Product Career Entry/Progression

They call Product Managers 'mini CEO's' for a reason. If you are doing your job correctly, as I see it, you should be regularly communicating with EVERY SINGLE business unit in your company (that pertains to your product). You need to know what their long term roadmap looks like and it's relation and alignment with yours. You need to know the changes coming, people coming and going, the support cases, the sales, the budget availability...it is all directly applicable to the Product Manager role.

This is not to say you need to take it all on yourself. Knowing what you are not good at is as, if not more important, than knowing what you ARE good at! Trust others to help you and you will all become better as a team, helping where another team member is weak and accepting and appreciating help when someone wants to help.

The best way to start to build and calibrate the custom operating system each PM needs to appreciate, manage, and ingest the multitude of things you will need to know and understand to be as impactful as possible, is....to start/launch your own product.

The process of getting from idea to execution to market is a hockey stick learning opportunity like I have never experienced!

Likening the process of becoming a product manager to that or forging steel, all of the minutia that you are exposed to in the process of creating and bringing a product to market acts as strengthening agents in the forging and honing of the steel you will use to make your tools that you will use to build value throughout your product career.

The inevitable low points in the process act as quenching cycles, helping you become hardened against future events while the high points, that have you running hot, help keep you malleable to bend when necessary while maintaining your integrity and blade to allow you to efficiently strike when opportunity presents to cleanly execute on objectives.