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src/guides/career/product-management.md

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-title: "A brief introduction to Product Management"
+title: "A brief introduction to Product Management fundamentals"
 author: "Rohit Ganguly"
 search_tags: ["pm", "product", "product management"]
 ---
 
-Product Management as a career is difficult to define, and my personal opinions on the career I chose change every year I give the 'Intro to Product' talk. I'll capture my consistent beliefs here.
+Product Management as a career is difficult to define, and my personal opinions on the career I chose change every year I give the 'Intro to Product' talk. I'll capture **my** consistent beliefs here.
+
+## Product Management?
+
+There's a million definitions online, here's a summary:
+
+In general, Product Managers do the following:
+- Work with engineering, design, and other orgs in a company collaboratively
+- Represent the voice of the user
+- Prioritize and rally features
+- Find problems to solve and prioritize them
+
+I'd advise you to do your own research on Product Management as a career before choosing it, especially for reasons besides the fact that it's a tech job that doesn't involve constant coding. As a warning, Product Management is an incredibly hard role to break into as a new grad and you shouldn't count on it - most PMs transition later in their careers and start in a different role.
 
 ## The Important Basics
 
 Product Management looks different *everywhere*. Sticking to the fundamentals will take you very far in your PM career no matter what exactly Product looks like in your organization. 
 
+### The first fundamental
 The first thing to remember is that the term Product Management can be defined by the three words "who", "what", and "why". Everything else in the career is to gain a clearer understanding of these two concepts.
 
 To elaborate:
 - Who (exactly) are we building this for?
-- What (exactly) are we doing?
+- What (exactly) are we doing? What does success look like with this feature?
 - Why should we do this (and not something else)?
 
 In the scope of an engineering team, the job of the Product Manager is to clarify the work to be done, and have a clear reason why.
 
-The second fundamental is to understand what makes a product. This is something that *somehow*, people with Ivy League degrees, venture backing, MBAs, and more occasionally don't understand.
+### The second fundamental
+To be successful, you must understand what makes a product. This is something that *somehow*, people with Ivy League degrees, venture backing, and every meaningless signifier under the sun don't understand.
 
-Simply put, a product is the fix to a problem that people will pay not to have. This means that if you haven't identified a problem to solve, you don't have a product. We see it all of the time - at the moment of writing this, the AI boom has led to a lot of attempted products with no real problem to solve.
+Simply put, a product is the fix to a problem that people will pay not to have. This means that if you haven't identified a problem to solve, you don't have a product, you have a (hopefully not expensive) side project. We see it all of the time - at the moment of writing this, the AI boom has led to a lot of attempted products with no real problem to solve. *Value* is the term for solving meaningful, money-making problems.
 
-You now understand that your job is to generate clarity on who you're building for, what you're going to build, and why. How do you even do this?
+You now understand that your job is to generate clarity on who you're building for, what you're going to build, and why. You get that there's money to made only when a problem is solved. Where do you start?
 
 ## Product Management Skills
+
+The name of the game is problem identification, prioritization, and ideation. We'll cover each individually.
+
+### Problem Identification
+
+You're a Product Manager on a software product. Let's say you're focused on Business to Consumer (B2C) products like Netflix.
+
+My personal approach is to start backwards and always ask questions. What makes your company money? For Netflix, when focusing on customer features, it's  membership revenue. Why do customers pay money for Netflix? Because they find content they want to watch. How do they find content to watch? Through the algorithm that suggests categories and shows.
+
+Understanding how your business makes money, now what are the higher ups saying strategy-wise? What can your product do to align with  overall business goals? While you represent the customers, you also have to get buy-in and aligning with strategy is a must.
+
+Once you have a good understanding of what makes money and what your company wants to do, you can look for problems to solve. PMs do this in a variety of ways, but they can look like:
+
+- Digging into usage data to see where users are struggling
+- Talking to users and seeing what their issues are, or running UX research studies
+- Seeing what competitors are doing and what they're prioritizing (competitive intelligence)
+- Learning about latest developments in your field, in-person at conferences/meetups or online
+
+Understanding your business and your users is key. A solution that makes everyone happy exists.
+
+### Problem Prioritization
+
+Ideally, this is a pretty straightforward answer once you have a good understanding of the problems to solve. This generally can be prioritized by looking at why you're building it. If you're building something to satisfy users, build something that satisfies a more important pain point. If you're looking to make money, pick the feature that has a higher chance to increase money made from your product.
+
+You should have a clear reason for prioritizing work, and if you're feeling unsure in a particular scenario, you have more to learn about your customer, the problem, your competitors, or the business.
+
+### Ideation
+
+You'll eventually bring your prioritized ideas to your stakeholders (design, engineering, leadership, etc) and they'll have their own thoughts on the question they're responsible for, *how* do we get it done? 
+
+You can come to the table with ideas on how it should be done from a customer's perspective. Understand their job to be done (JTBD) and pain points. The design and engineering teams will handle the rest - do *not* get attached to a solution! 
+
+The most important thing is adjusting your ideas with impact/effort. Again, you are not responsible for ideating a solution - your job is to ensure that there is value provided to customers at the end of the day. If you're getting pushback on your features and you can't defend it, you need to develop a deeper understanding of the customers/problem/business/competition OR improve your communication of your ideas.
+
+At the end of it all, you'll have to prioritize scoped features (features that have had their effort to build measured). Ideally you go for low-effort high-impact features first, and work your way backwards to medium-effort high-impact, medium-effort medium-impact, etc. This is very situational but this process will look the same everywhere.
+
+## Closing
+
+Product Management is an incredibly rewarding career that benefits curious and hard-working individuals with multiple domains of skills (technical, design, research, marketing, economics, psychology, so much more).
+
+Here's some resources I suggest if you're interested in learning more:
+
+- A little outdated, but solid: [Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager](https://a16z.com/good-product-manager-bad-product-manager/) by Ben Horowitz
+- A great primer on the basics (what is PM, resume, interviewing): [Cracking The PM interview](https://www.crackingthepminterview.com/) by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
+- Job board for new grad positions at Big Tech: [apmlist](https://apmlist.com)