Today, I’m making the strange and scary transition from being a product manager to the founder of my own startup.

Me and my co-founder were recently backed by Y Combinator, the legendary accelerator behind companies like Stripe, Airbnb and Coinbase. We’re pumped for this new journey.

Leaving a steady salary at a fast-growing company, especially with uncertain economic conditions, is objectively crazy.

But surprisingly, when I tell people about this transition I keep hearing things like

“I’m a little jealous of you.”

“I wish I could do that.”

“I feel stuck in my job.”

I wanted to unpack my decision and lay it out as objectively as I can. The goal is to give anyone thinking about the founder journey (or a big career transition) my thought process for making the leap.

What did you want to be when you were little?

If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was a teenager, I would’ve told you I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I fondly remember starting small businesses with friends, be it creating and selling comic books in elementary school or planning large scale events in high-school.

In university, I discovered a bunch of career paths that seemed like they would teach me useful skills. Consultant, UX Designer, Product Manager — each one seemed like great ways to learn what I needed to know to be successful.

Ultimately, I was lucky to join Facebook (now Meta) as a product manager after university. I learned a ton from this experience and am eternally grateful for everyone who I met.

But like in any job, I stepped into a well-crafted career ladder that tells you what you need to do to get to the next level of your career. It gave me a great hill to climb, along with people further up the hill to look up to.

Soon, however, my personal goals and the career ladder started to blur together.

I wasn’t thinking about learning skills to be an entrepreneur, I was goaling on skills that would help me move to the next rung of the product management ladder

Climbing the wrong hill

Chris Dixon, the legendary venture capitalist, has a great essay called Climbing the Wrong Hill. In it, he highlights a trap that many ambitious people fall into:

There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one. [They end] up falling for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards.  This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

In other words, the pressure to keep moving up may lead you to a spot you didn’t intentionally choose.

I took this advice to heart and introduced significant randomness into my life by joining a startup after 2.5 years at Facebook.

It was great — I got to work more closely with business development functions, got to talk to customers directly and started to attend industry conferences to learn about bigger trends in fintech, crypto and financial crime. 

But at the end of the day, I was still on the same product management hill, I had a set list of tasks and skills to develop with levels that soon started to find their way into my personal goals.

That’s when it hit me - to become the entrepreneur I dreamt of being since childhood, I might need to take a step down to get on the right track.

What do you need to make the jump?

Some people are brave enough to make the jump with nothing figured out. Alas, I am not.

I decided that I would have two criteria for when it was the right time to take the plunge:

1. Deep understanding of a big problem

2. Great people to work with

For (1), I spent the last four years deep in fintech. From launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil to helping Paxos reach 10M crypto wallets globally, I had gotten very familiar with the challenges that come with scaling fintech platforms.

P.S. If you’re working in fintech and want to see what we’re working on, get in touch here 👀

For (2), I was lucky to reconnect with an extremely talented, technical friends who was also ready to quit his job and dive into the unknown with me.

Having these two things crystallized gave me the confidence that I could be successful.

So what’s next?

I’m going to share unique insights, non-obvious lessons and war stories from the earliest days of company building through this newsletter.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, be sure to subscribe or share this with friends:

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I’m also headed to San Francisco for the summer! If you’re in the area and want to catch up, reach out.

Finally, I’ll be sharing more details on what I’m working on soon. So stay posted.

Thanks for reading,

- Will

While most unicorns seem to be slowing down, there’s one that feels like it's just getting started: Ramp. 

From Techcrunch in July 2022:

Despite a cooling market, corporate spend management startup Ramp reports that it has more than doubled its revenue run rate since the start of the year.

The feat would be impressive in normal times, but is particularly so when tech companies — big and small — are laying off, freezing hiring and/or reporting slowing growth. 

How is Ramp continually able to grow, ship and improve the lives of its customers?

I spoke with Geoff Charles, Ramp’s VP of Product, to go deep into the decisions Ramp made to build a high-functioning product culture that scales.

Will:  How would you describe your product culture at Ramp? 

Geoff:  We have three vectors of our product culture. The first, which Ramp is mostly known for, is high product velocity. Over the last two years, we've shipped about five new product lines and a flurry of features for businesses of all sizes. And when we think about velocity, I think you essentially have to define or design your entire org and culture around speed, and be very open to the shortcomings of anchoring on speed. 

The second vector is around empowerment. A lot of times, especially in non-tech companies, product is the recipient of requirements from the business, so you have the business and the product teams, and they're separate organizational structures. And it's especially true in finance, tech, or FinTech, because finance tech is mostly finance companies that have a tech arm to it.

When tech companies really came out, they put that all on its heads, where business is actually led by the tech organization, they sell the products we build, we don’t build the products that they sell. That was a really intentional culture that we set forth at the beginning of Ramp to be product-driven. What that really means is building products for customers in service of the business, not for the business in service of customers.

The third vector is being okay with building what should be and not what is. That’s especially true in B2B, where it’s easy to take orders from customers, adding a button and a column, and you start building really poor B2B products that becomes nothing for everyone instead of something meaningful for a few people. So a third cultural aspect that we really anchored on was the ability to truly define what customers need instead of what customers ask for, and the ability to really deeply think about what things should be. 

Product Velocity 

Will: What are the trade-offs with anchoring around velocity? 

Geoff: There are a couple of dimensions here. The first is that the need for velocity falls mainly on our feature-facing teams whereas platform teams focus on precision, quality and uptime. We built very strong platform capabilities like authorization, payment systems and decision systems, that have compounded over time.

The feature-facing teams had less of a technical roadmap with regards to the long-term view of what they were building, and so the risk wasn’t “are we building it right?”, it was “is what we’re building what a customer wants?” So you essentially need velocity to ship it as quickly as possible and validate it with a customer.  Sure, you can use Figma prototypes–and we do use that a lot. But we also need to just build something fairly quickly and ship it. We definitely added tech debt in certain areas meaningfully, but deliberately, because we wanted to test it.  

The second is more on comprehensiveness, we shipped features that we’re not covering even close to 80% of the use cases. But we’re still meaningfully better than what was there today. It’s this concept of like, think through the 10x experience, walk back to the 1x or 2x experience and incrementally build and ship, which builds momentum. Nothing kills velocity more than a six month project that never sees the light of day. People get demotivated, and then the environment and the data changes. So ultimately, what you’ve actually set out to do is the wrong thing in the first place. So velocity helps mitigate that as well. 

So we end up sacrificing on two things. One is the tech debt in areas where we’re not certain, and two is the full-fledgedness of the feature. So the feature might have good user experience, but not solve every single problem for everyone. I think one way of reducing scope and increasing velocity is being much more opinionated around what you’re solving for. For example, permissions. Every single company will think about permissions in a different way. You could spend three years building the best permissioning system that has checkboxes for everything, which every single feature needs to be aware of and then your entire product development process slows down.

Or, you can say that we have four roles, and you take it or leave it. Sort of like a menu at a restaurant. You can train your entire staff to cook everything under the sun, or you can have six options. And you’re really good at those six options, and you’re much faster at actually creating that food. So we went down the opinionated route, and that helped us improve dramatically in terms of velocity because it reduces a lot of complexity with regard to our build and its maintenance. So there are certain things we decide that have an impact. Now the customer may really want fully customisable permissions, so we might lose that deal. That’s fine, we’re willing to lose these deals so that we can anchor back on velocity. 

But we never sacrifice user experience. We never, ever ship something that was a bad user experience. And the way we did that was to have a design report to the CTO just like product and engineering. Sometimes you have design reporting to product, and I think that’s a mistake because you essentially have conflicting priorities in terms of what is the right design and user experience. So having a very, very strong design team that is an equal partner in the product development process helps us make sure that we never sacrifice user experience. 

Empower your engineers

Will: Who is involved in the solution design once a problem has been defined?

Geoff:  One of the things I’ve realised within tech is that empowered engineers do not want to be given a requirements doc - they want to be co-founders of the solution. So the question really is when do you involve engineering? The moment that you have found a strong signal on the fact that you’ve found a very interesting problem and you’re converging on a potential solution, or forming an opinion on that solution. That’s when I’d bring in the engineering and design teams.

For each of these problem areas, we define a product leader, a design leader, and a tech lead. We don’t involve other cross-functional stakeholders but we do create visibility. We go into prototyping and come up with different solutions. We spend a lot of time thinking about user experience and using lightweight prototyping such as Figmas to go back to the initial customers that we did research on and say, “Hey, here’s a product that we built for you, interact with it, and let me know what you think? How do you feel? What do you value?” 

We spend a lot of time with engineering, designers and product in the room to build that empathy and energy from the customer. We spend a lot of time at the point and sometimes you’re like, why is an engineer in the room? They will code and build 10x faster after these types of calls, because they have empathy and they’re empowered. That upfront investment is so important. It has led to engineers being very different today than they were even three or five years ago, where they’re actually much more cross-functional. They’re more like product thinkers,not really interested in just the technical part, or that’s the DNA that Ramp looks for. I deeply believe that prototyping, involving cross-functional teams, being in the same room helps to find a good solution. Let’s go build something as quickly as possible and launch it. 

Respect for technology

Will: You mentioned that the business side is not telling you what to build, but you’re telling them what to sell. That’s a really fascinating dynamic. I’m curious how that was created, and what does it look like in practice? 

Geoff:  We started Ramp by building out the tech organization first. So the culture was set from the beginning around like a tech-forward culture. The way it’s maintained is continuing to hire people who deeply understand, empathize and respect technology. So in the interview process, it’s actually really important to harness that, as you can easily destroy a team if you hire a salesperson who just sees tech as IT that builds features that customers are asking for, without deeply understanding the fact that customers don’t actually know what they want.

To build long-term value at a company, you need to really invest in the technology you’re building and take bets that you’re probably three to five years away from customers actually wanting, and within the market it hasn’t even materialized. I think it really starts with the culture you set out at the founder level, because culture is set from the top. As a product leader, I was involved in hiring across marketing, sales, account management, talent and legal, and ensuring candidates each had a deep respect for technology.

Lastly, I think it’s about trust. If your tech team is building random stuff that customers don’t really use, it’s a sure way of reducing that trust, so with great power comes great responsibility where you need to prove every quarter, every sprint, every year the fact that customers love your product. And I think that’s really what I’m held accountable towards is the growth product through strong product market fit and word of mouth. And as long as that continues, then I’m trusted by the sales leaders to make those decisions. 

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PMs are bats and product comes first

Will: How does a product or feature at Ramp go from inception to market? 

Geoff:  I love transparency and data. So I anchor on an extreme amount of data points that are constantly moving around in the organisation. I sort of picture PMs as like bats, where we are blind and have sonar, and as long as we continue getting signals back we’re able to effectively navigate the crazy ambiguous world we live in. We have processes where we get a ton of feedback from customers at every single point. We have surveys, analytics, in-app product reviews, third-party reviews, sales calls, sales-driven requests, account managers, customer success gives support, feeding data–it’s just constant data and feedback back to the PMs. And then the question is, how the hell do you deal with all these different data points?

So I’ll give the example of travel. There were a lot of data points, pointing to the fact that companies had a problem with regards to controlling spending on Ramp that was associated with travel. So Ramp came out of the pandemic, there was no travel. So our entire product was really focusing on the accounts payable use case, you buying software and you paying your ads on Ramp. As travel picked back up, we basically woke up to the fact that many people were requesting to travel in different areas, spending tons of money on airfare and hotels, and a lot of companies were requesting Ramp to build a booking platform that helps me control what my employees are booking on.

So again, customers were like, let me be prescriptive with this solution. They pattern match with what already exists today, the TripActions or the Concurs of the world basically forces the employee to use a clunky, expensive and terrible platform to book their business travel. So Ramp was like, there’s an opportunity here. We are not going to take that solution and are going to explore this opportunity the right way. We prioritised it because we saw an increase of 10x the number of spend that was happening on our platform, we had data on how much money was being spent outside of Ramp on travel. And we saw that there was a big business opportunity for us to focus on getting more travel spend on the Ramp corporate cards. 

We did a bunch of interviews, took a look at the market, our competitors, win-loss rates, and segmented customer interviews based on industry and size of company. And we found that what the vast majority of businesses truly wanted at the end of the day was visibility and accountability. So Ramp decided that the problem wasn’t that you couldn’t book on the platform, but what you truly want is the ability to know who is spending in and out of policy and correct that behaviour. What if the moment that you actually swiped our card we gave visibility to the finance team on what you actually bought, all the way from the class of ticket, itinerary, price and per diem? And we could automatically flag anything that was out of policy and enable the finance team to call that back. That is a better experience than having to force everyone to book through a certain portal and charge $30 per trip to do so.

So that’s the Ramp travel experience, which was mostly an expense policy and travel integration with account information that automated all the visibility of business travel within a single platform, and that was with your corporate card. So you can book from anywhere but still have centralised control. This led us to have a different type of product and take an anti-Concur, anti-managed travel solution for the vast majority of businesses that don’t have a ton of travel needs, but all businesses need that control and visibility. 

Product Management at Ramp

Will: What do you look for when hiring product managers?

Geoff: One is, I look at people who deeply care about the customer.  Do you care deeply about the customer? If someone is having a pain point with your product, are you going to say you don’t know because you don’t use it, or are you going to take ownership and try to solve it? These are very different thinking structures. I look for people who you can ask them a question and they’re not just going to answer the question, they’re going to explain their thought process, framework and principles.

I find those types of people to be so much better at cross-functional work because they’re able to explain how they got to the conclusion. I do have a strong bias towards experiences, especially for early on start ups, you can’t take a bet on people with no experience. I anchor toward people who have shipped products in the past.

That said, I also love internal transfers–we’ve had two on the team. People who have come in through different areas that are more generalist, like Biz Ops or even a UX designer, and giving them the opportunity to take on small parts of the product, are always great ways of hiring people.

I also like ex-founders, people who have started a company are excellent PMs because they have grit.

And lastly, communication. People who are very concise in the way they communicate and are able to effectively tell a story are incredible. Those are the must-haves. 

If Ramp’s culture speaks to you, they’re hiring for tons of roles across product management, design, engineering and more. Check out their open roles here.

Thanks again to Geoff Charles for taking the time to share his experience on building product cultures, org design and product management. Give him a follow on Twitter and follow Ramp to keep up with their product velocity in real time.

If you want to see more deep dives like this, drop a like, comment or reach out to me on Twitter.

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Until next time,

Will

Naval Ravikant, prolific investor and co-founder of Angelist, has a non-intuitive suggestion:

What does a business risk here mean for a product manager?

To me, it’s working on a risky company-critical initiative — one where success can reinvent the business and where failure can be a huge setback.

Think of working on Disney+ before it launched or delivering the upcoming Augmented Reality (AR) glasses from Apple.

If you can successfully deliver on a company-critical initiative, you’ll be rewarded. Specifically, 

1. You’ll be trusted to lead larger teams

2. You’ll become more senior in the organization and

3. You’ll earn the trust and respect of the broader team, increasing your influence internally

These items all increase your leverage. This is the “fuel” to your career growth and what allows you to have an outsized impact on any environment you work in.

Below I want to share a recipe for growing your leverage internally through company-critical initiatives. It includes:

1. Embrace Accountability

2. Meta-Execute to Deliver

3. Earn Leverage (and my story of doing this myself)

Before that, a quick shoutout for today’s partner…

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🔭 Seek Accountability

Accountability for a company-critical initiative bears the risk of a highly-visible failure. That’s scary! 

But just as your failure is amplified, your success is too. People will notice if you can lead a challenging initiative and deliver what you’re accountable for.

In the end, taking calculated bets on yourself is how you grow faster than your peers.

So before finding accountability, ask yourself: are you ready to add fuel to your career fire? Things to consider are:

1. Can I handle my current scope well?

2. Does my manager trust me?

3. Is the new initiative clearly more important than my current one?

If you say yes to all three, let your manager or skip-level know that you have the capacity should a critical initiative come up. You may say:

Alternatively, seek out underfunded but critical initiatives yourself;

By putting your hand up to work on critical scope, you’re showing you care about the overall success of the company.

Meta-Execute to Deliver

How can you deliver a company critical initiative while not dropping the ball on your current scope? The answer rests in a practice I learned at Facebook called meta-execution.

Meta-execution is executing through others. This is how product directors can steer a team of 200 people without writing tickets, doing experiment reviews or writing weekly updates.

The ability to empower leaders within your team to have more ownership is what separates execution for a PM on a 5-person eng team and a PM who drives a 40-person eng team.

Imagine a world where you need to balance your existing scope with a company-critical initiative. The best way to meta-execute would be to find a capable leader on your team and delegate meaningful parts of the execution to them. This person may be:

1. An engineer, engineering manager or tech lead

2. A designer, data scientist or UX researcher

3. A customer success lead, product ops associate or program manager

Here’s what that division may look like:

Tactically, meta-execution unlocks your capacity to drive additional scope. In this case, the company's critical initiative is more important so it’s critical to spend more time there.

With this setup, it’s up to you now to deliver on the critical initiative. There are no shortcuts or secret sauce to do this correctly — it’s just executing to the best of your capabilities.

Accountability Earns Leverage

Success in your new initiative can earn you leverage in the form of a larger team, more influence and a higher role within the organization. 

I experienced this firsthand while I was a growth product manager for Facebook’s Video team. As lockdowns spread in the spring of 2020, more people were watching videos on Facebook.

We saw a surge in organic traffic but realized the need to drastically improve parts of our first-time user experience (FTUX) to retain them. I put my hand up to lead this initiative and quickly aligned the broad team on a strategy, feature roadmap and execution plan.

As the surge slowed down and the dust settled, I looked back and noticed that I was successfully able to lead my existing scope (which was user activation) and the critical improvements to FTUX. 

This led to my leverage growing internally:

I took a calculated risk on my ability to execute and it paid off. Give taking great accountability a try and let me know how it goes!

Recap:

1. Seeking accountability is like adding fuel to your career fire — it amplifies successes and failures

2. Successfully delivering on a key initiative where you’re accountable requires meta-execution

3. If you can deliver on the initiative successfully, you’ll be rewarded with more leverage

4. Leverage is the key to growing your career at an unusually fast pace

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A great product manager resume can change your life. This was my experience — with no referral or real connections at large tech companies, my resume is the thing that got me my first PM job at Facebook (now Meta).

I still get asked a ton of questions about PM resumes, including:

1. What’s the best product manager resume template?

2. How do I make an Associate Product Manager (APM) resume?

3. What product manager skills should I highlight?

Today, I want to answer all of these questions with an in-depth guide on making a great PM resume.

This will be based on my own recruitment experience but also backed by my experience hiring at Facebook/Meta and reviewing 100s of product resumes.

Let’s go!

😢 97% of product manager resumes don’t land interviews.

This is especially true for top-tier companies (Google, Meta) and great startups (Stripe, SpaceX). An open role will receive hundreds of applications and standing out is really challenging.

But investing in standing out is extremely high ROI.

The salary for an entry-level product manager at Google is $167,000 a year and a mid-career product role at Meta earns $345,000.

🔑 Key idea: A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

The next most important thing is getting a referral, which I talk about more here. But unless you have a friend at these top companies, a strong resume is a necessary asset to even get a referral.

Here’s what makes a great resume:

📝 Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Specific to the job: Every bullet point should be concrete and speak to your candidacy for the role. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: “various,” “managing,” “impact”). Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to.

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.

Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact: Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products

Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple: Please, please, please just choose a simple resume template (I link to an example in the final section). No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals. 

🔑 Key idea: Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

🗺 Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

🎬 Summary [Optional]

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

• Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behavior. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

• Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences. 

🎯 Header

Your name, email address and phone number are essential information.

• Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.

• Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.

• Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

🚀 Experience

This is the most critical section of the resume. I spent years refining the art of creating good experience bullet points. Here are some critical suggestions to improve yours: 

• Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.

• Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.

• Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skill sets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Let’s go into even more detail. You may have heard of the STAR method for breaking down your experiences during interviews. 

STAR is fine for interviews but is bad advice for resumes. Generally, people spend too much time on the situation and tasks whereas the action and result are what matters for a resume.

This is why I recommend RACR, or result, action, context and result. Yes, the result is twice on purpose. This is because there are often two levels of results: the outcome of your action and the impact of this outcome. Here’s an example using a strong PM bullet point.

🔑 Key idea: Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

Notice how this bullet point leads with a tangible outcome (the dashboard) and ends with the business outcome. This is what product management is all about -- creating things that improve the metrics of the business. The context of the situation is a supplement to the outcomes as it is not especially relevant for the roles themselves.

If you need more help on your experience bullet points, I added 40+ strong examples from PM resumes I’ve seen to the resource in the final section.

🎓 Education

My main advice: keep it simple. You won't get hired because of your academic background. Education should go under your experience section unless you went to a very recognizable university (ex. Stanford, Oxford).

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information. 

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

• Courses Include Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking

• Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

🔑 Key idea: Unless you went to a well-known institution, keep your education section simple and below experiences.

⚓️ Projects

I’m a huge believer in projects. These are things you do outside of your day job or core curriculum to advance your interests. On a resume, they are a great way to fill in your skills gap. My general philosophy: build the experiences you need.

I was an economics undergraduate with work experience in user experience design and analytics. The glaring gap in my product management resume was a lack of technical expertise (ex. working with engineers). I used the projects section to highlight three projects I worked on with engineers at hackathons. Here’s one of those bullet points:

• Tumblr HackDay​ – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4th ​place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

🔑 Key idea: Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences. I go into more detail on how to do that here.

💎 Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight soft skills and hard skills. I go into more details on the right skills to highlight here.

Summary

Building a concise, targeted and effective resume is amongst the best investments you can make when you’re ready to make a jump in product management. Use these tips to craft a product manager great resume:

1. A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

2. Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlight specific skills to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

3. Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points in the most effective way possible.

4. Keep your education section simple. Put it under the experience section unless you attended a very well-known institution.

5. Use projects to fill in gaps on your resume that aren’t covered by your experiences

If you need more help with your resume…

… I made a Resume Kit! It contains the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product manager roles. It includes:

1. The actual product manager resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)

2. 40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews

3. 10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out

4. A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager (APM) Playbook

5. Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

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Until next time,

Will

Getting your first product management job is hard.

It’s even harder to get one at a top company that invests time and resources into teaching you about the craft of product management.

I was one of ~15 people to join Facebook’s (now Meta’s) Rotational Product Manager program during the summer of 2019. This is one of a handful of Associate Product Manager (APM) programs in the tech industry. Each of them has the potential to change the trajectory of your personal and professional life.

There are a handful of associate product manager programs out there:

1. Meta’s Rotational Product Manager Program

2. Google’s Associate Product Manager Program

3. LinkedIn’s Associate Product Manager Program

4. Uber’s Associate Product Manager Program

5. Lyft’s Associate Product Manager Program

6. Atlassian’s Associate Product Manager Program

In this guide, I want to go very deep on all the experiences, resume tips and interview strategies you’ll need to get an Associate Product Manager role.

For current PMs, I hope this guide can be the perfect response for when someone asks you “How do I become a product manager?”.

Next time you hear this, feel free to forward this guide to them!

Also one important note

This guide is supported by partners. If you sign up for their services, I’ll get a few bucks to keep writing guides like these. I only recommend products that are actually useful.

Table of contents

1. 🗺 Introduction: Understand the Programs

   1. 🥇 Top Associate Product Manager Programs

   2. 🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

   3. 📅 Timeline for APM Programs

2. 🛠 Part 1: Become a Great PM Candidates

   1. 📚 Learn the Right Skills

   2. 🧱 Build the Right Experiences

   3. ⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: LinkedIn Learning

   4. 🤝 Get a referral

3. 🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume

   1. 📝 Overall Principles of a Great Resume

   2. 🗺 Sections

   3. 🎬 Summary [Optional]

   4. 🎯 Header

   5. 🚀 Experience

   6. 🎓 Education

   7. ⚓️ Projects

   8. 💎 Skills [Optional]

   9. ⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: My Resume Kit

4. 🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interview

   1. 💎 Learn the Interviews

      1. 📞 Phone Screen (All)

      2. 📊 Execution / Metrics (Facebook, Lyft, Google)

      3. 🎭 Product Sense / Product Design (Facebook, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Google)

      4. 🎖 Leadership & Drive / Behavioral

      5. 💯 Estimation (Google, Meta)

      6. ⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: Exponent

   2. 🧮 Practice Frameworks

      1. 🎯 Segmentation

      2. 🧠 Brainstorms

      3. ✅ Prioritization

      4. ⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: RocketBlocks

   3. 🤖 Mock Interviews

5. 🎬 Final Recap

This is a long guide (25 pages!!) and it may be more enjoyable to save + read the PDF version — which includes more artwork, bookmarks and slightly more content.

Get the PDF Copy via Email

Let’s dive in!

🥇 Top Associate Product Manager Programs

APM programs are perfect for new grads or people with less than 5 years of experience in a non-product field. In my cohort at Facebook, about half were new grads and the other half had backgrounds in analytics, consulting, program management or finance.

There are a handful of associate product manager programs out there at companies like Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Atlassian and Spotify.

While all of them vary slightly, there are a few common benefits of APM/RPM programs: 

🏄 Opportunity to try multiple teams: APMs/RPMs have the chance to be the PM on multiple teams, giving them the ability to choose areas of interest, learn how things are done in different environments and build a rounder skillset

🏘 A tight-knit cohort: These programs have a small number of other talented peers. Having a small group of people allowed us to get to know everyone individually and have intimate conversations that were not performative. We also bonded because all of us were equally smart, ambitious and had similar career goals. This community thrived because anyone could reach out and you would be excited to speak with and learn from them.

🧑‍🏫 Mentorship: Each program has various forms of mentorship. At Facebook, we would have a manager for the entire 18 months, a mentor, small-group mentorship and alumni support.

🥗 Access to company leaders: We had many events where 5-6 PMs would have a candid conversation with industry titans like Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Sumo and Chris Cox. These conversations were exponentially more enlightening than fireside chats in front of 1000s of people. Conversations got personal, specific and involved the whole group (rather than a Q&A).

🔑 Key idea: Each APM program gives people with no formal product experience the chance to work in an interesting product space, bond with a talented cohort and receive training within the company.

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

What type of candidates gets into these programs?

All backgrounds are eligible to apply. In practice, though, successful candidates often have experience in strategy, analytics, data, design, engineering, consulting or finance. This is because successful candidates will have the experiences necessary to succeed in the role.

Do I need a technical background (i.e. do I need to code)? 

Some programs, most notably Google, do require a technical background. Others, like Meta, LinkedIn and Uber, do not screen for technical backgrounds.

Would you recommend an APM program?

100%. I learned a ton in 18 months (and wrote about my experience in detail here).

Is this program only for recent graduates?

No. It’s for people with little PM experience, including existing professionals or new graduates. In my cohort, roughly 50% of RPMs were experienced hires.

What are some example rotations?

Growth for Uber Eats, Launching Google Payments in Brazil, Creator Monetization for LinkedIn, AR filters for Instagram Stories, Machine Learning for Google Search. Nearly every part of a company is open to APMs/RPMs.

Can I apply if I need a visa sponsorship?

Yes. I know several people who applied while needing a sponsorship to work in the target country.

Is one program better than any other?

Not really. Each company has their own culture and way of building products. But rather than getting caught up on culture too early in the process, I recommend you apply to all the programs that you are interested in.

📅 Timeline and Approach

Applications for these programs open between June - October of any given year. Here’s a summary from APM List:

1. Meta

2. Google

3. LinkedIn

4. Lyft

5. Atlassian

6. Uber

7. Visa

🔑 Key idea: Don’t wait until applications open to start preparing. Start now -- specifically by learning the right skills, building an effective resume and getting referrals. Preparing early is what sets strong candidates apart.

At a high level, this is how I’d suggest preparing for recruitment:

1. Make sure you have the right skills for the job: If you don’t build a project or two to demonstrate those skills/

2. Make a killer resume: Frame your experiences in effective ways, use a simple template and highlight the impact of your experiences

3. Effectively practice for interviews: learn the interview rubrics, self-study frameworks and practice a ton.

I’ll walk you through how to do each one.

🛠 Part 1: Become a Great Candidate

With the logistics covered, the rest of this guide will be about making your application stand out. 

🔑 Key idea: 97% of applicants don’t get an interview. You need to build the right experiences, make a killer resume and network to be a part of the 3%.

Here’s my general advice: your main focus needs to be on getting an interview. Once you land the interview, switch to interview prep.

The exception is if you are confident you’ll get an interview (e.g. you’ve secured a referral and/or you have incredible experience). If this is the case, switch to interview prep early.

🔑 Key idea: Don’t prepare for interviews until you are at least 80% sure that you will get an interview. Focus all your time on getting the right experiences, making the perfect resume and getting referrals until then. Being a great interviewee is useless if you don’t get an interview!

But for the rest of us, getting an interview consists of three things: the right experiences, the right resume and the right referral. The most important of these is the right resume as this is how you’ll be evaluated. 

📚 Learn the Right Skills

Like any job, having the right experience means you have the skills to do the job well. APM/RPM programs are no different.

The trick is that people feel that they can’t demonstrate product management skills without having a previous role in the product. This is a lie.

🔑 Key idea: The right experience is in alignment with the PM job requirements. These are a combination of soft and technical skills. 

The skills necessary to succeed as a product manager include soft skills and hard skills.

🍦 Soft Skills

Let’s focus first on soft skills. These include

1. Leadership

2. Project management

3. Strategy & Vision

4. Analytical Thinking

These are the skills that you’ve likely developed from past jobs, school or life experience. While we’ll get into how to frame this on your resume in a future section, it’s important to map out all of your experiences that map to one of these attributes. Do not restrict this mapping to your work experience. Instead, your list may include:

1. Leadership: Led hockey team, led fundraising campaign at the food bank, led a team of marketers for a marketing campaign

2. Project management: managed tasks for an engineering project, organized freelance calendar

3. Strategy & Vision: build a go-to-market plan for Class 454, and established a charter for a volunteer group

4. Analytical Thinking: did a research project for undergraduate thesis, built financial models 

Catalogue all of the experiences that you have related to these soft skills in a document. This will help you see where your strengths may be and where you need to fill in gaps.

For areas with gaps, I’d suggest taking a short course to improve your skills here. A course will give you the experience to put on your resume (in the Skills or Education section).

🔑 Key idea: If you have gaps in your skillset, take a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap. 

LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing. Claim your free month here.

Here’s one for each section:

1. High-Stakes Communication - Spend an hour improving one of the most important skills of your career - communicating effectively.

2. Project Management Simplified - Learn a simplified version of project management to determine how to effectively drive progress amongst several stakeholders.

3. Product Management: Building a Product Strategy - a great crash course on how strategy is created for products 

4. Data-Driven Project Management: Project Metrics That Matter - learn how to choose the right metrics using analytical thinking

I think of soft skills as the bare minimum that you need to demonstrate to get an interview. But to exceed the minimum, you need to include skills that will differentiate you from others.

🗿 Hard Skills

This is where hard skills come in. In my experience reviewing resumes, having these is what differentiates a strong candidate from a weak one. If you want more advice on building hard skills, I wrote a guide on this exact topic.

 Hard skills include 

1. Engineering/Coding Knowledge

2. Design

3. Data Analysis

Any candidate can say that they are a strong leader. But it’s harder to claim that you have a hard skill like design, analytics or programming. 

In a similar way to how you catalogue soft skills, catalogue your hard skill experience too. To help you out, here are some areas that might fit into these categories:

1. Engineering: coding, systems design, APIs, scripts, building programs

2. Design: wireframes, interface design, prototyping, graphic design, user research

3. Data: SQL, statistical analysis, experimentation, survey design, data collection

🔑 Key idea: Use hard skills to differentiate yourself from other candidates. 

This is where it’s important to have experience in either design, engineering or data analysis. Ideally, you’ll have experience in all three. It all depends on your background:

Highlight all the technical skills you have. Again, if you’re not feeling strong on one or more of these, take a quick course and build some projects in this area.

Again, I’d recommend taking these courses with a LinkedIn Learning free month (redeem it here). Here are some suggested tutorials:

1. Programming Foundations: Real-World Examples - I did this course while I was in university! I learned a ton about computer science and featured this course prominently on my resume.

2. Figma Essential Training: The Basics - Figma is the premier design tool for UX designers. Understanding the basics while working on a real project is hugely valuable.

3. Data Storytelling Basics - Rather than coding, learn the basics of storytelling with data. This will be more valuable for interviews and on the job.

If you’re new to Product Life, join 10,000+ other product managers learning tips to grow their careers.

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🧱 Build the Right Experiences

In addition to taking courses, another great way to build the skills you need for a PM role is to get PM experience before you get the job,

I wrote a full piece on this topic, but the summary is to work on side projects. These are small projects that you can ideally do on a weekend that help you try a new tool, practise a new skill or perhaps earn some extra cash.

🔑 Key idea: Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences. 

At a glance, the best PM side projects involve building something and taking it to market. Here are some ways to build that experience.

👨‍💻 Data Science Project

Find a data set that’s interesting on Kaggle (a site with awesome, free datasets). Use Excel, SQL or Python to find interesting trends in the data. I did this exact process with a dataset from Spotify to answer a research question, Is faster music happier? As a bonus, I shared this project with a Research Scientist at Spotify and it helped me build a great relationship (while developing my skills).

👩‍🎨 Design Feedback

Find an app you love and identify changes to improve the user experience. This helps you build product sense and gives you something to share with a company you love. Check out Growth.Design or UserOnboard for great examples of doing constructive app critiques.

🔨 Use No-Code tools to build a product

This is likely the best avenue. No-code tools make it easy to build a product. I’d personally check out tutorials on NoCodeMba. In a few hours, you can build a Tinder clone or an upvote site like Product Hunt without coding. Once you’ve built a product, drive traffic, get users and respond to their feedback.

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: LinkedIn Learning

If you want some help building the right skills or experiences, I’d highly recommend claiming a free month of LinkedIn Learning (usually $26/month). LinkedIn Learning has over 14,000 expert-led courses related to business, design and technology. As a bonus, you get access to all of LinkedIn Premium including talent insights, InMails and more.

I’ve personally taken six courses on LinkedIn learning, including Technology for Product Managers, Programming, Python GUI Development with Tkinter, and Programming Foundations: Real World Examples. Featuring them prominently on my resume helped me get my PM job. 

🤝 Get a Referral

All APM/RPM programs are at companies that value referrals. A referral is when a current employee at that company refers you for an open role that the company is hiring for.

A referral will significantly improve your chances of landing an interview. While it’s not 100% necessary (I didn’t have one), you would be foolish not to try to get one.

🔑 Key idea: People are incentivized to refer strong candidates. They determine your fit for the role based on your resume and opening messages.

To expand on this, many employers give their employees a bonus if they refer someone who gets the job. They also want to help people.

But in my experience, most people who ask for referrals do not appear as strong candidates. Common mistakes I see:

1. They don’t personalize their message to the person they reach out to

2. They have spelling or grammar mistakes in their message (shocking, I know)

3. They don’t attach their resume

4. If they do, their resume is not strong and does not highlight relevant experiences

5. They do not explain why they are perfect for the role

Now the next steps are to find the right person to refer you and to send them a great message.

The right person is often someone who works at the company. Start with your own network

1. Do any alumni of your college work at the company? See here for a guide on how to find those people.

2. Do any alumni of one of your former jobs work there?

3. Do you have any friends or contacts at the company?

If yes, reach out to them on LinkedIn or over email. If you don’t know anyone at the company, you’ll need to make a contact. In this situation, just search Product Managers at the company you’re looking for on LinkedIn.

Strong opening messages contain four things: 

1. A personal connection: include a message to endear the connection to you. This may be what you have in common or a media feature they did that you enjoyed

2. A sentence on your strong background: use one sentence to communicate why you’re a good fit for the job.

3. Ask for a referral: be direct and ask for a referral, not a coffee chat or a call. This is because these PMs are inundated with requests for their time. It’s also infuriating getting onto a coffee chat where it’s very clear that the candidate just wants a referral and doesn’t care about your answers.

4. Include your resume: this gives them a chance to dig deeper into your background and even refer you without any additional follow-up.

Here’s a template I’d suggest:

Hey Will. I loved your blog post about your journey to Facebook. As another first-generation immigrant, I could really relate!

I’m a computer science student at USC and interned as a PM at Walmart this summer. I’m set on product and have been preparing for interviews all summer. I’d love to interview for Facebook’s RPM program, would you be open to referring me? I’ve attached my resume.

Thanks!

Your Name

🔑 Key idea: Your referral reach out should include a personal connection, a sentence on your background (bonus if it sounds impressive) and your ask for a referral. Don’t beat around the bush and please don’t ask to “pick your brain” or a “virtual coffee chat”. 

I would try 1-3 people at each company you’re aiming for. These people are likely receiving many referral requests, so be patient and understanding.

🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume

Creating the perfect resume is the hardest part of landing an interview. But it’s also the most important.

🔑 Key idea: A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

If you’re like me and are applying without a referral, without a coaching service or without connections at the company, the best way to get an interview is to have a killer resume.

I made hundreds of resumes during my job hunt. Now, I have had the benefit of seeing hundreds of PM resumes and interviewing over 50 candidates for PM roles at Facebook/Meta.  I want to use this experience to share detailed guidance on building a stellar resume. If you need more help, I’ll share a resource that I wish I had when applying.

📝 Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Specific to the job: Every bullet point should be concrete and speak to your candidacy for the role. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: “various,” “managing,” “impact”). Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to.

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.

Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact: Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products

Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple: Please just choose a simple resume template (recommended resource). No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals. 

🔑 Key idea: Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlighted specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

🗺 Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

🎬 Summary [Optional]

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

• Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behavior. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

• Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences. 

🎯 Header

Your name, email address and phone number are the essential information.

• Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.

• Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.

Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

🚀 Experience

This is the most critical section of the resume. I spent years refining the art of creating good experience bullet points. Here are some critical suggestions to improve yours: 

• Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.

• Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.

• Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skill sets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Let’s go into even more detail. You may have heard of the STAR method for breaking down your experiences during interviews. 

STAR is fine for interviews but is bad advice for resumes. Generally, people spend too much time on the situation and tasks whereas the action and result are what matters for a resume.

This is why I recommend RACR, or result, action, context and result. Yes, the result is twice on purpose. This is because there are often two levels of results: the outcome of your action and the impact of this outcome. Here’s an example using a strong PM bullet point.

Built a custom Tableau dashboard (result) by integrating with Salesforce data platform (action); enabled the team to accurately track user engagement metrics (context) and build a roadmap to grow engagement by 20% (result).

🔑 Key idea: Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

Notice how this bullet point leads with a tangible outcome (the dashboard) and ends with the business outcome. This is what product management is all about -- creating things that improve the metrics of the business. The context of the situation is a supplement to the outcomes as it is not especially relevant for the roles themselves.

If you need more help on your experience bullet points, I added 40+ strong examples from PM resumes I’ve seen to the recommended resource.

🎓 Education

My main advice: keep it simple. You won't get hired because of your academic background. Education should go under your experience section unless you went to a very recognizable university (ex. Stanford, Oxford).

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information. 

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

• Courses Include Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking

• Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

⚓️ Projects

I’m a huge believer in projects. These are things you do outside of your day job or core curriculum to advance your interests. On a resume, they are a great way to fill in your skills gap. My general philosophy: build the experiences you need.

I was an economics undergraduate with work experience in user experience design and analytics. The glaring gap in my product management resume was a lack of technical expertise (ex. working with engineers). I used the projects section to highlight three projects I worked on with engineers at hackathons. Here’s one of those bullet points:

• Tumblr HackDay​ – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4th ​place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

💎 Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight soft skills and hard skills (more details in Part 2). 

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: My Resume Kit

I made a Resume Kit with all of the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product roles. It includes:

1. The actual resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)

2. 40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews

3. 10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out

4. A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager Playbook

5. Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interview

After investing in getting the interview, it's time to shift gears to get the offer. This means succeeding in the interviews.

Interviews have rubrics and predictable structures. This is why the best predictor of success in interviews is the number of hours of effective practice.

🔑 Key idea: Your experiences don’t matter once you get to the interview stage; it’s now all about performance. The best way to perform better is through effective practice.

There are three stages of effective practice

1. Understanding the interviews: read and learn what the interviews look like. This is key for understanding the rubric you’re being evaluated by, what great answers look like and strategies for answering PM questions.

2. Self-study: easily the most underrated step, studying by yourself will help you solve interview problems with greater ease.

3. Mock interviews: finally, practice with others to improve your communication, time efficiency and ability to interact with an interviewer.

I practiced for a few hours a day over 3-4 weeks before and during my interview period. This may have been overkill, but I knew that getting an interview meant I was a serious contender for one of the roles. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

Rather than give you high-level guidance on each interview, I’ll share my advice and link you to more detailed guides, videos and resources to go deep on specific areas.

Let’s dive into each of these.

💎 Learn the Interviews

Each APM interview process will have different interviews. I haven’t done them all, so I’ll share my experience and link to some great resources from Exponent which is (spoiler alert) the best ROI resource for understanding how interviews work. 

📞 Phone Screen (All)

Key question of the interview: Does this person meet the job requirements?

Example Question: Can you walk me through your professional background?

They are looking for two main things they are looking for at the phone screen stage: communication skills and alignment with the job description criteria.

🔑 Key idea: Phone screens are all about strong communication and how aligned you are with the job description. 

Communication skills: This is the most critical part of the interviewing process. If you can practice one thing, I’d prioritize your communication. Strong communication means three things: 

1. Structured

2. Concise

3. The ability to tell stories

Excellent communication is out of scope for this guide. But if you feel like you could benefit from improving your communication, I’d pick up a free month of LinkedIn Learning and take one of the following courses

1. Communicating with Confidence (free trial)

2. Communication for Product Managers (free trial)

A recruiter may assess your communication skills by asking open-ended questions like “Tell me about yourself” or “Tell me about a project you’re proud of.”.

Alignment with job criteria: Just as your resume aims to qualify you for every part of the job description, recruiters may look to confirm that you meet the job requirements on the phone screen. For example, if you lack design experience, anticipate questions like “What’s your favorite product and why?

📊 Execution / Metrics (Facebook, Lyft, Google)

Key question of the interview: How do you prioritize and make decisions involving metrics?

Example question: You’re the PM for Instagram Stories. What’s your North Star metric?

For this interview, I’ll point you to several great resources that can help you best prepare

• How to Ace Facebook’s Product Execution Interview (free): two friends of mine wrote a great guide for Execution interviews.

• Mock Interview (free): A former colleague did a great mock interview

• Mock Interview 2 (free): Another interview looking at Facebook Marketplace

• Here is a list of questions you can expect for Execution interviews (free)

🔑 Key idea: Show the criteria about how you are making a decision and making the decision. Indecision kills candidacies. 

🎭 Product Sense / Product Design (Facebook, LinkedIn, Lyft, Uber, Google)

Key question of the interview: How do you take an ambiguous problem space and turn it into a creative solution?

Example question: You’re the PM for Facebook Dating. What do you build next?

I always enjoyed conducting this interview -- it’s much more creative and interesting than some of the others! At a high level, I can share that we’re looking for people who can set a strong product mission/vision, define the right audience to build for and prioritize the right solution to build for this audience.

For the best dives into how to do well in this interview, use the resources below.

1. Facebook Product Sense Interview (free): A helpful and comprehensive guide!

2. Mock Interview from a Facebook PM (free): A former colleague did a great mock interview

3. Product Sense Rubric (paywall): The things that interviewers are looking for during product sense interviews.

4. List of questions (free)

I always enjoyed conducting this interview -- it’s much more creative and interesting than some of the others!

🎖Leadership & Drive / Behavioral

Key question: Does this person have the attitude and soft skills to succeed as a product manager?

Example question: Tell me about a time that you failed. What did you learn from it?

This is largely a behavioral interview. I’d prepare using the following guides.

1. How to Ace Your Google Behavioral Interview (free): a guide that has helpful advice for Google and beyond

2. How I Prepared for Facebook PM Interviews: Leadership & Drive (free): This is a great guide written by a friend 

3. Expert Tips for Answering Common Interview Questions (free trial): a one hour LinkedIn Learning course with high ROI

One general tip that I learned when conducting these interviews:

🔑 Key idea: Behavioral interviews are 50% strong communication. I’d suggest taking a free LinkedIn Learning course, practicing saying your answers during mock interviews and practicing structured communication.

💯 Estimation (Google) 

Key question: can this person use logic and math to handle ambiguous situations?

Example question: how many Google Maps users are in New York City?

Here are some great resources for interviews at Google like this:

1. Google APM Interview Guide (free) a great resource with example questions, interview strategies and Google specific tips

2. PM Estimation Interview Guide (free): a good breakdown with strategies on doing execution interviews

3. Google PM Estimation Interview (free): a great mock that covers this question type

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: Exponent

If you need more help on interviews, I recommend getting a membership to Exponent. For $19/month, you get access to their full product interview resource library. There are also specific resources for several popular APM companies like Google, Meta, Uber and more.

If you’re at the interview stage, investing in the right resources will have a large impact on your likelihood of landing the job.

🧮 Practice Frameworks

Self-studying is the piece that I feel sets me apart. Others over-indexed on reading books and mocks with peers. I would spend hours each day self-studying, specifically by practicing:

1. Segmentation: breaking down ambiguous problems into actionable pieces

2. Brainstorms: creatively think of many options given an ambiguous prompt

3. Prioritization: choose the best option amongst a series of reasonable ones

These areas are agnostic to the interview type or the company, so practicing is high-leverage when interviewing for multiple companies. Below, I’ll walk through the exercises I did and share resources on how to do the same

🎯 Segmentation

Every interview begins with a problem. It could be something like

1. Why has metric X gone down?

2. What should we build first in area Y?

3. How would you set the market for market Z?

Each of these are ambiguous questions with multiple paths forward. This is where it is important to break down problem spaces with a structured approach.

🔑 Key idea: Bucket potential options into a mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive list of options. This will make navigating the ambiguity much simpler.

The best way to do this is to look for buckets of mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive (MECE) options. These buckets should encompass all of the potential options while being separate. Here are two examples.

What has metric X gone down?

Bucket 1: Factors external to the company

1. Economic changes

2. Social changes

3. Geopolitical changes

Bucket 2: Factors internal to the company

1. Measurement changes

2. Product changes

3. Policy changes

These two buckets cover 100% of the possible options for why this change may have occurred. 

Structures like these are very common parts of product management interviews. The only way to do them well is to practice (the recommended resource has tons of drills to do this).

🧠 Brainstorms

At many points during the interview, you will need to creatively brainstorm across multiple different areas. Examples include

1. What are all the metrics we may want to track?

2. Who could we possibly build for?

3. What pain points do these user groups have?

4. What potential solution might we build?

🔑 Key idea: Practice brainstorming for every possible axis ahead of time. When brainstorming during an interview, you’ll remember some of the best ones. 

Create brainstorm situations for yourself and push yourself to identify all of the potential 

Example: What metric should we care about most?

1. Engagement

2. Retention

3. Monetization

4. User Sentiment

5. Social Value Created

6. Virality

7. Performance

8. Reliability

9. Activation

Brainstorming is crucial. Again, the recommended resource has tons of drills to do this and it’s something that I feel set me apart during interviews. Practice a ton!

✅ Prioritization

This is the third and arguably most challenging framework to master. It’s also the one that is most relevant to the actual PM job.

Prioritizing between two or more reasonable options is challenging. You may need to decide between

1. User groups: do we focus on teens or adults?

2. Metrics: do we focus on retention, engagement or monetization?

3. Solutions: do we build a VR shopping experience or a new standalone Google App?

I wrote a full guide on prioritizing as a product manager. The key here is to define the criteria that you will use to make the decision and then measure your options against that criteria. This will show that your process is objective, logical and auditable.

🔑 Key idea: Prioritize based on explicit is explicitly defining the criteria that you will make your decision on. 

⭐️ Highest ROI Resource: RocketBlocks

If you want more help with frameworks, Rocketblocks is an excellent resource to practice key frameworks for product interviews. I used their resources when applying for jobs and enjoyed the active practice. There are tons of drills, technical skill reviews and product sense exercises to choose from at a reasonable price. 

They also have a community that you can use for…

🤖 Mock Interviews

With an understanding of the interview structure and practice in breaking down problems, brainstorming and prioritization, you’re ready to do mock interviews.

🔑 Key idea: Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. Be careful of taking too much feedback from other interviewees. 

Mocks are great for practicing your delivery and simulating the environment. Be cognizant that there’s a little bit of “the blind leading the blind” here -- the person on the other side of your interview may not know exactly what to look for. This is why I recommend self-evaluating yourself based on your own knowledge of the interviews.

Here are some mock interview communities that I’ve heard great things about:

1. ProductBuds: a great, supportive community of aspiring PMs. They have a channel to coordinate mock interviews that I would definitely recommend.

2. Rocketblocks: there’s a big community for mock interviews on Rocketblocks -- but they also have coaches and experiences PMs you can interview with too!

🎬 Final Recap

What a whirlwind. If you’ve read the full guide, you’ll now be better equipped to:

1. Build all the skills you need to get a PM interview

2. Have a killer resume that will get you noticed

3. Crush the interviews and land a job offer (or two, or three…)

I wrote this guide to simulate all of the advice I would give to an aspiring product manager over 3-5 hours of coaching. I hope it helps you in your unique journey.

Here is a recap of all the key tips from the guide:

🗺 Introduction

• Each APM program gives people with no formal product experience the chance to work in an interesting product space, bond with a talented cohort and receive training within the company.

• Don’t wait until applications open to start preparing. Start now — specifically by learning the right skills, building an effective resume and getting referrals. Preparing early is what sets strong candidates apart.

🛠 Part 1: Become a Great Candidate

• 97% of applicants don’t get an interview. You need to build the right experiences, make a killer resume and network to be a part of the 3%.

• Don’t prepare for interviews until you are at least 80% sure that you will get an interview. Focus all your time on getting the right experiences, making the perfect resume and getting referrals until then. Being a great interviewee is useless if you don’t get an interview!

• The right experience is in alignment with the PM job requirements. These are a combination of soft and technical skills. 

• If you have gaps in your skillset, take a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap.  LinkedIn Learning  is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing.  Claim your free month here .

• Use hard skills to differentiate yourself from other candidates. 

• Use projects to fill in skills gaps from your experiences. 

• People are incentivized to refer strong candidates. They determine your fit for the role based on your resume and opening messages.

• Your referral reach out should include a personal connection, a sentence on your background (bonus if it sounds impressive) and your ask for a referral. Don’t beat around the bush and please don’t ask to “pick your brain” or a “virtual coffee chat”. 

🏆 Part 2: Cracking the PM Resume

• A strong resume is the single most important thing you can do to be a part of the 3% of applicants who get interviews.

• Each bullet point should be concise, show impact and be highlighted specific to the PM job. Don’t include filler words, vague statements or fancy visuals.

• Use RACR (results, action, context, results) to frame your experience bullet points.

🏁 Part 3: Crush the Interviews

• Your experiences don’t matter once you get to the interview stage; it’s now all about performance. The best way to perform better is through effective practice.

• Phone screens are all about strong communication and how aligned you are with the job description. 

• Show the criteria about how you are making a decision and making the decision. Indecision kills candidacies. 

• Behavioral interviews are 50% strong communication. I’d suggest taking a free LinkedIn Learning course, practicing saying your answers during mock interviews and practicing structured communication.

• Bucket potential options into a mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive list of options. This will make navigating the ambiguity much simpler.

• Practice brainstorming for every possible axis ahead of time. When brainstorming during an interview, you’ll remember some of the best ones. 

• Prioritize based on explicit is explicitly defining the criteria that you will make your decision on. 

• Use mock interviews to practice timing, communication and simulating the environment. Be careful of taking too much feedback from other interviewees. 

Final thought: we need more diversity in tech

The final tip I want to share: apply. 

These programs are transformative -- both for your personal learning and your socioeconomic standing. This was my situation; I went to a university in Canada, didn’t know many people in Silicon Valley, didn’t have a technical background and didn’t have the resources to make big investments into myself.

Joining one of these programs exposed me to smart peers, incredible mentorship, new cities, new countries and new ways of growing my career. 

If you feel like you need this, don’t disqualify yourself by not applying. Don’t assume that you don’t belong in this industry because of your background, skin colour, location or native language. 

🔑 Key idea: You can’t get the job if you don’t apply. Don’t disqualify yourself because you feel like you don’t belong in this program or tech in general. You belong.

We need more diverse thoughts and people in our industry if we want to continue to change the world for the positive. I sincerely hope that this guide is able to play a small part in many diverse stories about “breaking into tech”/

Please do share this guide with anyone else who may find it valuable or encouraging. 

And, with that, good luck on applications!

If you want to stay in touch, follow me on Twitter and/or LinkedIn!

As we head into an economic downturn, founders are all thinking about the same thing: becoming default alive.

Default alive means that companies make it to (or maintain) profitability with the money they have left.

To do this, they can either raise more money (hard), grow revenue (very hard) or cut expenses (the easiest).

In practice, we’re seeing several real companies double down on core revenue drivers and reduce spending on offshoots.

This includes Uber (full memo):

Meeting the moment means making trade-offs. The hurdle rate for our investments has gotten higher, and that means that some initiatives that require substantial capital will be slowed.

And Facebook (full memo):

The short answer is that we’re not trying to build a lot of new tabs right now - we’re focused on making our core products better and more integrated

This seems like good advice for founders — but how should employees navigate the downturn?

I think the answer is analogous to default alive - it’s to become default essential.

Essential means you are 100% critical to the core business and/or the most important company bets. Non-essential means the business would continue to operate without you.

As an employee, you want to work on essential initiatives. Not only will these be the safest for job security, but they are also the most likely to receive additional funding and have the most growth opportunities.

Now how do you get to the essential initiatives?

Below, I’ll share an unintuitive strategy. There are three steps:

1. Audit your portfolio of work

2. Find essential scope

3. Globally optimize

Let’s dive in.

1/ Audit your portfolio of work 

It’s important to understand how you’re allocating your time. For product managers, it’s even more important to understand how you're allocating your team’s time.

A breakdown of your personal capacity plan may look like this:

For a team, it may be:

From here, identify what portion of the effort is going to essential initiatives versus non-essential initiatives.

Essential means that the initiative is 100% critical to the core business and/or the most important company bets. Non-essential means the business would continue to operate without this initiative.

This is hard — it’s tough to admit that part of your plate may be non-essential. But having this view will help ensure your team becomes default essential to the company.

This is what it may look like:

If 100% of your and your team’s plate is essential then congrats, you are default essential to the company. If not, it’s time to find essential scope.

2/ Find essential scope

Your goal is to devote 100% of your personal and team capacity to essential initiatives. I’d suggest tackling this in two steps.

The first is to find essential initiatives at your company. My favourite way of doing this is to map your company’s investments on the BCG Matrix. It’s a simple 2x2 matrix that organizes bets in a portfolio by two axes:

1. The market growth rate

2. The share of the market that a company captures

Let’s use a company we all know to better explain this grid — Microsoft.

• ⭐️ Star: Microsoft Azure (high growth in cloud with high market share)

• 🐮 Cash Cow: Microsoft Office (lower growth rate but enormous market share)

• ❓Question Mark: Hololens (high growth rate but low market share)

• 🐶 Dog: Bing (low market share in a lower growth area)

You want to be on the Stars or the Cash Cows during hard times. Question marks can be important but there is a high risk. Avoid dogs at all costs.

The next step in finding essential initiatives is finding a way to work on Stars.

My suggestion is to speak to the product managers working on them. Chances are that they have important initiatives that are understaffed and in need of more support.

There may be an opportunity to support these — both with your team’s resources and your own capacity.

Reach out and have the conversations. Mention a desire to understand the gaps in the key areas. Here’s how I would do it:

Hey Jane. We’re planning for Q3 now and I’d love to understand the priorities for your areas. I’d also be interested to see if there is anything me or my team could help with.

After speaking with the relevant product leads, you may come away with a handful of essential, unfunded product areas.

Do a rough scoping of this work and create a second option for how you could better allocate your time and team’s resources. This may look like this:

If you can successfully do this, you’ve now created a roadmap that makes you and your team default essential.

3/ Globally optimize

It’s time to tell your manager and/or leadership team about your options. You may be thinking:

Wait so you want me to tell my manager that part of my work is non-essential and then dedicate my team’s resources to someone else’s scope? That’s crazy.

Yeah, this plan makes no sense if you’re playing political games. These include growing headcount for no reason or posturing about the importance of your work.

But this is what leaders who truly care about the success of a business should do. This is how your CEO is thinking and aligning yourself with that mentality shows strong character and long-term instincts.

So proactively share the options you’ve uncovered with decision-makers. In doing this, be sure to include the following messages:

1. Your desire to optimize for the company’s outcomes versus being tied to your scope

2. The work you’ve done to identify crucial areas

3. Your recommended roadmap for the highest impact

Here’s how I would approach it:

Hey all. I want to make sure that my team is ruthlessly prioritizing the most critical initiatives at the company — especially given the macro need to focus on profitability.

This is why I began understanding what crucial parts of the business were underfunded and in need of greater support. I also audited my team’s roadmap and noticed that we would create more value if we changed our roadmap to support some of those areas.

