Building Products for the Enterprise

Chapter 8. The Product Managers

Making your way into product management in enterprise software might look different than career paths in consumer software. Similarly, how you think about building and managing a team of product managers takes an enterprise slant in a number of noteworthy ways.

We’ve written extensively here about how product managers can work most effectively with other business functions like development, design, marketing, operations, sales, and leadership. So now, maybe it’s time to turn our attention ever so briefly inward for a bit of navel-gazing about the product management team itself.

Among our goals in writing this book, we wanted to not only help guide aspiring product managers prepare for the role, but also advise experienced product managers on how to grow, scale, and improve their teams. This chapter aspires to do just that.

Getting into Product Management

So, you think product management sounds like a cool gig and you’d like to get into it. Good call! Here’s our best advice on what you should do.

Product management should almost never be your first or only job in technology. We strongly advise against aiming for it as a first step into tech. Product management, as a generalist role, benefits enormously from the depth of experience its practitioners can bring to bear from other disciplines. Whether that experience is in crafting compelling customer narratives, empathizing with business challenges, building software, or something else, possessing ...