AMA: Carta Director of Product Management, Anton Kravchenko on Product Management Skills

1. [If available] Intern as a PM before applying for a full-time position would put you ahead of other candidates.
2. Read Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and practice, practice, practice. 
3. Use LinkedIn to reach out to other PMs at your dream company. Speak with them to get a better pulse of the company and the work they do. Often, showing that you go the extra mile matters.

Being a team player and sharing team responsibilities e.g. sharing scrum ceremonies with your EM, will help you be equal partners. 

Don't forget that while you're doing customer calls, aligning stakeholders, or writing PRDs, your EM is directly managing the engineering team. This takes energy and time. 

Start with your passion for Product Management and DWIT attitude. Find a team who needs an extra pair of hands. Partner with them in your free time. Deliver results that are visible to others. From there, it's an easy sell organizationally for "why" you should become a PM when the organization needs one. 

Classic PM answer - it depends. 

The longer you are at the organization, the better intuition you will develop.

The same applies to the product maturity, e.g. 0-1 vs. 1-N. New product to market requires PMs to look at trends and have a better sense of the customer needs. Well-established product decisions align more with data e.g. Google's conclusion that ms of latency = impact on $ revenue. 

I usually recommend starting with the following books:

1. Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
2. On Design Thinking by Tim Brown
3. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

As for the courses, I hear great things about:

• Reforge - www.reforge.com
• Managing your PM Career in 2023 & beyond - https://maven.com/shreyas-doshi/product-management-career

This might not be the answer you'd expected ;) 

I'm a first-generation immigrant, and I didn't really have a choice early in my career. I simply needed a company to sponsor my visa. After changing four jobs in the first year, I joined a company that was willing to invest in my immigration. Luckily, my new role was at the intersection of marketing & product, so I had to see both directions. 

I chose Product as I wanted to build things and understand how they work.

Usually, tech companies organize their teams so that there is a fully dedicated UX designer accompanying each PM. I can't say the same about data teams. 

Almost in every company, PMs own KPIs for their product area. This means that you have to define what metrics your engineering team needs to capture and instrument dashboards that inform your product roadmaps. 

I don't think it's black & white. There is a broader spectrum of colors here. Leverage your superpowers to shine and learn the skills that help you do your job better. What matters is delivering results that move the business forward. These results will be noticed, and the rest will organically follow. 

I like to challenge those I hire with questions that don't fit the usual narrative. Below is an example of my Friday fun question:

Imagine humans decided to take the moon and push it through a giant rock grinder. The rock and matter that comes from another side of the grinder are dumped on earth. Question — would a human need an oxygen mask at the top of that rock structure?

I look for out-of-the-box thinking and thoughtful process to derive the answer.

This is a challenging one, as people's problems could be mentally draining and less exciting to deal with. 

Tactically, I'd advise speaking with your HR business partner and seeking their advice by sharing specific examples. 

Longer term, I'd suggest practicing radical candor with your manager. This process takes time & energy as you need to build trust. If you haven't yet, I suggest reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott.