Becoming a PM Influencer
As a product manager, I’ve launched ten multi-million dollar software products within 5 years. Outside of my product management experience, I also serve as a PM influencer and thought leader: I’ve written 90+ best practice articles on software product management, I’ve published 3 books on Amazon, I’ve been a featured speaker and writer for 80+ different organizations, and you can find my content on NBC, CBS, Fox, MarketWatch, and Benzinga.
People have asked me, “how did you become a PM influencer?” To address that question, I’ve broken down my journey of sharing product management knowledge with others.
But, before we can really get started, it helps to know about my background.
Clement’s Background
I’m the son of two Taiwanese immigrants who were relatively successful in Taiwan but have financially struggled in the United States. I have one sibling, a younger brother who I’m immensely proud of. My personal mission since high school has been to make other people’s lives happier, easier, and better - and so I measure myself by both the breadth and the depth of the positive impact that I make.
I’m a huge introvert, and I struggle to do well in groups of strangers, but I love writing and public speaking because I don’t need to respond to every person individually in real time.
In college, before I ever started working full-time, I was already a writer. I wrote a weekly series of 200 articles on Facebook, which was meant to inspire my friends as we collectively struggled through college and job recruiting. So, I already had the practice of writing 1 article every week for 4 years straight.
I became a product manager through a series of coincidences. I never planned on becoming a product manager, and even when I was asked to become one, I fought my CEO for weeks on end because I thought I wasn’t qualified enough for the job.
When I did become a product manager, it was incredibly painful at the start, though also incredibly rewarding. I hated that I knew so little about product management, I hated that my peers were too busy to teach me, and I hated that I couldn’t find easy-to-access resources on product management (e.g. articles, conferences, videos, templates, etc.).
It was that struggle that made me excited to help others into product management.
The Friend
I didn’t realize it at the time, but product management was really starting to heat up as a desirable career choice from the year 2017 and onwards.
When I had been a product manager for a few months, a couple of my friends reached out to ask me about how I had broken into product management. Since they were my friends, I was excited to help them, though I felt significantly underqualified to help.
We had multiple one-on-one phone calls where I talked them through my journey and provided what advice I could. In doing so, I started learning something new about myself - I loved teaching others about product management, even though I didn’t feel like I knew enough about it to be a subject matter expert.
After I had advised these friends, they started letting their other friends know that “Clement is great at talking about product management”, and I started getting more and more phone calls.
I dedicated at least 1 hour per person to ensure that they could ask all of the questions that they had, and I started to note down the questions that I couldn’t answer. After each call, I conducted independent research to find the answers to those questions that I hadn’t been able to answer live on the phone.
This became a really powerful forcing function for me to get better at product management. My PM skills weren’t just valuable on the job; they were also valuable to my friends. As my friends gave me more and more questions to answer, I became more and more polished and structured in my answers, and I picked up the skill of dissecting my own experiences to yield frameworks and key insights that they could take with them.
The Peer
LinkedIn started gaining significant traction as a professional network in 2017, and soon I got inbound LinkedIn requests from MBA connections who wanted to know about product management. The hottest career at that time for MBA candidates was software product management, so I found myself running weekly calls with MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and other Ivy Leagues to discuss how to break into product management.
Over time, this started to take a toll on the quality of my work at Blend and on the quantity of free time that I had. And, the other frustrating part was that I spent so much time answering the exact same questions over and over again.
So, I made the decision to start documenting my discussions into templates that I could send out over LinkedIn messages. That way, I could say, “Before we schedule a call, read the below. Let me know if that answers your questions.”
By doing so, I dropped my call volume down from 4 hours a week down to 30 minutes a week, which I dedicated to people who had specific questions that I didn’t have templates ready for yet. When I did address those questions, I would add those into my templates, and soon I had an ever-growing body of written thoughts on product management.
At some point, I figured, “it’s not really fair that you have to be personally connected with me to find this information. I need to get my knowledge into a more publicly accessible format.”
