Many students in Computer Science and Engineering get interested in a role called Product Manager at some point in their time at Tufts. Often, it’s either because they find they don’t want to program or design for a living, or because through club or project experience they realize they like the strategic and coordination aspects of a project. Many times students don’t exactly know what a Product Manager does or how to get there. There is a lot written about this subject, and we now have Amory Wakefield (amory.wakefield@tufts.edu), as an advisor, who spent most of her career working as a Product Manager. She and I collaborated on answering some common questions on the role.
What is a Product Manager?
So You Want to Be a Product Manager — This is an excellent Harvard Business Review article (HBR limits the number of articles you can read for free) that talks about the core competencies needed by a good PM.
Product Management – Start Here — This article from by Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group is still one of the best out there on what product management is, and a wealth of resources to read more about it.
What is the difference between a Project Manager and a Product Manager?
Product Manager vs. Project Manager — A great article by Kelly Vega in DPM (Digital Project Management). Worth reading and maybe it will get you to subscribe as well.
The Product Manager vs. Project Manager (again!) — Basically a blog post from a Product Manager who was glad that the Project Manager was also at the product pitch meeting. Makes it easy to see there is a difference in roles.
The Difference Between Product and Project Management — Another quick article that outlines the responsibilities of the Product Manager and Project Manager.
Sample Companies that hire PMs at the entry-level
- American Express
- Blackrock
- DoorDash
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Instacart
- Khan Academy
- Red Hat
- Robinhood
- Roblox
- Salesforce
- Samsara
- Scale AI
- Shopify
- Visa
- Warner Bros
Sample Companies that hire PM interns
- Adobe
- American Express
- DoorDash
- Cloudflare
- Databricks
- Disney
- Electronic Arts (EA)
- IBM
- NVIDIA
- Oracle
- Qualcomm
- Rakuten
- Salesforce
- S&P Global
- SAP
- Slack
- Spotify
- Visa
- Walmart
