PMFT Digest 16 - Coming of Age for the Product Managers

2014 Jul 21, by David Kim



PM Reading Digest - Coming of Age for PMs

Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.

Last week Lewis Lin spoke to PM Fast Track meetup audience about Product Manager interviews. Friends at Carbon Five hosted us. Carbon Five develops and designs web and mobile products for their clients. They are also active in the SF developer community, and hosted RailsBridge recently. I volunteered in a front-end class.

RailsBridge class

RailsBridge front-end workshop beginner class

Coming of Age for PMs?

Speaking to one of the Carbon Five principals, Courtney Hemphill made me wonder whether Product Management is on a cusp of a big demand shift for the better. Tech-savy teams start with programmers and designers, and now increasingly are adding product managers. I call it the Product Triumvirate. Other consultancies like Pivotal Labs seem to be on the same page as judged from job openings of PM roles.

During a bike ride with some startup folks, one of the heads of operations for a fin-tech startup mentioned to me that his team is hiring its first product manager (they hired a head of product who will lead that effort and build out the team). These anecdotes point to me the natural progression of talent needs at a growing tech company.

Increasingly, I am convinced that for a web or mobile tech company to be great, it needs a great PM or needs to be educated about its need for one.

To be great, a tech team either needs a great PM or needs to learn that it needs one.

The Future is Here

Of course, the future is already here.

Product managers have been a key part of Silicon Valley success story for years.

So how do you find a product manager? If you are founder looking to hire your product team, how do you know a great product manager unless you were one?

Ben Horowitz, in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things shares some answers to that very question.

It is a must read for founders, and for aspiring product managers.

Book: Hard Things

As for aspiring PMs, Nitin Julka (a PMFT member), shared a post about how he found a PM job.

After six years of running an Ohio-based IT business, I was ready for a change. I wanted to work in Product Management at a rapidly growing, venture-backed startup in Silicon Valley. I had loved software technology my entire life … read more

See how Nitin did it!

Miscellaneous

I am going up to OSCON in Portland. If you are around, please say hi. It is interesting to me that the product theme is ever present in tech.

Upcoming Events

Silicon Valley and SF


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