I’ve outlined Option 1 and Options 2. I recommend we pursue 2. What do you think?

This will require some discussion and alignment. But if you can successfully land this roadmap with the relevant stakeholders, your entire team will now be focused on the most important areas at the company.

In other words, you’ll all be default essential.

Closing Thoughts

As founders think about being default alive, strong employees should think about becoming default essential. Not only will this make your and your team job’s safer, but it will also demonstrate that you are a committed leader with a strong strategic sense.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this strategy below.

🚨 Featured job opportunities

🩺 WellTheory: Senior Product Manager (California)

• Will’s comment: Talk about mission-driven — WellTheory is looking for a 0-1 PM leader to reverse the autoimmune epidemic. If this cause speaks to you, check out the role.

💸 Paxos: Product Manager - Securities Settlement (New York City, San Francisco)

• Will’s comment: I work at Paxos! This is a high-priority role on an exciting team. Paxos' product culture is strong and a perfect fit for experienced PMs who want to drive impact in the blockchain/web3.

Want to feature a job? Post them here on our community job board.

🌟 Seeking your dream role or dream employee? Join the Product Life Talent Collective.

For companies: If you’re hiring, apply to get regular drops of amazing product managers in our community. Over 100 PMs from companies like Coinbase, Meta, Netflix, Zoom, Shopify, Samsara and Workday are actively looking for their next play. Join now and start hiring directly from our community here.

For product managers: Join our Talent Collective to get reach-outs from growing companies. Apply here.

Managing up is the art of creating a strong relationship with your manager.

This is an underrated system for growth as a product manager.

Investing in this relationship is an excellent use of time as it unlocks:

1. A career coach and mentor: your manager has likely been in your shoes and can help you plan long-term in your career.

2. Connect to opportunities: your manager often has better visibility into the workings of the organization. If they trust you, they will nominate you to take on important projects or to step up and lead larger teams.

3. A life-long evangelist: even outside of your current company, having a senior person in your field who trusts and respects you will create long-term opportunities.

4. More enjoyable work environment: being a PM can be lonely. A manager can be your trusted confidant and sounding board if you invest time into the relationship.

The foundation of managing up is your regular one-on-one with your manager. I want to share the template I use for running these meetings with my manager.

This template was simplified and refined over 3 years and 6 managers. It helps me:

1. Be more effective in my role

2. Carve out time to discuss my career growth

3. Bring visibility to work I’m doing

Give it a try:

Get my template

Let’s break down the components.

10 minutes of updates

In a 30-minute meeting, I like to spend ~10 minutes walking my manager through the items I’m working on. There are a few reasons to do this:

1. Get light feedback on items that I have a good handle on

2. Bring visibility to the work you’re doing and make it top of mind

3. Raise blockers to help your team move forward

I’ve included some example agenda topics in the template:

Kicked off Project ABC working with squad 1 and squad 2. This maps to my annual OKR 2 and if we can execute, should unlock N new users.

Aligned with Kate on the priority on work-stream A. She will prioritize this in the next three sprints.

Kicked off OKR planning for next quarter. I’m concerned that OKR 1 is not achievable given the current resources.

• What’s the best forum to raise this concern in?

20 minutes of discussion

The more nuanced part of my agenda is the ~20 minutes of discussion topics. These are topics to dive into with your manager.

There are three types of discussion topics:

1/ Advice

Your manager has likely been in your shoes. If you’re struggling with an element of the role, team dynamics or navigating the company, seek your manager’s feedback.

It’s essential to frame your feedback ask in a way that will create the most useful outcomes. So rather than asking:

Do you have advice on topic X?

I like to frame it as:

Do you have advice for solving Problem Z? In Situation Y, I’m noticing that Problem Z keeps occurring. I’ve tried to debug this by doing Action A but it hasn’t solved the problem.

This framing shows that you understand the core problem and have proactively taken actions to try and solve it. If you haven’t yet tried to solve it yourself, do that before seeking advice.

Examples of advice topics:

My relationship with the customer success team isn’t as strong as I’d like. I feel like this is because I have to constantly turn down their suggestions on what to build and when.

• How can I say no without harming relationships? So far, I’ve tried to explain our resource constraints and other priorities, but neither seems to be landing.

2/ Career planning

One-on-ones with your manager can often be very tactical. It’s important to make time with your manager to discuss your long-term career path.

For you, this is extremely valuable. It allows you to zoom out from OKRs and annual goals to reflect on the skills you want to accumulate, the experiences you want to have and the relationships you want to build.

For your manager, it helps them understand what you want and what it will take to keep you motivated in your role.

Great managers will use this information to connect you with opportunities to grow your career. Selfishly, this helps them retain good PMs and gives you a chance to have more impact in your role.

Examples of career planning topics:

One of my career goals is to become a manager by the end of the year. I spoke with two people managers this week (Jack and Melanie) to get their feedback on the right managerial skills to build and how to build them.

• Based on these conversations, here is my plan [link] to learn these skills in the next 6 months.

  • Are there items missing?

  • Do you have other suggestions for how I might learn these skills?

3/ Strategy

Finally, one-on-ones are a great place to review strategic directions for your product area.

I often do this by reviewing a doc with them. In addition to soliciting feedback, this is an excellent way to build alignment and create an evangelist for your strategy.

Examples of strategy topics:

I think we need to more aggressively target Customer Segment Z. There is a $10B opportunity if we can capture 10% of this market in the next 4 years.

1. Are you aligned with this framework for evaluating the investment decision? 

2. Who else should I run this decision by?

Putting this into practice

With a template in hand, make sure to do the following three things to deploy it correctly:

1. Share the doc with your manager so they have visibility on upcoming and past conversations

2. Add your topics at least 24 hours before your one-on-one. This makes sure that A) your manager has time to read it if they like, B) it’s ready for your one-on-one

   1. Bonus: send your manager a message with the agenda and ask them to drop any comments or add any topics they’d like to the agenda

   2. If there are no topics, cancel the meeting to save time

3. Stick to the agenda and capture notes live.

In summary, use your one-on-ones with your manager to build a strong relationship.

You can do this by creating visibility on your work, seeking their input and discussing your long-term career objectives.

Community Advice on Managing Up

I asked Twitter what advice they have on managing up. There was some great advice:

From Adam, Director of Product at Microsoft:

From Graham, Product Partner at Connect Ventures:

🚨 Featured job opportunities

🤝 Paxos: Product Manager - Brokerage Transfers(New York City, US Remote)

🏄 Fractal Founders: Founder (New York City, San Francisco)

If you’re looking for your next play, apply to be a part of my Talent Collective.

If your team is hiring, reply to this email or reach out.

If you’re new to Product Life, join 9,700+ product managers growing their careers:

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Until next time,

Will

After several years as a product manager at Meta, I was ready to jump into the world of “web3”, a new ecosystem of applications built on top of blockchains.

But navigating web3 is hard. There’s a ton of hype, FOMO and acronyms (DAOs, DeFi, NFTs) that made it challenging to find the perfect fit for me.

Today, I wanted to share the playbook I used to navigate my job search in web3.

While my situation is web3 specific, I think this playbook can be extended to almost any emerging industry. So read on even if you’re not sold on web3 yet.

The outcome of this playbook is to help you go from 100s of possible entry points into an industry to 3-5 amazing fits for you.

There are three steps in this process. Each helps you narrow the aperture of opportunities to the ones that best align with your goals:

1. What stage of company am I looking for?

2. What area do I have the highest conviction in?

3. Who are my ideal teammates?

So if you’re exploring your next play in Web3 or an emerging industry, try working through the three steps below.

Step 1: What stage of company am I looking for?

Companies are more similar across stages than across industries.

For example, working at an early stage music NFT project will be more similar to being at a Y Combinator backed e-commerce startup than working at OpenSea.

Nikhyl Singhal, a VP of Product at Meta, introduced me to this concept. In one of his great essays, he shares how the cultures, compensation, exit opportunities, manager quality and background of peers vary wildly by the stage of the company.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. People sort themselves by risk-appetite (amongst other factors)

2. The problems being solved require different approaches

3. Operational cultures vary by stage

For these reasons, he suggests starting at the right stage for you before even looking at companies.

Nikhyl divides traditional companies into four main stages: the drunken walk, product-fit, hypergrowth and scale.

Web3 and many emerging industries are a little different.

1. The entire industry is nascent meaning even the largest companies (e.g. Coinbase, Opensea, Consensys) have potential to grow even more.

2. Company metrics like funding rounds, employee count or valuation aren’t as widely used. For example, the Ethereum Foundation has no external funding, ~400 employees and a token market cap of ~$370 billion. What stage is that at?

But the principle remains the same: deciding which stage to jump into will drastically change your experience.

For this reason, I’d suggest choosing between one of three stages of Web3 Growth.

Here are the key considerations of each stage of team.

Early: Pre-Product Market Fit

• Key question: Do you want to build the first iterations of a Web3 product?

• Pros: creative, small teams, more potential upside, less process, less politics.

• Cons: higher risk, unproven model, less need for a traditional product manager.

Growth: Post-Product Market Fit

• Key question: Do you want to grow a Web3 product that has traction?

• Pros: fast-paced, existing consumers/customers, more established team.

• Cons: can be stressful, ambiguous, and lack structure.

Scale: Expanding to new markets

• Key question: Do you want to work on Web3 products with the structure of an established team?

• Pros: structure, strong mentorship, resources, brand recognition

• Cons: slower moving, more process, upside may be already captured

The key metric here is Product-Market Fit — this means the team has released a product that has significant traction. Lenny Rachitsky has a great compilation of how the best experts define product-market fit.

Think about the right stage for you, regardless of the specific area or company.

Step 2: What area do I have the highest conviction in?

It’s now time to explore the landscape itself.

But in true PM fashion, define your decision-making criteria ahead of discovery to have better results.

The desired outcome of this step is to find the sector of Web3 that you have the most conviction in. Conviction is a combination of optimism for its mass adoption, signs of explosive growth and an understanding of the problems it solves.

To do this, create a table of all of the areas in Web3 that you want to explore. From here, I’d suggest looking at the following five-axes to assess your conviction.

1. Mass Adoption - how large can you see this getting?

2. Talent Inflows - can this space attract incredible talent?

3. Capital Inflows - can this space attract capital and customers?

4. Innovation - how much better is the web3 solution versus web2?

5. Your specialized knowledge - how many unique insights do I have about this space?

Measuring your conviction against axes makes it quantifiable, transparent and objective.

Use a table to assign scores across each axis for your areas of interest. My table looked like this, with a 10 point score for each axis.

From this exercise, you’ll have 1-2 areas that you have high conviction in.

Going one step further, turn that area into your own Web3 thesis. This is a statement that encapsulates your conviction and why you hold it.

Here’s a template:

I believe [area X] will solve [important problem Y] through [innovation Z]. This is based on my [experience/unique insight] and the [talent/capital inflows] this sector is attracting.

Here’s my thesis:

I believe DeFi will solve regional barriers in financial infrastructure through digitally native asset rails.

This is based on my experience building WhatsApp Payment for Brazil and the influx of incredible talent and partnerships that this sector is attracting.

Get creative with your thesis. The more unique it is to you, the more conviction you likely have.

(P.S. if you write a thesis, tweet it out, tag me and I’ll retweet it to help you find companies that are building against your thesis).

Step 3: Who are my ideal teammates?

One thing I love about Web3 is the diversity of backgrounds it attracts. This ranges from artists to community managers to game developers.

Defining your ideal teammates will help you whittle down a medium list of teams to a handful of excellent fits.

Move past the obvious filters — like smart peers, a good manager, leadership you respect etc. — and ask questions that can help you distinguish between companies.

Here are some of the questions you may want to ask yourself:

1. Experience Level: do I want to be with industry veterans or newcomers with no preconceptions?

2. Product Culture: do I want to be on a team with an established product culture or do I want to help build it?

3. Manager involvement: do I want an active manager or one who will give me significant independence

4. Cross-functions: do I want to primarily work with designers, business development, data scientists, community managers, marketers or engineers?

Assessing these will take time. LinkedIn is your best friend for the first pass, but beyond this, you’ll need to start speaking to people on these teams.

Twitter is the easiest place to reach out to web3 operators. They’re also very excited to speak with you — hiring great talent is at the top of everyone’s mind right now.

In my web3 job search, I reached out to my future manager with this simple message:

Hey XXX. I’m a PM at Facebook working on developer experiences. Before this, I worked as a PM on WhatsApp Payments.

I’m excited by crypto and am exploring the right next step. Paxos seems great and I’d love to learn about your team. Would you be open to a quick chat?

So once you’ve found the 3-5 teams that you want to explore more, reach out to some operators with this template.

Recap on the process

If you’re looking for your perfect role in Web3, try answering these three questions:

1. What stage of company am I looking for?

2. What area do I have the highest conviction in?

3. Who are my ideal teammates?

If your exploring non-web3 areas, try this approach anyways!

It will force you to narrow your focus, be objective and find the best fit for your career goals.

Good luck!

🚨 Featured job opportunities

👾 Dapper Labs: Product Manager, Data Analytics (Remote - North America)

💸 Argent: Senior Product Manager - Mobile (Remote - Europe)

🤝 Paxos: Product Manager - Securities Settlement (New York City, US Remote)

🧑‍🏫 Synthesis: Senior Product Manager (Remote)

🩺 Canvas Medical: Technical Product Manager (San Francisco, Remote US)

If your team is hiring, share a role with 9000+ product people here.

When I was in university, I wanted to land a role in User Experience design. But I didn’t know anyone who was hiring.

I caught up with a few friends during the summer and told them about all of the weekend design projects I was working on.

I showed them my portfolio and told them I was looking for an internship in the space.

One of them was impressed. She appreciated that I was self-taught and already had a portfolio of projects.

Later that summer, she told me that her company was hiring UX design interns and she’d be willing to refer me.

That company was Microsoft and it was a pivotal role for my career.

Looking back many years later, how did I really land that role?

The answer is that I accidentally created an evangelist.

An evangelist is someone who respects you, knows your aspirations and thinks of you when a relevant opportunity crosses their desk. 

I’ve since learned that evangelists are the most important relationships to foster in your career. Evangelists can help you:

1. Get your next promotion

2. Secure funding, sales, partnerships or talent for your startup

3. Connect with pivotal job opportunities

4. Find mentorship from experts in your field

Creating Evangelists

We’ve all naturally created evangelists in our careers. But I’ve started to notice that there’s a process for creating evangelists more intentionally. Here it is:

1. Build credibility

Aim to build credibility with someone by delivering exceptional impact and demonstrating strong character through repeated interactions.

Exceptional impact means that you are delivering strong results in your core role and delivering business impact outside of your role.

As a product manager, this involves executing well and growing your scope (a topic I’ve dived into here and here).

These results need to be paired with strong character. This means that people think of you as ethical, reliable and trustworthy.

There aren’t shortcuts to demonstrating character, but one mantra to keep in mind is “Show, Don’t Tell”.

You can’t tell people that you are reliable, you need to show them they can count on you over time.

In brief, building credibility is about delivering exceptional results while proving that you have a strong moral character. It’s not easy, but its worth it.

If you feel like you’ve done that, it’s time for the next step.

2. Share your goals

For people to evangelize you, they need to know your goals. Otherwise, you won’t be top of mind when relevant opportunities come up. 

Communicating your aspirations can be hard.

Here are some templates for how to share your goals with those that you’ve established credibility with:

Manager

My goal is to become the manager for this division. I’ve started to take on more managerial responsibilities recently, but I know I have a lot to learn. Can we work together to find what experiences I should aim to develop over the next 6-12 months to set myself up for this role?

Peers

Just an FYI, but I’ve been doing some design consulting on the side. If you know any early stage companies that want to contract a UX designer, send them my portfolio!

3. Evangelize Others

Life is a repeated game. Helping someone today can open doors for you tomorrow.

So evangelize your friends, peers and even superiors. Understand their career goals and find ways to connect them to opportunities that matter to them.

While it’s easy to evangelize friends and peers, evangelizing your superiors is less intuitive. Here are three ways it can be done:

1. Nominate them for opportunities like a speaking gig or an award.

2. Promote their work by celebrating their accomplishments or giving their managers positive feedback about them.

3. Help them hire by introducing or referring people in your network to join their team. This is a big vote of confidence and they will appreciate the endorsement!

Summary

Creating evangelist is a skillset that will accelerate your career.

It also forces you to build credibility, be transparent about your goals and help others along the way.

As a next step, think of 1-2 people that would make for great evangelists.

Find ways to build credibility with them and form a strong relationship. From there, share with them your career goals and find opportunities to evangelize them.

Let me know how it goes!

🔥 Exploring new roles (actively or casually)?

Apply to be a part of my Product Collective — a reverse-job board where top companies apply to you.

It’s invite-only, curated by me and tailored for PMs with 2+ years of experience. Just create a profile and let jobs come to you.

Companies will subscribe to get access to members looking around. I’ll personally vet each opportunity to make sure that there is high signal-to-noise.

It’s free with no obligations, just upside. Let me help you land your perfect next role by applying below.

Apply in 2 minutes

If you’re looking to hire the best PM talent in the community, sign up here.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

Twice in the last month, a coworker did something that irked me. 

More specifically, I didn’t appreciate them communicating on behalf of me or my team to a wider audience.

Maybe it’s being Canadian or people-pleaser tendencies, but I’m pretty conflict averse.

When something small irks me, I usually simmer in isolation before sweeping it under the rug.

But Paxos, my new startup, has a cultural norm of real-time candor. This means that to show real respect to our colleagues, we share candid, real-time feedback. This helps them and the overall team improve. 

This norm is really well-realized in our day-to-day operations.  In one-on-one conversations or Slack messages, people will often tell me things that I can improve or suggestions for how to I can better lead my team. 

At first, I was defensive hearing these suggestions and took them as criticism.

But after the initial sting, implementing the feedback really did help me improve. I found myself being more effective in meetings, documenting next steps better and creating more precise goals.

So in these two situations where I was irked, I decided I wouldn’t just simmer. Instead, I exercised the value of real-time candor and sent both of the individuals a message like the following:

“Quick feedback - in the future can we make sure you and I are aligned before sharing docs like X? This makes sure we have the details sorted out before moving to next steps.” 

To my pleasant surprise, both times the feedback was received extremely well. They were both apologetic about my concern and receptive to incorporating the feedback. 

Better yet I found that our working relationships improved dramatically. We were now both more candid with each other and we spoke more frequently.

As a newcomer to the team, it also felt like I had earned the respect of these coworkers because I had done the “hard thing” of giving feedback rather than the cop-out of bottling it up.

Next time you find yourself irked, try giving real-time feedback. It can diffuse tension, help your team improve and build stronger relationships with coworkers.

Need some help doing this? Here are three templates for fast feedback:

A direct ask:

Hey Sam. Can you share an agenda ahead of our team syncs? I feel like we can use the team’s time more effectively if we have prepared topics ahead of our conversation.

A suggestion for improvement:

Hey Priya. Good job on the Q2 OKR presentation. Next time, I’d suggest skipping the background context and jumping straight to our OKRs. This will give us more time for discussion with leads.

