Main Takeaways: -Product management covers a huge range of skill sets so whatever you're doing today will be a tool in your future chest -Every company has product management gaps that you can fill today, you just need to find them -You can learn a lot of relevant PM skills on your own outside of work and bring them into your day to day creativeMain

1. www.productschool.com
How to Learn PM by Doing it in Your
Current Role by Hulu Sr PM

2. CERTIFICATES
Your Product Management Certificate Path
Product Leadership
Certificate™
Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
Product Management
Certificate™
20 HOURS
40 HOURS
40 HOURS

3. Corporate
Training
Level up your team’s Product
Management skills

4. Free Product Management Resources
BOOKS
EVENTS
JOB PORTAL
COMMUNITIES
bit.ly/product_resources
COURSES

5. Learn to product manage
in your current role
Matt Ransford, Product Management at Hulu

6. Who am I?
● Manage a team of PMs at Hulu in Developer Platform Engineering
● Have worked at small agencies and Fortune 500 companies
● Been in this and adjacent spaces my entire career

7. Product management is
understanding many
disciplines so that you can
influence, guide, and direct
in service of bringing your
product vision to life

8. What’s the tl;dr?
● Product management covers a huge range of skill sets so whatever you’re doing
today will be a tool in your future chest
● Every company has product management gaps that you can fill today, you just
need to find them
● You can learn a lot of relevant PM skills on your own at work (and outside of
work) and bring them into your day to day

9. What we’ll cover
Where you are
Learn your organization
Learn your industry
Learn your customers
Learn yourself
Learn to facilitate
Meeting fundamentals!
Where you want to be
Project and Program
Code
Engineering
Customer Success
Finance
Marketing
Sales

10. Focus
I’m going to talk
primarily about how
to product manage in
software technology

11. How do I PM?
There is no one way to do product management and no two companies will do it the
same way
in some companies PM is very specialized
in some companies PM is quite broad
in some companies it’s less rigidly defined and it’s up to you
But first: establish a baseline of understanding

12. Where You Are

13. Learn your org
What does the organization know?
Learn as much as you can about the org itself
Learn as much as you can about how to influence
Learn as much as you can about its customers

14. Learn your org
Corporate strategy
What are the highest level objectives and how does your function contribute?
Core competency
What is the company best at doing?

15. Learn yourself
What are your strengths?
Are you a visionary or are you an executor?
Are you technical? Are you good with partner relationships?
Lean on those strengths but know where your gaps are
Work to fill the gaps

16. Learn to facilitate
Learn how to facilitate!
Networking internally is huge, huge
Get people on board
Gain consensus
Meet people, learn what they do
Build relationships to the point at which people come to you to get things done

17. Meeting Fundamentals
Fundamentals!
Run an effective meeting always
Meeting invites have agendas
Clearly defined goal/outcome
Start wrapping up ten min before end of an hour meeting
Document the recap somewhere everyone can access

18. Where You Want to Be

19. Project and Program Management
Most direct path into Product Management
Learn the basics of agile and its ceremonies
Planning, standup, demo, retro
Make a Trello board for yourself and do your work in Kanban
Try to do manage one of your projects as a sprint

20. Code
“Learn to code” is so overwrought
Go through an entire beginners tutorial
Something practical — Google “Python for business”
Git + deploy something on a cloud provider
AWS is going to be your likeliest — Use Lightsail or Copilot

21. Engineering
You need to know how engineering works
Writing user stories, participating in agile ceremonies
Describing product solutions in technical terms
Understanding technical trade-offs
Don’t go too deep into the how but you need to own the why and what

22. Customer Success
They know your customers best!
Sit in on their calls with customers
Learn how NPS and CSAT work (and their limitations)
Where do customers struggle with your product? Where do they succeed?

23. Finance
They control the budget
They know how to model
They know what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in the past

24. Sales
Meet your sales team
Sit in on calls with them
They’re a great resource for understanding your customer
A key aspect of product management is selling
to your internal stakeholders
to your end users

25. Marketing
How do you get customers interested in engaged?
What’re the different marketing channels in your org?
Which are most effective and why?
How does the public feel about your brand?
Marketing tells the public version of the story you tell internally

26. And So
Look for areas where there are gaps at your current company
Build relationships with those who would want you on their team
This works best in smaller orgs but it’s not a hard and fast rule, there are always
holes to be plugged in every org

27. And So
How do you get there?
Ask yourself whether the business has a role for you
Even if it’s a gap you see as needing to be filled — the business may not agree
Can you be open with your manager about where you want your career to go?
Is your org one that would welcome someone making those kind of moves?

28. Thank You!

29. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training