i am an aspiring PM .Currently i work as project manager and design project roadmaps.How do i transition to Product role.I keep reading blogs in medium,follow podcats ,an active member of a product slack community but i dont think I know the jargons right or can crack the design interview.I have looked at product school courses but i want more intervoew prep focussed and practical experience rather than theory.Any blogs/must reads welcome
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Take a pass at “Cracking the PM Interview.” However, I don’t think you’ll be successful just with interview prep and “jargon”, you need some real world experience or technical training.
This
I have read cracking the PM interview,swipe to unlock,inspired.What do you mean by technical training ,I am a technical project manager -But we do not have product roles to transition .Is there a way I can work on projects to get experience ?I reach out to people to volunteer too but that hasn’t worked much .
Swipe to unlock was such a trash book. Sorry to hijack your comment, but when I see that book title I lose my mind.
Do you have some recommendations ?
If you want to prepare for PM interviews, take a look at the PM interview prep guide: https://engineerseekingfire.com/how-to-prepare-for-product-manager-interviews/
This is great .Thank you !
This is a good resource, but it’s specifically for technical product managers. OP may not be aspiring to be a technical product manager.
I was recently in a similar situation making the jump from operations to product management. In the interviews I drew from my past experiences leading various aspects of projects that i could relate to product management scenarios. I never had direct product manager experience but worked enough with engineering that I was able to land a PM role.
That’s great and congratulations.Do you mind if I DM you on what you read and how you prepared .Most important thing is storytelling w.r.t your past experience to get a call and then prepare the product sense and design questions to crack the interview
You bet
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Hey! Maybe you should check out Exponent course. They have lots of free you tube videos with mock interviews. it’ll give you a good idea of interview and preparation, the course itself is pretty reasonably priced.
+1 Exponent has great content on its YouTube channel.
Why's your periods and commas all weirdly placed such that they're converging the sentences into one instead of separating them. Is that a thing at ConvergeOne?
It’s a train of thought.
With many folks getting laid off and the pool of experienced PMs increasing, I think it’ll be hard to switch my changing companies. I would go for an internal switch. Yes, mastering the interview is important, but what’s easier/better is actually just learning the job and using your own time to do product activities for the team you work with now. Some ideas: do your research and become the expert on your consumers/customers, understand their business models, their pain points and needs and the value you’re providing, determine what frictions you’re not seeing (for their business or the use of your product) that you could improve. Then, put together as many pitches as you can for ideas they could solve those pain points. For strategy, read as much as you can about product management - I’d recommend starting with Inspired by Marty Cagan for a great high level view of the role. I’d then suggest Measure What Matters by John Doeer for setting objectives, measure the success of those objectives and roadmapping initiatives to hit those OKRs. For project management side, start attending scrum ceremonies to see how things work. Start reading user stories and learn about how to write good acceptance criteria (Agile Samurai is the normal go-to book). Then learn the tech stack and why it’s chosen, learn how the team develops and the release process. You’ll want to learn a bit about AB testing, data to track, how tests are run, how to read out not just the data but what that data means, the behavioral change you created and value realized. From there, how you decide to iterate on that experience or move on. As a PM, you work with every team at the company. Learn all the key stakeholders, what their job means at the company, how they’re measured for success (that’s how you know what matters) and the ins and outs of your business model. Building those bonds will drive a lot of support for your transition. There’s more and happy to expand on any of that, but if you work on those areas and get involved, you won’t need to study an interview guide. You’ll just be a PM at that point and it’s likely you won’t have to change jobs - they’ll promote/move you over. And you’ll be killer. Sounds like a lot of work? It is. Being a PM is one of the most demanding jobs at a tech company and requires a diverse set of skills. The only way to become a great PM and land badass roles is putting the work in. Good luck.
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