How to develop Associate Product Managers
When a company hires an APM without a program, the product leadership still has to evaluate them. In this article, I’ll share a simpler way to do that
Hello, I’m Tiago Ferreira, Sr. Product Manager in Brazil with +6 years of experience crafting products. With The Next Movement, I want to share part of my product management experience with the whole world, but also talk about career more broadly, technology, good books, and - why not? - philosophy, music, culture, gossip, just like an open diary. If you enjoy reading my article, subscribe and share it with your friends 🤓
When Google created the first Associate Product Manager (APM) program in 2002, they aimed to form professionals capable of leading the multidisciplinary role of a Product Manager – a role that was still beginning to grow at Silicon Valley companies.
Twenty years later, Brazilian companies started that movement internally: Nubank (the fastest-growing Brazilian fintech), for example, was the first to create a specific program to train APMs.
But, when we broaden the view, we see a different reality: only a few companies have the time, money, and dedication to develop APMs as an internal program.
So, what usually happens? A lot of APMs are hired to deal with hands-on work anchored by a Sr. Product Manager or Product Lead responsible for people management.
When I was Product Lead at TC, I had the opportunity to hire and help APMs develop their skills. That’s one of the most powerful ways to directly lead an individual contributor – even knowing that a PM or an APM also leads without authority designers and engineers.
Anyway, we don’t expect an APM to have a similar background as a Product Manager because, even knowing that the role is new and emerging in Brazil, usually, the PM has a solid background in marketing, technology, or distinct areas, such as biology, human resources or, in my case, journalism.
To evaluate Product Managers, Marty Cagan wrote an interesting article explaining skills assessments: from individual skills, like team collaboration, to deep industry knowledge. He attributes scores to each skill.
When I hired APMs, I used his assessment as an example. But, considering that the APM doesn’t have the expected experience as the PM, I simplified the criteria, based on hard skills and soft skills.
Hard skills
To evolve an APM, the first thing I did was separate hard skills and soft skills. Marty Cagan gave us an interesting approach to the following hard skills: User/Customer Knowledge, Industry/Domain Knowledge, Product Knowledge, Technology Knowledge, User Experience Design Knowledge, and Business and Financial Knowledge.
All of those disciplines are important, but I prefer to adapt them to four topics:
Data Knowledge: Use data to confront different requisitions. An APM must dedicate part of his time to analyzing data and using it in his daily decisions.
User Knowledge: An APM must show empathy for the user during discoveries, side by side with the Product Designer.
Market Knowledge: It’s important to understand the competitors, do benchmarks and share different papers that could reveal new opportunities on the product (an outside view).
Business Knowledge: Understand the company strategy and how the product is connected to that (an inside view).
It is not expected that an APM will master all these skills. But, when you evaluate an APM based on these criteria, you have a glimpse of how she/he could develop to become a good Product Manager soon.
Soft skills
Understanding the soft skills the Associate Product Manager needs to keep an eye on is more important than hard skills.
Cagan has suggested an approach to deal with that, but I think it is too complex inside a dynamic context.
For an APM, the most important thing is continuous learning. On the other side, on his individual skills list, Cagan expects a lot from Product Managers — a position aspired by an APM. So, I’d prefer to soften this approach, observing these aspects:
Continuous learning: Showing interest in learning product management hard skills, spreading knowledge, sharing articles, and talking to stakeholders to know more about the business.
Decision making: Ensure that the team will remain focused on what we have to deliver. Also, the APM must have an active role in discoveries — even if the Product Designer takes the lead.
Alignment with stakeholders: A squad always has a dependency on another squad or service provided by staff engineers. Also, the APM needs to communicate about the delivery: if the team deployed a change on the product, for example, marketing and customer experience teams need to be aligned.
Team collaboration: Co-creation is one of the most important individual skills in product management, and the APM must listen to the developers when they’re blocked, stay aligned with stakeholders if something goes behind the schedule, and facilitate a psychologically safe environment for the whole team.
Next steps
First of all, it is not my intention to create a definitive way to evolve APMs in companies without a specific program.
Call this an approach to facilitate the progress on both sides: for the APM, who could visualize a simplified way to understand his hard and soft skills, planning different ways to evolve in them; and for the Sr. Product Manager, Product Lead or Group Product Manager, who could diagnose and suggest action plans for the Associate Product Manager.
If you work in a company with a well-structured product team, I strongly recommend aligning this evaluation with the Director or VP of Product. Senior leaders usually are more experienced professionals when they have to deal with employee evaluation and, for sure, can contribute more than you expect to develop APMs in the company.
Download the spreadsheet
Here you can download and create your APM evaluation, based on soft skills and hard skills. If you have any suggestions or doubts, please share them in the comment section.
*This article was previously published on Medium. It is edited, for more clarity and context.