8 Ways to Accelerate Your Product Manager Growth

7 min readDec 5, 2017

To be successful as a product manager, you need to develop strong ownership not just of the product you work on but also of your own professional growth.

Product management is hard. It’s a discipline that is deep as well as broad. No matter how senior you are, there are always new things to learn.

Product management is still a relatively nascent discipline. The way the role is defined and evaluated can vary tremendously between companies and even between teams within the same company. Experience gained in one context may not readily translate to another.

The PM role is inherently a leadership role; the expectations placed upon you are high and typically, you’re the only PM on your team. You may not get many opportunities to interact with other PMs to learn how others approach the role and its challenges. If you’re at a company that is just beginning to establish a product organization, you may even be the only person in a product role. In other words, you’re often on your own to figure things out.

Software and hardware are constantly changing. The way we think about, use and rely on technology does as well. The landscape that a PM needs to understand and navigate is always evolving.

Lastly, product management is highly competitive. Every time you decide to go for a promotion or interview for a new job, you’re going to be up against lots of smart, ambitious, and talented people with interesting and valuable experiences.

If you’re not actively honing your craft, you’re falling behind.

One way I’ve found to navigate this is to seek out others’ experiences. While I’m convinced that the best way to learn is by doing the work and reflecting on it, I believe the second best way to learn is by studying others.

One of my favorite things about being in product is the community. It’s big, vibrant and generous.

Whenever I’ve found myself stuck, wanting inspiration, or looking for new ideas I’ve turned to the product community. I’ve built this into my routines. I read books, blog posts and articles on my commute. I listen to podcasts when I work out. I keep a list of interesting tools, frameworks, case studies, examples and stories that I return to whenever I’m looking for something specific (like how others use roadmaps for long term planning). I’ve subscribed to newsletters and digests to regularly get interesting content pushed to me.

These habits have helped me get unblocked numerous times, enabled me to better understand my craft and how I want to grow as a product manager and leader, and analyze gaps in my skills and knowledge and seize opportunities to narrow them. I’ve been able to expand my toolkit of concepts, frameworks and tactics much more rapidly than if I’d relied on personal experience alone. As I’ve built up this mental map of helpful resources and how to leverage them, my confidence in my ability to solve tricky problems and maneuver difficult situations has grown by leaps and bounds. Perhaps most importantly, I’ve become a better critic of my own ideas and work because tapping into how others think has expanded my own thinking.

I’ve compiled my favorite avenues for learning about product management below. I’d love to hear about yours, and the habits you’ve built up around them. Leave a response or a comment so we can compare notes!

(As a side note: to learn efficiently, you should also have clear goals in mind for your learning. Ellen Chisa has written a great piece about how to do just that.)

Mentors

This is perhaps the first thing people think of when they think of how to grow in their careers. Mentorship is a big topic that has been addressed well by others so I won’t say more about it here aside from this: mentorship doesn’t need to be a big, official thing. It can simply be semi-regularly grabbing coffee or a bite to eat with someone whose perspective you value or whose career trajectory you admire.

Books

Reading books is perhaps the second thing people think of when it comes to learning. Many much better read people than myself have compiled lists of book recommendations for PMs. Two excellent starting points, with some overlaps, are

Noah Weiss’ 77 articles and books that will make you a great product manager and
Ken Norton’s Books for Product Managers

Meetups and conferences

This is yet another avenue for learning that I suspect most PMs are familiar with, but perhaps not all PMs have explored.

Meetups are a wonderful way of getting involved with your local product community and learning about local product companies. The best way to find the good meetups is to explore meetup.com or to ask others (perhaps using some of the forums I’ve listed below).

Conferences are a wonderful way of meeting people from other cities and countries, and learning about the latest trends and case studies. If you have a professional development budget through work, definitely see if it covers all or some of a conference trip. I can highly recommend Mind The Product and Lean Startup, both leading product conferences that happen several times a year in a few different locations. For a more comprehensive list of product conferences, check out this blog post (scroll to the bottom for 2018 dates and locations).

Slack and Facebook groups

I’ve found Slack and Facebook groups to be one of the best ways to connect and interact with other product people. To join a group, you typically have to request to be invited and answer a few questions about yourself.

Women in Product, founded by Merci Victoria Grace, former Director of Product @SlackHQ, is specifically for – you guessed it – women in product roles. The group currently has close to 3,000 members. Apply to join the Slack group here. This is my personal favorite and a group I spend time on daily.

Women in Product, a non-profit founded by a group of women product leaders at Facebook, has a closed Facebook group that I visit daily, too (yes, these are two different groups with the same name). This group has around 5,000 members.

Tech Ladies is another women-only community that I visit daily. They have a closed Facebook group and a newsletter. Tech Ladies is for everyone who identifies as a woman or non-binary and works in tech, so the topics span more than just product.

Product School offers PM courses (in addition to a podcast and a blog) and has a Slack group with 17,000+ members. Their Slack group regularly hosts AMAs with PMs and PM leaders.

Mind The Product is one of the biggest communities and conferences for product people. Their Slack group is currently 11,000+ members strong.

Pivotal Labs (where I work) uses Slack to help people connect across offices. It’s become an effective tool for us to learn from one another asynchronously and across time zones. If you have PM colleagues inside your organization that you wish you could interact more with, try setting up an internal Slack group.

Podcasts

I love podcasts. I find them to be the most convenient way of learning new things because I can do something else, like go for a run or cook dinner, while listening to an episode. They’re are a great way to learn about other PMs’ careers, specific companies product cultures and to go deep on specific topics. Below are the podcasts I find myself returning to regularly.

Product leaders

Below are some of my favorite product leaders who frequently share their experiences, thoughts and insights in writing, and also curate content from the broader product and tech community.

I’ve linked their blogs; make sure to also follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn if you use either platform habitually.

Medium publications

As you probably know since you’re reading this on Medium, Medium is another excellent way to discover great content. In addition to following some of my favorite product influencers on Medium, I also follow a number of publications and am subscribed to topics that interest me like Technology, Work and Psychology. I use the Medium Digest feature to receive recommended reads via email.

Some of my favorite publications are:

PM Insider
Product Coalition
uxdesign.cc
Hacker Noon (this is technically a publication about technology, not just product, but I’ve found its content to be interesting often enough to include it here)

Newsletters

Newsletters are lovely. They regularly show up in your inbox with advice and carefully curated lists of articles, upcoming events and job openings, and you don’t have to do anything other than read what you like.

My personal favorites include: