I had zero prerequisites to get into product manag it and I've done a a serviceable job myself you have basically two options one you can enter a really Junior role at a mid to large company or you can enter a startup if you're looking at being a PM at Google a PM at meta that you you do need to look at how did people get from here to there and you will see a little bit more of that like classic sort of business into PM straight out of school or straight out of graduate school path yo if you want to break into Tech you should at least minor in CS so he completed the minor in one year I think he did like second summer semester in order to do it but he landed a job at Uber as a PM after that I think in about 5 years you're like definitely going to have to be much more technical than the average PM is right now to stay competitive in what I think is an evolving rooll [Music] so I'm just going to dive right into it a couple weeks ago I got to chat with Akash Gupta and clar vau two kind of like product celebrities and I knew that when I talked to them I wanted to ask them how people can break into product management if they don't have any prior product experience and I wanted to ask this because a lot of folks are interested they want to know like how do I get started with this awesome career path so I asked them for some advice and the insight they gave were phenomenal I'm so excited about them and a little bit jealous that I didn't come up with those insights now real quick before diving in I want to do a little plug uh for everyone involved in this video first of all if you like this kind of content make sure to subscribe and you can even like this video too if you really want maybe leave a comment you know whatever floats your boat also be sure to check out the chat PRD YouTube channel which has a lot of good product focused videos and you get to learn a lot about Clair vau who is just like an inspiration for a lot of people in product also make sure to check out alash gupta's product growth newsletter it's an amazing newsletter filled with so many insights and he's just got so much experience and is good at sharing insights and giving advice for people in product management so there's all the plugs without further Ado let's dive into the interview bye [Music] hi everyone I am so excited because I'm here with Akash Gupta and Claire V Akash is the creator of the product growth newsletter has gone from pm to VP of product uh in his career super impressive career um and I have Claire vau who is the founder and creator of chat PRD and a three-time CPO and cpto forget that um so thank you guys both for for being here I want to talk today about just how folks can break into product management this is a discipline that a lot of people really want to work in but it's so hard to do that if you don't have product experience on your resume so who better to ask than the two of you um so the first thing I'd love to know is just in your opinions are there any prerequisites that folks need to have in order to become a product manager I will dive in first because I had zero prerequisites to get into product manage it and I've done a a serviceable job myself so I have to say no because I was absolutely not by degree or experience quote unquote qualified to be a product manager but I made my way here and so I have one of those very lucrative liberal arts degrees they tell everybody to go out and get and then get into Tech so I studied um history and got out of uh University and just wanted any any job that would hire me and I actually got hired as a copywriter so I came in from like sort of a marketing copywriting background I was technical I had coded from when I was a really little kid even through high school and you know selling websites and that kind of stuff as a service but I had never done it professionally or in a company I just happened to get a a job at a startup writing copy and I was employee number 13 and I ended up being the second product manager there because what I realized was product is just words that instruct people through an experience or to a goal especially if you're doing digital products right you're basically putting words on screens sometimes with a box around them sometimes it's a box you put words in and you try to get somebody from here to there and I was very good at words and I was very good at getting people here to there and so I started from a very nontraditional path and as somebody who's then worked their way up from APM all the way to Chief product officer and even even Chief product and Technology officer running both product and Engineering I've hired so many people that have had that classic PM background but I've also hired people out of technical support and sales and product marketing and design and I do think um PM is one of those generalist roles where from my point of view um there isn't one background that makes you a perfect PM you can really come from anywhere 100% agreed I don't think that there is maybe a background or a degree that is a prerequisite but there is I think some personal characteristics that you want to think about when you're a PM so the first thing is you have to be able to have a lot of meetings in the day there are some of you out there who are listening to this who are like I operate best with two meetings a day you're not going to have that ever as a product manager even your entry level pm job is going to have four to five meetings a day by the time you get to caire's level you'll have 16 meetings a day I certainly did as a VP of product so you're literally booked all eight hours of the working day so and they're typically triple booked and you're choosing like this is the one out of the three that I there is high leverage okay I'm gonna say no to all three just because my CEO asked me something so you're you're dealing with a high um demand job you're going to be in a lot of meetings and even though we people originally used to say PMS are the CEO of the product you're actually facilitating decisions so you also have to have that capability that you like working in teams if you were that person who just never could succeed in team sports or something like that it might not be the job for you because you're basically doing a team sport as a job you're helping the designer the tech lead all together come to decisions and once you've reached CLA or VP level then your helping all the execs and the CEO and the investors understand the product Vision so it's always going to be a team sport so those are like the personal characteristics that I would emphasize and then I would say that there are some very well trodden paths to becoming a product manager so you should try to figure out which archetype of path so of course like I've hired people who were a former teacher I've hired people who had a history degree like Claire of course all those people did but each of them still followed this well TR path which is that if you are a very experienced Tech professional or professional you're typically going