My Path to Becoming a Product Manager
It all started with Spanish music — no, seriously. I believe the little baby larva of my professional career stemmed from years of being passionate (some may say a bit too passionate) about the methodology my AP Spanish teacher in high school used to help us learn complex phrases to prep for the AP exam. You’re probably giving your computer or phone screen a puzzled look right now, but I truly believe that’s what got me to where I am as a Product Manager today.
Let me explain.
For as long as I can remember in my school years, I’ve always been interested and pretty strong in both the humanities and sciences, which made choosing a major challenging at the time. Amounted with all the college chatter from girls in my class (I went to an academically rigorous all women high school in Silicon Valley), who were, to use an understatement, overachievers, I thought I would see how the college orientation went to before making a decision. When I looked over the curriculum and list of majors, there was one that caught my interest. Despite its seeming lack of practical application to the real world (in my limited 17 year old view), I went with my gut instinct and chose Spanish Linguistics as my major. “I’m pretty good at languages,” I thought, “love everything to do with Spanish and linguistics sounds…cool I guess? Something new, let’s see how this goes.” To appease my likewise overachieving self and parents, I concurrently took all the prerequisite classes for medical school, to ensure I had a plan for something highly applicable in the real world, especially for a child of immigrant parents.
In one of my “Intro to Phonetics” classes, a lightbulb went off. In one of the many classes where we spent hours repeating sounds and discussing the actual application of those sounds in different languages — imagine, ‘ “th, th, th,” like in “THought” not the sound in “THere”…now in Korean, they have a different sound, because they don’t have that sound in their language, the closest sound is…..you produce this sound by putting your tongue on the postvelar [the soft part behind the roof of your mouth]..’ A HA! Why aren’t foreign languages taught to adults by training them how to figure out where they should place their tongue? These are basic principles of a very scientific study of language applied to a practical and, many times, very difficult task. These kinds of thoughts began to churn in my mind more over time taking linguistics classes.
Over the course of my time at UCLA, I was fortunate to take classes that spanned the fields of psychology, linguistics, life sciences, economics and neuroscience. Even though I had turned my prerequisite classes on the side into a full blown second major, Psychobiology, my interest in practicing medicine was waning. The varied principles of linguistics, behavioral and biological phenomena that tied back to communication and process were my true passions. Now the question, of course, was what to do with this? As any recent graduate knows, starting out in the real world is a shocking and pretty terrifying mental exercise.
Adamant to apply my newly acquired linguistics and psychobiology background, I began an internship at a small search advertising startup and also had a consulting R&D gig doing Spanish transcription on the side. The draw for me was to keep up my passion (Spanish transcription) and get into a massively influential industry (the first thing I read when started was this book about Google) that was at least tangentially related to my background. At the startup, Relevad, I worked on just about every facet of the company, which I know now was one of the most challenging but valuable stages for me. Because I was an intern and there were only about 8 engineers, a sales/account manager rep, the CTO and the CEO, it was the prime opportunity to soak up as much as possible in a talented but resource constrained company. Just a sampling of what I delved into: mining and analyzing data to report back experimental findings to the CEO; learning the basics of HTML, Javascript, Python and SQL to be able to build and run my own small programs; researching and categorizing our customer base; working at the conference booth pitching the company to interested attendees. Now, I was just a young grasshopper in the complex web (bad pun intended) of ad tech, so this sounds a lot more impressive than it actually was — but I had exposure to all sides of the business and development of one particular company.
The next company I ended up at decidedly shaped the exact path towards Product Managerdom, Martini Media, where I spent about 1.5 years in the Publisher Operations group. Once again, I was thrown into a new environment and side of the industry to learn about what makes Publishers tick, from the first integration with a digital ad network to their yearly revenue strategy. Martini Media was a much larger organization — about 40 people when I started — with a fully fledged sales, business development and operations teams, but a small engineering team, tasked with building out internal tooling and automating some of the manual processes the company had performed. A lot of the tasks we had as an operations team at a certain point became second nature to me, so I was looking for my next learning opportunity, as I’m not one to become complacent in a routine.