Constructive criticism:

Hey Alex. I think your comment about John’s performance in the general Slack channel was inappropriate. It may have hurt their feelings and is not the culture we want to create. I’d suggest reaching out to John to apologize.

Give it a go and let me know how it lands!

Small personal update:

For 40+ weeks in 2021, I sent out a weekly essay on product management. But life got a little crazy in the fall: I left Facebook, joined Paxos and have been trying to enjoy my life in London.

But I’m going to start publishing regularly again! I’ll aim for bi-weekly to start. Thanks, everyone for your patience and kind words during a busy period in my life.

Oh, and I also have a cool project to share with you all soon based on this newsletter’s mission: Expand Access to Opportunity. Stay tuned (or reach out if you’re really curious).

Hope life is treating you well,

Will

Life update: I’ve decided to make the jump from Facebook/Meta into the world of blockchain, crypto and web3. I’ll be joining Paxos as a product manager to modernize financial infrastructure using blockchain. 💸

I consider myself very logical. I don’t tend to act rashly and get a kick out of building frameworks and decision-making structures.

So I want to share my step-by-step process for making this big life decision. I’ll break it down into three repeatable steps:

1. Choose an area - find a growing area with a problem that you have personal conviction in.

2. Choose a stage - Decide if you want wartime or peacetime, then zero in on the right maturity for you.

3. Find a team-fit - find colleagues you respect, a need for your skills, and a strategy you buy

I hope this helps other people who are thinking about their own life transitions. ☺️

1/ Choose an area

Here’s a simple idea: work in a growing area. Venture capitalist Arianna Simpson put this well:

A rising tide lifts all boats. Being in a growing industry or space gives you more room to learn, develop valuable skills and meet other people in similar stages of their careers. I wrote about this idea in more depth here.

The less simple piece is finding the tide you are most bullish on. This requires a combination of objective measures (ex. user growth, top talent mobility) and personal experience.

For me, I’ve been optimistic about payments and financial infrastructure for a long time.

In university, I did my thesis on M-PESA (the largest mobile money network in the world) and its effect on household spending in Kenya.

I was amazed to see how this new financial infrastructure allowed people to send more gross remittances, save more and spend less on transportation (because money was no longer needed to be transacted physically).

I could also see how people could access other financial services other than payments, like loans, mortgages, investments, through this new infrastructure. This was the clearest example I had ever seen of technology giving people better economic opportunity and mobility.

This excitement led me to become a product manager on the WhatsApp Payments team at Facebook. During this time, I led teams focussed on two areas: launching WhatsApp peer-to-peer (P2P) payments in Brazil and scaling our compliance platform to better support anti-money laundering (AML), counter-terrorism financing (CTF), and risk screening.

On the team, I kept bumping into the limitations of payment “rails”. This is the infrastructure (or plumbing) that allows money to move from one account to another. An example of this limitation is how regionally focussed it is -- it's infinitely more challenging for money to move between countries than within countries. This has many consequences, including

1. the need to customize/re-build payment products in each country

2. many emerging markets miss out on financial infrastructure

3. use cases limited by old infrastructure

I shared some of these learnings on Twitter in December 2020 and multiple people suggested that web3 technologies could be a solution.

Blockchains, for example, let digital currencies move instantly on infrastructure not owned by oligopolies and could allow people in Nigeria, Peru, and Japan to all access the same financial products. This got me excited and I started to explore web3.

Looking at my next step, I wanted to solve some of the problems I had encountered trying to build payment products in emerging markets. While many have built on top of existing rails in the past, I was excited by blockchains’ abilities to build new ones altogether.

For that reason, I knew I wanted to dive into the area of new financial infrastructure with blockchain.

The key idea here: I didn't want to choose an area because of hype. Yes, growth is an important factor. But I wanted a rising tide that is in a space I have personal conviction in.

2/ Choose a stage

Nikhyl Singh, a VP of product at Meta, wrote a great piece called Stage of company, not name of company. In it, he divides all tech companies into two types: peacetime and wartime.

Big tech is peace. Stable, predictable and "default-alive". There is a lot of benefits to this environment and I learned a ton from my time at Facebook — evidenced by this newsletter’s 40+ articles and 50,000+ words!

But I yearned for war: less structure, more ownership and room to create new ways of doing things. 

I’m also at a stage of my life where I’m flexible and can take risks (no kids, no mortgage and some financial runway). It felt like a good time to introduce more risk and accountability.

Nikhyl suggests that there are two "wartime" stages: the drunken walk and hypergrowth. Deciding between the two was interesting and required reflection on my personality and goals.

Although I could see myself becoming a founder one day, I ultimately landed on hypergrowth because it’s where I feel I can add the most value as a PM.

To recap, my framework now had two things completed:

1. Space: blockchain-based financial infrastructure

2. Stage: wartime + hypergrowth

It was just down to finding a mutual fit with the right team.

3/ Find team-fit

I looked for a team with:

1. Colleagues I admire

2. A strategy I believed in

3. A need for my skillset

After many great conversations, I knew that Paxos was the right fit for me. The team is incredible, they have great traction and a strong direction for the future.

Paxos is a regulated financial infrastructure company. Many people (even in web3) haven’t heard of Paxos because it operates behind the scenes of some major breakthroughs in crypto. Here are some of the exciting work the team is doing:

1. Powers the crypto wallets of PayPal, Revolut, MercadoPago, InteractiveBroker and more

2. Supports USDP and Pax Gold, two regulated stablecoins that unlock new use cases for retail and institutions. Notably, USDP was chosen by Novi (Facebook) to be the stablecoin in the Novi pilot facilitating remittances between Guatemala and the US.

3. Settlement solutions for institutions like Credit Suisse, Bank of America and Mastercard. This is one of the most exciting areas for enterprise-grade blockchain use cases, allowing for new functionality like T+0 settlement.

The strategy was also clear: build regulated infrastructure that allows assets to move instantaneously, anywhere in the world, at any time.

This strategy, especially the focus on regulation, aligned with my view on how to approach this space based on my time at WhatsApp Payments. I loved that there was a big mission and a deliberate path to get there. I was sold.

P.S. If this mission sounds exciting, Paxos is hiring a ton across many roles:

• Software Engineer, Product Managers

• Business Development, Sales, Customer Success, Ops

• Legal, Compliance, Talent, Accounting

Open roles here. If you have questions, DM me on Twitter.

Ultimately, deciding on the right team is about defining what makes a good team to you. For me, this skewed heavily to the people and was a strategy I could help advance. If you’re still thinking of how to narrow down teams, I’ll suggest another great article by Nikhyl Singh that helped me think about the details of team selection.

Conclusion

I have a lot to learn about blockchain, stablecoins and financial infrastructure and I’m excited to dig in.

I’ll be writing about my lessons from building products in web3 in this newsletter. If this peaks your curiosity (and you’re new here), subscribe below: 

Subscribe now

If you’re building in web3 or work on financial infrastructure, respond to this email, leave a comment below or DM me on Twitter. I’d love to say hello.

Let’s build! 🧱

What differentiates junior and senior product managers? While this varies at each company, there seem to be two universal skillsets:

1. Meta-Execution: the ability to empower capable leaders on your team to drive meaningful parts of execution. Doing this helps your team grow, create more aggregate impact and free up your capacity to focus on strategy.

1. Create scope: proactively identify and capture opportunities outside of your current areas of responsibility. These allow you to create impactful work for your product team while helping you grow your own career.

In a past essay, I explain what scope is and why great PMs should want to create scope. Today, I want to talk about how to identify and capture opportunities to grow your scope.

🔦 Identifying Pivotal Scope

Scope is the area you are responsible for as a product manager. Let me explain with an example.

Six months into my product management journey, I became a PM on the Growth team for  Watch, the video destination within the Facebook app. I was the most junior PM on the team.

The growth team (at the time) consisted of three “pods” - activation (acquiring new users), retention and international markets (products for specific markets). Each of these had its own product team and was led by a PM.

From this example, you can see that scope is directly tied to:

1. How senior you are as a product manager

2. The resources (ex. team size, budget) you have at your disposal

3. Because of the two things above, scope is also tied to how much impact you can create for the product

All of these are good things to have and a PM who is looking to grow should seek to grow their scope.

The million-dollar question becomes: how can I create more scope?

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think there are three ways to grow your scope:

🌁 Extension

Key question: what’s an area adjacent to your current scope that can drive meaningful impact?

Often, there are areas that your current scope may interact with that you are not investing in. For example, when I was working on WhatsApp Payments in Brazil, there was an opportunity to build out a more unified approach to payment compliance across all of the countries we were operating in.

Noticing these extensions requires understanding your product space well and seeing where you can add value. If you ever find yourself saying, “That’s out of scope” seek to understand if this is an area you can really invest in.

⏰ Moments in Time

Key question: how has the world changed and what can we do about it?

When major shifts happen, opportunities arise. These shifts may be in the form of

• New laws/policies that affect your product area

• Strategy shifts within your company

• Strategy shifts of your competitor

• World-changing events like COVID-19 or new technology research

If you notice that one of these shifts will affect your product, find ways to capture this scope (discussed in a moment).

⛓ Connecting Dots

Key question: how can we join forces with other teams to create more value together?

Socializing with other PMs inside and outside of your company is great for your personal development - but it also may help you find new scope.

When working on a video growth team, I had a chat with the product manager that led the “Saved” product (where you can save links, videos, posts and come back to them later). In chatting, we learned that there were some interesting experiments we could run that would let us both grow our top-line metrics.

Make time in your busy schedule to speak with other product managers across the organization. Counterintuitively, this may be a great way to help your current product area.

🧲 Capturing Scope

Finding scope is great. But turning it into “shovel-ready” work for your team is another ball game.

Regardless of how you find the scope, the next steps are usually the same: create a strategy for addressing this new area.

This involves:

• Context and why now: share your latest understanding of the landscape and why now is the best time to invest.

• Opportunity size: measure the impact of this new area against other investment opportunities by measuring the opportunity size against the top-line metric or OKR.

• Plan of attack: how will you make progress in this new space? This may be a prioritized backlog of the features you may need to build, an understand roadmap to help you uncover more information etc.

• Defining success: If all goes well with your plan of attack, what will we have accomplished? This may be a movement of a metric or a new understanding.

• Resources: what new investments will we need to achieve success? This can be a headcount ask for more engineers, regular check-ins with executives or the ability to let other goals for your team slip in order to pursue this new initiative.

Here are two templates that may help you define your strategy:

1. Initiative doc by Lenny Rachitsky

2. Roadmap 1-pager by a Facebook PM

📝 Summary

The path to growing from a product manager into a product leader involves meta-execution and creating scope.

• Scope is your area of responsibility. Find ways to grow this to grow your career and the impact your team can have.

• When finding new areas of scope, look for extensions to your current scope, moments in time and opportunities to connect dots.

• Once you’ve identified a worthwhile area, proactively create a strategy that helps you capture it.

📚 Reads and Resources

When to Make a Career Change by Sharmeen: Sharmeen decided to leave Twitch to join Facebook. This was a big move and she shares her thought process throughout.

Community DAOs by Patrick Rivera: DAOs are one of the most fascinating developments in crypto. Patrick does a great primer and shares how they can be used to build mores sustainable business models.

What needs to change? by Nikhyl Singhal: Nikhyl is a Facebook VP who shares case studies on when he needed to adapt to major changes. A great read for product managers.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Will

The PM role has never been more popular.

Every year, thousands of people apply for entry-level PM roles, enroll in boot camps and read about jumping into product.

On the other hand, hiring a PM is insanely hard right now. My team has several open headcount and we need people to fill them.

In my view, the best way to address this gap is to help internal candidates transition into the PM function.

These people — who often come from customer success, marketing, strategy, engineering or design — have already passed your company’s hiring bar, are looking for new challenges and bring domain expertise to the area.

This is something my team is trying now and I’m lucky to work with some internal candidates who are making the transition. Below, I’ll share the process I recommend to people looking to make the jump internally.

Managers, consider using this same process to help rockstars in other functions join your team as a PM.

Earning Your Stripes

The best way to become a PM is to be a PM first. A great way to do this is to find a PM that you can meaningfully help with their role.

This will give you experience, help the PM scale their own scope and give you a chance to create impact as a PM.

Here’s the process I’d recommend to kickstart that internal move to product:

1. Find a PM (ideally in your product area)

2. Scope a workstream that you can drive

3. Deliver

4. Seize Openings

🔎 Find a PM

Transitioning starts with a conversation — either with your manager or a PM that you work with.

If you have a good relationship with your manager, share your interests in developing more product management skills and see if they have any connections to a product team.

While it may be counterintuitive to share with your manager that you are looking for a new role, good managers will want to support your career growth and help you hit new goals. Selfishly, they also would prefer to retain you at the company as opposed to losing you.

Alternatively, if you already work with a product manager, you can reach out directly to them.

Either way, reach out and share your intentions with them. Here’s an example:

Hey Jane. I’m Will and I work on payment partnerships for Paypal Cash. I’m looking to transition into a PM role in the next 6-12 months and would like to help a PM with some of their core responsibilities to develop the right skills. Would you be open to chatting and seeing if I can take some workstreams of your plate?

As a PM, I’d be happy to offload some of my workload onto an eager, capable person. This is what makes internal candidates so much better — they are pre-vetted and know how things are done at the company.

🤝 Scope a workstream that you can drive

Once you’ve found the right PM, your next goal is to scope a workstream that you can drive. This should be something that leverages your current skillsets, has measurable success, and is independent enough that you can drive it with minimal involvement from the PM.

Start by meeting with the PM. Arrive with an understanding of the responsibilities of a product manager, eagerness to learn and a narrative on why you’re looking to join a product function. You need to convince this PM that you are reliable and able to take on meaningful parts of her or his scope.

Once you’ve established some credibility, consider what type of workstream you can drive. I’m working with two aspiring PMs and I’ve seen two ways of identifying these workstreams:

Extend your current scope to take on more PM tasks

Regardless of your role, there are connections between your work and the responsibility of a product manager. If you’re in analytics, for example, a natural extension of the research project you’re already doing is to define product requirement documents (PRDs) based off the recommendations you provide the team.

Try to draw a line between your responsibilities and how you can support projects that this PM would care about. Here are some examples for inspiration:

1. Sales - support B2B go-to-market for a new feature.

2. Customer Success - translate some customer challenges into product specifications that can be added to the team backlog

3. Legal/policy - create a one-year roadmap of the legal/privacy changes on the horizon that may affect the product. 

Projects like these are great because they allow you to use your current knowledge to learn practical skills. The downside of these is that some of these projects may be “nice-to-haves” for the PM rather than “must-haves”.

If you want to go deeper and create more value for the PM themselves, I’d suggest…

Own meaningful execution

A product manager is responsible for two outcomes: great strategy and great execution. To scale their impact, PMs often look to delegate execution to other leaders on their teams to make sure they have time to define the proper product strategy.

If you want to offer significant value to the PM you’re working with (and learn a lot along the way), look to drive meaningful parts of the execution. Ideally, you want to seek out projects that are important to the team and deliver real impact.

Find a workstream like this by asking, “What is an important project that you’d like to offload to someone?” Give the PM some time to think through the right project for you to drive.

If and when its been identified, work with the PM to make sure the expectations, success criteria and your requirements are clear.

This is a great time to define what you would like to learn, what support you expect and how much time you can commit over a given time period.

📈 Deliver

Once you’ve successfully scoped a workstream, it’s time to deliver.

Start by ramping up. I’d suggest doing 1-week of shadowing (where you shadow the PM in meetings or sessions that involve your work stream) and 1-week of reverse-shadowing (where the PM shadows you as you drive those same conversations).

After this, aim to drive this workstream solo. Keep a one-on-one with your PM to ask questions and keep in contact asynchronously.

Operating independently can be scary. But this is exactly what a PM is expected to do.

A key tenant of successful product managers is agency — the ability to proactively solve problems independently. Demonstrate this by making progress with minimal supervision and great upward communication.

📬 Seize Openings

At the end of the given workstream, reflect on how much impact you were able to create. Debrief with your PM to see what you did well and what you can improve.

If you’ve successfully delivered an impactful result, it's a good time talk to your PM about joining their team as a PM. If their team isn’t hiring at the moment, ask if there are other teams they would feel comfortable endorsing you for.

In the worst case where there are no openings across the company, you’re now in a much better position to transition into a PM role at another company.

But in this job market, I’m confident that your current employer will want to retain you.

📝 Summary

Use the approach above to gain PM experience and transition into product. In this process, you’ll experience what the job is really like by driving independent progress with real results to show at the end of it.

For managers that are hiring PMs, identify some rockstar candidates in other functions and see if they are looking to transition into product.

Help them structure a win-win relationship with PMs on your team that allows all parties to grow their skills. As a bonus, you might get some excellent PMs onto your team.

🦾 Reads and Resources

👾 Buying Your First Crypto with HAX: a friend of mine has an awesome course + community for investors looking to jump into crypto. The cohort starts next week.

💫 Ads, privacy and confusion by Benedict Evans: an exploration of what we really need from the privacy landscape changes that are underway.

👥 How I built a paid community to 1,000+ members in 10 months by Dru Riley: As we kick off Product Circle next week, I’m studying how communities grow and what makes them successful.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Will

While engineers often work in teams and designers often critique each other's work, I don't have a consistent group that I feel a part of.

I thought this was unique to me and my struggle to be vulnerable with people, but I'm learning that loneliness is a common part of the role:

Why is this? From talking with other PMs (and asking questions on Reddit and Blind), I think it’s a few things:

• We have to be leaders: I notice this when I have to be optimistic about the future of whatever product I'm working on others have the ability to express doubts or concerns.

• Roles are not well-defined: The PM role is relatively new and seemingly everyone has a different take on how it should be defined. This leads us to feel insecure in our knowledge and rely on resources that could be plain wrong because there has yet to be an established framework for success in this role.

• Awkwardness and Politeness: It can be hard to change a relationship from a strictly professional one to a social one. We also may not know how to navigate the culture.

• Unspoken competitiveness: In a role where you're vying for scope, there can be some animosity between PMs. While there are exceptions, people note this as a common theme.

Loneliness isn't a good state for our mental health and can lead to burnout. It’s also hurting our career growth.

All of the big jumps in my career — my first job as a designer, working on winning hackathon projects and my dream role on the WhatsApp Payment team — all stemmed from conversations with inspiring people outside of my current team.

Conversations with other smart people are where I get great ideas, opportunities and advice from someone who is not connected to my day-to-day life.

Loneliness, I'm learning, leads to poor mental health, the inability to have important conversations, and worse career outcomes.

I think this is something we should try to solve as product managers.

👥 Connections versus Friendships

If loneliness is the problem, what's the solution?

I was stumped. But fortunately, my girlfriend (who is smarter than I) shared a famous essay with me to help me think through this problem differently. It was aptly named "The Opposite of Loneliness". Here's the part that hit me (emphasis added):

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life...

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed.

Something clicked. As PMs, we're surrounded by people every day. We have a "community" — colleagues, Slack channels and PMs we occasionally keep in touch with.

We're not lacking PM connections, we're lacking PM friends; people "who are in this together” and “Who are on your team."

Connections are PMs you chat with on Slack, occasionally tweet at, or catch up with quarterly over Zoom. They may be people who you enjoy spending time with at work, but the conversations don't stray too far beyond small talk.

