9 Steps To Become A Product Manager With No Experience

I got two product manager jobs, even if I had no product management experience. Hey, I am Dr. Nincidi. I'm passionate about all things, product, career growth, and nonprofits.

I'm on a mission to help people create amazing products that impact millions of people's lives while getting the work-life balance you deserve. Welcome to Product Insider. Shall I wait from the real talk? No way.

Covering everything from imposter syndrome, people management, and the barriers facing the work leader of tomorrow, and we are joined by fan-level product leaders to get a lowdown on what's hot right now. And I'm your host, Dr. Nia C. Lee.

I moved to the U.S. with $800 in my pocket and became a direct product within four years. Now I ran Product Manager Accelerator, courses that make product management careers available to everyone.

Are you ready? Welcome to Product Insider. People frequently ask me this question, how do you become a product manager? To be honest, for all the product managers today, we do not have product managers experience to begin with but you become a product manager.

The question is what do you need to gain to make a smooth transition to become a product manager? What do you need to do to make people hire you as a product manager? Today I'm going to answer these questions to tell you how to become a product manager. And step one is to do side project.

There's a lot of preparation you need to do. As I mentioned, nobody has real product manager experience before they become a product manager. But how can you show that you have the right potential to become a product manager? That is through the side project.

And for example, we can do Hackathon. This is the most highly recommended experience I encourage all my students to do. So Hackathon usually is like two days over the weekend. one I attended was 54 hours of continuous hackathon experience that you need to work with a team of people to address a problem and make MVP and launch a product so those experiences going to push you through the product management experience in a very fast motion so that you're able to learn what it looks like to interview customers to do design to come up with the idea and in addition if you can win any award in those hackathon it's going to be really great highlight on your resume such as I won the second place when I attended Hackathon like three years ago.

And there besides Hackathon, you can also help out with a startup. So help them to launch a product to do voice customer interviews. Basically, startup needs lots and lots of help. They do not have resources but you can step in to help them out with the process of launching and developing a product That also something you can mention on your resume but to be honest most importantly you really need to be sincere and building the product with them together instead of just I did something I put something on your resume as a hiring manager I was able to tell how exactly he had done this before I can immediately tell he's faking that so make sure you really execute this so besides hackathon and startup there are 13 different ways you can improve your experience to add value to product management interviews I create a checklist for you to identify those 13 projects you can find out the checklist down below as a description of the video and second is to build the product sense what it means is that before you start to become a product manager you need to think like a product manager what it means is if you grab any product such as Apple watch what do you like about it how would you want to critique it how do you want to improve it and if you were the customer would you like to pay for this or not what kind of customer would like to buy an Apple watch so you should start to think about those questions as a product manager designing the Apple watch this is going to prepare you for the product management interview and third is help with a product launch in your current company I assume you already had a few years experience in your previous life even if your student doing your MBA you already worked for a few years so now if you're in your current company what can you do for example if you are not part of product management team but you're in the adjacent functions around product management there's something what you can do and first of all when everyone who launched a product as a product managers product managers like me will work with different departments within the company such as the marketing team or corporate strategy or software development team and we will work together to launch a product so if you are part of those marketing or corporate strategy team you need to get closer with a product launch help me design a go-to-market strategy so that this could be your related experience and you have been part of the entire experience of launching a product and number four is understand the product managers challenges what it means is that you need to wear the shoes of a product manager ahead of time as a product manager we're thinking about different aspects of a product and how to enhance a product and how to make customers willing to buy our product so if I were you I would do information interview to understand what the biggest challenges they are trying to solve and in addition shadow of product managers and people had asked me before to shadow me to understand what exactly product managers doing so this is going to prepare you to interview so you can answer those product management interviews questions way better number five is that if you are not a technical person for example you in finance or marketing you want to become a product manager what can you do is that you need to study the software architecture to be very frankly with you we believe that it's easier to train an engineer to study pricing and business side aspect instead of training a business person to study what's api how to run containers on top of the aws platforms how to do integration regarding different sdk so those things are very hard to train so therefore if i were you you do not have an engineering background i would go through some kind of boot camps or learn and pick up a book to learn the software architecture how does api sdk works this will be part of your day-to-day operations even if you get a job so therefore start to learn this ahead of time number six is to join a product community so networking is how you open the doors to get interview i've also seen that lots of people when they go networking they approach me you want them to tell you about themselves lots of them couldn't make the connection between what they did before to put a management which means you really need to improve your 30 seconds elevator pitch so i teach you how to do the 30 second elevator pitch in my free public workshop and I give those workshops probably once per week so you can subscribe to my newsletter I'm going to make an announcement about my public workshop so you can come in and learn how exactly to talk about your 30 seconds elevator pitch it is critical important was because there will be tons of students or other people who doesn't have product management experience trying to get into the space but who should I help out is the person who already had the vision knowing what's their value how can they improve and how can they join the company as a product management so how you really package your story in the 30 seconds elevator pitch is very important during this networking process number seven is your resume believe me lots of people send me their resume have me to review the resume or they want to apply for jobs in my own group the resume doesn't look like a product manager resume.

They're missing those keywords such as voice of customers, end customer feedback, product launch, MVP, and even technical description of those products. And those are specifically missing in those resumes. So therefore those candidates cannot stand out. For lots of you guys if you already follow the original step one to step six I told you earlier you should be able to identify several experiences relevant to product managers Now when you put on your resume you need to know how to put it correctly So if you're interested in learning more about writing product management resumes, you can comment down below.

Let me know if this is a great interest to you. Number eight is the interview. Prepare for product management interviews. After you gain all the experience, you need to learn how to tell stories, how to present yourself in those interviews.

I already made a video about 10 secrets to ace the product management interviews and you can directly watch a video right here. I'm not going to repeat what I said earlier. And number nine is join a product management boot camp. So the key behind it is you need somebody to provide behind the scenes information to tailor your specific experience to the product management interview.

The interesting part was that not everybody had the same experience. Everybody's experience need to tailor a little bit differently so you need to know how to do that so I recommend everyone to learn what product management is and how to tailor your experience to product management jobs so attend the product management bookend is pretty interesting as well so you can check out my bookend if you're interested you can check out more information down below and finally I create a step-by-step guide to show you how to become a product manager you can find out the guide and down below this is how exactly I transitioned from the engineer to a product managers and how I I start to manage senior product managers in my own team.

So hopefully it's going to help you to land your dream job. Thank you for tuning in. I hope today's episode gave you real clarity on your path to product success. If you're a product manager on the hunt for your next role, or you're struggling to stand out in a competitive job market, especially in the AI space, I got something special for you.

We have a free masterclass this week where I teach you how to create a product portfolio in 14 days to lend any PM job offer. You will learn the exact framework that helps thousands of product managers lending PM job offers in fan companies and unicorn startups and gain a competitive edge through a killer product portfolio. We're offering limit time 100 free seats to the masterclass today. So grab it before it's gone.

So go to pmexcelerator.io slash masterclass to claim your free spot and start standing out today. link in the show notes. And as always, if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to join our over 100,000 product manager communities by following me on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, and by just searching Dr.

Neasiti. I share free content every single day to help you break in and accelerate in product management. I will see you in our next episode. This is Dr.

Neasiti.