How to Become a Top 3% Product Manager

Finding your first job as a product manager is just like the ever frustrating chicken and egg problem of getting your first job. Companies like to hire people with prior product management experience and it’s hard to get prior experience without first getting hired.

Here is some of our best advice (compiled from years of speaking to candidates trying to break into the industry as well as from our own successful experiences) around landing a job as a product manager.

Become a Great Product Manager: Things You Should Do Immediately

Side Projects

One of the best ways to demonstrate your interest in product management is to work on a side project that gives you the experience in shipping a product.

A side project could be anything from a tangible iPhone app, wireframe, or even PowerPoint case study. You could volunteer to help a non-profit or small business or you could just do some research on a company’s current product / service and show how you might improve it. Continue Reading

What Does a Product Manager Do? [A Day in the Life + Responsibilities]

Day in the Life of a Product Manager

As product managers, the one question that we get asked every now and then is: “What does a product manager do, anyway?“

Unfortunately, many of us still stutter while answering this question since product management is a versatile career path.

Furthermore, responsibilities vary from company to company.

To be more specific, the product manager role tends to vary heavily depending on the product lifecycle and the stage of the company. 

Due to this variability, there is a wide range of day-to-day activities, but ultimately, a product manager is still responsible for doing whatever it takes to collaborate with multiple development teams and move different conversations towards closure.

In this article, we’ve provided two examples of day-to-day activities for the following two product manager roles: Continue Reading

What is a Product Manager?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked: “What is a product manager, and how do I become one?”

I’m always fascinated by this question, because the person who’s asking is already interested in product management, even though they have no idea what it is.

That interest makes sense. Product managers are amongst the highest-compensated, most well-respected professions in the world today, even though they’re among the least well-understood.

In business schools around the world, MBA students have set their sights on product management as their dream jobs. Colleges are starting to create new majors and programs focused solely on product management due to high demand.

Part of the challenge with describing what a product manager does is that the role of product manager is inherently poorly-defined. Why is that? Continue Reading