Introduction

When we start a new career, most of us need to gain some foundational skill sets before or during the first few years of work.

However, product management is a newer career path than medicine, law, and banking. As a result, there isn't a well-defined path to gaining the required skills and knowledge to be an effective product manager. There's no standard degree or certification that product managers get before they start their careers. The few existing bootcamps and certifications are aimed at helping you land a product manager job, and less at helping you learn how to succeed as a product manager. 

Once PMs start their careers, traditional training falls short. Online resources are scattered across the internet, but they're often too specific to individual experiences or they try to provide one-size-fits-all templates that might not be applicable across the diversity of situations that PMs experience. What’s more, few companies offer structured internship programs. Even when they do, internship programs tend to be too short to provide adequate exposure to the PM role. In 3 months, most interns only begin to get the context around the org, the customers, and the business model, and they're often assigned projects that aren't a priority. And only a handful of large tech companies offer formal training programs for full-time roles.

For instance, large companies like Google and Dropbox have a structured new product manager training program. They provide new PMs with dedicated mentors, a cohort of peers, content, and diverse opportunities to build and launch features—from optimizing existing features to building new features or contributing to larger product development efforts.

With this structured experience, new PMs quickly learn the skills and frameworks needed to be effective across a variety of projects, setting them on an accelerated career trajectory.

But these environments are the exception to the rule. In reality, new PMs often work in organizations with limited time and resources to invest in development outside the requirements of their role and projects. This is why many smaller companies don't hire inexperienced PMs—because they know they can't invest in developing and training them. Jiaona Zhang, former Head of Product at Airbnb, shares, “Airbnb didn't hire new PMs for many years because they knew they couldn't train them. When I transferred non-PMs into product roles, I spent significant time on mentoring and training. This made me realize how hard it is for new PMs to join tech companies even as large as Airbnb.”

As a new PM, when you don't go through a structured and comprehensive training program, it leads to three common challenges in your career. First, you only learn skills that are relevant to your projects. This is problematic because product management is inherently multi-dimensional.

When your only source of learning is previous projects, you might find yourself only building one aspect of the PM skillset, rather than the whole. So when you're put in a different situation—such as a different type of project at the same company or trying to move to a different company—you might not know how to approach it because you've never done it before. This can lead to a low-confidence spiral, because every time you learn how to do something, your next project requires you to start from scratch.

For instance, imagine you're a PM at Airbnb working on improving the property search algorithm. To execute the feature, you might have to do a lot of quantitative analysis and work closely with an engineer to implement the algorithm. However, your next project might require you to redesign Airbnb's payment flow, which means working closely with designers to build prototypes and run usability testing. Your prior experience with data analysis won't help you execute on this project, so it might feel like you're starting from ground zero.

The second challenge that arises when new PMs don’t get formal training is that it takes longer to learn the best practices and frameworks underlying effective product management.

Often, your manager and teams are going to be busy and under tight timelines. So they will often take a more directive approach, telling you what to do instead of teaching you. The onus will be on you to pattern-match over multiple iterations to learn product management best practices and frameworks.

Continuing with the Airbnb example, as you're trying to learn how to work with designers to build prototypes, you might approach your manager for help. If they are busy with other projects, they might provide pointed feedback on how to improve that specific prototype, but they may not have the time and bandwidth to teach you the best practices of prototyping.

You will instead have to go through a few different projects with prototyping work before you begin to recognize the patterns of good design collaboration and prototypes.

The third challenge is that you can't always see the big picture that you're operating within.

When you spend your first year as a PM trying to learn the fundamentals of your role, you don't always have the capacity to take a step back. It's hard to see how your feature ladders up to organizational and team goals, or how it links to other teams' goals and projects. In this scenario, it becomes hard to identify and plan for possible dependencies or communicate and collaborate with the relevant teams.

What these situations demonstrate is that, while it isn't impossible to become a great product manager without a structured training program, learning foundational product management skills can be instrumental to accelerating your growth trajectory.

