In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about transitioning into product management.
Show Notes
Q: What can I do to prove to potential employers that I have what it takes to be successful as a product manager, even though I don’t have experience? How do I write my resume?
A: Right now, companies are looking for senior product managers to balance out their teams, since they have mostly trained juniors. You should look for a company on LinkedIn that will invest time and resources into training you. Investigate their product leader: if they are very experienced, they will likely know how to train people and be more willing to find people to work with. For resumes, I recommend highlighting your achievements in previous jobs that are affiliated with product management, such as doing customer interviews and creating personas. Pull out what’s relevant and tell the story the way you want to tell it.
Q: Do you need an MBA to become a product manager?
A: MBA’s typically help product managers in leadership positions, but it’s not a requirement for transitioning into the field.
Q: What steps should a senior product manager take to move into a director role if he or she has not had the opportunity to manage people?
A: What I’ve seen that helps people move into that role is showing that you can be strategic and think outside the box. Additionally, you have to be more business-focused; while we want to ruthlessly prioritize the user and their needs, you also have to figure out how to prioritize that within the frame of your company strategy. Think about what the company strategy is and then take every chance you get to explain to the leaders how your product can help achieve those goals.
Q: How do I evaluate a company's maturity and practice in modern product management? What should I look for before and during the interview process?
A: Here are some questions I ask product management leaders to gauge the company’s maturity, and what the responses indicate. What are your most important business goals? What are your most important product goals? What are you working on now and why? If they can't tell me the story behind that, it means that there's no strategy in the organization or that there's misalignment.
If you get to meet the head of sales or the head of engineering, ask them about product management to see if they have a good understanding of it. If the rest of the organization doesn't know what you do, you're probably gonna have a hard time executing and doing your job there.
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
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?
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right. Let's dive in. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa, where I get to answer all of your questions. We've had a lot of questions since Georgie's podcast on product leadership about your role as a product manager.
We've got tons of questions about transitioning into product management, what to do there, how do you evaluate a company's maturity and practicing modern product management so that you know it's a place you actually want to work at? And then also, how do I make the transition from an individual contributor to a director level or above?
So those are the questions we're going to tackle today, and I'm pretty excited to dive in. So the first question we've been getting comes in lots of different forms. I'm a salesperson and I want to become a product manager, what can I do? Or I'm trying to get my first product job. So our first question is about transitioning into product management.
It says, Dear Melissa, I've been searching for product management positions, but it doesn't seem like organizations are interested in hiring me. I'm a technology consultant with three years of experience in strategy and implementation of tech projects and products. My title has never been product manager, but I've had project roles that share similar characteristics.
I've heard that getting an MBA makes it easier if you haven't held a product manager position already. Is taking a pay cut and starting as a junior associate product manager my only option if I don't want to pay for a business school? Is there anything else I can do to prove to potential employers that I have what it takes to be successful as a product manager?
We get questions like this all the time.
I will say there's probably about 30 to 50 other questions in our question bank right now that says, I'm a salesperson and I want to become a product manager, but nobody will hire me. Or I'm a marketing manager and I want to transition into product. What should I do? Very, very common question. So I'm going to answer all of those questions now.
There's one thing that I need to explain to you though, that I think will shed some light on why you're not getting callbacks for the position of product management. And this is kind of about the state of product management in our world today. Here's the thing. A lot of companies just went through major transformations into technology organizations or product organizations.
And what they did was take a bunch of people in the organization who used to be subject matter experts or business analysts or these other roles and turn them into product managers. So there's tons of organizations, especially big ones out there who have a lot of junior product managers and no senior product managers.
So when they're not calling you back because you don't have product manager on your resume, it's because they're looking for senior product managers to help balance out all those junior product managers that they do have. This is the case as well for a smaller scale of companies too. A lot of times an organization will start off with a bunch of really smart people, hire them, have them be scrappy, join for the long haul, and then they become a de facto product manager.
And now as they start scaling, they'll bring in a product leader who will look around and say, wow, I've got a bunch of junior people, but I don't have time to train them all. Let me hire some more senior people too so that they can execute a little faster. And that's what I see is just a very common state in the software world these days.
We have a lot of junior product managers, but we don't have a lot of senior product managers. And we have even fewer chief product officers or VPs of product to help train everybody to get them up and running and to build those organizations. So unfortunately, that's what you're up against right now.
