Melissa answers questions about approaching your product management career thoughtfully and strategically. She covers what PMs are particularly good at and how to reframe the idea of PMs being “generalists,” what she thinks about product management certification courses and FAANG companies, and what taking an alternate route via product operations would look like.
Show Notes
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers questions about approaching your product management career thoughtfully and strategically. She covers what PMs are particularly good at and how to reframe the idea of PMs being “generalists,” what she thinks about product management certification courses and FAANG companies, and what taking an alternate route via product operations would look like.
Q: What tips would you give to someone who is concerned about being a generalist?
Q: Should a product manager aim for a start-up or one of the FAANG companies in the beginning of their career?
Q: What is the career track for product operations, and how do you support a person to grow in this role?
Q: Are product management certificate courses worth the effort, and which do you recommend?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
Your job is to create scalable solutions for a problem. And if you can do that really well with software, it's actually a pretty hard skill to master. And the only reason I can tell that is by working with a lot of people who haven't done product before, teaching them product. And I teach them the processes, I teach them how to talk to customers and understand the needs and take those needs and then craft solutions around them.
But it's that crafting solution piece that usually throws people. It's like, what do I do with these needs now to actually make a solution that is amazing, right? That really solves the problems for my customer in a scalable way. That's the piece I think that we're specialists at. And all the other pieces add to that.
They help us come up with those solutions that are great. And no, it's not just something that the product managers go in the back room and do. Yeah, we take input from engineers and designers, but at the end of the day, we're the ones accountable for how well that solution does meet the needs of the customer.
And we have to be able to see these insights and pull them out in order to do that. Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions. Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why?
Hi, Melissa, do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy? I'm struggling to walk through this white panel. Hi, Melissa. I'm a little shy. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm a little shy. I'm a little shy. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa. Today, we're talking all about product careers, which is a very hot topic lately. If you're in school, like my MBAs, they're getting ready to go out and find their next internships or their full-time jobs. So it is definitely the season for careers.
So we've got four great questions to answer for you today. But I want to remind you before we begin that if you have any questions for me, you can submit them to dearmelissa.com.
We do this every other week. We go through all of your questions, and I'm really excited to answer them. So without further ado, let's dive into these four. Dear Melissa, what tips would you give to someone who is concerned about being a generalist? Designers become great at design, developers with developing, and sales with selling. You get it. But the skills you're building as a product manager, they're not so clear. This is a really good question, and I think a concern that a lot of product folks have. Like, what am I a specialist at? So I'm gonna answer this right after this message from our sponsors.
All right, we're back, and we're talking about product management skills. What are we good at? Are we just generalists, or do we have a specific skill? I think this is a really good question. It's been something that I've been mulling over in my head, and I actually tweeted about it a couple days ago.
I think product managers are actually specialists. Yeah, we definitely have some generalist knowledge and background stuff that we have to talk about, and that's things like, you know, we need to know a little bit of business, a little bit of tech, a little bit of design. We need to know about those things, but what do we specialize in?
I didn't realize that we were specialists until I started working with companies that didn't have product managers there. They had a lot of subject matter experts that were brought in as product managers, and I started to realize how we think differently. And I think what we're experts at is a little bit of systems thinking, and also this whole thing about productizing, which is weird.
It's like, hey, we're specialists at product. But yeah, that's the thing. I'm gonna give you an example of a scenario that I ran into a bunch working with a company, and they are basically providing services for the rest of the, you know, it's a bank. Let's go with that. It's a bank that provides services for the rest of the bank.
And I looked at what they were building with their software, and they had something like 500 different apps, things that were like redundant across different business lines, things that could have been consolidated. And I was like, you really should build a platform here with different applications on top of it. And it was something that a lot of the people, having come from a banking experience, couldn't see.
They couldn't see how you take software and use it to create products that scale and meet the jobs to be done of many different users with the same type of workflows or system. And I think that is what product management is about. It's about understanding the needs of the business and the users, and then creating scalable software that meets those needs in a profitable way or a scalable way, even if you're internal, to serve many people and many needs at once.
This is something that we really shouldn't discount. I know everybody's like, oh, you know, product management kind of do it all. They're the catch-all function. But that's not true. It's really a strategic function. And as we get more and more software-related in a lot of our companies, I think this becomes more and more important.
