McDowell

When it comes time for interviews, you’ll able to prepare for their questions more effectively. You will learn how to describe your unique experiences and most important accomplishments. You’ll learn how to tackle problem-solving questions. You’ll understand what it means to think about the user. And, finally, you’ll solidify your technical skills.

All products and features start with research and planning. This is the time when the PM is starting to think about what to build next. The next idea may come from a customer request, competitive analysis, new technology, user research, the sales or marketing teams, brainstorming, or the big vision for the product.

Goals
Use Cases
Requirements
Wireframes
Bullet points describing every possible state of the feature
Internationalization
Security

Ask about who you’ll be working with on your core and extended team.

Find out how much of your time will be spent writing specs and how much you’ll be working with designers. Learn where the balance is between PMs, designers, and engineers in making product decisions.

Because companies in online software collect more data, it’s important that these PMs are skilled with data analysis and designing experiments. It’s also important to work well under pressure, as servers can fail at any time and PMs often have to make quick decisions.

Depending on the team, sometimes PMs on B2B products are responsible for thinking about how product decisions will affect revenue. They’ll need to balance features that match their long-term strategy against features that current big customers are clamoring for.

As a PM on a mature product, it can be very important to make sure you don’t get stuck making small incremental improvements. Often, a mature product’s biggest competitor is the last version of that same product. At the same time, mature products often have the luxury of time to make big bets on new ideas.

PMs who want to work on products used by millions of people would enjoy working on mature products. Mature products are also a great place to learn from the people who were able to make the product succeed.

Product managers are responsible for identifying problems and opportunities, picking which ones to go after, and then making sure the team comes up with great solutions, either by thinking of the solution themselves or by working with the designers and engineers. This is why product sense—having the intuition to recognize the difference between a good product and a bad product—is so important for product managers