My “Product Firsts”
Happy #WorldProductDay!
This year’s theme is #ProductFirsts so I figured it’s a good opportunity to look back at how I came to be in Product.
Some time ago, after hitting a plateau and not being challenged professionally, I volunteered to join a team from my company to work along side Pivotal Labs team to build an app. (By volunteer I actually mean I knocked on every office door to make sure I get onto the team).
I began my Product Management journey working along side an amazing PM Nick Tomaszewski and later Isabelle Berner and a designer-extraordinaire Mike McDearmon. My learning was by doing, and the doing was eye opening. I spent the previous few years as Infrastructure Project Manager (and years before that in various roles in IT Security), so the world of user-centric design was new to me. But I remember how quickly it made perfect sense and with it the thought of “Why aren’t we doing everything this way?”.
I spent 4 months working along side the team at Pivotal Labs. Taking to users, sifting through data, prioritizing, ideating, solutioning, talking to users again, prototyping, user testing, launching an MVP. I came away from my experience with a few things that are still true today:
- Product Management is part art and part science.
- Product Management is where I want my career…
