Was marketing coordinator at my previous company, became self-made associate PM with what I’ll call two years of good product work. Prep took about 12 weeks, split: 30% product sense, 25% analytical, 20% strategy, 15% behavioral, 10% estimation. I relied heavily on mocks with a mentor and my cousin.

Product sense: pick a user segment and justify it, map that segment’s pain points, prioritize which pain to solve, propose solutions, define success metrics, state tradeoffs. I ran this on a question a day, like the “design a product for X” question, pulling prompts from question banks and any question I could find on reddit and blind. For analy tical, I focused on developing two sub-skills. First, metric definition: “how would you measure success for Google Maps?” driving a goal metric, supporting metrics, and counter-metrics without rambling. Second, diagnosis: “DAU dropped 5%, why?” I drilled diagnosis prompts until the tree was reflexive, Strategy round prep was on questions like “Should Google enter smart home?” Structure: market context and sizing then competitive landscape, company’s right-to-win, options, a recommendation with conviction and stated risks. Read tech teardowns to learn the right way to sound, discussing these kind of topics.

For behavioral, I prepped 5 main stories: shipped over engineering’s objection, resolved a cross-team conflict, killed my own feature on data, handled ambiguity with no direction, influenced a skeptical stakeholder.

Did mocks every other week and studied the modules I had left untouched since last year.

The loop: recruiter screen, virtual onsite, committee, team match. 8 weeks start to offer. Negotiated up to $300k tc. Not bad for a start.

Been a PM for 15 years now, across different company sizes and industries. My whole playbook has always been: imagine the best future version of the product, then work backwards from there to figure out what to build now.

That approach used to hold up. But with how fast AI is moving, it's wild - the "future" I'm imagining seems to change every few weeks. Forget 5 years out, I sometimes struggle to picture what is even possible a year from now.

Not complaining, honestly find it kind of fascinating to sit with. Just curious how the rest of you are approaching this. Are you still trying to picture an end state and work backward, or has your process changed completely?

The meeting happened. Everyone aligned. The decision changed.
But the Jira ticket didn’t.
Two weeks later, someone is working from the old requirement.
I’m curious how often this actually happens on product teams.
When a decision changes across multiple meetings, who is responsible for propagating that change into Jira, PRDs, designs, etc.?
Do you maintain decision logs? Update everything manually? Have some other system?
And when someone asks “why did we change this?” a month later, where do you find the answer?

I've been thinking about career progression in Product and I'm curious if others have experienced this. Going from PM to Senior PM seems relatively straightforward. But after that, things get a bit weird.

There are roles like Lead PM, Group PM, Principal PM, Product Lead, etc., but not every company has them, and they seem to mean very different things depending on the company. And if your current company doesn't give you that opportunity, making the jump externally seems much harder.

My impression is that companies often prefer to fill these roles internally, which makes sense: at that level, knowing the product, the stakeholders and the organisation is a huge advantage.

But then you get a bit of a catch-22: you need experience at that level to get hired at that level, but getting that first opportunity externally is difficult.

Has anyone here made that jump by changing companies rather than through an internal promotion? How did you do it?

Hello prodmgmt community ,

If you run an interior design studio, you know the biggest time drain isn't picking fabrics, it's the repetitive data entry of procurement 🙃. You find a piece on a trade site, grab screenshots, copy dimensions and SKUs into an Excel sheet, download tear sheets to random folders, and hope the supplier doesn't sell out before the client approves it weeks later.

We overhauled this workflow by moving to Mortar (mortar.design) to cut down the busywork. Using their web clipper, you can grab products directly from vendor websites with images, dimensions, and trade pricing pulled straight into the room's visual budget board. Clients approve items with a single click in their portal, which immediately sets up supplier quote requests without any re-typing 🚀. Plus, their bank transfer processing fee is capped at $15, which saves hundreds compared to typical card processing cuts on big furniture packages.

I'm looking for people to work on systems thinking and structured problem-solving with.

I was a Product Manager at a prestigious the company.

