You Don't Need Experience To Become a Product Manager

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.

What does it take to get into product management?

What's the requisite experience?

Are certificates worthwhile?

Do you need an MBA?

As a hiring manager, I've hired half a dozen product managers, as a consultant, I've evaluated many more. I don't care what your experience is. I don't care if you have a certificate. I don't care if you have an MBA.

I only care about one thing: Can you do the job?

Too many people think product management is idea generation and requirements gathering. But to be a good product manager you need to know how to do so much more.

You need to be able to:

• understand and work within the business context
• work with engineers
• think strategically AND get into the details
• estimate the impact of a feature
• know when to say no
• make the case of why something should be on the roadmap
• predict release schedules with unreliable engineering estimates
• use data to inform your decisions
• know when talking to someone trumps data
• find another way when you hit a roadblock
• advocate for the user
• focus on benefits not features
• know the difference between your user and your customer
• conduct an ad hoc usability test
• get to the root cause of feedback
• be the product expert on customer and prospect calls
• distinguish between bugs you can ignore and bugs that must be fixed
• be ruthlessly focused on your product's core value
• guide a designer to not just create your vision but build upon it
• write user stories that communicate the what and the why
• ensure high product quality even if you don't have any QA support
• understand what drives revenue, if not manage the P&L for your product
• identify the most important thing to do right now (not always the most urgent)
• experiment with everything
• get in the heads of your users / customers
• identify a pricing strategy
• iterate until the end of time
• and so much more

Many of these things require experience. You have to learn them somewhere.

But I don't care if your experience is at a big company or a small company. Or if you were a product manager, a business analyst, a designer, or an engineer.

I want to know how you think, how you make decisions. Show me.

Show me on your resume. Show me in your cover letter. Show me on your blog.

Because there is no one path to product management, don't waste time deliberating about the right experience or the right certificate. Show off the product management skills you already have and relentlessly build the ones you don't have.

If a certificate, degree, workshop, conference, specific job, etc. helps you build those skills, by all means pursue that path. But focus on skill-building not credentials.

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.