The 3-month course to becoming a Product Manager that’s built by Boston’s best Product leaders can be done on your own time, and 100% free

Author: Ryan Durkin & The Operators

There are no shortcuts in life. But this is the damn near closest thing to it.

Everything here is 100% free. Brought to you by the people, for the people.

Like our Boston boy, Matty Damon once said: “You dropped  $150 grand on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.” Get your career started in Products by following the guide below. Good luck, and hit us up with questions if you want. 

  • Expertise: Product Management

  • Cost: 100% Free. Forever. And ever.

  • Time needed: Nine months @ 15 hours a week

Big props to Josh Berg (VP Product @ CarGurus) and Tony Haenn (VP Product @ Lola) for the collab on this.

Pre-Work Reading

  1. Read Chapter 7 on Product of the High Growth Handbook to first understand the answers to these questions: “What is Product Management?” “What do Product Managers Do?” “Characteristics of great product managers.” Etc. 

  2. Let’s talk about Product Management. Oldie but a goodie from Josh Elman at Greylock (former Product guy at Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc).

  3. For timely, new content on Product, subscribe to Lenny’s Newsletter (a weekly advice column about products, growth, etc). It’s a great resource.

Pre-Work Courses

Review this list of courses here. It’s updated frequently. You absolutely should take the following courses below. Remember… this shit is all free.

  1. Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals (Coursera)

  2. Software Product Management Specialization

  3. Customer Analytics (Coursera + UPenn)

  4. Business Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making (Edx + BU)

  5. Testing with Agile (Coursera)

  6. Product Design (Udacity)

  7. App Marketing (Udacity)

A. Product Vision & Strategy

Google everything you can about “Product Vision & Strategy for Tech Companies.” Companies approach product vision and strategy differently. So your job is to read. Compare. Figure out the differences. And then choose one to try to emulate. Down the road, you may even craft it to be your very own. ;)

Start to practice strategy by observing the world. Take an idea and tear it down. What must be true for that idea to be a good idea? If you read an article on TechCrunch, why do you think the company did that? What do you think they’ll do next? How are their competitors going to respond?

B. Skillsets You Need To Develop

1. Problem Solving / Analyzing Data to Make Decisions

Learning to understand customers and assess opportunities is the most important thing you can do as a PM. Product is not about “developing features.” It’s about identifying opportunities, solving problems, and prioritizing what should be done rather than what could be done.

  1. Do Case studies: Read this. And this.

  2. Learn Product frameworks: Check out this and this for examples. 

  3. Learn SQL

    1. Start here. Intro to SQL: Querying and Managing Data 

    2. Then this. Learn SQL: Code Academy

    3. Leverage W3schools SQL tutorials.

  4. Learn Google Analytics: By understanding Google Analytics, you’ll 

    1. Get certified in Google Analytics. Take all six of these Google-created courses.

    2. Subscribe to the Google Analytics YouTube channel. Watch as many videos as you can until your eyes bleed.

  5. Choose a data visualization tool to learn. The most popular ones are:

    1. Pick a tool:

      1. Google Data Studio: This is free and good enough for learning purposes

      2. Google Sheets Charts / Excel Charts: You’ll always have these wherever you work, so good to be familiar with how they work. Sometimes you just need a chart now and dropping one in your spreadsheet is the fastest.

      3. Tableau: So this one costs money and if you want to spend the couple hundred bucks. Or you can watch YouTube videos on Tableau training for beginners for free here. The only con is you won’t have Tableau in front of you. But you can try it for free here

      4. Looker: Free Looker YouTube videos or Domo.

    2. Use it:

      1. More important than the tool is that you can extract insights from data sets. Go pick a few public data sets (Kaggle has high-quality free data) and start understanding them.

      2. Build some charts that help you understand the data. Is the data normally distributed? Is there a weird kink in the data? How does the data vary over time? Are there seasonal trends?

      3. Practice your elementary stats. For each continuous variable, summarize them (mean, median, mode). Build a box plot. 

2. Project Management

  1. Learn a project tracking tool like Jira or Trello. Atlassian’s Jira tool for project management. It’s free. Rip through all of them. Trello is actually owned by Atlassian. It’s a much easier-to-use tool, so if you want to start there, sign up for a free account and go.

