From software development, to product management…
I’ve been professionally developing software for the past 10+ years and although software development is great, lately I’ve been looking for a new challenge, and as you can probably guess from the title, the challenge that tickled my fancy is product management.
Product management (PM) sits in the very interesting junction of business, design, and technology. For some reason, there’s no such thing as a formal PM education, so usually you sort of become a PM from one of these adjacent fields. I’ve been involved as a founder in three startups, so I have a strong understanding of the business side of a startup / small company, and I have a very strong passion for design. So after quitting my job as Head of Mobile at Colu, I decided to become a product manager!
So what’s the plan?
Well, going from software development to product management is a big change, and like the famous quote says, “change is a process, not an event”. I’ve just started to work at an amazing startup called Jolt (How I ended up working at Jolt is actually quite an interesting story. But I think I’ll keep it for another post). And one of the many amazing things in Jolt is the perks you get when you start working there. Now I’m not talking about beer taps, or sleeping pods. Instead of those nice, but rather useless perks, Jolt invests in its employees’ growth. Each employee has a personal growth plan, and Jolt invests its resources in making sure we each reach our goals.
So like I said, I just started, so we haven’t worked out the details of my plan just yet, but I know my end goal is product management.
What’s this “blog” all about
When I started thinking about this new product management challenge, I was rather frustrated with the little information I could find about this sort of career change. So I decided to document my process / insights in the hopes that anything I write here could help the next girl / guy choosing to follow a similar change. My goal is to write a weekly post about my process of becoming a PM and about PM in general. So if that’s something you’re interested in, don’t be shy, click that follow button, and join me on my journey.
If you do, I only have one request, speak your mind, let me know what you think, comment! It means the world to me.