Friends are people who check in on you when things are rough. People who you can bounce crazy ideas off of and who will root you on in whatever you're doing. They don't feel the need to act professionally with you and they are people you'd love to go to a concert, bar or park with. I've been lucky to have some of those in my PM career:

The opposite of loneliness isn't a bigger network; it's real friendship. In our context, friendship with other PMs who you actively want to spend time with.

Building these friendships will help us become happier and significantly improve our career trajectories.

😕 Friends Aren't Prioritized

PM loneliness is not new. In fact, there are many communities trying to help PMs build connections. They break down into a few categories:

• Free-to-access spaces (ex. Product School, PM Facebook Groups, Mind the Product): these are spaces with 20,000-100,000 people interested in product management. They can help you discuss topics (ex. "Should PMs be technical?"), but aren't conducive to building relationships or having 1-1 conversations (the one exception here is Women in Product which I've heard amazing things about).

• Courses (ex. On Deck Product Management, Lenny's Course, Reforge): these can be extremely valuable and I admire folks like Andrew Yu, Lenny Rachitsky and Sachin Rekhi who are leading these cohort-based classes. But the time-commitment (3-10 hours per week), price ($1,000-$5,000) and focus on lectures/workshops can make friendship secondary to education.

• Communities for aspiring PMs (ex. Lewis Lin's Slack channel, Product Buds): these are great for breaking into PM and I like how supportive they tend to be. But they are targeted to new PMs. When I joined as a current PM, I was asked to give mock interviews, review resumes and have coffee chats.

All of these communities serve important roles and have participants who really benefit from them. But at the end of the day, these are primarily about professional connections, education or interviewing. These are helpful, but as Shreyas Doshi puts it, developing relationships with other PMs can do wonders.

This raises the question: what is the right design of a community focused on PM friendships?

❤️ The traits of a good community

I'm incredibly lucky to have been a part of one community where I made real friends in product management: the Rotational Product Manager program at Facebook. Looking back, RPM helped me make some lifelong friends who have already changed the trajectory of my career.

I want to share what this program did exceptionally well to foster friendships. This is not meant to be an advertisement for the RPM program. Instead, it’s a potential blueprint for the type of community that the wider PM industry needs.

Here's how this community created genuine friendships:

🤟 Friendship > Curriculum: during onboarding, we were told time and again that we should spend more time getting to know each other than doing our training modules. We accepted the advice and spent time eating lunches together, going on a trip to Sonoma and going out together on the weekends.

🔒 Small and safe: you can't have meaningful friendships with 1000s of PMs. Our small group of about 15 people allowed us to get to know everyone individually and have intimate conversations that were not performative.

🏃‍♀️ People of the same calibre: we bonded because all of us were equally smart, ambitious and had similar career goals. This community thrived because anyone could reach out and you would be excited to speak with and learn from them.

🌍 Diverse: Homogeneity is boring. Hearing stories from someone with different lived experiences, skillsets and cultural upbringing makes a community exciting and dynamic.

🏦 Investment: Admittance to this community requires rigorous screening and people who had the same goals. It also requires us to go to events and organize things for the community. This made us all feel like we had "skin in the game" for the community to succeed.

🔑 Access: As a small group of high calibre PMs, we could access the most intimate, useful conversations. These included

• 🥗 "Tiny Lunches": 5-6 PMs would have a candid conversation with industry titans like Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Sumo and Chris Cox. These conversations were exponentially more enlightening than fireside chats in front of 1000s of people. Conversations got personal, specific and involved the whole group (rather than a Q&A).

• ⭕️ Circles: Groups of 3-4 PMs and a more senior PM would get together every week to support each other. We'd talk about how things were going on our teams, common themes (ex. performance reviews with our managers) and ask the senior PM for advice.

• 📚 Playbooks: There were onboarding guides, templates to start off with and best practices from people who had been in our shoes before. This gave us a clear playbook to do our job better and shed light on what it takes to get to the next level of our careers.

This community helped me create real friendships with other insanely smart PMs. Outside of friendship, there was an even bigger impact on my career trajectory:

• 📈 Higher performance: RPMs routinely perform at the level of PMs with 2-3x the experience.

• 🧑‍🚀 Exit Opportunities: RPMs are poached to go to places like Stripe, Chime, venture capital or found their own startup. When they stay at Facebook, they excel quickly to leadership.

• 🛣 Proven paths to product leadership: Seeing people in your community go on to do insane things is inspiring. It also helps you understand what you need to do to cross the IC to PM leader chasm. One example is Ashley Yuki, a 2013 RPM who is now the Co-Head of Product at Instagram. Hearing stories from people like this makes our path to becoming product leaders clear.

With all of these incredible attributes, the RPM program had its limitations — I only met people from Facebook and only learned how to do things the Facebook way.

This is where I see an opportunity to build on some of this community design to create something truly unique.

Introducing Product Circle ⭕️

I've spent the last few months working with kick-ass PMs to build the community we've always wanted. We call it Product Circle and applications for the first cohort (20 spots) open today.

Product Circle is designed to be an intimate group for PMs at top startups and companies to build real friendships.

These friendships will create great memories, introductions, opportunities, side-projects, startups, mentorship, ideas and conversations.

Being a member of this community involves:

1. 🤟 Friendships with top PMs: In your first week, we'll introduce you to other PMs with overlapping interests who we think can make for great first friends. We'll host in-real-life (IRL) member events, deep-dives on hot industries (ex. crypto, creator economy) and regular peer coaching sessions (modelled after my experience with "circles" at Facebook).

2. 🔑 Intimate events with product leaders: We know that chats with 5 people are more honest than those with 500. We invite Head of Products, first-PM hires and Directors/VP of Product to have candid, open and practical conversations with our community.

3. 🔒 Conversations you can't have anywhere else: It's hard to speak to your manager about everything. It helps to have a safe space filled with people of the same calibre as you to talk through things like switching teams, product consulting, bias at work and more.

4. 📚 Exclusive Resources: A crowd-sourced vault of the best resources to give you a leg up. Examples include templates on how Spotify plans go-to-market, Unity does product requirements and how Stripe creates a writing culture.

Our guiding principle is friendship > connections. With this mantra, I see us creating a product version of the famed “PayPal Mafia” (but more diverse and thoughtful) with each member going on to build teams, products and industries that move the world forward.

If this sounds like the type of community you want to be a part of, join us.

Apply for Membership

Know someone who could benefit from a community like this? Share this post with them (especially for diverse candidates).

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But how are individuals on the team — including the PM — evaluated? In other words, what's the scorecard our managers use to see if we're top performers or below the pack?

Understanding the scorecard is crucial to make the next big jump in your career. Extending this idea to your product team also lets you build leadership capacity on your team — allowing you to scale your collective impact.

In other words, scorecards are a good thing to understand! Let’s start with…

🏅 The PM Scorecard

Shreyas Doshi created an excellent map of the skills PMs need to demonstrate at different parts of their careers:

He even goes a step further and breaks down the components of each of these senses:

These two charts set a great foundation for the general skillsets you’ll need to develop as a PM.

But here’s a cool thing I’ve learned: you can choose to develop those skills on low-impact projects or high-impact projects. Think about it — you can develop really strong project management skills (“Execution Sense”) by delivering a feature that is not critical to the business or you can apply those same skills on a strategic priority.

To combine skill development with the fastest career growth, look to develop your skillset on company priorities. Seek to understand your leadership’s perspective to identify these priorities.

When I was working on WhatsApp Payments, an area that our leadership was especially interested in was scaling was our compliance platform.

While I was prioritizing P2P payments, I realized that my focus on compliance would be amongst the most impactful things I could do for the business. I stepped up to lead strategy and execution for a series of compliance initiatives.

Because of work, I developed strong skills while having regular check-ins with our VP and a chance to see the broader strategy that I may not be privy to. In the end, the outcome I created benefited the business more than other work I could have done while helping me grow my presence in the company.

In brief, pair your PM scorecard with the highest impact projects to scale your career the fastest.

📭 What if there is no scorecard?

Even better! This is a way to grow from a PM into a product leader — by defining organizational processes that can improve overall product efficiency.

Tell your manager that you'd like to proactively define the evaluation criteria for PMs on your team/in your company. I'd suggest starting these criteria based on Shreyas' map.

Next, be explicit of what actions translate to each “sense” in your company’s culture. For example, in your company, "Analytical Sense" may correspond to setting quarterly goals that are well-informed by data.

Design the skill maps to both optimize for the value each skill provides to the company and the skills people at the company want to learn.

Merging these will require you to talk to other PMs on your team to understand what they see as important for their growth in the company and the skills they personally want to develop.

Finally, align leaders on this scorecard. This is a fantastic way to develop your internal presence by genuinely helping your team to scale.

As a final note on the importance of having a scorecard: scorecards reduce bias. It makes success objective, not subjective to the point of view of particular managers. Standardizing success can help you retain and grow diverse talent in your product team.

👏 The scorecards of your teammates

Let’s expand the concept of a scorecard to other members of the product team. The key idea: if you know how others are evaluated, you can help them grow their leadership abilities.

Why should you care about the growth of your teammates? Three reasons:

1. Build leadership and ownership on the team: chances are that the more senior someone becomes, the more likely their scope will involve leadership, higher-level thinking and strategy. Helping teammates develop these skills will create thought partners and more capacity on your team

2. Collectively do more: having more leadership skills will also increase the raw output on your team. This will allow you to set higher goals, take on new scope and attract more resources.

3. Retention: If you can help people identify a growth path within your team, they are more likely to stay and continue adding value to your product area.

Understand the scorecards of your teammates by asking them how they are evaluated. Have a candid conversation where you share how you’re both evaluated and what your growth plans are. This also helps to strengthen your relationship and demonstrate genuine care for their growth.

With an understanding of their growth plans, you can then set challenges that allow them to grow while increasing the output of your team.

🏁 Summary

1. Identify the business needs that matter most to your leadership. They often have more visibility on the big picture.

2. Being successful in these areas will yield higher rewards/exposure than doing the same tasks on other areas.

3. If there is no scorecard, step up and create one. This will let you take on the scope of a PM leader while growing your visibility within the company.

4. Understand the scorecards of your teammates to help them grow into leaders. This will help you create ownership, collectively do more and retain the best people.

📚 Reads and Resources

To perform at your best, focus on goals not tasks by Paul Adams (shared with me by Adam Kazwell): a short read on improving performance by focusing on outcomes.

Build with Maggie Crowley: a product focussed podcast with nuanced and tactical conversations between great PMs. I liked this episode with Jackie Bavaro.

Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials by a16z: by inner payment nerd loved this chat on tech-enabled solutions for student debt, consumer choice and bureaucracy.

👀 And one more thing…

When I started as a product manager, the thing that changed the game for me, and really helped me grow, wasn’t a newsletter or a course.

It was community.

Communities of ambitious peers, mentors and product leaders helped me make big leaps in my career.

I’ve since learned that building friendships with the right people is the most valuable thing PMs can spend their time on.

Next week, I’ll share what I’ve been working on to help top PMs change the trajectory of their careers.

Stay tuned. ❤️

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

An uproar ensued. Many felt like this was further proof that product managers don't do anything. Others (mostly PMs at other companies) applauded this model. PMs from across the internet weighed in on this method.

John Cutler from Amplitude pointed out one truth to the situation: people were quick to judge with no context.

Today, I want to add some context and share how we define the PM role at Facebook, how our relationship with engineers works in practice and why this model works for us (and perhaps your team too).

The Role of a PM = Execution + Strategy

Since joining Facebook, I've been a PM on four teams across different parts of the company. They were in wildly different areas and the day-to-day responsibilities varied. But the constant was what I was expected to deliver and my working model with engineers.

Product managers at Facebook are responsible for two key outcomes: great strategy and great execution. A former manager explained this principle in a catchier way:

The role of a product manager is to figure out what game we're playing and how we're going to play it.

Strategy is choosing the game we're playing. It’s finding worthwhile areas to invest in and creating a compelling vision for how we can succeed in this game. A great strategy connects to the evolving need of users, aligns with the business’s direction and has a reasonable set of pillars to make progress.

Execution is how we play the game. It’s the day-to-day processes, decisions and actions we take to make progress towards our mission. Execution is what Ben’s tweet was referring to, so I’d like to spend more time here.

In my mind, great execution boils down to nailing two large categories of sub-tasks:

Prioritization involves, roadmapping, estimating impact and deciding on the right features to build. This is an important part of my role and this is the category of execution where I spend the majority of my time.

The other side is process management. The process is everything that is necessary to go from a product brief to a launched and successful outcome.

Doing these sub-tasks well can help create a great execution rhythm. But If a PM were to do all of these for every feature that they were involved in, this would be a full-time role.

And for more junior PMs, this is the full-time role. When I first became a PM, the majority of my day was supporting the execution rhythm of the team. This was project management, Gantt charts, discussing experiment results and writing weekly summaries. When I first started, I was more of a feature manager than a product manager.

But after my first evaluation cycle, I learned a key point: PMs are responsible for the outcomes of the team; the inputs are subjective. For example:

• No one cares that you built a Gantt chart; they care that you delivered the project on time.

• No one cares that you created meeting agendas, wrote weekly emails or created tasks; they care that the project had an impact when shipped.

• No one cares that you wrote SQL queries because your data scientist was on PTO; they care that your goals were reasonable and achieved.

This understanding made me stop defining my role by the tasks I needed to do and instead focus on the output I was responsible for creating.

Let me be clear: PMs are 100% accountable for the results of your team. If your team fails to hit your goals, it’s your neck on the line. Cemre explains this well:

But results are an outcome; the inputs to create that outcome are your team’s decisions. Your goal as a PM should be to find the best combination of inputs to maximize the outcomes of your team. Ray Dalio calls this systematic thinking.

This means you don't need to do every task related to execution. In fact, the only way to scale your role/impact in the org is to begin meta-execution.

Meta-Execution

Meta-execution is executing through others. This is how product directors can steer a team of 200 people without writing tickets, doing experiment reviews or writing weekly updates.

The ability to empower leaders within your team to have more ownership is what separates execution for a PM on a 5 person eng team and a PM who drives a 40 person eng team.

Meta-execution is about empowering leaders within your team to have more ownership. This allows the PM to focus on the problems they are uniquely able to solve.

Let's revisit the list of execution items above. You could stack rank these into a list of items that the PM is uniquely positioned to solve. My view would be:

The ones towards the top of the list are the ones that will always need your attention while the ones on the bottom can be delegated to other leaders on your team.

Meta-execution requires finding capable leaders to drive more execution independently. Once you’ve identified these leaders, empower them with ownership and continue to offer support along the way.

This helps you get to a world where meaningful parts of execution are driven by other team members.

A model like this makes sure you're helping the team execute on the areas where they need your support the most. It also frees up your capacity, which you can then use to define the longer-term strategy for your product area.

Key points:

1. PMs are responsible for the outcomes of the team; the inputs are subjective. Your goal should be to find the best combination of inputs to maximize the outcomes of your team.

2. The more senior a PM you become, the more impact you can have with strategy. Freeing your own capacity while not allowing outcomes to suffer requires meta-execution.

3. But regardless of your delegation abilities, you will stay accountable for execution.

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Empowered Product Teams

You don't need to look far to find criticisms of this method. From Ben's post:

Criticisms like these create an adversarial view between product and engineering. It's saying that PMs have certain tasks they need to do and engineers have others.

This criticism is only valid when teams do not decide what to build. If you don’t decide what to build, then all that matters is how you deliver the project that was assigned to you.

If your team does decide what to build, then the outcome you create is how you’ll be judged — not “who does what”.

This is what Marty Cagan refers to as the difference between empowered and non-empowered teams.

In most companies, technology teams exist “to serve the business.”  That is very often the literal phrase you will hear. But even if they aren’t explicit about it, the different parts of the business end up driving what is actually built by the technology teams.

However, in contrast, in strong product organizations, teams exist for a very different purpose.  They exist “to serve the customers, in ways that meet the needs of the business.”

This perfectly highlights the contrast. At Facebook, product teams decide what is the best thing to build and are responsible for the outcomes.

In this world, there is a significant amount of work on understanding the customer, user, business and market needs for what you're building. This is why a PM focussed solely on execution is a sign of a non-empowered team. Dare captures this well:

If your team is responsible for outcomes, engineers are happy to drive parts of the execution if it enables the PM to find the most impactful outcome to create.

When engineers are evaluated on the impact they create (ex. grew DAU by +5%), they want the projects that can deliver massive impact. If I were in their shoes, I’d much rather my PM spend time finding these projects rather than managing the tasks of the project I’m working on.

Key points:

• Empowered product teams are responsible for outcomes, not inputs. This is why people take on tasks outside of their traditional roles (to support the outcome).

• On an empowered product team, everyone thinks about the best way to improve the outcome. This may involve changing the inputs (ex. engineers drive parts of execution so PMs can identify the right areas to focus on).

• The best way for a PM to help an engineer is to ensure they are working on the most impactful work.

From the Engineers POV

Let’s go deeper into the perspective of an engineer.

In an empowered product team, all engineers think about the outcomes of the team. They are involved in prioritization, work with cross-functional partners (ex. design, data science) and are evaluated on the impact they create — not the lines of code they write.

Dominik Krejcik wrote an excellent description of what it’s like being a tech lead on an empowered product team:

Being a tech lead in an empowered product team is not a purely technical role. In addition to your typical engineering duties, you are a part of the product manager/tech lead/product designer trifecta and you collaborate on product decisions.

Collaborating on product decisions is possible when engineers have ownership over an area. A way for engineers to grow their ownership is by driving meaningful parts of execution.

Communicating progress, leading experimentation and driving project management will make the engineer the face of the product and necessitate their inclusion in important decisions.

Here are some ways I’ve seen engineers and PMs work together to drive execution:

• Creating roadmaps: PM drives the process (with input from everyone) to find the most impactful projects. Once they have been prioritized and the project has been kicked off, engineers own the solution and track progress towards milestones.

• Communication: Engineers will drive meetings, documentation and general communication for the feature they are supporting. More senior eng will drive progress for larger areas. PMs will drive meetings, documentation and project management for the entire team.

• Project management: PMs create the execution structure (ex. recurring meetings, project tracker, milestones check-ins) and engineers drive it. Engineers who lead these meetings are responsible for raising blockers and support each other for hitting the goals. The PM plugs into the parts of execution that they can best support

These engineers drive execution to develop skills, be involved in product decisions and earn the ability to take on more ambiguous problems.

Key points:

• Empowered engineers want to collaborate on product decisions. Driving execution is a great way to develop ownership and become included in important decisions.

• PMs and engineers should work together to make sure that execution is well-handled. If there are gaps in the process, the PM should aim to fix them.

Putting this All-Together

When a team is evaluated on outcomes, they adjust their inputs to have the most impact. While we’ve spoken about engineers taking on execution tasks, there are many other permutations of this concept:

• If a PM can free up a tech lead’s time to architect a large-scale problem, the PM should jump in.

• If a designer can drive the project management to allow a PM to formalize a new partnership, the designer should jump in.

• If data science needs leadership buy-in to finalize goals, PMs can jump in to drive that alignment.

This is because the product team is, in fact, a team. It’s not a series of individual roles who sit next to each other.

