Going Beyond Idealistic Book Principles & The Myth of Unicorn Product Managers (with Emily Tate, Managing Director @ Mind the Product)

An interview with Emily Tate. Emily is the Managing Director of Mind the Product, the world's leading product management community. Emily started out in marketing, before moving into product management at an aviation company and then onto Mind the Product via a serendipitous sequence of events. She's passionate about product and claims to be able to talk about it all day long!

We talk about a lot, including:

• What the Managing Director of Mind the Product is up to these days and some of the exciting plans as we get out of the pandemic
• How she got started in marketing, then product, then marketing, then product, and what made her settle into product management in the end
• The challenges of being product manager for a technical product, and whether you need to be technical to be a product manager
• Whether it's fair for employers to expect product managers to have deep subject matter expertise or whether being a good product manager is enough
• Whether there's a right way to "do product", the different types of product manager, and the importance of not judging yourself on your weakest skills
• The futility of trying to hire unicorn product managers, and making sure you hire the right product managers for the right products
• Whether the wealth of aspirational content out there is setting too high a bar for product managers
• What to do when you're working for a company that doesn't do product management well, and how to sell yourself into the next company when you know you weren't doing everything by the book
• Some of the warning signs & red flags you should watch out for when applying for a product management job
• The pros and cons of with fortune cookie influencer advice, and making peace with the intentions behind it

And much more!

Get more from Mind the Product

If you want to hear more about the Mind the Product origin story, check out this episode with Janna Bastow, co-founder of Mind the Product and CEO of ProdPad.

Contact Emily

If you want to catch up with Emily, you can reach her on LinkedIn or Twitter.