  2. Learn how to roadmap using Ghant Charts. Ultimately, excel works perfectly fine. Your goal is to produce a Ghant Chart. I’ll pull together examples here soon. For now, just google it and watch videos on it. 

  3. Learn about Agile development. Don’t get too wrapped up in this and don’t overthink this. It’s more straightforward than you think. Understand the process, and put it into practice in your life.

3. Product Design (UX/UI)

  1. Learn Figma or Sketch or ) or another UI tool (I know an awesome PM that works almost exclusively in MS Paint): The best PM’s think deeply about user experience and are comfortable thinking in design terms. What’s the most important thing on this screen? These tools take one week to learn the basics, so you can crank out a wireframe. A picture is worth a thousand words.  In a Product career of 10, 15, 20 years… it’s not that hard of a demand to ask someone to spend a week of your life and learn it. Learn them. If your UX/UI designer wins the lottery and quits, you’ll be able to do the work.

  2. Learn InVision: Be able to link together mocks.

  3. Practice: You have product experiences every single minute of the day. Paying for groceries, ordering Uber Eats / Drizly. Pay attention to them. What did you like? What was confusing? Why were you confused? How would you make it better? Bonus points for actually wireframing /mocking your idea.

  4. Read: A few short books that are 

    1. A Book About Design: Complicated doesn’t make it good

    2. A Book about Design: Complicated doesn’t make it bad

4. Leadership

You’re a leader now. It’s not a title, but something you do every day that elevates the performance of those around you. We saved the best for last. You can be an all-star at the first three skills, but if you suck at this you’ll never ship a great product. You’ll probably also get fired. This is a team sport, and you’ll only ever be as good as your team. A few selected readings, and a podcast to think about.

  1. Radical Candor

  2. Trust & Communication Trade-off

  3. Leading Above the Line 

The most important things to practice:

  1. Build relationships. Care deeply about the people around you. Learn how to connect with them and build relationships. 

  2. Practice giving specific and actionable feedback. Start only with positive praise, but make sure it’s appropriate praise (don’t praise someone for a slack message). It’s harder than you might think.

C. Get Building: There’s no better way to learn than to build

Product people are builders. If you want to be in Product, you need to build, too. Over the years, there’s been a massive increase of people wanting to “get into product:” People looking to make a transition in their careers. MBA’s. People right out of school. A number of them have asked me for jobs and my friends for jobs in product. And I typically say back: “K, what have you built?” Often times the answer back is: “umm… nothing.” That’s not a great answer. 

The best way to become a Product Manager is to build a product, period. I don’t care if it’s you building a website in Squarespace or Weebly or Wix for your local hair salon, or local plumber. I don’t care if it’s you recreating in InVision, the Wayfair mobile app, or you doing an audit on Coinbase or Duolingo or Hulu or Hubspot or the Partners Healthcare medical portal you log into when trying to sign up for a doctor’s appointment. But, you have to think through ways to solve problems, design, build, and get repetition.

Learning product takes time. And all I can say is that if you focus on reading, learning SQL, learning to identify opportunities, learning agile and testing, and actually building shit… you’ll stand a chance of moving into the career and getting hired. If you skip any of those… you’re gonna have a tough road ahead. Also, there’s a lot more in the Product realm you could get great at… but for now… the basics are above. Crank through it. Then hit me up and we’ll get you to the next level.

D. Ongoing Reading

A leader never stops learning. A champion never stops learning. If you want to be a leader, a champion, the best in your field, you are going to need to build up a fire to learn. To read. To watch YouTube videos. To take free courses online. And so, I will end with a handful of free Product blogs and resources to help you in your journey.

Once you’ve completed the above, come talk to me. We can review what you built, talk through what you’ve learned, and make intros for you to connect with other Product leaders. We’ll open doors, and close deals. There’s enough in this doc to keep you moving forward for a while. Keep moving forward. Keep learning. Good luck.

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