👋 Hey, I’m Ben! Welcome to my breaking into product management guide. In addition to this guide, I also write a weekly newsletter about how to grow products and companies. I go deep on growth strategies, how to build products users love, and what actionable lessons can be learned from what best-in-class companies are doing and industry experts are saying. Check it out and subscribe!
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Product management is a bit like an exclusive club; once you’re in, you’re in. Getting in is the hard part. The goal of this guide is to help you bridge that gap and do the seemingly impossible; break into product management as a non-PM. Beyond that, I also aim to arm you with the tools and skills that you’ll need to be dangerous once you get there.
Before we get started, I’ll give a little background on myself. I am a senior growth product manager at a wearable tech company. My trajectory to product was anything but linear; I graduated with a degree in finance, spent a year in software sales right out of college, switched to an ecommerce strategy role at a large ecommerce company, and ultimately made my way into product from there. I spent over two years at the ecomm company networking, applying to PM jobs, and doing everything in my power to break into product before finally finding someone willing to take a chance on me. It was hard, but I did it, and so can you.
The purpose of this guide is not to go deep on every topic mentioned. Rather, I set out to highlight the high-level path to breaking into product management and provide access to additional resources that have more comprehensive deep dives for each topic.
Product management overview
A product manager is the individual directly responsible for a particular area of the product, or the whole product, depending on the size of the company and scope of the role. They are responsible for that product’s successes, failures, and defining the future vision and roadmap for it. They sit between the customer, the business, their design partner, and the engineering team and are responsible for identifying and prioritizing the problems that need to be solved and building the tools and features that will solve them. They are responsible for: