Early Career Tips for Product Managers
John J. Schaub
Jan 7, 2023
A recent conversation on LinkedIn prompted me to think about some of the early career strategies I employed so I thought I would pull together a blog post on the topic. If you want to know about all my epic failures you will need to buy me a few beers at least but I am happy to share the ones that worked out and the ones that I wish I had employed. I should note the title on this post focuses on Product Managers but the reality is that these tips will work for almost anyone.
Tip 1: Take a rapid succession of short roles. Your primary goal in the first few years of your career needs to be to learn as much as you possibly can and the simple fact is you will never learn faster than your first six months in a job. To take advantage of this accelerated learning curve early in your career you want to stack up a few short tenures with different companies. Not only will this get you an accelerated learning curve but it will get you experience in multiple different environments and hopefully company sizes which is hugely valuable. The problem with this approach is of course that you will be branded a job hoper and suffer the negative consequences of that so you need to be a bit clever about how you approach it. There are a few techniques that I have found that can help get you a lot of experience in a short timeframe:
Internships - If you have not yet graduated and you have the option to do an internship via your University, do it and do not worry about delaying your graduation. The reality is your job prospects and skillset upon graduating with an internship or two under your belt are vastly better than entering the market with zero experience or connections and within a couple of years of graduation you will have passed those that went through university faster.
Maternity/Paternity/Health Leave Coverage contracts - There was a point in my career when I went out of my way to take short term coverage contracts. The thing you need to understand about a short term coverage contracts is that they are very hard to fill for employers. Most people do not want them because they have almost zero chance of turning into a longer term role and because everyone knows you are a short termer you suffer all the consequences of being a lame duck and will have to work twice as hard to get anything done. Because of these downsides these contracts tend to pay a bit more than others and employers are often forced to hire more junior people than the role really needs because of the lack of competition. This is a goldmine if you are a junior looking to advance your career and in my experience coverage contracts represent one of the few ways you can actually move up while switching employers. There is of course the added benefit that because the contracts are fixed term you face no stigma for not staying with an employer after your contract is complete but because they are inherently harder from a leadership perspective if you do well in one of these contracts you will be the first person the employer calls when they have an opening.
Consultant Roles - Getting a gig with a major consulting firm right out of university as a way to get rapid experience is a tried and true approach. I did not take this route but people I know that did have done well with it. I have been told that transitioning from consultant to employee can be harder than it seems but in general this seems like a solid approach to me.
Internal Consultant or Secondment Roles - One of my rules in my career has been to never say no when the boss asks you to step into another role for a few weeks or months or in a recent case years. These opportunities almost always teach you a lot about a different aspect of the business and can open up options that you would have never expected. More recently in my career I took a role (Director Special Projects) that was essentially corporate firefighter and saw me moving from project to project on a cadence between weeks and months. This sort of formal internal consultant is in my mind the only way you are going to be able to continue rapid role iteration as you get more senior but a word of warning it is the most mentally exhausting role you can have as you are always trying to learn something new and you are doing it at a senior level where there are real consequences to being wrong.
Tip 2: Side contracts. Doing small contract gigs is a great way to build experience and connections. This was easier when I was building my career because you did not have to compete with Fivrr and the like but there are still a few avenues that are available.
Teach at a University - Many university programs in particular MBA programs love to hire working professionals to teach as it helps keep their programs tied to the real world. These roles pay better than you would expect on a per hour basis and come with a few huge advantages particularly early in your career. First you will never learn something as well as you do when you have to teach it. Second if you have any discomfort around public speaking walking into an auditorium of 50 people to teach a class will quickly get you past it. And third as you progress in your career and start building teams yourself having a deep bench of former students is an absolute cheat code. After five or so years of teaching you will know someone at every major company in whatever city you live in and you will have an excellent understanding of their capability for recruiting purposes. To put this one in perspective there are years when I have made more off of referral fees by finding my former students jobs then I did actually teaching the course they took.
