How to break into Product Management (Real Product Manager Stories)

[Music] hey guys it's theclobro or just chloe just call me just come close welcome to my corner of the internet where i talk about uh the things that i've been pondering about in my life and my career as i go through them yes last week i posted a video about what i do my day job which is being a product manager and i got so many kind comments about how it was so helpful not gonna lie i was pretty nervous posting it because i was like this is so boring why would anyone want to watch this it was actually really good information about what consumer tech is like so thank you for the comments and support it makes me want to create things that are a net positive on the internet you know literally after posting last week's video the top question that i got in my comments at in my dms was how do i break into product management and today i am going to go into that in full detail i'll be sharing stories of how me and my friends swindled our way into becoming pms at google twitch ea and tiktok so let's get started let me tell you going into pm is hard competition is quite fierce because supply is far less than let's say software engineers like the general rule of thumb is there's 1 pm for every 10 software engineers so then why is this such a hot career path to go into why does everyone want to go into it why are we all talking about it why is it so hard to get into and three reasons number one it's really influential prestigious and respectable there's like a ton of ownership like you own your feature road map you own the meetings you own the decision at the end of the day all the other stakeholders are going to give you input and at the end of the day it is you who calls the shots it's also a really visible role you're like basically presenting at every single big meeting so there's just like a lot of power which means there's a lot of alphas so watch out the second reason is compensation you all know that if you work in a non-tech role in tech your tc or your total comp is going to be a lot lower than the others which really sucks like you've got eng data science and product who are making all the big bucks and then there's everyone else and it sucks when you genuinely want to be in a non-tech role but our comp system in tech is just super broken and it is just beyond me i think an entry-level new grad role at like facebook is about 118k and that doesn't include your sign-on bonus and your rsus and your performance bonus entry level for industry is like 155k 160k so with that kind of money you might be able to pay rent in san francisco but you'll still be broke the third reason is that there's really high growth you get to build really transferable skills as a pm so if you ever want to do anything else it is really good for you one of the most common next steps for pms if you're not going to be like a head of product or a director of a product it is to be a founder or a ceo a lot of people think being a pm is like being a mini ceo of a product like that's true to an extent and there are plenty of pm turned ceos that make great examples so the growth potential is very high the talent pool is very strong and it's a very big role because the scope is just massive here is a clip of my friend mohsin who is a pm at google and these are his thoughts about product management the best product managers are those who have the minds of an engineer the heart of a designer and user and and the speech of a diplomat but because it's like a really sexy career path it just feels impossible to get into it sometimes because it's not like software engineering where you can just get a degree and then recruiters are like cool yeah come interview and then you do the interview and then you get all these offers from all these great tech companies although there are product programs are starting to pop up but it's one of those jobs where in order to get a job you need to have experience but in order to get experience you need to get the job and you're not sure where to be in this circle of product job stuff i don't know it doesn't make sense so then the original question was how do you break in and i've seen two types of people trying to break in number one new grads and number two industry hires all right let's talk about the new grad first hello new grad or college student you may have a stem degree or like econ or liberal arts you're interested in tech but you just don't want to be an engineer cool get it your options aren't your number one apply for product adjacent roles because they're just far more entry level roles in other job ladders than in product number two you can join product school or a product program something like that but i don't really have much experience and it's really expensive so i can't really speak to that and number three apply for the associate product manager or rotational product manager programs at all the big tech companies so i'm gonna talk about this for a sec these are really great programs but they're just insanely competitive like you definitely have to get referred they only open up these programs like once or twice a year and thousands of people all across the world apply for it at the same time and only less than one percent of those applicants get in even if you pass all the interviews if you just say something that's slightly less impressive than another candidate you're just not getting the spot also i think that the rule is that you can have up to like four years of industry experience and still be qualified to apply for the program so if you're a new grad trying to apply for it you might be competing with people who are already industry hires and who have experience in tech i won't go too much in detail about the program because your girl did not get in but i also found this glorious blog post by this guy named kevin way kevin who are you and why are you so great apparently this