“How Do I Get Product Management Experience from Scratch to Land My First Role?”
Including my backstory and a helluvalot of resources I wish I had when I was starting🔥
Here’s my truth: I became a product manager by accident.
My background is in kinesiology, biomechanics, and journalism. I have always been interested in some version of entrepreneurship, and pitching and connecting ideas. I popped out of my undergrad/masters degree/graduate diploma working as an ice hockey biomechanics researcher, a freelance writer, colour commentator, and at a production company before I landed my first product role.
The best part? I didn’t actually know what a product manager was until I became one.
As I’ve written about before, before I joined my first startup, I experienced a laundry list of “life slapping me in the face” moments that I am now incredibly grateful for. These things, which were quite traumatic at the time, like living through a shooting, being in a bus accident, my aunt passing away after being hit by a car while cycling in Toronto, having my partner contract lyme disease that caused bilateral facial paralysis, finding out my dad had cancer, and my mother-in-law passing away, really forced me to get my ducks in a row and figure out what is the most important to me in life and why.
After going through all of this, I had this overarching feeling that I was on the outside looking in. What I realized I really wanted to be doing was building something. I wanted to be part of a team working on a project that was making the world a better place in some tangible way that you could use, hold, and feel. But the most important thing I did at this time was write out a list on a piece of paper — I mapped out, in no specific or coherent way, what I wanted my life to look like and what I wanted to change. This was the catalyst for a domino of positive events.
After finishing my competitive hockey career at McGill University, I got really into CrossFit to stay in shape. Because of my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) (which I didn’t know I had at the time), strength training has always inherently helped me feel better because stronger muscles means more supported joints to offset the natural laxity that happens when your collagen isn’t produced and metabolized like a normal human’s.
One day I saw some marketing photos posted on our gym’s internal Facebook group. They were from a company who was making a motion capture suit that was washable, that you could wear under your gym clothes, to quantitatively assess how you move (i.e. what each joint’s range of motion was while doing things like a functional movement screen, squatting, running, etc.). I immediately thought, “I WISH I HAD THIS WHEN I WAS YOUNGER”, reflecting back on all of my years spent in rehab after surgeries and pretty significant injuries from a very young age due to my EDS coupled with being involved in impact sports and being a smaller body.
So, I cold emailed the CEO. This is the exact message I sent:
I’m a three-time national champion ice hockey player with an M.Sc in biomechanics and am EXTREMELY interested in your company and all the cool things you are doing.
Are you going to be hiring in the near future? I’d love to learn more about your company and team.
Lisa Zane, M.Sc, B.Sc
A week later, I had an interview (which, to my surprise, ended up being filmed as part of the Quebec documentary series, Alexandre et les Conquérants, focusing on three up-and-coming startups in the province), and I became one of the initial full-time employees of Heddoko as their Biomechanics Lead to work on this.
We ended up being accepted into the Techstars Accelerator Program shortly thereafter, and I moved to Boston and lived in an apartment with the two Founders. While doing the program, our CEO asked if I wanted to be the first product manager. Naively, I said yes on the spot and promptly went back to my desk to Google, “What does a product manager do?”.
I’ve always been a square peg in a round hole, and while my path to product isn’t typical, it’s one of many options to get your foot in the door. My story also shows that sometimes you need to throw everything you read in a book out the window and act as best as possible with the tools you’ve got and the context at hand to get to where you want to go.
So, here are my tips on getting product management experience from scratch so that you can get your initial foot in the door, talk with hiring managers and product teams with confidence through the interview process because of the experience you’ve garnered, and end up growing your skills in ways that work best FOR YOU.
1) Get your initial bearings.
DON’T do what I did. Get an initial lay of the land. Understand what being a product manager entails. Look at the skills you need to be good at to excel. Understand the different types of product managers that are out there. Look at what it’s like to be a product manager in different stages of companies, working on different types of products, and on different sizes of teams. Talk to product managers first-hand. Ask them questions. Read. Be a sponge and immerse yourself in the world of product management to truly understand if it feels like a good fit for you.
