Anybody made the move into a product manager role with no prior experience? How did you do it?

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Started my career as a CPA at a big 4 firm —- moved to Corporate Strategy then I had an opportunity to move to a product management role. Now I’m a GM of a financial product. I oversee product, business strategy, operations and business development, etc.

In terms of product management, your best bet would be to become a business analyst first. they essentially do all the requirements documentation which is like product management 101.  You don’t necessarily need to be technical for a product management role, but you’ll need to understand agile vs waterfall methodologies. Find an industry that you’re very passionate about and you have an in-depth knowledge of and become a business analyst there. At the end of the day, a product manager is essentially the voice of the customer, so if you understand the user/industry it’ll help in the long run.

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Thanks! This is helpful.

Im assuming you’re talking about becoming a Product Manager at a tech company vs a bank/retail company.

At a big tech company, here are some of your options:

1) Go to business school. People don’t realize this but Tech companies recruit heavily from
the top business schools and they recruit a ton for PM roles.
2) go to coding boot camp since you’ll need some sort of basic technical background and the likelihood of getting an interview is higher if you have a computer science background
3) join the tech company in a completely different role that has nothing to do with Product management and then switch into the role via internal networking.
4) join a start up where you’ll have the opportunity to work with Product very closely and learn from them

Oh and KPMG1 sounds like they don’t work at a tech company. You most definitely need to be fairly technical at a big tech firm to be a Product Manager. You’ll be working with engineers every single minute of the day, so having technical aptitude is important. It isn’t mandatory but all the PM’s I know have technical aptitude.

The PM roles at Adobe for example are by far the most difficult roles to fill along with software engineers. These two teams are the true talent at any tech company. It’s not going to be easy but it is achievable. Good luck!

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Fair point.... if you’re going to a very technical company like Facebook google Adobe Microsoft you’ll need to be technical. It all depends I guess.

from OP’s point of view, is a coding class really going to help? Unless you’re doing coding every day, you’re never going to know more than your developers or actually sit down and write code. I would recommend taking a course in agile methodologies and basic Tech architectures (for example: Microservices architecture) before taking a course in coding. 

Technically never has the label Product Manager, but realized when applying for jobs I had the skills, as I was already working on a specific tech. I’m now a PM at a smaller tech company and doing well. Consulting skills map nicely. :)

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What tech company?

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Same here.. interested in this thread

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Guy from my firm did it. Took him a year and he is not at a FAANG

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