Like just a lot of junior people in the market for product management because it hasn't been around that long.
We don't have a lot of very senior leaders. That's just the state of the world. So my tip, right, for finding a company that will hire you, that will invest in you, and that will say, hey, I'm going to take a chance and actually train these people is to find a company that has a very experienced chief product officer or a VP of product who's building the team.
And you can do that by hunting on LinkedIn, go to the profile, look up the product leader, see what their background is. If that person is a very experienced product leader, then they're going to know how to train people. They're going to be more willing to find smart people who are going to work with them.
You may also want to find somebody who's been at the company for a little bit, because if they have just walked in and tried to start building their team, they may be taking up a bunch of people who are a little bit junior and already trying to level them up. They might not have capacity for another one, but if they've been there a while and they are a great product leader, they hopefully have a system in place to take people on and help make them great product managers, even if they didn't hold the title before.
So that's one place I would start to look at. Another tip, the reason why you want to find a chief product officer and not, let's say, a product founder or somebody who doesn't have experience as a chief product officer before or in product, they are probably looking for somebody to do the product work for them. In a lot of cases, when founders found the company, they grow into a chief product officer role or a VP of product role, but a lot of those people don't have scalable product experience.
They're really, really good at starting their companies, getting up and running, finding product market fit, but they're not really good at scaling it. So they're looking for product managers with experience to come in and do all that work for them. They still lead the vision. They still lead the strategy, but they're looking for somebody to come in and execute.
So in that case where you have an inexperienced chief product officer or VP of product, you may not find somebody who's willing to train people, something to look for. So that's why I say, go find somebody who's got experience in there.
Hopefully they have an associate product management program. If you are a product leader and you do not have an associate product management program and you are very good at product, you are doing a disservice to our industry. We need more ways for people to get into this role. Like I said, I've got 50 questions on this in my inbox.
There's people who are hungry to learn. And I think that's a big part of being a successful product leader. When we go out there and actually hire chief product officers, one of the things I put on my scorecard is, can they grow talent? Can they grow better product managers? What are your track records for that?
So if you're not doing that, you are not fully embracing your chief product officer role. So really encourage product leaders, try to make an APM program, try to really figure out how we can develop more product managers because the world really needs them. So that's my little spiel for you. All right.
So let's say you found a company with a chief product officer. You want to apply.
This is the one you're going after. What can you do to position your resume if you don't have product experience? I see a lot of really bad resumes out there for product managers in general, but also for people trying to transition in. And usually what the resume has on it is just like a bunch of stuff under the jobs you've held before.
That's like, I ran this team. I created these flyers. I did X, Y, and Z. They're very, very tactical things usually listed under your job. I'd recommend you actually flip your resume on the head and start to pull out everything that's relevant to product management and bring it on top. My resume looks like that too.
I've got a bunch of bullet points on the top of my resume. I was just thinking, man, I haven't used my resume in a long time, but my resume, when I did use it, it has a bunch of bullet points on the top that highlight specific achievements that I know are relevant to the job and are relevant to product. So for instance, if you've done a bunch of customer interviews, let's say you work in marketing.
This is pretty common in marketing. You did a bunch of customer interviews, you've done market segmentation, you've created personas, and you started to identify needs that people have. That's a good thing that actually relates to product. Like I want to know about that if I'm going to hire you. So I would pull that work up, put it in bullet points, and talk about the success that you've had there on the top of your resume.
So I was responsible for leading a customer research effort to understand our customers and our personas. I created our six personas from that, qualified them, worked with sales teams so that they understood them, worked with the product team and the UX team so that they understood them as well, backed that up into market research, X, Y, and Z, whatever you did to make that successful and what the impact was there. If you've set product goals before, I want to know about that.
If you've optimized some kind of process or you've optimized some kind of product or you worked with a team that did do that, I want to know about that. So really think through the different parts of product management, right?
Understanding your customer, honing in on problems, working with developers to create solutions, working cross-functionally to make sure the solutions are delivered well, and that launch goes well, measuring success, working with executives to get things prioritized, setting strategy. If you've done any of those in your job, pull that out, put it front and center at the top of your resume. Because I guarantee you when people are hiring and they're skimming resumes and you don't give them anything else to look at besides your job title, they're just going to take a look at your job titles and say, nope, not a product manager.
But if you pull all of that stuff up and highlight your achievements at the top of your resume and I'm skimming it, I'm like, oh, they've done a bunch of this work before. This might be a good fit. It might be easy to help them level up into a product management position. So that's my biggest advice.
I think the way that we learn how to do resumes is just stupid. Like a list of your previous jobs and then what you specifically did at them in a tactical way is not telling the story that I want to learn about you.
So tell the story the way that you want to tell it. Don't worry about specific formats and resumes. You still have to like include your job experience on there, but it doesn't have to be the first thing that people see. Pull out what's relevant and really frame yourself as I can learn, I've done some of this before, and I just need a little bit of structure to help me get started in the product management job.
So now there's the second part of this question, which is, do you need an MBA? And since I teach at Harvard, I feel like I'm a little bit biased here because I teach the MBA students, but I'll give you my honest opinion on it. Where I've seen MBAs help product managers is really in the leadership positions.
We actually have Maggie Crowley come in and speak to our product managers. She's a director of product at Drift every year, and she put it really nicely. She said, my MBA didn't really help me when I became a team level product manager, but as soon as I became a director and worked my way up, it became really invaluable because I had all the leadership skills that my other product managers peers didn't have.
I was able to manage people. I was able to really understand strategy better. I had some of those financial skills. And that's what I see as a real big benefit of having the MBA is when you get into those leadership levels. So is it required to move into a product management position? Absolutely not.
Is it required to even move up in leadership positions? Absolutely not. I do not have an MBA, and yet I teach MBAs. It's a different domain. I think MBAs are valuable. There's a bunch of stuff that I see getting taught at Harvard that I'm like, man, I really wish I could have taken these classes. But is it required for your position?
No, I still think you can learn some of those things along the way if you choose not to go to business school. I think there's a lot of other reasons to go to business school. I see lots of connections being fostered. I see really great curriculums being taught on leadership and strategy and analyzing all these other companies that I think is really valuable.
So if you want to go that route and you want to get a business school degree and become a product manager, more power to you.
If you don't want to go that route, I do not think it's necessary. And I tell this to the people that I work with, it is not necessary to become a product manager. So hopefully that solves your question with the MBA route. But if it's something that you really want to do, I could encourage it. I could very much stand behind it.
And hopefully we're going to see more product management curriculums taught in the MBA programs because we're seeing more and more people get MBAs and then transition into product management. I'll also say too, with the MBA programs, it really depends on who's recruiting at your school. So we know that Amazon recruits a lot of senior product managers from Cornell's MBA program.
So it's like a feeder into that. And if you go through that program, you can apply to it. Amazon comes and they look for that there. I've had a lot of my students at Harvard get offers from Lyft for product management jobs or from other places in Silicon Valley. Specific companies recruit at specific schools.
So that's something to look for as well.
But again, like I said, I don't think an MBA is required, but I do think you could learn some leadership skills there. And if you want to be a leader, maybe that's valuable for you. If you want to be a product manager, do not think it's required. The other thing is if you are crafting your persona as a product manager, the biggest thing I can say is just try to do projects that are product related, but also recognize that you probably haven't done it end to end.
Like don't walk into the interview and be like, oh yeah, I've done this all before. Like I'm a product manager. When you were working as a BA or a consultant somewhere else, like if you are a consultant, you're usually working with people who have specific requirements and have hired you to build something.
That's very different than figuring out what it is you should be building within a system of an organization. So there are differences there. Can you learn how to be a product manager maybe quicker than somebody who's never worked with any of that before? Probably. But it's important to recognize that there's still a lot to learn in this domain once you get that product management job.
So I would not set the expectations that if you were transitioning from another domain into product management, that you're going to walk in at the same title or the same level that you were in that other domain. You still have to kind of learn what you don't know and grow as a product manager. So I hope that helps.
Remember, really tell your story and pinpoint the skills that you have really front and center so that people don't just look at your job titles. They look at what you can actually do. But I've known tons of people who've transitioned into product management from design or sales or really anything and have become great product managers.
So I don't think there's any hard and fast rule that you can't do this. And I'd like to see more APN programs out there, more CPOs really training our product managers so that we can have a thriving field where lots of people can get into this and learn what they need to learn. All right.
So let's say you follow all that advice. You land the job. You're working for a couple of years, and now you want to move up in the organization. That's what our next question is about. So this question says, Dear Melissa, what would be the steps for a senior product manager to take in order to move into a director role if he or she has not had the opportunity to manage people?
