Failed Startups Beat Any MBA for Building Elite Product Managers

What if the secret to building world-class product managers isn't found in any MBA program or product management course? What if it's discovered in the messy, uncertain world of failed startups and the hard-won lessons that come from eating rejection for breakfast?

Mick Johnson has spent 16 years navigating between Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google, while launching two startups that taught him more about leadership than any corporate handbook ever could. As one of Facebook's first mobile product managers and mentor to over 100 PMs, he's witnessed the evolution of product management from the inside out.

In this candid conversation, Johnson reveals why the best PMs learn to "breathe underwater," how failed startups become the ultimate personal development bootcamp, and the counterintuitive management philosophy that transformed Facebook's rotational PM program.

Mick Johnson: My name's Mick Johnson, and I've spent the last 16 years sort of moving between large tech companies and doing a couple of small startups along the way. I was one of the first product managers on mobile for Facebook. I went to Google and spent some time working on maps for automotive. And then I went back to Meta to work on Facebook again.

Australians have a little bit of wanderlust, right, we like to explore, we like to see the world, and I've always liked travel, I've always liked exploring new things. I had a number of friends that had moved to the Bay Area and I was at a point in my life where it felt, OK, it's time for a change, time to try something new. And really when I first came I just planned to be here for a couple of years, but I really grew to love the States, I really grew to love the Bay Area.

Mick Johnson: I had a small startup called Gasbag, which was a way to find cheap gas around you when the iPhone App Store first came out. I would say the first startup that I did, my co-founder and I, we were sort of new to Silicon Valley. We're sort of new to some of that culture. We ended up becoming Y Combinator batches. We were actually there when going through YC meant you got something like $6000 per founder, we were paying ourselves $1500 a month or something. Right, just trying to make ends meet, trying to make things work. We didn't really know how to raise money, we were just doing everything that we can without much of a map.

We knew we had product market fit when our servers went down and people tried to call us. Cause they wanted our service to work. That was when we knew we had it.

You call it sort of searching in the wilderness a little, you're trying to get to product market fit and you build thing A and no one really responds and build thing B and no one really responds. And when you finally build thing X, and it takes off, you will know, and it's hard to describe that feeling until you've had it.

Mick Johnson: I often see people who've gone from a large tech company to being founder of a startup, and they always forget or deprioritize go to market. Because if you work for Google or Facebook and you have a new feature or a new idea, you can get it in front of billions of people. That's not hard.

Many early stage founders will say, well, we're planning to just build it and we'll get referrals and people will like it and that's how it'll grow. But as an early stage founder, often your product can be pretty good, but if you go to market is amazing, you will get enough signal to truly make it great. And if you can't get people using your product, it doesn't matter.

And so this can be any combination of calling people on the phone, creating search ads, doing content marketing, referrals, doing whatever it takes to actually get sales and marketing. We built some really interesting things, but ultimately it didn't scale, it didn't succeed.

Mick Johnson: That then led me to Facebook in the early days, I think I joined in 2011, was one of the first PMs on mobile. Spent 4 years at Facebook doing a whole host of fun things. I went to Google and spent some time working on maps for Automotive. And then I went back to Meta to work on Facebook again.

And so the main thing I learned from both of my start-up ventures, I'll say, startups are a bad financial investment, but they're a great personal investment. You will learn more about what you are truly capable of founding a start-up than doing almost any other thing in the world, because you will put yourself out there into the world and the only thing standing between you and your dream is yourself, and for folks who are into self development or self learning or any form of inner learning, it's just one of the the best things out there.

Mick Johnson: This was at a time when Facebook was growing quickly. I was one of the first rotational PM managers and then ended up running the program. We would have a one year program, folks would come in with less than 2 years of experience, we'd put them on 3 rotations of 4 months each, roughly, and by design, we would have them work in different parts of the company. So they had to do at least 1 consumer and at least 1 non-consumer.

I think I've probably mentored or managed over 100 PMs. Something I tell people who want to be a PM, product management is a learned skill, not a studied skill. The best PMs are those who can take data and intuition and human response and visual appeal and bring them together, sort of as ingredients.

The really significant thing that happened, whereas a manager's normally responsible for the output of people on their teams, what we decided was an RPM manager should be responsible for the growth of the people. They wouldn't be judged on how well those PM's projects went, and the really interesting learning was that when we had managers whose sole job it was to manage, the RPMs did way better. Turns out that at the early stage of your career, when you have managers who are really dedicated in helping you uncover and develop your skills, the business output actually increases as well.