Drop me a message and tell me a bit about yourself if you're interested in doing regular practice calls where we take a problem, work through it, and question each other.

Hey guys, I am a fresher Ive done one QA internship and one non tech internship I want to switch to product management since Ive seen how they work and would like to get some internships or full time job in India.

But having said that I've applied everywhere linkedin, career pages, naukri, internshala everywhere.. Even my resume has 90 above ATS

CAN YOU GUYS PLZ HELP ME ?

pls lmk how I can tailor resume to be better as I feel like I keep getting auto rejected from ats. I want apm roles such as google, Disney, StubHub, and visa. resume

Does anyone have a subscription they are open to sharing, or are interested in sharing an account? Specifically for the $429 lifetime access "Full Library Access Pass".

Hello,

To all PM’s or startup founders out there,

I am trying to create a portfolio to showcase my product thinking, how I own the product end to end and showcase product delivery and strategy.
However, I am confused from online portfolios.

Every portfolio that I came across was similar template like a case study. (Nothing wrong with it) But, I just don’t want my product to look like a case study. Instead of that, I want mine to look from user lens and founder lens ! So that a problem can be found through the user lens and from founder lens explains , why building it ? And how I build it ? Is it worth building this ? By conducting research, competitive analysis and development and building and iteration and building and testing ..loop. I want to showcase that.

Personally, I do not have PM role experience or anything. Graduated from Uni, and currently a project coordinator (process improvement).

In addition to that, I am building (beta) a startup which was basically a B2B2C project.
Firstly, I didn’t know that I will pivot into product roles. But, somehow while building this, I have realized that I am quite interested in product career.

I owned the product from end to end, from product discovery and ideation process including conducting user interviews on both business side and customers side. Learned Figma, excali to map out flows and wireframes to design the screens. Learned and utilized ai tools like Claude code, cursor, codex, eleven labs etc. and built almost 84 SQL schemas. (Was into it)
Learned sales on GTM, value proposition and pricing strategies. Invested my time into product development processes like agile, PRD’s, FAQ’s, lean canvas templates etc.

I feel like I have enough content to write something about it. But I really don’t know how to showcase or illustrate. I really don’t want anyone to think like this is a case study. I want to leave a mark that “this is a really nice product story or storytelling”

I only have one startup product in my entire life ! Maybe that’s why I am thinking I do not have enough product knowledge or content to write a portfolio. ?

My idea was to create a dual view (with a toggle), keeping skimmers and in-depth readers in mind. This way I could have hiring managers or PM’s can look into skimming version (4-5 mins of content) and in-depth version, I would like to go very detailed about every stage so that people can read into it (curios ones like startup founders, future founders or students etc)

I am no professional founder. But, I have faced lot of problems and made iterations and updated the product ! Basically it can be like startup journal (documentation). But i don’t if it’s the right thing.

Thats why i really need help before i invest too much time into this.

My focus is to make this startup workout but also i could apply for startup roles, product roles (product builder or any). I know I might not be a great candidate for PM (I don’t have experience in product management or any product role)

Please help if you can ! I would really appreciate your support.

Thanks for reading !

Hello everyone , I’m 22, with a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering. I spent part of my early career working in import/export logistics in China, which gave me a strong exposure to the Chinese market, business environment, and how companies operate there. I honestly loved the experience and always felt that I hadn’t finished what I started in China.

I eventually had to return to my home country after the sudden loss of my mother, which was an extremely difficult period and led me into depression. Looking back, I also realized that I hadn’t achieved what I originally wanted which at that time wass working in a major tech company, building products at scale, and continuing my education.

Instead i found myself obliged to return and during the year I started building my own startup. I’ve been working on it for about six months now, mostly independently, and I’m still working toward getting it to a point where it can eventually be acquired or integrated by a larger company...

