Breaking into Product Management is not easy. The competition is high, and most roles require you to have 2–3 years of experience before applying.

But “How do you get experience without getting the job?”

This is this the “Chicken and Egg” question that has stomped a lot of aspiring PMs from getting into the job.

Don’t worry, in this post, I’ll show you that step by step process of incrementally attaining experience and landing yourself a PM role. Let’s go!

The Chicken Came First Before the Egg

Firstly, let me answer the “Chicken vs Egg” question, the Egg actually came first. A few million years ago, a…

The term “Product-Market Fit” can be baffling for a lot of new Product Managers.

The phrase sounds great in theory, but in reality, finding product-market fit raises more questions than it answers:

• What is Product-Market fit?
• How do I know when I have Product-Market fit?
• How do I know when I don’t have Product-Market fit?
• More importantly, how do I find product-market fit for my product?

Hopefully, this post will be able to answer some of the questions for you.

What is Product-Market Fit?

According to Marc Andressen: “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

…

When I started in the Product Manager role, I’d spent hours googling terms like: “How To Be a Great Product Manager” or “What does a Product Manager do?”.

I’d read blanket advice like: “To be a great PM, you must Communicate Vision” but how do you like… “communicate vision”?

So I spent years learning from various mentors, taking notes like a stalker, and reading every book I can on that topic.

Many years later, I’ve distilled the traits of great product managers into these five key points. …

Working with developers can be intimidating. If you don’t have a tech background, the jargon they use can go way above your head.

Early in my career, I’d hide my insecurities by writing a product spec as detailed as I can. Forcing my developers to give an estimate based on the spec. We’d miss dates and I’d burn out the team.

Now I realised that was the wrong approach.

To create world-class tech products, business and tech must be embedded together. A modern Product Manager needs to play an active role in the solution discovery process.

So how do you…

“That’s just a feature.” — the ultimate trigger words for any Product Manager.

This piercing phrase is often an accusation that your idea is not worthy of solving a big enough problem.

This dilemma confused me for a long time and gave me a lot of imposter syndrome. Many years later, I realised this:

Feature or Product, it’s just a matter of perspective. Products are features, and features are products.

As a product manager, we work with multiple teams to define requirements for our products. A Product Spec is a communication tool we often use to get everyone on the same page.

Back in the days, we’d use a product requirement templates like a BRD (Business Requirement Document) or a PRD (Product Requirement Document) to get everyone on the same page.

However, big documents are too slow in the modern age, and it’s prone to miscommunication. Even worst, it turns your product team into a requirement gathering function — rather than a value delivery function.

As modern product managers, we…

We’ve all been there, your team spent weeks cooking up an awesome design experience for your product.

You set up a design review session to present the work to your boss, but he/she ripped it into shreds:

• “The UX flow is all wrong! Think about the customer!”
• “I don’t like this screen. It’s too messy!”
• “Why don’t you let people pay with Paypal!”

You walk out of the room with your designer dumbfounded, questioning your career choices in product.

But wait, don’t go polishing your resume just yet. …

So you’ve spent the past few weeks talking to customers, doing market research and you’ve touched down on a product that solves a real need.

Now what? How do you turn these sticky notes and prototypes into features for your MVP? 🤔

In this post, we’ll talk about the end to end process of turning insights into customer needs and how to map our features for your product.

Let’s go dive right into it.

Feature Scoping Comes After The Idea Validation Phase

Before heading into this phase, make sure you’ve aligned the idea with the business and validated the idea first. …