This document provides an overview of product management in Silicon Valley, including why the region is attractive, the role of a product manager, how to choose companies to work for, how to get a product management job, relevant classes to take, and how to stay up to date in the industry. Key recommendations include choosing companies based on their people and product over size, gaining technical skills and experience before seeking a PM role, and networking to find job opportunities.

1. Product
Management 101
What you need to know to get started in Silicon Valley
Maisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail
www.learnproduct.com

2. Topics
•Why Silicon Valley?
•Why Product Management?
•Choosing Companies
•Getting a PM job
•Classes to take
•Staying up to date
•Further learning

3. Why Silicon Valley?
• Pros
• Leveraged
• Get to build stuff
• Meritocratic (no set
career path)
• Growth industry
“Software is eating
the world”
• Work w/
interesting people
• Flexible lifestyle
• Cons
• High Risk/Reward
(Gambling)
• Few obviously
exciting companies
• Less
structure/more
chaotic
• Limited location
choices (SF, NYC,
Austin, Boston,
SEA)

4. Role of a Product Manager
1. Product Strategy: deciding what product to build
2. Execution: project management
3. Leadership: convincing executives to give you
resources and engineers/designers to build what
you want
4. Make your product succeed (not a 9-5)
Great product managers are:
• Smart (learn quickly), truth-seekers, motivated

5. Choosing Companies
Key to success is choosing great companies
Wrong seat on the right plane is much better than the
right seat on the wrong plane
Good companies have great people whom you can
learn from, work with again and who will recruit
other great people
Battlefield promotions, halo effect

6. Choosing Companies

7. Choosing Companies
Startups
Don’t work at a startup for the sake of doing a startup!
Choose 1) smart people, 2) good product 3) good brand
Don’t assume that smaller company means greater impact

8. Choosing Companies
Sweet spot: high growth, funded startup with team in place
(15-200 employees). Still a lot of equity and career growth
A company with 75 people and market traction is much
more likely to be successful than one with 2 people and a
presentation
It’s even harder to start a software company if you have no
industry experience and don’t have a network

9. Getting A Job
1.
Read my book (www.learnproduct.com)
2. Identify good companies (Quora, LinkedIn TC, VC portfolios, ask around)
3. Find and connect with people who work there (warm lead versus cold lead)
4. Try to get any job you can there and switch to product
5. Get the words Product Management on your resume (Amazon internship)
6. Approach companies with specific ways that you can help solve a problem
they have (i.e. wireframes for how you would improve a specific part of the
site). SV companies value doers more than talkers.
7. Build a product prototype (e.g. weather app)
8. Learn coding basics
9. “Check your MBA at the door.” An MBA is not necessarily a positive in SV

10. Classes To Take
• You should understand how to build websites/mobile apps. These four
classes get you 95% of the way there. They’re a lot more work than GSB
classes, but grades don’t matter and they’re totally worth it.
•
Read my book (www.learnproduct.com)
•
CS106a: Programming methodology in Java (take this in the spring
of year 1, so you can take CS142 in the fall).
•
CS142: Webs Applications (Only offered in the Fall and need to
take CS106a first. This is the best class at Stanford).
•
CS193P: Developing Aps for iOS
•
CS106B: Programming abstractions in C++
•
Learn SQL, html and CSS on your own (lots of good web tutorials)
•
D-school classes look good on a resume
• Check out iTunes U, Coursera

11. Staying up To Date
• Fred Wilson
(@fredwilson)
• Brad Feld (@bfeld)
• Chris Dixon (@cdixon)
• Paul Graham (@paulg)
• Aaron Levie (@levie)
•
Quora
•
TechCrunch
•
PandoDaily
•
Techmeme
•
Angel List
•
Crunchbase Weekly
Newsletter (fundraising &
acquisitions)
•
HackerNews
• Bill Gurley (@bgurley)

12. Themes/Companies
Collaborative Consumption
•
Sidecar, Lyft , TaskRabbit, AirBnB
Consumerization of the enterprise
•
Asana, Box, Zendesk, RelateIQ, Evernote, Dropbox
Payments
•
Stripe, Square, CardSpring, Google Wallet
Content discovery
•
Pinterest, Spotify, Quora, Pulse, Prismatic
E-Commerce
•
Fab, TheFancy, Etsy, One King’s Lane, Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Quirky,
Ed Tech
•
Edmodo, Coursera, Udacity
Phone as remote control
•
Uber, Homejoy, Grubhub
Big Data
•
Cloudera, Palantir
The Internet of Things
•
Nest, Lockitron
Mobile Communication
•
Snapchat, Whatsapp, Viber
•
Nextdoor, Wealthfront
Misc

13. Topics to Research
•
SEO (app store and web)
•
SEM (spend $20 to experiment buying google adwords and FB Ads)
•
Analyze Business Models: How does X make money?
•
Technology buzzwords (HTML5, JQuery, NoSQL, Bootstrap)
•
Mobile
•
•
iOS and Android platforms and apps. What does each platform allow
developers to do? Characteristics of top performing apps? App stores?
Download a bunch of apps and observe design/mechanics.
Trends
•
Alexa, Comscore, Compete (monthly page views, uniques visitors, time
on site etc)
•
AppAnnie (iOS and Google Apps)
•
AppData (Facebook apps)

14. More Reading …
www.learnproduct.com

15. Getting A Product Job
•
PMs are risky hires for companies because they control very expensive
engineering resources and make decisions that can make or break a
business/product. To mitigate risk, companies look for people who already
have PM experience and a technical background. If you don’t have both, you
need to be strategic:
•
Write a sample spec for the company and make wireframes using Balsamiq
Here’s a spec template.
•
Exhibit these traits ... Intelligence (“you can’t fix stupid”), product sense,
ability to lead engineers without direct authority. Check out Ken Norton’s
famous blog post on how to hire PMs
•
Get hired for an easier role and do an internal transfer (only realistic if
company <100 people)
•
Take the CS classes on the later slide and build something
•
Get a summer job at Amazon/Microsoft. It’s useful to have the words
“Product Manager” at <Company people have heard of> on your resume