Related Posts
Any book recommendations on change management?
More Posts
Recs for Raleigh/Durham
Conversation Starter
Decided to payoff my mortgage.
Additional Posts in Tech Strategy & Product
AWS vs Amazon PM roles?
Hello folks at Uber, I’ve been approached by a recruiter for the role of a Regional Operations Manager - Eats’ Marketplace team. Wondering how this fares against the Strategy and Planning team (which I’m guessing is the most elite Strategy team at Uber). Also, should I be looking out for any other non-engineering teams within Uber that are well known for what they do?
New to Fishbowl?
Download the Fishbowl app to
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
Product management is grounded in the simple concept of developing products with direct input and interaction with customers, by understanding their problems and needs. It fundamentally has nothing to do with technical skills and pioneers of this go back a little further than technical roles. Ie- Henry Ford was a product pioneer and I'm pretty sure he didn't have any AWS certification.
Therefore, it's good to align to a track of soft skills, more than the hard ones. Look for people who are able to solve complex problems that lack a clearly defined solution. People who communicate well, understand how to spot market trends and who possess empathy.
I personally come from a technical background, but I have found very, very little of my technical skills to be truly useful in a product role. Working with technical engineers is only a fairly small portion of my time. To be clear, that it's my perspective on a role as a product manager. If you want a role as a product owner, you may be looking at different criteria to hire. But the two roles are vastly different (even though many companies try to marry the two)
There is a history. Product Management originated from business analysts that had deep technical skills, but wanted to build the business. This has evolved over the years (both good and bad) and now you can come from various career and educational backgrounds. I still think it is extremely important for the person to be technical and hands on. Even if you have a business background get ready to get into the mess. I sometimes worry that foundational technical knowledge is being ignored and replaced by overpriced MBA programs or people "managing" projects. I'm surprised how often I'm interviewing PMs that know very little or nothing about core system architecture and data management.
Best of luck with your search!
PM’s my first role after graduating Uni, I’m at a startup. I also did internships in design, dev, and traditional engineering while I was studying.
Most PMs at our startup are entry level and came straight from Uni. A couple had boilerplate corporate experience, also entry level. At the intermediate level we’ve got 1 former consultant and a couple of devs, but many had product experience. No one Sr and above came from outside product.
My take is that the easiest way to move to PM is internally if your company has PM roles, followed by joining a startup. I did the latter and didn’t need any specific courses, just read books and blogs plus worked on a no-code side project to put it into practice. I know some folks might advocate for courses but I personally didn’t see a need for them (or certifications).
Keep in mind PM roles have a high variability and folks go into them in a myriad of different ways, so this is just what worked for me.
Happy to help. Pairing time depends on the person and their type of project. For me, I started being more independent when I got promoted from APM to JPM 7 months in. That’s when my PM lead stopped attending most ceremonies and just read my weekly summaries. They still handle staffing and billing because we agreed that’s not something I want to prioritize learning about, but I do everything else.
Really appreciate the contrasting insights from F1 and CO1. I think you're both right. It seems:
1. Different firms are often talking about different but very complementary skills when using the term "product mgmt"
2. Soft skills matter especially where product demand is elastic: strong ability to understand the customer and market as well as herd the cats internally (clarity from ambiguity, and teaming)
3. Hard skills also matter where products are primarily tech solutions these days. More operational competence and credibility follows an ability to really understand what SWEs etc can actually do. PMs have to organize or even jump into the fundamental dev work at lots of places, at a minimum on knowing what or who to procure at appropriate quality/cost.
The combination of very strong 2 and 3 in the same person is quite rare - both because the cognitive types are quite different and because mastering both takes a lot of time.
Any sense of which firms lean more one way or the other? Especially the big ones we all know about. Eg Amazon splits out technical vs non-technical PM: leetcoders vs MBAs.
Some came from technical program management and some came from development background in our firm