my goal is to become a product manager one day. ive been in sales for two years now and ive seen some success. ive heard that customer success is a good middle ground. im sure i have a lot of value to offer having talked to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people about the product i am selling. however, im getting bored of sales and i have a somewhat technical background (no engineering but operations/supply chain). any advice on how to bridge the gap or move
Get a book on PMing. There are more now than there used to be. See what items in it appeal to you and go deep on them. If you have some engineering the analytics based development and a/b testing parts of the pm job for a typical web company will be within reach. You can also look on meetup for pm groups or try to help at a hackathon without trying to take over a project from an engineer. Any coding you learn adds credibility even if you admit you are not going to do it as a career or fun
I have some books on lean product management and such, anything you’d recommend? Cracking the PM interview? Also these books don’t give me any credibility at all as I can’t put reading a book on my resume lol. That’s why I’m thinking of doing some PM boot camp (Product School/General Assembly) but I’d love to get there organically without a CS background if I can.
You need to practice what is in the cracking book. You perhaps know some models of selling since you are coming from sales. There are similar patterns/models to other career areas. Contrast and compare these and then try it practice some for free if you can. Programming skills helps immensely, but if you are working for a software company take your feature request pipeline and analyze that. What gets traction, and what doesn’t? What are the high level technical blockers? What needs user/design experience to come up with a solution? Boot camp if you can’t find some hook to build your product side, but a review and product breakdown blog that exercises your product brain is a good start. Most pm stuff is not new
Also I’m somewhat opposed to doing a coding boot camp as I’m not interesting in coding. Been thinking about scrum or agile certs or getting my PMP or doing a PM boot camp eventually.
Gawd, pls don’t become one of those monstrosities that is a scrum master who never understood/liked coding.
It’s not that I don’t understand it, I think if I gave it a try I would. I love puzzles, languages, and figuring things out. Granted all my “coding” experience comes from excel formulas and such but I just don’t have a passion for it. It’s cool when it works but I’m more interested in people’s decisions and go to market strategy.