Transition to Product Manager Post Graduation

By Leslie Cook
Posted on December 21, 2023

Welcome to our Product Newsletter, a biweekly email highlighting top discussions, and learning resources for product managers.

What We Will Cover In This Edition:-

Top Discussions:

1) How can i become a Product Manager after graduating from college?

2) Should PM’s design the wireframes

3) When do you hire your second product manager, and how do you decide their seniority, responsibilities, etc.?

Top Learning Resources:

1. What is good retention?

2. Drive growth by picking the right lane

3. Four fits for $100m+ growth

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Top Discussions

Question 1) How can i become a Product Manager after graduating from college?

Hello all! I’m new to Prowess and have been through the site quickly. I love the community section and am pretty impressed with the discussions. I just wanted to ask a few quick questions about product management.

How does someone who is in college get to be a Product Manager after I graduate, what major should I pick to help me out in getting a job working on products?

Also, do I need to be a deep techy person not just tech savvy but also understanding the basics of coding if I want to work for a tech company or is it just the business side?

– Pouya Taaghol

Discussion

A] @PouyaTaaghol Welcome to the Prowess Community. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your stay here as much as we all enjoy being here. Coming to your question

At a software startup, you may be asked to have some tertiary knowledge of some java or JSON if you are going to be working with a lot of APIs. I use a lot of SQL in my role since I work with a lot of user data and backend stuff. It’s not an absolute requirement, but it’s helped me take on some new responsibilities, and I have learned a new skill. I also help write a lot of technical integration documents, which means a lot of Visio flowcharts and a working knowledge of our data.

You may also be asked to do some design work for wireframes, so knowing some basic Photoshop or illustrator will never hurt.

If you work in health insurance, or for some big manufacturing conglomerate, you may have to understand a lot of industry-specific skills and be able to learn a lot of legalese, whereas you may not have to be so technical. Other roles may be more sales-focused, so you may have to understand the ins and outs of product marketing and be able to deliver great presentations.

No matter your job or field, the best advice I’ve ever been told is to be an expert at something that no one else is able to do or wants to do, this will make you an invaluable asset to your organization.

Whether you are a PM or BA, you will be asked to do a lot of things and work with many types of people from C-level execs to front-line customer support staff and everyone in between. Be able to adapt and communicate more than anything else.

As far as education goes, any combination of communications, marketing, finance, or computer science-related majors/minors will get you started on the right path.

TLDR: Become a Dentist

– Dhiraj Mehta

B] @DhirajMehta, Thanks for the warm welcome and for the advice, I was thinking of working with smartphone companies like Samsung or Snapchat or the automobile industry. I don’t understand the last sentence, why would I want to be a dentist lol, although it was one of my options?

– Pouya Taaghol

C] It depends on the type of product management. It’s not atypical to find a lot of computer engineering or computer science grads in Product. This will definitely give you an advantage when it comes to interacting with developers, or anyone technical.

But there are multiple areas that a product manager needs to interact with and have influence in. As a result, I’ve seen very successful PMs who have come from various undergraduate domains:

English, Economics, Biology, Psychology, Philosophy, etc. I’ve even seen some with no degree at all.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

A good PM must be a strong communicator. You need to be able to present well, converse well and write well. You must be able to communicate ideas effectively and to explain technical or non-technical details to non-technical or technical people, respectively.
You must be able to formulate hypotheses, and test ideas. Understanding the value of quantitative and qualitative results, and how they work together to prove a hypothesis is essential. You must also be able to perceive data objectively and draw conclusions, even if they don’t agree with your hypothesis. Data literacy is essential.
You must be able to draw conclusions from disparate fields or understand how systems interact and function. High-level knowledge of psychology and economics is valuable.
While you may have design and UX resources, it’s often helpful to be at least somewhat well-versed in these fields. Being able to quickly throw together wireframes or lo-fi mockups can go a long way when communicating an idea.
Product Management exists at the intersection of development, marketing, finance, operations and more. Understand the basic needs of these groups and you will be more effective as a PM.

Finally, you should know that there is no one discipline that will help you, but ensuring that you can learn and are curious about new things will increase your odds of becoming a successful PM. Hope that helps!

– Michael Yoffe

D] @Michael Yoffe, It does help a lot, thank you. I have an interest in most of the topics you are talking about and I feel like I am skilled in some topics. I am focusing on marketing, economics, psychology, finance and much more business-related subjects. I might need to focus more on my writing and communication, but I feel like that won’t be a major issue, I just have to experience it in person to know my strengths and weaknesses.

– Pouya Taaghol

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Question 2) Should PM’s Design the wireframes

Recently as a part of the updated product development process, PMs are supposed to design the wireframes entirely and then take them to the designers. Do you think this is a healthy approach to a good UX design?

Also, I have a good sense of design but am relatively bad at actually designing UX or UI so not very comfortable with it either. What should I do?

