Imagine this (it's based on a true story).

You've started a passion project donating shoes to the homeless, it catches fire and scales quickly. What began as you giving away your personal collection of sneakers has quickly evolved into 12,000 pairs collected and donated over the first few years.

You're doing your best to keep track of the inventory movement but the current process of handwriting your inventory records in a spiral notebook is not sustainable. You need something better but you are not sure what it is and you're limited to a lean budget along with minimal technology.

This is where the Product Manager comes in.

I'll skip the details but over the next 4-6 weeks I partnered with the founder and leadership team to understand the problem that they were facing and build a scalable solution that supported their growth and impact from 12,000 pairs donated in 2018 to over 25,000 pairs across 27 cities by 2021.

And I did this 2 years before landing my first Product Management role.

I'm sharing this because over the last 12 months I've talked to dozens of Product Managers and the piece of advice that I hear most frequently is to go build something.

If you want to be a Product Manager you have to build your PM muscle!

That being said, it's hard to build a muscle if you don't have any problems to solve, and in fact this is probably one of the top questions that aspiring PM's ask.

"What should I build?"

My response is this: Don't solve a made up problem. Go out into the world and find a problem to solve. From my experience Non-Profit's are very lean and almost always in need of help. Put on your PM hat and get to work.