The last post was about what a product manager actually does. This post attempts to answer a question I often get asked: how to become a product manager? My simple answer is:

Build and grow a product.

It’s a facetious answer because generally the person asking really just wants to know about the CV side of things. How do I position myself? How do I get an interview?

But it’s a genuinely more useful answer, because it equips you to do the job.

Product management requires trade-offs across many disciplines

The last post talks about how product management is a multi-functional job. You need to at least be passably decent across a number of fields (technical, design, analysis, etc).

But there is one skill you need to become an expert at: integrating those fields to make prioritization decisions. This is the fundamental thing that a product manager does. And it’s really hard to develop that skill without being in an inherently cross-functional role.

The crash course approach is relatively time efficient because it forces you to quickly develop both your understanding of different disciplines and how to integrate them.

The crash course is very painful – but not impossible

Realistically, I don’t expect many people to be able to do this approach. It’s extremely painful – which puts the “crash” in the course.

The pain is from running up multiple learning curves, which means falling flat on one’s face many times from making mistakes. But if you’re one of the few that have the time, energy and self-awareness to make good from your mistakes, you’ll come out of this with a rare set of skills.

From a resource standpoint, doing a product on your own might seem impossible. But at least for digital products, the cost of building and launching something modest is within the scope of a single person. Possibly the same could be said for hardware products too (I’m less familiar with that world).

Keep in mind that there is no expectation here to build the next Facebook. And in fact, there’s no expectation that your product will become very big. But by the time you know, you’ll have much of the learnings anyway.

Again, it’s painful, especially if you’re doing this as an after-hours or weekend project. But it’s doable.

Some tips

If you’re diving head first into the deep-end, here are several tips to think about.

1. Pick a personal itch. It’ll save you time and minimize the risk that you go wrong by not understanding your user well enough.
2. Pick a small scope. Building a self-flying AI jetpack to cut your commute time is not realistic.
3. If you have zero technical ability, just pause right here and get some. Learning to code is easier than ever before. Run through tutorials, tinker, explore. Again you don’t need to become an expert, but understand just enough.
4. Design is much harder than it looks. Product design isn’t just aesthetics. It’s how well the product fulfils the user’s goal. If you’ve never paid much attention to design, then start by really noticing when and why you are delighted – or annoyed – by different products.
5. Process matters. Tools matter. But the tail should never wag the dog. Process and tools are there to multiply your productivity. If you’re spending more than 5-10% of your time on process, it’s too much. Scrum is my favourite. But whatever you use, tweak it to make it work for you.
6. Get to “real users in real situations” as quickly as possible. For example, take just a couple hours to draw some mockups and shove them in front of potential users for feedback (my favourite tool: Balsamiq). It truly sucks when you get feedback after months of work and realise how much of your time was wasted.
7. Tap into your network for help and advice. Have a friend who can teach you a bit? Great – hit them up for coffee. It’s a fast way to learn.
8. The crash course doesn’t really cover working with other people. So team up with someone if you can. But at the very least, make sure you’re learning how to work in a team elsewhere in your life.
9. The crash course will not suddenly make you an expert overnight. It is just a brutally fast way of accelerating your learning.

Build AND grow

Launching something is just the start. The real learning comes from trying to make something grow.

Product development is an iterative process (design –> build –> feedback). Before the initial release, the loop is a bit stunted, because the feedback is only from approximations of “real users in real situations” (RURS). The decision making is also much simpler in closed conditions.

When something is released, and you’re trying to grow it, you have to make decisions in the context of RURS. In other words, you’re operating in the real world. That entails a lot more complexity and challenge. This week, are you better off fixing that bug affecting your most vocal user – or finally launching that new feature?

Also pushing growth brings in a bunch of skills not involved during the pre-release phase. Things like basic analytics, user insights, marketing, investigating bugs, etc. Again, it’s a lot more complex when you’re trying to grow.

Just one tip about the growth. It’s easy to get caught up on big numbers and the distant future. Instead set yourself baby steps. Get 1 user. Then get 10 users. Then get 100. You’ll probably find just getting to 10 is a big challenge. But it will focus your prioritisation in very concrete and tactical ways, which is very important when you have limited resources.

There’s gotta be an easier way to get the skills of a product manager

Yup, there is. By no means is the crash course the only way to learn the job.

If you can land a job directly doing it (perhaps a large corporate that has an in-house program for it), then that’s fairly straightforward. Or you can specialise in any number of disciplines and then step your way towards it. In other words, look for cross-functional opportunities to work closely with “makers”. And then eventually pivot into other disciplines or into product management itself.

Regardless of how you chart your career path, the point of all of this is that on the skills front, make sure you become 1) at least passably decent across a range of disciplines and 2) you become excellent at integrating disciplines. With those two requirements fulfilled, you’ll have the foundation for being a strong product manager.