guy is like a product manager at ibm or something that's what it says over here and he summarized all the top apm programs so check out his blog post if that is what your goal is it's a pretty impressive breakdown now moving on to industry hires if you are like the rest of us normal plebes kidding normal humans we usually just switch in from another role so then the question is how do the rest of us get into product and a lot of my friends and i have pretty diverse stories i'll start by sharing a story of my friend mohsin he worked for teach for america then did consulting then did business school at uc berkeley and then joined google working in a belief finance and that's actually where i met him and then over time he started to get really into the pm space and transferred internally this process is called internal mobility and it's actually a really tricky process to do especially at fang companies because there's like a whole leveling system where you have to be a certain level to be eligible to even apply for interview and then you gotta interview and it's a very similar process to what external candidates actually go through so it's like you don't get a huge advantage being an internal candidate sometimes and also even if you make the transfer successfully sometimes you get down leveled for example at facebook you got to be ic5 so individual contributor level 5 to be able to transfer to the pm ladder and once you make it you get downrank to ic4 and it shouldn't really change comp that much but it's just like just like not a fun thing to go through anyways mohsin was able to successfully transfer internally which is really hard but i think that he was pretty prepared he's had a lot of industry experience before and really understands what the product role really entails he's also mentioned that he's worked with a lot of people part of the apm rpm programs and even though they're really bright competent people i don't think a lot of them really understood the role of the product manager and became like soured by the experience and decided to quit afterwards and so it just goes to show how complex the role can get for certain teams but mosin was very well aware of what he was getting himself into so that's motion another story i have is of my friend michael so michael actually was a product analyst at electronic arts ea and he's been wanting to be a pm for quite some time he started to reach out to all the people he knew at work and apparently got ghosted a ton and so he just kept asking people to mentor him or coach him or give him any advice and finally one person said yes to him and was able to coach him along the way and bring him in introduced him to what projects he was working on and then michael was able to get his feet wet and then when finally head count opened on the team and the hiring manager had him in mind and he was able to transition in doing product this whole process took him like six months from beginning to end and that's usually how it goes not a lot of people have time to mentor you breaking into product management because like people are really busy in product but i know michael was really grateful and he wanted to pay it forward and he actually mentored me going into product so yay but i think what's interesting about michael's path is he focused in analytics he also has a background in economics and he really understood the relationship between human behavior and metrics and how they intertwine how they reflect each other and he really understood what levers to use when trying to move metrics so then next i want to talk about my friend kristen chen she is the director of product at soundcloud and i actually did a podcast interview with her about her entire career about the lessons she's learned about how she broke into product all the challenges she's faced all the doors i have closed on her and then all the advice that she wants to give so check that out if you're interested but i want to show you a clip of her explaining her thought process of how she wanted to break into product she actually started off her career in consulting and then worked at linkedin doing insights and then transitioned to her first pm role at twitch and then to pinterest and then to soundcloud so yeah listen to the segment i gave myself six months to a year so maybe at the end of 2016 or beginning 2017 i made up my mind and said okay i'm gonna transition i started out just conducting these informal interviews and coffee chats um with people on a network i do this kind of 360 degree like view of the role so also i went and had coffee chats with product marketing managers or engineering managers and you know i read all the books i could find i asked people for advice and i was actually trying to understand you know could i break into product directly from insights i was wondering oh do i need a software entering background do i need to go to get a master's degree or mba or go to coding boot camp or yeah you know what do i do do i take the general assembly course do i go to product school and i actually applied um to a bunch of interviews before hitting up my network just to dip my toe in the water against the practice i got completely destroyed in the beginning like it was bad just on the phone nothing beats a real interview right even though they were really rough and i definitely felt you know embarrassed or ashamed i was like okay let me keep my head up i'm going to write down the question i'm also going to ask the person and just be straight up oh you know could you give me some feedback how could i answer that better next time what are you looking for some people will give you feedback um some people can't just because of company policy but i wrote down every single one of those questions and just practiced and i take them to my pm friends and say hey how would you answer this teach me and um and so i got my job at twitch because my very good friend um