产品经理入门

by Melanie Lei

由Melanie Lei

所以您想成为产品经理？ 这就是我的入门方式。 (So you want to be a product manager? This is how I got started.)

One of the most common questions I get asked is, “How do you get a Product Manager job if you haven’t been a product manager before?”

我被问到的最常见问题之一是：“如果您以前从未担任过产品经理，那么如何获得产品经理的工作？”

A while ago, I had the same question. It’s the quintessential chicken-and-egg problem — you can’t join the club unless you’re already a member of the club.

前一段时间，我有同样的问题。 这是典型的鸡肉和鸡蛋问题-除非您已经是该俱乐部的成员，否则您不能加入该俱乐部。

As an account manager at an Edtech startup, I became really interested in working on the product. I hoped to transfer internally to a product role at my company. I felt like my deep understanding of our content creators’ and our learners’ needs gave me an advantage. But I was told, “Sorry, we just really need someone with product management experience.”

作为Edtech初创公司的客户经理，我对开发该产品非常感兴趣。 我希望从内部转到公司的产品角色。 我觉得我对内容创作者和学习者需求的深刻理解为我带来了优势。 但是我被告知：“对不起，我们真的需要一个具有产品管理经验的人。”

Over the last few years, after a lot of work and research, I was able to successfully transition into product management. Periodically, I’ll get random inquiries or introductions to acquaintances who all have the exact same question: “If I want to be a product manager, but I’ve never been one, how do I do it?”

在过去的几年中，经过大量的工作和研究，我能够成功地过渡到产品管理。 定期，我会随机询问或介绍熟悉的人，他们都有完全相同的问题：“如果我想成为产品经理，但我从未成为一个产品经理，该怎么做？”

This is my shot at sharing my own journey a bit more efficiently and widely. I can’t guarantee any results after using this formula — I just know after a lot of trial and error, this is how I got there. I wish you good luck on your own journey!

这是我更有效，更广泛地分享自己的旅程的镜头。 使用此公式后，我无法保证会有任何结果-我只是经过反复尝试才知道，这就是我到达那里的方式。 祝您旅途愉快！

步骤0：处理产品(或至少尽可能接近产品) (Step 0: Work on product (or at least get as close to it as possible))

Wait, what? Isn’t the whole point that I’m trying to get a job where I start working on a product?

等一下 难道不是我要开始从事产品工作的全部意图吗？

Yep, but here’s the thing. You can’t really crack the chicken-and-egg cycle without getting a little taste of what it’s actually like to be a chicken. It can often feel like you aren’t really doing “product” things if your title says something different, but there are all kinds of things that qualify:

是的，但这是事实。 在不了解鸡肉的实际情况的情况下，您无法真正破解鸡肉和鸡蛋的生产周期。 如果您的标题有所不同，通常会感觉您并没有真正在做“产品”事情，但是有很多事情可以满足：

• Collecting feedback from users, prioritizing it based on business impact and consumer impact, and sharing the information with relevant decision makers who can make changes happen
  收集用户的反馈，根据业务影响和消费者影响确定优先级，并与可能做出改变的相关决策者共享信息
• Coming up with a new idea for a feature and detailing out all the things it would do, then figuring out whether it can be built
  想出一个新的功能构想，并详细说明它会做的所有事情，然后弄清楚是否可以构建它
• Analyzing data from your website / app to determine common user paths or whether certain business events had a major impact
  分析来自您的网站/应用程序的数据，以确定常见的用户路径或某些业务事件是否产生重大影响
• Managing revenue or profit and loss lines for a specific product or service and making changes that increase that revenue
  管理特定产品或服务的收入或损益表，并进行更改以增加该收入
• Leading a project from start to finish that involves people from different teams coming together to build something
  从头到尾地领导一个项目，该项目涉及来自不同团队的人在一起构建东西

Before I had an official product manager title, I collected experiences that were centered around product. As an account manager, a lot of my success came from a deep understanding of all of our product’s intricacies and being a fierce advocate for new features my partners needed. As a lead of a vertical that made $100K+ a month, I prioritized marketing, writing, and product resources to help my business grow.

