How To Become a Product Manager Without Any Experience

Breaking into a Product Manager role can be tough, especially if you have zero experience in being one. However, should that stop you? The answer is a resounding “no”.

A big part of being a great product manager have to do with proactively finding opportunities and taking the necessary steps to reach your goals. Here are 5 proven steps that can help you get a product manager role without any prior experience.

1. Know How to Read Market Demands

The first step of building any product is finding the right thing to build. To do this, you must have a solid understanding of the market and its demands. By observing market trends, you can identify what consumers want and tailor a product to meet their needs.

Find out which customer segments are having what problems. Some questions to start off with:

• Is there a gap for a particular market demand?

• Who are the current players filling in those demands?

• How is the market responding to those existing players?

Knowing these insights will give you a great foundation to build relevant product ideas to take forward.

To begin building your skills, you can start by researching the industry or sector you are interested in. Read up on news articles, blogs, and industry reports to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and developments. There are also many great tools out there that can help you gain insights into the market, such as Google Trends and Keyword Planner, Crunchbase, Similarweb, and Semrush. These tools can help you identify trending searches on the internet, monitor your competitors, and track your industry's overall performance.

2. Build Your Own Product

Even if you're not formally a product manager yet, you can start building your own product. This will give you first-hand experience in end-to-end product management activities that will help build your skills and confidence. Considering the market demands you observed in the previous step, figure out what kind of product you can build to meet those demands.

When starting out, it is best to go with something simple. For example, setting up an informative website or blog that covers the topics related to the demands you have observed. Alternatively, you can offer pro-bono consulting or mentoring sessions within your circle, focusing on the topics related to the market demands. On top of validating the demand for your product or service, doing this will also help you build your experience and establish your brand.

3. Get Good With Marketing

One of the key skills of any product manager is knowing how to build an audience. To get people to consume your product, you must lead them to it.

Start by crafting crafting a great message to communicate strong value proposition for your product. What experience do you want your audience to have? How can your product make their lives better?

Once you nailed down the core values of your product, develop a marketing plan that includes tactics like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimisation. By effectively promoting your product, you can generate more leads and drive more people to your product.

There are many great tools out there that can help help you design and automate your marketing campaigns, like Canva, Google/LinkedIn/Facebook Ads, Mailchimp, and Zapier.

4. Measure Your Results

To reach a level of success, your products must be regularly tweaked to make them better. To know which aspect of your product needs improvement, you must learn how to measure your audience's response to your product. If you were maintaining a website, look at the analytics to find out which pages are most/least frequently visited. You can also run a survey with your users and combine the responses with your website analytics to find relevant improvement areas.

Other important metrics to track include user engagement and retention. Does your audience like what you’re offering? Do they come back for more? By regularly measuring your results, you can identify trends and patterns that can help you make informed decisions about how to improve your product and grow your user base.

5. Keep Improving Your Product

As market trends constantly shift, a product is never truly finished. Without continuous improvements, your product will quickly become stale and irrelevant. To get around this, you need to regularly observe areas for improvement and make appropriate changes to your product.

For example, if you have been running a blog for some time, analysing your top-performing content can help you identify the topics that resonate most with your audience. You can then create more content around those topics to increase engagement and keep your audience interested.

After making changes to your product, remember to keep measuring the results and observe any improvements. From what you gather in the observation, you can determine further improvements going forward.

Bottomline

Following these steps can help you land a product manager role, even if you have zero experience to start with. By proactively building relevant product management skills through the creation and development of a real product, you will have a first-hand experience managing a real product to reach success.

Having real-world experience in managing products means you have relevant and applicable skills you can demonstrate to potential employers. This will give you a huge advantage in the product management market, as many product managers in large companies don't even have the capability or authority to perform end-to-end product management practices.