“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. – John F. Kennedy
As a Product Manager, I am able to relate and emphasize the importance of continuous learning and it helps in product management. Being curious and striving to do daily learning leads to a product’s success.
Learning New Skills
You may wonder why I should learn and acquire new skills? I have studied and got a degree and got into a job and moved up the career ladder and became a product manager. I don’t have time to do the learning, as I have to balance my work and personal life. Yes, understood. I can empathize with you, since as a product manager, mom, wife it is difficult to allocate time. But at the same time, you have to balance your work and personal life as well as your learnings. Otherwise, you will be lagging behind.
The vital reason is the technology and business is changing fast and we also should be updated in terms of these changes. Then only we will be able to serve as a great product manager/leader. I am sharing a simple tip to handle this from my personal experience. I allocate time for work, household activities as well as for my learnings in my daily activities. The learning time can be 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 1 hour based on your schedule. The essential part is you have to do this consistently. Over a period of time, you will be able to acquire a new tech skill or develop a new hobby.
Great product managers are curious and have a desire to learn new things.
Learning by Doing
Since a product manager has to learn multiple skills to accomplish his/her daily tasks without relying upon the tech team. Product management is best done in the way of learning by doing. For example, to analyze the product metrics you should not wait and rely upon the analytics or tech or marketing team. Since they might be busy in their daily tight work schedules and delivery sometimes. You can learn to write advanced SQL queries and try to get the metrics by yourself.
It is not limited to that, you are reading a book or article about the product KPIs, best practices about building product strategy. We can’t take all the points or practices and implement them right away. There is “No one size fits for all success..” Each product and each organization is different and has unique strengths and weaknesses. Based on the learnings, refine the process and integrate the KPIs suitable for your product.
Be Updated
Always find moments to learn new concepts and grab opportunities. Have a list of learning resources and subscribe to the important industry’s podcasts and blogs. So that whenever an episode or article is published you will get the notifications straight to your inbox.
Be part of the product communities and participate. You should not only consume the content, you have to give back to the community too.
Below is the list of a few of Product Resources followed by me:
- https://mastersofscale.com/
- https://www.productschool.com/
- https://productled.com/
- https://www.mindtheproduct.com/
- https://theprodcast.com/
Happy Learning!!