Episode 129: Answering Questions About Product Management Career and the Difference Between a Product and a Feature

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how to get your dream PM job, resources for young product managers, and how to determine if a project is a standalone product or a set of features.

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Q&A:

Q: Dear Melissa, I've gotten an interview with a recruiter at a dream product-led company. It's an experimentation platform, a PM position. I don't have direct experience in this area. So what should I highlight about my experience that proves I can excel at this position? Is it seeing the developer as the customer, seeing the importance of larger operational needs, not just the technical experience? Please help me get a second interview.
A: So it sounds like you are going for a platform product management position. So in a platform, in a product management position, which is different from a user-facing product management position, your developers are the customers, so you definitely have to remember that. It also requires you to be a little bit more technical. That means that you should get up to speed about things like APIs and how they work and how they should be designed, and understand data structures and algorithms and different stuff like that. But no matter what, if you are working on a platform, whether or not a developer is the customer, you still need great product management chops for that. So remember you are still thinking about what the customer is.
Q: Dear Melissa, I have a young and inexperienced product team, but they are all learners and aren't afraid to take courses or read books to advance their skills. Do you have any recommendations for courses or certifications I should get my team to take? I would especially love some recommendations as it relates to Q&A and testing.
A: One thing to look at when you're trying to bring new product managers up to speed is what kind of knowledge they need to know and I think you first want to start with a good basis of what product management is, and that's where everybody should start. Then, what you're gonna do is go deeper into the different aspects of product manager and get them up to speed on those areas more. So you really want a nice broad course that teaches you about product management and to end, what that looks like, then you want to start to dive deep into things that are more specific for you.
Q: Dear Melissa. How do you know if the thing you're working on is actually a standalone product versus a set of features behind a packaging and pricing tier? What signals do you look for when determining this?
A: This is always such a hot topic. Everybody gets into these huge debates about whether I am working on a feature or is it really a product? And I think from the standpoint of you doing product management, it doesn't matter that much. Like if you're a product manager on a team, rarely are you actually working on a full product. You usually have a feature set that's going to improve the product that you're in charge of. And those feature sets could be huge in really large companies.

Resources:

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

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Previous guests include: Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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