Navigating your product career

The last couple of years have been a roller coaster ride for product people in the job market. Not that long ago, companies were falling all over themselves to hire product managers. Today, not so much. Product management pundits have alternatively claimed the end of product management or explain you can only differentiate yourself with “courage, gut, sense, etc .” As always, reality rests somewhere in the middle. This week we pulled together some recent resources to help you navigate your career without (hopefully) getting motion sickness.

Meanwhile, in product news, Iyo tries to succeed where others have failed, Ticketmaster suffers a data breach, Granola wants to help you read your meeting notes, and Canva targets the enterprise.

Navigating your product career. The product management career path is certainly a tricky one. And the dearth of formal product management education means that product people often question whether their career decisions are the right ones. There is a path for Product Managers – but that path to success is rarely a straight line, and the skills that got you to your current role may not be the same ones that will propel you to the next level. Our own Mike Belsito reflected on advice from numerous product leaders to put together a deep dive on navigating your product career that helps you think more deeply about your career in product.

Elevating your product management game: A guide for the new and the ambitious. How can you become an exceptional product manager in an environment where you’re under constant pressure to deliver but have little guidance or time to learn? Michael Hirsch shares his self improvement plan .

The ultimate guide to product manager roles and skills. In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, the role of a product manager has become increasingly vital. Product managers oversee the development and success of a product from conception to launch, and beyond. To excel in this role, it is crucial to understand the immense responsibilities that come with it. Jake Brereton provides an in-depth analysis of the various facets of a product manager's role , as well as the essential skills required to thrive in this dynamic field.

Charting the product manager career path. As the ZIRP era winds down, the product management career has shifted in several ways. It’s tougher to get into and it’s even tougher to find roles that manage product managers. Fortunately, the product management career path has opened up new opportunities for individual contributor product managers and companies have begun hiring again. Despite all the turbulence, product management remains an excellent career option. Joel Polanco goes over product manager career paths, skills, compensation, and more .

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This week’s Video

Hacking your product career with Gib Biddle. We often think about how to improve the products we're managing. But sometimes, we overlook the one product we'll always manage — our careers in product.

In this special video , we learn from Gibson Biddle , acclaimed product leader and former VP of Product at Netflix, on how to best:

• Understand the technical skills required of a product leader, plus the leadership skills required as you grow.
• See how a highly strategic, "hacking" approach builds momentum in your career.
• Accelerate career progress through your own "personal board of directors."

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free .

Product Management News: Week of June 3, 2024

Where is the market for wearables? The pre-launch excitement for Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 didn’t translate into sales post launch. Alphabet X spinout Iyo thinks they’ve cracked the formula for an AI device that people are actually interested in. It remains to be seen whether people will want an AI chatting them up via ear buds. These examples are proof again that the best way to find out if people will buy your product is to put it out on the market.

Ticketmaster just lost a bit of customer data in the Snow(flake). Entertainment giant Live Nation has confirmed its ticketing subsidiary Ticketmaster has been hacked . Live Nation said the data breach occurred due to “identified unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment containing Company data” and while the official statement did not name the third-party cloud database in its statement, a spokesman indicated the database was hosted on Snowflake. This incident raises an interesting question - when a company uses a third party service, who’s responsible for data breeches? The company? The third party service provider? Both?

This AI meeting support tool requires you to still pay attention. There are a lot of AI meeting transcription and summarization tools out there. Granola hopes to differentiate itself from others by organizing your rough notes into an easier to read format. It combines your notes with a transcription that it takes of the meeting to fill in any holes you may have left. That feature could prove to be both helpful and humbling.

Canva goes enterprise hunting. Canva launched Canva Enterprise a product targeted squarely at, you guessed it, large organizations. The new product includes a set of visualization and productivity tools, including an infinite whiteboard, docs, presentations, websites, and data visualizations. In other words, they're trying to out-workspace Google Workspace.

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald