I love this post from Patrick Collison on advice he’d give his past teenage self. Here’s the advice I’d give to past me in my 20s:

Professional and Personal Advice

• There’s more opportunity in chaos. Don’t let organized chaos (e.g. — start-ups) scare you. Thoughtfully jump off the deep end. You’ll grow most from these opportunities.
• Focus on people. You win or lose based on the team you surround yourself with. Find people with skillsets different from your background, those who have equally high levels of persistence, and people who show care to one another during tough times (not just the good times).
• Be a specialist. Don’t make context switching a strength. Being well rounded is extremely overrated. Be great at a couple things, and be ‘good enough’ at everything else so your weaknesses don’t destroy you.
• Clarity of goals makes execution easy. Make the target clear and easy to see. Clarity creates focus on what you ruthlessly optimize for, and increases the chance of success, while decreasing the time it takes to get there.
• Empower your coworkers; don’t be threatened by them. The best way to be successful is to surround yourself with successful people. The best way to surround yourself with successful people is to make everyone else around you successful. If you are threatened by a coworker’s success, the problem is likely inward and not outward.
• Scale yourself out of the job you’re doing. Don’t be a control freak. Give others the chance to show their capabilities or help them get there.
• Learn to take feedback well. Feedback is how you learn where to grow. It generally shows care when someone tells you where things aren’t going well. Likely, they believe in your ability to fix and grow from it.
• Everyone has imposter syndrome. Everyone. No matter the years of experience, the number of success stories, or FAANG companies on your resume, everyone has imposter syndrome. Either learn to embrace it positively, or you’ll crumble from the anxiety. Own it; don’t compensate for it.
• Looking up is great, but look down occasionally, too. Never be content with where you are, but be proud of what you’ve accomplished. Decide what success looks like based on what’s important to you, not based on how others’ opinions about you.
• Inspiration is everywhere. The people who are at the top of their trade always have something to teach you. You’ll experience how the world’s best chefs can teach you about perfect execution. Absorb.
• The stress isn’t worth it. Life isn’t as dramatic as you want to make it. It’s okay to get upset and let a little stress motivate you, but normalize your emotions with relativity. Smile :)
• Don’t try to minimize failures; optimize to maximize successes. Don’t bet small and expect big results. You’re mostly going to fail in your career, so maximize for the chances where you can be right and be really right.
• Be outwardly positive. It’s easy to be dismissive, negative, and assume malintent from others. Don’t do that. Be a source of positivity on this earth. It will become more important than ever.
• Tell others you care about them. You never know when the things you love will depart from your life. Make sure people know know how much you love them. Call your mother as much as you can, even if she drives you bananas occasionally.
• Be humble, be thankful. You’re a product of everyone else who took a chance on you and helped you grow. Pay it forward. To the individuals who taught me these valuable lessons over the past 10 years, I’m eternally grateful to each of you.

Always keep learning. Be humble and be thankful.

Although product management is still an evolving field, it’s become a staple of successful development teams, forming a strong pillar to stand aside engineering, design, marketing and customer success. However, the paths into product are different than the route to end up in one of these other disciplines.

Rather than focus on how to become a PM, it’s more important to have confidence that this is the right role for you. Here’s what I’ve learned on how to think about a career as a PM, whether you’re a new graduate or have 10+ years of experience on your resume.

Let’s talk about the why.

You should choose a career in product if you’re obsessed about your customers and the problems they have. Your job is all about bringing the customer pain to the team; being crisp on what you’re solving and why it’s worth solving. You should be able to feel your customers’ pain like it’s your own and have a strong urgency to represent their needs to your team.

I’m always discouraged whenever I ask someone why they want to be a product manager and receive one of the following:

• “I want to be the person to make all the decisions on a team.”
• “I have a lot of really good ideas we should build”
• “I don’t really have core skills in engineering, design, marketing or customer success. I’m not passionate about any of those things.”

All of these individuals would make terrible product managers. Being a product manager is not about being the ‘idea’ person, listening to product pitches and randomly choosing designs. There’s a big difference between what makes a good PM vs. a bad PM and I highly recommend you have a clear understanding on what a good product manager does before exploring a career in it.

Product management includes being part of the decision making process with an equal amount of grunt work and heavy lifting you can’t be unnerved by. If you’re interested in gaining some initial experience at non-decision making work, start observing/analyzing your product’s core metrics. Try to derive one insight every day and share it with others on your team. It can be a hunch you have based on the data & trends you’ve analyzed, or a question you have now that you know more!

What do you need to get good at?

PMs need to be good at roughly three things (and I’d argue in this order):

• Execution — you need to be able to take a task (big or small), break it down into digestable pieces and deliver on them. No excuses. If you can’t ship it 🛳, you’re not going to make it.
• Win with a team — building product is a team sport. If you can’t energize a team around a customer problem, work cross functionally, communicate well, build consensus or influence others, then you’re dead in the water. You’ll quickly learn the success of your product is largely representative of the health of your team. The only way to get recognized as a great PM is if your team is great, not if you are. Healthy teams deliver amazing products. Toxic teams build 💩.
• Have vision & discipline — vision & discipline are all about developing a strong framework to learn about the right problems to solve. You need to know what’s important to solve, who are you solving it for, why is it worth solving, and how do you measure success? You need to make customer & data informed hypotheses to find the right problems to focus on, with the patience to be occasionally wrong. You need to learn how to stay focused on a couple things, and say no to everything else. You should value working with a team to figure out what behavioral & analytics signals can help guide where you should go.

How you can get some experience

The best PMs have experience to bring to the table.* They have depth in previous expertise, such as engineering, design, marketing, or customer advocacy. They’ve been part of teams that have built product before and have success stories on what went well and learnings from things that didn’t go well.

If you are still interested in product, here are ways I recommend getting useful experience to help make sure this is the right role for you:

• Know your customers. Find ways to know more about your customers than they know about themselves. Know them like the back of your hand. Know their names, what team they’re on, what success looks like to them today, tomorrow, or in 3 to 6 months...Know what would make them look like superheroes in the eyes of their team and their manager. Try to know their next move before they even make it. More importantly, earn their trust, respect, and their ears. The best ways to gain this experience is to be part of customer interviews & usability sessions. You could even ask to do a tour of duty with your support team.
• Obsess about the design and experience. Write out the 1 or 2 core actions a customer needs to take in order to be successful with your product. Is it easy to onboard and learn about your product’s core actions? Is the first time experience so delightful that there’s a high probability they will share it with a friend? Ask a friendly designer (or use the internet) to help teach you how to do a storyboard or a UX wireframe. Come up with a few suggestions, with supporting data, on some experiments you could try. What metrics would you pay attention to if your changes were successful? Finally, try and pitch a team to give it a try.
• Become a great storyteller. You need to be the best story teller to your team, to your customers and to the market. Do you know what you’re building, and more importantly, why you’re building it? Try to write a mock blog post about a future product feature and share it with a few close customers. Do they have a strong reaction that prompts them to ask you when they can use that feature? Work and get them to be your first beta testers when you’re ready for external feedback. From there, break that end goal down into milestones and see if you can excite your team based on that narrative and why it’s important to tackle the problem now.

Becoming a product manager is less like becoming a “CEO of a product,” and more like becoming the conductor of an orchestra. A great musical experience isn’t simply hitting the right notes, it’s about the accuracy, quality, and order of those notes that makes it a masterpiece. Your team’s execution depends on their ability to express themselves and work as a group. As a conductor you’re balancing the interests, and expression, of each of these subgroups with the final piece and audience in mind.

I’d love to hear from you about what you’ve done to work on some of these skills. How have you gained experience to grow your confidence about a product role?

Follow me on Twitter for more: @hemal

• New grads — this does mean I discourage you from trying to jump straight into product unless you’re part of a rotational program that ramps you up into product. Even then, I highly recommend getting experience in another field and bringing that to a PM role.

In the spirit of ‘always be learning’, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with others to learn the mastery of the trade and there’s conclusion I’ve arrived at:

There’s a terrible amount of confusion on what a good product manager does.

Product management is a relatively nascent discipline. Across a lot of companies, it can mean a product owner, a project owner or even a program/process manager. Since the role is so different across the industry, the understanding of what makes up a good “product manager” is so undefined.

Because of that, I want to share my version of the modern day Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.

Story Telling vs. Selling

Good product managers are story tellers. They tell captivating stories focused around customer pain and their emotions, which motivate others to action.

Bad product managers are salesmen. They know they can’t lead with authority, so they try to persuade teams to implement ideas they come up with. They sell, they don’t inspire.

Learning vs. Shipping

Good product managers focus on learning. Whether it’s customer interviews, shipping product or looking at user metrics, good product managers are always laser focused on what they can learn that makes an impact to customers.

Bad product managers exclusively focus on shipping. They think success is only defined by delivering product into the hands of their customers. They never see how shipping is subset of learning. They fail to revisit what they ship and use what they’ve learned to pivot, kill or iterate on the original idea.

Multipliers vs. Individual Contributors

Good product managers are multipliers. They figure out the strengths and weaknesses of their team and find ways to bring out the best in people. They learn the best way to be a 10X individual, is to get 2X productivity from 5 people around them.

Bad product managers are individual contributors. They have to be the fastest to answer every email, first to have an opinion and is the earliest one in the office/last one out.

Context vs. Ideas

Good product managers share context. A good product manager is the curator of the best ideas, not the creator of the only ideas. They invest in collaborative brainstorming and know the best ideas will come from a team where everyone has shared context over the customer pain and the reason to care to solve them.

Bad product managers only share their ideas. They are quick to jump to a solution and don’t want to hear other input from the rest of the team.

Decision Making — Small vs. Large

Good product managers make a small percentage of team decisions. They give context to builders and let builders build. They get out of the way by empowering everyone on the team to make the right decisions.

