My PM Journey — Reflections on my first year as a PM
Hey!
One year ago, I became a product manager. Since then, I’ves been documenting my first steps here on this blog with the goal of taking my fellow aspiring and rookie PMs along for the rollercoaster that it’s been.
I’ve had the privilege of having over 1,000 readers, dozens of commenters, and have even some new personal connections created through this blog. As an unforeseen bonus, being accountable to this blog forced me into the wonderful habit of pausing, reflecting, and drawing conclusions every so often. Doing this taught me so much and allowed me to see things with such clarity — everything I wrote about became a lesson that I could follow up with relevant action items, as opposed to a vague memory or thought in my mind.
This will be my second to last post in the blog. In it, I want to present my journey up until this point, as a case study of a first year PM. My hope is that reading it will allow others to prepare for challenges and hardships they may encounter on their journey, and hear some ideas for how to deal with them.
This post will divide my first year into four chronological challenges, along with the key actions that helped me overcome them.
Challenge one — Getting the job
One of the toughest parts of being a PM starts before you actually become a PM — getting the job.
The moment I decided to pursue this career path, I embarked on a crazy journey. It began with great hope and optimism, continued with major bruises to my ego and a very sad job application conversion rate, followed by taking a job that might’ve seemed like a compromise, and ended with a glorious dream-come-true promotion.
Looking back, if there was one thing that I believe was crucial in the success of this journey, it was my ability to be consistently proactive.
Proactivity led me to meticulously research tech career paths and consequently fall in love with Product. It drove me to learn PM skills and domain knowledge while still job-hunting. It’s what made me relentlessly promote myself as a PM candidate while working as an analyst. Finally, it was the main driving force behind my thorough preparation for the PM role, which was later crucial in helping me survive a rough beginning.
Challenge two — Getting started
My first quarter as a PM was a real life Tetris fail. Problems were piling up way faster than I, with my minimal experience, skills and knowledge, could deal with. Unlike cliche motivational stories, the feeling was not of learning or growth, but rather drowning. The light at the end of the tunnel was nowhere to be found.
I would bet that perhaps especially in startups, PM onboarding experiences often feel like getting tossed into a stormy ocean.
We have a crazy job.
Having to juggle dozens of aspects of a product is ambitious, even with rich domain knowledge and experience. Doing it while trying to learn a majority of these aspects, borders insanity. It’s hard to imagine this experience not being overwhelming and difficult, for anybody.
As a PM, my job is to enter many rooms and be the most ignorant in each of them. The dependency on colleagues is no less than immense.
I like to joke that during my first month on the job, my product had three PMs– and I wasn’t any of them. My manager led the strategy, my lead dev the technical aspect, and my designer the UI/UX. What was I doing? Trying to survive.
If there was one thing that was crucial in my eventual survival, it was the people around me. Having built strong, positive connections with them made this period bearable. Not only was I able to learn and grow, but the support and encouragement I received truly kept me going.
Pro tip: Surround yourself with good people and form strong bonds right from the get go. They will be critical in getting through the tough times.
Challenge three — Routine
One day, I looked around and there were no more fires to put out. The moment that I was dreaming about quickly turned out to be quite terrifying. I’d spent months trying to keep my head above the stormy backlog, and suddenly, the major problems had been solved, the infrastructure had been laid out, and I was left with no idea what to do.
Everything being just fine was definitely not something I’d foreseen to be a challenge.
In my somewhat unique case of being the sole PM of a product that’s not at the forefront of the company’s focus and resources, I had a lot of freedom. However, having been stuck in the backlog for so long, I did not really know what to do with it.
At first, I didn’t do anything. I was drowning in tasks for several months, so the thought of making up tasks the moment things slowed down seemed like craziness. It took a few chill weeks before I realized that while my dev resources may be limited, I can do so much more to improve and advance my product.
The real change was brought about when I got creative and started truly leveraging the seemingly limitless PM toolbox.
There were endless things to do! From setting the strategy and launching marketing campaigns, to improving the way I communicate to executive stakeholders. Before things got routinely busy again, a bit of creativity and resourcefulness allowed me to do awesome things for my product, and deal with some cool things that the day-to-day might not necessarily allow dealing with.
Challenge four —Welcome to the big league
Following a lengthy trip down memory lane, let’s come back to the present.
I’m super excited to tell you that I’ve decided to end this blog in the midst of a truly exciting period!
The last few months of my year have brought about two major things —
- Launching the platform — You might remember the new product that we designed and built from scratch. Well, not only did we launch it successfully internally, it created positive buzz and excitement in client interviews, and we will be releasing it externally in the upcoming weeks!
- Receiving further responsibilities — Several months ago I noticed a unique combination of opportunities — I’d reached a point where I could take more responsibility, and I spotted a need for manpower in our product team. Following a joint initiative by myself and my manager, I’ve joined our director of product in managing our new API security product. This is truly one of the peaks of my career so far. The opportunity to join this highly technical, super strategic domain in which I have no previous knowledge or comparative advantage, is nothing short of a huge display of trust and belief. This couldn’t be more exciting for me and I plan on rocking the hell out of this opportunity.
As always, this great news also brings about great new challenges. Learning completely new fields, diving into significantly more technical domains, growing dramatically in scale and impact, all while still being entirely responsible for my original, rapidly growing product… I’m getting tired just writing all of it.
How will I handle this challenge? Only time will tell, though I have a feeling it’ll include a lot of hard work, and probably me returning to reread and get inspiration from all of the solutions that I’ve mentioned here in this post.
That was it.
A first year as a PM in the books (technically, in the blog).
This blog has been an incredible experience for me. For those considering it, I truly recommend it.
I want to finish by thanking you, all of my readers who’ve been a part of this journey. Writing this post led me to looking back at all of my posts. Besides the powerful things that have happened, your support and appreciation have been majorly present along every step.
I truly hope that you are able to conquer you goals and become the best PMs you can be, all while maintaining mental health and well-being. I wish that this blog may have played at least a tiny part in helping you along the road, whether by inspiring, providing advice, or at least by having the ability to relate.
This might be the end of this blog, but it is definitely not the end of my writing. I’m sure you’ll hear from me in the future.
Thanks, and best of luck to you all!