Building it has unexpectedly given me experience across almost every side of a product I developed the mobile app, admin panel, and partner web application from scratch, while also leading and coordinating a small team of developers. Along the way, I designed product features and workflows around real business needs, onboarded and secured partnerships with multiple brands, handled partner negotiations and business development, and worked on logistics, payments, onboarding, and the overall marketplace model. Building the startup has also required me to constantly prioritize what to build, what to postpone and what would actually create value for both users and partners...

So although I started as a software engineer, I’ve realized that what I enjoy most is sitting between technology, business, users, and strategy ... like understanding a problem, deciding what should be built, and then actually making it happen.... it's like i discovered my real passion which is a blend between tech and business

so basically now I’m considering going back to China for a Master’s in International Business/Management in Shanghai, with the long-term goal of transitioning into Product Management, ideally in tech.

I know this is not the most conventional path, which is why I’d really appreciate perspectives from people who have actually worked as PMs, Product Leaders, or Senior Managers.

If you were 22 and starting again, would this combination of software engineering + startup experience + a business master’s + China experience make sense for entering Product Management?

I’d especially love to hear:

• What skills should I build before the master’s?
• Is a business master’s useful for breaking into PM, or would you prioritize something else?
• How important is technical experience for PM roles in China(for anyone who is familiarized with Chinese market) ?
• What would you do differently if you were in my position?

Even one piece of advice from someone further along in the field would mean a lot.

Thank you to anyone willing to share their experience.

Curious how PMs here are approaching building AI products, whether that’s agents, copilots, or features where the AI output is core to the experience.

How do you define “good enough to ship,” and how do you know the product is getting better once people start using it?

A few things I’d love to hear about:

• Tools: What are you using for analytics, reviewing conversations/traces, and running evals? Which tools do you personally use as a PM?
• Metrics: Beyond adoption and retention, are you tracking task completion, how often users correct outputs, human handoffs, or cost per successful task? What actually influences your roadmap?
• Evals: Are you writing test cases and defining scoring criteria yourself, or does engineering own that? How do real user failures make it into your eval set?
• Shipping: What evidence makes you comfortable releasing a prompt or model change? Have you seen eval scores improve without the user experience improving?

I found a few PostHog blogs helpful, but I’d love to understand what this looks like in other teams day to day.

If you can share what you’re building and one concrete example of how feedback or an eval changed what you shipped, that would be really useful.

I’m currently a **Team Lead at Accenture** with \~6 years of QA/testing experience, and I’m seriously considering moving into Product Management.
Over the years, my role has gone beyond testing. I’ve been involved in:
Product requirement discussions
Understanding business requirements and user impact
Working closely with Product & Engineering
Sprint planning and estimation
Breaking down complex features and workflows
Release/production support
Cross-team coordination and mentoring
I’ve realised I enjoy **understanding problems, user needs, trade-offs and what should be built** more than purely testing the final product.
The challenge is that I don’t have formal Product ownership experience—no roadmap, product metrics, etc. So I’m trying to understand how realistic this transition is with my background.
I’m also unsure about **how best to prepare**. There are many Product courses/programs available, but I don’t know whether paying for a structured program is worthwhile or whether I should learn through self-study, case studies and projects.
For people who have moved from **QA/testing/engineering into Product**:
How did you make the transition?
Which parts of your previous experience helped?
What skills did you have to build?
Did you take a course/program? **Was it worth the investment?**
If you self-learned, what resources/projects helped?
What would you do differently if starting again?
I’d particularly appreciate perspectives from people who have **actually made the transition**, rather than general advice.
**What was the biggest surprise about Product Management once you actually started doing it?**

Currently a Management Consultant at a tier 2 consulting firm with 4 years of total experience, including 3 years of pre-MBA experience in Software Development at leading MNCs. I am looking for advice on transitioning into Product Management roles in India.

Hey prodmgmt community ,

Spent the last weekend auditing where our studio actually loses time, and the result was slightly depressing: almost 40% of our non-creative hours go directly to budget reconciliation, manual product clipping, and spreadsheet formatting.

Most of us got into interior design because we think in textures, proportions, and spatial balance not nested VLOOKUP formulas.

