Is PM right for you? How can you get an internship or new grad job as a product manager?

Intro


My name is Martin Anquetil and I'm an incoming Associate Product Manager at Google!

A bit about me - I was born in Paris and grew up in Bellevue, Washington. I originally applied to USC to study Journalism, but transferred to Computer Science & Business before I even set foot on campus. I got involved with an amazing organization called Spark SC, and got really into the tech/entrepreneurship space! At first, I thought I'd pursue Software Engineering because that's what some people around me were doing.

But my sophomore year of college, I had no internship lined up and I felt lost, confused, and honestly a bit ashamed. I didn't know what to do! Thanks to a few great people, a bit of a luck and self-reflection, and some great resources, I was able to figure out that being a product manager was the right path for me and that maybe I just didn't like engineering that much. I eventually got in a good groove, got lucky, and got a couple cool PM internships!

All this to say - regardless of where you are now, things will work out for you! I hope this guide can set you on the path to figuring out what you want and how to get there.

This guide is largely an aggregation of the awesome PM content and ideas that already exist across the internet. I've benefited from them in the past and I'm hoping to spread it so that you can too!



What is Product Management?


Product Management, and specifically the role of being a Product Manager has grown in popularity in recent years as software companies grow in numbers and in size. It is a rapidly changing job, which varies in scope and responsibility per company or even team, so no single definition can explain it perfectly.

A few years ago, when discovering Product Management, I was most motivated and impacted by Sachin Rekhi's The Art of Product Management presentation:

The Art of Product Management