to take a down level into product management that's path one so if you were a director maybe you'll be like a manager or maybe even just a senior IPM the second path which is really common is I'm in college a gosh I really want to get into product management you have basically two options one you can enter a really Junior role at a mid-to large company so don't have your eye on those senior PM roles but like an associate PM or a rotational PM or you can enter a startup which is how I broke in so I broke in with the regular title product manager but I broke into a company with 16 people so those are really like the most well trod in paths and if you look at those people who do have work experience the vast vast vast majority of them are doing so at a company that they already work at and so if you talk to people it's like I was a software engineer at this company I started taking on more product work I was a product marketer at this company I started taking on more product work so I would say those are like the well trod in archetypes that you should try to follow in some way shape or form yeah and you and I might share the same point of view which is there's no one archetype but there is a pretty standard archetype that lands sort of APM rotational roles in very large companies and those are often mbas that go into those roles like select univers so there are I I think your you're and my experience are maybe colored by the types of companies we choose to work at and the types of companies we hire for but I do think there are if you're looking at being a PM at Google a PM at meta that you you do need to look at how did people get from here to there and you will see a little bit more of that like classic sort of business into PM straight out of school or straight out of graduate school path for larger companies and I would also copy at that with so I've recently I took like 20 college students and the ones who got the RPM and APM roles actually this data kind of blew my mind they all had CS degrees so these big companies really want that technical background for the RPM APM role and all of them on top of those CS degrees they were regularly participating in hackathons where they were creating their own products and they were taking internships where they were learning what the product management role is so they would often like after their freshman year they'd take an amaz onui internship they would then parlay that into junior year a meta rotational program internship so that way they could say yeah when I was a su at Amazon I learned that there were these and these problems with the prds there were these and these problems with involving me in the process so that is kind of the most highly effective path and you'd be surprised like people think oh I go to Indiana University or I go to bits in India or I go to you know some like just top 50 University not top five University actually those people still can break in it's just more about having the Cs degree and having kind of that product experience plus internships yep got it cool that was that was just a ton of great information thank you both um one question that I often get asked this um is do you have to have a CS degree or do you need to know how to code in order to be a PM so I don't have a CS degree and I still run a very long lar engineering organization I consider myself fairly technical um so the answer is like of course no you don't have to that caveat saying like I think in about five years you're like definitely going to have to be much more technical than the average PM is right now to stay competitive in what I think is an evolving role so I have actually a strong opinion that PMS need to get more and more Technical and by more and more technical I actually don't mean more and more computer science technical I believe PMS need to go further in the ability to build whether that's like prototyping designing um designing out apis figuring out these using no code tools I think PMS need to build Builder skills and I would say the past three to five years very different in product management um there was maybe not that Demand on the product manager and I think in the next three to five years there's going to be a significant demand there or at least there will be if you work in my org yeah I think there's again sort of uh bifurcation of the role so if your early career I would highly recommend getting some sort of technical chops so myself like my dad was a professor of computer science I've been coding apps my whole life I still do programming so I think that that technical basis for me even though I didn't have a CS degree was incredibly helpful and I highly recommend like anyone who's in high school or college listening to this you should take the courses yes um I know somebody who I met who was after his junior year at University of Chicago he went to University of Chicago for economics you know he took all the classes he basically completed his major then I was like yo if you want to break into Tech you should at least minor in CS so he completed the minor in one year I think he did like the second summer semester in order to do it but he landed a job at Uber as a PM after that so uh if you want to do it even like late in your career if you're just hearing about it it's still worth doing or let's say you have three years of experience you're working in customer success today I think that you should take some weekends take the easy classes at uh Stanford or MIT both of those are free online on YouTube for programming and you should get the basics of programming and then what you want to do is you want to learn more about what it looks like at a big company so at a big company it's not exactly like you know your single files that you're doing in your homework classes but you're like having to read a giant monolithic repo and then learn about it so those are like the two elements of technical skills if you're early in your career I mentioned there's this bifurcation I do find that being a product exec especially at a big company so not like necessarily the scale of company that Claire is currently leading but like let's say like a Google or an A firm that I worked at or an epic games the product leadership job is an exec job and some of the best product leaders that I worked for they might not have even had much product management experience they might have been like a founder and then they were a VP and then they moved into a senior director of product role as I mentioned they usually do take that down level but if you're in that senior stage of your career you you're already working like 50 60 hours a week and you have a family you don't have time to take these technical courses I think that then what you want to focus on is like the product set of slant of being an executive because all your executive skills will still translate over and so for you thinking about you know Lenny has a bunch of amazing deep Dives on how X company builds product reading those listening to his podcast I do