Imagine a football/soccer team where strikers refused to play defence because that wasn’t their role. This is what some of the gripes on Ben’s original post sound like.

Product managers are leaders on a team. Not because we have any authority, but because we are responsible for the long-term outcomes of our teams.

Sometimes, it’s in the best interest of our teams for the PM to take a step back from execution to develop leaders on the team, define long-term plans and make sure we’re working on the absolute highest priority items.

Thanks for reading. It took me a while to frame my ideas on this topic so I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on Twitter. If you enjoyed this read, share it with a friend:

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See you next week,

Will

After roadmapping, prioritization and defining success for your projects, it’s time to start executing. Enter the kickoff meeting. This meeting brings all stakeholders onto the same page, defines ownership and creates momentum around execution.

When done right, kickoff meetings can help to empower your team to drive progress independently. It can be seen as passing the baton from the PM, the person who often defines the feature, to the lead builders on your team. 

Successfully passing the baton is an art.

When I first became a PM, I didn’t think I needed to pass it at all. Isn’t the role of a PM to lead projects? While this is true initially, to scale yourself and take on more scope, you need to empower leaders on your team to drive execution so you can spend time defining the direction of your product.

Below I’ll share my process towards kickoff meetings — an invaluable tool to scale your leverage.

Why are kickoffs useful?

1. Create ownership within your team: to successfully scale your team, you need multiple leaders. One litmus test of how centralized your leadership is: would your team fall apart if you were sick for a week? Kickoff meetings help to establish new owners to drive projects.

2. Create clarity: kickoffs ensure that everyone has all the details, context and definition necessary to make the project succeed. 

3. Create excitement and momentum: finally, kickoffs are a great opportunity to install excitement, urgency and purpose into a project. 

Before the meeting

Find owners: On any given project, there are several product team members involved. This may include designers, engineers, data scientists, product marketing managers or any other number of roles. It’s important to find 1-2 members who have the knowledge and capacity to drive progress.

Often, these are the people who will be closest to the project. If this is a front-end heavy feature, for example, a designer may be well-suited to drive progress. If its an analytics heavy, this may be the team data scientist.

One thing that is not variable is that this person must have the capacity and ability to lead the project. These people are looking to grow their scope and are on a track to a formal leadership role (ex. Engineering manager) on the team.

Define the product: regardless of the owner, the PM still needs to define the project. Loop in the owners early to get their ideas, but ensure that you have a product spec or product requirements doc defined.

Huddle with owners to ensure that you are all aligned: With owners defined and a product spec ready, ensure that the leads are aligned on the requirements and what will be necessary to succeed. Tactically, this will allow them to answer all of the questions from their teammates in the kickoff meeting and beyond — allowing them to be seen as the project leader.

Ask an owner to schedule and drive the kickoff: This puts them in the right spot to drive the meeting and be the point of contact for questions that arise in the future. Be available if they need support (ex. “Loop me in if you need my help.”).

Include stakeholders: Include all relevant team members in the meeting. It may also include people who want to be aware of progress (ex. A sales team member who wants to understand timelines for a project their client has been requesting).

Suggest topics to cover: topics I like to suggest are:

1. Why are we building this (i.e. the wider context)?

2. How did we decide to work on this project over others?

3. The product brief

4. Any initial designs or engineering architecture

5. Next steps and timelines

During the meeting

Understand the two purposes of a kickoff:

1. For the team: the purpose of the meeting is to get concrete next steps on how this project will be executed. People should leave the meeting with action items, a clear understanding of why we’re building this product, and excitement.

2. For the PM: the purpose is to empower owners to drive the project independently. This will help maximize the impact of your team, get the most value from individual team members and free your capacity to work on projects that demand your attention.

Volunteer to take notes: this is a value add that allows the owner to focus on driving the meeting. It’s also a general best practice for PMs.

Do not lead, but play your role: although there will be owners driving the meeting, you may be called upon to share product-specific details. These may include the product vision, how it aligns with broader strategy or any external dependencies that you will help to resolve.

If the owner forgets, ask about the next steps towards the end of the meeting: this makes sure there are next steps and accountability to drive progress.

After the meeting

Congratulate the project leads: this is just a nice thing to do! It also shows appreciation for their leadership.

Pro-tip: give the next steps you’ve documented to the owners to share out. I will literally type out the next steps, action items and timeline and encourage the person who led the meeting to share it out. This reinforces that they are leading and driving the project from here on out.

Take the back seat but be available: with owners now driving progress, be sure to make yourself available to unblock, help or support in any helpful way.

Summary

The kick-off meeting is one of my favourite tools for creating ownership within your team. It allows teams members to step up and grow their skillset while freeing up your capacity to focus on strategy or more involving execution projects.

1. Kickoffs should create clear ownership, project clarity and excitement for the work being started.

2. Before the meeting, find owners and make sure they are aligned with the plan. Encourage them to schedule and set the agenda for the meeting.

3. During the meeting, support the owners by taking notes and sharing the pieces they feel are necessary (ex. Product vision).

4. After the meeting, congratulate them and give them the next steps to share widely. Be available to support where necessary.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

📚 Great reads, watches and listens

🤝 Being a Tech Lead in an Empowered Product Team: This read captures the ideal team state for a product team. In it, you’ll see tech leads doing far more than engineering.

🤑 Life Advice: Become a Billionaire: A quasi-empirical argument for why you should aim to be a billionaire. A fun and thought-provoking read!

🛬 How to write landing pages: As I work on a new project now, I’m amazed at how little I know about copywriting. This is a great resource for those building side projects.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

Hey, I'm Will. A few years ago, I was keen on applying to Facebook's Rotational Product Manager program. The one problem: I didn’t know anyone at the company and hadn’t done product manager interviews before. I spent hours Googling, practicing and reading books, guides and resources. Fortunately, I was able to get the job.

Recruitment for programs like RPM are very competitive. Given the massive demand for these roles, interview-prep companies are charging $500+ for courses on how to get through the interviews. These courses are problematic because it gives an unfair advantage to people who can afford these premium resources.

Below, I'll share all the advice I wish I had when going through product management recruitment. The goal of doing this is to “level the playing field” and make sure everyone has the knowledge they need to succeed.

I especially hope that this guide is helpful to people from diverse backgrounds — including underrepresented ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds and varying educational pedigree.

We desperately need more people like you in the tech industry. Don’t be discouraged because you’re not from school X, have experience at company Y or know skill Z. Please, please, please use this guide and apply to this program.

Alright, let’s jump in.

Table of contents (click to jump to that section):

1. Introduction

2. The Application Process

3. Frequently Asked Questions

4. Resume Advice

5. Interview Overview

6. Best Practices and Tips

7. The RPM Experience

8. Closing Thoughts

Note: This guide includes resources that I personally recommend and if you do sign up, I may earn a few bucks from partners. This helps me keep writing resources like these!

Introduction

Facebook's Rotational Product Management (RPM) program is an 18-month program for people with less than one year of product management experience. RPMs have a chance to rotate through three different teams across the company over six-month periods.

As an RPM, you’ll have a lot of support, including:

1. A manager to support your 18-month journey

2. Managers on each rotation to help you succeed in the day-to-day 

3. A mentor to help you ramp up

4. A “circle” of other RPMs to crowdsource knowledge from

5. A broad alumni network (in and out of Facebook)

6. Program managers to support the program and your individual growth

I say this to highlight that you do not need to be an expert product manager on Day 1. You’re expected to grow and learn as time goes on. 

I started at Facebook as an RPM in the summer of 2019. I wrote about my four-year journey to Facebook and my 18-months as an RPM in more detail if this is helpful.

The Application Process

How do I apply for the RPM Program

We hire RPMs once a year for two start dates in the following calendar year. There are five Facebook offices that support RPMs: Menlo Park, Seattle, New York City, London, and Tel Aviv. Applications open on July 26th on the Facebook Careers page. We encourage you to sign up for alerts there, so you are notified when applications go live.

Your application to the program will require a resume and responses to short answer questions. These questions will be emailed to the applicant automatically by CodeSignal after a resume is submitted through Facebook Careers. Applicants will have 24 hours to submit answers to the short response questions (estimated time to complete: 1 hour).

Application Timeline for 2023 Start Dates

• July 18, 2022: Applications open.

Who is the ideal candidate?

RPMs are hired from various backgrounds. We look for people with full-time experience or recent graduates.

We actively seek applicants with no tech experience. RPM is suited for individuals completely new to the product manager (PM) function.

Individuals with more than one year of PM experience, including PM internships, should apply for Product Manager roles listed at Facebook Careers.

[Added July 2022] If you feel like you’re missing any experiences, LinkedIn Learning is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you might be missing to be a strong candidate. Claim your free month here.

Frequently Asked Questions

There is a complete list of FAQs with the following questions on the RPM website:

• Who is the ideal candidate for the RPM program?

• How long is the RPM program?

• How is Product Management at Facebook different from other companies?

• What does a ‘day in the life’ of a Facebook RPM look like?

• What kind of mentorship is available to RPMs?

• What happens after the program?

• How do I apply to the RPM program?

• Is RPM a remote-eligible position?

• How can I prepare for the interview process?

• Is there anything else I should know about applying?

Here are some more FAQs that I’m often asked:

1. Do I need a technical background (i.e. do I need to code)? 

   1. No. Many RPMs come from backgrounds in finance, marketing or consulting. That said, exposure to technology and engineering is always a bonus.

2. Would you recommend the program?

   1. 100%. I learned a ton in 18 months (and wrote about my experience in detail here).

3. Is this program only for recent graduates?

• No. It’s for people with little to no PM experience, including existing professionals or new graduates. In my year, roughly 75% of RPMs were experienced hires.

1. What are some example rotations?

   1. Growth of Facebook Watch, Launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil, AR Commerce features, Oculus VR experiences, Instagram Stories, Building Portal. Nearly every part of Facebook is accessible to RPMs.

Resume Advice

Now with the logistics out of the way, let me start sharing some advice.

Here’s a brutal truth - 97% of applicants don’t get an interview. This data may be old, but it was my experience once I saw the hiring funnel.

If you’re like me and are applying without a referral, without a coaching service or without connections at the company, the best way to get an interview is to have a killer resume.

I made hundreds of resumes during my job hunt. I’ve also read dozens of guides and articles on how to write the best one. I want to share my general philosophy on resumes and then more details on each section. If you need more help, I’ll share some resources that I wish I had when applying.

Overall Principles of a Great Resume

Specific to the job

Every bullet point should be concrete and speak to your candidacy for the role. Remove filler or vague words (common culprits: “various,” “managing,” “impact”). Every word should speak to your qualifications for the specific role you're applying to.

Bad bullet point: Managed various social media channels for a multinational firm by being proactive, hard-working and excellent at communication.

Better bullet point: Led team of 3 (2 marketers, 1 engineer) to execute a referral program for a SaaS project, leading to $50,000 in new revenue and 120 new customers.

Impact

Ideally, every bullet point should show the outcome you’ve created

Bad bullet point: Led user research on our products

Better bullet point: Synthesized qualitative user research from 23 usability tests into actionable tickets in Visual Studio; worked with engineers to improve the user experience and confirm the build meets the user specifications.

Simple

Please just choose a simple resume template. No fancy graphics, colours or multiple columns are necessary. The goal of your resume's style is to be easily readable. You will not get "bonus points” for cool logos or visuals.

[Added May 2022] If you need more help with your resume, I made a kit that includes the resume I used to apply for the RPM program. Here it is.

Sections

My suggestion would be to have five sections: Header, Experience, Education, Projects and Skills.

A Note on the ‘Summary’ section

Some people like to include a summary section. My advice is only to include this section if you have significant experience in a field very different from product management.

Bad summary section: 10+ years experience managing teams, leading product development and creating business impact.

• Why is this bad? Because it's redundant with your experience section.

Better summary section: I'm a Ph.D. physicist who is fascinated with consumer behaviour. I'm looking to apply my rigorous academic background to the world of product management.

• Why is this better? If your resume is made specific to the job, many of your experiences as a Ph.D. physicist will not be on your resume. This summary also creates a strong, memorable narrative for your experiences. 

Header

Your name, email address and phone number are the essential information.

• Social profiles (ex. link to Twitter, LinkedIn or Github): include these if you're incredibly proud of the content on them. Most recruiters won't check these but interviewers later in the process might.

• Location: Resume best practices say that you should include this.

Style: Make your name legible and slightly larger than your header titles.

Experience

This is the most critical section in the resume. My main suggestion would be to follow this excellent guide from a former Google Recruiter: How to Wow Recruiters With Your Resume.

In addition to that guide, here are some tips that I would add:

• Each bullet point should tie to one of the responsibilities of a PM. These include leadership, design, working with engineers, project management, data analysis and communication.

• Every single point should be relevant. If an experience isn’t relevant, take it off your resume. This may feel painful, but it helps to strengthen your resume.

• Fill in the gaps with side projects. You may notice some gaps in your skillsets and experiences. Note these down and aim to fill them in with projects (more on this below).

Education

My main advice: keep it simple. You won't get hired because of your academic background. Education should go under your experience section unless you went to a very recognizable university (ex. Stanford, Oxford).

Use the education section to highlight the points from your degree that are most relevant to the role. Again, remove irrelevant information. 

Example Education Section:

The University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (Economics)

• Courses Include: Python Programming, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Design Thinking

• Extracurricular: 2015 Campus hackathon winner, mentor for Girls Who Code

Projects

I’m a huge believer in projects. These are things you do outside of your day job or core curriculum to advance your interests. On a resume, they are a great way to fill in your skills gap. My general philosophy: build the experiences you need.

I was an economics undergraduate with work experience in user experience design and analytics. The glaring gap in my product management resume was a lack of technical expertise (ex. working with engineers). I used the projects section to highlight three projects I worked on with engineers at hackathons. Here’s one of those bullet points:

• Tumblr HackDay​ – Led a team of 3 (2 engineers, 1 data scientist) to build a new Tumblr mobile interface for casual users; won 4tth ​place across the entire company (40+ competing teams)

If you have gaps in your skillset, I’d also recommend taking a short course. This will give you something to put on your resume to fill that gap. 

LinkedIn Learning has 14,000+ courses and is offering readers of this guide 1 free month to learn all the product, design and technical skills you’re missing. Claim your free month here.

Skills [Optional]

This is a section to list out the tools and skills that you’re proficient in. Use this to highlight relevant skills (ex. Python, Figma) and not generic ones (ex. Microsoft Word, hard-working).

If you need more help on resumes…

I made a Resume Kit that has the templates, advanced strategies and resources I wish I had when applying for product roles. It includes:

1. The actual resume template (DOCX, PDF) I used to land my product role at Facebook (and still use to this day)

2. 40+ of the best experience bullet points I’ve seen from 100s of resume reviews

3. 10 advanced strategies to making your resume stand out

4. A PDF copy of The Associate Product Manager Playbook

5. Resume reviews for a limited amount of people

I made this kit because I’ve seen firsthand how a strong resume can change lives.

As we discussed, 97% of candidates don't get interviews — and I hope this resource can significantly improve your odds of being part of the 3%.

Get the Resume Kit

Interview Overview

There are three stages of the interview:

1. Phase 1: Phone Screen

2. Phase 2: Execution and Product Sense Technical Interviews

3. Phase 3: "Onsite" Loop (will be VC because of COVID) - Execution, Product Sense and Leadership and Drive

The good thing about the RPM interview process is that there are many resources to succeed. Googling will lead you to example questions, resources and mock interview videos.

But if you’re at the interview stage, you have a serious chance of landing a high-paying job. I bought some resources at this stage and it turned out to be an extremely high return on investment (ROI).

When it comes to paid interview resources, many of them are overpriced. There are two that I’d personally recommend as being very high ROI:

Exponent: the most comprehensive platform, courses and community for PM interview prep. They have a suite of courses, practice exercises and coaching services to help you land the job.

Rocketblocks: I loved using Rocketblocks to build my product sense, analytical skills and segmentation. The exercises are great and were great for digging into gaps in my skillset.

Lean on these resources to practice — because you’ll need a lot of practice for these interviews! Here’s my advice for specific RPM interview stages:

Phone Screen

The goal of the phone screen is to do a non-technical screen of your candidacy. In my mind, they are looking for two main things: communication skills and alignment with the job description criteria.

Communication skills: This is the most critical part of the interviewing process. If you can practice one thing, I’d prioritize your communication. Strong communication means three things: 

1. Structured

2. Concise

3. The ability to tell stories

Excellent communication is out of scope for this guide. I’d suggest looking at more resources to develop this skill set. Here is one course that I’ve heard positive things about (with a two-month free trial to Skillshare): Communication Skills: Become More Clear, Concise, & Confident. 

A recruiter may assess your communication skills by asking open-ended questions like “Tell me about yourself” or “Tell me about a project you’re proud of.”.

Alignment with job criteria: Just as your resume aims to qualify you for every part of the job description, recruiters may look to confirm that you meet the job requirements in the phone screen. For example, if you lack design experience, anticipate questions like “What’s your favourite product and why?

If you’ve made it this far, you may enjoy my newsletter Product Life. Join 10,000+ product managers who are growing their careers by subscribing below:

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Execution Interviews

Key question of the interview: how do you prioritize and make decisions involving metrics?

Example question: You’re the PM for Instagram Stories. What’s your North Star metric?

Some friends of mine who are ex-Facebook PMs wrote a great guide on how to prepare for the Execution interview. Rather than rehash it, I suggest you lean on their advice.

Product Sense Interviews

Key question of the interview: How do you take an ambiguous problem space and turn it into a creative solution?

Example question: You’re the PM for Facebook Dating. What do you build next?

As an interviewer, I can share that we’re looking for people who can set a strong product mission/vision, define the right audience to build for and prioritize the right solution to build for this audience.

Here are two ways to practice for this interview:

1. Create practice questions by going through the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp apps. I would literally open the app, find a section of the product and then try a product sense question. For example, I’d open Facebook, see the Marketplace tab and then ask myself, “You’re the PM for Marketplace. What do I build next?”. This will help you learn the apps and practice applying your process in new situations.

2. Do product sense drills: Practice brainstorming, segmenting users and thinking of a creative solution. If you want situations to practice, this is where I again recommend using a tool like RocketBlocks.

Here’s an example product sense interview.

Leadership and Drive

This interview tests a candidate’s ability to support, build and lead their team. Again, I’ll share a resource from a Facebook PM who has shared the best way to succeed in this interview.  

Best Practices and Tips

Perfect the resume first: Don't worry about interviews until you're 100% confident in your resume. If you need more help with your resume, I shared the resume resources I wish I had here.

Get people to review your resume: Ask friends, mentors, professional contacts, recruiters or other product managers to give you critical feedback.

Define your narrative: Concisely explain your background in a narrative format. This will be deployed multiple times during the interview process. Here's how I do mine:

• Hey there, I'm Will. I'm a product manager at Facebook working on gaming monetization. Before this, I was a PM on a few other products like WhatsApp Payments, Watch and Memorialization. Before coming to Facebook, I studied Economics at university. I'm a writer and am excited by the creator economy and international money movement.

