Building a mental model as a young product manager to set yourself up for career success

This post originally appeared in my newsletter on June 10, 2024

In this edition we expand our mental model of product management to set ourselves up for career success by acquiring good habits and put them into practice.

Q: As a new product manager, approaching the completion of my first year on the job, how do i set myself up for success?

First of all congratulations! In 2024, it’s no small feat to have landed a product manager role. By this point I hope it’s safe to assume that you’ve been able to push to production, one or more improvements / features. The other assumption is that you enjoy being a product manager and want to make it a career. If the latter is not true, you can safely ignore the remainder of this email, although it will serve you well regardless of which career you chose.

Having said that this being still very early in your career, i would suggest you continue to practice the advice i gave in this earlier post which boils down to:

1. Understand what product management is - Continue to learn by not just absorbing but doing
2. Know what good product management looks like - Continue to process and refresh your understanding of what good habits are (as they continuously evolve) and incorporate at least one of those good habits in your every day
3. Follow people and resources that will help - Continue to do so

To that foundation I will add the following:

1. Remind yourself your #1 job is to make your product win
2. Start building your story
3. Pick a focus

Point 1: In middle to big organizations, it can be easy to fall prey to what I call maximizing locally. That is maximizing on things that can help you get noticed more quickly, more responsibilities and pay, but the catch, is not that transferable outside of your organization. Some of these locally maximizing pursuits include (and thanks to Shreyas Doshi latest Linkedin post ) keep my manager happy, keep my stakeholders happy, getting promoted, launh as promised. And while some of those activities will be helpful, they shouldn’t be your #1 job. Making your product win ie product outcomes for your users and your business should be #1.

Point 2: Prepping for that first year review might be nerve -racking and most good young product manager would be working on identifying their weaknesses but I invite us to more generally take this event as a mechanism to look at both “weaknesses” as well as core strength and think through a plan to improve on both of them. Flipping that mindset will pay dividents in the long term as by maximizing what you do well, you are maimizing your value creation to your current employer as well as building that portfolio of skills that can be taken anywhere.

Point 3: Product management early on can be overwhelming, especially when you are left staring such as 10 habits of top 1% product managers by Sid (of @justanotherPM fame). His great list includes among other things relentless focus on impact or deeply understanding user needs or understanding the product, market and industry. And while mastery of all habits (and many more) will come with time, suggest leveraging the following resources to start deeping your toes into one of the following focus:

• Improving your customer obsession by understand how to get feedback from customers - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick demystifies customer development and/or research. It’s an invaluable resources to learn how to approach trying to understand true demand vs someone trying not to hurt your feelings.
• User interface and experience playing such an an important role in product success, having a solid basis to understand user experience is critical - Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, is a great primer to help product managers understand what makes a good user experience.
• Strategy is often an overuse term which has lost most of its meaning. hint most companies have plans not strategies - Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard P. Rumelt - What is so incredibly valuable about this book is how quickly and easily it helps define what good strategy is, that is its built on a diagnosis of what the problem space or challenge is, a set of guiding policies meant to help overcome the difficulty and coherent action design to achieve the policy’s goal. In other words, to address a challenge, good strategy would tell you which space to play in and how to play in it. It also clearly describes how bad strategy can be easily spotted as it often consist of fluff, fails to identify a problem, speaks of goals and is made up of tactics. This book even provides framework for creating your strategy named the strategy kernel .

I’ve benefited a great deal from the resources and approaches I have outlined. Let me know what resources or framework I should include in future versions of this email.