Getting your first job as a product manager
Getting your first job as a product manager can seem impossible. Thankfully it’s not! I share my advice on how to break into a career in product management.
Author: Jock Busuttil
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals.
In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS).
Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK.
He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
PRODUCTHEAD: Training wheels and learned helplessness
» Motivation comes from making progress in meaningful work
» A mission-focused team tackling poorly understood problems may appear unproductive to outsiders
» It is everyone’s responsibility to act upon negative behaviour / thinking, but without assigning blame
» Even in the most controversial negotiations, the other party is just like you and aims to walk away happy
PRODUCTHEAD: Is there a standard product development life cycle?
» Success at every life cycle stage hinges on the same challenge: being able to solve problems for your users
» Early on, focus on learning about your users and their context and the constraints that affect your problem
» Maturity is the most difficult stage for a product, so you have to make the absolute best out of what you have
PRODUCTHEAD turns 3 🎂 / The changing realities of product management
» In product management, “the basics never change, it’s the more advanced stuff that changes”
» Oft-cited company frameworks such as the Spotify model were just a moment in time — everything moves on
» When all is changing around you, be an anchor of stability and trust for your team
Force multipliers
I seek out “force multipliers” to extract multiple benefits from the same work, like my very own workplace fusion reaction. Can you find your own?
PRODUCTHEAD: Charting your career path
» Early in your career, focus on building one skill at a time
» Find out what a company’s really like by meeting a contact there informally before the interview
» Practice experts can enjoy a varied career, but may find it harder to work in some domains
» As a product leader, what are your identity, superpower, mission and impact?
PRODUCTHEAD: Who’s in charge? You or the process?
» An inflexible process means working with incomplete information and making the wrong decisions
» Treating work as closed-ended projects leads to context switching and discontinuity
» A way to increase value in Scrum is to involve the team members in the discovery and strategy work
» Respect is not deference; it demands that we challenge each other to be the best we can be
91: How to sharpen up your vision and strategy
You can help your company to sharpen up its vision and strategy with these straightforward questions and worked examples.
PRODUCTHEAD: Wartime vs peacetime product leadership
» Wartime vs peacetime leaders employ different skill sets
» Airbnb’s changes to product management could be just what is needed in wartime or equally a retrograde step
» Working from home is a particularly polarising debate because it aligns with the leader-employee divide
» Discussions about productivity are often a proxy discussion for some other dysfunction
PRODUCTHEAD: The value of a drink in the desert
» To buy your product, the value users perceive from the product must be greater than its price
» The biggest, worst-kept secret of monetisation UX: ask, ask and ask again
