READING: Product Management in Practice

I see a product manager’s job as an interdisciplinary field that prioritizes the need for collaboration and patience. Based on the reading, what I grasped the key idea of Product Management to be, is the acceptance and acknowledgement that collaboration and a variety of learning must be prioritized in the field for you to be successful in that specific career. I learned that it is essential to understand that it is not your success that should be put first, it is the team’s success that should be put at first as the team’s success is your very own success; and with that important fact it means that as a product manager it is important to engage with the team and build a long lasting relationship with them so that the team can work together and deliver positive results. Another thing that I took away from the reading is that it is important to ask for help when needed, as being a product manager may demand any of us to take on roles and responsibilities that we have never taken before, but we should not be shy to ask for help as that is what essentially builds relationships and gives us the ability to work on the product together. If I were to ask the author any specific question, the first question I would ask them is what would they recommend undergraduate students to do in order to break into product management? As it was mentioned in the text there are some companies such as Amazon that have preference for those with an MBA, but how can an undergraduate student stand out compared to applicants such as those with an MBA? Another question I would ask is, how do you achieve a perfect work life balance as a product manager? The author mentioned that in their early years they were working 60 hours a week, but that over time they ended up working less as they achieved more of a balance between work and their social life; just exactly how did they achieve that work life balance?