The whole "CEO of the product" sound bite is silly. As a PM you have to influence the whole company with your data, presentation skills, and charm to maybe get 1/4 of them to agree and put out almost the right features. Folks, especially the early career PMs will soon understand that they have very little say on what features to build and prioritize and its more often than not the HiPPOs which is taken into account.
We need to come up with a better way to interview for PM. People very clearly just study for the questions and have no idea how to do the actual job. At best you get a fair idea about the candidate’s communication skills and clarity of thought.
Obviously there are great influencers and PM practitioners out there who put out quality content. But unless you are experienced PM yourself, it might seem really vague and hard to implement in your daily work. Sooner or later you're going to realize that the advice might be very far from what your life in the trenches is going to look like. It's meant to represent a utopia of what it should be, not necessarily as it is.
You can’t learn product management from reading books or watching videos. The best way to learn product management is to build somethin and ideally with a cross-functional team, designer, developers and whole gang. Experience the epic shitshow, have it fail, deal with the issues and conflicts that arise and then use that to showcase your actual credibility. Side project with your developer friends are a great way to build the so-called product portfolio. If you don’t have developer friends, try building something using no-code tools. Even writing on a personal scale will set you apart from the 100s of people applying for the same position.
The role's bracket of responsibility/goals vary on a spectrum depending on the industry, company stage, culture, product stage, people involved & the market of operation. It's also a completely different function before and after product market fit. Product Management at pre-PMF companies is widely different from those at post PMF companies.
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