How I Got Hooked on Product Management

This is a guest post that was originally published by Evgeny Lazarenko on Medium.

“I’m a Product Manager at TradeGecko, an inventory management SaaS company based in Singapore.

This post is a recollection of personal experiences which helped me figure out what I want to do in the foreseeable future, namely Product Management.

You might relate to some parts of it, especially if you’ve just become a product manager yourself, or currently in transition.”

In early 2010 I received Monbukagakusho Scholarship and moved to Tokyo from Moscow. I was a young and naive boy from a post-Communist country who just got out. And I didn’t have a plan. For years I’ve been preparing to leave Russia, and when my dreams came true, I was out of ideas what life to lead from now on. Continue Reading

19 Lessons I Learned During My First Year as a Product Manager

This is a guest post that was originally published by Manas Saloi on LinkedIn.

2015 was a big year for me professionally. I transitioned from coding to product management. While I’m constantly learning and have a long way to go, I want to share a list of 19 things that I’ve learned last year:

1) Get your priorities straight. The first 30 days at your new job are critical in setting expectations with the management as well as getting familiar with everyone in your team. Start early. Dig in. Create a reputation as someone who gets shit done.

Here is a great article on the topic: 12 Things Product Managers Should Do in Their First 30 Days at a New Company

2) One of the hardest things to accept when you first transition into a product management role is that you will no longer be writing code, creating beautiful UIs, running marketing campaigns or whatever you were doing on a regular basis before making the switch. Your only goal now is to make sure you help your team ship the right product to your users. You are now an owner of the product without any of the stake- holders directly reporting to you. This will mean being a champion for your developers when talking with management (setting timelines), fighting for your marketing team when they need a feature to be shipped which might not be considered a priority by others. Essentially, being the voice of all stakeholders involved with your product/company. Your job now is to remove roadblocks and help people do their job well. Continue Reading

Product Q&A with Jen Granito Ruffner

Jen Granito Ruffner

About: Jen Granito Ruffner is a product manager driven by helping people be more productive & extract more value out of social networks. In her past, she’s worked at AOL Instant Messenger, LinkedIn, Zynga, Myspace, & Tagged.

She has launched LinkedIn’s news, sharing, and events products; Tagged’s (mathematically) viral registration flows, some of Cityville’s largest revenue generating and engaging features & more.

She is currently leading product at Kifi; focused on building tools and a network to  retain your team’s web centric knowledge management.

In addition to hard problems; she also enjoys ping pong, wine, poker, softball, travel, & cheese. Continue Reading

Are We Product Managers or Problem Managers?

This is a guest post that was originally published by Jen Ruffner on Medium.

Problems should be the foundation of product development

We’ve all been to those planning meetings where the conversation starts to go on a tangent and the team starts suggesting ideas that don’t actually solve the problem that you started talked about. I like to call them headless ideas. And as the person leading the meeting, you have to go into damage control. It starts with a delicate dance of slowing the current momentum & corralling the conversation back to the problem.

Why and how does this happen? So much of product management glorifies coming up with great ideas and giving feedback. Also the wider you go in the organization combined with the closer you get to the pixels; the more feedback you’re going to get. Continue Reading

Product Manager Interview: Create a New Product

Product Manager Interview - Create a New Product

As you might imagine, creating a new product is an extremely broad and open-ended topic that can quickly get out of hand. If an interviewer asks you to walk through how you might create a new product, take the following approach to better structure your answer:

1) Identify and validate a problem

Feel free to use a whiteboard here but the easiest way to come up with some product ideas is to spend some time thinking about some problems you’ve noticed in your own life. Once you’ve jotted down a few problems you’ve noticed, talk through how you might speak with potential users to validate the problem. You should be as detailed as possible and explain how you might find these users, what questions you would ask, and how you would document their needs. Continue Reading

Product Manager Interview: Improve a Product

Product Manager Interview - Improve a Product

Another common question that is frequently asked during product manager interviews is “How would you improve X product?”

While the product design question asks you to design from scratch, this variation is meant for the interviewer to see how well you can understand the current situation of an existing product, propose potential solutions to any problems the product may currently have, and understand your ability to execute on those solutions.

As usual, you’ll want to structure your answer so that it’s easier for you to process in your mind as well as clear for your interviewer to understand.

Depending on the situation, you may either have the option of choosing an existing product to improve or your interviewer may propose his/her own company’s product. Either way: Continue Reading