<aside> 💡 Hello! I’m Yash Ramchandani, a current APM at Google and a previous Computer Science major at the University of Michigan. In this guide, I will provide my best tips and advice for landing a product management gig straight out of college. Let’s get right into it 👇

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❓What work would I be doing?

Your job as a PM is to

1. Figure out what should be built
2. Get it built
3. Measure goals and ensure launch success

Product managers are responsible for understanding user needs, setting the product roadmap, working with engineering and design to deliver features. You are ultimately accountable for the product's success or failure.

PMs are closer to business critical decisions and their work impacts many other people in an organization, so they’re likely to get more responsibility early in their career. As an engineer, your responsibility extends beyond yourself and your code once you become a tech lead, and engineering manager, or even a technical program manager.

How do you each of those things?

• What should be built: Do a lot of research and write a proposal document with what you think the company should build and why (called a PRD) For example:
  • In Google ads, a customer can set a target ROI for a campaign but if they set an ROI that is too high, we can’t serve ads for them because the cost of the ads would be higher than the ROI they are asking for. However, if there are some cases where if they reduce the target ROI just a little bit they could get a lot of users to click on their ad (this is simplified)
  • So I had to decide if we should build some kind of automated recommendation to tell advertisers to reduce their ROI in certain situations
  • I had to do research to figure out what properties of advertisers we could use to computationally determine if an advertiser likely had set too high an ROI (lots of fun math, ML and speaking to engineers), how many advertisers were in this situation and how much additional revenue we would get showing this recommendation
• Get it built
  • To actually get people to build it - you will need designers and engineers to work on it. To get them to do that, you need their managers to allocate this work to them
  • So you share your proposal with the managers, get on a calls to explain the details and answer questions
  • The managers will then add it to the list of things their team will build
  • Getting it built often means doing a lot of annoying stuff. Need a “whatever it takes” mindset
    • Once, an engineer told me he has worked with a part of the codebase he was not familiar with, so I set up a call between him and the engineer who wrote a large part of the codebase (I’m sometimes the personal assistant of engineers lol)
    • I wanted to speak to an advertiser once to get feedback on something but the sales time was taking too long to schedule the meeting so I joined a Slack group with a number of marketing agencies and asked if anyone was free to talk and scheduled feedback meetings myself
    • TLDR: getting things built often requires a lot of random hard to predict operations\
• Measure goals and ensure launch success
  • Keep checking the metrics
  • Stay on the lookout for bugs and get them resolved as soon as possible
  • Make sure customer support is answering tickets related to the feature well
  • Watch out for any new policies by governments that are released that might put your project in jeopardy

🖊️ Getting the Job

Watch YC Startup School

Most people will not do this. But there is a dramatic difference in the product intuition of those who’ve watched this course and those who haven’t

Knowing how to find product market fit for one product and grow it, is very similar to building startups and this Youtube playlist contains the same knowledge that Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, Dropbox, Stripe, Instacart, Cruise, Reddit, and more used to build their companies.

It was a huge part of the knowledge I required to be a good PM

Startup School Winter 2020