a bunch of deep Dives on how companies build product and their product strategy so understanding their product strategy I think that those almost become more important than the technical Parts at least in my experience at big companies yeah I mean it yes and no also like I work 50 60 hours a week and I have my family and I still do technical stuff so you know the heart the heart operates where the heart finds joy um yes and no um and maybe this is another conversation we should have which is yes the the role at this level is an executive role it's a vision setting team f it's honestly a commercial role in many ways in a B2B operations they spent a lot of time with sales they spent a lot of time thinking about revenue and business line growth and I think at the foundation of what we build and I think this is a little bit of something that maybe I get PMs and and product leaders curious about the foundation what we're building is software at least in the type of product we're we're talking about and I bias towards product leaders who can understand how technology can provide deep leverage to their product strategies and so I really like to get people to stay anchored in the technology and in in how we might build something and especially in a moment right now where I think the foundational Technologies on which we build software are going to look very different in the next decade than the previous decade and I think in that world it is upon the product leader to understand those technology waves and those fundamentals um in addition to the sort of product visioning and then I'm of course taking this from somebody who has a broader role across product in engineering so it's probably just self- selection bias but I do think um I think the profile is changing and I think you can see different profiles in different companies awesome that's all great great Insight um aash you actually mentioned a couple of these but I'd love to know if there's any specific trainings you you would recommend can you uh say those ones you mentioned one more time and then if there's any more that either of you recommend love to hear it yeah so I think it just just depends on like kind of like your age and then your skill set so the younger you are the more you should be thinking about these are like official things that I can officially put so recently actually I just advised a bunch of people who have been graduating from cmu's product management graduate program and you'd be surprised at the placements these people are getting they're working at Big Tech PMS they're working at very good companies as PMS so you don't need to like poo poo on these degrees that are coming out if there's a degree that says product management on it or if you can get a CS degree which is kind of the most preferred you should definitely go for that and even if you're the type that's like oh man like I'm not the best programmer I'm probably going to end up with a 3.2 GPA versus I could end up with like a 3.9 as an English major I would go for the 3.2 and CS um I think that that's going to be a lot more beneficial for you but for all of you people who maybe like a degree isn't the option you're a little bit further along in your career the way I think about it is don't just FOC focus on learning product management uh yes you probably want to follow like Lenny and myself and Marty Kagan and Teresa Torres and some of these really inspirational people there's also like the linear methodology which is really popular these days that you can follow if you want to follow from a design leader but you also want to learn like the core skill sets so we talked a little bit about the technical so I won't dwell too much on that you can find courses about it but then there's the really important designed skill set which I feel a lot of people are missing so really learning like what is a Double Diamond process how do we go about iterating on product design and then there's the business skill set which I also find some people are missing which is like they can't tell me what CAC stands for or what CAC to LTV ratio is or what the difference between net income and eitaa is and so you want to also understand that business side of things and in addition to those financial metrics I just threw out like the go to market Motions like how do you go to market in B2B versus b2c what does account-based marketing mean versus outbound regular and so getting those three areas of knowledge is what I would think about and trying to get the best sources for all of those so what I like is newsletters I'm a newsletter writer so I just hit it with a hammer but like there's awesome newsletters in all of these spaces Kate Suma and julieju write great design newsletters and the business side of things CJ Gustafson um writes a fantastic metrics newsletter so you can kind of find like those types of resources what do you think about that CL yeah you know I was thinking about the business side and something we haven't mentioned in a path into product that I think is actually really un undersold and people might poo poo this is I just love an X Management Consultant I love them I love them give them to me they can analyze data three ways to Sunday they work harder than anybody else on the team and they know every single business metric and I can put them in any meeting internal external as high as you can go and they will not embarrass me like I love a manag consultant so I do think like there are just again product has many flavors and you know the things that I optimize for and product product managers and product leadership may be very different than what another team optimizes for so I think the other thing to really understand is you're trying to break into product is find product leaders that share a vision of product management that you agree with and you feel like you'll be successful under like if you're a de I I'll be really trans transparent if you are like the deepest crafts person on the face of the Earth and you need to like Pixel Perfect everything you need to go in a room and you need to like Aspire uh like clairo's House of fast-paced product Innovation might not be the one for you that's fine it's going to work really well somewhere else it's just not going to work in the model that I'm going to run and so I do also think there's this interesting you need to understand yourself when you're trying to get into product what skills do you have what do you have to offer where will you fit and where will you have really high impact and there's such a diversity in the role and there's such diversity in companies that you have options there and so I think kind of zeroing in um stepbystep in your career on what that perfect fit is um can be really powerful especially if you want to accelerate your product career not just get into it awesome well this has all been fantastic advice for anyone who wants to break into product management thank you both so much for taking the time to share your insights yeah thank you thank you yeah cut uh