Yukon Lin's mentorship at Codecademy launched the speaker into product management. He argues the best way to learn is through apprenticeship with experienced leaders, since good PM writing has been rare. Reforge's engagement and retention course shaped his strategic thinking.
Chapters
I mean, my current boss is a guy called Yukon Lin, who was my VP of Product at Codecademy, who I think is one of the best product leaders out there. And he like kind of tapped me on the shoulder and told me I could be a good PM when I didn't know what the field was. So like, I got, again, incredibly blessed and lucky that that just kind of like happened to me, and I ended up going down this path. Product management is really like kind of an apprenticeship job where like you have to learn it by doing it, and you learn most of it by watching the way other people do it. So like the best advice is like you find people who are legit and you work for them. Right. Because like, I mean, there's better product management content out there now, but even like 3 years ago, almost nothing written was by like the great product leaders because the great product leaders are like rich and they retire and most of them don't write books. Like they go own vineyards. I think after that, a lot of the Reforge content is really, really good. Like I took their engagement and retention course, which like really shaped the way I think about that. They pivoted to AI. I'm not 100% sure if they offer that anymore, but like their content I thought was really, really strong.