在获得正式的产品经理职位之前，我收集了以产品为中心的经验。 作为客户经理，我的许多成功都来自对我们产品所有复杂性的深刻理解，以及对合作伙伴所需要的新功能的强烈拥护。 作为一个垂直行业的领导者，该行业每个月的收入超过10万美元，我优先考虑营销，写作和产品资源，以帮助我的业务发展。

步骤1：阅读 (Step 1: Read)

Here are the things I read while prepping for job interviews and considering whether I really wanted to switch over:

这是我在准备工作面试时考虑的内容，并考虑我是否真的想切换：

• Cracking the PM Interview - pretty basic, but gives a good sense of what common questions and exercises might be. If you haven’t done case interviews, this is good practice.

  破解PM面试 -非常基本，但可以很好地理解常见问题和练习。 如果您还没有进行案例采访，这是一个好习惯。

• Stratechery - Daily newsletter covering in-depth analysis on tech, including breaking down companies’ strategic moves, mergers, why certain products fail and others don’t, and so on. I actually didn’t start reading this until I started my current job, but it is totally worth the $10/mo subscription fee if you want to beef up on macro-level strategic thinking about the tech landscape.

  Stratechery-每日新闻通讯，涵盖对技术的深入分析，包括分解公司的战略举措，合并，某些产品为什么失败而其他产品没有失败等等。 我实际上直到开始我的当前工作才开始阅读本文，但是如果您想加强对技术前景的宏观战略思考，这完全是一笔10美元/月的订阅费。

• Ken Norton’s Bringing the Donuts Newsletter - Advice on how to actually do the product manager job well. Also includes job postings and recommended books.

  肯·诺顿(Ken Norton)的《带来甜甜圈通讯》 -有关如何切实做好产品经理工作的建议。 还包括职位发布和推荐书籍。

• Julie Zhuo’s blog and newsletter - Honest, personal stories from her career as the VP of Product Design at Facebook and lessons learned. She’s great at addressing the personal quandaries that come with being a product lead (dealing with insecurity, breaking into the industry, handling conflict, responding to rejection).

  朱莉·卓(Julie Zhuo)的博客和时事通讯 -诚实，她在Facebook担任产品设计副总裁的职业生涯中的个人故事以及所汲取的经验教训。 她擅长解决产品领导者带来的个人难题(应对不安全感，闯入该行业，处理冲突，响应拒绝)。

步骤2：提出问题 (Step 2: Ask questions)

I asked my friends to set me up with any product manager they knew, even acquaintances of acquaintances. Then I prioritized the contact info of the product managers I met into the following categories:

我要求我的朋友让我和他们认识的任何产品经理一起工作，甚至包括熟人。 然后，我将遇到的产品经理的联系信息划分为以下类别：

1. I’m not at all interested in working at their company
   我对在他们公司工作根本不感兴趣
2. I’d love to work at their company
   我很想在他们的公司工作

I set up 5 - 10 calls with the product managers in group 1 to ask all of my PM career questions:

我与第1组的产品经理建立了5-10个电话，询问我所有的PM职业问题：

• What do you look for when you interview PMs?
  采访PM时会寻找什么？
• Here’s my honest experience, what parts do you think I should highlight?
  这是我的诚实经验，您认为我应该强调哪些部分？
• How did you get to where you are?
  您如何到达自己所在的位置？

Because I wasn’t actually interviewing with them, I felt comfortable sharing my vulnerabilities openly and asking for candid advice — things you can’t always do in an actual interview.

因为我实际上没有在采访他们，所以我很乐意公开分享我的漏洞并寻求坦率的建议-在实际的采访中您总是无法做到。

From these calls, I was able to develop my own understanding of the “ideal” PM: analytical, technically savvy, consumer-driven, critical thinker, strategic, and able to work with many different types of people and motivate them.

通过这些电话，我对“理想”的PM有了自己的理解：分析型，技术精明，消费者驱动型，批判性思想家，战略型，并能够与许多不同类型的人一起工作并激励他们。

I thought about what my own strengths and weaknesses were. I was weak at deeper quantitative data analysis and programming knowledge, but stronger at working with many different types of people and prioritizing for the good of a business.

我考虑了自己的优点和缺点。 我擅长于更深入的定量数据分析和编程知识，但擅长与许多不同类型的人一起工作并为企业谋福利而优先。

I shaped my PM search towards roles that played to my strengths and had a strong support network to bolster my weaknesses (For example, data scientists and analysts to help grow my quantitative analysis skills, strong tech lead engineers who could help me direct and prioritize the development work).

