I love the idea of leveling up in real life, like Neo in the Matrix, downloading 10 hours of combat training:
I always want to learn that next skill that will make me more valuable and effective in my role, and keep working towards those bigger and better things.
However, if you google “product management skills to learn”, one of the top results, titled 6 Key Hard Product Management Skills, has, at #2 on their list, I kid you not: “Basic Product Management Knowledge.”
The rest of that list, like most resources I find, are full of vague soft skills like “communication,” or incredibly broad topics like “understand economics.”
Meanwhile, developers have incredible resources like this Frontend Learning Roadmap to help guide their learning paths:
This can be done for product management, and that’s the goal I’m setting out to fill with Product Level Up.
Nobody has time for a 40 hour Udemy course on data science just to understand its principles enough to learn where it can be applied to better understand or better solve problems. You don’t need to be an artist to learn the basics of product design and UX in order to work effectively with your designers, and have good opinions and insight into how that work gets executed.
Product Level Up is a challenge to myself to research into valuable skills and knowledge areas that can make good PMs great; doing the research, finding the best information, and presenting it in the most actionable way for a product manager.
Each week, I’ll put out a write-up that can help you learn that new skill in just a 15 minute read, that you can get through over your morning cup of coffee.
Check out our journey so far:
If you think anyone in your network would be interested, give it a share!