As manager of the publisher operations team, I frequently found myself interfacing with the engineering team to help streamline the process between development and what was important for the business. At the time, I didn’t have any exposure to any product organization, but what I was attempting to do was what product managers do on a daily basis! At that point, I had a Eureka moment — product management was a function that had been overlooked at the company, and I needed a place to learn the ropes so it can be my next career move.
As fate would have it, I got referred to have a conversation with the head of Product at Sharethrough — was I interested in a role on the Product team as a Solutions Architect?! This, for me, was the best way for a non-engineer to break into the Product Management track. I started a few months later in that role, employee number 42 (ish), to fill the gap between all business operations and the product team. My publisher operations experience from the last company helped me develop empathy with the processes and tools the team at Sharethrough was employing, and learn about the external business stakeholders. I sat in on internal operations meetings, and sales calls, as well as in engineering planning and retrospective meetings. Once more integrated with the product development process, I realized we didn’t have a solid release process, so took on the task of writing and publishing release notes to our business teams. Over the first 6 months, I learned so much about the relationship between the business and product teams, that my next step was to scale up on what it really meant to be a product manager.
As I learned, being a PM wasn’t simply running meetings with engineering, accepting user stories and writing release notes. I began to shadow the PMs more and saw there was a holistic ownership over the entire product process. At this point, I filled in some more communication gaps and began to meet with Marketing, working on competitive matrices, developing user guides and holding training sessions for our users (at this point, all internal users) for the new features that had been developed. At this stage in the company, with a headcount of about 60, it was starting to become apparent that more formalized processes were not just nice to have, but really a required part of scaling the business. It was an exciting time for the company, and for me, as I had realized the next step of my career trajectory and officially moved into an associate PM role.
At this point in the business, we had experimented with testing out a new product and overall business philosophy on the product side, which was a platform for our external customers to use. I was tasked with continuing to develop and support features of our internal platform, which was a natural transition from my Solutions Architect role. It was very useful to have had established relationships with our internal teams, as they were my main customers. As time went on, and we were gaining traction with the new platform, it became apparent that it was costing us operationally and engineering resources to maintain the old system, so the main goal was to transition the pieces that we were going to continue to sell and support.
About a year in, I had gotten a good grasp of the main skillsets and facets of the product management role, and since then, with Sharethrough’s headcount approaching 200 (!!), I’ve taken advantage of the ever changing landscape and opportunities in and out of the office to better myself. From learning new specific hard skills and tools that would enhance the work I do day to day, to leadership and facilitation work that I am extremely interested in, there’s always more to soak in. It’s fascinating how all-encompassing of a role product management is, especially as an organization continues to mature at a growing company. More to come in later blog installments...
So, going back up 40,000 feet, how did memorizing Juanes and Shakira lyrics really lead me to become a product manager at an ad tech company? I believe subconsciously my high school Spanish class stimulated my curiosity in understanding the tie between a methodology (memorizing pop lyrics) and mastering the structure behind a language, a complex system of communication (fluency in a foreign language). What’s common between my passion back in high school and what I’m doing today is my innate interest in understanding and implementing some methodology to an interesting outcome — speaking the Spanish language was an ever-evolving product of sorts.
What I realize now is the reason I was hooked to Linguistics is because it’s the scientific study of language. Well, duh, that’s the official definition, but if you peel back a layer, it’s the scientific breakdown of all the processes that occur towards the incredible phenomenon that is the structured human language. And language is constantly evolving and going through experiments and transformations, just like any software based products that people decide to build. Fast forward about a decade later, and here I am breaking down business context, goals, metrics and ideas to development in order to evolve the product and the business at Sharethrough.
Far fetched conclusion? Maybe. But it helps me explain my own career evolution, and perhaps more importantly, a hint of what direction I aim to head towards.
