Many of these people are behind Google’s best products and services, and others have moved on to lead their own companies. Marissa gets most of the credit for this program, and put countless hours into coaching these promising product leaders, and the program has produced some exceptional talent. The purpose of the program is to take high-performing and/or high-potential individuals with a proven or growing track record in other areas (be that business or education) and coach them into very strong product managers. In the Google program, they work hard to find the absolute best and brightest, from inside the company and outside, and entry to this program gives the lucky aspiring product leader entrance into a two-year coaching program to learn how to become an exceptional product manager and likely future product leader. As you’ll see, this program is nearly the opposite of that. Sometimes this name causes confusion because in many companies outside of Silicon Valley, especially companies using feature teams, the term “Associate Product Manager” refers not to this program, but rather to an entry-level, junior product manager. Very early on they realized that these strong product leaders were in very short supply, and one thing they did was to establish the Associate Product Manager (APM) program. Most people know that Google has many exceptionally strong engineers, but less known is how hard they have worked to develop a set of product managers that are worthy of these engineers. Their first product manager, Marissa Mayer, set a very high bar, and they have worked hard over the years to recruit and develop a very strong army of product managers. One company that realized this a long time ago is Google. Great products are the result of a strong product team, and the anchor of that strong product team is a very strong product manager. I have written many times in various ways about how critical it is to put very strong people in this role, and I meet execs every week that tell me that they need more. I find that most tech product companies out there are struggling to find enough very strong product managers.
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