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Navigating your product career
The last couple of years have been a roller coaster ride for product people in the job market. Not long ago, companies fell all over themselves to hire product managers. Today, not so much. Product management pundits have alternatively claimed the end of product management or explained you can only differentiate yourself with “courage, gut, sense, etc.” As always, reality rests somewhere in the middle. This week, we gathered recent resources to help you navigate your career without (hopefully) getting motion sickness.
Meanwhile, in product news, Iyo tries to succeed where others have failed, Ticketmaster suffers a data breach, Granola wants to help you read your meeting notes, and Canva targets the enterprise.
Navigating your product career. The product management career path is certainly a tricky one. And the dearth of formal product management education means that product people often question whether their career decisions are right. There is a path for Product Managers – but that path to success is rarely a straight line, and the skills that got you to your current role may not be the same ones that will propel you to the next level. Our own Mike Belsito reflected on advice from numerous product leaders to put together a deep dive on navigating your product career that helps you think more deeply about your career in product.
Elevating your product management game: A guide for the new and the ambitious. How can you become an exceptional product manager in an environment under constant pressure to deliver but with little guidance or time to learn? Michael Hirsch shares his self improvement plan.
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This Week’s Interview:
Hacking your product career with Gib Biddle
We often think about how to improve the products we're managing. But sometimes, we overlook the one product we'll always manage — our careers in product.
In this special video, we learn from Gib Biddle, acclaimed product leader and former VP of Product at Netflix, on how to best:
- Understand the technical skills required of a product leader, plus the leadership skills required as you grow.
- See how a highly strategic "hacking" approach builds momentum in your career.
- Accelerate career progress through your own "personal board of directors."
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This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.
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Last month, we relaunched Gigantic, an online learning platform for Product Managers and Leaders.
Courses include:
- Become an AI Product Manager
- Product Strategy and Leadership
- Mastering Customer Research
And more... So check out Gigantic and level up your product game.
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Landing your dream product role
As product managers and leaders, our careers are driven by our ability to find opportunities that align with our skills, experiences, and aspirations. However, the job search process can be daunting and isolating, especially in today's competitive market. Earlier this week, I interviewed Phyl Terry, author of Never Search Alone, who shared invaluable advice on navigating the job search with a product mindset.
One of the key insights from our conversation was the concept of "candidate-market fit." Just as we strive for product-market fit in our roles, Phyl emphasizes the importance of understanding the intersection between what you want, what the market wants, and how the market perceives you. By treating yourself as the product and conducting thorough research and discovery, you can better position yourself for success.
Another crucial aspect of Phyl's approach is the power of community. They strongly advocate for forming a "job search council" – a mutual support group of fellow job seekers who can provide guidance, accountability, and emotional support throughout the process. By leveraging the collective wisdom of your peers, you can overcome the isolation and anxiety that often accompanies the job search. (These councils are available to join for free at phyl.org).
We also talked about the importance of collaborative interviewing and negotiation. Rather than viewing these interactions as one-sided, they encourage candidates to shape the conversation actively. By presenting a thoughtful "job mission with OKRs" to the hiring manager, you can demonstrate your value, clarify expectations, and set yourself up for long-term success.
These days, we must approach our careers with the same level of intentionality and strategic thinking that we bring to our products. But if we’re thoughtful about it, we can confidently navigate the job search and find the perfect role to grow and thrive.
Mike Belsito
Co-founder, Product Collective
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Where is the market for wearables? The pre-launch excitement for Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 didn’t translate into sales post launch. Alphabet X spinout Iyo thinks they’ve cracked the formula for an AI device that people are actually interested in. Whether people will want an AI to chat them up via earbuds remains to be seen. These examples prove that the best way to find out if people will buy your product is to put it out on the market.
Ticketmaster lost some customer data in the Snow(flake). Entertainment giant Live Nation has confirmed its ticketing subsidiary Ticketmaster has been hacked. Live Nation said the data breach occurred due to “identified unauthorized activity within a third-party cloud database environment containing Company data.” While the official statement did not name the third-party cloud database in its statement, a spokesman indicated the database was hosted on Snowflake. This incident raises an interesting question - who's responsible for data breaches when a company uses a third-party service? The company? The third-party service provider? Both?
This AI meeting support tool requires you to pay attention still. There are a lot of AI meeting transcription and summarization tools out there. Granola hopes to differentiate itself from others by organizing your rough notes into an easier to read format. It combines your notes with a transcription that it takes of the meeting to fill in any holes you may have left. That feature could prove to be both helpful and humbling.
Canva goes enterprise hunting. Canva launched Canva Enterprise a product targeted squarely at, you guessed it, large organizations. The new product includes a set of visualization and productivity tools, including an infinite whiteboard, docs, presentations, websites, and data visualizations. In other words, they're trying to out-workspace Google Workspace.
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The ultimate guide to product manager roles and skills. In today's fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, the role of a product manager has become increasingly vital. Product managers oversee the development and success of a product from conception to launch and beyond. To excel in this role, it is crucial to understand the immense responsibilities that come with it. Jake Brereton provides an in-depth analysis of the various facets of a product manager's role, as well as the essential skills required to thrive in this dynamic field.
Charting the product manager career path. As the ZIRP era winds down, the product management career has shifted in several ways. It’s tougher to get into and even tougher to find roles that manage product managers. Fortunately, the product management career path has opened up new opportunities for individual contributor product managers, and companies have begun hiring again. Despite all the turbulence, product management remains an excellent career option. Joel Polanco goes over product manager career paths, skills, compensation, and more.
Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.
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How QXscore transforms the product development lifecycle
Tuesday, June 11th @ 02:00 PM EST
Product teams know all too well that design spaces aren’t prone to structure or measurement, which often makes obtaining or proving ROI difficult. Moreover, most measurement occurs after a product gets launched. But what if there was a way to measure and optimize designs from the beginning to empower product teams to plan with more confidence and reduce the cost of rework?
Cue the QXscore (quality of experience score).
Join Lucas Lemasters, UX Research Principal at American Airlines and Chris Schmidt, Global Account Director at UserTesting, as they discuss how QXscore enables product teams to build experiences that drive customer value by…
- Measuring the quality and efficiency of user experience (UX) design
- Measuring product performance through a UX lens
- Identifying the relationship between UX success and product metrics to demonstrate business impact
Plus, you’ll have a chance to ask questions of your own!
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Leading without Authority
Thursday, June 13st @ 01:00 PM EST
From layoffs in the Tech space, to a surge in mobile users in Gaming, to consumer trends in Ecommerce, 2023 performance varied greatly. Mixpanel examined data from over 7,500 companies to understand what growth, retention, engagement, and marketing metrics looked like across six key industries.
In this webinar, we discuss:
- 2023 growth rates and how they compared to 2022
- Differences in average growth rates compared to growth rates of top performers
- How retention rates changed from 2022 to 2023
- How key industries can understand what healthy engagement looks like
- What good reach looks like based on key marketing metrics
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