How to transition from Professional Services to Product Management

Problem

After having worked as a professional services consultant for 8+ years I realized that I while I loved working with customers to understand and solve their problems, many times I was limited by the capabilities of the product itself. In the value chain of product to customer, I was at the tail end of things. My passion was in building the product and I needed to move into product management. But as I started exploring opportunities, it dawned on me that for someone with the level of experience I had, there were not a lot of ways to shift to a product management role. Companies were looking for experience product managers or fresh college graduates.

Actions taken

To prepare myself for this transition, I started with the good old way of reading. I read blogs on product management to familiarize myself with the concepts, processes, methodologies and challenges. I spoke to some PMs to get an understanding of what a day in the life of a PM is like and what does the job function entail. I read through 1000s of interview questions and did mock interviews. I read sample resumes and then created my resume by framing my experience in a PM context. I realized that the work I did as a consultant was similar to how a PM works, except that I worked for a specific customer at a time. So when I wrote my resume I focused on what the hiring manager would be looking for – what did I build, what were the success metrics, what value proposition it provided to the end customer, and how did I measure those results. I started applying to internal job postings as well as applying outside through references provided by my network. Finally, I just went in for the interviews. I failed at a lot of those interviews before I finally succeeded!

Lessons learned

It was a slow process, and at times I was very dejected. But here's what I learnt –

1. There is a lot of tribal knowledge available, so make use of it. There are amazing blogs made publicly available by some of the most well-known from the PM community. Make use of them. Even once you become a PM, don't stop reading and learning.
   

2. Apply to as many job postings as you can. While network and references play a big role in the Silicon Valley, companies are looking at applications to make sure they don't miss out a good candidate. My first real PM job was based on a posting I applied to 6 months before I heard from them !
   

3. There are no substitutes to the real test. So, don't be afraid of interviews and don't be afraid to fail.