The Writer
After 1.5 years as a group product manager at Movoto, I decided it was time to switch to another organization as a product manager. I started recruiting for product management roles at other companies.
That was an unpleasant experience. I was rejected so many times, even though I knew I had what it took to succeed.
One core problem with product management recruiting is that recruiters prefer either brand-new PMs (e.g. PM interns) or experienced PMs. They want brand-new PMs to be able to mold them into a specific way of working, and they want experienced PMs to drive new initiatives.
As a newly-minted PM, I didn’t fit into either category. That single fact caused me so much trouble throughout the recruiting process.
I realized that my recruiters and my interviewers had no way to truly assess my capabilities; the PM interview process can be notoriously qualitative, and I felt that I didn’t have enough concrete evidence at my fingertips to prove my worth.
I knew that my limited years of experience caused recruiters to feel that I was too risky of a bet, even though I had successfully launched million-dollar product lines as a group PM at Movoto.
I figured that if my interviewers had known that I had mentored so many people into product management, they’d trust me more as a candidate. So, I converted my LinkedIn templates into a series of 10 articles on product management.
My thinking was this: if my interviewers knew about all of the work I had done before we even got onto our first phone call, I would have a much easier time with future interviews.
The Community Builder
But here’s the twist: I didn’t write for my own blog. Rather, I wrote for someone else’s blog.
I don’t quite remember how this happened, but at some point I ran across Product Manager HQ. I figured that I could create more positive impact in the world by contributing my articles to an existing blog with an audience, rather than starting from scratch.
So, I decided to pitch my articles to PMHQ. But, before doing so, I figured that they must have been getting a bunch of article pitches. After all, many people want to have the “fame and glory” of being featured, without providing deep, long-lasting value.
So, I crafted a report that analyzed all of PMHQ’s existing articles, and I recommended investing in particular content areas that were underrepresented or entirely missing.
I sent my pitch package to PMHQ: all 10 of my articles, the report, recommendations on what to write next, and 8 article outlines that were ready to go if they accepted my recommendation. I let them know that they could publish my content for free and that I expected no payment.
Kevin, the founder of PMHQ, reached back out to me with enthusiasm and gratitude. He told me that he had received hundreds of pitches since founding PMHQ in 2014, but that mine was the only one that truly understood his pain and focused on resolving it.
He asked me not just to publish one article, but to join him as a Co-Founder at PMHQ. As a Co-Founder, I would not just write content, but I would also maintain our newsletter and grow our Slack community.
I accepted. From there, I wrote 50 articles in my first year. I maintained my prior schedule of writing one article per week, so that I would push myself to get better at product management and at writing.
What really stuck with our reader base was this: talking about my own experiences, in depth, while providing a framework for how to tackle the problem that I’d faced in the past.
Looking back, it makes sense that I would be strongest at that kind of writing - that’s what I had been doing ever since I answered my friends’ questions over the phone!
The Guest Writer
My articles picked up significant traction over LinkedIn, and our reader base regularly forwarded my articles to their bosses, their direct reports, and their friends. At some point, I caught the eye of the content strategists at Mixpanel and Gainsight, and these two organizations reached out to ask me to write for them.
The benefit of writing for a different organization is that you can access their reader base. So, in those articles, I included PMHQ in my author blurb so that we could continue to grow PMHQ while also serving the needs of Mixpanel and Gainsight.
Those articles were roaring successes, which led to many others reaching out, including Coda and Almanac. Over time, organizations learned that they could reach out to me to address a burning topic on their minds.
By the way, if you’re interested in becoming a guest writer yourself, check out our Behind-the-Scenes content creation streams! You’ll learn how to craft compelling essays and how to pitch to other publications.
The Speaker
I don’t remember how this happened, but at some point Product School asked me to speak on their behalf. I spoke in person in San Francisco for an audience of 80 people. Afterwards, I stayed behind to answer people’s questions.
One of the attendees happened to be well-connected with Advancing Women in Product (AWIP). She loved my talk and wanted me to speak for AWIP as well. I served as a moderator for an AWIP event, and just about everyone in the audience loved the discussion.
