How to gain experience in product without having experience in product
Diving into the types of valuable and unproductive experiences
The title of this article is irritating enough. So, I’ll keep this post short and to the point.
Most people tend to get stuck in the cycle of “I need to be a PM to be a PM,” which unfortunately gets reinforced during recruiter screening calls. Let’s rephrase this cycle with “I need some exposure and experience to be a PM.”
Exposure + Experience will help you to assess if product is something you really want to pursue. It can kick-start your learning journey, uplift your confidence, become the building blocks of your resume, and de-risk you in the job market (by proving that you have an adequate understanding of the PM role).
There are 3 types of valuable experiences:
Note: the more you can cover from this section, the more advantageous it would be. However, this isn’t a strict checklist for you to tick off.
Internal Experiences
These are the experiences you can currently gain from volunteering your time and energy to a product team. It might feel awkward for some people, but have an open and honest conversation with your manager about your career plans, then involve a Product Leader and a Tech Leader (depending on how large the organisation is).
If all parties are open to the idea, an arrangement could look like this:
Joining some of the product team’s meetings or shadowing a PM for an agreed-upon amount of time
Taking small tasks to assist the product team (i.e. writing user stories, supporting with product research or brainstorming sessions)
Dedicating 1 full work day to act as a ‘Junior PM’ (if you are super lucky)
This will give you exposure to the day-to-day of a PM, the product mindset/culture, and how to work within a product team — great experience to have. Connecting with other PMs and software engineers during this period will also help you to familiarise yourself with the product language.
This type of exposure and experience carries a massive opportunity, as you may be supported for an internal transfer (which would be the best outcome for you).
I was lucky to work in an ecosystem of ventures where I could float between different startups, which gave me really good exposure across a range of products. I also pulled in additional hours to juggle both roles.
I’ve also seen aspiring PMs join product communities and grab temporary, unpaid side roles from their network. This is a great idea in theory, but it has the downside of a high time commitment. Your choice.
Self-Driven (Personal) Experiences
These are experiences you create. The main advantage is gaining a wide range of product experience (due to the freedom you’ll have). The disadvantage is the lack of a ‘professional’ setting to count this type of experience as ‘reliable’ from a hiring manager’s perspective.
It could look like…
Picking up a side project in an area (or a problem space) you are interested in.
Imagine yourself as a PM, tasked to explore exciting problem spaces. Imagine your end goal is to build an MVP. How would you lead this journey?
Tip: your step-by-step process should broadly mimic what PMs do — research, identifying the riskiest assumptions to test, drafting low-fidelity prototypes, talking with potential users, etc.
Tip: try to get your hands on a variety of tools in this process (like Figma, n8n, etc) and document your progress (take notes of learnings, record user interviews, etc). Eventually, you may even consider building a hi-fidelity prototype as the final showcase (i.e. via using a front-end coding language, or AI tools like Lovable).
Tip: don’t be a superhero by trying to solve the world’s toughest problem. Small, simple and clearly-defined problems are easier to tackle and communicate. Don’t try to find the most intellectually complex problem to prove your intelligence; the purpose of this activity is to demonstrate that you can think and make decisions like a PM.
This work will shape your portfolio (and it’s quite a fun activity). You can showcase it to your hiring managers in a suitable format during an interview.
Entrepreneurship.
There are a lot of crossovers between the roles of a PM and an entrepreneur. In fact, becoming an entrepreneur is a common fantasy among product people, which seems to have accelerated with the rise of AI tools. While the scope of responsibility and accountability are different, many important product skills are a part of an entrepreneur’s day-to-day (especially at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey).
Having “self-driven” (personal) experience is very important if there isn’t much for you to refer back to from section 1.
Transferrable Skills
Product is the interesting intersection between users, business and tech. People from a wide variety of backgrounds can find transferable skills in product (for more elaboration, check out my prior post). Some roles even have high exposure to, or cover specific skills that are a part of a PM’s job description (i.e. BA, Product Marketing, Product Design, etc).
Examples: leading user interviews as a UX/UI Designer, driving the product pricing & packaging discussions as a Product Marketing Manager, etc.
The key is to think about how you have applied the ‘product mindset’ in your current role (and previous roles). This shouldn’t take much effort, but a bit of creative thinking, depending on how obvious the links are between your background and a PM’s role.
What types of experiences won’t be as valuable?
In the past, I’ve seen people moving into Business Analyst (BA) or Technical Project Manager roles, thinking that this would act as an intermediary role and make the transition into product easier. Unfortunately, prior to 2023, a lot of aspiring PMs received this recommendation.
I never took that pathway because I’m an impatient person; I decided to be a PM and had no intentions to mess around with adjacent roles. Looking back, I realised why moving into a BA role would have been a non-strategic/unproductive decision.
You might think that it is a dumbed-down version of a PM’s role, but at the end of the day, it’s not a product role. It’s a BA role. Unless the company promotes all their BAs into PMs after 12 months, there is no guarantee that you will take on a product role. From a hiring manager’s perspective in external companies, ‘no product experience means no product experience.’ You may become ‘less risky’ to hire (only in comparison to other aspiring PMs with no experience), but you still won’t qualify as experienced. I’ve seen it happen multiple times — starting from scratch will give you a disappointed feeling.
In fact, it might even play to your disadvantage if the company doesn’t promote you from a BA to a PM role after 12 months (which happens more often than you’d imagine). Externally, you will get asked, “if you have aspirations to become a product person, given your background and experience in your company, why won’t they promote you?” (Hint: “what is wrong with you?”)
Unlike the common belief, the BA’s role is not a dumbed-down version of a PM’s role. It is not equal to a Junior/Associate Product Manager role. In most companies, the role is completely different, with a very specific (and narrow) crossover. This will give you more exposure and 1-2 transferable hard skills, but you won’t be doing the job of a PM. In 12 months, you will still face a learning curve and will still make the mistakes of a junior PM who’s just starting their career.
Noting that I have come across a few companies that treated their Senior BAs as PMs, but this is quite rare.
The types of companies that hire BAs are traditional enterprises/legacy companies (i.e. telcos, insurance, banks) that have systems and processes originated prior to the digital age (and have not fully transitioned into the modern ways of working yet). The type of “product” exposure you’ll get in such companies can be more harmful than beneficial. You might pick up bad product practices (habits) and have a different understanding of the product culture than companies that originated during the digital age. For that reason, even experienced PMs coming from such companies struggle to land their next product role.
Lastly, most traditional enterprises realised around 2020 that they are facing a risk of elimination by the competition. There’s been a rush of digital transformation over the past 5 years to catch the speed of market innovation. Even legacy organisations are now slamming the ‘AI’ label on their features. The role of BA is redundant in modern ways of working, and traditional enterprises recognise that. Waves of redundancies hit BAs, Program/Service Managers, Scrum Masters and Technical Project Managers between 2023-2025. This is not a space you want to enter into.
Note that I am specifically criticising the career move into a BA/Program/Service Manager/Scrum Master/Technical Project Manager role to later become a Product Manager. If you already have this background, by all means, play it to your advantage (refer to the “transferable skills” and “internal experiences” sections of this post).
Hope this was helpful! We all need to start from somewhere, and each person’s career journey is different. I tend to hear a deep sigh and regretful language coming from people who have invested 5-10 years into a career before realising that they belong in the world of product. It’s the “I’ve wasted my time” sentiment.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve learnt that there is no “right” pathway through your career, but instead “right” attitudes and mindsets one can adopt. After all, life is way more exciting and rewarding when we experience novelty, seek out new challenges and chapters.
All the images I use have been generated using deepai.org (the pop art generator). 🦸♀️
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