Our program partners, Anand Subramani, VP of Product at Path, and Jioana Zhang, VP of Product at Webflow, recognized this need for a structured and comprehensive product manager training that is accessible to all, and have developed this program to fill that void. Both Anand and JZ come with over 15 years of experience as product leaders and mentors at multi-billion dollar companies like Zynga, Gusto, Dropbox, Pilot, Webflow, Airbnb, and WeWork. They have managed and trained countless new product managers across these companies.

While product management is a multi-dimensional role that can look very different across organizations and even teams, Anand and JZ have focused this program on the four pillars that are foundational to most new product managers across organizations. The first pillar is Opportunity Validation, the second is Design, the third is Development, and the fourth is Launch and Iteration. 

As an early-career PM, most of your projects will be centered on features. So in this program, we’ll take a feature-centric approach to this process. However, these pillars apply to everything from small feature updates to large product development. That’s why mastering them early on will accelerate your PM career growth. Let's walk through what each of these pillars means when we're working on building features.

First, feature opportunity validation. Before feature specs are developed or any code is written, product managers need to decide what to build and validate whether it will create value for their users and their business.

For instance, consider a PM at Figma, the design collaboration product, who is responsible for building new collaboration features. It’s the PM’s job to identify an opportunity to improve collaboration, and they must do so in a way that not only solves a meaningful user problem but also creates value for the business and aligns with the company strategy.

So let's say the PM heard from the customer support team that some users wanted the ability to quickly react to comments in Figma. Rather than diving in to build it, the PM would validate this opportunity by conducting interviews with different types of Figma users, and determining if this was a widespread problem for the broader Figma user base.

They would also assess how this feature could drive business value. Let’s say they find that the ability to react to a comment is likely to increase engagement on comments by 50%, and this ultimately increases retention for the business. Only then would the Figma team invest resources into designing and developing the reaction feature.

The second pillar is feature design. Once opportunities have been identified and validated, PMs are responsible for helping turn these opportunities into designs and specifications. This requires combining an understanding of user needs, business constraints, and design decisions to develop a feature prototype.

In the Figma example, the PM would partner with product designers to lay out the functionality and user experience for the reaction feature.

To do this, they would have to understand what types of reactions users want to provide, where they want to provide them (in product, through email, or through other environments like Slack), and how they want to be notified when they receive these reactions. Based on this understanding, as well as other development and design constraints, they would prototype the reaction feature and test it.

Third is feature development. Once feature specifications and prototypes have been created, PMs are responsible for working with engineering teams to bring these designs to life. They need to build workplans and drive feature development through their team's operational cycles. Additionally, they need to track and communicate progress and challenges to cross-functional teams.

In the Figma example, the PM would collaborate with their design and engineering counterparts to break down the reaction feature into milestones and tasks. They would track progress against the plan, and share updates with leadership, their manager, and cross-functional teams that are involved in development.

Finally, there’s feature launch and iteration. One of the core responsibilities of a PM is owning the end-to-end success of new features. This means they need to ensure it’s launched smoothly, performance is measured, and learnings and new opportunities are synthesized and communicated to other teams.

In the Figma example, the PM would have to ensure that the feature is marketed during and after launch through email and app notifications, social media, and other channels. They would then evaluate how the feature is performing against its goals. Does it help users quickly react to comments? How much does it increase engagement on comments? Based on this performance, they would have to decide what to do next. They might need to improve the user experience or add more reactions. Or they might decide to move on and work on a different collaboration feature. 

The PM would then package these learnings and insights and present them to leadership, product, design, and engineering teams.

As we can see from this Figma example, most PM projects will go through the product development pillars in sequence. PMs identify opportunities to develop a feature or product, then execute on these opportunities by designing, developing, and launching them. Ultimately, they evaluate their performance post-launch. Since the product development pillars are often sequential, we sometimes refer to them as the stages of product development.

Understanding the product development pillars—both separately and in sequence—and mastering the tools and strategies to execute these pillars will not only set you up for success in the first few years of your PM career but also put you on a high-growth trajectory as a product manager. There are four key reasons why.

First, you’ll learn skills that are relevant throughout your career. These pillars are foundational to product development at every level.

