Get Backed PDF complete. PDF Download. Group Genius PDF complete. Happiness Is PDF Kindle. Instant Analysis PDF complete. PDF complete. Dweck, PH. Life Leverage PDF complete. Liquidated PDF complete. Moneyball PDF Kindle. Read Anger Therapy Online. Read Being The Starfish Online. Cracking the Coding Interview - 7 s Embed Size px.
Start on. Show related SlideShares at end. WordPress Shortcode. Next SlideShares. Download Now Download to read offline and view in fullscreen. Download Now Download Download to read offline. Gayle McDowell Follow. Cracking the Coding Interview - 7 steps - Udacity.
Cracking the Facebook Coding Interview. Architecture of Tech Interviews. Cracking the Product Manager Interview. Cracking the Coding interview Abbreviated - aug Cracking the Coding interview College.
Related Books Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Related Audiobooks Free with a 30 day trial from Scribd. Alon Stoerman. Khanh Tran. Show More. Views Total views. Actions Shares. Are people complaining about a missing feature you wanted to cut? Or are they raving about something you fought to keep in?
Most people discover that they can cut a lot more than they thought. Sharpen Your Analytical Skills Analytical skills come into product management in two major ways: analyzing what your team should be doing and analyzing how to persuade people to do that thing. As a PM, you need to become comfortable with finding data that convinces people.
See if you can find ways to demonstrate analytical skills as a designer. For example, maybe you can run a survey to get data that will help influence a design. Or maybe you can learn SQL and start pulling usage metrics. These skills will help you make the jump to PM. Can you become involved in roadmap discussions?
Are there team meetings that you could offer to run? Maybe you can identify a project the team should be working on, pitch it, and rally people to work on it. Can you take some of the load off her plate?
You might be able to spec something out for her or try your hand at analyzing some data. In many cases, a PM would be happy to help show you the ropes.
Sometimes it feels awkward to take leadership roles when no one has given you permission. For example, if you find that engineers are reluctant to fix UI bugs, you might come up with a contest that motivates them.
Transitioning from Customer Support Paul, currently a senior product manager, used his understanding of customer pain points to move from tech support to product management. When customers wrote in saying something was broken, he would always ask them what they were trying to do in order to understand the underlying customer need. Then, when he filed bug reports, he included detailed descriptions of the problems, suggestions for potential ways to solve the problems, and ideas for new features that would help.
As a PM you have to think about the user base as a whole. You need to think and talk about things in terms of the big picture. Articulate how an issue works in the bigger ecosystem. Sometimes the trick is to be persistent. Here are some skills you can emphasize when looking for PM roles: Analysis. Do you work with data at your current job? Are you an Excel ninja? Many software companies are looking for data-driven PMs who can make sense of metrics and draw insights from usage patterns.
Customer Focus. Are you in a customer-facing role? Have you learned how to translate customer feedback into action? Companies love product managers who understand customers and their needs. Business Savvy. Are you comfortable putting together business cases? Do you know how to size a market? Your experience can be a real asset in making the right business decisions. Do you have a background in marketing? Can you effectively communicate the value of a product?
Marketing skills can help a PM design a product that will do well in the marketplace. Industry Expertise. Do you have deep knowledge of how your industry works? If so, you have a leg up on applying to PM jobs in that industry. Your understanding of the industry means you can be a productive PM in a short amount of time. Could your team use some product management help? Do you have some extra capacity to step in? Many people slide into the PM role just by helping out when there was a gap.
When trying to jump to a PM role, compare these PM skills to those required or demonstrated with your current position. I got in the door through the people I knew. These people really advocated for me. They had worked with me at Google and were able to vouch for me. I got into the company as an internal tools PM. Then once I was in the company, I transitioned to a consumer facing team. One of the best ways to improve your candidacy for a product management position is to start a side project.
The side project gives you a chance to gain experience shipping a product, builds up your resume, shows off your technical skills, shows off your product design skills, and gives you a lot to talk about during your interview. If you hired people to help you, it might also give you a chance to show leadership skills. Fills in the gaps in your experience. There are many tutorials online that you can follow to build a simple app for free.
