How I approached my new job as Product Manager at Rocka

Earlier this year I received a call from a friend. It was Mauricio, head of a venture builder called Rocka.

In the past, I had worked with Mauricio and the Rocka team building Vendiste.com from scratch, a mobile marketplace for people to buy and sell second-hand stuff in Latam. As a cofounder, the Rocka team helped us from designing our brand and defining the product to building our backend infrastructure and the API that powered Vendiste’s mobile app.

The journey with Vendiste was quite an interesting one. I met my very good friend and mentor Ernesto who taught me how to do business professionally alongside many other stuff. He was my cofounder for the project, and together we reached 100.000 downloads in 1 month after launch, paving our way for our acceptance at the Start-Up Chile acceleration program (gen 17).

Ernesto (left side) and I

The purpose of the call was clear, the business was growing and they needed someone to lead the product team and help with the company’s general strategy. Someone that understood:

1. Users, clients, customers.
2. The strategy of Rocka and of our clients.
3. The product team: designers and developers.

At the moment, I was working on a digital marketing agency I had co-founded. But something had been itching with the agency work and after Mauricio started talking about the role and the projects they were building I immediately fell in love with the position. Projects like Bambú, Dailybot, and others caught my attention. That same night and out of nothing, I started sketching a document profiling Bambú: short pitch, channels, markets, business model, audience, important activities, KPIs and some ideas for acquisition strategies, retention, referrals & rewards programs, gamification and CSR. I knew I was back in the game.

Bambú app. Guided meditation on the go

This was the first time I was to officially ‘accept a job’ so I needed to plan how I would enter the company causing the least friction possible and gaining the respect of my fellow teammates.

For full context, Rocka is a fully distributed team, meaning everyone works remotely.

This is what my first To-Do looked like, my plan for my first days:

1. Set clear expectations for my job position.
2. One-on-one call with each member of the team to get to know each other and set the tone.
3. Understand each product: its market, its strategy and its tech stack.
4. Read documentation. Literally reading everything that was out there would help me understand better the current state of each project.
5. Setup. Joining Slack channels, Trello boards, downloading and setting up the tools the company uses, configuring my inflows of information (Google alerts, newsletters, etc.), etc.)

Of course Rocka had its own agenda ready for me, but sharing this with the team helped them establishing the plan for my first days and caused a good first impression.

I am writing this after my first months at work, and the future looks nothing but thrilling.

Thank you for reading my first literary piece, I will be writing new ones on my journey within Rocka. If you liked it, please subscribe and share.

Enjoying mojitos in my first off site with some teammates

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