Here are some ways one can gain product management experience to strengthen your resume and help you learn all of the necessary product management skills!

Consider what industry you hope to move into as a product maanger, and think about where you are right now. What skills from your current job will prove to be really helpful in this industry? Figure that out so you can sell it on your resume and interviews.

Showing companies in the industry you chose that you can do the product manager work is important. Perform product tear downs, conduct market analysis, do user research. Add these things to your resume to show that you add value.

Throughout your time preparing for a product management career and beyond, an important part of your journey is going to be finding a good mentor.

For product managers working in the tech industry especially, web development will play a part in the product process. Whether the product is part of the website, or the website is used for marketing, or both, understanding web development and being able to effectively take advantage of these skills will allow you to make and market the best version of your product possible.

It may seem obvious that communication skills are important for the product management job. They are important for any job. However, it is imporant to keep in mind that as a product manager, often an important part of your job is to conduct the communication between software engineers, marketing , and business employees. This requires knowing marketing, business, and engineering enough to effectively communicate project details with all of these different groups of people. This requires studying these different fields and getting comfortable communicating in those spaces.

Finance is a huge, important part of product management role. Whether it's calculating the cost of a product, creating forecasts for product revenue, or developing future financial scenarios and planning out the response to them, finance is an important skill to strengthen as a product manager,

Product Managers lead the development of a product. This is done in the form of a project usually. For this you need project management skills to run successful projects that create successful products.

You may not be able to jump into product management right away. In that case, there are multiple different roles you can get into and work your way to the product management role. The key is having a role somewhere in the product process. You could work in Customer Success to get to know the product and customer deeply which is crucial for product management. You also could start as a software engineer to get to know the product from the development standpoint. You will develop a deep understanding of what makes the product work, what direction development could go in the future and be able to work with engineers to plan how to move the product forward. In a similar vein, you could start off as a UX Designer, studying the design of the product, how it meets a customer's needs, and how the product's UI could better answer the pain poinys the customer is facing. This perspective is important for product managers to have so that they focus on making products that focus on the customer.