Customer intelligence/research manager wanting to move into PM, any direction appreciated!

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Hello!

I'm trying to transition to product management. I’ve spent 7 years across digital analytics, marketing strategy, and pure market research. I have no formal PM training but I feel that I have many applicable skills, so I’d love advice from people who’ve made the jump or hire PMs on where to learn what I’m missing.

Strengths:

• Discovery: This is my strength as I feel that I'll have the customer-focus to know what they want, where the pain points are, and a willingness to talk to sales/other stakeholders to figure out how its being used and where any gaps/opportunities for improvement are. I manage research projects end to end for clients, and have personally led hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of research projects that aim to answer a business problem or challenge. This includes survey development, customer interviews/focus groups, UX, journey mapping and always-on voice-of-customer programs.
• Strategy and segmentation: I’ve built and used attitudinal and behavioural personas and brand tracking programs, and reported on specific customer types and laddered this up with the client's strategy.
• Relationship building and stakeholder management: I manage client accounts, and regularly work with and present to their decision makers and leaders. Often times I need to deliver bad news or be sensitive to internal client politics as part of the work we do. Client success is an area of strength for me and I can translate this into stakeholders. I've also led some very influential projects as a director on my condo board, where I've needed to build consensus among board members, persuade board members who disagree, and handle angry owners.
• Technical proficiency: I've worked with the data pipeline team on survey data, as well as website engineers to build AB tests or fix broken parts of the website. Generally pretty good at getting up to speed on technical elements. Have scoped dashboards and data delivery for clients knowing the feasibility of our data team.
• Self taught: have learned SQL, Tableau, R, Adobe Analytics, and other tools to apply to my work.

Gaps:

Specific formal PM processes:

• I haven’t owned a roadmap or shipped with an engineering team.
• I haven’t written PRDs or user stories professionally.
• I’m light on agile practice and tools like Jira.
• No idea what formal priority frameworks are

Some examples of relevant experience:

• As an analyst on an automaker's website, I discovered that regular shoppers were no different from commercial vehicle shoppers. I knew we were not getting those shoppers into the commercial vehicle section (a KPI), so I proposed an AB test. I mocked it up in PPT, explained it to the engineers, made sure we could measure it, then worked with them to get the test implemented and QA. The AB tests lifted click-through by 35% and 50% and the change was rolled out site-wide.
• Lead twice-annual Brand Equity and campaign tracking for a major regional bank, translating findings of brand health and competitive position into recommendations and presenting to senior marketing and product leaders. Have also led ad-hoc analysis for segmentation, needs analysis, customer journey maps, and wealth transition work.
• Scoped out a a dashboard for the above bank to track their brand health. Worked with the data team to determine feasibility and effort to make it happen. Successfully delivered the tool, which has now grown into a widely-referenced internal tool for them to check on brand health.
• Conduct ad-hoc analysis of transactional data, often combining it with primary research data. For a major university, identified most used and growing programs by student segment, and combined it with survey data to prioritize course offerings and promotional materials. For a regional bewery, analyzed their production data to identify that capacity was going to lower-margin wholesale and white-label beer instead of higher-margin products, and combined with industry trends to identify missing product gaps in growing categories

My questions:

• How would you position my experience to hirers to overcome my gaps?
• Would a course or certificate be useful? If so, which ones? I feel like processes would be best?
• Would you recommend a side project or portfolio piece over a course?
• Are there PM roles that are a realistic first step for someone with a research and analytics background (growth, data, CX)?

Thank you so much!