This is the fourth and final post of my 4-part "How to Become a Product Leader" series.

A true product leader knows their market, inside and out.  How can you be an expert, if you’re not one already?  Pretend you have a magic wand…

This is the third post of a 4-part "How to Become a Product Leader" series.

So now we’ve covered two of the most obvious ways to become a Product Leader.  However, they’re two of the toughest, and they might not be for everyone.  Next up, we’ll walk through two ways to become a Product Leader that might be less obvious.  First up: “be internal.”  Before you become Captain, become a key part of the team that you want to play on. Like anything else, the way to get to your leadership position is by starting… somewhere.  Anywhere you can build up trust internally, and prove your ability to

• understand customer needs
• work with a diverse group of stakeholders
• formulate a vision, and 
• execute

In other words, you can prove your ability from within an organization, from any number of backgrounds.  Here’s a handy chart showing some ideas of where you can started:

Use your existing skills to come up with new ideas, become an outspoken member of your team, then carry your ideas to Product Management, and push to see them carried through.  If you have enough passion, and can correctly identify where your firm is uniquely positioned to better serve your customers, you’ll be as able as anyone to end up carrying your ideas through.

This is the second post of a 4-part "How to Become a Product Leader" series.

So you've got your eye on Product Management, defined in the first post of this series, but you don't yet have the Product Management title or responsibility.  What else can you do to build up that experience? Build Something!

1. Be a Product Manager (duh)
2. Build something
3. Be internal
4. Be an expert​

Figure out some problem that you want to solve, then find a way to test if people would be interested in an offering of any kind.  Do this on a small scale before investing too much time or money.  Instead of spending $100,000 on developers or equipment, set up a landing page using Launchrock or a pre-sale page on a site like Kickstarter to see if people are even interested.

Once you're confident that the problem you're solving is one that would pique the interest of other people, begin to formulate a vision of what your potential offering might look like, and bring your offering to life, one small step at a time.

As one example, I'm going to share some early links of Mystery Gift Machine below.  For the first time, I'm publicly documenting the progression of the online present-giving service that I built in 2012.

I built the first versions quickly, and they were hideous and embarrassing.  Like Eric Ries says in his classic entrepreneurship book, "The Lean Startup," the way to build a successful startup is to Learn, Build, and Measure.  I'm building on that here by emphasizing the importance of iteration, recognizing that small tweaks can often provide outsize returns after you bring an initial solution to market.

If you follow these steps and "Build Something" -- whether it's software, a community group, or a non-profit organization -- you'll refine many of the same skills you'll need as a product leader:

• Defining the problem you are solving
• Coming up with a list of possible solutions that you could potentially deliver
• Understanding what would be most effective to the most people
• Prioritizing your roadmap
• Working with different technologies/ people / groups to bring your solution to life
• Iterating!

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Until next time, follow @AdamStober

This is the first post of a 4-part "How to Become a Product Leader" series.

What is Product Management, anyway?  Let's start with the following definition, drafted by Rebbie Hughes, Melissa Appel, and myself ahead of a recent EnerNOC career fair: