Ultimate Guide to Breaking into Product Management

A few tips no matter where you are in your journey

Are you looking to get into product management? You’re not alone, according to an Agile Insider report The hiring trend for Product Manager’s (PM) grew over 30% between 2017 to 2019.

While growth during 2020 may have slowed, it certainly didn’t stop, and now in 2021 I can tell you from experience the growth is accelerating with a vengeance. Despite this growth, product management is also notoriously difficult to get into.

Entry level positions often require skillsets most don’t know how to build, and qualifications that seem un-fulfillable unless you are already in the field. So what can you do to ensure you have a leg up on your competitors and secure that offer?

Here are some tips to stand out from the rest, broken out by where you might be in your journey. Though, many of these can be applied at any time, even if you are already working as a PM.

This applies both to working on your degree and working on your post-graduate education, though the former can easily be more difficult to break in from.

The greatest challenge with candidates still pursuing their education, is a lack of practical experience. Well duh! You may say, but the thing about product management is the job itself does require a breadth of knowledge and experience across a variety of fields and disciplines.

Sadly most college education is geared towards the opposite, a focus on a specific discipline. Because of this, while college candidates have great ideas and fresh perspectives, candidates fall flat on questions tied to experience. So as a graduate, how can you get in edge over your peers looking to break in?

Product management spans a number of disciplines: Marketing, Engineering, User Experience, and Data Analysis being chief among them. Most likely, you are already studying in one of these areas, so try to take one or two classes in each of the others to gain an understanding of them.

If you are going into the tech field, you should prioritize at least one…

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