Product Management

101

Product Management

101What you need to know to get started in Silicon Valley

Maisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmailwww.learnproduct.com

What you need to know to get started in Silicon ValleyMaisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail

www.learnproduct.com

Topics

•Why Silicon Valley?

•Why Product Management?

•Choosing Companies

•Getting a PM job

•Classes to take

•Staying up to date

•Further learning

Why Silicon Valley?• Pros

• Leveraged

• Get to build stuff

• Meritocratic (no set career path)

• Growth industry “Software is eating the world”

• Work w/ interesting people

• Flexible lifestyle (not client services)

• Cons

• High Risk/Reward (Gambling)

• Few obviously exciting companies

• Less structure/more chaotic

• Limited location choices (SF, NYC, Austin, Boston, SEA)

• Stress (sometimes)

Role of a Product Manager1. Product Strategy: deciding what product to

build

2. Execution: project management

3. Leadership: convincing executives to give you resources and engineers/designers to build what you want

4. Make your product succeed (not a 9-5)

Great product managers are:

• Smart (learn quickly), truth-seekers, motivated

Choosing CompaniesKey to success is choosing great companies

Wrong seat on the right plane is much better than the right seat on the wrong plane

Good companies have great people whom you can learn from, work with again and who will recruit other great people

Battlefield promotions, halo effect

Choosing Companies

Choosing CompaniesStartups

Don’t work at a startup for the sake of doing a startup! Choose 1) smart people, 2) good product 3) good brand

Don’t assume that smaller company means greater impact

Choosing CompaniesSweet spot: high growth, funded startup with team in place (15-200 employees). Still a lot of equity and career growth

A company with 75 people and market traction is much more likely to be successful than one with 2 people and a presentation

It’s even harder to start a software company if you have no industry experience and don’t have a network

Getting A Job

1. Read my book (www.learnproduct.com)

2. Identify good companies (Quora, LinkedIn TC, VC portfolios, ask around)

3. Find and connect with people who work there (warm lead versus cold lead)

4. Try to get any job you can there and switch to product

5. Get the words Product Management on your resume (Amazon internship)

6. Approach companies with specific ways that you can help solve a problem they have (i.e. wireframes for how you would improve a specific part of the site). SV companies value doers more than talkers.

7. Build a product prototype (e.g. weather app)

8. Learn coding basics

9. “Check your MBA at the door.” An MBA is not necessarily a positive in SV

• You should understand how to build websites/mobile apps. These four classes get you 95% of the way there. They’re a lot more work than GSB classes, but grades don’t matter and they’re totally worth it.

• Read my book (www.learnproduct.com)

• CS106a: Programming methodology in Java (take this in the spring of year 1, so you can take CS142 in the fall).

• CS142: Webs Applications (Only offered in the Fall and need to take CS106a first. This is the best class at Stanford).

• CS193P: Developing Aps for iOS

• CS106B: Programming abstractions in C++

• Learn SQL, html and CSS on your own (lots of good web tutorials)

• D-school classes look good on a resume

• Check out iTunes U, Coursera

Classes To Take

Staying up To Date• Fred Wilson

(@fredwilson)

• Brad Feld (@bfeld)

• Chris Dixon (@cdixon)

• Paul Graham (@paulg)

• Aaron Levie (@levie)

• Bill Gurley (@bgurley)

• Quora

• TechCrunch

• PandoDaily

• Techmeme

• Angel List

• Crunchbase Weekly Newsletter (fundraising & acquisitions)

• HackerNews

Themes/CompaniesCollaborative Consumption

• Sidecar, Lyft , TaskRabbit, AirBnB

Consumerization of the enterprise

• Asana, Box, Zendesk, RelateIQ, Evernote, Dropbox

Payments

• Stripe, Square, CardSpring, Google Wallet

Content discovery

• Pinterest, Spotify, Quora, Pulse, Prismatic

E-Commerce

• Fab, TheFancy, Etsy, One King’s Lane, Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Quirky,

Ed Tech

• Edmodo, Coursera, Udacity

Phone as remote control

• Uber, Homejoy, Grubhub

Big Data

• Cloudera, Palantir

The Internet of Things

• Nest, Lockitron

Mobile Communication

• Snapchat, Whatsapp, Viber

Misc

• Nextdoor, Wealthfront

• SEO (app store and web)

• SEM (spend $20 to experiment buying google adwords and FB Ads)

• Analyze Business Models: How does X make money?

• Technology buzzwords (HTML5, JQuery, NoSQL, Bootstrap)

• Mobile

• iOS and Android platforms and apps. What does each platform allow developers to do? Characteristics of top performing apps? App stores? Download a bunch of apps and observe design/mechanics.

• Trends

• Alexa, Comscore, Compete (monthly page views, uniques visitors, time on site etc)

• AppAnnie (iOS and Google Apps)

• AppData (Facebook apps)

Topics to Research

More Reading …

www.learnproduct.com

Getting A Product Job• PMs are risky hires for companies because they control very

expensive engineering resources and make decisions that can make or break a business/product. To mitigate risk, companies look for people who already have PM experience and a technical background. If you don’t have both, you need to be strategic:

• Write a sample spec for the company and make wireframes using Balsamiq Here’s a spec template.

• Exhibit these traits ... Intelligence (“you can’t fix stupid”), product sense, ability to lead engineers without direct authority. Check out Ken Norton’s famous blog post on how to hire PMs

• Get hired for an easier role and do an internal transfer (only realistic if company <100 people)

• Take the CS classes on the later slide and build something

• Get a summer job at Amazon/Microsoft. It’s useful to have the words “Product Manager” at <Company people have heard of> on your resume