Journey to Product Management Part 2: Resources that helped with my career transition.

I got a lot of love from Part 1 of my Journey to Product Management and I would like to say thank you to everyone that read, commented or shared it. If you haven’t seen it, please check it out here.

One thing I did mention in Part 1 of my post was that I took a lot of online courses to help me transition into product management. Apart from online courses, blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, books communities, slack channels were really helpful to me. I have created a list below. PS, this is not an exhaustive list. This is only what worked for me. I advise you to do your research to find more resources that would work for you too.

Online courses

I took a couple of online courses. some free and some paid. Not all were really helpful tbh but the good ones were:

1. The become a Product Manager Udemy course by Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell. This was the best course for me. The instructors are amazing. They created a slack group to answer our questions and the curriculum was exhaustive. I love this course and I still go back to it on some days to get some questions answered.
2. Google Analytics by google: Free course by google.. helped me to understand the basics of Google analytics.
3. Digital Marketing basics by Google
4. Data Fundamentals by Udacity.
5. Ux Fundamentals by the Interaction Design Foundation

Notice that only one course was directly related to Product Management? This is because Product management is such a cross-functional field that it makes sense to also learn about other domain areas like UX, Product marketing business management and Analytics. For more online courses, you can check out General Assembly, Product School and other Bootcamp.

Books

I found the following books helpful:

1. Cracking the PM interview was really helpful for interviews
2. The product book by the product school.. A free book that’s honestly a gem
3. Sprint by Jake Knapp
4. The Phoneix Project : It was quite refreshing to read a fictional book about IT
5. Shapeup by basecamp. (Free)

Communities

I picked my communities very carefully. I wanted to join places I could add value to, were free of judgement and with quality content. My top communities for Product management are

1. Women in Product on Facebook
2. The Product School community on Facebook, Slack and Youtube
3. Product Dive Slack channel : Mostly targeted at Nigerians
4. Product Coalition on medium and Slack
5. TechLadies

Helpful tips

I know a lot of you are interested in learning and getting that amazing product job that you deserve but calm down small. Don’t go trying to sign up for all these courses or buying all these books at once. Knowledge isn’t going to disappear thanks to the internet. I advise that you should be methodical in your learning. Create a realistic schedule/curriculum for yourself, look for courses outside these ones listed, combine free and paid-for resources and make your self a resource to people too.

I started to create a realistic study guide for myself on Notion here. It’s super rough and incomplete but might be useful for someone. If I get enough requests, maybe ill clean it up and turn it to a PDF or a downloadable resource. Let me know what you think about this.

Please let me know in the comment section below if you found this useful, if there’s a course you absolutely recommend or if you are looking forward to part 2.

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