So we need to be able to look at things and be like, should this be mobile? Should this be a desktop application? How should we structure it so that we can add to it, solve different problems, scale different problems with it? That's a lot of a science, not necessarily a generalist function, because we are making decisions here about how that relates.
So I would really look at that. Your job is to create scalable solutions for a problem. And if you can do that really well with software, it's actually a pretty hard skill to master. And the only reason I can tell that is by working with a lot of people who haven't done product before, teaching them product.
And I teach them the processes.
I teach them how to talk to customers and understand the needs and take those needs and then craft solutions around them. But it's that crafting solution piece that usually throws people. It's like, what do I do with these needs now to actually make a solution that is amazing, right? That really solves the problems for my customer in a scalable way.
That's the piece I think that we're specialists at. And all the other pieces add to that. They help us come up with those solutions that are great. And no, it's not just something that the product managers go in the back room and do. Yeah, we take input from engineers and designers, but at the end of the day, we're the ones accountable for how well that solution does meet the needs of the customer.
And we have to be able to see these insights and pull them out in order to do that. So that's what I would say. And it becomes really important. And especially if you're working at businesses that are going through digital transformations or are adding product for the first time or thinking about things in a productized way, your skills are really invaluable there.
And I don't think this isn't necessarily like something that is so unique to a specific person that you can't learn it. It's like, yes, you can learn it, especially if you're a subject matter expert, but that's really where you got to concentrate. You have to understand like, how do I pull out software patterns across industries?
One blind spot I see a lot, and especially in more complex industries like healthcare or banking, anything that's got like a lot of compliance and regulations is that they're so used to doing things the same old way in their industry over and over again. And they don't look at things from outside their industry that could actually help them make really cool, unique products that could set them apart. It's this mentality of like, no, we've always done it that way.
We're an insurance company. We couldn't possibly borrow the swiping function from Tinder, right? And you know what? That's the type of mindset that's not gonna help you innovate.
And a great product person should be able to look at like what every business does and take certain aspects of it and say, you know what? We could apply that here. That doesn't really affect how we do business on the backend. It doesn't affect our subject matter expertise, but it's an unexpected way to provide extreme value to users that people aren't doing in our industry because they're too stuck in their own ways.
So that's what I would say. Like really hone in on what makes you special, which is being able to solve problems in unique and scalable ways with software. That's your expertise as a product manager. And I'd really concentrate on that. Concentrate on growing that. It's gonna be really important, I think, going forward.
Next question. Dear Melissa, I've seen a lot of talk about what kind of company you should join as a product manager near the beginning of their career in this role. What are your thoughts on this? Should someone aim for a startup or an enterprise or one of the sexy FANG companies? Why? I love the acronym FANG.
I just think it's really funny. But if you don't understand what it means, it means Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. You know, the really big ones that we all look at and say, hey, they're really cool software companies that do everything well. Plus, they recruit tons of product managers.
So definitely a good place to go. So I have very particular thoughts on this. And it is a question that keeps coming up in my MBA class all the time. So very timely. Just been talking about this quite a bit. My biggest advice for anybody, when you're thinking of what company to join in the beginning of your career, is go where you're gonna learn the most.
Go where you're gonna learn the most. Your first job as a product manager, I would go to a place where you have a strong product management lead to learn from. If you were the first product manager in a startup, it's gonna be really, really hard for you because you don't know what to do yet. Like, you're not there yet.
You still haven't learned structure. Even if it was an overbearing structure that you learned at a large company, at least it was a structure.
Going to a startup without that, being the first product manager, you have nobody to learn from. It's gonna really set you back because you're gonna be spending a lot of cycles doing the wrong things in order to get to the right things. So I would optimize for learning. So what does that mean? I think at the beginning of your career, going to one of the big fang companies is totally fine as long as you end up on a team that you're gonna learn from.
I'd ask questions like, how often do you release, right? Are they gonna put you in a product management training program? That's great because you're gonna learn all of this structure and have formal training that you didn't have before. Fantastic. When I talk about like, how often do you release, I'm looking for companies that release pretty often and not like once a year, once every two year so that you actually get experience doing iterations so that you get experience seeing things go out there, measuring the success and then making decisions from it.
So if you're gonna go to a larger company, fang, non-fang, whatever, ask them about that. How often do you ship things to customers?
