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Ask HN: I am about to go from SWE to Product Manager, what is your day 1 advice?
3 points by mr_00ff00 26 days ago
As title says, what advice do you have for someone who is a mid-level SWE (4-6 YOE) and about to become a product manager?
4 comments

I recommend reading a book about consulting, e.g. in McKinsey's style.

Your PM job will be a lot more about influence and communication.

Influence is often about getting people to trust you and get the last 10% done. Prepare to spend 3 months on a very technically-difficult project, then have the CEO rip apart your demo because the copy on the first screen isn't what he expects, without every getting deeper in to the product. That's the last 10% and your job is getting your tired team to care about it.

The way decisions are made will be significantly different compared to the egalitarianism of engineering. Understanding how your organization makes decisions and adapting to it is key to success as a PM. (Consensus? Founder mode? Disagree and commit?)

Good PMs make impact and at the end of the day. Your career is almost entirely dependent on your manager's subjective opinion of your work. You'll need to learn to "manage up" - ensuring that your manager agrees with your decisions and thinks that you have had impact.

The persona that fails in PM is the pseudo-academic who was told they were smart as a kid, and can't hustle, make a decision, or sell others on their ideas. You need to be prepared for conflict.

Might want to reconsider. PMs are not really needed. They exist for dysfunctional teams that cannot manage their workload. (PMs are not Product Owners)
What are you doing to learn how to PM?

I recommend reading The Mom Test.

Dusting off some old replies. The TL;DR is: reduce information asymmetry, expose thought processes and align (everyone knows what to do, what not to do, why, and how we got there). People should send in pull requests to your thought processes. They should be able to take decisions based on their model of your thought processes, which you can help them build. Increase leverage and fire yourself every day. The posts that are more relevant to you:

If I disappear, what will happen:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008223

Communication, alignment:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177646

Useful things for the team and product that add leverage:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439

Communication with the team (link, and subsequent clarification):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614372

Fractal Communication: communication that can penetrate several layers of management and be relevant to people with different profiles and skillsets:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26123017

Product development:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827841

Management involvement as a spectrum:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715971

Giving a damn:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356222

Researching topics:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922120

Keeping up with a firehose of information:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147502

Tips to learn from videos:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710623

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723586

Remote work, use existing tooling and build our own. Jitsi videos, record everything, give access to everyone so they can reference them and go back to them, meetings once a week or two weeks to align:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179539

Less relevant to you, included nonetheless...

Understanding codebases:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100

Testing pipelines, scaffolding, issue templates:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591067

Making the most out of meetings and leveraging your presence:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873103

Consulting, understanding the problem your "client", who can be your manager, has:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24972611

Product, architecture, and impact on the team:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503365

Onboarding new hires to a codebase, what if it were you, improve code:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22860716

Reduce information asymmetry, template for taking minutes of meetings to dispatch to the team:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886

On taking notes. When you're told something, or receive a remark, make sure to make a note and learn from it whether it's a mistake, or a colleague showing you something useful, or a task you must accomplish.. don't be told things twice or worse. Be on the ball and reliable:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209518

More meeting notes. Reply to a person who had trouble talking in corporate meetings:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323660