Looking for an expert in importing products into Canada and knowing the various regulations and certifications needed for those products. Any takers?

Hello Aidan. I was recently featured on a panel at General Assembly for an audience looking to make a career shift towards product management. In 2014 I moved from a marketing / user engagement role at a software startup to product management. The transition is still fresh in my mind. Based on the experience on your LinkedIn profile, it seems like you would be well-equipped to make the switch. You have a technical background, experience with generating team outcomes and strategic direction. I think the challenge you face is not whether you have the right skills and resources, but rather how you would like to apply them. Product management is broad and so is your choice of employers. It would be great to jump on a call to get a better context of your situation so I can give you specific tips on how to put your best foot forward.

Some of this is stage dependent and all of it is highly dependent on the team above the product manager. The simplest answer of course is to find PM's from companies who have had exemplary success where the Product Manager candidate either led prior success or was exposed to it in a meaningful way. A simple starting point is to ask them to give you examples of conflicting opinions on a feature and how they evaluated the conflicting opinions and made a decision and tracked the success or failure of that decision. AirBnb actually gives PM's homework as part of the interview process where they have to actually present a unique idea (from scratch) to the interviewing team. Happy to talk to you about best process based on your stage and existing team.

It depends on a lot of things. This is a pretty broad question with lots of pieces. Rob Walling has a great course on Udemy on The Startup's Guide to Virtual Assistants. The course costs $99 and it's more focused on VA work than straight dev / coding but it touches on both. I took it and it was worth every penny. https://www.udemy.com/startups-guide-hiring-virtual-assistant-va/

Your skills would be most useful if you were starting your own startup and needed to make an early prototype to show to investors or potential cofounder developers. Your experience in debugging, testing, and agile, could help you get a job as a product manager, and the fact that you have a background in some sort of 'coding' will help too. It's very unlikely that it would help you get an actual dev job though, since you wouldn't be able to translate your programs into actual code that could be taken over/continued by other devs. Even if the programs you mentioned do allow you to export as code, it's unlikely that it would be exported in a way that's very usable by other devs.

I read your story and I feel your pain, but I have bad news. The problem is not your people, the problem is you. You have a responsibility that goes way beyond developing great products that wow customers; you have the responsibility of leading! Leadership is one of those subjects that most people feel they have covered, I thought I had it covered too until I found myself in exactly the same shoes as you are wearing right now, and boy did it pinch. It took a while for me to realize I was the problem but three things clued me in: 1. I found out that I kept firing and hiring new people and it did not make a difference 2. I met a friend who was building a great company with what I would consider average people and he was really getting things done. The difference was that leading people came natural to him while building products came natural to me 3. I finally came to terms with the fact that I enjoyed being the solution point and the center of the product development universe. Clients loved me, me people stood in awe of me and I loved it and hated it at the same time You need to get into a leadership coaching program. I'm sure you will find some very capable people on clarity but trust me, the sooner you start, the better. Your organization will not change until you change, and there is no better way to say it. Like I said, I know your pain and you are not alone in this my friend.