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Product management is a craft says Bob Corrigan, a sucessful product manager and author of the ack/nak blog. He said this on the February 2009 episode of the Product Management Pulse Podcast (PMPP), “The Craft of Product Management,” where I first heard it, and on a ack/nak post, “meditation: on mastery”.

Until recently, Bob claims, there were no product management focused programs at universities. Most product managers have achived their level of competency by learning product management skills from a mentor, traversing the road from apprentice, to journeyman, and finally to master. In his own words:

After some reflection, I think that product management follows the same apprentice-journeyman-master training vector as medieval craftsmen, but without the benefit of any explicit structure, standard training, or agreed-upon criteria for evaluating mastery.

At the beginning of our careers, if we’re lucky, we find a “master” who is generous and patient – even if the products we do our learning on are neither. Everything is a live-fire exercise in product management. All the more reason why having someone to show you the ropes is so essential. Book-learnin’ just won’t do.

This speaks some truth.

I myself did not undergo formal training in product management. While I did take a handful of management classes while an undergrad studying computer science at UCLA, none of these classes were specifically focused on the art of building products loved by customers (and their pocketbooks). Instead, they focus on tactical matters such as project management, financing, accounting, leadership, and so on. These are important competencies in a product managers toolbelt, but they do not constitute the core of what a product manager does.

Much of the learning, then, comes on the job. As Bob aptly said, it’s a live-fire exercise. The cost of failure is real money, and lost opportunity. To an apprentice like myself, guidance from someone who has been through it all before can be a huge help.

If you work at any level other than the top of a large, well-established company, you probably do have a mentor. You may not like it, you may call them by another name, or you may conciously choose not to treat it as such, but the relationship undoubtably exists. This is because, larger companies are more risk adverse, and less likely to let a rookie take the ropes without guidance (read oversight).

To some this can be reassuring. To others it is midly restrictive. To others still it is nothing short of bureaucratic in the worst sense of the word. Whatever your outlook, heeding the advice of veteran can help you avoid blunders. If that person has been with the company longer than you, it can also serve to better integrate you into the culture of the company. Furthermore, the resouce pool at a large company can be expansive, allowing you draw from multiple sources or seek a different mentor if the need arises.

If you’re the founder of a bootstrapping startup, you may find that you have no mentor other than your own experientially built repertoire. Unless you are unusually gifted, keeping this repetroire growing healthily each day is an important factor to achiving success. Fortunately today you have an advantage. The ability to seek and connect with mentors virtually is easier than ever before. While you should be careful not to believe everything you read from unknowns like me, a little reserach and good judgement will go a long way. If you’re betting your life savings on your venture, then by all means seek all the help you can get!

If neither of these categories applies to you, you’re probably somewhere in-between. Perhaps, like me, you work for a small company with a founder CEO. Your company has enough road behind it to be proven, but may now be experiencing growing pains while attempting to transform itself from a one hit product wonder to a sustainable product-line execution machine. From a team small enough that everyone knows one another’s names, to a headquartered, multi-office mega-player. A mentor can be extremely beneficial to a product manager entering this fray.

A budding product manager in a small but growing company will be called upon to put in establish new processes and procedures, and make decisions on matters that are outside of their experience, level of competence, or comfort zone. Making do is part of the game, no time to dwell on the inconsequential. It comes with the territory—resources will always come up short of the need.

Even the most talented individuals will make mistakes under these conditions. What’s more, your output may seem sound, and the mistake may not be apparent until it is too late. While mistakes are a powerful motivator to learn and improve, they are not the only way. Fortunately for you, my friend, you probably have great resources right under your nose. The founder or founders that went through it all while launching the product that brought the company to its current level of success, and they are probably more than willing, nay, eager to help you.

Seeking support from founding individuals serves dual purposes.

First, since they are the founders and probably own at least the majority stake in the company, they have a strong interest in keeping things moving in a positive direction. However, te company has grown to a point where a few individuals (themselves included) cannot control, keep tabs on, and decide everything. This is terrifying to them. You must accept their input, but by taking it one step further to actively seek it out regularly and frequently, you make it easier for them to let go of this control and get past their anxiety.

Second, it greatly decreases the chance of you making a mistake. At this stage of your companies growth, some mistakes that are way to easy to make can have detrimental effects. They cripple your growth or even send you back to the to the starting line. Call it CYA if you would like, but I wouldn’t want to be the one responsbile for that simply because I was too proud to ask for help from those around me with more experience.