Breaking Into Product Management: A Product Manager HQ Guide

An Indispensable Guide for Breaking Into Product Management

Product managers are amongst the highest-compensated, most well-respected professionals in the world today.

There’s just one problem. The profession of product management is amongst the least well-understood, and that means it can be brutally difficult to break into product management without prior knowledge.

This practical, easy-to-digest guide provides you with crucial tools to enable you to break into product management. Based on thousands of conversations with established product managers and aspiring product managers, this mythbusting resource arms you with valuable knowledge.

We walk you through the lives of multiple kinds of product managers, set up your foundation for success, and break down the most popular questions that come up in the product management interview process.

If you want to break into product management, this book is for you!

What's Inside

This 4-part book contains more than 150 pages of hard-earned insight. Inside, you'll learn:

• What is a product manager
• What a day in the life looks like for different kinds of product managers
• How to think like a product manager
• Whether you need an MBA
• Whether you need a technical background
• How to derisk your journey to product management
• How to best conduct research on a company you're interested in
• How to write an effective product management resume
• How the author became a product manager
• How to practice effectively for the product manager interview
• How to answer the "create a product roadmap" interview question
• How to answer the "analyze a metric change" interview question
  
• How to answer the "tell me about a failure" interview question
  
• How to answer the "design a product" interview question
  
• How to answer the "tell me about your favorite product" interview question
  
• How to answer the "improve a product" interview question
• How to answer the "create a new product" interview question
  
• How to answer the "prioritize a roadmap" interview question
  

Each chapter is designed to provide you with immediately actionable insight. At the end of each chapter, you'll have the opportunity to reflect on what you learned and on how to apply it to your product management journey.

About the Author

Clement Kao is a Co-Founder at Product Manager HQ, a community dedicated to providing career advice for aspiring product managers and experienced product managers. He’s written 60+ best practice articles and has been a featured speaker and writer for more than 15 different organizations.

Outside of Product Manager HQ, Clement is also a Product Manager at Blend, a San Francisco-based startup that partners with lenders and technology providers to re-imagine consumer finance. In the last three years, Clement has launched four multi-million dollar products, and he’s actively tackling new problem areas to unlock the next generation of multi-million dollar products.

About Product Manager HQ

Product Manager HQ is dedicated to providing career advice for aspiring and current product managers. We run the world's largest Product Manager Slack community, and we’ve been featured by Forbes as a top community for tech entrepreneurs & product people. Our articles on product management have been read more than 1 million times.

Product Manager HQ has been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Product Hunt, Mattermark, AlphaUX, and many other publications. Our sponsors include Facebook, Hired, Amplitude, Lob, FreshDesk, UserVoice, Notion, ProductPlan, Alpha-UX, Techcrunch, SaaStr, Hack Reactor, and others.