Shows off your skills. Is something you can speak passionately about. Are you solving an important problem? Or did you get to test out some interesting hypotheses? Did you learn a new technology? Make sure you can tell a story about your project. You can recruit friends to help you with implementation. You can hire people to build it. You can also make your side project about discovering the feasibility of an idea.
You could then iterate on the product idea and see how that affects the sign-up rate. Another good non-technical option is a design and usability project. Pick a problem in the world or your local community and start talking to people, observing them, and coming up with ideas.
IDEO, a top design firm, has materials on Human-Centered Design on their website that can help you learn more about running these projects. In fact, those are great reasons; they show a passion for learning and experimenting. If you have any positive metrics user signups, revenue per user, etc. Your side project should be listed on your resume as well as on your website, if you have one. Career Advancement Chapter 5. The person with the most hours is not always the one who lands the promotion.
As you build your career, these tips will help you achieve greater success. Ship great products As a PM, the biggest measure of your success will be the products you launch. They will remember that you led the team that delivered a successful product.
Get some launches under your belt The product life cycle, from planning through implementation to launch and beyond, sets the main rhythm for a PM. The product life cycle varies in length from team to team. Become the expert When you join a new team and all of your teammates seem so smart, it can be tempting to just shuttle questions to other people since they know so much.
Instead, make sure you really take the time to become the expert on your areas and your customers. Think about what kinds of research you can do to really understand the space.
You can look at data and metrics, or you can chat with the sales team. Talk to as many stakeholders as you can, and learn the background from your team.
Look at your skillset, decide which skills you need, and then find a place where you can learn those skills. You might want to pick a company that has several strong PMs to learn from.
Working closely with PMs is an excellent way to pick up the trade. Choose a growing company At a growing company, new opportunities are always opening up, and you quickly become one of the more senior employees. Find a manager who believes in you Many great PMs credit their success to great managers who gave them opportunities to prove themselves. You can often talk to other PMs at the company to learn who the best managers are and who are the managers to avoid.
Once you have a good manager, show them you are reliable and can do good work. Then, talk to them about how you want your career to grow, and be brave enough to take on the challenges they give you. Focus on your own efficiency. A few small changes to your routine can sometimes make a big difference in how organized you are. As you become more efficient, you will feel like you are gaining hours in the day. Understand how your role fits into the company.
Career advancement as a PM usually means expanding the scope of the area you work on. You might start by working on a feature, move to PM-ing a larger area, and then eventually own a whole product or even a product suite. To grow in this way, you need to understand how the pieces fit together to see the bigger picture. Help your team with something tangible early on. Most teams are a little bit suspicious of new PMs. This is an easy way to get off to a good start with your new team and earn goodwill that will help you in the future.
In these cases, you want to do an amazing job on your unsexy piece and prove you can be trusted with more important work. Then you can find areas you think are important and offer to contribute to those. Make sure you draw the distinction between teams that are just unglamorous and teams that are truly unimportant. The improvements you make as an infrastructure PM can be magnified throughout the company, so they can be a great place for career advancement.
Take on cross-team or company-wide tasks. At some point in your career, your visibility across the company is going to matter if you want to be promoted to higher positions. Sometimes you can get this visibility just by launching big projects that are important to the company, but there are other ways to get your name out there.
By leading and doing a good job on big company-wide projects such as UI reviews or goal setting, you help more people across the company think about you as a good PM. Similarly, you can teach a class or present at an all-hands. Another reason this cross-team work is valuable is that it helps you form relationships with people throughout the company.
Define and measure success. One way to really stand out as a PM is to get more concrete about what success means for your team. Depending on the project, success might mean more user growth, increased revenue, or increased customer engagement. For other projects you might have a more specific feature-based goal. Get the job done. Make sure your engineers use the specs to build features, or rewrite the specs or find another way to get your ideas across.
If you made a proposal, did you convince your team to pick it up? If not, find another way to make your point.