Some resources to get you started:
- Product Manager Resources: The Best Place to Start: I put this list together as a tool for myself, initially, after being asked my clients and teams I was working with for resource recommendations on a recurring basis. (Note: I’m currently working on a new edition of this — if you’d like to get early access and a discount, you can sign up here)
- Check out some of the following websites, blogs, and communities that regularly post and share great resources and tips:
Silicon Valley Product Group
Product Hunt
Mind the Product
Product Lessons
Product Coalition
HH Product Management
Product Talk
Product Collective
Pragmatic Institute
280 Group
Product Manager HQ
First Round Review
Inside Intercom
Invision
Fresh Tilled Soil
First 1000
Career.pm
The Product Group
This Too Shall Grow
On Deck Journal
Women in Product
Products By Women
The Big Hack
- Join some of the following Slack groups:
Mind the Product Slack Group
The Product Coalition Slack Group
Product Talk Slack Group
Products by Women
- Listen to some of the following podcasts:
How I Built This — Guy Raz
Your First Million — Arlan Hamilton
The Pitch — Gimlet
Side Hustle School — Chris Guillebeau / Onward Project
Product Hunt Radio — Product Hunt
Build with Maggie Crowley — Maggie Crowley
Masters of Scale — Reid Hoffman
The Product Experience — Mind the Product
This is Product Management — Feedback Loop
Product Decoded — Krista Gambrel
Product Thinking — Melissa Perri
One Knight in Product — Jason Knight
The Optimal Path by Maze
- Follow great product thinkers (and leverage Twitter and LinkedIn for this!). Here’s a list I created to get you started.
2) Figure out what problems you care about and why.
Not enough people start here. If you look at people in later stages of their life who are feeling misaligned or in crises because they feel they have wasted their time or are filled with regrets, I strongly believe a lot of these feelings could have been avoided if they were prompted (by life events or just the awareness of the impact that this could have later in life) to ask questions like:
- What is most important to me and why?
- What do I want people to say about me at my eulogy?
- What problems do I really care about? Why do I care about them so much? Who do they impact? How do they impact these people?
- What is my North Star?
By creating a prioritized list of the problems you’re interested in solving, you adopt what J.P. Michel calls a Challenge Mindset — rather than being focused on a specific profession and then being siloed to the common understanding of what you need to be good at/do in that profession, you’re focusing on a problem that you really care about solving, which blows the lid off of the box everyone else is living in and lets you learn and grow in a much more targeted, continuous and expansive way.
Some resources to get you started:
- The Challenge Mindset: TED Talk by J.P. Michel
- Define Your PM Career North Star: I put this together as a tool for myself after going through an extremely challenging time and questioning what I wanted to put my energy into and why.
- Finding Meaningful Problems to Solve: Use this if you’re not sure where to start to a) understand where to find meaningful problems to solve or b) to validate whether a problem you want to solve is a good problem to solve.
- Problem Finding and Framing Resources: This is a list of resources I put together recently for a group coaching program I ran.
3) Gain full-stack product development experience any way you can.
I KNOW this sounds a lot easier said than done. I’m willing to bet that you’re probably reading this right now because you’ve hit roadblock here. This is the classic chicken-and-egg problem of product management — most companies only want to hire you with previous experience, but it’s tough to get experience without being part of a company.
There are actually quite a few ways to go from conceiving of, building, and shipping a real product that don’t take a ton of time or money.
Here’s a quick list of some ideas:
a. Build and ship a real product with a team in a short period of time with a product bootcamp.
I recently mentored two teams with Co.Lab’s Product Management Bootcamp. Each went from 0 to 1 with a launched product in 8 weeks on top of full-time jobs. The structure of this program is to set students up in groups of 4 (1 product manager, 1 designer, and 2 software developers), provide some structure week to week with classes, a Discord channel, a mentor to work with, and lots of examples and templates to glean from, and let the team work cross-functionally to launch their first product. Here’s a detailed Twitter thread I wrote about the experience with one of the teams I mentored. We created a product called DeepDiive, a web app aimed at initiating more meaningful conversations among remote co-workers.
Other bootcamp-type programs I’ve heard good things about are PM Dojo’s Product Accelerator Program, Product School’s hands-on learning programs, In The Lab Product Management’s 12 week product management incubator program, and Productability’s free hybrid learning program.
b. Join an APM training program at a large FAANG/MAANG-type organization.
