Newbie Product Manager...Looking for advice :)

Kelly Mekwunye
6 replies
I am currently transitioning from Molecular biology/Cancer Research to product management and I am looking for any helpful advice in helping me get my first role from seasoned and experienced product managers. Thank you for your responses :)

Replies

Jonathan Massabni
wow congrats on the move! in short, basically asking the right questions to understand what the clients need, and selling the vision to the team. This old thread can definitely help : https://www.producthunt.com/disc...
Raaghav Goel
I'm still not super seasoned but I have a lot of recruiting advice to give. I've recruited for and gotten offers in 5 different cycles at this point In terms of prepping for your interviews and getting first role, you can do the following: - Polish up your resume and highlight skills that PMs use - Develop product sense. I found a16z's podcast and How I Built This really helpful - Tech news was great too - https://twitter.com/shreyas/ on Twitter has some great PM advice - Lenny's PM newsletter is great too - Interview Prep books: I used Decode & Conquer and Cracking the PM Interview when I was recruiting. Really really helpful (Lewis Lin also has another book with interview questions that's really helpful once you've gone through both of those above) - Design of Everyday Things was a great book to hone in my design thinking skills - When it comes to interviewing, definitely do loads of mocks. PM interviews are quite unique and practice makes progress! Lewis Lin's Slack community was quite good for finding interview partners At your first role, definitely speak to your manager about the culture of the company and how PMs fit in. Set up 1:1s with everyone to develop rapports and relationships with the stakeholders you'll be juggling and working with. Depending on the culture of the company, you could also consider brushing up on tech concepts and system design. At most companies you won't be asked to write code but it's really helpful in working with engineers if you can "speak code" and understand what the code does. Hope that helped :)
Kelly Mekwunye
@raaghavg Thank you so much. I really do appreciate your feedback. I am really excited about the move :D