Getting Strategic to Land Your First Product Management Job (with Crystal Parker, Product Manager & Entry Level Career Coach)

An interview with Crystal Parker. Crystal is a Product Manager at Spear Education and an entry-level career coach. She's using her personal experience of getting into product management to help others do the same through her coaching, where she aims to map out a strategy and work out their golden path to that first product management role.

We talk about a lot, including:

• The mission behind Spear Education, what it's like building an analytics platform for dentists and how she built up her dental domain knowledge
• How she got into product management in the first place, why it's the perfect job for her and how she got past the interview process given that she had zero product management experience
• How she upped her product management game once she got in, how she managed to "finesse the rest", and the resources she used to build her product management skills
• Her passion for mentoring others & how it led her to start coaching those following her and help get people from non-traditional backgrounds into tech careers where they belong
• How she gets strategic with the people she's coaching to map out their path to success and how that's informing a new e-book which will allow the wider world to follow the Crystal Parker approach (™?)
• The sorts of things you shouldn't really waste your time on when trying to get that first product management role, and where to best focus your efforts instead
• Some of the gateway positions you could consider to get into a product company, get close to the product management team & eventually transfer into the role you're after

And much more!

You can reach out to Crystal on Twitter or check out her website crystalaparker.com.