What career bottleneck have you experienced as a product manager?

Product manager Every product manager must have one, two, or even three career bottles in his or her career

neck

Why did you say once?

It is the process of our transformation from layman, a -2 year old, 0 year old newcomer, to product manager practitioner.

The second time, probably because of the transition from product manager to data product manager. There is a second bottleneck, as the different areas of work require different skills.

The third is the post-work anxiety, the repetitive routine that makes us wonder, “Will I ever make a product again?”

Speaking of the career bottleneck of product manager, some students think that how high is the product manager ceiling? It seems to make more sense.

But a career bottleneck is not a ceiling. A career bottleneck is one’s own career advancement and advancement, and the ceiling represents future opportunities for this group of people.

28 principle let product managers survive Internet enterprises, only 20% of the ratio can survive in the future, surviving enterprises only according to the 28 principle to become a very few can achieve unicorn, or even listed.

So back to the beginning: What are career bottlenecks for product managers?

As if the answer to the question, an important factor in this career bottleneck is the company or product line

Product managers are more of a low-level competency professionally. Such low-level capabilities include:

• How do you draw a prototype?

  
  

• How to write the requirements document?

  
  

• What is the business process?

  
  

• How difficult is it to develop and implement?

.

Kevin, for example, has worked as a product manager for over 5 years to build the PMTalk product manager community, and I find that I don’t seem to have changed. Instead, it is because of the professional environment that you are in that you are changing with the rising tide. I used to make appointments with SOME CEOS or partners. If I was an employee of a unicorn company, it might be difficult for others to reach in-depth cooperation with you. After all, I am still a worker with limited resources. But now I can take our community to exchange resources with the other side, AND I bring equal or premium exchange with the other side through my resources.

Career bottlenecks are confined to the ceiling of the enterprise itself. Due to the constant change of corporate strategy and the difficulty in promoting business, the 0 to 1 projects I used to be responsible for were either stillborn or failed to flourish.

It seems unreasonable to say that my professional ability is not enough. After all, the difference between a profession and a product is that one is a person and the other is an enterprise.

If an enterprise fails to do well, can you say it is because of you alone?

Another example: During requirements review discussions, product managers often argue with interaction designers and developers. Do you have one question on your mind? Why are we arguing about this again and again here, instead of standing on upstream strategic planning?

This can be done with less effort and less time spent arguing, but the reality is that most product manager career bottlenecks involve more effort and less effort. Even if it affects decisions from upstream, the core direction is hard to change.

Instead of being a 33-year-old product manager, the headlines say that 35 is a midlife crisis for Internet workers. But before the realization of wealth freedom, product managers should continue to grow before facing their own career bottlenecks

Growth is everything, whether it’s in the enterprise or shaping personal IP. Only through continuous growth can your product have resources, with resources products will be iterative, t-shaped development structure is possible.

Personal IP is shaped by tagging within the team. For example, if you are a technology-based label product, you will repeatedly demonstrate whether new technical solutions can be used for reference or use in team communication, so as to create a technical learning atmosphere for the team. The team must give you the label “technology-based”

If you are a communicator, prioritize your needs on a daily basis. Even if it is diss, it can be redeemed or patched up in the next version by other means. With less separation between product, development, and design, your label on the team is: good communication skills

In the Internet occupation, operation and product can not be separated. Any hot spots and seals through wechat index, Baidu index, quickly through H5, small program for product verification.

“Standing on the tuyere, pigs will fly”, the operation of an H5, small program, public account is able to complete commercial verification even without development support, but also have the core business line operation ability. For example, the circulation and distribution between sales, customer service, marketing and finance is also a kind of operation.

Understand the operation rules of various forms of products, such as douyin and official account operation are two ways.

The above two are faced with different distribution of channel content, one is different form of content generation.

Product manager career development bottleneck and the company is another point, is to see the speed of the company’s development. For example, the company’s system has been stable and standardized, with only one iteration every three months. It can be imagined that the corresponding product manager basically belongs to the “Buddha nature” work, hold a meeting, collect a demand, draw a prototype repeatedly, stay in a bottleneck period

The second scenario, however, is that the company is growing too fast, and my ability to deal with it is insufficient. The learning speed can not keep up with the company’s development speed, and eventually the bottleneck comes, and you are either eliminated or transferred.

There is also a scenario where the company structure changes and the product manager is not authorized to participate. There is less need to do it, and there is no place for you to be able to do it except by yourself. I end up asking myself, “Am I still making products?” Am I a product manager?

In terms of the definition of bottlenecks, because the needs of product managers at different stages are different and the definition is different. For those with less than 3 years of experience, they are trying to learn new skills and knowledge to meet the requirements of work; for those with more than 3-5 years of experience, they have bottlenecks in product planning and business ability; for those with more than 5 years of experience, they have bottlenecks to meet their team’s product performance and the company’s turnover growth

But the bottleneck is that the bottle is not yet full of water, or that the water is full and cannot be filled. I think most product managers are still stuck with the former, probably because of the corporate ceiling. “For example, the market size is in the tens of millions,” or “the market size is in the hundreds of millions,” or “the turnover of the product line you are in charge of is in the millions.”

Be your own owner and promote from the inside out. Product manager career bottlenecks begin by dropping career ceilings, for example by moving into a big company. I haven’t changed. But the value of the big company lifted me up.

Well, that’s our original for today. I will update it daily

In addition, my first book “From Zero to One: PM changes the World” was officially launched as an electronic file. This book summarizes 222 original products, covering the content of product manager interview, algorithm, interaction and other different dimensions. If you are interested, you can reward and leave a message on your email. I will send an email to you around 12:00 noon every day (hope you do not spread support, support copyright). If you need to preview the book outline, jump to the link

A book for myself and product people: Product Light.