What happened
Stav Charkham opened on the paradox in the title: almost every junior product role asks for product experience, and the only place to get product experience is a product role. He is a useful person to hear it from, having no degree and never having attended university, and having taught himself the job.
His own way in was through a small startup making public places accessible to blind people, where he was a project manager. Talking to blind users turned up problems in the product, he took them to the CTO, they fixed some, and he watched those fixes change how people got around. He decided that was the work he wanted and found out afterwards it had a name. Then he hit the wall, because product management is usually a second job and he was eight months into his first.
The question he asked himself is the one worth stealing: what is the minimum experience I need before I can have a real effect on a product? The plan that came out of it had four parts, and he did them in order. One cheap introductory course, chosen not for depth but to give him the vocabulary, after which he could finally see what he was missing and go after those things specifically. Then dozens of coffee chats. Then internships, deliberately one at a B2B company and one at a B2C company. Then building something himself, which happened when covid stranded him in a long-distance relationship and he quit the second internship to build a product with his girlfriend for couples in the same situation.
He was sharp on why this subject is so hard to learn. The material online is enormous and contradicts itself. The job differs so much between a large company and a startup that people are describing different work with the same words. And most of it cannot be practised: you can practise code, which either runs or does not, but there is no way to practise prioritisation, or alignment, or leading people who do not report to you. He thinks that is the actual root of the paradox. Doing the job is the only way to rehearse it, so having done it is the only evidence anybody trusts.
His coffee chat script was specific. Ask how they got in, how they would describe the role, and what their favourite part of it is. Save "what should I focus on to get my first position" until late in the conversation, so the answer is about you rather than about people in general, and do not act on any single answer: collect several and look for the shape. Always close by asking to be introduced to somebody else, which he described as passive meetings in the way founders talk about passive income. Afterwards, keep a spreadsheet of who you met, what they said, what you are going to do about it, and when you last spoke, then send an update once a month. He noted that this is what founders do with investors.
On building something, the sequence was find a problem in your own life, check it is not only yours by talking to people who should have it too, then write down the assumptions that would end the project if they were wrong and work out how to test them. That, he said, is the job: finding your assumptions and finding a way to test them. He hired a freelancer for his first build and thinks that was a mistake. Better to build it yourself, or better still to find a developer who also wants the portfolio piece, because then somebody else is playing the developer and you are actually practising being the product manager.
He was firm about one last thing. Developers have GitHub and designers have Behance, and a product manager's portfolio is the writing they do about what they worked on and what changed because of it. Document as you go and publish it, because there is nothing else to show.