Does anyone have any advice for someone looking to start a PM career? Two of my close friends are PMs at Amazon and IBM and their jobs seem fascinating to me, but I’m totally new to the field. I plan on inundating myself with books/podcasts/YouTube videos/etc. for the next two months before I graduate. I have a BA and MA in psych and have a lot of background working in educational settings, so I’m going to look into education and mental health companies as a way to get my foot in the door (and because I care about those topics). Any tops for beginners would be so so helpful. Thanks in advance! Advice for new PM?
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Excellent intro to Product Management. If I could recommend only one course to dip your toes into it then it would be this one!
https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-product-manager-learn-the-skills-get-a-job/
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This course is also available on LinkedIn learning, same guys, same video. That was how I started and it was the best foundation I could have asked for.
You should take it.
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@AnaRodriguez, If I’m currently a PO, and on track to be a PM but want to make sure I have the skills for it, do you think it’s still worth investing time and money into taking this course?
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It’s $20 so yes, go ahead… Go for it…
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Here’s the best advice I can give - Most of the PM courses and certification programs and even some of the best books provide knowledge that is too focused on one or the other dimensions of product management.
One has to start with product philosophy and how customers evaluate a product. How to identify the problem correctly and define an approach to solve the problem with a product? Just read the book “How coffee & kale compete”. Here’s the link
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Wow… Thank you so much…
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I also am a psych undergrad/psych masters. I’ve been a PM for the last five years or so after jumping from academia to tech. I now manage a team of PMs so I’m also heavily involved in the hiring process. I hope this advice helps.
Where to start:
You have two paths.
The first path is to find a junior (truly junior) PM role. These aren’t hard to come by: they’re just competitive. In my opinion, junior roles only need two things: drive and potential. I look for candidates who have done interesting things with the constraints they’ve been given.
Drive: Did you take an idea at university and found a club? Great! Did you take your hobby and run a side business? Excellent! Were you the captain of a sports team and you leveraged that to help a charity? I want to see a spark and ambition to do more: however large or small.
Potential: Do you have a foundation to grow your skillset into a product role. The job of a product manager is to drive growth by being the evangelist for their customers. The role has a heavy focus in taking data and turning it into outcomes (not just output). With a psych degree that’s easy. Focus on your experience running research studies, analyzing statistics to understand participants’ behavior and how you frame experiments based on previous knowledge. This is an effective analog to the way PMs gather feedback in the form of direct feedback (NPS, interviews, etc) and indirect though user recordings.
Finally, see the interview as an opportunity to tell a story. The story about yourself, your competencies, your abilities. Make interviews mutual conversations: this is how to get buy in from a manager who will work with you for (hopefully) years to come.
Read books like Competing Against Luck, Hooked and The Design of Everyday things to give you a foundation for having conversations with your interviewers about your product.
And the biggest point: to the extent that you can, always go into the interview having engaged with the company’s products and understanding their competitors. If you can get a free account, free trial, etc, come in with questions about their products and observations. Make it clear you know their value prop, who their customers are and their market defensibility (what makes them different from competitors).This goes a long way to differentiating you.
The second path:
Find a project manager role in a product org. The focus here is on process: how you have used process to guide projects to completion. Again, easy for you. Spend some time working with the PM and devs and getting involved where you can. Once you have some project management experience you can easily transition into a junior PM role since you now have a solid foundation for the process side of the role (think agile management etc).
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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Wow!!! This is incredibly helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to give this advice. I feel more confident that I might be able to find my way now. 
Are there any courses/certifications that you’d recommend just to give me more education/a very tiny edge? The Stanford one was recommended to me, but I don’t have the $650 at the moment to spend.
Books:
-Inspired
-Hooked
-Working backwards
There are also some very nice resources to “break into PM”. You can search in youtube:
-Diego Granados
-Exponent
-Dr Bart
As for a certification, I believe it has no real value as most information and advise will be found for free of through LinkedIn learning (if you have premium subscription), blogs or Youtube. As a PM i find those resources good enough to get you started.
Of course I am also here to help the community as a PM outside tech (automotive in my case), so glad to connect via LinkedIn and see how can I support you.
Cheers and good luck!
M
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This! There is a whole industry of certification where they teach the same stuff and make people pay thousands of dollars. If you have a certain level of motivation, you can learn on your own and then join people to build something meaningful that employers value at a fraction of the cost. That’s why Prowess exists.