我将PM搜索塑造为发挥自己优势的角色，并拥有强大的支持网络来弥补我的弱点(例如，数据科学家和分析师帮助提高我的定量分析技能，强大的技术主管工程师可以帮助我指导和确定优先事项)开发工作)。

第3步：准备自己的故事并将自己放在那里 (Step 3: Prepare your own story and put yourself out there)

After all the informational calls, I was able to develop a more ideal pitch of why a company should hire me as a PM, even though I didn’t have the official title on my resume. I focused on all of the PM-like activities I had done:

在进行了所有信息通报之后，即使我的履历上没有正式头衔，我也能够提出一个更理想的建议，说明公司为何应聘我为PM。 我专注于我所做的所有类似PM的活动：

• Working with PMs and engineers to build new features
  与PM和工程师合作构建新功能
• Assessing user needs, and balancing complicated stakeholder groups
  评估用户需求，平衡复杂的利益相关者群体
• Analyzing data to make business decisions
  分析数据以制定业务决策

Given how difficult it is to transition into product management, the PM title felt like a secret society that only superhumans could break into. But all of the informational calls I had were very helpful in demystifying the role and giving me courage that I had the skills I needed to do the job.

鉴于过渡到产品管理有多么困难，PM头衔就像一个秘密的社会，只有超人才能闯入。 但是我进行的所有咨询性电话对于揭露角色神秘感和使我有勇气，我拥有完成工作所需的技能都非常有帮助。

To give myself confidence and assess my own market value, I put up my profile on Hired.com, a marketplace where employers reach out to you and offer you salary bids. I got a good sense of where I stood in the market and what salary range I could ask for. Updating my LinkedIn profile and setting it to “open to new opportunities” also helped with some inbound recruiting requests.

为了给自己信心并评估自己的市场价值，我在Hired.com上建立了我的个人资料，该市场上老板与您联系并向您提供薪水标书。 我对自己在市场上的地位以及可以要求的薪水范围有很好的了解。 更新我的LinkedIn个人资料并将其设置为“迎接新机遇”，这对一些入站招聘请求也有所帮助。

步骤4：可能会转化为真实采访的信息采访 (Step 4: Info interviews that were likely to convert to real interviews)

Back to group #2 - PMs (and other people) at companies I’d actually be excited to work at. I didn’t have people introduce me to these contacts until I felt like I’d done enough research and crafted my narrative of my experience.

回到第二组-我实际上很高兴能在公司工作的PM(和其他人员)。 在没有感觉到我已经进行了足够的研究并撰写了自己的经历叙述之前，没有人向我介绍这些联系人。

When I talked to them, I did it with the mindset of it being an actual interview, and spent most of my informational questions asking specifically about the company, how it was doing financially, and future strategic plans. In almost every case, the person ended up referring me to their head of HR to begin the initial phone screen process.

当我与他们交谈时，我的想法是进行一次实际采访，并花了我大部分的信息性问题，专门询问公司，财务状况以及未来的战略计划。 几乎在每种情况下，此人最终都将我转介给他们的HR负责人，开始进行初始电话屏幕处理。

步骤5：面试，面试，面试 (Step 5: Interview, interview, interview)

Once I made it past the HR phone screen, the real work began. The general process would be: informal phone chat with someone who works at the company -> HR phone screen -> hiring manager phone screen -> take home exercise -> onsite, usually involving a presentation of my work, situational exercises, or both.

一旦经过HR电话屏幕，便开始了真正的工作。 通常的过程是：与公司工作人员进行非正式电话交谈->人力资源电话屏幕->招聘经理电话屏幕->进行家庭锻炼->现场，通常涉及我的工作，情景锻炼或两者兼而有之。

The topic of how to get through a PM interview is a meaty one that I may tackle in a future post :)

如何通过PM面试的话题是一个多肉的话题，我可能会在以后的帖子中谈到：)

As I mentioned before, this is very specific to my own experiences, and I don’t think there is one universal path to becoming a PM. The PMs I’ve met and worked with have come from a wide range of backgrounds, from poetry major (me), to former programmers, to people who graduated and went straight into product.

如前所述，这是我自己的经历所特有的，并且我认为成为PM并没有一条通用的道路。 我遇到并与之共事的PM来自各种各样的背景，从诗歌专业(我)到前程序员，再到毕业后直接进入产品领域的人们。

I hope this brief overview is helpful for those of you who are hoping to transition into product management, and I wish you the best of luck!

我希望这份简短的概述对希望过渡到产品管理的人们有所帮助，并祝您好运！

Looking forward to hearing your own experiences and advice in the comments.

希望在评论中听到您的经验和建议。

翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-break-into-product-management-d354944308c0/

产品经理入门