Breaking into Product Management? Here's where to start.

Product Management as a discipline has been around for a while. It used to be mainly about creating a Product, building a market around it and selling it to customers. The role mainly sat within the Sales and/or Marketing department.

Nowadays, the term Product Manager has come to signify a role that sits at the intersection of Business, Engineering/Technology and UX. By principle, a product manager is in charge of providing a product with great customer experience, developed with sustainable technology (sometimes innovative) and providing recurrent business value.

The tech boom within the past two years has launched Startups which brought about a rise in the need for Product Managers. The boom was also a catalyst for Digital Transformation in existing companies, which have discovered that a Product Manager helped to drive innovation & transformation while ensuring return on investment.

The Product Manager role is thus one of the most promising roles of the 21st century, be it in a Startup or Large organization. Some choose to pivot into this role (from previous roles as project managers, designers, marketing managers, sales, business analysts, software engineers, etc), others "fall into it" through attribution within their company. Product Management is a profession by itself and whichever path you take into it, once you make that decision, you have to learn the profession.

Where do I start?

Books

There are so many books about Product Management out there but these are some of the most inspiring ones:

1. The Art of Product Management - Rich Mironov

2. How to create Products Customers Love - Marty Cagan

3. Agile Product Management with Scrum - Roman Pichler

4. The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Blogs

These blogs release articles regularly on Product Management techniques:

1. Silicon Valley Product Group

2. Inside Intercom

3. Pendo Blog

4. ProductPlan Blog

5. Product Elites

Listen to Podcasts & Watch Youtube videos

Listen to seasoned Product Managers talk about their past & current experience. Watch great talks on different aspects of Product Management. You'll find out you're not alone:

1. Product People

2. 100PM

3. Productized

4. Product Plan

5. Mark Shead

Join Product Communities

These communities, like Product Elites, organize blogs, conferences, talks and webinars on Product Management:

1. Mind the Product

2. Product HQ

3. Hacker Noon

4. Product Stack

5. Product School

6. Product Elites

Follow Product People on Twitter

These people have a large Product community following. They post daily insights on Product Management:

1. Melissa Perri

2. Eric Ries

3. Marty Cagan

4. Roman Pichler

Get trained & certified

Certification is most effective after you've acquired 1 to 2 years on the job as a Product Manager. Most organizations do not hire certified Product Managers without experience:

1. AIPMM - Certified PM

2. Berkeley Product Management Certificate

3. Scrum Product Owner by ScrumAlliance or Scrum.org

4. Product School

Get a Mentor

This is our favourite. You can either get a mentor to help you transition to Product Management, to help you succeed on your first job or to give a boost to your Product Management career. Our experienced mentors at Product Elites will help you shorten your learning curve with their weatlth of Product experience. So, get onboard and join the club

Bringing it all together

Don't feel too overwhelmed with all the product resources. Start from somewhere, it's not a sprint, it's not even a marathon, as a product manager, learning never ends. So, take the resource that suits you and start from there.

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Tolulope Ayeni

Product Elites Mentor

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