I reshuffled myself from Sales Bizdev to Product Manager after I worked for the first time with a squad
The experience of building a bridge between Sales and a squad put me in touch with Product Management and helped me realize I wanted to be a PM for good — so I reshuffled myself to the role I wanted.
I joined SumUp in 2016 when the team in charge of building our offline sales channels was just starting. Back then, we sold card readers almost exclusively online. This strategy limited our market reach in a place like Brazil, where nano-entrepreneurs’ online shopping habits were taking baby steps: figures form that time showed that the average Brazilian would purchase items offline 9 times more frequently than online. Given this huge market gap opportunity, for almost 2 years I worked as a sales bizdev testing new offline channels — both at the office and on the field. Ranging from partnerships with retail stores to recruiting sales representatives, the end goal was to run effective experiments to understand which offline channels would scalably increase sales, and which wouldn’t.
By early 2018, we, as a sales team, had strong indications that focusing our efforts on developing one particular offline sales channel would maximize our returns. The bet was to double down on our sales representatives and deprioritize the rest. The more the “sales reps” channel scaled, the more we discovered all sorts of underlying problems that needed focused attention to make the channel successful. The most troubled one was our sales attribution system, which lacked automation and accuracy.
To solve this specific problem, SumUp decided to allocate an existing squad to collaborate with me and work on the source of the attribution problem. It was the first time I closely worked with very skilled Software Engineers, a Product Manager, and a Product Designer. My role there was to bring the context and users’ interests — sales reps and the sales team — so that the squad could get a complete understanding of the problem we needed to solve and why it was important.
Working together with the newly renamed “Partners Squad” opened my eyes to a new way of solving problems. This team used very structured approaches to identify problems and come up with solutions. I started grasping the value and dynamics of dual-track product development and perceived how critical the Product Manager role is in such a team. Combining 3 major dynamic forces — business drivers, user needs, and technical feasibility — the PM conceives and coordinates an ever-changing sequence of development items to maximize the business return on the team’s effort without overstepping technical constraints. Not an easy task — I thought — nevertheless quite interesting.
As my familiarity and interest in product development grew, my contributions to the squad’s work started yielding outcomes. The business sense and user empathy I had developed in the previous 2 years were crucial factors for this. At the same time, I had become a full and essential member of the squad: my inputs were more than welcomed, they were actually required. Evidently, all squad members soon felt the need to properly name my role in the team to better define expectations. We ended up borrowing one from the literature: Business Owner, but it never really took off, as we later found out to be a very unstable role to fill given my circumstances then.
Let me explain the last sentence a bit better: at that time, I was paradoxically a full member of two teams: the squad and the sales team. In both teams, I had pressing responsibilities. I was badly juggling with both roles for a while: for months, I ended up working far too many hours and still not delivering the best I could for each team individually. However, although the situation felt quite unbalanced, it was necessary to generate the discomfort for me to actively start seeking a change.
A mixed feeling arose when the former PM of the squad left the company in January 2019. As much as I really enjoyed working with her, and learned a lot from her by example, I knew it meant an opportunity for me. Her responsibilities were temporarily distributed among all squad members according to how each of us could best support the squad’s mission. But in the following months, my role kept expanding to fill the void. Little by little both myself and the team were steadily gaining confidence in my job as the PM, slowly and commonly coordinating behavior changes towards that direction.
The climax of my urgency to take that leap into Product Management happened during a Lunch & Learn session with one of SumUp’s agile coaches, where he explained the role of a PM in detail. I realized with much more conviction I was already doing part of the role’s duties and I really wanted to learn the parts I didn’t know, especially to fill my lack of deep technical knowledge. When the L&L session ended one of my fellow coworkers said my eyes were sparkling big time. And he was right — the sparkle was just what I needed to make up my mind.
Firmly stating my wish to migrate to Engineering & Product to my former leader wasn’t the easiest thing. I was the first SumUpper to cross that river in the company, but I am extremely thankful that SumUp has always truly enforced a culture that encourages people to chase their objectives and puts an active effort in being flexible enough to accommodate these changes and its consequences. A few discussions later, my former leader and I started to look for people who could take over my responsibilities in the sales team, so I could fully dedicate myself to the squad and to learn more about Product Management.
Eventually, my substitutes came as the result of another structured reshuffle initiative, but that’s another story. Their arrival enabled me to fully transition to my current role as a PM, where I now stand firmly. I’m glad to say that my reshuffle, on the other hand, was quite organic when compared to the others that I’ve seen at SumUp: I took the active decision to change my role, and I was the one who talked the leaders into the reshuffle, not the other (usual) way around.
It is important to notice that a big part of my successful transition was to recognize the knowledge and experience I lacked, especially expertise in technology. But being able to really count on the squad during this learning period was essential. They were not only great at sharing knowledge but also would often challenge my decisions, throwing me way out of my comfort zone. This practical learning process helped me to quickly adapt my mindset from a business person to a full Product Manager. Of course, I also went after product management courses myself to complement what I was living day after day. In the following months, I avidly consumed several product management seminars, lectures, and read tirelessly about agility, UX, growth hacking, experimentation, and mainly software development.
Looking back, my transition to Product Management couldn’t have fitted better my career desires, despite the bumpy gravel road that led me there. The baggage I carried from my previous experience was a decisive factor for the squad’s accomplishments, and now it is undeniable that we all arrived at a higher level of realization and performance. This change helped me to unleash my full potential. In the years to come, I plan to strengthen my product management skills so that I can successfully enforce my role in any other context unrelated to the one that first guided me there: sales channels. After all, who knows where SumUp’s next challenge will emerge?
My story is the last one in a series of 5 stories about talent reshuffles at SumUp. If you would like to learn more about how we see people development and talent management, please reach out or leave a comment!
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