Looking back, this is something I wish I had done BEFORE joining my first startup and being PM #1. These programs provide structured and supported guidance to help you learn with training wheels instead of what happened to me — making big mistakes in a very public way, consistently in the beginning. I learned a hell of a lot this way, but it was also incredibly stressful. APM List is the most comprehensive list of opportunities I have found so far, but you can also check out individual company pages like:
- Google APM Program
- Uber APM Program
- Facebook/Meta RPM Program
- Twitter APM Program
- LinkedIn APM Program
- Lyft APM Program
- Yahoo APM Program
- Salesforce APM Program
- Atlassian APM Program
c. Find a problem you really care about solving and join an early-stage startup that is solving it.
This was my foot in the door. Linda Zhang’s new tool, topstartups.io, is the place I would start here, but there are tons of ways to do your own startup research, from looking at LinkedIn, AngelList, Crunchbase, Glassdoor, to job boards like Product Hunt, Lenny’s Job Board, Women in Product, to Googling things like, “Best sustainability startups”, or “Best startups working to improve mental health”.
The important part is to start with the problem first. Poke around, see what startups exist, and make a list with two columns: “HELL YES” and “HELL NO”.
Put the ones you love under the first (“HELL YES”), and the ones that you can’t imagine working at under the second (‘HELL NO”). Once you’ve got a handful of companies in each, take a step back and look to see what patterns emerge. This will help you refine your search and really understand the problems that you deeply care about and the other criteria that are important to you.
Startups are also looking for foundational, highly-transferable skills like the ability to learn quickly, to be a great communicator, and to create order out of chaos. You need to wear many hats, especially in the early stages, so if you’ve got a varied background (like me) this might be a great fit for you.
d. Build and ship your own product.
It’s easier now than ever to do this. It also doesn’t need to take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. This could be a side-hustle you’re working on outside of your full-time job, or it could be the thing you build during 2 weeks of vacation. You set the constraints. The one piece of advice I would give here: KEEP IT SIMPLE.
By seeing it through — from finding a problem to solve, to doing user research, to building your first prototype, doing user testing, gathering feedback, launching, marketing, and providing some version of support for v1.0 — you’ll have a great lay of the land and a lot more tangible experiences to draw upon during the interview process.
Even if you have no design or development experience, there are tons of options to build simple products with tools like Figma, Adalo, Airtable, Webflow, and Bubble.
My experience has also taught me that we often learn the most when things are the hardest or the messiest — so even if you hit a bunch of roadblocks or it doesn’t turn out exactly like you thought it would, chances are you have a new arsenal of learnings that will serve as an excellent framework for developing the product you work on next.
Some great resources here are:
- Need Experience? Build Your Own by Will Lawrence
- How to Build a Portfolio as a Product Manager Newbie by Anesii
- Build Your First Products (List of Tools) by Andre Albuquerque
- I’m doing a deep dive on tools right now also so if you’re looking for things like no-code or prototyping tools, feel free to send me a message!
e. Get a job in an adjacent role at the company you’re interested in first and then transfer
Last week, I was listening in on Nicole Daines’ Twitter Spaces Event, “Mentoring in Product Management” and the question, “How do I get into product management” was one of the top questions asked. There’s a great conversation about this at 23:42. Daines and Jason Knight have great responses here focused on starting in a tangential role at a company you’re interested in — like customer success or marketing or software development — building relationships internally, and waiting for product management opportunities to come up within the org, whether that’s a PM internship or Associate Product Manager or Product Owner role.
This list is certainly not exhaustive but it’s a good start if you’re currently at a crossroads and faced with the difficult challenge of figuring out how to land your first product management role.
I have also made an effort to connect the WHAT to the HOW as I feel that’s something that we are desperately in more need of when it comes to reading about product things (so the theory can turn into action immediately instead of there being this huge gap where you are left scratching your head and asking yourself, “Now what?”).
If you’re currently looking for your first PM role or know someone who is, I offer 1:1 personal coaching to support people through this as it can be incredibly tough mentally and it’s something I wish that I had when I was first getting started. If you’re interested you can send me a message or book a free 30-minute intro call.
What tips would have helped you land your first role? What resources would have made things easier for you? Comment below — I would love to add to this!
Thanks for reading ✨
Lisa
Looking for tools to help you bridge the gap between product articles you READ and what you can actually DO and put into practice? Check out my Product Manager Toolkit:
Follow me on Twitter: @lisazane15
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- A Few Thoughts on Conscious Time