Hello! I am looking to get into Product Management. Does anyone have any advice on the best way to get into it? Best certifications to take? Any books or courses as well? Any insight would be helpful. Thanks!

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Can you share a bit more about what you do now/what your background is? That drives a lot of the advice.

In general, the certifications are not super useful in product, but it is theoretically one way to get the base knowledge. It just isn’t super likely to get you the job on its own, and there are free alternatives to getting the knowledge.

Lots of books to recommend but can start with your background/experience first!

likesmart

That sounds like a good role to transition honestly. At the very least you could emphasize service design/ux design in your transition. You also work for Instacart which is awesome!!

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Agreed with what PM1 + PM3 have said. I would also ask yourself why do you want to be a PM? Don’t follow the hype train- there are a ton of other amazing careers and important roles that are important for an organization

likesmart

You mentioned you do root cause analysis for issues in your current role. Are those investigations done manually? Is there anything you can script up to catch problems before they have to be discovered manually or escalated from a customer? You can create automated monitoring and then score the severity of the issues based on impact and effort and provide a recommendation on priority to the PM? That’s a good start for finding some mentors at Instacart and honing your technical skills so you can maybe pivot to PM eventually

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I do them manually but I did not think about your perspective. I will look into this. Thank you.

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Marty Cagan’s book Inspired is a great book for any PM to start with. It really is the Bible of Product Management in many ways

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Echo what PM1 says.

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Product management is not always solution driven cuz there are many different solutions it is about understanding the problem and analyze opportunity, impact, and feasibility. Start with reading pm books, talking to pms, and move into roles like product research or product operations. If you are a very strong candidate you can shoot for APM roles.

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Thank you!

Udemy, Coursera, and General Assembly all have good courses! Various price levels going on there. Try out one or two and then pivot as you feel you need.

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What products are people working on at Instacart?

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That makes perfect sense. I’ll focus on becoming a PM here. Thank you!

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This isn't hard advice but one book that's good to read in your spare time is Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

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Thank you.

How many YOE do you have?

I do not have any years of experience in a particular product role yet.

The product podcast from the product school is a super helpful resource. They often have guests on who talk about how they broke into product management. I broke in by getting a role in Product Operations first.

Can we connect? I’m in a similar position and would love to hear how you did it!

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