charmeen referred me to twitch and she was um i think she was in product there at the time in managing a team and i was able to transition into twitch as a senior product manager because they happen to have a role for an insights and data pm that matched my skill set really well so something to take away from kristen is that she actually specialized in insights and then became a senior pm working on insights at twitch two things you have your industry and you have your job normally if you're trying to transition it is much easier to stay within your industry and then become a pm within it and then if you want to change industries you can swap over so like if you work in fintech it is just easier to try to become a product manager within fintech first before transferring to another industry as a product manager and finally we have my story i was actually in biz dev leading partnerships at a streaming company and then i met with users all the time to like figure out what their biggest problems were and then see how we could improve them i i was really good at partnerships like i i very much enjoyed it but then i realized no matter how well i sold the company we were always bottlenecked by product so then i did a lot of product analysis and then i worked with engineers and designers on working on what the next feature launches could look like and at the time i met michael who was our first product manager and then he was really gracious and he just like introduced me to all the different concepts and product and i realized wow i really wanted to transfer and so i made the request but then hr totally blocked me and that was really challenging even though i got everyone's support across the managers then it led to me having to interview elsewhere and that was a really scary process i remember michael used to do interview prep with me like every other day or something he'd be like how do you improve this product why did this metric go up or down and i would just be shaking on the whiteboard and be like i don't know but then eventually we did enough exercises that i started to realize the patterns i did eventually get offers from smaller companies but then i decided to join facebook because i wanted to see what product looked like at a larger scale i actually joined facebook doing product development which is not really a product role it actually aligns with operations and reports up to sheryl sandberg and it doesn't report to product i also tried to transfer internally there i was a really high performer i got approval and support from my manager and my product director i even got w who was the vp of product at marketplace at the time to sponsor me to join her org but then i got blocked by hr again because of head count reasons and it was just so challenging and they were like well maybe in six months and so i was just like i can't wait that long i know that six months doesn't sound long in the grand scheme of career and life but i have been chasing this for like a year and a half at this point so i've been so tired of it i just couldn't wait so then i started interviewing again and at the same time i was trying to get as much pm experience as possible i actually was doing contract work for a startup as a product consultant and then i just bugged all the pms that i worked with and asked them if i could help on any of the upcoming feature launches and a lot of them were like oh i'll let you know we'll see but then eventually after i've like proved my worth they gave me a few opportunities and i was able to be one of the pm leads on live online events which is really cool at the same time i was also doing the interview thing a lot i read all kinds of product books and did a ton of mock interviews with my pm friends by the way i do think that dakota conquer was the most useful book for interviews and i also went on productmanagementexercises.com for interview questions i think that's the right website yeah i literally just drilled mock interviews all night and all weekend and i finally was able to get a good amount of offers and then i decided to join tech talk yeah and that's it these are the stories of how a lot of us got into product management i hope this is helpful to you for when you need to make your moves so i think for a lot of us it wasn't like an easy direct line forward it was actually kind of zigzaggy along the way it doesn't mean that we were slow to the game it just means that we learned other things along the way also in the future i do want to cover some tactical advice on how to best prepare for all the different interview loops in product interviews as well as any resume tips for getting noticed and i just want to share more personal stories about like different challenges that i face in my career with like managers and promotions and relationships and like all kinds of things in adult life so do support if you're interested in seeing more also don't forget to check out the podcast interview with kristen chen the link is down below it is such a neat interview i have learned so much from speaking with her and it's also a great way to celebrate our asian woman leaders in tech so check it out when you're doing your laundry or just cleaning or driving it's a really good listen that's all for today and see you next time bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Chloe Shih

Views: 127,511

Keywords: product management jobs, what is product management, how to get a PM job at google, how to get a PM job at twitch, how to get a PM job in tech, how to get a PM job in gaming, how to become a product manager, how to break into product management, how to become a product manager with no experience, how to transition into product, best product managers, apm programs, rpm programs, facebook rpm, google apm, uber apm, tesla apm, associate product manager programs, colorsofchloe

Id: 8o4jFPV2ras

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 01 2021