Crowley: Aspiring PMs should accept any job offering the official title
Maggie Crowley · Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, TripAdvisor) · Nov 5, 2023 · at 33:51
Maggie Crowley, VP of Product at Toast, discusses why landing the official PM title is the single most important career milestone for breaking into product management.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 18.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“My advice is always, if you can get someone to stamp you with the product manager role, take it, because to your point, it's what we screen on. It's for better force. It's just like, you just have to, you have to get that first job. And then once you get that first job, it all gets easier because you can get in and then you can talk about your experience.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Maggie Crowley
Software teams should never attempt a side-by-side product rewrite, warns Maggie Crowley
“Just don't do it. Don't rewrite. If anyone ever tells you to do a rewrite, don't do it. A side-by-side rewrite. Nope.”
Crowley: Product strategy accounts for only 5% of a PM's job
“And strategy to me, and hopefully we'll talk about strategy in a bit, it's one tiny slice. You do a strategy, but it's five percent of the work that you do. Yes, it's important because you want to get your strategy right and you need to pick the right products…”
Product managers aren't great until they've shipped a bad product, says Crowley
“A question I ask in every product interview is what's the worst product you've ever shipped? And that's because I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it en…”
Crowley: Staying multi-year at one company teaches PMs more than job-hopping
“I got to see two or three cycles of the same product, and that, I learned more from that than I did out of the, you know, year or so I spent doing other things each at a time, because you got to see the consequences of your decisions, and that's rare, and peop…”
Crowley: Underrepresented PMs routinely get unhelpful feedback to be more strategic
“Another thing I hear, especially as you get further in your career, and unfortunately, if you're maybe an underrepresented person in tech, is that you need to be more strategic, and so that's feedback that almost always happens, especially if you're a woman in…”
Crowley: You are not a good PM until you ship something terrible
“I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it enough time, like, and it, and it's not only that you've done it, but that you can admit it, and you know which on…”