Product Management Career Path

To make this decision, I think of opportunity, ambitions, passion, and time: Opportunity - obviously there is a matter of compensation, but there is also an opportunity for professional growth. For e

There are some absolutes, which may be self-evident, but I'll still mention them for the record: disrespect, discrimination, excessive stress, unreasonable and unhealthy workload, workplace toxicity i

There are a couple of factors to consider here: Are you learning anything new in your current role? If not, would staying with the company, even if it is in a different role, or a more senior role (b

The answer here is extremely nuanced and will vary from situation to situation. There's a phrase from Graham Weston that has stuck with me from my time at Rackspace: “What we all want from work is to

My favorite interview question was asked by a hiring manager ~8 years ago when I interviewed for an Associate PM position at MuleSoft. I was asked the following: "Imagine humans decided to take the mo

"Assume I don't know anything. Teach me something in the next two minutes about a topic you are passionate about - can be anything". This questions helps me understand how a person thinks on their fee

The question I love asking every candidate is "tell me the story of the most impactful thing you’ve ever worked on." I like this question for several reasons: It works for every level of experience.

For very role-specific hiring: "Knowing about the role, how does your experience and skillset fit the needs?" The best answer: Reflects the candidate really understands our company, has done research

Design a product for drivers driving in rush hour. I am betting every human stuck in traffic has once thought... “Dang this traffic sucks, I wish I could [insert idea].” The best answer I’ve heard is

One question I love to ask is: "Tell me about a time when a conversation with a customer made you realize that your product direction was wrong." I have heard so many great stories about dispelling

There are very few hills from a professional perspective that I would be willing to die on, but this is definitely one of them. I absolutely believe that fully remote product teams can work in the lon

Working at GitLab for the last three years has shown me that fully remote teams can work and be highly effective. Teams at GitLab are remote and highly distributed and work asynchronously first. For e

Your ability to create value quickly will depend on how quickly you can identify the problems and gaps in ways your organization operates today, and demonstrate progress towrds fixing them. Here's how

Before gaining influence, you have to gain your team's trust. One question I love to ask when I join a team is: "What are the biggest challenges the team experiences? How can I help?". Gather this inf

I've found informal mentors to be very helpful throughout my career. These have often been colleagues and peers I work with at a given company where I will buy them a coffee and chat about their caree

TL;DR - Be clear about what you want to learn and then ask for help. You'll find most people are eager to help others grow. Before finding a mentor, it's critical to think about what you are hoping t

It's important to be transparent with your manager about your career aspirations and then align on the criteria for a promotion. Create an actionable plan to close any gaps and track progress against

My biggest frustration is that I let people down. Currently, I work with teams of 50+ people, which means I need to be available all the time. The more senior as a PM you become the more folks you nee

Being patient when I would like to be impatient. Product management is deeply humbling in that good things often take time. I like to say that I am "tactically impatient, strategically patient" - as i

I get frustrated whenever I hear business outcomes and customer outcomes described as two forces that are in tension, and that it’s necessary to choose between either building a fantastic product or

One area of frustration is when everybody wants to play the role of product manager informally but very few have any formal training or experience in product management. This manifests as all kinds of

One very common frustration is not being able to make everyone happy. As a product manager, your job is to hear many perspectives, which may be at odds with each other, and you don't have infinite tim

There are different paths that each product manager takes, but the common ones I've seen are: 1. Joining a tech company as an Associate PM or an intern straight from college. For college grads, I sugg

There is a fork in the PM career path road: one is becoming a people manager, the other becoming an expert in a deep thinking product area sans managing a team.  My recommendation is to figure out whi

This is a very interesting question and one that I keep touching upon on almost all career conversations with my teams & mentees. There is no one typical career path for PMs, which can be both lib

My personal acronym for the skills that make product managers succesfull is H.A.C.K. H for Humility. There are two particularly important benefits of humility. First, humble people better navigate th

This is a tough question to answer because it is so situational. For example - I have seen organizations where PM is so immature that it is essentially a project management function. Melissa Perri eve

Regardless of how you grow your product team, you'll need to establish a healthy culture around the product process, how you work, and the principles you run the team with. This means you have a defin