Working with more senior PMs is the only working solution I have found.
Product Management is a very complex role...there is no straight forward learning path today other than doing the job ,building shit and strong mentor ship!
It's also very different from company to company. Some companies will refuse to hire non-technical PMs. In other companies you will find PMs who do not know basic SQL. It's strange.
I couldn't agree more. I had the PM title twice before I worked with some senior PMs at a very successful Fortune 50. What a difference experience makes. I cringe when I think about how incompetent I was in my first two PM roles.
Ditto. My first three stints (albeit with zero help from peers or mentors) were terrible. It seems like you need a couple of epic screwups under your belt before the patterns start to present themselves.
Totally agree. I've taken a number of juniors on over the years where I have spotted raw talent. I would say 50% of them are now killing it versus more experienced (and expensive) external hires. 20% are doing just fine. And 30% just couldn't make it work, at least in our organisation.
It's a tough, complicated and at times lonely role but I wouldn't do anything else... working for someone else at least.
Part of the challenge here is that the product manager role itself isn't well-defined.
My favorite analogy here is the one about cancer - cancer isn't one disease, it's thousands of diseases that all look the same on the surface, but are really different when you dive in. A cure for skin cancer doesn't really help get you closer to a cure for lung cancer, as an example.
Specifically for your partner - what kind of product management is she doing? B2B or B2C? Customer-facing products or internal products? Web or mobile?
The more specificity you have, the more likely you'll be able to find more relevant professional development resources for her particular flavor of product management.
That being said - once a PM hits a particular threshold of experience and self-awareness, they can generally come up with their own professional development track, though it always helps to have a mentor.
there was a spinoff professional networking/mentoring group whose name is escaping me at the moment, but she can find such resources via women in product: https://www.womenpm.org