– Angela Blue

Discussion

A] This just seems like a very CYA maneuver by someone on the UX team disguised as an exercise in efficiency. Why should the root of any blame for a bad design begin with the PMs of all people in this situation, because of the way the process is designed? What is the guarantee that any of the resulting wireframes are double-checked by UX in this scenario?

– Shiya Oliu

B] I actually did but the manager was more interested in saving the time of designers by avoiding too much back and forth. Apparently, if we provide wireframes as a part of the requirements, they can get the designs finished sooner. I am still thinking of a more holistic way to resolve this. Maybe start with providing very lofi ones

– Kathryn Zaroulis

C] It’s very bizarre to me why your manager would like you, without experience, to create the wireframes when you have experts for that. Designers and developers own the HOW part of the equation. Product managers should be focused on the WHO, WHAT & WHY parts. You mentioned back and forth. Maybe you should invest more in the original specs doc so that UX knows how to get to the point quicker? I think maybe you could spend some time thinking about improving communication instead of doing their jobs.

When PMs start doing wireframes, they get sucked into the rabbit hole of product design and development, and with that, any outward focus on markets and customers goes out the window as the PM becomes a slave to the day-to-day development process.

– Jesus Rojas

D] In an ideal world, what I say stands true. However, not all companies have the luxury of time and/or resources.

So, in that case, either you can do it or the designer. There is no straight answer to this or one size fits all solution. Try and experiment with your team to see what process works best.

And if you feel comfortable conveying your thoughts or ideas via wireframes, then go for it by all means.

Just remember that wireframes are part of implementation and implementation is solution space. A PM should ideally be focused more on problem space.

– Natasha Martin

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Question 3) When do you hire your second product manager, and how do you decide their seniority, responsibilities, etc.?

Hi all – we hired their first PM who was for all purposes a senior hire. They helped to establish a product process and drive some key projects early on. Now we are thinking to hire a second person, simply because we are scaling and have more surfaces to cover.

What considerations should we make? What impact does this decision have on the shape of our organization in the future?

– Rohit Kumar

Discussion

A] Have your first hire delegate some things to a new hire. Observe how they work together. If they are both same level seniority will be shown by a leader or manager. Either you have managerial skills or not. Most of the time employees leave the workspace because of their managers. Culture in your workspace is crucial.

– Marco Silva

B] So – the most important thing you can do is establish roles and responsibilities early on – is the new PM subordinate to the existing PM? Having 1 person report to another person as their only report is rough unless you expect to quickly grow the subordinate team. Better to have them both report upstream.

Still, if the current PM has put together all of the processes, talk to both folks early on and explain that the processes are good as they are, but you expect that they’ll partner up and make plans going forward.

Third, they have to have aligned teams – you need to find a way to have engineers aligned with each of the PMs, otherwise, there’s going to be conflicted about prioritization – this can be project-driven, it doesn’t have to be permanent, but if there’s not enough work for a PM to be partnered with engineers, you don’t need a PM.

Finally, you need to be really clear with both the current hire and the new hire around how you see the roles evolving. I see a lot of PMs interviewing where they started as an IC PM at a startup, assumed they were auditioning for the VP/SVP/CPO role, and when the company raises a lot of money and they hire in an experienced PM exec, they are bitter and unhappy. I’ve also been the exec hired into these roles and it sucks to manage people who feel like they’ve been lied to about their prospects in the job. It’s possible that the people you have now are the people who can grow with you to a much bigger size, but the odds are against them, and they should understand that.

– Naomin Wosu

C] When have Product Owners sit on top of Project Managers in terms of seniority?

It’s a slightly different skill set, but so far, we’ve always graduated project managers into product owners.

Generally, product owners have a portfolio of products, and project managers have a single product lifecycle that they manage. Other businesses might have the inverse of this in terms of portfolio size due to product/project complexity.

So: have your existing PM take a “product owner” role, and have the new PM work under them. The Product Owner decides the feature definition and feature priority, and your new project manager deals with execution.

– Karan Trivedi

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Top Learning Resources

What is good retention?

Although retention is widely considered to be the most important metric to get right when building (and investing in) a business, it’s also one of the least understood. Why? Because unless you’re a growth expert or an experienced investor, you’re often relying on anecdotes, dated blog posts, and misguided benchmarks. I ran into this problem myself many times when working with startups.

Drive growth by picking the right lane

Once you get to even moderate scale, each of these lanes becomes highly competitive. In the case of paid marketing and SEO, you are competing for a customer’s attention. Paid marketing becomes a business model competition (who can turn this customer attention into enough value that they can bid more than anyone else for that attention), and SEO becomes a ranking algorithm competition (who can capitalize on their content in such a way that “deciders” like Google want to continue to send traffic their way).

Four fits for $100m+ growth

Model Market Fit is the concept that your market (and # of customers within your market) influence your model. Your Model Market Fit hypothesis revolves around some simple math: ARPU x Total Customers In Market x % You Think You Can Capture >= $100M. Yet when you do this for a lot of early-stage startups the simple math tells you that you don’t have a $100M company. Here is how to use the Model Market Fit Threshold.

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