Volunteer Boards - I stumbled into the world of volunteer boards a little by accident but it has been extraordinarily valuable. In my case I was a mid level Product Manager with zero direct reports who ended sitting on a board of an organization with hundreds of staff and a $50M+ annual budget. The experience I gained in that role was what let me step up to professional roles reporting to and serving on boards. Getting on a good volunteer board is actually pretty challenging as they often have masses of highly qualified applicants for every opening, the trick is to actually care about the cause you are working for, bring a unique skill set to the table and do what I did and apply in a year when there are fewer applicants.
Tip 3: Network relentlessly. Yes you should probably attend a lot of conferences, meetups and the like particularly early in your career but the reality is that those tend not to be that valuable and the value drops pretty quickly as you get more senior. There are however a few ways you can network more effectively at every career stage.
Be the Organizer - One of the smarter things I did early in my career was found a Product Management meetup group because there wasn't one in my community. While I was running the group it gave me an automatic introduction to dozens of senior Product leaders and companies who wanted to host events for hiring purposes and it also let me network with other organizers from multiple countries. A decade later I have long since stepped away from the organization but I made sure to recruit an excellent team on my way out and it has continued to grow. If you cannot be the organizer at a minimum volunteer to help, a volunteer role at a conference reception desk will get you introduced to potentially hundreds of senior people in a few hours.
Help people out - I do not want to sound purely transactional but the reality is if you want people to help you then you are going to need to help them. Even having the reputation as someone who is willing to help people out will go a long way when you inevitably need to ask someone to bump a task up in their roadmap or provide access to some resource. As a Product Manager your ability to drive things forward is your key career skill and there is almost nothing you can do as a leader that will get you more street cred faster then walking into a new team that is faced with some insurmountable problem that you can solve by making a phone call. The more people you help out along the way the more people you can call when you need to make the impossible happen.
Get comfortable with cold calls - I am strongly of the opinion that everyone should do a sales job early in their career in particular Product Managers. The ability to pitch a customer and work through the sales process is hugely valuable and beyond that it just forces you to get past the discomfort of doing sales in general. I never worked a sales job but I have led sales and in doing so I realized just how formal and structured a process it is when done well.
Tip 4: Find a Mentor. In your career you are going to face all sorts of challenges and the really challenging ones are beyond the scope of a blog post. Finding someone who is a few years more experienced who can provide you with feedback and suggestions as you progress is absolutely vital. The reality is though that formal mentor arrangements are very rare unless you are lucky enough to work at a company that offers them. A more realistic approach is to team up with someone at about your level who has a vastly different skillset and help each other so if you are a strong technical Product Manager teaming up with a business Product Manager is the way to go.
Tip 5: Keep in touch with people. As your career progresses you will meet thousands of people. As a general rule you should do your best to keep in touch and keep those relationships alive. The thing is you never know when you might be interested in moving to a new employer and if your former boss from when you were an intern works there now you are miles ahead if you can reach out directly. A few tricks I have learned to help with that:
Setup a professional email and use it everywhere - The worst thing universities do is assign students a student email which they will inevitably lose access to a few months after graduation. This makes keeping in touch with people that much harder. I would recommend you setup an email on a domain you own and use it for all the communications where you possibly can. Obviously your employer is unlikely to allow you to use a personal email at work but you should do what you can to make sure folks have a permanent route to contact you.
Send a nice working with you email - Yes it seems a bit cheesy but avoid the desire to just sneak out of the building on your last day. Every time you leave a job drop a note to your team and colleagues and make sure they have your permanent contact info. Connecting on LinkedIn should also be standard operating procedure.
Do not burn bridges - Multiple times in my career I have either returned to a company I previously left or was hired by a former boss that moved to a different company. It is inevitable that you are going to leave employers at various points in your career but if at all possible leave in such a way that you will be welcomed back.
Hopefully these tips provide some value. If you have any questions do not hesitate to reach out.