I have 8 years of total work experience, graduated from a Tier I college. I still feel lost as to what future holds. Kickass & genuine advises on professional, personal fronts are most welcome. I am sure a lot of folks could relate.
Professional advice -
Think Big - The more you move upwards, you need to think bigger. Keep interacting with people from other companies and understand the problem they are solving. It will give you best practices, frameworks to think. I always tell people that PM job is a thinking job, which can be excelled only with more ideas.
Nurturing teams - sit with your team and just hear them out. It will help you become a better leader for the long term. Reading HR research on leadership help you learn more about humans and effective teams. It’s not all bogus.
Relationships- Start having 1:1s with horizontal teams to the extent of over-communication. If people aren’t keen to formalise it, make it informal chats. Do it religiously and keep a record on your side.
Documentation FTW - Learn all different documentation practices - 6 pagers, excel/sheets smartness, RACI matrix, basically anything which can bring structure to the execution.
Personal -
Health - Take care of health, tier 1 & PM must have taken heavy toll on your mental abilities. Workout, meditation should be part of your day.
Personal finance - Not to sound like those YT finfluencers, as you’ve worked hard the money, learn how to grow it. It is much easier than product management ;)
Chill - Give some chill time to yourself, everyone in PM role faces this lost-feeling but at the end they figure it out :)
P.S. - I have gone thru and still come across the lost feeling especially in turbulent macro environments
What did you do before product management?
ElonMast has already laid down some great advise.
My 2 cents on professional front : Find an industry or a product which you really connect with. The key differentiator between an average PM and an amazing PM is the ability to prioritise the right problem to solve and influence stakeholders to align with your vision. To do this effectively you need to be the super user of your own product and at the same time, spend time outside work to think critically about what other products in your space are solving for. To do all this, you must be really involved and excited about the industry or domain. Solving the problems in that space should make you feel good, else you will not enjoy the grind that comes with the job
Great point @ScarfaceX!
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Hey folks,
So I work as a product intern and have an offer to join full time as an Associate Product Manager at a Fintech B2B startup upon graduating.
So cutting to the chase,
Recently I have been under tremendous pressure to deliv...