From Koi to Dragon
The journey from internship as a product manager until become the real one.
This story is about my own journey when I first introduced to the product manager role.
Internship Period
During my 6th term, my university gave me an opportunity to do an internship with several companies. Some of the companies that joined the partnership with my campus were quite large in terms of size and impact on the industry.
One of them was Blibli.com (PT Global Digital Niaga) an e-commerce who had a great progress back then. Blibli.com was looking for some interns to help on various divisions across the company, one of them was “product management”.
The first thing that came into my mind was this role will be handling all the goods that are being sold by Blibli.com.
Until I decided to come into their booth to ask some question about the open position for an internship opportunity. Their explanation about product management was completely different than what I thought about the role.
It was said that the role involved in many business processes and doing constant communication with tech, business & operation. I applied for the role directly without knowing what will I do when I become a PM intern in Blibli.com because it is mentioned that a person with good communication and critical thinking is required for the job. The role itself was not that popular and not many people know about it as well back then.
The interview process that I went through opened my mind about what the role is doing in a company, especially a start-up that doesn’t have an established hierarchy in it. The role is flexible and you can represent tech, business, and operation at the same time. I thought it’s an easy job until they approved my application.
The first day of work was refreshing and meaningful since some senior level PM & UX told me about what it means to be a PM in Blibli.com. They also shared some issues that they have encountered during their work as a PM & UX. A lot of collaborative works need to be done in order to accomplish something and PM almost can’t work alone at anything. I was required to bravely ask whenever I have doubt or my assignment was not clear.
I thought as an intern, I won’t have much work to do and it should be my responsibility to learn what I want to learn. Or in another word, as long as I don’t ask or be proactive I won’t learn anything. It was the other way around. My supervisor assigned me to a product that was under development and not mature yet, I was expected to help the team on the data and from the general requirement that has been collected by my mentor PM.
The thing that I loved so much during my period as a PM intern in Blibli.com was my supervisor encouraged me to communicate to each respected person that I need to talk to in order to get things done or to get insight and data, which is a basic need for a PM to produce a great product or feature.
They also constantly monitor my work and my growth, especially for those basic skills that a PM should have. Skills like communication skill, negotiation skill, problem-solving and product knowledge. The line of communication was not limited, even as an intern I can talk to my Head of PM or even to my CEO to discuss things that could be their concern.
End of Internship
During my last week as an intern in Blibli.com, I asked my Head of PM for her time as I want to thank her and appreciate the chance she gave me to learn how PM works in Blibli.com. During the session, I asked about how does the business and also her as a Head of PM see about what PM really does along with the impact of the role itself. She widened my mind by explaining the workflow both from the technical and communication perspective.
What I saw is; PM actually works like we are in the same company but there’s not much PM can achieve if there’s no communication between every department exist in the company. She encouraged me to sharpen my skills in which area that I’m lacking. Back then I was lacking the negotiation and problem-solving skill, but it was fair since the intern doesn’t really take any decision and negotiate with internal department and external partner as well.
Jump in a little to my university life. Fortunately the thesis I took, required the case taken from a company. I consulted my previous PM manager in Blibli.com and he helped me a lot with it. Therefore I was able to maintain a good relationship with the company itself and continuous monitoring for my thesis progress. Long story short, after I finished my thesis defense I applied to Blibli.com as an Associate Product Manager.
Hired as Associate PM
After I finished my 7th term and graduated, Blibli.com gave me another opportunity to learn the PM role much deeper by approved my application as an associate product manager. I was assigned to finance product in Blibli.com. I didn’t really know how finance product worked in other companies, the requirement only came from the finance department with so little manpower. I knew that the finance department didn’t want to invest so much on manpower since they prefer to bring the product to a level that the whole finance operations could be done by a single product.
I talked a lot to the users and even did some operational task in order for me to understand deeper about what my user was doing to get the job done. A lot of things I learned from the mentorship with my supervisor including how to communicate with various people with different backgrounds. My supervisor also encouraged me to handle a lot of production issues as well. Because from production issues I can learn a lot about how the system works and what the users really do on their daily basis.
Time passed by and I was entrusted with more responsibility.