These successes convinced me that I shouldn’t be afraid of public speaking. Over time, I’ve had many organizations reach out to ask me to speak on their behalf, and it’s been a blast each time. Occasionally, someone in the audience happens to be an organizer for a different community, and that then leads into yet another speaker engagement.
The Author
I started noticing that my followers were having trouble with keeping up with all of my content. Across multiple interactions, I saw that followers didn’t know that I had already written about the question that they had, or that they couldn’t find the full body of work that I had already created.
To combat that, I decided to create a forcing function: a book. Books force people to commit to reading it from start to finish in a particular order. I knew that my knowledge was synergistic with itself - reading only one of my articles is valuable for addressing a specific problem, but reading many of my articles together unlocks new ways of thinking about the world.
The goal wasn’t to earn money. I barely covered the production costs of the book, and I essentially gave away my time for free to bring the book to life.
The goal was to assemble my content into something much more powerful for my readers. And, in seeing the fantastically positive feedback from those who bought and read the book, I believe that I achieved that goal.
Interestingly, having a book enabled me to reap two additional benefits:
I was able to access new audiences that I couldn’t access before - notably, my book has had significantly more demand in India than in the United States
I was able to build even more credibility as an authority in product management
Since then, I’ve published a total of three books on Amazon, and I’ve also converted these books into audiobooks.
The Podcaster
As my LinkedIn follower base grew due to my writings, books, and speaker events, people started reaching out to feature me in their podcasts.
I had a lot of fear at first. I’m not a natural podcaster. My voice isn’t deep or velvety, I get too easily excited, I speak too fast, and I regularly forget what question I’m trying to answer. That’s why I prefer the structure of an article or a presentation.
But, given that I had successfully traversed other forms of content, I figured that I might as well give it a shot. I agreed to my first guest podcast, and we shipped it.
From there, others learned that they could also have me join their podcasts. I’ve since joined a handful, and gotten over my concerns around being polished on-air.
It’s a bit funny, because I’ve gone full circle. A podcast is basically a friendly phone call where you talk about what’s on the host’s mind - the only difference is that it’s publicly available.
And that’s exactly what started my journey into becoming a PM public intellectual: to share my knowledge with others, so that we can all live in a better world with better software.
The Influencer
I summarize all of these public knowledge building activities (writing, speaking, podcasting) as “being a public intellectual”, similar to how 80,000 Hours describes it. As an aside, I strongly recommend reading the 80,000 Hours guide on how to create the most impact with your life.
Being a public intellectual can be rewarding but exhausting. I spend about 8 hours per week crafting content, 4 hours per week to speak for audiences, and 8 hours per week responding to people on LinkedIn and email. That’s 20 hours of “personal free time” that I give up each week to serve as a public intellectual.
I’m excited that I’m enabling people to pursue their dream job and unlock higher salaries, that I’m empowering people to build better products, that I’m upleveling product organizations around the world, and that I’m creating a better world for end users by making their product managers more skilled, more empathetic, and more thoughtful.
The Founder
As an education entrepreneur at Product Teacher, my vision is to create a world where anyone can bring their dreams to life through software.
Everyone should have access to the knowledge they need to create and scale their own products - regardless of industry, race, gender, nationality, or wealth - because product management will unleash the next global wave of entrepreneurship.
I’ve coached professionals from hundreds of companies to advance their careers in product management, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, PayPal, Box, Zoom, Adobe, Uber, Lyft, Salesforce, Reddit, eBay, Hulu, and Spotify.
Problematically, many high schools, colleges, and universities don’t teach product management. So, as an educator, my mission is to create accessible PM resources for a global community. To do so, I’ve focused on three core principles.
First, students have different content preferences and learning styles. That’s why I’ve shared my knowledge through books, audiobooks, articles, webinars, videos, courses, and podcasts.
