End the cargo-cult phase. Articulate what product management actually is — in your own words, without the business/tech/UX Venn diagram — and diagnose, honestly, why prior PM education (a certificate, a cohort course, years of half-absorbed newsletters) changed nothing about how you build. Surface the gap between the canon (written for VC-funded multi-team product orgs) and your reality (one engineer trying to ship things that sell). Write the first version of the position document you will edit fourteen more times.
The audit is git blame plus the post-incident review applied to your own education: the cert-didn't-operationalize pattern is mostly curricular, not characterological — the same shape as a tutorial that teaches Rails routing without ever making you build a CRUD app. You know what resources :posts does; you can't architect a controller. The diagnosis is the cure.
And the PM frame itself is not a new vocabulary — it's a vocabulary that talks about the user the way you already talk about the system. Users are systems too: stochastic, partially observable, with internal state and their own bugs. User stories ≈ acceptance tests for the user instead of the test runner. Discovery ≈ rubber-ducking where the duck can contradict you. Outcome metrics ≈ acceptance criteria for the user's life rather than the system's behavior. Most of what makes a senior engineer good at PM is recognizing that they already know how to reason about systems like this; the curriculum is teaching them to apply it where the system is a person.
If you hold a PM certificate that never changed your behavior — a university-branded course, a Coursera track, an employer-paid program you finished and filed — you will be defens…
Two diagnoses run through this module, and both have to land before anything downstream works.
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
1. The PM Education Audit (if you hold any prior PM education — certificate, cohort, course): produce PMEDUCATIONAUDIT.md classifying every framework you were taught into four col…
9 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.