How do you measure the success? If you find a place that does it fairly often, good, go there, it doesn't really matter. If you find one that's like once every other year, like, no, you're not gonna learn. It's just gonna be a really slow slog there and you're not gonna get the experiences that you need to actually grow in your career.
Now, second thing I would look for besides how fast do they release, who is my product management leader? I go on LinkedIn and I stalk all the product management leaders and I look at their backgrounds. I'm like, do they come from engineering? Do they come from marketing? Have they been in product for a really long time?
I wanna understand, is this person gonna be able to mentor and train me or are they new to product as well? Now, a lot of product leaders out there are new to product, particularly, probably not in the fang companies, but like in other companies, yes, they are, especially startups and a lot of growth stage companies. So look at their track record, look at where they worked before and look at what titles they held.
And if you are in the interview, then ask them about product and how they think about it and what their philosophy is and all that wonderful stuff. That's gonna help you understand if they're gonna be able to grow your skills and grow you as a product manager. So that's my big thing.
Now we have to talk about stage of company. First job as a product manager, I think you could go big company fang, I think you could go growth stage company. I would stay away from being the first person in a startup. If you got like a super experienced startup leader, like a product leader, and it's not just the founder, it's like a VP of product, okay, I would go to a startup then, but no, it's gonna be chaos.
Like startups are just pure chaos. I remember joining my first startup, I came from Barclays Capital, which is not a startup and then went to OpenSky. And I was like, oh my God, this place is crazy. And I loved it. I love chaos. So that was really exciting for me. I also loved having like tons of responsibility and owning stuff.
So I loved the startup, but I had a really slow dedicated pace before that at Capital IQ and at Barclays that taught me structure, that taught me ways of working. Now a bunch of those went out the window when I ended up in a startup, but I still felt like I kind of knew what I was doing when I got there.
I didn't know all of it and I definitely improved, but like I had a base to go on. So going into chaos was a little bit easier because I had a structure to fall back on. So that's something to think about. Like, who are you gonna learn from there? Do you like chaos? Do you not like chaos? If you don't like chaos, I would really stay away from startups.
It's nuts. It's so much fun to me, but like some people just don't like that. They want structure. They want comfort. They want things to be stable. You're not gonna get that at a startup. So this kind of leads, you know, these other two. I'd say growth stage companies, which are a little bit bigger than startups.
They're not like you're five people in an office, not 30 people in an office, right? It's probably gonna be like 50 to a hundred people growing. I think those are the best opportunity to really grow as a product manager because you're going through these phases of growth so quickly. Like when you hit growth stage, it's basically like three to four years of going from, I don't know, like $20 million, $10 million up to almost an IPO.
You are going to expand that product and build new features and refine different things and go into new customer segments, all this stuff in a really, really short amount of time. And you're gonna get so much experience from that. So growth stage is really great to hone all of your skills as a product manager and to really see something move rapidly.
When I was talking about releasing, like you're gonna be releasing quickly. You're gonna be doing all the complicated roadmaps and portfolio management. Like you'll be seeing that, you won't be doing it, but you'll be seeing that from your CPOs. You'll get experience working with broader teams, like working with sales teams and marketing teams.
So you're gonna get a lot of experience really, really fast. And I find that you grow as a product manager a lot faster in a growth stage company or smaller companies than you do in enterprises because enterprises just tend to move slowly. So these are the things you need to think about though. I'd say as like your second step as a product manager, not your first step.
Your first step, you should optimize to go somewhere you can learn, somewhere you can build a structure and a mental model about what this job is. Your second step though, you should go somewhere where you can learn really, really quickly and get lots of experience in there, have some responsibility, really own something and drive it through because that's what's going to really set you on a fast career trajectory to getting to a product leader if that's your goal. So hopefully that helps.
I think as long as you just stick with that premise of like, where can I learn, you'll be really great starting off in your career. And then later on your career, then you go to places you can earn. You gotta learn first and then you can think about earning. A lot of people wanna go to startups because of the equity.
You have to understand that that is so rare. It's so rare that your startup is actually gonna return something to you if you are not the founder. If you are the founder, you've got a lot more control. But like, if you're just joining as employee number five or six and you're a lower level product manager there, you're probably not gonna end up with loads of equity anyway.
And it's rare that that equity actually turns into anything. But you go into one of those companies as a leader later on in your career, you're gonna make boatloads of money because you're gonna have a lot more equity and you're gonna have a lot more control over the success of your company as an executive giving input. So I'd really optimize for learning at the beginning of your career.
