Accelerating Your Career with BPMA
Climbing up the career ladder is a years-long process, and everyone’s path is different. Finding opportunities within the organization where you work can sometimes be challenging as some organizations have established career ladders - while some don’t have clear criteria developed at all. This can make it very difficult to identify opportunities to showcase one’s potential to become a leader. Boston Product Management Association (BPMA) offers a number of ways for product managers to engage in activities that can make a big, positive impact on their careers, and position them well within their organization to make the jump to more senior positions.
Engaging Diverse Audiences
Product managers sit at a crossroads between many teams in any organization. BPMA’s monthly events provide an opportunity to hear from colleagues from other organizations about best practices on how they engage with other teams in their organization to solve problems. Events focused on product analytics, cross team collaboration, managing internal applications, story mapping are all great opportunities to hear about how other companies approach product management, and to engage in a dialogue with peers and network. Applying newly learned ideas can distinguish a PM in their organization, and position them as a thought leader.
Giving Back with Mentorship
A more personal, and targeted way to fastrack a career is to become a mentor with the BPMA. There are two mentorship tracks - one for the aspiring and job seekers; and the other for established professionals. They allow both seasoned, and mid-career PMs to engage in this leadership building activity as they guide other PMs through their career. While being a mentee is a great opportunity to learn from others, becoming a mentor elevates that learning, as it allows PMs to practice their leadership skills and apply them in their organizations.
People Management within BPMA
Volunteering with BPMA can evolve into an opportunity to manage a team of volunteers, drive strategy, and execute on it towards a certain function within the BPMA board. The blog and web content team led by one of the volunteer Product Managers, for example, works to identify topics of interest to the BPMA readers, and create engaging content. Publishing blogs follows the product development process, maintaining a backlog of stories, developing them through the peer review process, and analyzing the success of the published blogs by looking at Google analytics data. These are transferable skills that can be used in any organization, and can help PMs advance their careers.
Engaging with the BPMA is a great and accessible way to learn new skills, meet other PMs, and share knowledge. Staying engaged with the organization, though attending events or volunteering gives professionals at all levels an opportunity to improve their leadership skills, pursue any career aspirations they have, to the highest leadership levels. Join us at our next event, become a mentor - or volunteer to become a member of one of our teams and set yourself up for a successful career ahead. Join us to learn, stay engaged to lead!
Milica Golubovic is a Product Manager with experience in B2B and B2C product development. As a member of the BPMA Blog team, Milica is collaborating to create informative, engaging content for the Product Management community.