Most of the larger companies have an explicit career ladder with descriptions of the skills needed at each level. These ladders can be frustrating because they look so explicit and concrete, and yet PMs can meet all the requirements for their current level without being promoted. Two things are going on here. First, you need to meet all the requirements for the next level before being promoted into it. Second, you need to have earned a reputation for consistently and repeatedly delivering work at that level.
Find a mentor or mentors. PMs have all kinds of different skills. Some people are really good at coming up with a vision for their team, while others are great at data analysis or design. Identify people who you think are really strong in an area and reach out to them. When reaching out to a mentor, be specific.
Being purposeful makes the relationship better for both of you. Build credibility. As a PM, you want to gain the respect of everyone you work with, whether they be other product managers or people from other roles. The most straightforward way to build credibility is delivering results. It can be hard to get feedback directly from people on your reputation, so it might be worthwhile to ask your manager. Director, Product Management at Yahoo How did you make such a big jump from being a product manager at Google to being a senior director at Yahoo?
I was taking a big of leap of faith. I think joining so early, when it was risky, helped me personally figure out a role I was excited about and gave me a bit of leverage. They have really set ways about how they do promotions. There are people who are put on the fast track, but they still have to go step by step. You get a big reward if you take a lot of risk. You can go to a startup. Or you find a very unique opportunity like I had, where a large company gets a new CEO and is willing to look at things with a new lens.
You want to become an expert in certain areas and be given the opportunity to get these chances. So stay a good few years before you make those jumps. What were some of the key breakthrough moments in your career? When I went to work on Google Maps in Zurich. That was a breakthrough moment for me. When I moved to Maps, one of my first assignments was search quality on Maps. That meant that I could bring in some of the lessons from web search to Maps—some of the things that we knew worked.
Because I had first- hand experience with the ways a cutting-edge team did things, I had value to bring to a different product. I brought a new rigor and emphasis on techniques that ended up being successful in a new product. Some things were different of course, but at the end of the day, the fundamental ideas were the same and they worked well. Another part of this was that I moved to Zurich.
This allowed me to have credibility with the engineers there. At some point, you become well versed. You have exposure and see the patterns, and this helps you do things better and better every time.
It gives you a leg up in your career. Another example of this: Facebook and Twitter have been really successful at having and nurturing growth teams. Some of that culture has started to have an impact on and show the way for startups. PMs who have worked on product growth have skills that would be applicable. Even though growing from zero users to five million users is different than growing from 10 million users to 50 million users, a lot of the general lessons can be applied.
What advice would you give to a PM who wants to advance in their career? Things flow more naturally. You get less cynicism and skepticism from engineers, and it enables a friendlier environment. Reaching that tipping point should be a big thought when you start a new role. Circumstances can make it easier or harder. The team started as a designer and myself and has grown significantly.
I assembled my team and that got me past the tipping point and made a lot of things easier. The decision at that point was to move on to a new project. On the Android Market team, there were a lot of difficulties in terms of strong opinionated leadership, but no single clear leader. The consequence of having such team structure was making compromised decisions, often picking the wrong tradeoffs.
Individual engineers could see this happening, which made it difficult for me as a PM to get past the tipping point. Working on the team involved clashes that were hard to resolve without conflict. Android was a very successful product, and people had a culture of working really hard. I felt like because of the structure of the team, not everyone could get rewarded for their work.
This coincided with my first daughter being born. I was spending a lot of time at work in an intense environment and was not getting rewarded for it.
When push came to shove, they got their way. I was coming home from work frustrated. When I joined Android we had 50 million users and we grew to million users while I was there. This was something to be really proud of—to contribute to this great, successful product, which was growing exponentially. So I decided to switch teams. Some factors are in your control, and some are out of your control. As an early tip, be as much of an observer as you can.
Understand the context of things. Be more inquisitive. Instead of telling people what to do or trying to make decisions, try to ask questions. Why is this the way it is? Try to understand the context and history instead of being the new dictator of the team. Another tip to get that tipping point early on is to demonstrate value to people.
Find a scalable way to do it, maybe scraping, maybe using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Another tip for more senior PMs: Figure out your own framework and principles for how you make decisions, and communicate that as often as you can.