Second, partnerships are powerful. I’ve partnered with 70+ organizations, including universities, nonprofits, and corporations, to share as much product management knowledge as I can. These organizations include: Google Ventures, Greylock, Sequoia, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, TechCrunch, Hacker Noon, The Muse, Facebook, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Gainsight, Hubspot, Robinhood, Shopify, Drift, Slack, Asana, Hack Reactor, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard.
Third, diversity in product management is crucial. That’s why I’ve spoken and written for audiences in Kenya, Nigeria, Ukraine, Britain, Brazil, India, Japan, and more.
The world needs diverse, empathetic, and skilled product managers. Better product managers build better software, and better software means a better world.
I’m eager to raise the next generation of product managers, through my work as a serial PM education entrepreneur.
Pitfalls to Watch for as You Become a PM Influencer
Here are the top 4 pitfalls to watch for, if you decide to aim at becoming a product management influencer like me.
Pitfall #1: Don’t obsess over the number of followers you have or the number of reactions you get. Focus on long-term value that people will reliably refer to their friends. Slow and steady growth beats out any short-term virality. Be proud of what you produce.
Pitfall #2: Don’t burn out. Ensure you only tackle a sustainable workload over a long period of time. If you write 10 articles at once within a single week, and then fall silent for a year, no one will consume your content. Instead, if you consistently write once per month over the course of a year, people will form the habit of consuming your content.
Stick to a disciplined schedule and enforce deadlines on yourself. It’s the only way for you to make it past writer’s block. Writer’s block is the fear of creating subpar content, and I’ve found that the only way I can override that fear is by using a bigger one: the fear of letting my readers down by not publishing anything at all.
Pitfall #3: Don’t focus too much on scalability with your first few initiatives. Instead, get started by doing things that don’t scale.
Don’t try to be an overnight success, and don’t expound on hypothetical situations. Because I spent so much time talking to people one-on-one, I gained a strong grasp of what people value, and how I can provide them that value.
Pitfall #4: On the other hand, make sure you eventually drop the things that don’t scale. I cannot possibly take every request for information interviews anymore.
While I feel heartless every time I turn down a coffee chat, I believe that it’s the right thing to do in the long run. I need to conserve my energy to unlock impact for hundreds of people, not just for a single individual.
And, providing people with scalable, evergreen product management resources is far better for them in the long run too, because they’ll be able to revisit my insights years down the road.
Long-Term Strategies to Consider as a PM Influencer
Here are some key long-term strategies to consider as you establish yourself as a PM influencer.
Go deep before you go broad. Having 50 articles at PMHQ first was incredibly valuable for convincing other organizations to ask me to speak for them or to write for them. If you go broad first, you likely won’t have enough credibility. I think of this like having a “base of operations” where I can always refer people back to my deepest body of work.
Establish your content first before kicking off any marketing. I didn’t start to aggressively promote my articles until I had written my first 50 articles at PMHQ. In my experience, good content can save bad marketing, but good marketing can never save bad content.
Branch out to other organizations at some point. If I only kept writing for PMHQ, I would have had access only to one single user base, which is the PMHQ base.
The incremental difference you get by writing another article once you have 50 is much less than the impact you’d make if you wrote a guest article for a totally different publication, and use that to drive others back to your “base of operations.”
Diversify your content types. Some people prefer podcasts, some people prefer webinars, some people prefer articles, and some people prefer self-paced courses. You can always repackage content from one medium to another! Plus, when you do that repackaging, you might find opportunities to further refine your existing content.
Do your market research. What pain are you trying to solve, and why? How does your proposed new content address that pain? What is the long-term roadmap for the kind of value that you want to create in the world as a public intellectual?
The Journey Ahead
As you set off on your journey to become a PM influencer, remember that you yourself are a product, and that you need to find product/market fit.
There’s no such thing as “overnight success.” Rather, you’ll need to pour in countless hours of sustained effort until you start seeing results.
Focus on your end users’ needs, and don’t fall into the trap of growing your ego.
In the coming months, we plan on pulling together a deep-dive self-paced course on how to establish yourself as a PM influencer. We’re rooting for you!
