As an early tip, be as much of an observer as you can. Don’t try to disrupt or change things too much early on. You’ll come to a product and have your conceptions of what needs to change, but most times there’s a culture of making decisions and reasons for why things haven’t been high priority in the past. You don’t want to pull the trigger too

Sometimes people ask me if you can work on a team when you don’t already know the area. If you’re interested in the area and have a drive for learning, you can be successful in any group.

One thing that can be difficult as a company’s first PM is introducing process. Engineers at startups love shipping code quickly and are very wary of overhead, so it’s important to be careful when adding process like Agile. PMs need to make sure that everyone still has a voice and understands the reasons for adding timelines and milestones.

One of the best ways to get signal on the culture at a startup is to look at where the founders, PMs, and early employees came from. Since product management doesn’t have a single, well-known definition, teams generally bring along the definition that they learned from their past companies.

Company Research: You can use your answer to show that you’ve done research about the company or position. Doing research shows passion for the position, and passionate employees make good employees. For example, you might say, “What piqued my interest was a presentation your lead UI designer made about the different methods you use for data

A good side project has the following qualities: Fills in the gaps in your experience. For example, if you don’t have a computer science degree, you can show off your technical skills by building a website or mobile app. There are many tutorials online that you can follow to build a simple app for free. Shows off your skills. If you’ve got great

At the more transparent companies, you’ll frequently see PMs move between teams, and cross-team collaboration is a big part of the PM’s job. At the more siloed companies, there’s less movement and usually less of the high-pressure, cross-team work.

As an engineer, you’re probably very focused on what is possible to build. For most of your career, you’ve needed to lower other people’s unrealistic expectations. As a product manager, you need to let go of that instinct and allow yourself to envision a world where you’ve made the impossible happen.

A PM’s role in defining product strategy differs between companies. At some companies, the strategy is “bottom up,” where key decisions often come from developers and PMs. At other companies, the strategy is more “top down,” where the direction is generally decided by executives and PMs, and developers are left to implement it.