Tips for Transitioning into Product Management

I’ve been asked by a few people how to transition from any kind of role into a Product Manager role, so I put together a few tips that helped me.

Don’t take these as gospel, this is totally based on my experience, but it did work for me and I’ve really enjoyed the role.

Start developing PM skills

Things like roadmapping, stakeholder communication, cross functional collaboration.

Start thinking like a PM

You can do this by thinking through every project start to finish, think about the small details and think critically through hard problems.

It helps to have a development, technical or design background in my experience.

I wish I was better at design and UX, its something I’m working on a lot now. These aren’t deal breaking, but it can certainly give you a leg up for lots of reasons.

Be comfortable doing and being prescriptive.

People don’t like to make decisions and it can be hard to feel comfortable being the guy who says yes even though sometimes it is your place and sometimes its not. If it is your place, don’t be afraid to say yes and no to new projects. If its not your role, practice creating persuasive arguments and influencing people to get things done

Check out Lenny’s Newsletter.

There’s so much good stuff in there, just having exposure to the way that product managers think will help you learn what you don’t know. I often find that just understanding what I don’t know helps me a lot.

Check out Reforge Product Management courses.

I got started with these courses and seriously every course they offer is freaking awesome. Cannot recommend enough. It’s the first time in a long time I read the content and thought “whoa everything he is valuable and is teaching me”.

Learn how to own something.

This is more than just work, but it means identifying stakeholders, communicating with them and persuading everyone you work with that you are the right person to be handling this project. If people feel like they should be talking to your boss, you don’t own it yet. Develop that confidence by owning your domain 1000%. Its hard and pulls you into uncomfortable places, but its super good for growth, personally and professionally.

Determine what kind of PM you want to be.

Do you like marketing, development, design, software, hardware, physical, digital? There are a lot of types of product managers and the job can vary drastically depending on what you do and with which company you do it with.

Be an absolute expert of your product.

Whatever space or product you own you should know it better than anyone. This comes from using the product yourself a little everyday and understanding how your users engage with the product. It was a little easier for me because I went from SEO manager where my whole job was understanding user behavior and search behavior, to development where I was building the resources I knew we needed to now Growth Product Manager where I’m owning the website, proposing new solutions, offering inputs, studying user behaviors even more in depth. I’ve just slowly scaled up how much ownership I really have.