How to learn anything as a product manager

It helps to have goals and a strategy for improving your skills in your personal life and career (keep reading to the end of this post for an LLM prompt that will help you build a learning roadmap)

As product managers, we’re familiar with breaking down large-scale ideas into manageable, valuable functionality that we can deliver to users early and frequently. This skill has proven invaluable, and fortunately, we can adopt a similar iterative approach to our learning process. In this post, I aim to share some key insights that have guided me in successfully acquiring new knowledge over the past few decades.

To those that know me, it’s no secret that I have a bit of an addiction to learning new things. I frequently have new hobbies and often spend a year or two becoming consumed by them before getting bored and moving onto the next thing. In the past 20 years alone, I’ve learned so much about so many topics that it’s entirely possible I’ve forgotten more than many people learn in a lifetime.

I get a little obsessive with these things, like when I learned to make pizza. I experimented with and changed my dough recipe and cooking technique every Friday for over a year until I achieved perfection. By the time I stopped, my kids were sick of eating pizza. Similarly, I’m improving my writing with this newsletter, and by making this public, I have some accountability which is why I’ve been able to stick with it for nearly a year and a half.

This post was originally published in my Substack newsletter. See Roadmap Weekly for this post and more, including audio versions.

I can’t get enough of learning. Here are some of the things I’m currently learning or working on improving my skills around, and let me tell you, I should definitely take some of my own advice with a couple of these that I’ve fallen behind on:

• Spanish
• Game development
• Writing
• Drawing

Something that’s easy to overlook as part of the iterative learning process, are goals and a strategy for improving your skills. Much like a product, this means having a roadmap for your learning. This syllabus, learning plan, or learning roadmap will help you stay focussed and ensure you’re getting a grasp on the basics. Keep reading to the end of this post for a free prompt you can use with your ChatGPT of choice to help you build your learning roadmap.

Steps to keep learning manageable

Here are some things to consider if you want to ensure your personal and career growth are not an afterthought:

• Free up time to work more on your skills development. This could mean extending your lunch break, replacing another activity for a while, or multi-tasking.
• Set time-bound goals and objectives for yourself.
• Make it a habit if you can; keeping a consistent schedule will help you stay on track and avoid forgetting to put time into what you’re learning.
• Frequency over duration. For many things, 10 minutes a day or an hour a week is better than 4 hours at the end of each month.
• Hire a coach or teacher to help guide you and keep you accountable. This can be a great shortcut and help you get through some of the plateaus you’ll experience.
• Engage in continuous learning through books, courses, podcasts, or webinars related to the subjects you’re committed to learning.
• Mentor or coach others once you’ve reached a base level of knowledge. This will help you cement your existing knowledge and push you to fill any gaps you may have.
• Reflect on failures and successes with learning progress retros. Evaluating your progress and adjusting your plan to meet your goals is important.
• Seek feedback from peers and mentors.
• Participate in communities or forums. This can be a great way to get feedback, hold yourself accountable, and be inspired. Just be careful not to compare your progress to that of others.

If you’re not sure where you should start learning, you can build a matrix of your current skills and evaluate growth opportunities. See my free skills matrix and learning plan template: Skills matrix and learning plan

Remember, even 10 minutes a day is 60 hours a year. That’s pretty substantial.

Common pitfalls to avoid

There are some common struggles I see and have experienced personally:

1. Not being focused enough on the current goal or having too many priorities.
2. Not spending enough time and being infrequent with your practice.
3. Not being intentional with your practice.
4. This could mean not having clear and attainable goals.
5. Shallow learning without giving it your full attention.
6. Passively repeating the same things hoping you will get better.
7. Or, trying to learn it all at once without a clear roadmap or process.

Let me give you an example. I know someone who loves art and has been drawing and painting daily for years. However, their progress has been very slow. Here are some of the things I see them doing that are limiting their progress:

• Spending days on a single, very complex drawing while trying to get every detail perfect.
• Painting that exact drawing without any exploration or even transferring it to a new canvas.

If this person were to take a step back and build a learning roadmap or syllabus, they’d be able to make far more progress. It’s important to consider what you need to learn, and in what order to build on prior knowledge.

What our artist friend above should be doing instead:

• Breaking down the complexities of something like painting. Learning to paint means learning:
  - How to paint light and shadow.
  - Mixing paints and understanding colour relationships, tone and value.
  - Experimenting with different brushes and brushwork techniques.
  - Learning to work with different mediums like watercolour, which is very different from oils or acrylics. Digital painting also has its quarks. It’s probably best to pick one to focus on before moving on.
• They should take a similar approach described above to improve their drawing fundamentals before moving on to painting. If you can’t draw what you want, it will be hard to get the results you’re looking for in a painting.

You could break down learning to paint into 20 or more key topics across many different phases of learning development. Once you learn some of the skills above, you’ll also need to learn and practice the typical painting process:

• Ideation and planning
• Rough sketches and thumbnails
• Value study
• Colour study
• Working in layers

If you want to break the rules and work outside the norms, experts will insist that learning all of the basics of a skill is still a must. I generally have to agree.

What to do when you’re stuck

If you’re feeling stuck in your progress, re-evaluate your learning roadmap and objectives. It can be helpful to go back to basics for a while. It’s important to remember that plateaus exist, and you will often hit a ceiling in your learning, especially after you grasp the basics.

A couple of books I recommend that will help get you in the mindset needed to push through these plateaus and encourage you to continue learning new things:

1. Outliers — by Malcolm Gladwell
   Well known for the 10,000 hours rule, Malcolm Gladwell interviews Bill Gates and explores the factors that contribute to high levels of success, such as opportunity, cultural background, and importantly, practice.
2. Peak — by Anders Ericsson
   Ericsson is responsible for the research that led Malcolm to embrace the 10,000 hour rule. Peak expounds on the remarkable adaptability of the human brain and how ‘deliberate practice’ allows us to master new skills and abilities.

And, as promised, here’s a prompt to get you started on creating your own learning roadmap: Learning plan prompts

This post was originally published in my Substack newsletter. See Roadmap Weekly for this post and more, including audio versions.