TCW #037 | How to get <insert role> experience when you lack <insert role> experience
Proven patterns for solving the classic chicken-and-egg problem of on-the-job experience.
Hey, it’s 📣 Coach Erika! Welcome to a ✨ free edition✨ of The Career Whispers. Each week I tackle reader questions about tech careers: how to get one, how to navigate them, and how to grow and thrive in your role.
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This week, I’ll teach you how to get role experience when you don’t have official on-the-job experience in that role.
It’s that classic chicken-and-the-egg problem, but there’s always a way to gain experience for a role you’re targeting, even before you land a permanent gig.
Let’s dive in.
Prime directive: build a portfolio (and help people see you in the role)
If there is one thing you take away from this post, let it be this:
When trying to get <insert role> experience without prior <insert role> experience, your #1 goal should be to build a portfolio of tangible, demonstrable work that you can (1) host online for others to discover and (2) whip out in an elevator or interview setting.
Your prime directive: build a body of work that compels others to associate you with the competencies for the role you’re trying to land.
This body of work should be as accessible as possible, ideally online. You can create a website or use your LinkedIn to showcase your body of work.
For this article, I wanted to offer proven patterns and advice for gaining role experience for any role. So, for each section below, I offer general avenues for gaining role experience, regardless of which role you’re trying to master.
To make the advice more real and tangible, however, I follow each strategy with specific actionable steps that a person seeking out product management role experience should consider.
You can think of the product management explainers in this post as a blueprint for your target role of interest.
Here’s the first such example:
💡Portfolio items for product management (aim for a minimum of 1 each of these artifacts):
Case studies. Having one of these in a format you like will also help with interviewing, as many PM interviews involve take-home case study prompts. An outline I like.
Competitive analyses. A template I like.
Market analyses
Product strategy one-pager. A template I like.
Product requirements docs (PRDs). Here’s a template I like, from Kevin Yien.
Product roadmaps. I personally like now-next-later.
Product metrics
🧰 Here are some additional templates you might like.
Optionally, you might include:
Product designs or concepts. These can be fancy wireframes in Figma, concepts in Keynote, or hand-drawn designs.
Code. Only if you write code, of course. Link to your Github or other repo.
Product blog posts or articles you’ve written.
Gaining real-world role experience
I work with a lot of coaching clients whose first instinct when trying to pivot into a new career path is to get a new certification or take an online course. I’m here to tell you that nothing beats tangible, demonstrable real-world experience that you can show to someone considering you for a new role.
Nothing beats real-world experience.
No course, conference, certification, or networking group will beat actually doing the daily work of the role you’re trying to master.
Do yourself a favor and start with real-world options when you’re looking for ways to gain role-specific experience.
Start your own side hustle.
This is one of my favorite options in the real-world category.
Building a side hustle could involve building a digital product, creating a physical product, or even providing a service. This will give you the opportunity to experience all aspects of product management, from ideation and concept validation to building to MVP release to post-launch support.
💡 How to start a side hustle to grow product management skills
One thing I always tell early career PMs or people trying to pivot into product management is that it’s easier than ever to build PM skills standing up a new product or service. That also means there are not a lot of good excuses for not doing this.
Quickly find user pain points by reading the abundance of online product reviews for products of interest — Apps? Start at the Play Store and App Store. Physical products? Check e-commerce sites. B2B SaaS? G2, ProductHunt, and Capterra
Validate market size with data and the open internet (It’s ok to start with: “Bard, what is the market size for X market?”)
Assess the competitive landscape by trying out B2C products or reading reviews for B2B products.
Survey people in your network or use Pollfish to target a user niche.
Stand up a test website in hours with easy website builders (Wix, Carrd, Shopify)
Build a medium-fidelity prototype on the order of days with no-code tools like Bubble and Thunkable.
Take on <role> tasks within your current role.
If you’re already employed, one of the fastest ways to pivot into a new role is to do it within your existing company. Why? Because they already know you, and if you’ve performed well in the past, they are going to want to keep you around.
You can start by letting your manager know that you’re interested in getting more exposure to the role of interest, and ask for ways you can take on tasks needed to learn how to do that role. This might be in a 10-20% capacity, or on top of your current workload.
💡 How to get product management experience when you’re already employed in a different role:
if you're a software engineer, you could volunteer to lead the development of a new feature.
if you're a customer support representative, you could work on gathering and analyzing user feedback.
if you’re an analyst, you could take your analysis one step further and propose product features to address user friction.
if you’re in recruiting, you could ask to redesign an aspect of the careers page to improve candidate experience or application rates.
if you’re in HR, you can raise your hand to redesign the user experience for new employee onboarding.
Volunteer.
Volunteer your skills to a non-profit organization. This is a great way to gain experience working on a real product or service, with real users, and with a team of others who are passionate about the cause.
💡Ways to get product management volunteer work
Find a nonprofit whose mission resonates with you. They won’t necessarily have “Product Management Volunteer Work” listed on their website. Start volunteering on their terms (maybe you start by cleaning the kennels at the pet shelter, that’s fine). Over time, find ways to edge into product management work (“You know, I think we could reduce average cat adoption time by upgrading the online pet profiles, would you be interested in having me take a crack at a new design?”)
Join a hackathon (for a cause). Volunteer for the PM role on the hackathon team. A couple of hackathon sites to get you started: Hacks for Humanity and HackerEarth Challenges.
(if you code) Contribute to open-source projects. This is a great way to gain experience working on a product with a large and diverse team of contributors. It will also give you the opportunity to learn from other product managers and engineers.