Bad product managers make a large percentage of team decisions. They view themselves as the person who knows all the right choices and are bottlenecks to forward movement. A good indicator of this is a team’s progress when their PM is unavailable.

Easy vs. Undesirable

Good product managers make their job look simple and easy. If you ever see a product manager and think that you could do his/her job with the same success, that’s a good product manager.

Bad product managers make their job look undesirable. These are the individuals who talk about their stressful lives, always run from meeting to meeting and never seem fully engaged in conversation. You’d never want to switch roles with them.

Winning vs. Losing

Good product managers are humble winners. Winning in product development is a team sport, and there’s no “product” in team. They share the glory with others around them and make sure everyone is there to celebrate both big and small wins.

Bad product managers are sore losers. They are the first to come up with an excuse and never want to talk about how they could improve for the next time around. They often point fingers at engineering, design, leadership…etc.

Relationship vs. Transactional

Good product managers are relationship-driven. Relationships trump feature requests with external customers, and internal relationships drive great teams. They spend time investing in people around them and think about the long term game, not the immediate future.

Bad product managers are transactional. They tell others what they can do for them and ask for things in return. Everything is give and take. They play checkers, not chess.

Marketers vs. Partners

Good product managers are good marketers. They know their target audience and the best ways to reach them. They design their product for distribution.

Bad product managers are partners to marketing. They view product marketing as the black box where ‘blog posts come from.’

Focused vs. Scattered

Good product managers are focused. They know when to push a team for a specific solution, and when to be creative on how to get there. They are persistent on pursuing clear customer pain and only focus on a select few to solve.

Bad product managers are all over the place. They run teams in a decision by committee basis. They want everyone to be happy and are willing to cater to every request.

Products vs. Excuses

Good product managers create compelling products. They build products that customers love and share with others. They create emotional experiences that are essential to people. They build painkillers, not vitamins.

Bad product managers create compelling excuses. They push products out to customers and fail to understand why they aren’t successful. They are quick to assign blame or find reasons they were doomed from the beginning. They focus on the advantages that other winning products & teams around them have, and not what they could’ve done better.

Good product managers know how to win. And they win with people around them.

So, when have you been a good product manager and when have you been a bad one?

Follow me on Twitter for more: @hemal

❤️ to @kevinweil, @jeffseibert, & @yoavshapira for making this post readable.

You’re about to get the best take away from any entrepreneurial article you’ve ever read in your entire life. Ready?

Stop reading this and start doing something about it.

I thought being an entrepreneur was knowing every mistake, flaw and growth hack in the start up world. I’d wake up and browse HackerNews while brushing my teeth, I’d peruse GrowthHackers around lunch and finally I’d sift through ProductHunt by night. I knew everything there was about being an entrepreneur except how to do anything about it.

In college, I had a taste at success by winning business and engineering competitions for a piece of technology that both Apple and Google would eventually come to compete with. After some bad advice, I folded my cards, cashed my chips on the table and walked away from what would’ve been an early retirement. Am I bitter? Uh…yeah, duh.

Everyone will constantly tell you to do your homework before you jump in and try to start your own company. People will warn you about the failure rate, how it’s easier to cut your teeth on someone else’s nickel and how you’ll be more valuable after spending 5–10 years working for someone whose already been successful. Here’s where I want to impart the most valuable thing I learned:

“if you want to be an entrepreneur, the only way you’ll learn is to go out and do it yourself.”

You will never be prepared until you try it yourself.

Stop planning out a future company, and tackle little projects that you can spend a few hours on to learn from. You’ll immediately start to address your weaknesses. For example, one of the most common is, “Am I technical enough?” Rather than read up on how to find a technical co-founder, just shut up and get back to learning how to code again. I can’t begin to tell you what it’ll do for your confidence.

Instead of learning how to game the market or reading how Company X found their first 100 customers through some absurd growth hack, try it for your own ideas. Imagine if your product could experience the best thing that ever happened to it, what would that be and how would it get that way? Practice identifying the best sources of attracting customers, refine and simplify onboarding experiences and sharpen skills on how to build the strongest relationships with each alpha tester.

Will you make mistakes? Absolutely. Will you fail in your first, second, third and fourth idea? I’d bet on it. Stop thinking it’s safer to just keep planning and wait till you come up with the perfect idea? The perfect idea never comes along because products never get it right on the first try, and you only pivot after you’ve seen the market response to your original hypothesis. Don’t fear failure, it’s where you’ll learn the most.

You will never learn more about being an entrepreneur until you actually try it yourself. When you’re passionate about an idea, learning transforms into the need to itch your curiosity when you hit a barrier or explore a new phase of your product. It’s wise to spend time researching, growing and benefiting from the likes of others, but don’t fall into the paralysis of being a serial want-repreneur. The best advice I can give you is to stop reading posts like these and start taking chances.

Hit me up on Twitter (@hemal) or say hi, I’d love to hear what you’re going to start doing.