Not necessarily because I performed on my previous assignments but my mentor believe I wouldn’t know more unless I try more.
I was given the opportunity to lead a project that involves finance product refactor, which require me to understand every business process that is being done by finance users. It was a hard task for me back then but I also saw it as an interesting challenge towards my job. I spent more time with users also consulting with my technical team, that way I could find another idea in order to fulfill the business needs.
Now
Currently, I’m handling a product that’s quite critical for the general business process of the company. And communicating with multiple divisions across the company to ensure that the feature delivered is correct and reach customers in the way we want it. This is where my communication skill is required to deliver every information correctly and left no one in a confusion that could lead the product into chaos.
Every PM in Blibli has their own way to do PM job and all of them are always open to sharing how they do their PM job. I could learn a lot from them and it changed how I look everything based on multiple points of views depends on what kind of tech team we’re working with, how business team sees the products, and how ops team dealing with daily tasks.
However, there is a saying that as a PM you can’t satisfy everyone with your product and it has become my greatest fear. I always wanted my product to be perfect but the decision has to be made and it often sacrifices certain party for a greater goal which is the company itself. Have I ever made a wrong decision? Of course yes, but it depends on whom point of view. If I ask finance team to do more work on top of their daily task because we add a new payment method, which needs a manual effort in order to deliver it fast then it could be a wrong decision based on finance team’s point of view. But if we look into company growing fast in terms of reaching new customer by a payment method we delivered, it is a perfect decision for the business team. This kind of cases always happen and my mentor regularly encourage me to negotiate with impacted parties and make a decision from a wider point of view.
During my time doing all the job as a PM for almost 2 years, I come up with several skills that are required to do our job properly :
- Negotiation
Negotiation skill is required whenever I talk to Stakeholders (business, tech, operation, etc) regarding multiple things such as feature improvement that would be impacting the current process; request coming whether it is urgent or not (or if they think it’s urgent), tech debt and its impact on my roadmap.
2. Communication
As PM bridging between tech and business, communication skill is essential. It can be used to mediate the discussion when thing gets too hot, collecting requirements based on what business really need to solve their problem, getting information from tech perspective and sometimes to coax tech guys on solution that they have for the current problem once we let them know what is the purpose of what they are going to build.
3. Leadership
No one will listen to someone that is not reliable
I need to know what is my product, what solution that it can give to the company’s business process and how do people interact with it both external (customer) and internal (operation). Once I get the grasp of what can I do as a PM to help the business process, it will be easier for me to give the requirement to tech and answer every challenge.
Being put in a product with more senior people around it both tech and operation, it is not easy for a guy who just recently doing PM job to drive things. But once a personal connection has been made, I can talk to them as a friend but professionally. There is another way of how I get the job done, by authority. But of course, it will be a challenge as I drive things around people who know things better than I do. And I see a crucial flaw in it, as I myself won’t work full-heartedly when I do not know what I’m doing and its impact.
This personal relation allow me to wake some guy in the middle of the night to troubleshoot an issue when it’s urgent without them complaining and could possibly make his tomorrow’s work being impacted
4. Decision Making
There are times when critical issues occurred and it needed firefighter right away. When a call has to be made with high urgency, it is when I know how to see things from multiple angles so that I chose to do the right thing. And when the result is bad, PM should take it as his/her responsibility.
It’s common that the decision made by the product manager may impact another part of the company. I put my product as an example, operation and tech team are the most common part that gets impacted. I need to calculate things better to know which decision that will bring more benefit to the company and also considering the impacted divisions or even other products. And from there, a line of communication should be made to let all the stakeholders know about what will happen.
5. Humor
I think this is one skill that I don’t need to worry about, and it’s not written as a must-have skill for PM. But I find it very useful in some circumstances. For example, when we had a long meeting discussing a new project that we had. The meeting was very long and some people have started to yawn, it is important to throw some jokes just to get rid of the boredom and bring everyone back to pace.
Conclusion
Product management is a role that needs deep understanding of the business process in the company. Specifically about the business process of the product. The role of the product manager in the company defines the priority when a decision needs to be made for critical issues, hygiene, bug fixing and road map (improvement should be made)
