectively communicate and collaborate with Engineering?”
If companies are looking for a complete PM, this will be the biggest capability gap in any non-technical candidate.
And, for me personally, that was the hardest hurdle to cross in breaking into Product Management.
How to Become a Product Manager
If you’ve made it this far in the article and think that Product Management is for you, I’ve laid out four options for you to become a PM.
Since the having demonstrable track record of understanding Feasibility is hardest skill to obtain, I’ve broken out the options to non-technical and technical buckets — in addition to a time variable.
How much do you want to invest in becoming more technical in order to be a PM?
With that said, understand that this is merely a capability gap that you need to fill.
A PM’s superpower (compared to an engineer) is the ability to distill user needs (Desirability) into technical requirements. And partner with Engineering in order to spec out the solution to those needs.
“When a developer asks me to help with a technical problem, I start by discussing the feature from the user’s perspective… You’d be surprised how valuable your new perspective can be.” — Julia Babb
Become a Non-Technical PM Immediately
The fastest way to becoming a PM is to join a company that doesn’t require technical skills from their Product Managers.
Surprised? Especially after all my doom-and-gloom about needing to be technical.
Not every company is looking for a technical PM that can get into the weeds with engineers.
Depending on the ways of working at a company, a PM may only interact with Engineering at a high-level, usually working alongside an Engineering Manager (EM) or Tech Lead to talk about user and business requirements.
This typically happens at a larger company, especially a company with a entry-level Associate PM program — like Facebook’s Rotational PM program (RPM).
Facebook actively advertises that anyone can join the RPM program, and that they don’t favor candidates with technical experience.
Another strategy is to look out for Growth Product Manager roles — which is a hybrid role between Product and Marketing that manages the optimization of the user conversion funnel.
While Growth PMs still interact heavily with Engineering, the products they’re responsible for are less technical and thus there is a less steep learning curve in order to be proficient in the tech stack.
For example, a Growth PM may be responsible for the sign up flow for a website. She/he will likely be shipping features that they intuitively understand, like adding a Google Auth0 feature (i.e., log in with Google).
Become a Non-Technical PM in Due Time
With a bit of patience, you can become a Product Manager in 9–12 months by joining a company that has a liberal internal mobility policy — and even quicker if your existing company is open to internal transfer.
The strategy here is to join a generalist position at a company — such as Business Operations or Chief of Staff, familiarize yourself deeply with the product, and transfer to Product Management after showcasing our knowledge of the tech stack.
Getting a sponsor at the company who can pound the table for you would be extremely helpful for this strategy to play out effectively.
This was the strategy I employed in order to become a Product Manager, so I’m happy to talk more about this 1:1.
Become a Technical PM Immediately
Let’s say you want to become a technical PM (i.e., a PM that builds back-end products that requires a bit of technical know-how), and you want to become one as quickly as possible.
The best way to do this is to loudly and unabashedly showcase your interest in learning more about tech.
After all — the best PM candidate is the one who constantly wants to learn more.
If you’re able to showcase your curiosity, companies are more willing to take a gamble on you — because they know that you have the passion and the grit to succeed as a PM.
“Technical proficiency is certainly desirable but not required. What is required without a doubt? Technical curiosity. If you aren’t intrigued by technology and getting your hands dirty via small projects, self-teaching on Codecademy/Treehouse, or asking smart questions, I’ll wonder why.” — Hunter Walk
In order to showcase your interest, you can tactically do two things:
- Start a side project.
You don’t have to be the next Zuck hacking away at the next Facebook, but get your hands dirty.
What is something that always bothered you that you wish you could fix?
Maybe you’re tired of eating the same food on DoorDash — build a review aggregator of nearby restaurants.
Or start even simpler. Maybe you’ve always wanted a firstname-lastname.com website to house your resume.
You’ll quickly realize that taking action and doing something is a much better teacher than anything else.
From the review aggregator, you’ll probably need to build a database to store all the reviews. You’ll probably need to scrape all the reviews from Yelp, Google, and other review sites.
From the personal website, you’ll soon discover what it means to buy a domain name, and host a website, and what HTML is.
Soon after, you’ll start to think about getting other people to come to your websites and use them.
Well — who would get value from a review aggregator or a resume site? Probably other hungry people for the former, and recruiters for the latter.
Why would they come to my site over XYZ competitors?
In asking these questions and solving them, you’ll learn the Desirability skill.
Later, you’ll want to improve on your projects.
Should you add cool animations to your site, or should you add another tab with an ‘About Me’ blurb?
Well — you only have so many free hours in a week. It’ll probably be easier to make a new tab of text, and the new tab will add more value to recruiters who come onto the site.
In asking these questions and making trade-offs, you learn the Feasibility and Viability skills.
2. Read voraciously about engineering and tech
I’m not talking about Hatching Twitter or the Everyday Store. Those are business books for business folks — filled with business terms and content.
You’ll want to read books that explain hard tech and software concepts in a digestible manner.
Learn about cloud computing, servers & clients, APIs, HTML/CSS, and Javascript.
Here are some great resources that helped me:
High Scalability blog breaks down company architectures
Become a Technical PM with Some Elbow Grease
Finally, if you want to take your time and become entirely technically proficient, you can formally learn how to code.
This can be in the form of self-learning through Youtube and MOOCs, enrolling in a coding bootcamp like General Assembly, or going back to school and getting a degree in Computer Science.
But don’t think that you have to learn a programming language in order to become a Product Manager. As I’ve outlined, there are plenty of options to pursue in lieu of this strategy.
Candidly, this is a route that I may eventually go down. But not because I think it’ll make me a better Product Manager, but rather I want to build more complex side projects that require custom code :)