If you develop that framework and those principles, it helps people realize that you are consistent. As an example, Adam Cahan, the Senior VP of the mobile org, has an incredible eye for animations and transitions on mobile.
Every time you bring him a new build of the app, he might notice that one of the transitions is inconsistent. Take the metaphor for your app and use it across the board. When you come to him with a fancy animation for something and he tells you not to do it, you might feel resistant at first. Another example is that I try to make sure that, as much as possible, when you open the mobile app, you get straight to the value with as few bumps as possible. Over time we realized that if you stick to that principle, you find other ways of doing things.
So, we have shortcuts for power users. We wait until you used a feature in the non-shortcut way and used it enough that our popup hint about the shortcut will make sense to you. It was great because I learned about all these great internet and software companies.
It was a great first role at an operating company because I supported a variety of functional areas with reporting and analysis, and I got to see how they spent their time.
I got really interested in seeing how new features and changes to the UX user experience would affect customer engagement metrics and ultimately revenue. I also found that I really enjoyed working with engineers and designers; I wanted to be more involved in creating things to delight customers. A couple of years later, I left to pursue an MBA, mostly because I felt it would be an efficient way to move from analytics to product.
I did a couple internships before and during business school - at oDesk and Amazon Web Services - which were a great way to get a taste for different company sizes, cultures, and sub-sectors. I started out as an individual contributor focusing on growth initiatives, like launching new plans and overhauling new user onboarding. I eventually grew into managing the platform team, which was responsible for things like identity, billing, and enterprise features.
I left SurveyMonkey a few years later to lead product at Optimizely where I built the beginnings of the product team from the ground up. The role turned out to be a bit different from what I expected and wanted so I left after about six months. I decided to do some consulting work to get to know any potential team and manager before committing. After a couple months of spending two days per week at DocuSign, I was hooked.
I converted to full time and am currently overseeing growth, which is really exciting given the stage of the company and viral nature of the product.
When I was working as a business analyst at Shutterfly, a PM left. Because I was already familiar with the metrics for that product line, I had the opportunity to step in and gain some PM experience. Having the opportunity to get some product work while at Shutterfly was crucial. Post-business school, I was able to reference this experience and provide concrete examples around product launches and tough UX decisions.
I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity to work there when I did. The leadership team is really great about growing talent and giving people the room and support they need. I would get a new project or responsibility, have no idea how to do it, figure it out with help from my boss and the team, and then take on additional new responsibilities before I had time to get bored.
My current role was very much the result of being at the right place at the right time. I was introduced to DocuSign just as they were building out their product team. The company had a strong lineup of enterprise software veterans, but they were in the market for product folks from more consumer and UX-focused backgrounds.
The venture capital community can be a great resource here; they value meeting talent you! Make who you work with your top priority. Those are the things that make me want to work with someone. I started in Microsoft Office as an intern on Outlook over two summers. Some people think of program management as just frontend, but I worked with AMD and Intel, all of the silicon vendors.
It was really fun. Then I decided to broaden my experience. I took on a project management role and became a lead at the same time. I took the project management role to deliver Visual Studio This was still a program management role, but specifically around release management. Program managers usually do just a little bit of project management and spend a lot of time on design.
Release managers pay attention to exit criteria, and all of the other pieces of project management to make the entire release go well. So I had to find another way to help these PMs learn. Next, I came back to the US and became a group program manager on the. NET Framework. Group program manager is the second-level manager. I helped ship Windows 8 and then moved to the C and Visual Basic team.
And most recently I switched to a new, unreleased hardware project. I had to work with people from different companies. This was where I learned that whoever writes things down has the power. People in different disciplines such as test and dev think that PMs make all the decisions. The ways you write things down and what you write down define history. The power of the pen. I got to have more influence on the way things should work out.
She has previously worked as a Product Manager at Google where she joined as part of the elite Associate Product Manager program, and as a Program Manager at Microsoft.
Both reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. This book shares the skills, frameworks, and practices that my peers and I have painstakingly learned and honed over the years so that PMs can spend less time reinventing the wheel.
0コメント