How to get into product management with no experience

How do you get into product management and startups with no experience?

Before we dive in, if you bought a copy of The Startup Product Manager, please leave a review - it would be greatly appreciated!

What has been my journey? 🌍

I want to lay out my journey below, and hopefully it can inspire you!

The purpose of telling my journey is to let you know that you can start anywhere.

Your life can change in a year or within a few years if you set your mind to something.

My journey so far (step-by-step):

• Growing up building random side projects (many failed): I built small YouTube channels, eBay businesses to sell coupons/Pokémon cards, and tried a lot of random stuff (and failed). I didn’t know how to code but just figured out how to set things up.

• Playing video games: they taught me the fundamentals of in-game economies and the basics of human behavior. These taught me important skillsets, potentially more important than a lot of what I learned before college.

• Taking computer science courses in high school: I learned the basics of C++ and Java through trial and error, but it wasn’t a fit for me. I wanted to do more customer-focused work and grow my business skillsets.

• Learning the importance of hard work: high school taught me that talent is 10% of the game. After that, 90% of the game is discipline and work ethic. High school was the most pivotal time for me. Like many of you, it teaches you how to balance challenging coursework and numerous activities. I was nowhere near the top 5-10% of my class purely on academics. During my senior year, I got accepted into Carnegie Mellon University and received an option to go to Cornell after my freshman year of college. I persisted my way through high school and did that during college as well. Through cold emails, I made my non-traditional path work for me: I landed internships at the Mayor’s Office of NYC and FCC. These internships then luckily set me up to get into product management. Part of this is all luck, through trying over and over again (or also like me, finding it by accident).

• When I got to college: I attended Carnegie Mellon my freshman year. During my summer, I worked at the Federal Reserve, I got lucky interning my freshman year under a product manager. Though it would not directly lead to a full time role, I learned a lot of skills that I then used in the future. I also was undecided between industries and what to pursue at the time. I then decided I had to figure out a way to pivot into a different career, setting my sights on recruiting for finance and consulting.

• I transferred schools: I had to re-adjust to a new environment, make friends again, and start a new major. My major freshman year was behavioral economics, and then my major sophomore year was industrial and labor relations.

• I had a non-technical major: I majored in ILR at Cornell. It was the most reading-heavy major on campus, and I had to learn to read effectively in college from scratch, without necessarily having a strong interest in it growing up. I was the only one in my major to join two engineering project teams, which were application-based and some of the most selective clubs on campus. Through persistence, I eventually worked in consulting (Accenture) and then pivoted into tech (Adobe) during my summers.

• Despite my non-technical background, I did the following and more: 

  1. Eventually, I led Cornell’s top mobile app development project team as the Product Marketing Lead.

  2. I took two product design courses in one semester and then became a teaching assistant for Cornell’s largest introductory human-computer interaction design course (product design). One of my design case studies gained traction on LinkedIn and got posted by a top author in product management.

  3. I still explored my interests in consulting and finance on the side because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Without initially knowing accounting or business fundamentals, I successfully took a course on equity research under the former equities group leader at Fidelity and then a course on consulting under one of the most influential former partners at Deloitte.

  4. During my senior year, I made the decision to become a PM full-time (before my final semester). I broke into product management at a FinTech startup that was backed by YC, a former Bain Capital Ventures Managing Director / Forbes Midas List Investor, a former Paypal Exec, and beyond. This was without me having any direct experience in PM over a prolonged period of time or necessarily studying computer science / business / etc as a major.

  5. Almost a year and a half later, I spoke on a FinTech panel alongside the CMO of Pipe in New York.

  6. Around two years after starting in PM full-time, I launched a book on product management and startups that led to this newsletter, numerous podcast engagements, and more.

• Why do I tell you all of this?

  1. You can do anything, especially break into product management and/or startups. I didn’t have the perfect background. Everyone starts somewhere.

  2. More in the next section on how you can break in.

How to break into product management with no experience:

1. Why do I tell you all of this?

   1. Your next role is a cold email away.

   2. You can do anything despite your background or current set of experiences. Whether you’re just getting started or are coming from some other path, you can achieve what you want to achieve. I believe that who you know and who you can get to know are important.

   3. The quality that separates those who achieve their goals are their abilities to stay in the game. What do I mean by that? It’s all about your persistence and small efforts compounded over long periods of time.

2. How to get into product management with 0 experience:

   1. You can do these three things to become a PM: 1) send out cold emails, 2) understand what your skills are, and 3) talk to founders + pitch your skills.

   2. You have relevant experience already: you just have to pitch it in the right way. Whether you learned the piano, volunteered at a non-profit, or played on a soccer team, you have done the fundamental work that is required in product management. Team building, stakeholder management, going from a beginner to an expert, building your knowledge, etc.

   3. Take a skills-based approach to PM: if you’ve built side projects or want to build side projects, you can learn product/marketing/coding/design and then pitch those skills in an email + interview.

   4. Product management is about solving problems: what is product management fundamentally? You are listening to someone, understanding their problems, and creating an effective solution. You have likely done this before in some capacity.

   5. Finding founders: start with YC’s startup directory and then go from there.

Refer 5 friends to the newsletter and get a free copy of my book that has everything you need and more: The Startup Product Manager!

If you bought a copy of The Startup Product Manager, please leave a review - it would be greatly appreciated!