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Ask HN: How to become a product manager?
After a couple years of failed startups, I'm at a point in my life where I'm burnt out and want to get a job somewhere to further improve my skills and finally get some income through the door. Instead of starting a company, I'd love to join another early-ish stage one.
The problem is I'm not great at any one thing. I taught myself how to code; I'm comfortable in my respective language, but I'm no "rockstar." I think of myself as more an efficient hacker than can duct tape stuff together quickly and launch early.
Sales, marketing, social media, design, and data analysis are areas I'm comfortable doing as well. But again, I'm no expert in any of these.
After talking with some mentors and friends, they suggested I look into Product Management, which I have. This position seems to resonate with me because I can flex a lot of the different skills I picked up while running my own startup.
However, I think these positions require X amount of years doing product management, of which I have 0. Also, I'm really ashamed of my failed startups, which might throw a flag that I don't know how to build and execute a product. How can I overcome these challenges?
- chiph 12y agoFailed startups == lots of experience. You just have to sell it that way. The PMs I've worked with that were good at their job did a couple of things well: They were great at talking to customers and finding out what the pain-points were, while at the same time not promising to fix them. We were SaaS, so we didn't fix/add anything until we were certain that it wouldn't negatively affect too many of the existing customers. They were also great at explaining to us the steps needed to accomplish a change. We changed our entire payment system at one job. Previously, customers bought credits, afterwards it was pay-as-you-go. Big difference. So he had to explain how to handle the customers who already had credits on account with us, plus the path of selling items differently. And identify all the points of change in the UI. Lots of diagrams with arrows and annotations...
- pmhopes 12y agoIdentifying and pulling relevant information from the customer without leading them is an incredibly important skill. I've done this numerous times while refining the product at hand. I definitely will highlight this skillset. Great advice. Thanks for sharing.