Hear from Ryan Hoover, Director of Product at PlayHaven, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management.
RyanHoover.me
Twitter: @rrhoover
Hear from Jason Evanish, Product Manager at KISSMetrics, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management.
JasonEvanish.com
Twitter: @Evanish
Feedback box blog post: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/secret-to-great-feedback/
Hear from Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager at Asana (and previously Google and Microsoft), about her experience and advice on how to get into product management.
http://pmblog.quora.com/
Twitter: @jackiebo (https://twitter.com/jackiebo)
Jackie also has a book coming out soon called "Cracking the PM Interview" - check it out! http://www.crackingthepminterview.com/
In this lecture, we discuss what Product Management is, especially in this new world of A/B testing and lean startup methodology. Product Managers help drive project teams towards building new features usually - writing specs, iterating on designs, imagining what the A/B test should include for variations, leading the engineering team to execute the spec, working with analysts to interpret A/B test results and pull other supporting data, reporting out to sales, marketing, and others on your progress, and much more.
We also briefly cover the steps to interviewing for the PM role - from the resume, to the phone screen, to the interview itself.
- Submit resume (either cold or via employee referral)
- Phone screen with recruiter and/or hiring manager (or actual product manager on the team)
- Assignment, e.g. Evaluate the Facebook signup flow.
- On-site interview (meet with PMs, analysts, engineers, designers, etc.). Some product questions, some vision questions, some brainteasers, some scenario questions.
- Offer / negotiation process
We describe this general process in this lecture, which we will dive into more in later course sections.
Product Managers come from all sorts of backgrounds - former entrepreneurs, artists, philosophers, and more. But the reality is that there are some core characteristics to each of these backgrounds that make people suitable to being entrepreneurs. We discuss these characteristics in this lecture.
Product Managers think big. While it's important to know how to catch bugs and get micro-interactions right in the UX of a product, seeing the forest through the trees is extremely important, as well.
Driving product vision involves imagining where Facebook / Pinterest / Twitter / Linkedin / Your Dream Product can be in 5, 10, 25 years. What do competitors do well / what are they missing / where is there a new opportunity in the market? What in your product doesn't make sense anymore that you should eliminate to make way for a new user flow in your product?
The spec (originally "specifications document" or "product requirements document") defines the project. It is what your engineers, designers, QA team, sales people, marketing folks, etc. will refer to in order to understand the goal and details of a feature or technical project. The spec should define the problem, the goal, product hypotheses, metrics for success, mockups that are visual representations of the feature, bullet points describing functionality and edge cases, how many people should be treated with experimental variations in the A/B test and much more.
Designers and engineers are the two groups of people you will work most closely with as a Product Manager. Designers are your partners in figuring out the look (UI - user interface) and feel (UX - user experience) of the product. Engineers are your partners in that they will actually implement the vision and make it work in your site or app. In these relationships, it's important to allow designers and engineers maintain autonomy (don't dictate every last detail), negotiate balances (e.g. Increasing virality is great, but at what cost to the user experience?), and figuring out how to solve the user problem without an excessive investment from the engineering team.
PMs work with the entire company. So outside of designers and engineers, you also need to communicate with marketing so they know how to message things to customers, sales so they know what to leverage for upcoming deal opportunity, executives so they know what to cover in the next analyst call, and so on. As a PM you need to listen to inputs, use what you can, set expectations, and be the ambassador for your project teams.
What's the point of building new features or trying to kill useless ones if you don't know the impact?
Product management today is lean and data-driven, so people want to know whether or not changes boost engagement, help retention, increase virality, drive monetization, etc. You need to know which metrics to watch out for and assert product hypotheses that are the right things to validate.
Where do you want to be a PM? Product management varies so much from company to company - big company vs. startup, consumer vs. enterprise, Google vs. Facebook.
In this lecture, we walk through the key questions to ask yourself to figure out which tech company is the right one for you.
Most aspiring product managers run into a common Catch 22: "you can't become a product manager unless you have been a product manager before, but you can't become a product manager if..."
Here we'll talk about how business analysts, consultants, MBA students, and others can fine tune their resumes and stories to highlight the experiences they have had that are most relevant for Product Management jobs.
Prior to getting an interview, most PM candidates will have a phone screen. This phone screen is meant to see if you have what it takes to warrant an interview and have the right expectations and enthusiasm.
The homework is meant to discover your product sense, ability to understand metrics, and comfort with engineering complexity and tradeoffs.
The product management interview can be tricky. You need to have vision. You need to understand metrics. You need to balance engineering tradeoffs. You will meet with PMs, designers, engineers, analysts, and maybe others. You may get asked brainteasers. You may get asked about what your favorite products are and why. You may be tasked with walking through how you will build Facebook Timeline or Yammer Tasks or something else - real or fictional.
Negotiating for your PM position. What do you care about? Salary, equity, vacation days, health insurance, and / or something else? Fortunately tech companies today compensate (and feed) their employees well.
During this process, you should also be learning as much as you can about the company and the team(s) you'll work with if you didn't already do this in the interview process.
Here we walk through ideal responses to the Yammer Interview Question.
Here we walk through ideal responses to the Facebook Interview Question.
Here we walk through ideal responses to the Pinterest Interview Question.
Congrats! You have completed the course and are ready to pursue a PM job. In this final lecture, we recap the course and share a few tips and resources as next steps.
A list of resources (books, people to follow) for aspiring PMs
Hear from Raj Ramachandran, Director of Product at Kidaptive and former PM at Zynga and Storm8, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management. Raj shares insights about how business school helps aspiring Product Managers, how to choose which industry to be a PM in (he chose gaming), and ways to break into PM without any prior experience.
Hear from Eusden Shing, PM at Pinterest and former PM/engineer at Hulu and engineer at Symantec, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management. Raj shares insights about how he made the transition from engineering to product management within Hulu and what he enjoys the most about PM.
Hear from Pascal Carole, Product Manager at Microsoft / Yammer, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management. Pascal was previously a software engineer at Microsoft, and he discusses how he made the transition from engineering to product.
Hear from Chris Lee, Product Manager at Dropbox, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management. Pascal was previously an entrepreneur and project manager at Apple (and a Wharton MBA!), and he discusses how he made the transition from his startup to product management, the role his MBA played, and what he likes the most about product.
Hear from Wil Keenan, Senior Product Manager at Change.org, about his experience and advice on how to get into product management. Wil shares his experience through his time at Vanderbilt, to building a business in Uganda, to becoming a chef in San Francisco, to Yammer, and now to Change.org.
Hear from Eva Andreasson, Senior Product Manager at Cloudera, about her experience and advice on how to get into product management. She has been an engineer and worked on hardware before her latest software product management experiences.
Hear from Teresa Torres, VP, Products at AfterCollege, about her experience and advice on how to get into product management.
Hear from Janna Bastow, founder of ProdPad based in the UK and former product manager, about her experience and advice on how to get into product management.
14:02: Hear from Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager at Asana (and previously Google and Microsoft), about her experience and advice on how to get into product management.
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