Intern, apprentice, or consult.
If you have a way in with a startup that is willing to take a chance on you, take a paid or unpaid internship, an apprenticeship, or a consulting project. Don’t focus on the money, focus on getting real-world experience and exposure to the role.
💡Ways to find internships, apprenticeships, or consulting opportunities in product management
Search for postings on Google or job boards like LinkedIn, Wellfound, and Indeed.
Post on your LinkedIn that this is what you’re looking for. Make it clear what you bring to the table (your availability and nascent skills) and what you hope to gain from the experience (including pay if applicable and specific skills you want to develop). Post at least once per week, assume only 5% of your network sees any given post you write. Over time, try to mix in thought leadership posts on PM, analyses of products, pitch deck teardowns, etc to demonstrate your growing interest and knowledge of product work.
Gaining academic role experience
In general, you’ll find that I recommend real-world experience over academic learning and experiences. However, I find that many people gain confidence once they grasp the lingo for a given craft, so it can be helpful to engage with book learning in parallel with real-world learning.
Below are a few ways to get academic role experience.
Enroll in a role-specific bootcamp.
Most roles in tech now have an associated set of boot camps that will offer a focused curriculum to learn a new role. They typically offer placement guarantees, or at least support for landing your first role, paid or unpaid. The benefits of bootcamps are that you walk away with a solid role understanding and a portfolio of real work (albeit, in an academic setting).
You’ll want to do extensive research to pick the right boot camp for you. They can be quite pricey, between a few thousand dollars and up to the cost of one year of Ivy League university tuition. They also vary in length (from weeks to months).
😎 My pro tip: ask hard questions about job placement — not just “what percent of graduates land jobs within X months” but also “what specific jobs and salaries do they land?” and “how many graduates gain work by getting re-employed by the bootcamp itself?”
💡Some well-reviewed product management bootcamps
Take online courses.
The MOOC explosion over the last decade+ and the more recent explosion of role-specific gurus offering YouTube videos and online courses (like mine!) makes it easier than ever to find an online course to help you learn more about a specific role:
how to land it
how to do the day-to-day work
how to grow a career in that role
The best thing about online courses: you can go at your own pace and (generally) on your own schedule 🗓️
The next best thing: you can start at 101 and work your way up to more advanced courses, again, at your own pace.
💡Some well-reviewed product management courses
Network with real-world people in <insert role>
Even secondhand perspectives help you gain role perspective. I consider networking to be “academic” because it’s not role experience you’re personally banking, but knowing the inside track on that role is invaluable to finding a great role at a company known for honing talent for that specific role.
Attend industry events, join online communities, and reach out directly to other people in your role of interest. Networking is a great way to learn about the industry, find out about new job opportunities, and get feedback on your role-specific intuition and skills.
💡Some well-reviewed product management networking events and groups
Lenny’s Newsletter Community (paid)
Women in Product (a Facebook group)
Ingest books, newsletters, podcasts, and articles.
Reading is so underrated. I’m a huge fan of supporting Substack newsletters like this one. Newsletters from industry veterans trying to share their learnings more broadly and chock full of gems that will not only help you navigate into your target role, but be better equipped to grow in the role.
Books and articles are in the same boat. Find useful content, then build routines that give you time weekly to read those books, newsletters, and articles.
I go on a daily 1-hour career growth walk where I listen to selected podcasts that help me grow in my craft.
On Sunday mornings, I spend 1-1.5 hours reading all of the Substacks I’m subscribed to.
The amount of learning over time is immense and will help you master your target role and craft in no time.
💡Top ten highest-rated product management craft books, according to PMs:
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Marty Cagan) ⚡️
The Lean Product Playbook (Dan Olsen)
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (Jake Knapp) ⚡️
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Nir Eyal)
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Geoffrey A. Moore)
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (Ben Horowitz) ⚡️
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value (Melissa Perri)
The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager (Josh Anon and Carlos González de Villaumbrosia)
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters (Ryan Singer)
Outcomes Over Output: Why Customer Behavior is the Key Metric for Business Success (Josh Seiden)
⚡️ Coach Erika’s faves
Get certified.
Certifications aren’t required in most tech companies, so I encourage people to avoid the false sense of confidence advertised by most certifications. It’s just all too easy to take a course for a couple of weeks and then get certified by filling out a pretty easy multiple-choice test with fresh learnings. Many employers discount certifications if they aren’t well-known and industry-standard.
😳 Trust me, I would know! In my twenties, I spent 6 weeks studying for a PMP certification. When I later got my job at Google, I learned the PMP certification was generally regarded as unnecessary in an industry that values first-principles thinking and creative problem-solving over process-driven frameworks.
That said, certifications are helpful when you want to learn the lingo of a new trade, so some of you might benefit from getting one. Just try not to go overboard and get 15 certifications and then feel frustrated when it doesn’t land you a job right away, ok?
💡Top 3 industry-respected product management certifications (but really, you don’t need any of these)
Certified Product Manager (CPM) by the Product Management Association (PMA)
Agile Certified Product Manager and Product Owner (ACPMPO) by the Association of International Product Management Professionals (AIPMM)
New Product Development Professional (NPDP) by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA)
Closing Thoughts
Prime directive: build a portfolio of work.
You’ll build experience faster with real-world tactics, but you may also want to bolster with academic experience to gain confidence in the lingo of the trade.
Give these role-specific skill development tactics a try and let me know how it goes.
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