5 Ways the Product Role Varies Across Companies

5 Ways PM Role Varies Across Companies

There are few professional fields I’ve come across as diverse as the product management field. In all my conversations with other PMs, I haven’t experienced one instance where the roles discussed were exactly the same. While this is great news for aspiring PMs because there’s something for everyone, it can also become a major source of headaches when deciding where to work.

In this post I want to highlight some key ways the PM role varies across companies by summarizing and commenting on several great points found in the Cracking the PM Interview. It’s my hope that this post will at least help people to start thinking about the sort of companies they’d want to work at based on their skills and personal preferences. Continue Reading

Should You Become a Product Manager?

Should You Become a Product Manager?

A lot of our readers have been asking for advice on whether or not product management is the career for them. I thought I’d first lay out a few points about common misconceptions/buzzkills of the PM role as well as qualities I’ve seen in great product managers.

Misconceptions/Buzzkills of Product Management:

1) I’ll be the mini-CEO of a product!

Let’s get one thing straight. You are not a CEO (at least not yet!). As a Product Manager, you’re going to have to learn to throw away any ego and remember that you own the failures while your team owns the successes.

“As a product manager, you own the failures while your team owns the successes.”

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 The best teams work well because everyone feels ownership over the product and it is your job to gain the credibility to guide your team towards a certain product vision or strategy. Continue Reading

6 Types of Products That PMs Manage

6 Types of Products that PMs Manage

I was re-reading the excellent Cracking the PM Interview recently and came across a great topic to discuss for this week’s post. Product managers manage products of all shapes and sizes, and it can be daunting for aspiring PMs just to figure out what sort of products might fit their strengths, interests, or even work-life balance preferences. I’ll be summarizing the 6 most common types of products that PMs manage and bring in some examples from my own projects.

1. Shipped Software

Shipped software are products delivered to stores, whether that’s physical (think CDs of programs at Best Buy) or digital (Apple App Store). The exploding popularity of smartphones in the past decade or so has led to mobile apps becoming the one of the most common types of shipped software. Continue Reading

A/B Testing

A:B Testing

In a previous post about quantitative vs. qualitative research, I briefly mentioned A/B testing as a type of quantitative research product managers should be familiar with. This post will cover A/B testing in more detail – we’ll take a look at what it is, why it’s important, how it’s done, and some examples.

What Is A/B Testing?

One example of A/B testing is testing changes on a page design against the current design which allows the team to pick the design that produces better results. In order to do this, two versions of the page are shown to similar visitors at the same time. For example, half of visitors would see version A of the page, and the other half would see version B of the page. Continue Reading

Product Management in an Innovation Lab

Product Management in an Innovation Lab

I wanted to switch things up a bit this week and share some of my recent experiences as a PM in an innovation lab. What are innovation labs? These internal labs are typically found in larger companies with more bureaucracy.

The point of the innovation lab is to strip all the process away, explore ideas that aren’t part of the typical product roadmap, and build a working prototype to validate whether that idea works, all in a very short amount of time. Essentially, it’s a larger company’s way to tap into the speed and flexibility that many startups offer and to experiment on ideas that might be risky but potentially have large payoffs for the company down the line.

The point of the innovation lab is to strip all the process away.

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An Introduction to Unit Testing and Integration Testing

Unit Testing

As a product manager who works with software engineers, you will definitely witness the various ways code is tested upon completion. Testing the end product is absolutely essential to making sure the user doesn’t run into a buggy experience and the feature doesn’t break another part of the product or site.

In this post we’ll be going over a basic introduction of a couple of types of testing and how product managers typically work with the developers to triage bugs from tests.

Unit Testing

Unit testing is the act of testing certain areas of code and verifying that those functions work as expected. It’s only concerned about testing code that lives within the function body and not how it interacts with other parts of the application. Continue Reading