Mick Johnson: The first thing to teach someone at the early stage of their career, there is a tension between how quickly you ship something and how good it is. Before you ship it, everyone talks about how long it's taking, and after you ship it, everyone talks about how good it was. And so for the very first thing that you ship, no-one will remember how long it took, it only matters how good it was, and you, ultimately, you need to care about and be responsible for how good the thing your team builds is.

There's a story I used to always talk about with rotational PMs and they're early in their career, typically motivated, intelligent, capable, and they start this job, they can do everything they're asked to do. They read the emails, they answer all the chats, they close all the tasks, they read all the docs, and then they get more work. And then they spend a bit more time, they stay a bit later at work, they do all the emails, they do all the chats, they close all the tasks, they do all the docs, and then they get more work.

And the amount of work that they have to do, it's like a rising tide of water coming up, up their neck and then their chin, and they're struggling and fighting and trying to keep their head above water as best they can. And then we'd have a conversation a few months in about they need to learn to breathe underwater.

And the water is work that they will not do. There will be things they could do, things even that they should do that they will not do because there are more important things for them to do. And this transition is going from a world where they judge themselves by what they're capable of, to a world where they judge themselves by what they choose to do.

What's amazing is once they make this transition, you can see it in their demeanor. The anxiety visibly recedes, they're like, yep, there's these tasks, but I've chosen to do this other thing and I'm confident in it. And that often leads then to the world of startups where there's so many things that you could do. You could do literally any of a billion things but your outcomes are determined by your choices, not your capabilities.

Mick Johnson: Oftentimes when you're working on things, there's one thing that you have to do and you don't wanna do it, right, there's some job that you've been putting off and it might be talking to a coworker or filing taxes or letting go of an employee, and you will find any reason to do anything else as long as it seems productive. And the thing that you have to do is actually eat the spike and just go straight at the hardest thing.

I had a time in my career where I was struggling to work with one of my close counterparts, and I was finding every reason in the book why that didn't matter. I'll decide which things I'm responsible for and they can figure out which things they're responsible for and it'll just work. And I got some really clear guidance from my manager at the time. Look, if the two of you can't figure this stuff out, none of the rest of it matters. It doesn't matter how good you are at your job if you don't solve this interpersonal dynamic.

And it was sort of quite emotionally hard for me to solve. There'd been some challenges and conflicts between the two of us. But when I finally owned up to it, I was like, no, no, this relationship and it working is the most important thing in this job right now. I need to eat the spike and just solve it. And I just dedicated the next month basically to solving that.

As soon as I decided to eat that spike, it got way easier. And so I think the piece that was then professionally most important to me is that the area of greatest growth is always the thing that you will emotionally and internally shy away from. And that's why there's growth there. And so that practice of examining those things that are most difficult for you, that has just been fruitful for me time and again.

Mick Johnson: About half of my mentoring sessions are about personal aspects of work as opposed to professional. How do I deal with burnout, how do I stay excited, how do I overcome this particular challenge internally?

Something I've learned that people don't do proactively enough, is you can curate your own life. People often think that if you are struggling with burnout or struggling with morale or struggling with excitement in your work, you have to make a big change, change jobs, change groups, change careers. In my experience, multiple small changes can have an enormous impact.

Just sit down and think of the 10 meetings I had today, which of them were my favorite and which ones drained me the most. And then for the ones that drain you, halve the frequency, and for the ones that enliven you, double it. The small change in your life, you can continually curate the things that exhaust you in minor ways.

Mick Johnson: As a young man, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I felt like I had to prove myself to the world, I had to show that I was better than other people, I had to show that I could do these things. Of course, the realization eventually, I'm really trying to prove myself to myself.

And so it gave me a lot of drive, it gave me courage to go and do startups and take the less well trodden path and put myself into harder to succeed situations and sometimes come out the other side. And then several stages along my journey, truly adopting responsibility for other people, made me realize I don't need to prove myself to anyone else. I just actually have to do great work.

For many folks, particularly in the Bay Area, if you work in tech or if you've done well academically, you're not really used to failure. You're pretty used to, if I study hard on subjects that I'm good at, I'm going to do reasonably well on this test or in this job or something like that.

But startups are ones where you might pitch an idea to 40 VCs and they will all give you polite maybes, and you will realize at the end of a month of knocking on every door you can that this is just not going to work out. And you have to decide, Am I going to make one more phone call? Am I going to send one more email? And I did sort of discover, yeah, I do believe in myself enough, I am going to do this.

And it was just that facing that sort of form of rejection which you can have either from investors who don't believe in you or in a product that hasn't found product market fit yet or you're trying to hire people to join your startup and you don't yet have enough credibility. I certainly discovered a resilience I didn't know I had.