I would recommend not doing a business major. While I’m sure you can learn valuable things in business courses, this could be a tragic lost opportunity. Your mind is in a formative state in college: your goal should be to stretch it as far it will go, watch it break apart, and then figure out how put it back together. Think less about what major will look good to potential employers and more about creating a blend of coursework that will cultivate the modes of thought you will need to thrive. Here’s what I suggest:

Computer science + whatever humanities area you are passionate about.

Continue reading “How Aspiring Product Managers Should Select a College Major”

The majority of optimal product manager activities depends entirely on the maturity and nature of the product. Product managers should be acutely sensitive to the precise circumstances of their product and act accordingly. While there are some common threads, this leads to a very wide range of day-to-day activities. What you should definitely not do is follow a fixed recipe.

I’ve explained a few examples of how the phase of your product should dictate your activities day-to-day.

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1. You’re developing a new product with a hypothesis that is yet to be tested. All your activities should be focused on validating or invalidating the hypothesis as quickly and cheaply as possible.

What you should be doing:

• Working on a framework for judging the success or failure of the product. There are many forks in the road you’ll have to navigate such as deciding whether the best feedback mechanism is qualitative or quantitative and figuring the right people to expose your product to. You may end up with nontraditional metrics or feedback mechanisms.
• Designing the minimal viable product (MVP) necessary to test the product hypothesis. Different types of products require different dimensions to be fleshed out (design, functionality, etc..). You need to decide the minimum set of work necessary for learning.
• Ruthlessly prioritizing feature development. You must keep the engineering team working only on the features required to test the MVP. Everything else is waste.

What you should not be doing:

• Optimization. In this stage, who cares if you can increase click through by 5%? You’re trying to decide first whether your company should invest a ton of money in this direction.
• Guiding the engineering team through major architecture decisions. Anything you think you know about the product is wrong.
• Allowing the development team’s focus to become fragmented. Your company’s management team may become impatient waiting for your results. It’s your job to keep the development team insulated from management thrashing until the results of your experiments are clear.

Continue reading “What Should a Product Manager Do Day-to-Day?”

Treat the creation of your resume as the same type of interface design challenge you face as a product manager. In a sense, you are the product, the potential employer is the user, and your resume is the product’s interface.

Continue reading “Writing a Resume for Product Management Jobs”

Not necessarily. The perception that product managers should code reflects the fact that the discipline of product management is in its infancy — the true nature of the craft is only beginning to be recognized. Requiring product managers to code might be a reasonable hack for identifying individuals who have one aspect of the product manager skill set, but a coding background isn’t strictly necessary and can even be a liability in some cases (as I’ll explain later).

Continue reading “Should a Product Manager Know How to Code?”

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I put absolutely no thought into choosing a career. I simply followed the roads that were most interesting to me which led me to a double major in philosophy and cognitive science, although I decided to only finish the philosophy major. In retrospect, these areas of study prepared me excellently for product management:

1. The multidisciplinary nature of cognitive science is analogous to how product managers translate between disparate areas of the busineess. In cognitive science, one has to weave a coherent narrative between technical areas (e.g., computer science and neuroscience), and the humanities (e.g., psychology and philosophy). This mirrors how product managers must create bridges between engineers, designers, marketers, sales, etc..
2. Studying philosophy helped me sharpen my fundamentals of thought. It taught the difference between a deep understanding of a problem space versus a hand-wavy one. The process of reading and re-reading a philosophy text until I could understand it reminds me of iterating on a user interface until it clicks.

Continue reading “My Route to Becoming a Product Manager”

The responsibility of a product manager depends on their context within an organization. Here are some examples of variables that might change a product manager’s responsibilities:

• Management structure. In some cases a product manager has the mandate and influence to push their product forward as they see fit, in other cases they will be responsible for executing a vision for the product defined by management.
• Maturity of the product. In some cases a product manager will be responsible for launching a new product, in other cases they will be responsible for evolving an established one.

Continue reading “A Product Manager’s Responsibility”

I’ve found that the best way to change a thought process is to fully commit to exploring it, fleshing it out, and articulating it. In doing so, your thought process will inevitably change as you’ll see places where it breaks down and opportunities to improve it. In researching your ideas, you’ll be able to connect your thoughts within a network of theories and you’ll discover other people who have thought within the same paradigms. Consequently, you’ll come across convincing challenges to your ideas, and interesting people who can give you feedback and other ways of thinking.

Continue reading “How to Change A Thought Process”

Step #1: Use your current qualifications to get a job in an area of a business where there is strategic white space. This implies that the business is stagnating in a key realm due to lack of clearly defined vision and there isn’t a clear person whose role it is to define and execute the absent strategy.

Continue reading “How to Become a Product Manager (Three Steps)”

In the midst of the many possible activities for a product manager to prioritize, above all, you must keep yourself in situations where you dictate what you and your team do. This entails spending the time to think deeply about the vision and strategy for evolving your product, and socializing your plan with management and your team so that they are fully bought in, understand what you’re doing, and trust you to execute it. This takes quite a bit of time and focus.

Continue reading “Product Managers Need to Dictate What They Do”

I strongly recommend reading this series of books by the architect Christopher Alexander:

1. The Timeless Way of Building
2. A Pattern Language
3. The Oregon Experiment

While these books were written before the discipline of product management  existed, they get to the essence of how to build things that will be inhabited by groups of humans — a fundamental mission of the product manager. An excerpt from The Timeless Way of Building:
Continue reading “Reading for Product Managers: Works by the Architect Christopher Alexander”