The very first step in APM - Associate Product Manager

And how I survived after 6 months

I landed this position by chance when I asked, 'Does your Product Team have any vacancies?' The rest is a story of how I tried to be, and I believe that I have become, at least, a good APM in my company.

Since I was originally part of the Marketing team, which is unrelated to the Product Manager position, I started from scratch. However, this is how I managed to survive.

The Work-flow:

If your company follows a Scrum Team with a strong Agile mindset, that would be great. So, I learned how to host Grooming and Planning sessions, facilitate meetings, estimate the complexity of tickets, manage the backlog, and prepare user stories. Initially, it was a little challenging since I didn't have much engagement with the team, but since I was an internal transfer, it went relatively smoothly.

Also, don't forget to attend meetings like the daily stand-up and retrospective. These are good opportunities to catch up and support your team.

Preparation When Becoming an APM:

Product Knowledge: Every APM needs to have an understanding of their products because they will be working closely with them. Try, learn, and absorb as much as you can because you need to know how your product works.

Project Management: As an APM, please focus on this skill since 70% of your work will involve delivery. Mastering project management will help you deliver your product in good quality and ensure that you work smoothly with your engineering team.

Communication: Sales teams, marketing teams, developers, quality engineers, designers, delivery managers, technical writers...these are the people you need to contact and communicate with if you want your product to run well. Therefore, good communication skills are crucial.

Data Analysis: Understanding the product's metrics is an excellent way to understand your product because, through data, you can see how customers are using it. Moreover, this is the source of truth if you want to inform or make any decisions regarding your product.

The four skills above are just a shortcut if you want to prepare for your career in the next three months. To become a good PM, you need to learn more and more. Maybe you should learn how to code (or at least understand how the front-end and back-end work with each other), what APIs are and how they are used in your products, UI/UX, etc. This is a whole new world, but don't be scared. Just take it step by step, explore, and find what's suitable for you. After that, run as fast as you can and ignore all distractions.

The Resources:

Books:

Inspired by Marty Cagan: A right mindset will help you do things right. This is the most basic book for becoming a product manager.

Discovery Habit by Teresa Torres

Communities:

Product School: https://productschool.com/resources

Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/

Thomas’s blog post: He a Sr.PM that I recommend you to follow to learn about Product Foundation. You can find him in Substack.

Chris Vu’ blog post: He a great PM, doing things-running around guy.

I'm exploring the product pathway, and I will share more on this in future articles. These are just my own experiences, so feel free to discuss them. I appreciate constructive feedback."