How to Product: Morgan McCunn

Sefunmi Osinaike
Doing a thing
Published in
7 min readAug 1, 2019

As part of our ongoing project to create a centralized resource to tell the stories of how people transitioned into a PM role (see my article explaining this here), this article series aims to provide a synthesis of the interviews we have done so far.

This article shares an in depth look into the story of Morgan McCunn who used her love for problem solving to experience different career paths. Her willingness to add value to her teams and a desire for learning created a great combination that set her up to become a product manager.

The educational path

Morgan was set on the medical school path while she was in high school. She enjoyed her science classes and decided to pursue a biochemistry degree at Queens University. In her first year, she got the opportunity to take a computer science elective which exposed her to solving problems with programming. It then led her to switch her major to computer science for the rest of the University.

Although she enjoyed the process of discussing problems, framing how to solve them, and breaking it into manageable chunks, she wasn’t convinced that she wanted to be a developer. When it came to implementing the actual work, it wasn’t as enjoyable as the journey to figure out the end state of a solution.

“I learnt how to say “Hello world!” in different languages and I couldn’t actually build anything of substance… it was a balance between I don’t know if I want to do this forever and i’m not convinced I could do this in the real world”.

After attending some talks at University and doing some additional research, she decided to pursue an MBA right after graduation. It was going to give her a chance to pivot into a different type of role that was an alternative to development. She wanted to learn more about various industries, economics, and how different trends in the market could shift industries.

Morgan attended Dalhousie University and got the opportunity to do an 8-month internship as part of her program in the strategy and operations group at Deloitte. It exposed her multiple projects in the energy and resource space where she was able to learn ways to tackle complicated problems for clients. She got the opportunity to learn from a lot of smart people, which made her term more fulfilling. The absence of implementation made her curious about how the projects concluded and wanted to play a role in seeing something to completion.

The technology path

After her MBA, Morgan wanted to work in the technology industry, where she would get the opportunity to implement solutions. She came across a posting for Canadian Tire for a rotational program in their technology group. It provided the opportunity to work in different roles in tech in a short period in an industry currently being disrupted.

“This was an industry I followed very closely. There was so much excitement about entrepreneurs, new technology, innovation, start ups and how different technologies are impacting various industries.”

After trying multiple roles, she found Project management as an exciting way to work with a team to accomplish a shared goal, which also exposed her to the inner workings of the large retail organization. Also, she trained as a scrum master, and she was able to learn about agile methodologies, which helped her as a project manager. The role was the opposite of consulting and focused on execution where she had little say in the approach to solving problems as the projects were already scoped out and defined by the leadership teams. Getting buy-in from all stakeholders was challenging, and she felt very restricted in making critical decisions that could impact her projects.

While working on a project for their eCommerce team to build recommendations for similar products, she stumbled onto Shopify. She wondered how a company was able to make a recommendation tool that all their merchants could use on the platform. After doing additional research to help her project at Canadian Tire, she learned more about Shopify and found a job posting that was attractive to her. Morgan applied to the role and got called for an interview.

The role was for their Product Support Network (PSN) team that helped liaise between the customer support team and the product team. She took the risk despite not sure if this was what she wanted to do. It was an excellent way to work closely with a product team to understand what they wanted.

Once Morgan started, she loved it. She became part of a group of people who were very knowledgeable about all of Shopify’s products and could funnel the right amount of information to the teams that needed it. Providing educational material for the support team and equipping them with the knowledge to answer any customer questions. Also, synthesizing all the feedback coming from customers and summarizing it in a way that could help inform the product roadmap.

“I got to see how these PMs worked, how their teams operated, what processes, tools or rituals, these PMs put in place to navigate what they were trying to build. It was a really cool way to form relationships with PMs and just learn what they were doing and shadow them for a little bit”

The path to product

One of the teams she was working with needed help prioritizing their work after losing their PM to another group. Morgan stepped in, and with her immense understanding of customer issues, she was able to support the team. She made sure they had the information they needed to make decisions about what to build next. She did this for several weeks in an attempt to fill the gap in the team. It got the attention of the director of product that was overseeing the team who encouraged her to consider a role in product management.

“At the end of the day it is just not being confined by a job title or a job description, I think what I did was make myself useful to the team, providing value in different ways that were unconventional, finding ways to unblock them and bringing them information that was useful is where people started to notice me a little bit more. ”

The director of product scoped out a small project for her on the team she was supporting to see how she performed after three months. It was an opportunity to create an environment where she could gain more experience as a product manager. Her team leader at PSN was very supportive of her trying out this new opportunity and was happy to welcome her back should it not be a good fit.

Morgan ended up performing very well on the project. She built a roadmap and was able to execute on key deliverables in a short amount of time. Being able to provide an opinion on what the direction should be was the most rewarding part of the experience for her. She experienced the best of consulting and project management to do the work to solve a problem while also figuring out the next best problems to solve. It gave her a lot of confidence, which helped her while transitioning completely into product management.

The opportunity to test out a role in a safe place allowed her to push herself to drive things forward. She found mentors to help her with the things she did not understand and asked for feedback regularly so she could improve. Carving out the time to reflect on what is going well and what could be improved helped her through this process. Morgan was very intentional in making small manageable improvements she could make to her workflow that can elevate her.

“I went from someone who was new to the company and had no idea what the products did, to Spending the time to learn the products really well so I could form opinions and hopefully influence the opinions of others in a valuable way. Taking the initiative to go above and beyond in what my role was ended up getting me recognized and I was able to pivot into a new role as a result.”

Morgan is still at Shopify, learning and growing as a product manager. Getting her team excited about the things they are working on so they feel rewarded is her superpower. Knowing ways to appeal to different people in different ways helps make the process fun for everyone. Feedback is important to her, and she uses it to improve the ways she builds products. She is also an advocate for working with customer support teams to unlock insights that can help product development. Check out her awesome article on the benefits of product managers working with support teams.

Want to learn more ?

We’re two friends trying to consolidate resources for folks making a jump into the technology product/program management space from outside the industry. We have interviewed a bunch of PMs and if you’d like to hear more stories like Morgan’s or other insights we find, follow our medium publication. We also started a podcast where we talk about the process of getting this all together. Subscribe and listen now on iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, TuneIn or Stitcher. We’d also love to hear your feedback so share your thoughts with us and like our facebook page.

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Sefunmi Osinaike
Doing a thing

Human 💡| Promoter of peace, entrepreneurship and technology!