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Customers frequently ask for one thing when the problem is something else. You need to have empathy for customers, too, and understand what they’re really saying as opposed to what’s on the surface. But you need to understand the technology enough to have a technical conversation, and translate it into layman’s terms for business folks-who might be stakeholders, but not as technically adept.
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What Are Ways to Start a Career in Product Management?ĭixon: A lot of people will recommend that you know how to code, and I don’t necessarily endorse that. Related Reading 14 Product Management Courses You Should Know Around 2003 or 2004, I kind of came through and said, “Oh, it’s product management.” But even when I was VP of New Products, I didn’t recognize what I was doing. I used to think of myself as an inventor, problem solver and artist. Everything I did professionally was about continuously releasing stuff, learning and talking to customers.
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I’ve been a product manager from the very beginning, but I didn’t always recognize I was doing a thing called product management - this is close to 20 years ago. I’m always looking to see, what are the problems out there that are worth solving? What are the fastest ways to solve those problems? And what are the pros and cons of each approach?Ĭhief product officer at Tafifi who blogs about product management at The Product Guy
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There will also be analytical-type questions that basically involve taking a big, ambiguous problem and breaking it down into smaller sets so that you can make progress on it. Product manager interviews differ from company to company, but generally there will be an interview that’s testing your customer focus and your ability to solve customer problems through good product design. I was lucky enough to know people who suggested the role to me, and I think problem-solving skills helped me get it. You don’t need to have a technical background to be a great product manager, but if you want to go directly into product management it helps. I started as a product manager right out of college. Product manager at Asana and co-author of Cracking the PM Interview Product has just now, in the last three to five years, gotten to a point where people really train for product roles and aspire to be product managers. A lot of the folks that I’ve talked to who have been doing it for more than a decade, like I have, have similar stories. But having the product manager experience at one company, I was able to take it to another company. My background was in marketing and branding. I was reorganized into my first role as a product manager. Product manager with a decade of experience managing hospitality and transportation technologies How Did You Land Your First Product Manager Job? Alicia Dixon We spoke with three product managers about their careers and how to get started in the field. Product managers also are tasked with getting stakeholder support and distinguishing essential ideas from duds. Still, product management is about vision, managerial finesse, having a strong sense of why a company’s products matter and always striving to improve on what’s already out there. The role has a special mystique because it requires no coding, a rarity among tech jobs. They do, however, use people skills like emotional intelligence to align different stakeholders around their vision of the product at hand, which could be anything from a cloud platform feature to a physical tablet.
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