🎄 Building your PM career

Despite being a relatively new discipline, Product Management is incredibly popular as a career choice. It is often seen as easy to get into because it is so wide-ranging. This is aided by its intersecting with many other disciplines, from engineering to design, operations and customer support. It also means that the role has a different flavour in every company and that there are so many intersecting paths that it can be confusing at any career stage, especially at the beginning.

My best advice for PMs at any stage of their growth is to think of their career like a Christmas tree. 🎄 Let me explain…

In the beginning (1–3yrs)

The job market is most competitive when you’re just starting. Entry-level roles are filled with great potential candidates — I’ve typically received 300–500 applications for associate-level roles. It’s rough in these streets. To get ahead, you need to stand out.

The thing about product management is that it’s so broad. The tasks can range from design, customer discovery, analytics, scrum or kanban, project management, competitor analysis and research, managing dev teams, design thinking, a multitude of tools, and the list goes on. This can be a curse as you haven’t had enough time to master many of them, but it can also be a blessing as not every PM role does all of these things.

The best advice I can give PMs early in their career is to go deep, not wide. Pick 2–3 areas and really stand out in them. This is because every entry-level role will have a bias towards a specific area. If you have a generalist profile, you compete with everyone on everything and are just 1 in 500. But if you have a clear grouping in one of the areas, then for the roles that are looking for that subset of skills, you’ll stand out from the crowd. You’ll more likely be 1 in 10.

So if you think of your career as a Christmas tree, this is the trunk. Deep and narrow. At least until you have about three years of experience under your belt.

A very common question for early stage PMs is how to build a portoflio that stands out. While having theoretical examples of work you’ve done can help, working on real world projects is so much better. The best advice I’ve seen (someone mentioned this in the PiP forums — you should join) is to identify a company that you’d like to work for and to do a case study on them.

This could be a review of their onboarding flow, competitor analysis, customer interviews, or something similar. Then you put together a few slides with insights and share it with a PM in the company asking to discuss it with them to help you learn for 30mins. This makes it a lot more relevant and interesting to them and will increase the likelihood of them taking a call — even if they’re not hiring right now. It also has the added benefit of you using exactly the same content and approaching all of their competitors. Seeing an analysis of a competitor onboarding flow, or some real feedback on a competing product is always more likely to pique someone’s interest.

It doesn’t guarantee you getting an interview, but significantly increases your chances. And at worst, you now have a real world example to add to your portfolio.

The Middle (3–6yrs)

Once you have a few years under your belt, it’s time to experiment wider and spread your wings. No one wants a one-trick pony. When you level up, you’ll likely lead a complete product end-to-end. This is when you will want to intentionally put yourself in situations where you will be challenged and learn new things.

You should have enough grounding in a specific area to fall back on, so this is the time in your career to experiment and move around. You want to build a broad base of knowledge and skills that you can draw from.

Think of this as the wide, bushy branches as you try new things. It’ll likely be a little chaotic, and that's OK. You’ll find that you start to identify an area or specialisation (Platform, Technical, Innovation or Generalist PM) that you want to lean into and enjoy more.

Making it rain. (6–10+ years)

As your career matures, it’ll start to focus again. At the start, you focus on skills, but at this stage, it’s more likely to be around a sector or stage. For example, you could love the early stage of building new things (like me), or you can become a payment or Web 3 specialist.

Everyone will focus their career slightly differently — and that's the point. You want to create differentiation to become one of a kind or at least in the top % for your niche.

Richard Mulholland has a great analogy for how speakers can stand out: to identify the intersection of a street and an avenue. (In NYC streets run across and avenues run up/down.) Your street is what you do and where you specialise, the avenue is the unique perspective you have on it. For example: I’m an ‘Innovation PM (street) in Africa’ (avenue). You could be an ‘Enterprise/Platform PM in Open Banking’ or a ‘Technical PM in Image AI.’

So, in summary, think of your career as a Christmas tree. Narrow and deep in the beginning, then broaden to build a knowledge base, and finally start to specialise again in a unique niche.

Did this fit your PM path? Let me know on Twitter @rogernort.