365 Days In a Product Manager’s Life: Day #2.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been focused on preparing for my new role before my first day, Tomorrow, 01/04/2021.

Here’s a list of the resources I have used to help guide me throughout this period:

• www.productschool.com: I consider this to be one of the best websites for Product Management resources. They have daily webinars by top product leaders in the biggest tech companies and startups, an enormous amount of free e-books and resources, and finally their Product Management Certification path. I’ll discuss their certification path in the bullet list below.
• Product School’s Product Management Certification: If you’re interested in getting a Product Management certification to help you either get into the field or just add some credibility to your resume, there are different places you can go with like General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly/) or Product School (www.productschool.com). I personally went with the Product School option because the instructor of the class is a renowned product leader at Apple and I believe that his mentorship/leadership will help me personally and have a big impact on my understanding of the field. Here’s the cool thing about Product School, they have multiple payment plans to help people cover the expenses of certification which helped me a lot as I juggle my personal debt payments and all the other fun financial stuff. My program starts next week on the 9th of January, so I am definitely excited about it and will be sharing more on my experience as I go through the course.
• www.codeacademy.com: Okay, different people have different opinions about how important it is for a Product Manager to have some level of programming/coding skills to excel in the PM role. I personally find programming to be super interesting and absolutely love the process of creating software. In my opinion, being able to back my conversations with my software engineering team will be super productive for the whole team to work more efficiently, so I decided to visit www.codeacademy.com. They have a “Full Stack Developer” path, which is a six-month program that walks you through the different fundamental topics of programming and gets you ready to code comfortably by the end of the program. I can’t remember exactly how much I paid, but it was a little over $200 for the membership, and it has been awesome! I’ve got into the habit of spending about an hour a day on the site, and have been learning tons of new things every day. Trust me, as someone who didn’t understand how the Command Terminal works, I feel like I’m hitting some milestones with Code Academy.
• “Inspired” By Marty Cagan: This book was actually recommended to me by the VP of Product at our company right after my final interview for the role. I still didn’t know if I got the job or not, but the fact that she encouraged me to check the book out, meant that it was worth it. I purchased the book from Amazon (https://amzn.to/38ULxyQ) and it has been such a great read! Marty Cagan puts a lot of knowledge into this piece of work and takes you through different theoretical and practical aspects of the journey towards building “Great Products That Customers Love”. I’m going through the book right now but for the time being, I’ll leave you guys with this quote from the book: “ We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” “Mercenaries build whatever they’re told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers”. This made me commit myself to become a missionary for my product and put that mission at the forefront of my day-to-day life. My VP also recommended a second book by Marty C., “Empowered”, which I got but haven’t had the chance to read yet. I’ll keep you guys posted on my progress.
• www.udemy.com: Udemy has a bunch of PM courses for less than $20 each. I literally looked for the ones with the highest reviews and went through them one by one. I personally enjoyed this one a lot: https://www.udemy.com/course/productmanagement101/.
• Jira certifications by Atlassian on Course Era: PMs use many tools every day to make their workflow more collaborative and efficient. Jira, is one of those tools that are adopted by a lot of big organizations. I have used Jira multiple in my previous careers but felt like I needed a refresher, so this course was a great resource to get me going and prepared. The course is supposed to be done within a 4 week period, by you’ll be able to finish in 2 days if you binge the whole thing as I did. It goes through the practical use of Jira as well as some of the theoretical topics around Agile and Lean that will help you make better use of the application. If you pay, you can also get a certificate after you complete the whole course, it’s pretty neat.

To conclude, these have been some of the main things I have used over the past month or so and I feel that I have gotten prepared by utilizing them. I’ll make sure to follow up on this post with my opinion on those resources plus anymore I come across. Cheers to you all!