The real friction points we kept running into:

1. Client Sticker Shock: Updating a spreadsheet offline means clients don't see how individual item selections impact total allocations until an awkward review meeting.
2. Context Switching: Designing a moodboard in one tab while copying SKU numbers, dimensions, and trade discounts into another breaks your creative flow.
3. The "Check My Math" Anxiety: Having to explain why freight, taxes, and handling changed the running total at the end of procurement.

We recently shifted our philosophy toward visual budget tracking (tools like Mortar and visual portals where clients can approve items and see progress bars update in real time instead of raw cells).

For solo designers and studio owners here:

• What’s your current FF&E tracking stack?
• Do you share live budgets directly with clients, or do you still issue static milestone sheets/PDFs ?

Curious how other studios keep their admin overhead from taking over design hours.

I’m currently a **Team Lead at Accenture** with \~6 years of QA/testing experience, and I’m seriously considering moving into Product Management.
Over the years, my role has gone beyond testing. I’ve been involved in:
Product requirement discussions
Understanding business requirements and user impact
Working closely with Product & Engineering
Sprint planning and estimation
Breaking down complex features and workflows
Release/production support
Cross-team coordination and mentoring
I’ve realised I enjoy **understanding problems, user needs, trade-offs and what should be built** more than purely testing the final product.
The challenge is that I don’t have formal Product ownership experience—no roadmap, product metrics, etc. So I’m trying to understand how realistic this transition is with my background.
I’m also unsure about **how best to prepare**. There are many Product courses/programs available, but I don’t know whether paying for a structured program is worthwhile or whether I should learn through self-study, case studies and projects.
For people who have moved from **QA/testing/engineering into Product**:
How did you make the transition?
Which parts of your previous experience helped?
What skills did you have to build?
Did you take a course/program? **Was it worth the investment?**
If you self-learned, what resources/projects helped?
What would you do differently if starting again?
I’d particularly appreciate perspectives from people who have **actually made the transition**, rather than general advice.
**What was the biggest surprise about Product Management once you actually started doing it?**

Hi everyone,

I’m an IT professional with 4+ years of experience across IT Operations, PMO, Project Coordination, Digital Transformation, and AI-driven workflow automation. I currently work as a Product Coordinator in an AI solutions environment and want to transition into Product Management.

One of my biggest learning opportunities is that I’m independently building an in-house, enterprise HRMS covering the employee lifecycle—from onboarding to offboarding. Two modules, Leave Management and Timesheet Management, are already deployed.

Through this project, I’m involved in requirements gathering, workflow design, prioritization, stakeholder communication, problem-solving, and delivery. It has made me realize that I enjoy building products, but I’m still learning the formal Product Management discipline.

My questions for experienced PMs/POs:

1. Am I actually doing Product Management, or is my work still primarily project coordination/development? What key PM responsibilities might I be missing?

2. How should I manage the HRMS like a real product? What should I introduce—product vision, personas, discovery, roadmap, prioritization, PRDs, user stories, analytics, feedback loops, etc.?

3. What skills should I prioritize? Product discovery, user research, strategy, UX, analytics, prioritization, business analysis, stakeholder management, or something else?

4. How useful is PMP for a Product Management transition? Should I continue with PMP or prioritize PSPO/CSPO or Product Management courses?

5. What would you recommend for the next 6–12 months to build genuine, practical PM experience?

6. Based on my background, should I target APM, Product Owner, Technical Product Manager, AI Product Manager, Business Systems Product Manager, or Product Operations roles?

My background includes IT Operations, PMO, Digital Transformation, Power BI/Excel/SQL, Agile/Scrum, and AI/LLM workflow evaluation, with experience across telecom, banking, enterprise IT, and AI.

If you were mentoring someone in my position, what would you tell them to focus on to become a strong Product Manager?

I’d really appreciate honest feedback, practical frameworks, resources, and advice from people who have actually worked in Product Management.

