Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.
During the past week, we held two project management related talks, one at Pivotal and the other at the Giant Pixel Corporation. The folks at the Giant Pixel are building a cool tool called Nama - check it out!
(No, they didn't pay me to say that, but I tried the tool and think it's cool).
And I observed something interesting. During the Pivotal talk, I asked the Pivotal product manager whether his team tracks software testing, or whether that’s implicit in the feature cards (and reflected in the velocity).
I was told the latter. “It is implicit.”
During Giant Pixel talk a few days later, John made the point that his team tracks both the features and the bugs. Basically, a project manager (or startup PM) should track anything that sucks up resources.
Why? Because ‘if it takes time, you need to plan for it. You need to prioritize your work. All the time!’
Makes lot of sense to me. I'll go out on a limb and say that John is right (event video link under our resources page.
If you've ever written software, then you know often you spend more time debugging than writing new code. Did you know that? (You might if you took time to observe your engineering team efforts closely.)
Anyway, I share this story, because the different viewpoints and the nuances highlighted for me how important experience is for a role like a product manager. Some things you can learn by hearing, but other things just take experience.
In week 16, we wondered aloud whether the age of product managers is upon us. Then, in week 19, we highlighted some common mistakes product job seekers make.
However, you probably want to know how to bcalendar.google.comlcalendar.google.comlecome a product manager. And we have data to back this up, because the classes that hosted people like Lewis Lin to “talk” about how or prepare you for interviews are always sold out. But, if you really want to be a product manager, start building.
You don't have to code to start building. See this beautiful example of a lean test by Team Buffer for its business accounts; basically a textbook lean startup example of testing before building.
The point is, you can start learning by producing something today.
So, that's the deceptively simple (and sorry, a bit glib) answer to how you can become a product manager.
I'd love to add to the reading list in the coming weeks.
If you have some fab reading that you want to share with others, please email me or comment!
Silicon Valley and SF
August 26: PM Happy Hour at Garaje (FREE). SF.
August 27: Growth hacking for great products ($25). At Yelp, SF.
August 27: Anderson Product Management Group networking ($20). San Jose.
September 12: Product Realization Group: 2014 Symposium & BBQ ($50). Sunnyvale.
October 11: How Do You Improve Your Product Team’s Performance? (FREE). Los Altos.
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