So I don't think managing people is the end all be all for a director role. But I will say I'm going to acknowledge it is very hard and I've seen it be really hard for people to move from an individual contributor role into a director role. And I don't know why. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with our industry.
I get really mad that we're not promoting people from within. We're not taking the time to mentor them so that they can have that director role. I'm seeing a lot of really amazing product managers who have proven that they could do director level work, not get that director level role. It makes me mad.
But this is what I would say I've seen that helps people move into that role. It's not just about managing people. It's also about showing that you can be strategic. So how do you think of more than just your product part, right? You're working on a feature or working on a small sliver of the product.
Directors of product oversee more scope than that. They oversee the strategy for a collection of products or an entire products or a very large feature set. So show that you can think outside the box a little bit more. Also anytime that you're moving into a leadership position and product, you have to be a little bit more business focused.
So while we want to be ruthlessly prioritizing the user and their needs, you also have to figure out how do I prioritize that within the frame of our company strategy? Start really thinking about what the company strategy is and then help explain to leadership every chance that you get how your product can help achieve those goals. So all of your product initiatives should ladder up to this.
You should be really talking about how your product is going to help increase revenue, how it's going to further your expansion in different markets, how it's going to solve retention issues.
Talk on that level because it's showing that you're raising up from just a team level execution oriented stuff, which is working with your developers and your designers and more like you have a seat at the table at the business and that's what you need to do to be seen as a leader. So a lot of this is communication. The other part of it is influence and with through influence, you can show that you can present your ideas, you can get things done.
So you really have to work on that. They call it a soft skill, but I feel like it shouldn't be called a soft skill because it's very important. But you have to work on your influence about getting people on your side, getting buy in, making sure people see you as authority on this and presenting your case in a way with data where people get on board.
So a lot of influence in there. And then lastly, the managing the people part. You don't just have to manage people to show that you can develop people or grow people or be seen as a leader. All product managers should have some kind of leadership skill in there. You should be having people turn to you to ask questions, to ask your advice on stuff, to get your opinion on their different product and their work.
That's a good mark that shows you're a great and strong leader. So even if you don't have an intern or somebody that's assigned to you in the organization to train, find somebody to mentor, right? If there's a new employee, take them under your wing, help them out, show that you're a team player, lead the people on your team, make sure that your developers and your designers see you as a leader.
Make sure that you're presenting as if you can actually run this stuff, right? That's what we're really looking for there. Managing people, you could take a course on how to do people management. Hopefully HR also has some courses on this, but it's not a requirement to move into the director role. And I think a lot of people look at this and think, that's the thing that I need to do.
I just need to manage people and that's what's going to make me move into a director role. But I've seen a lot of people get promoted who've never managed people before because they've shown that they're a leader and that people respect their opinion, that they can get stuff done, that people follow their advice, they look to them for advice.
That's what you really have to show to move into the director role. So a lot more there on understanding strategy, presenting your cases, and then getting people to look at you as an authority on the topic and as somebody who can really pull things together, rally a team around an idea and get buy-in. That's what we look for in people that we want to promote into the director level.
Like I said at the beginning, I see a lot of people who are qualified for that, just not getting that director role. And I think it's poor hiring practices. I think it goes back a little bit to what I was saying at the beginning of the podcast too, that there's probably a lot of junior people out there in the product management role.
And what leadership will do is try to hire people with more experience in at those mid-level roles to help train them. You might be getting passed up because of that. That's a sad thing. I'm on a mission to fix that, honestly. I talk to people about this all the time, but the more that you can position yourself as a leader, the more I see people get less hesitant about moving you into those positions.
So maintain visibility in the organization, make sure your ideas are being heard, and make sure that you're making connections all across the organization, because if you want to move on to that director role, especially at your organization, a lot of it's political. They're going to ask around and be like, do you think this person should be the director? You want everybody to say, yes, of course, that person's such a strong leader, and not really look at have you managed people before or not.
If you haven't managed people though, I really suggest you take a class or a course on it and learn. It's one of the hardest things that I had to learn much more so than product management. So I would advise anybody who's a people manager for the first time to get some good training on that, because there's a lot of nuances to it.
All right. So that leads me to our final question, which is about finding the right company. So this question says, dear Melissa, how do you evaluate a company's maturity in practicing modern product management? What should I look for before and during the interview process? My current criteria for choosing a company to join can feel limited as I get discouraged, that when I get that gut feeling that something isn't right during the application process, I hope there's a more scientific approach I can take.
