Product Management Quick Start
A few approachable resources for digital PMing.
Sometimes people ask me how to get into digital product management. This happens at meetups, or through friends and colleagues. I usually share some resources and chat over coffee. I thought I’d share my regular response.
It goes something like this:
You want to be a product manager? That’s great! It’s rewarding and enjoyable. But I’m a bit biased, because it’s what I do everyday. It’s a cool combination of design, tech, and business.
Product (quick videos)
The #1 product management resource that I recommend is this online class. It’s the one my mentor gave to me. And the one I give upcoming PMs.
Find one of those coupons to buy it for $10 or $15. The class shows industry standard product processes and tasks. The videos are digestible. There are summary PDFs too, if you like reading.
User Experience (UX for short)
I believe the best product managers overlap a lot with UX designers. When I say UX, I mean user research, talking to people, planning, workshops, and strategy. I do not mean wireframes, prototypes, and visual interfaces.
For UX I recommend:
It’s a digestible blog about products, users, processes, and best practices.
Books (skip ‘em)
Honestly, I would stay away from books to start. Yes… Sprint, Lean Startup, Rework, Entreleadership, Hooked, and Inspired are good… but they are too specific. And too long-winded.
Product, and UX, are broad disciplines. Reading a whole book may feel like covering too little ground for how long it takes to read all the pages. Committing time to a whole book can be demoralizing for fresh starters.
Listen instead (think LEAN)
Secret pro-tip… shhh…. don’t tell anyone. Subscribe to one of those book summary apps, like Blinkist. Listen to a 15-minute synopsis first. Then decide if you want to read the full book. You may be OK with starting with the big picture summary.
Meetups
At the time of this writing… I live in Charlotte. I recommend the CLT UX, CLT Design, Women in UX, Skookum Tech Talks, and Skookum Volcano Tour Meetups. These cover UX and product related topics. Meetups are great places to learn, network, and see cool, local companies. Those companies may be looking for product roles.
And that’s it!
I don’t recommend bootcamps, or podcasts, or people to follow on twitter, though I’m sure there are good ones.
My goal is to give people interested in product a few specific approachable resources. No overwhelming reading lists or curriculums. I try to save them time, money, and energy. (LEAN again).
The first step in getting into product management is a few Udemy videos, a couple book summaries, and showing up at a meetup. The truly motivated will study more resources, read some books, find the right people on twitter, and start a side project.
If this you, good luck! If you’re in Charlotte, we should chat over ☕️ or at a local meetup.