And also if you go to one of these companies too, you're gonna learn on somebody else's dime, which is always great. So optimize for that at the beginning of your career, then optimize for earning once you get enough under your belt where you feel like you can make decisions and really steer a company in the right direction. Next question.
Dear Melissa, I saw you're writing a book on product operations and thought, this is so relevant right now. I'm in the middle of thinking through a replacement for a junior product manager in my team. And I use Kate Leto's framework to map the activities involved. I think it pretty much sounds like We don't have an operations role as such.
So I'd be quite interested in understanding more about what the career track for product operations is and how to support a person to grow in this role.
I think product operations is just gonna get bigger and bigger. And that's why Denise and I are writing this book on product operations. Every CPO I have worked with who's implemented a product operations team would not go back. They're like, this is amazing. This helps me scale so much. This helps me create good strategies.
Like I can't even think of another way of working. So very, very important role, especially at scale. Now, when you think about a product operations team, there's actually multiple components to it when you do scale it. But you have to start from ground floor. One person, it's gonna be a little bit different.
But let's say you are at scale. You have a big product operations team. You're probably gonna have people who are specialized in user research, understanding like the methods of recruiting people and helping to streamline processes for doing that. Probably partnering with some UX folks on that side as well.
You're gonna have a bunch of people who are really good at data. So understanding like how you can model out scenarios with data, getting into the revenue projections of things, helping you track data, helping you surface insights that really get into your product strategy, looking into market insights as well, like pulling out TAM and SAM analysis.
These are great people with consulting backgrounds. I just find like the people who come out of McKinsey and Bain are fantastic at this because they can model these things out pretty quickly. And then lastly, you're gonna also look for people who are really good at process, who can basically like run the steering meetings, can track roadmaps, can standardize these processes across product management, can help deploy that across a role.
That's another piece too. Now, these are for like really large companies. You're gonna have all those specialized roles, but where do you start first? The biggest thing that you need when you start is really getting that person who can help with the data because that helps you as a product leader really be able to set your product strategy and understand if you're tracking towards that product strategy as well.
So that's what I would look at first. So if you were looking at this product operations job for this person, I'd look at getting somebody who can help you with that modeling, who can help pull that together, who can help inform your product strategy going forward.
Now, this person may be a junior product manager, but I would say they shouldn't be a junior person if they're the first person on the team because they're basically gonna be building this team. And the next step for them would be something like director of product operations or VP of product operations, which is a pretty common role at scale in organizations now. So you're looking to level this person up to kind of oversee a bunch of those different areas.
If you had a VP of product, you'd probably have a director of product over each one of the areas I was talking about, like the customer research and getting external data into your company, internal data in the form of like really tracking that strategy and forming it, and then the processes piece, you'd have somebody over that as well. So it could be a director of product that specializes in one of those, but eventually like moving into a VP of product. That's kind of what we're looking at to oversee this and help scale product management across the organization.
Now, what can they do besides product operations? Lots of places to go.
They can move back into product management if they decide that that's really what's for them in the future. You're gonna get a lot of exposure to product management as a product ops person, and we see a lot of people move into that role. Or they could go on to do things that are more operations focused, like a COO.
This is a great place for that. They'd have to go in and learn a lot more about different parts of the business, but that's definitely a track that they can get into. Maybe they wanna be a chief of staff to the CEO or the CPO. Lots of different ways you can actually look at. So when you're thinking about supporting this person to grow in that role, you're trying to find somebody who can help you right now, but also trying to figure out like, what are they good at?
What do they specialize at? Help them understand the product management. Help them understand what questions you're trying to answer as a product leader. Like what questions do you ask to get to the heart of your strategy or where you wanna take it? Those types of things are gonna make them better at really sensing what those should be, what those questions should be before you even ask.
And the more they get experience with that, the more they see how these things work, the better product operations person they'll be. All right, last question. Dear Melissa, I'm considering taking a product management certificate course. Do you think they're worth the investment? Which do you recommend?
I've worked in FinTech and product and program compliance roles for some time now, and I have an MBA. Will a certificate like this help me be able to better sell my skillsets? So I think this question really comes down to, where do you want to work? I find that the companies who ask for certificates are probably the ones who understand product management the least.