Ooh, this is an interesting one. I do like this. Very good question. Over the last about six years, this is kind of what I do all day, every day with corporations. I go in, I evaluate their maturity with product management, and then I make recommendations about what they should do to get there. So I'll tell you what I ask organizations to see if they have good product management maturity.
And I know some of this you can only do in a couple interviews. So I'm going to keep it short. We do a very much more robust process of looking at data and roadmaps and all that stuff. But here's where you can get your spidey sense tingling and see if it's on the right direction or not. So I meet with all the product managers, and I ask them, who came up with the last feature or product idea you built?
So if they're telling me, oh, the product ideas just get handed down, or the leadership came up with that feature, that's not good. If they tell me about the process, that's like, oh, I went out and we had this goal, or this thing that we were working towards, and we went out and we interviewed our users.
And then I worked with my team to come up with a solution and we iterated on it. That's good. And a lot of people are going to fall somewhere in between those two extremes with their answers. And you just have to decide, is it a chance that you want to take? But that's really what I'm looking for there.
I'm trying to find product managers that tell me about a process that they came up with to figure out what to build. So it's not just something where they were handed it, and then they executed on it. It's more like, we went through this whole thing of data and research to figure out that this was the thing to be built.
Another one I ask, what was the last product you decided to kill? So what did you roll down? Did you kill any of your legacy products? Did you do any of that? If they'd say, we've never killed a product before, that's not good, right? Obviously, that means that they're not re-evaluating their strategy or measuring success.
That's not great. Or they say, oh, we committed these ideas to customers. We can't go back now. That's showing me that there's no flexibility.
There's no learning baked into their process. So I'm looking for people who can say, oh, well, we did some research on this idea the CEO had or this idea the head of sales had. And we found out that wasn't a great idea. We pushed back. We came up with a better idea. And we moved on with that. Good. Good maturity in product management.
Another one. When's the last time you talked with your customers? If the product managers or the head of product or anybody has never talked to their customers or haven't done it in a really long time, big red flag. Another one. What's your most important goal for the organization? And this is really to test the strategy up and down the organization.
Is everybody telling the same story? So it's like, what's your most important business goals? What's your most important product goals? What are you working on now and why? If they can't tell me the story behind that, that means that there's no strategy in the organization. And that could mean that there's misalignment.
There's people working on things that aren't important. It's usually a little bit of a mess. So that's something that I really look for, for evaluating strategy.
I want to ask the CEO, what's the most important thing? What's your business strategy? And I want to hear some of that all the way down to the product managers, right? I'm looking at that up and down the line there. And then I also go and I talk to stakeholders too. So I'll talk to the head of sales.
So if you get to meet the head of sales or the head of engineering, ask them like, what is product management like here? Or, you know, kind of allude to what do you think product management does and see if they have a good understanding of it? Because if the rest of the organization doesn't know what you do, you're probably going to have a hard time executing and doing your job there.
So that's something that I look for as well. But I want to pull this back into something that you said in this question, you asked, like, is there something more scientific than just listening to my gut? Well, I look for one thing definitively too, in a lot of these organizations, I look for great experienced CPOs.
And if I'm going to work for somebody who has a great track record or great VP of product, who's got lots of experience, I know that person's usually going to shelter me from a lot of the swirl at the leadership level, and I'm probably going to learn.
So that's something that I would encourage people to look for. And in absence of that, it does come down to a gut feel, right? You said, is there anything more scientific than looking at my gut? It's like, what's the track record? What's this data from the questions that I just said? And if all else fails, and you still don't have a good feeling about this company, I would recommend you go with your gut, because that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day.
If something doesn't feel right, it's usually not right. So I think you're wise to listen to that. But I would just talk to as many people as you can in the organization and try to see if there's a consistent story there. And that's really going to be the thing that tells you the most data on whether or not this company can perform.
So that's it for our episode on Dear Melissa. Next week, we are going to be talking about hiring product managers, which gets into a lot of what we're talking about today. So we will have Kate Leto on the show, who is going to be talking about her new book called Hiring Product Managers.
And we're going to talk about all the interesting things that go into that. How can you tell if you have the right person? How can you tell if this person can do the job? So make sure you tune into that episode. And also, in the meantime, submit all your burning questions to DearMelissa.com, and we will answer them on a future show.
