« How to Plan a Product Management Career - Ramsey Pryor »

In Chapter 20 of 22 of his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, international Internet product management executive Ramsey Pryor provides a product management career development framework. Pryor lists three stages of product management. The first is a mainline product manager role that provides opportunity to give birth to a product, go to market, and learn from the experience. The second stage is a group product manager role that includes managing a product family, defining the company product approach, and managing a product manager team. The third is a company product executive role such as VP Product, that includes managing resources, budget, sales and marketing relationships at an executive-facing level. Within these three groups, Pryor highlights an additional division between new product managers, or trailblazers, and mature product managers, or optimizers. Pryor encourages product managers to get experience in both areas and develop a preference. Pryor earned an MBA from the University of Navarra IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain and a BA in Economics and Spanish from Northwestern University.