How to become a product manager
Discover how to break into product management with zero experience and at the lowest cost and effort possible. Get rid of the biases and craft an actionable strategy to fast-track your PM career.
Hi and welcome to the Corporate Waters weekly newsletter 🙌
I’m Mikhail and I'm excited to share my learnings to help you navigate the murky waters of product management, leadership, and corporate dynamics. Subscribe to unlock the full value.
From time to time, I surf through various product communities on Slack, Reddit, and oddly, Discord. My main goal is to get a sense of the key challenges the managers are facing. Predominantly, these communities are packed with junior, associate, or wannabe product managers asking for advice on how to get into tech. At the same time, there’s so much misconception around the technicalities - finish those fancy PM courses, get that MBA degree, do a hundred mock interviews, etc. Most of that advice is a load of bias.
On top of that, internally I’ve had a range of colleagues reach out to me directly asking about the product opportunities at Bolt. Mostly they come from different functions like operations or public policy and want to switch gears. That transition isn't easy, because the skill sets required for both roles do not overlap. Hence, I had to think of potential workarounds - how can one contribute to product without taking on too much risk and learn the required skills along the way.
The more I thought about it, the more these two problems seemed similar to me. Essentially, the question boils down to - how can a person with limited or no experience get into product management? I’ve decided to structure my thinking and draft a playbook on the matter to answer most of the critical questions:
Should you get an education? (courses, MBAs e.t.c.)
How long does it take from zero to hero?
What skills do you need to focus on?
Besides, I’ve come up with a set of principles that can help aspiring future product managers create an actionable strategy for getting into BigTech in the least amount of time, with the least effort and costs possible. Read on - at least a 100x ROI return on the paid subscription spent is guaranteed.
