Early Product Career Advice
I teach in the Master of Science in Product Management degree at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a program offered by the CMU School of Computer Science and Tepper School of Business. The program attracts a broad range of students who have several years industry experience. The students enroll in the program with the goal of becoming a product manager. In this post I highlight some of the early product career advice I offer students that may be of interest to the broader community.?
The first thing I discuss with people early in their product career is that I’d estimate the average tenure at a company for a product person to be about 2 years. I emphasize that this is your first product job on your career journey. It is the beginning of the journey, not the end. The journey is likely to have 10+ stops (companies) along the way, so don’t over-index on your initial job.
Focus on companies that do product well and that operate in a category that interests you. Look for companies that offer a strong mentorship model for people early in their product careers. In the end, your initial job is the first step of your career journey and should be evaluated for its potential to improve your product skills, learn the craft of product, and as a stepping stone to your next career move over the next few years.??
There are many factors that influence your initial product career choice. I outline some of the important considerations that an entry level product person should consider. Your product career search should begin with a good understanding of your passion, interests, and skill set.?
Product vs services company: Product managers exist in both product companies and services companies. Services companies focus on building one-off systems for single customers. Systems integration and consulting firms are examples of services companies offering product management positions. Product companies focus on building products for markets consisting of many customers in a 1-Many fashion. Which do you prefer? For the most part, product companies are a better fit for product managers than services companies.?
B2B or B2C: What type of products do you want to build? B2B (businesses selling products to businesses) or B2C (businesses selling products to consumers)? Some companies (e.g., Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) are both B2B and B2C. The type of company you work for heavily influences your work day and style. For example, a PM at Amazon eCommerce working on their home page might be involved with extensive A|B experimentation. The peak traffic hours of operation may be the evening and weekends. A PM role in a B2B healthcare company might be quite different. Peak hours are likely to be normal business hours and the focus may be more on onboarding and feature utilization and less on experimentation.??
Product role: As an aspiring product manager, there are a number of product roles for you to consider.? The range of product manager (PM) roles includes: full life cycle PM, technical PM, API PM, platform PM, international PM, growth PM, community PM, ML PM, and data analytics PM. There is also the idea of a horizontal versus a vertical PM. A horizonal PM owns features that span multiple teams. They may not actually have their own engineering team. Horizontal PMs focus on feature coordination across the teams involved in the feature. A vertical PM owns features that are contained and have fewer implications on other teams. Vertical PMs typically have their own engineering teams.???
Industry: Virtually every industry is in need of product managers. Many product managers focus on a specific industry due to interest in it, demand for it, etc. Some product managers are generalists and their career spans many industries. Over time, some PMs chose to focus on a specific industry in terms of domain knowledge, networking, competitive products, use cases, and ecosystems. Industry sectors include agriculture, real estate, media/entertainment, education, social services, financial services, energy, engineering/design, tech, fashion, tourism/recreation, health tech, public sector, retail/eCommerce, manufacturing, transportation. What industry do you want to focus on or do you plan to be a generalist??
Stability: The recent economic situation has led to many layoffs. Early career product people should understand the stability of the company workforce, the defensibility of the product in a recession, and the importance of their product area for revenue generation, growth, and churn management. How stable is the product organization and your specific product area in the company???
Product management life cycle focus: Do you want to be a full life cycle product manager across the five product movements (strategy, planning, development, marketing, operations) or do you want to focus on a few movements??
Geographic preference: What are your geographic preferences in terms of company location and markets served? For some of my international students, a PM role with a US-based company that sells into their home country can be a good fit. All PMs have to be comfortable with the idea of being remote or virtual, especially in the post pandemic era. A tool like NerdWallet is an excellent resource to understand the cost-of-living salary equivalence across different locations.????
Ethical considerations: What are the ethical considerations of the product category? How comfortable are you with navigating those issues (privacy, uses of data, AI/ML, potential ill uses of the product, pricing and fairness, bias, etc.)? What is the company’s reputation for ethics?
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Company size: What size of company are you interested in? Do you want to work in a company with a large product portfolio spanning many categories or in a smaller company focused on a single category?? As an aside, company size often dictates release speed and development agility.
Team size and product organizational model: What size product team are you interested in? Would you prefer a product organizational model that reports into a CPO and is separate from engineering or would you prefer a model where product and engineering report into a single executive? Would you prefer an organizational model where you have your own dedicated engineering team? Would you prefer a model where product design reports into the product organization or into the development organization??
Stage of company: What stage of product category (pre-chasm, bowling alley, tornado, main street) and stage of product (start-up, scaling, mature) would you like to work in???
Culture: What company and product culture do you want to work in? How about things like remote/in-person/hybrid, dress code, flex time, mentorship model, use of Agile, work-life balance, opportunities for advancement, and the product career ladder (tech, business, etc.)? More specifically, how do you feel about the hiring manager and their mindset about product and your career development? Your manager and their mindset is often more important than the company-level considerations.?
Career trajectory: Where do you want to be in 5 years? What skills and experiences do you need to acquire to get there?? How should that influence your initial product position? Ask the hiring manager how they envision growth within the team and in your role? You should clearly understand how promotions and team expansion is expected to work. There is also the distinction between a product executive leadership role and a principal or group PM role. This is more of a decision that should be addressed in your 10 year career horizon, but you should start to have a perspective on your desired career trajectory over time.?
These are some of the important early product career considerations. Those early in their product career should be intentional about planning their product career aspirations. It is important to seek out a product mentor. I tell all early product career professionals to not just follow the money. Focus on your passions and doing work that matters to you. Working in companies that do product well and have a strong product mentoring program can do a great deal to advance your career. Early career product professionals must make sure they understand the business of software: ARR, Churn, LTV, Gross Margin, Profit, and CAC. All product professionals should be lifelong learners as the product management discipline is forever changing. Finally, product managers should be always developing their personal brand via networking, advanced education, certifications, speaking, blogging, reading and engaging with product thought leaders, and attending/presenting at product conferences.
What early career advice would you add for product professionals??
A special note of thanks for the insightful comments and upgrades to this blog from two early product career gems and CMU MSPM Program Alums: Al Nejmeh and Jeff Monteiro.
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M.sc in Computer science
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