Thread by @sriramk

Breaking into PMing - a 🧵 // A question folks from eng/design/other functions often have how to become a PM in a tech co.

It can seem non-obvious and differs with each company but here are some patterns I've seen work. All the below assumes you have no PMing on your resume.

1a/ First, here's a secret: everyone desperately wants to hire a good PM but good PMs are hard to hire and a bad hire can be disastrous for a team. This sets up various incentives.

1b/ It's *much* easier to do a lateral move to a PM in a company you're working in as opposed to joining a new one. highly recommend this over trying to find a new company to take a bet on you.
The below assumes you're going to try and find a role in your current co.

2/ Start finding ways to add value to your team outside your function. Easier if your team has no PM (or) if there's more to be done than your PM(s) can handle.

Some examples:

2a/ Talk to the customers and/or understand their data. No team can have too much of people trying to understand customers and compile that for insights. Also core job of PM!

2b/ Do all the "glue" work PMs do. Set up meetings, morale events, act as a channel between various teams (eng and sales). There's always a lot more to do here and even if you have an existing PM they'll be grateful for the help

Doing the above is going to get you some social capital and credibility from your peers (PMing is all about credibility from the teams you are PMing).

3/ Write a product brief/spec/narrative/whatchamacall-it for something new to build. And then oversee it getting built by all the teams involved. Pick something small/boring/non-essential if you already have a PM overlooking the crit. pieces.

Get into the habit of writing these

4/ Look around your company for folks looking to hire PM (easier the larger the company is). Grab coffee/lunch - build a relationship. And send them examples of your work from above. Easier if they're closer to your team.

5/ The truth is: it is *really* hard to hire good PMs. So any hiring manager will be sorely tempted to have a good internal candidate than go through the process of making a bad hire on an external one. You want to be top of mind for that person.

Ideally the hiring mgr/HR should have a chat about you along the lines of "Hey, we have this open role. Should we look at X (you) for this? They've been doing a lot of PMing and their engineers/designers love them"

You want your name in the conversation.

6/ All the above easier said than done but I've seen some of the best PMs I've worked with come from the route above. And they came from diverse backgrounds (no well-known schools or CS degrees). Internal credibility is a powerful thing.

7/ If you're an *external* candidate, it gets trickier. Think you need to look for - what are examples from your work life that you can point to as proxy for PMing?

8/ Two hacks.
a. You're looking at it. Twitter is super powerful to get known in the PM world as a smart product person. Build a brand for yourself with your writing.

b. Write a strategy doc for a company or a product. I will guarantee you that the PM/CEO responsible will read it. Again, a tactic I've seen work many times to get someone hired.

9/ And finally - keep at it! I've seen people persist and do a lateral move at all sorts of levels (and it gets easier the higher the ladder you are since a lot of these roles "generalize").

This was on my writing todo list pre-COVID-19. Trying to get back to writing more non-COVID content.

And as always - do subscribe to my newsletter at sriramk.com/newsletter !