A new product manager who recently graduated from college joined our team a few months ago. As I’ve been meeting with her, I’ve been thinking about my own journey in product and wondering how and when did I learn what I know? What learning moments stuck with me most? Can we short cut her journey so she can orient to the job more quickly? If so, can we scale this to the rest of the team product managers of all levels grow in their roles too?
I took the topic to a group of product managers within our organization by simply asking, “How did you learn to be a product manager?” In order to facilitate a more structured conversation, I provided several categories of competencies around which we discussed training, reading and work assignment recommendations.
Learn by doing resonated most as the best way to improve. Several in the group commented about how when they asked for those extra credit or stretch assignments, their expertise grew most. These were the most impactful moments in their careers.
Product Manager Knowledge
Product Manager functional expertise or knowledge is a broad area of several topics that takes time to learn (I don’t think anyone is ever done learning in this area). A product manager has to know about her customers, business or industry and product – backwards, forwards and sideways – and same for all her competitors’ products. She needs to understand data and be able to make decisions based upon insights derived from data. This is why we see some of the best data analysts become great product managers. It’s essential to the role. It’s also important to learn technology and user experience in order to partner best with those we work with to be a strong partner and know the best questions to ask to deliver great products.
General Product Management Courses
For general product management courses: we like Mary Cagan’s public workshops, Product School’s leadership course, Nielsen Norman trainings in experience design and Stanford’s artificial intelligence course. General Assembly offers a good survey course in product management. Looks like they offer all kinds of interesting topics. We hear that Reforge is about to offer a Product Strategy course and we’re really excited about it since we’ve enjoyed their testing and growth courses. A few people raved about Duarte’s DataStory for learning how to use data to tell stories.
Make Use of Your Company’s Own Training Resources for Customers
The team recommended taking the classes or courses offered by our own company for the products we use to make our product: in this case, the corporate website. This is a little specific to our team but doesn’t hurt to mention. If you have a customer support team, marketing conference for your customers or customer training team, they could be great resources to learn more.
Data Skills – Build a Daily Routine
With respect to building those data skills, our group suggested monitoring data daily and making hypotheses about why the numbers move as they do. This daily routine instills discipline about data and helps a PM know what impacts her product’s metrics. We watch traffic, conversion, units sold, traffic referral sources, and many more on the website.
Process Knowledge
Knowing and understanding process is something many of us take for granted especially after we’ve been in the workforce for a few years. The most important processes we think important are those around agile, quantitative and qualitative testing methods and product discovery.
Agile Product Owner training
I like to send all product managers to product owner agile training (offered by Scrum Alliance) because I think it provides a foundation from which the product manager can think about her work and engaging with fellow team members even if the company follows some altered form of agile (and most companies have some sort of twist anyway). It also helps our product team have a common vernacular when discussing the work.
Product Discovery: Learning first-hand from customers is the crowd favorite (so why do we do so little of it?)
The conversation picked up quickly when we talked about how we learned customer discovery, research and qualitative testing. For many of us, this is our favorite part of the job. We loved learning how to do this and remember fondly experiencing how a real-live person interacted with our product for the first time. The best way to learn this skill is participation and these days this is pretty easy with sites like usertesting.com. Many of us learned by raising our hand to try out an A/B test as a stretch assignment. We find more senior PMs are happy to help bring along their team mate to learn how to do product discovery.
To learn product and customer discovery, we’ve read a lot of great books like: Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make me Think”, Eric Ries “The Lean Startup”, and Don Norman’s classic “The Design of Everyday Things”. IDEO U has a good course for design thinking – a related topic.
Individual Skills
Things like collaboration, communication, influence, time management and leadership skills can be learned in all kinds of jobs and apply well to product management roles.
Facilitation skills – just give it a try yourself
We agreed that some of these skills just come with work experience. Several of us learned facilitation skills by participating and watching. Then raising our hand to try to facilitate ourselves. It wasn’t always perfect but we grew in our confidence to lead a team through a discussion. This should be an easy one to try: See if your scrum master might let you facilitate your team’s next retro? You might also like Jeff Patton’s Story Mapping book. It’s one of my favorites about product workshops.
Interpersonal skills to be a better, happier human
Some books we like in this area include: Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Granny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler and Stephen R. Covey. There are all kinds of Crucial Conversations-related training and resources and I’m the first to admit this was the most impactful and important class I ever took.
What’s next?
We talked about so many ideas in just a short 45 minutes and it was actually a fun conversation where we learned more about each other. Definitely needed in our fully remote lives! Not only does the new team member have all kinds of ways to get better at her job, so do the rest of the team. Win. Win. Win!
Regardless of age or experience, there is always something more to learn in the area of product management and it’s good to be choosy about what might resonate best. How do you learn? What type of development goal might help you short cut your journey? I hope this has given you a few ideas about an extra assignment, a new book or an (online) class that will help you grow in your career as a product manager.
The Craft of Product 