Not every experience is relevant: I was proud of an experience I had in high school and thought I would always have it on my resume. But mid-way through my university experience, it no longer became relevant to the jobs I was applying to. I made the hard decision to take it off my resume and prioritize some of my internship experience. This made my overall resume much stronger and cleaner.

Not all of your experience will be relevant to being an RPM. You have two choices in this situation: Remove it from your resume or adjust your experience to make it directly tied to the job description (see here on how to do that).

Build your experiences with projects and courses: If you’re missing experiences that are relevant to the job, build those experiences yourself. I’d recommend claiming a free month of LinkedIn Learning and taking some courses to fill your gaps.

Your background gets you to the interview; performance gets you the job: This was my mantra during interview prep. If you pass the phone screen, it’s all about how well you do on the problems in the interview. This was comforting for me during the interview process. 

Practice, practice, practice. When I had my interviews scheduled, I was practicing for ~5 hours a day. A great self-study tool that I recommend is Rocketblocks. Regardless of how awesome you are, you can always benefit from more practice!

Apply to multiple programs: While this guide was specific to Facebook’s Rotational PM program, I’d encourage you to also apply to other similar programs at places like Uber, Google and Twitter. It’s common to interview for all of them and join the one that is the best fit (and gives you an offer, of course).

If you need more help, here are two more detailed guides I wrote:

1. The Associate Product Manager (APM) Playbook: The definitive, 25-page guide on resumes and interviews from an APM alumni

2. The Product Manager Resume: an In-Depth Guide: All of the templates, tips and examples I wish I knew when applying for product manager and associate product manager roles

The RPM Experience

In this section, I want to share my background before entering RPM and some details on my experience in the program. The goal is to show that 1) people from very different backgrounds can enter the program, 2) the program is worth the effort put into the recruiting process!

My background before entering RPM

1. Studied Economics at a university in Canada (non-target for Facebook recruiting). An average student involved in entrepreneurship extracurriculars.

2. Internships at Microsoft as a User Experience Designer, Tumblr as a Business Analyst, a startup called Siftery as a Growth Intern and a final one as a business operations intern at an ad-tech company in China.

3. I went to a few hackathons, worked on a side project with local entrepreneurs and wrote content online.

If you want more details, I deep dive into my background and four-year journey to Facebook.

My RPM Experience

I loved my experience as an RPM. I joined a cohort that was a 50/50 split of recent graduates and experienced hires. My rotations were:

1. Supporting the Bereaved/Profile Memorialization

2. Watch Growth

3. Launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil

If you want more details, I did a deep dive into my 18 months as an RPM.

Closing Thoughts

Above are all of the tips I would give someone in a coffee chat about the RPM program, applications and interviews. I hope they are helpful.

The final tip I want to share: apply. You can’t get the job (or any jobs for that matter) if you don’t apply. Don’t disqualify yourself because you feel like you don’t belong in this program or tech in general. 

Please do share this guide with anyone else who may find it valuable. Especially consider diverse people in your networks who may benefit from this advice.

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Good luck with the applications!

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Two years ago, I joined Facebook as a Rotational Product Manager (RPM). This is a role designed for people new to product management, and it offers them the chance to rotate through three teams across Facebook (the company) over an 18 month period.

This experience changed the trajectory of my life and career. It’s also an experience I get a lot of questions about. Today, I want to share the story of my 18 months as an RPM, my three rotations and the lessons I learned along the way.

For those interested, applications for the RPM program open on July 26th and we’re hiring for our offices in Menlo Park, Seattle, New York and London. I wrote about my 4-year journey to the RPM program here.

I’m also writing a short guide that shares all of my application, resume and interview advice for the program. If this sounds useful, reply to this email. If you’re reading this on the website, subscribe below and respond to the welcome email.

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Finally, this won’t be a short article — I’d like to tell you the full story, so you really understand what being an RPM is like. Alright, let’s do it.

👍 Ramping Up

After 5 months of backpacking through Asia with my girlfriend, I relocated from Vancouver, Canada, to Menlo Park, USA.

On my first day, I arrived at 1 Hacker Way, Facebook’s global headquarters, with a sense of wonder. People zipped around on bikes, gathered in courtyards eating free breakfast and sipped smoothies on their way to meetings.

Over the first four weeks, this sense of wonder remained. We had some training around engineering, data science and product basics. But more importantly, we had time to get to know our managers and the rest of our cohort of RPMs.

My manager was an awesome, extremely experienced PM named Matt. We hit it off, and I remember pouring out my life story to him on Day 1. He would be my manager for the full 18-month program, helping me grow my career and improve as a product manager.

If I could use one word to describe my cohort of fellow RPMs, it would be impressive. These people had impeccable credentials and really great personalities. We spent time ramping up together and exploring the Bay Area — including a winery trip to Sonoma, hikes near Sausalito and happy hours in San Francisco.

It soon came time to jump into our first rotations. Before we joined Facebook, the RPM program director sent us all an email and asked us what we were interested in working on. These would inform our first rotations. Here’s the list I shared:

On my second last day of training, I woke up to a post in an internal group with the title “R1 RPM Rotations for H2 2019”. I fumbled with my phone to open it up.

I scrolled down and found my name next to a project called “Profile Memorialization/Supporting the Bereaved on Facebook.” I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but my immediate next action was googling the word “bereaved”.

💐 Rotation 1: Death 101 and learning the game

A few days later, I officially started my first rotation on Facebook’s Memorialization team. This team tackled an incredibly important problem: creating positive experiences (and minimizing negatives ones) for the bereaved on Facebook.

Training had given me a rough idea of where I should start: have 1:1s with all of my teammates, understand how I can start adding value and speaking with my manager about where I can have the most impact.

But nothing could prepare me for my second day of work. My team had two user researchers — people with incredible academic backgrounds who help to understand the qualitative nuance of building in specific spaces. They had organized a session for me that they called, “Death 101”.

We spent two hours going through the latest research on death online, where people seek comfort during bereavement and how our products fit into their journey.

It was heavy. But it impressed on me the importance of what the team was doing.

The first six weeks were dedicated to understanding the team, our products and my role on the team. My manager on this rotation was a veteran PM who was exceptionally strong in creating direction in an ambiguous area. She eased me into the role by allowing me to shadow her in a few meetings, letting me ask any question (no matter how dumb) and sharing her views on where the team could go.

From this rotation, one of the items that really stuck with me was my manager’s definition of the product manager’s responsibility:

Product managers decide what game we’re playing and how we’re playing it.

Succinct and to the point, it helped me understand that I needed to know “which game” before making rash decisions on how to play it.

After six weeks on the team, I was able to start driving new projects rather than supporting existing ones. This started with a brainstorm around a new team strategy that the leadership team had been discussing for a while.

From here, we voted on the ones with the highest impact to effort ratio. We came to a great shortlist of a few ideas.

I took these ideas back and decided to work with relevant people to scope them out. If it was a design-heavy project, for example, I worked with our designer to define it. This led us to define some initial product briefs — documents that outline the goal of a product, the details of what we would build it and how we’ll measure success.

Midway through the six months, I felt like a true part of the team. I led our weekly meetings, worked with engineers on features and was accountable for deliverables. At this moment I felt like I understood the broad strokes of the role.

I was also beginning to think more about our strategy. While I inherited a charter, my research into “what game we’re playing” led me to conversations with our leadership team to understand how our team was in line with the broader Facebook strategy.

I struggled to manage these strategy explorations with the day-to-day execution (project management, feature definition, communication). I felt like I needed to be involved with every detail of the project for it to succeed. I eventually realized this was unsustainable and began to loosen my attachment to any individual feature to think about the direction for the next six months after I left

As my time on the team was coming to an end, I thought about what else I wanted to learn at Facebook. Being a cult follower of Chamath Palihapitiya, I knew that I wanted to spend some time working on a consumer growth team at Facebook. Facebook is best known for the growth PM archetype— moving incredibly fast, being analytical and scaling things internationally. I knew I’d kick myself if I left Facebook without learning this skill set.

For your second and third rotations as an RPM, teams submit projects and RPMs are encouraged to speak to these teams to find a good fit. I spoke to about 10 teams, all of whom were hiring an RPM to focus on growth. Eventually, I landed on a team with insane growth, a great manager and an even stronger PM culture: Facebook Watch.

Lessons from Memorialization

• The role of a product manager is to decide what game your team is playing and how you’ll play it

• Stepping back from the day-to-day is critical in order to think about long-term strategy

• Give yourself enough time to understand the nuances of your space before pushing new initiatives

• I wrote a whole article on specific product lessons I learned from memorialization.

If you’ve made it this far, you may enjoy my newsletter Product Life. Join thousands of product managers who are growing their careers by subscribing below:

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📈 Rotation 2: Growth, Covid Surge and Execution

Watch was growing at a dizzying pace. It felt like every month we were passing an insane new milestone. I was keen to jump in and learn how to develop my execution skills, my knowledge of growth principles and my ability to use data.

My area of ownership was Activation — getting new people to try Watch and become active users.

In Memorialization, the goals were hard to define which made product intuition the key area to develop. This was the opposite of Growth: the goal extremely well-defined (“get more users”) and it was all about how we would do that.

From day 1, my role was to understand which users were the most important to activate (“what game we’re playing”) and how we would activate them (“how we’ll play it”). This may sound simple, but at Facebook’s scale, there are thousands of cohorts, billions of data points and limited time/resources to have an impact.

Fortunately, Watch had an incredible group of product managers who I could spend time with and learn from. My manager was a rockstar PM who excelled in driving execution across a broad portfolio — the exact skill set I wanted to develop during my time on Watch.

I also benefitted a lot from time with our Growth lead. He was an MIT physicist turned McKinsey consultant turned growth product manager extraordinaire. He shared a lot of practical advice around navigating my career.

I learned that being a growth product manager is about making changes in the product that increase its discoverability, engagement, retention or monetization. These changes make up a portfolio of two types of projects: short-term, incremental tactics and long-term, habit-changing products.

I started on the former. These involved defining features, working with design to determine the experience, supporting engineering as they built it and working with analytics to review the experiment results. I was shocked at how fast this cycle would move. For some projects, it went from idea to public launch in 4-6 weeks. And these weren’t all minor changes - sometimes they would bring millions of new people into the product every day.

The long-term bets, however, required partnerships with other parts of the company. One, for example, was working closely with the Facebook News Feed team to identify long-term opportunities to boost the discoverability of videos in the feed. This involved more strategy alignment, escalating areas where we did not have consensus and then collaborating on a bigger project.

In the middle of my rotation, the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns started to sweep the world. With people stuck at home, more people were spending time on enjoying videos on Facebook.

The area I was responsible for, activation, saw a huge surge. But with the surge upon us we realized the need to improve our first-time user experience (FTUX) to make sure those new users came back.

I decided to lead this sprint as it was a natural extension of my scope. It involved creating a new strategy, aligning quickly with our leadership, and executing a series of brand-new features. This challenged me to grow my leadership skills and ability to tackle critical projects.

Towards the end of my rotation, I started to feel confident in my execution abilities. At this point, I wanted to find a team where I could develop my strategy skillset and work on an area I was especially passionate about.

Remember the list of teams I said I was interested in before I joined Facebook? WhatsApp Payments was #1 on the list. I did my undergraduate thesis on mobile money in Kenya and was passionate about financial inclusion.

I listened in on the WhatsApp Payments All-Hands and was impressed by one of the product leads. I sent her a message afterwards and asked her to submit an RPM project to take me on. Two months later, I joined her team to support the launch and growth of WhatsApp Payments in Brazil.

Lessons from Watch

• When you’ve nailed a strong direction, you can focus on perfect execution.

• Choose a team for the product managers you’ll ultimately work with. These are the people whose habits and skills you’ll adopt.

• Seek opportunities to extend your scope in order to grow.

💸 Rotation 3: Money, Stakeholders and Brazil

Six days before joining the team, the Brazilian Central Bank suspended the roll-out of WhatsApp P2P to “preserve an adequate competitive environment” (source). This was my first clue into how visible and high-level the work was going to be.

At this point, I had become pretty good at ramping up. Joining the payments space, however, was a whole different animal. In addition to the product teams, there was a whole suite of roles involved. This involved:

• Go-to-market teams like product marketing, partnerships, operations and customer support.

• External payment companies that we were working with for the launch like Mastercard, Visa, Cielo and Nubank.

• Compliance, legal and risk teams to ensure that we were following the laws, making informed policy decisions and following financial regulations like Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC).

• Technologists with payment expertise like partner engineers, solutions engineers, external consultancies and technical program managers.

With all these roles and the news of suspension in Brazil, my role quickly evolved into supporting the relevant moving parts to support going live again.

[While I usually try to be open with my experiences, I won’t go into as much detail given the sensitive nature of this work.]

Product management in payments was wildly different from my past two rotations. The PM in this area was more responsible than ever to build alignment, define a path forward and then lead execution on it.

Tactically, this meant that I did a lot more decision-making frameworks than I did product briefs. It also meant closer collaboration with leadership teams to make sure our strategy was coherent.

My manager in this rotation was incredible and held me to a high standard. She didn’t care if I was an RPM, she expected me to operate at the same level as the more senior PMs on her team. I appreciated this and found myself growing immensely under her mentorship.

A lot of the impact I had that half involved scaling up new teams to tackle areas of the payment stack that would be necessary to roll out the product to different markets. At times, this would mean defining strategy, targets and an execution plan for workstreams that involved 50+ people. More than anything, this decision taught me leadership and the skills necessary to coordinate large teams.

Towards the end of my rotation, we were able to land important strategies for the growth of WhatsApp Payments, scale platforms to help us meet high levels of compliance and support other payment initiatives across the company.

Lessons from Payments

I actually shared a Twitter thread with all of my specific learnings from this rotation. Have a look:

In closing

Looking back with some time to reflect, I’m so grateful for my 18 months as a Rotational Product Manager.

It really was an accelerated path to being a strong product manager. It also gave me the chance to meet great people along the way. I want to close with some of the high-level lessons I learned from my experience:

1. People > Area: While learning the nuances of a space is great, its ultimately your manager, teammates and mentors that will determine how fast you’ll grow.

2. When starting out, prioritise execution over strategy: Strategy is sexy and everyone wants to call the shots. But getting better at execution — project management, making decisions, defining features etc. — is table stakes to growing your career as a PM. Don’t neglect it!

3. Be proactive: This is the most important trait that has helped me get to Facebook and thrive while here. Find the opportunities that excite you, build the experiences you need and act more than you ponder.

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One fascinating concept I've learned as a product manager is the idea of creating scope.

In other roles, “scope” is a fixed list of responsibilities. But for product managers, scope tends to be extremely fluid. While you start with a set of responsibilities, these often change with business needs.

The best PMs seem to always tackle exciting areas of work and grow their role in the company. But their role isn't growing because they are given more scope — it's growing because they are creating more scope.

Generally, I've noticed what differentiates junior and senior PMs is the ability to find and drive new scope. This ability require proactivity, awareness and confidence in your own abilities.

Today, I want to share my learnings around scope and how you can create more of it. Doing this will let you:

1. Learn new skills by tackling interesting areas

2. Become invaluable to your company

3. Accelerate your own PM career.

🎨 Visualizing Scope

Six months into my product management journey, I became a PM on the Growth team for Watch, the video destination within the Facebook app. I was the most junior PM on the team.

The growth team (at the time) consisted of three "pods" - activation (acquiring new users), retention and international markets (products for specific markets). Each of these had its own product team and was led by a PM.

It’s important to note that PMs who report to the same manager can vary in seniority. What doesn’t vary is that seniority is directly tied to the size, ambiguity and impact of the scope they oversee.

This is also true for the Group PM. They are the most senior and have the largest scope of all PMs in a group.

But growth was only one group of Watch. Other groups focused on other parts of the product, for example, social features, the viewing experience, and the back-end platform. Zooming out, Watch as a whole looked something like this.

From this view, you'll notice that the Group PM of growth fits into a nearly identical organizational structure as individual PMs within the growth team. They are just a part of a larger area — in this case, all of Watch.

In both the Group PM and individual PM cases, PMs with larger scope have the ability to have more impact. This is because important areas garner more resources (ex. # of engineers), attention from leadership and are typically more aligned with the larger group strategy.

In summary, scope has two key traits:

1. Senior PMs have a larger scope (and therefore, higher likelihood for impact)

2. You can grow your scope in two ways: by managing other PMs or creating new scope within your area.

Managing other PMs is intuitive and a common career goal of product managers. I want to speak more to the second route of expanding your scope, which is much more nuanced.

🔍 Creating scope

In the middle of my time on the Watch Growth team, the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns started to sweep the world. With people stuck at home, more people were spending time on Facebook and enjoying videos.

We saw a surge in activation, which is the area I was responsible for at the time. But as the surge was ongoing, we realized the need to drastically improve our first-time user experience (FTUX) to make sure those new users came back.

I decided to lead this sprint as it was a natural extension of my scope. It involved creating a new strategy, aligning quickly with our leadership, and executing a series of brand-new features.

As the surge slowed down and we went back to business as usual, the "Activation" pod began to include the FTUX as an essential part of our team’s charter. We were planning projects for the next few quarters to continue to improve this area with new engineers. Our scope had grown because it now encompassed a larger area.

This story shows how scope creation happens in practice. Often, an event (internal or external) will make a new opportunity possible. It’s then up to the product manager to proactively understand an area and create a path forward. Capturing the opportunity and the ability to expand your scope requires four things:

1. A strong handle on your current scope. If you're overwhelmed by your current responsibilities, you won't be in a good position to scale your team.

2. Awareness of trends outside of your immediate scope. Follow industry news, tune into company All-Hands, socialize with other people across the company and speak to directors/VPs and understand the areas they are thinking about. This product discovery will help you find opportunities.

3. The ability to prioritize. There may be a reason no one else is tackling the area. Prioritize the opportunities that you think have the most value. I wrote a full guide on prioritization here.

4. An ability to proactively define a new plan: This may be in the form of a roadmap, a product brief, a strategy or a vision. But the key part here is that you need to find and create a path forward in an area to own the scope truly. Otherwise, you risk taking responsibility for an area and having no progress to show for it.

If you’re looking to grow, aim to improve on the four attributes above. Take time to research outside of your immediate area to identify worthwhile opportunities to tackle. I’ve been inspired by rockstar PMs that have done this themselves and am confident that it’s a clear path to growing your responsibilities and impact.

✍️Summary

Growing your scope is the surest way to accelerate your career, learn new skills, and have more impact.

1. Seniority is directly tied to the size, ambiguity and impact of the scope you oversee.

2. Find worthwhile scope by keeping a pulse on trends in adjacent product areas and factoring in product discovery into your weekly schedule.

3. Proactively define a way of capturing the identified opportunity. If you need more resources (ex. a bigger team) to capture it, make the proposal.

4. Delivering on your existing and new scope will allow you to grow your skills and responsibilities sustainably.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

How to Work Hard by Paul Graham: a great essay on how to pair focus with raw effort to achieve things you previously thought were impossible.

Instagram’s Evolution by Ben Thompson: a thought-provoking take on Instagram’s new focusses on creators, video, shopping and messaging.

How People Discover New Products by Lenny Rachitsky: Lenny highlights the seven ways people can hear about products with examples and tips on how to execute that growth strategy.

If you liked this edition of Product Life, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. 😊

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Until next time,

Will