As a junior PM, you'll likely be responsible for features. Most of your effort will be concentrated in the third and fourth pillars: feature development and feature launch and iteration. But understanding all four pillars and how they fit together will make you more effective in your existing area of focus, and expand your scope of work over time.

As you grow to senior PM, the scope, size, and complexity of these features will grow, and you'll find yourself spending more time on the first two pillars: validating feature opportunities and designing features. This ensures that you and your design and engineering counterparts are developing and launching the right set of features.

As you advance to group PM, you'll manage a product roadmap and a team of PMs who are building features using these four product development pillars. And as a product leader, you'll be responsible for the vision and strategy of your product, which then influences that product roadmap and the products and features that you build.

Learning these foundational pillars and taking this integrated view of product and feature development early in your career will enable you to make better decisions at the product, roadmap, and strategic levels.

Second, you’ll become an independent operator who can build features with limited supervision.

When you work through the four product development pillars for a feature or product that you're responsible for, you're no longer dependent on your managers' and supervisors' inputs at each stage. Instead, you'll be able to sequence your work and decisions independently, and you'll bring your own mental models and frameworks to navigate difficult decisions and trade-offs.

For instance, when you're breaking down a feature into development milestones and sprint cycles, you need to prioritize what functionality you want in the initial release and which elements you can de-prioritize for later releases. Most PMs ask their supervisors how to sequence their work. However, using the product development pillars will allow you to learn the most important inputs and trade-offs to consider as you prioritize milestones and sequence feature development.

Third, you’ll begin to own feature outcomes. By mastering these product development pillars, you won't just execute on the vision and plan of your supervisors, but begin to own features end-to-end.

When you master the first pillar, you will be able to participate in, and eventually lead, the scoping and prioritization of feature work. You will have a clear point of view on whether you should build a feature, and what success for the feature will look like. Mastering pillars two and three means that you won't just participate in the design and development of the feature, you'll actually guide the process with your unique understanding of the customer and business. By mastering pillar four, you'll learn how to evaluate feature performance against goals and proactively identify opportunities to improve feature outcomes.

Fourth, you’ll learn when and how to communicate and collaborate with leadership and peers. In this program, we'll teach you how to proactively work with leadership, engineering, product, design, and other teams.

Getting inputs, aligning on goals and progress, and communicating challenges and wins at the right time will enable you to gain visibility and trust from your org's leadership and other teams. That’s going to differentiate you as a high-performing product manager. Helen Smith, VP of Product at Reforge, says, “The biggest way that high growth PMs differentiate themselves is by how they react when things don't go well. High-growth PMs communicate and learn from every problem or failure that their projects encounter.”

These four things—mastering the foundations, becoming an independent operator, owning outcomes, and collaborating expertly—will set you on an accelerated trajectory in your PM career. Anand and JZ can attest that new product managers who show mastery of these four pillars rise quickly up the PM ranks. In the next four modules, we'll work through the four product development pillars. For each pillar, we'll introduce tools and strategies to help you communicate with leadership, your product, design, and engineering team, and cross-functional stakeholders.

In Module 1, we'll focus on the first pillar: identifying and validating feature opportunities that create value. We'll discuss the three components of a great product opportunity—strategic fit, user value, and business value—and walk through a four-step process to validate them.

In Module 2, we'll focus on the second pillar: designing features. We'll talk about how to do efficient brainstorming with design counterparts, how to leverage prototype testing to arrive at a high-fidelity design, and how to gain approval and update your product requirements document, or PRD.

In Module 3, we'll discuss the third pillar: developing product features. We'll discuss the body of work that must be completed to transform a designed feature into a built feature. We'll give you a playbook for development that includes mapping your cross-functional team, preparing for development, managing execution, and managing risk.

And in Module 4, we'll cover the fourth product development pillar: feature launch and iteration. We’ll teach you how to effectively coordinate a launch, evaluate performance, and communicate the feature’s impact with stakeholders.

In each module, we'll introduce a set of templates and exercises to help you apply your learnings to your work. By the end of this program, you’ll be able to recognize and deeply understand these four product development pillars and use them to accelerate your PM career. Let’s get started.