Learning to Be a PM: A Five-Year Reflection
Quick Overview
This reflection covers five years of product management experience, summarizing career milestones, role responsibilities, interviews and mentoring, product launches, and core lessons on defining a personal PM path and finding effective managers while discussing skill areas such as technical depth, people and project management, business strategy, and product evangelism. It is aimed at early-career and practicing product managers and functions as a personal retrospective and career-development guide for understanding team roles, career progression, and manager selection.
Resource Title
Learning to Be a PM: A Five-Year Reflection
Overview
It has been a long time since I last visited the forum — five years passed in the blink of an eye. To those who sent me private messages back then, my apologies; I only just saw them recently.
I named this post “Learning to Be a PM” because this path truly has no endpoint. On my five-year work anniversary, looking back brought many reflections. I’m sharing this partly to give back, partly to spark discussion, and hopefully to learn from others as well.
Career Background & Experience
Over five years:
- I worked on three different products
- I had five different managers
- I went through multiple internal interviews
- I interviewed at other companies
- I interviewed candidates and mentored interns
- I spoke as a session presenter at industry conferences
- I met customer CXOs
- I attended meetings with VPs, Technical Fellows, and Directors
- I designed and launched products
- I also did plenty of copy-and-paste, hands-on work
At the beginning, everything felt overwhelming and exciting — like riding a roller coaster. Over time, through gradual exploration, patterns became clearer.
Core Reflection: Knowing Your Own Path
The most important thing is knowing your own path.
As a PM, you may lean toward:
- Deep technical expertise
- Project and people management
- Business and strategy
- Sales and product evangelism
A good PM, based on personal style and interests, usually excels in at least one area and is solid in the others.
Strong PM teams are often complementary — some are great communicators, some are strong executors, some win markets, and some stabilize teams.
For early-career PMs, however, understanding your own path is often the hardest part.
What’s more interesting is that:
- In one team, you might be the strongest in business
- In another PM team, you might suddenly be the weakest in business
This exists across many industries, but is especially common in tech due to high mobility. As a result, PMs are expected to be well-rounded without obvious weaknesses, while still having a distinct personal style. Otherwise, future hiring managers may hesitate.
So how do you begin? Below are personal experiences for discussion.
Lesson 1: Find a Good Manager (Most Important)
Yes — this is the most important thing.
What is a good manager?
A good manager is someone:
- In whom you can see your future self
- Who has at least one strength you deeply want to learn
- Who is patient and willing to invest time in developing you
There is a saying at the company:
A person can usually only be two of the following three:
a top technical expert, a great manager, or a genuinely good person.
This shows how rare good managers are.
A good manager helps you find meaning in tedious work, turns chaos into order, shares experience and networks with you, and makes you feel ownership over the product. They lead from the front — mentor, partner, and role model at the same time.
How to Find a Good Manager
Good managers are always surrounded by people. Great mentors are never in surplus.
You need to continuously improve yourself to reach the level where you can encounter them. Don’t wait to be discovered — actively seek them out.
With platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, the industry is smaller than it looks. At the very least, when a good manager notices you, you should already have sufficient industry background and connections.
Lesson 2: Commit to a Major Technical Direction
Cloud computing, mobile devices, once-hot apps, and rapidly growing enterprise software — PMs must specialize in at least one technical domain.
Unlike professional managers, junior PMs are not in high demand. This creates a classic catch-22:
You need experience to become valuable
↔
You need to be valuable to gain experience
Despite how flashy the market looks, opportunities are never as abundant as they seem. If you think you can walk out and instantly become a millionaire CEO — it’s time to wake up.
Employers may talk about “training” after you’re hired, but during hiring, what they really want is someone who can immediately help solve specific problems.
Open roles are always fewer than candidates.
Lesson 3: Never Reject Learning Opportunities
PM is a role where you know a little about everything, but are not the best at anything.
Any engineer can outdo you technically.
Any designer can outperform your product intuition.
Any Ivy-league-trained marketer can surpass your marketing and sales skills.
The mission of a PM is to bridge different specialized roles.
The larger the product team, the broader the expectations. Each discipline has its own language and terminology — if you don’t learn them, you won’t even know what you’re missing.
Growth Over Time: From Year 1 to Year 5
This is more like internal skill than visible output. It may not show day to day, but it matters when it counts.
-
Month 1: Able to organize meetings
-
Year 5: Able to design meetings
- Who should attend
- How participants think
- How to build collaboration
- How to align efficiently
-
Year 1: Complete assigned tasks
-
Year 5:
- Understand the industry
- Maintain product awareness
- Identify growth opportunities
- Track competitors
- Reduce team stress
- Understand pre-sales and post-sales
The better a PM becomes, the more they realize that rigid rules rarely hold. Stay open, build intuition, and expect surprises.
Nothing is surprising.
Five-Year Reflection
Five years ago, I moved to this city alone.
I had been driving for only five months.
I lived in a dark, half-basement room.
My emergency contact was my manager — because I had no one else.
Now, I have my green card. I travel on holidays. GRE and GPA feel like a distant lifetime.
What once felt life-changing is now daily routine.
Day by day, step by step, toward a future that is still unknown.
Closing
Keep Calm and Have Fun!
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