Now that you have a list of companies, it’s time to start the specific research on what it would take to get your dream job with one of them. Networking will be very important to understand the needs of those companies and I’ll cover that on later lessons. First, you need to spend some time understanding the different areas that make a great Product Manager.
The Four Pillars of Product Leadership
Following are the areas that companies and hiring managers are looking for, regardless of industry or domain. I call these, “The Four Pillars of Product Leadership.” They are:
- Soft skills
- Business acumen
- Technology and UX skills
- Domain knowledge
Before continuing, I recommend reading the article below and getting very familiar with these pillars. They will be key to understand as you move forward.
What It Takes to Be a Great Product Leader: The Four Pillars
SWOT analysis of your pillars
As with any product, before you jump into creating a roadmap, you need to establish a baseline to determine where you are today. A simple way to do this is to perform a SWOT analysis on your product, or in this case on yourself. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is a tool used very often by executives and managers in companies of all sizes.
Note: If you are not familiar with SWOT analysis, see the additional resources section at the end of this lesson.
Strengths and weaknesses are characteristics intrinsic to the product. You can think of them as things you are inherently good at, or that need work.
Opportunities and threats are external factors that influence your product. You can think of opportunities as external factors that will make it easier for you to land that job. Threats may include the skills or other characteristics of the competition that would prevent you from getting that job.
To create your SWOT analysis, I recommend doing the following:
- Read “dream job” postings from your target (or similar) companies, so you can get familiar with the types of skills and experience they require.
- Write down each of those requirements/skills under the corresponding Four Pillars category.
- Next, assess how your skills map to the ones required by your dream job, using the SWOT framework.
For example, based on mobile PM job postings at Twitter and similar companies, as well as key universal PM skills from the Four Pillars, a personal SWOT analysis might look something like this: (this is still too vague, but you get the idea)
Strengths:
- Strong experience in cloud Product Management
- 4 years of B2C experience
- Technical background
- Strong business acumen and understanding of finance
Weaknesses:
- No experience communicating with Executives
- Presentation skills
- No direct experience in user research and testing
Opportunities:
- PM jobs in social media industry are growing
- Social Media will continue to grow in the mobile space
Threats:
- Other candidates will likely have more experience and domain knowledge in social media
The goal of this analysis is not to put you down or make you feel that the path ahead is insurmountable. All the opposite. It is meant to help you prioritize the areas that need work in order to land your dream job. Keep in mind that everybody will have some strengths and some weaknesses. That’s just normal.
I’ve heard people say they’d rather focus on their strengths than waste time on their weaknesses. There’s some value in that, but in this case, it might backfire. Product Management requires a balance of the pillars in order to succeed. Somebody that is very strong in one area but has zero understanding of another will not succeed. For example, if you are very strong in business acumen but have poor soft skills, you won’t get very far.
Mastering the Four Pillars is a life-long pursuit, so don’t wait to be an “expert” in all of them before making your next move. The take-away is that you need to identify key areas where you are lacking so you can improve your chances of success and minimize your risk.
Create a plan to improve your skills: Your personal roadmap
Your SWOT analysis gives you an idea of the areas that need some work. Like any good Product Manager, you now have a backlog of items that need to be developed. Now it’s time to prioritize them and build a roadmap. There are a lot of resources out there that can help you strengthen your skills. The question is, where do you start?
Fortunately, the answer is the same for your career as for a product you are managing: gather feedback from your customers to guide the learning you need to do. Launching into learning without any customer feedback is like asking engineering to develop new features without any voice of customer. It might result in some new cool functionality, but it’s probably something nobody will want to buy.
Instead, follow an iterative process:
- Talk to customers to get feedback: The best way to validate what skills you need is by talking with people in your target vertical. You’ll likely discover that there is specific knowledge you weren’t aware that you needed.
- Develop the knowledge and skills you need: Now that you’ve validated the gaps in your product, find out what books, classes, articles, etc you need in order to develop those skills and be more attractive to your target customer. Also, don’t go too deep into any one topic; it’s very hard to reach expert level until you’re actually in the job. Instead, try to cover your gaps as best you can and keep your learning broad across all your opportunity areas.
- Rinse and Repeat: This process should be iterative, so be sure to continue connecting with new people in your target vertical throughout your learning process. Each time, you’ll get a new perspective on the knowledge and skills you should develop. And most importantly, you’ll continue expanding your network—each new connection could open new doors for you.
The rest of this guide focuses on helping you define who your target personas are, how to contact them, how to learn about their pains, and how to sell your product. By understanding their needs, you’ll be able to create a plan to improve your product, so you can attract the companies and roles that align with your dream job. Last but not least, the final lesson in this guide will help you prepare for the PM interview so you can pass it with flying colors.
Are you ready to start improving your product? See you in the next lesson!
Additional resources: