How To Break Into Product Management Without Any Prior Experience - w/ Jackie

In this episode featured not-Guru is Jackie Henning. Jackie is a Product Manager at Cylinder and thru her content, has helped hundreds of aspiring PMs break into Product Management. We go over the exact steps anyone willing to break into PM can take, whether you're a student or a working professional - including actionable tools and resources to facilitate your transition.

Think product management is a velvet-roped lounge guarded by Stanford MBAs and ex-consultants with polished slide decks? Surprise—it’s more like an indie music venue with a bouncer who only checks whether you’ve actually played a set. In this episode I hand you a four-step, field-tested blueprint for cracking the product-management code without prior experience, corporate pedigree, or a single day in “Associate PM” purgatory.

Before recruiters even skim your résumé, they’re hunting for one signal: Have you built and shipped something that solved a real problem? We unpack the mental flip—from “I want a PM title” to “I solve user pain on deadline”—that separates career tourists from true builders. Think of this as the moment Neo sees the Matrix. After the switch flips, networking feels less like begging and more like swapping war stories.

Still juggling lectures, labs, or a 9-to-5 that smells nothing like product? Good. Campus hackathons, low-code Chrome extensions, and weekend API mashups are your new resume bullets. We dig into why a scrappy side-project—even one cobbled together in Notion and Figma—outshines a spotless GPA, and how to spin that story so talent partners at Meta, Microsoft, or the hot new SaaS startup have to call you back.

Generative AI isn’t coming for your job; it’s coming for your excuses. We walk through the exact toolkit—ChatGPT for lightning-fast PRDs, Maze for no-code user tests, Chisel for backlog triage, plus a sprinkle of Zapier and Midjourney for polished mockups—that compresses a month of product grunt work into a single Saturday sprint. Master the stack and you become a one-person product squad, ready for whatever 2025 (and the next algorithm update) throws at you.

We roast the rookie moves that tank otherwise promising candidates: resume buzzword-soup, writing “passionate about innovation” without evidence, and attaching a 42-slide deck no one asked for. We even tackle the awkward truth about AI-generated specs: if ChatGPT can spit out your entire product brief, you’ve written the wrong brief.

Finally, we gaze past the hype cycle. Will LLMs draft every user story? Probably. Will that kill the PM craft? Only if your entire value prop is formatting JIRA tickets. We explore the human skills—storytelling, prioritization under chaos, ethical decision-making—that no model can replicate, and why doubling down on them now will future-proof your career.

Whether you’re an engineering undergrad itching to ship something real, a marketing analyst tired of “report-monkey” purgatory, or a side-hustler angling for your first full-time PM role, this episode is your practical, no-fluff guide to breaking into product management without prior experience—and thriving as AI rewires the playbook.

All my links: readysetdopodcast.comJackie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelinehenning/

Timestamps:(00:00) Background + Intro
(02:25) Jackie's Hot Take on Breaking Into PM
(05:26) Advice for Aspiring PMs – The Threshold Concept
(08:20) Gaining Product Experience as a Student
(10:41) Why Hands-On Experience Matters
(13:13) Building Your Own Product
(15:56) Leveraging AI Tools for Product Development
(22:47) Common Pitfalls in Product Management
(25:15) The Future of PM in the Age of AI
(33:40) Outro + Gratitude