Creating Impact in your First PM Role

Sheila Oviedo
Sep 3, 2018 · 5 min read

I am starting a blog to share my experience in product management and there is no better way to start than to share lessons learned from my first product manager role. The last four years have been an adventure and I hope you will join me for the ride.


Tales of the Lonely

Photo by Rye Jessen on Unsplash

Like many product managers, I stumbled into product management by accident. After four years as an analyst in a research and data firm, I transitioned to become the first PM of our flagship product in 2014. I came into the role with a strong understanding of this product (after all I spent four years producing content for it), and a solid product development experience (I co-developed on of our most popular rating products). I didn’t come in empty-handed, so I thought how hard can it be?

Turns out, it was hard. I had no clue how to be a real PM and nobody in the company taught me how to be one either. I was hired as PM and released to the wild where I confronted more challenges. Here I was, held responsible for an existing product where every decision had been made a long time ago and no one could recall how some critical decisions were made, or why.

Another challenge was I had very little exposure to the tech infrastructure and processes that supported the product. The formula to calculate some of the ratings? No idea. How we managed the universe of companies we covered in our research? No clue. And oh, our clients are getting data feeds? Well, good to know.

Finally, I had very little knowledge of the commercial side of the product. Pricing was determined by the sales team and I would realize later on that I would not have influence over that ever.

At the back of my mind, I wondered: How could I have an impact as a PM if I didn’t know how to be one?


You Don’t Have to be Rich to be my Girl

It turns out, I didn’t need to have 100% knowledge of being a PM to have a positive impact on the product and the company. Here’s my two cents on how you can do it:

Photo by Chase Clark on Unsplash

Use your strengths and experience to your advantage. Product management is a relatively new field and very few PMs come into the role with all the skills checkboxes ticked.

I used my experience as a research analyst, one-time client account manager, as well as my previous product development experience to shape the role and add value to the company. I focused on content strategy and development, supported client account managers in client engagements and onboarding of new clients, contributed to external communications, particularly marketing materials, and managed client complaints.

By focusing on my strengths and what I knew best, I felt like I had something under control as I navigated what appeared to me as a sea of uncertainty.

Have a vision of the product. An absolute must have to guide you through the daily grind of PM life. If the company does not have a formal vision, craft one and make it your mantra. Remember that a vision is always better than no vision.

When I interviewed for my role, I was asked, “What is success for you?” I replied, “Success is when our product becomes more mainstream and used widely by the biggest players in the financial services industry.” It was a vague statement and I had no idea then how to measure it, but it was a vision that helped guide my day to day activities.

I prioritized activities that led to the mainstreaming of our product, which could be as simple as responding quickly to a client question or facilitating a conference call with a client and one of our researchers.

Open lines of communications with stakeholders. Introduce yourself, your role and your goals to stakeholders. This is something I wish I had done, instead of assuming that everyone understood my new role. I realized much later that people did not know that I was the PM even if they came to me for everything about the product. And for some who knew, they did not understand what the PM’s role was.

I was miffed but lesson learned. Talk to client-facing teams and ask how your product is being used by customers. Talk to your operations teams to learn how to the product is being produced. Talk to your engineering team to understand what they are working on. Sometimes, the act of reaching out is already an added value in itself.

And be accessible. If people have question about the product, make sure you are there to respond. You may not know the answers (and even if after three years of managing the flagship product there were still questions that left me blank), you can still point them to people who may know.

Be scrappy. Nobody works for you, so sometimes, you have the do the dirty work yourself. Whether you are a junior PM or vice president level, no task should be too menial if it means delivering a high-quality product on time.

I like to say that the only thing I didn’t do for my product was clean the bathroom, which is actually closer to the truth than most people realize. And TBH, I probably would have if a filthy bathroom was the only impediment to releasing a product. For me, no task was below my pay grade if it meant getting regular client deliverables out the door on the dates we committed to.


These were lessons I learned on my first year as PM, but these are lessons that ring true today, nearly five years and multiple products later. What are yours?

Sheila Oviedo

Written by

Product management and ESG pro. Blockchain and DLT novice. Created www.sustainabilitymatters.info in my spare time. @sustymatters

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