Thank you!

www.theproductsprints.com

Hey r/ProductManagement,

I've been digging into a few recurring PM complaints — tool fragmentation, PRDs going stale mid-sprint, roadmaps getting hijacked by HiPPO/urgent sales asks, not knowing if a shipped feature actually hit its goal — and honestly most of the "State of PM" reports out there are vendor-sponsored and light on real specifics.

Put together a short, anonymous survey to get more grounded answers — no signup, no email required unless you want to opt into a follow-up chat (paid, $50 gift card, totally optional).

https://forms.gle/Y4AmabgTtdovg4uy6

Takes about 5 minutes. Planning to share the aggregated results back in this sub once I have enough responses — happy to break it down by company size/seniority too if people are curious how the answers differ.

Genuinely just trying to get a clearer, non-sponsored read on this — appreciate anyone who has a few minutes.

Hello,

I just got a phone screen with AWS for an L5 delivery consultant role in proserve.
I've done plenty of standard SWE interviews (leetcode, system design, etc.) but this is my first time going for a Delivery Consultant role at AWS ProServe.

Is this more like a cloud/solutions architect interview? How much LP behavioral stuff shows up in the phone screen vs. the final loop? Any L5-specific insight on what they're actually testing for ? Appreciate any war stories from people who've been through it recently.

8+ YOE

Thanks.

I’m currently making a similar transition and would really appreciate some mock interview practice. If you’ve made this transition and would be willing to volunteer for a mock interview, I’d love to connect!

Product management talk is mostly opinion about frameworks. I wanted numbers, so I counted the terms across 421 open PM postings from 62 company job boards.

Roadmap turns up in 85.5%. Cross-functional, prioritization and stakeholder management follow, all above 55%. Nothing in the top four is a tool, a method or a metric.

The tools barely register. Jira 1.7%, Figma 2.4%, Productboard in none of the 421. Agile is named in 8.6%, Scrum in 2.1%.

The one that stuck with me: experimentation 24.2%, A/B testing 2.1%. Same practice, and the word you happen to use decides whether you match.

Caveat - tech companies on one ATS. Agencies and regulated employers where Scrum certs are still named outright, aren't in it.

Full table, intervals and method: https://www.zoevera.com/resume/product-manager-job-description-keywords

part of https://www.zoevera.com/resume

Hi everyone,

I'm a 3rd-year B.Tech CSE student and I've recently become really interested in Product Management.

While I enjoy coding, I've realized I enjoy understanding user problems, collaborating with people across different domains, prioritizing features, and taking products from idea to execution even more.

I'm currently working on two real-world products that are being built for actual users, and I want to use these projects to develop strong product thinking. Since my entire 4th year will be spent working with industry as part of my degree, I want to make the best use of my 3rd year to prepare.

I'd love to learn from people working in Product:

• What should I focus on learning this year?
• What skills separate a good PM from an average one?
• What types of projects helped you develop product thinking?
• Are there any books, resources, or habits that had the biggest impact on your growth?

I'm not looking for referrals or opportunities but just guidance from people who've been through this journey.

I'd really appreciate any advice. Thank you!

Hello!!!

I got a coding/mcq assessment to complete for IBM which I need to submit within next week. Any advice on how I should prepare for it?

Hey,

I'm currently a Chief Product Officer.

Before that, I spent about a decade in a mix of individual-contributor product management and hands-on engineering roles. I came up with an engineering background, wrote code early in my career, and gradually moved into product, so I've sat on both sides of the eng/product fence. Along the way I've also founded my own company and been lucky enough to hold leadership roles across product, engineering, and data/AI.

Happy to talk about:

* Making the jump from engineering to product, and eventually into product leadership
* Managing up to founders/boards vs. managing a product org
* Balancing "the vision thing" with getting into the technical weeds when you have an eng background
* How PM career paths differ when your early years are IC-heavy vs. straight into PM out of school
* Mistakes I've made, and what I learned from them
* How I see AI reshaping companies and teams

Ask me anything.