Graduating the APM Role

In my last post I explained the story of how I took a demotion to become an Associate Product Manager at accuRx. Well now I’m back to tell the tale of how I’ve now become a fully fledged Product Manager 🎉

Since joining in January, I’ve had an amazing experience learning and growing with the team here. . Being exposed to new product concepts; writing product visions, delivering against OKRs and story mapping…I know you’re probably thinking ‘how was I a PM before, not having known about those?’ 🙊 As well as learning how to use online tools (thanks COVID) like Slack, Trello, Miro, and Notion.

However, learning all this has, by no means, been a smooth ride.

When I was a product manager at a large hardware company, my role was focused around heavy documentation and sign offs at every development milestone. Sharing the onus of decision making by presenting data and research findings to senior colleagues was a safety net I didn’t realise I had, until it was gone. Moving into a start-up where knowledge was plentiful but processes were sparse took a lot of getting used to.

What was I expecting moving to a start up?… To be honest I didn’t really know! This was my first job change I’d ever had. I no idea that the change would feel equivalent to moving from primary school up to the big and scary secondary school 😬 Safe to say, my confidence was well and truly knocked.

I was used to much slower development cycles, business cases and document approvals. All of which afforded me the time and confidence that whatever I was doing was the correct decision.

Moving to accuRx where we have 1 week of planning, 6 weeks of development and the main seal of approval coming from a silent nod at a senior team check-in, it’s safe to say I was feeling out of my depth…. They were right to put me on the APM course!

Over the last 5 months I have had to rebuild my confidence with the help of the team, coaching and supporting me every step of the way. The weekly Product School sessions were perfectly placed to cover all core concepts that I hadn’t met before and gave me the platform to ask questions and consolidate my understanding. Whilst the closeness of the Product community ensured that the extra bit of guidance or support I needed, was never a problem.

Re-building my confidence is still a journey I am very much on but…

I am now a Product Manager 💃 and am responsible for our paid-for modules that make up accuRx Plus.

By no means am I a perfect Product Manager (is anyone ever?) but I am now happy and confident to make decisions on the products I manage; with research, data and users at the heart of that.

If anyone has any good resources/tips on building self-confidence I would love to hear about them in the comments below!