I guarantee you, the FANG companies do not ask for product management certificates. They have training programs and things like that. Or they're hiring people in with experience. But I know you're looking to get started. So what can you do to get started? I think it's good to have a course in product management, but if you're like, hey, is this certificate that I'm paying extra for, and it's the same kind of thing in Agile as well, is this certificate I'm paying extra for actually gonna get me the job?
It's probably gonna get you the job at companies you might not want to work at. That's been my experience, looking at people who require certificates and help you make the leap. But you might just want a product management job. So here's the chicken and the egg problem. And I think this is just a general problem with product management.
I don't love it. I want to see more apprenticeship models. I want to see taking people with great skillsets and great systems thinking and pulling them into product and training them. But I know that's not the world we live in currently, but hopefully we can change that soon. If you're looking to just get your foot in the door and go somewhere, then a certificate might be useful for you.
But know that you might end up at a company that doesn't really quite get product management. But after you get that product manager title on your resume, you can pretty much go anywhere. So this is the stupid conundrum in our industry that really pisses me off, that we have to deal with.
So that's what we have to think through, is like, is the certificate helpful for you to get your first job? Now, with an MBA though, there's a lot of companies, especially the fan companies, that recruit people with MBAs into product management roles. I know Facebook does this. You're going to end up as an entry-level product manager, but they're going to train you.
You'll probably rise up the ranks a lot faster, and you'll get a lot of experience that way. And then you can go anywhere after you have Facebook on your resume. So things to think about like that too. Also, if you want to sell your skillsets, you need to demonstrate that you can do product. So I always tell people like, can you find a problem that you want to solve on your own a little bit and just work through the process of like interviewing people, coming up with the concept, maybe writing out a little bit of specifications, making like a little presentation about how you would build it, how you've tested it.
Like if you can even show like pet projects, people look for that. Like hiring people do look for that for entry-level roles.
So you want to show that you're dedicated to this, and you can think through a lot of those things as well. If you've worked in FinTech in product as well, I'd ask like, what do you have on your resume? You may not be showcasing your skills on your resume to the best of your ability. Make sure you're putting on there the outcomes you've achieved.
Make sure that you talk about the people that you've worked with. Make sure that you talk about products that you were building and what your role was and that you actually owned it. A lot of that is going to help, right? Like the way you sell yourself on your resume is what most people go after. So play that up.
Play your product skills up that you've done at the FinTech. Make sure it shines and make sure it covers a lot of the keywords that we're looking for when hiring. We want to see understanding customers. We want to see that you've built something with teams. We want to see that you ship something. We want to see that you iterated on something.
We want to see that you've worked with stakeholders and negotiated hard things and built roadmaps and all that stuff.
Can you talk about that on your resume? If so, that might help get you through the door. So at the end of the day, I can't really say if a certificate will make or break this. I teach the Product Institute product management course, which I'm sure you've heard on this podcast before. We don't certify people in product management.
I don't believe that I can actually certify anybody without seeing them do the role. And if you're going to a course and you're not actually producing something in the role, I don't really believe in certificates, like certification of something for that. But we do give you a certificate of completion, which has helped some people.
So if you want to check out that route and you're just cool with the certificate of completion, that's productinstitute.com. If you want to be certified, I know Product School does this. Like I said, I'm very skeptical of certifying people when there's no proof of what they've actually done in the job or I've seen them go through the role.
So you got to be wary of that. And it's the same issue that I have with the Agile certifications for the product owner roles too. I know a lot of banks look for people that have a CSPO. I'm not of that mindset because I think a CSPO actually leaves out a lot of the strategy that I want to see somebody do as a product manager, but I've heard it has helped people get jobs.
So if I'm going to give you real advice about getting a job and especially a first-time job, certain companies do look for a certificate, but it's about where do you want to work. If you want to go work for a startup, I guarantee you they're not looking for a certificate. You want to look for a growth stage SaaS company, they're not looking for a certificate.
If you want to go to a bank that's doing a digital transformation, a lot of them are looking for certificates. So again, where do you want to work? That's going to tell you whether or not you should invest in that certificate or not, but I do think training is helpful no matter what, because if you can talk the language, you can show that you've done it before on your resume, it's going to help you get the interview.
All right, that's it for the Dear Melissa episode this week. Make sure you tune in next week for another guest episode. And if you have any burning questions you'd like me to answer, please remember to submit them to dearmelissa.com. We'll catch you later.
