18: Transferrable Skills and Mastering Product Execution

How To Succeed In Product Management | Jeffrey Shulman, Red Russak & Soumeya Benghanem

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Diego Granados (Microsoft), Welly Lee (Microsoft), and Shyvee Shi (LinkedIn) to talk about the value of transferable skills and experiences. It’s never about building from scratch, it’s all about the journey that helps build your skills as a PM and the experiences you can bring with you wherever you go and whenever you work on a new product.

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:35 Some PMs aren’t aware of the multitude of experiences and skills necessary in other roles
• 13:15 The most valuable transferable experiences or job roles
• 19:27 Create a compelling argument why an undervalued area can work
• 23:52 What aspiring PMs should have: transferable skills & complete understanding of product management
• 27:21 Product management is about managing risks
• 32:41 The PM role is a practice of balancing tension
• 35:16 You cannot be a good product manager if you don't like people
• 44:51 Resources to look into to learn product management
• 48:49 Start by doing the baseline, understand the gaps, then create a plan
• 52:49 At the beginning, you have to be good at execution
• 57:51 PMs a lot of time wear multiple hats
• 58:47 Important career pivoters
• 01:00:34 No single recipe is going to work for everyone
• 01:02:49 It’s the journey to learn new things