Going into my senior year of university I expected to graduate into a software engineering job, so finding myself in an APM program with zero formal product experience was unexpected. Those two years, however, ended… Read More »How I Maximized My APM Experience
6:30am Morning routines are important, and mine currently involves reading for half an hour before going on my morning run. Reading and running are exercise for my mind and body, and it’s satisfying getting them… Read More »A Day in the Life of an APM
I spoke with Grace Yeung, co-founder of Product Buds and incoming PM at Salesforce, about her experience as a product manager intern and how other PM interns can thrive in the role. This interview has… Read More »PM Intershps: An Interview with Grace Yeung
There’s a standard canon around how best to approach one-on-ones with your manager. A less common flavor is for product managers having one-on-ones with the direct engineering team they work with. To be upfront, this can be… Read More »One-on-One’s with Engineers
Common advice for new product managers is to “loop in engineering” early in the process of feature development. There’s a class of advice that I personally take issue with: advice where the plan and the goal are… Read More »How to “Loop In Engineering”
A serious, practical guide for maintaining your carefully crafted work persona. Prepare a list of generic questions and statements that sort of make sense regardless of context. Try “You’re breaking up, I couldn’t hear what… Read More »5 Things to Do When You Don’t Understand
This article is cross-post with PM101, a product and program management blog written by Thaisa Fernandes. A big thank you to Thaisa for sharing her time and knowledge. If you like this article, there’s tons… Read More »Frameworks to Keep in Mind
This may seem antithetical to this site’s founding purpose, but you don’t actually need a technical background to become a product manager. Let me share some ways in which my CS degree doesn’t help me… Read More »Where My CS Degree Doesn’t Help
I spoke with Grace Yeung, co-founder of Product Buds and incoming PM at Salesforce, about how she developed as a product manager without having studied CS. This interview has been edited and lightly arranged for clarity, with my… Read More »PMing with a Non-Technical Background: An Interview with Grace Young
As an APM interviewer, one of my questions was “Design a self-driving ride-share car experience.” More often than not, the interviewee would describe some variant of “tap your phone to unlock the car”, implying the… Read More »Why Technical Details Matter in Interviews
Aspiring product managers know that “product sense” is a necessary trait to develop — many articles (Jackie Bavaro’s is a good start) have been written on what it is and how to develop it. I want… Read More »Technical Product Sense
The most frequent question I get is “How technical do product managers need to be?” It’s a reasonable question that, like a lot of elements of product management, doesn’t have a straightforward answer. For those… Read More »How Technical Should Product Managers Be?
A Discussion on Early-Career Product Management I had the pleasure of recording a conversation with Diego Granados (PM at Microsoft) for his YouTube series. We cover the whole gamut of my product management career thus… Read More »A Conversation with Diego Granados
It’s commonly understood that product managers at tech companies should be technical, but the explanation of why typically ends at “because you’re building a software product”. This is true, but its conciseness belies the higher-order… Read More »Why Product Managers Should Be Technical
Why are some features trivially easy to implement, while others require a whole rearchitecting of the system to achieve? One of the main reasons is proper (or improper) abstractions within the codebase. Product managers need… Read More »Abstraction
Introduction What if I told you you could piece together your own degree in Product Management at the school you’re attending right now? Almost no schools have any formal coursework that teach product management, but… Read More »Majoring in Product Management