How to Become a Product Manager
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Loading... - Alanyo Montes
- 12 Sep 2022
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There’s no cookie-cutter path to becoming a Product Manager. Across North America, Product Managers come from a variety of backgrounds, including communications, marketing, and engineering, to name just a few. What all these people have in common is that they’ve mastered a handful of hard skills – including customer research, the ability to identify market opportunities, and product modeling and roadmapping – as well as the essential soft skills a Product Manager needs, including strategic thinking, leadership, communication and collaboration skills, and especially empathy.
The good news is that you’re aiming to become a Product Manager, the hard skills are rather straightforward to learn, though they will require dedicated study. The soft skills that set the most successful Product Managers above their peers can take longer to hone – but fortunately, these can be developed while working in a wide range of fields.
How to become a Product Manager in five steps:
Learn product management fundamentals
Get familiar with the product management process
Study your line of business and industry
Develop your own projects to build product skills
Create a portfolio of projects to showcase your work
STEP 1
Learn Product Management Fundamentals
To become a Product Manager, you have to understand that Product Managers work at the nexus of technology, business, and user experience. It’s a position of great responsibility: a product’s entire lifecycle, from ideation to launch and beyond, can rest on a Product Manager’s shoulders. For that reason, it’s also a position that demands proficiency in a number of different areas, both technical and social.
For many, the most effective way to learn product management’s technical skills (and gain practice using its social ones) is to enroll in a Product Manager course. In this type of structured learning environment, you can be sure you’re covering all the basics while avoiding misspent time, with continuous feedback from an instructor to help keep you on track.
Product management is one of the most lucrative jobs in tech. Even so, recruiters find Product Manager positions difficult to fill. One of the difficulties lies in finding candidates who are both seasoned and up-to-date on the latest developments in tech; it’s a position that necessitates continuous training – yet another reason Product Managers often begin working in a different field before transitioning to product management mid-career.
A deep understanding of your marketplace and your customer base, spotting new opportunities, and the ins and outs of usability testing, not to mention your business’s strategic goals, resources, and technical limitations is a lot to juggle. A Product Manager Certification will not only help you to master those skills, it will also give you the confidence to feel comfortable overseeing the process.
In a product management certification course, you’ll also gain the specific technical skills Product Managers need – like how to develop a go-to-market strategy, define your minimum viable product, position and price your product, and create competitive analyses and status reports. The list goes on: product launch metrics, A/B testing, version control, standard measurement platforms, familiarity with wireframing, UX design, and software development lifecycle methodologies like Scrum – all of these are things a Product Manager must be comfortable overseeing. Read More...
