Career Mobility @ AIQ

Intro

👋 I’m Phil, a Senior Product Manager at ActionIQ working with our Customer 360 and Query Execution & Storage product teams.

I’ve been with ActionIQ (AIQ) for almost four years, which seems like a lifetime for a startup. Over that time, it’s been amazing to see the company grow and mature — not only as a product, but also as an organization. A benefit of that growth is that ActionIQ gives employees the opportunity to move to new teams that better suit their long-term career aspirations.

In this post, I’ll talk about my own journey from Professional Services to Product Management and provide some tips to successfully navigate your own internal career transition.

My Role Trajectory

Let’s first cover what the Professional Services and Product Management teams at AIQ actually do. Both offer challenges and rewarding experiences, but in different ways.

As an Engagement Manager (EM) on our Professional Services team, you are the main day-to-day point of contact for our customers. Your core responsibility is to drive projects for customers to expand the value they get out of AIQ. For new customers, this means managing the upfront implementation of the AIQ platform. At existing customers, you’ll partner with our customer success team to train new customers and support new use cases.

As a product that sits right at the center of a company’s data and customer experience tech stack, these projects are a bit more involved than just flipping a switch and holding some training sessions. EMs partner with stakeholders across the customer’s org to understand their business needs and use cases for AIQ. Then, they work with our Customer Data Engineers to translate them into data requirements and train users to set them up within AIQ.

If an EM’s goal is to ensure individual customers get value out of the product, a Product Manager’s goal is to maximize the value of the product overall. Responsibilities include meeting with customers to understand their needs, synthesizing inputs to define a vision for the product, and working with Design, Engineering, and Product Marketing to build and launch features that execute on that vision.

Why I Made The Shift

I first joined ActionIQ in 2019 as an Engagement Manager after four years at a technology consulting firm. After working exclusively in the financial services industry, the jump to a startup was both jarring and fantastic.

The EM role is a rewarding one, with a front row seat to witness how our customers use and realize value from AIQ. But after spending my whole career so far in client-facing roles, I felt ready for a new challenge.

Having worked with Product Managers throughout my career, I honed in on that as a potential career path. The idea of continuing to work with customers to solve their problems — but also balance that with a broader perspective of the market — excited me.

Luckily, there was an existing precedent at AIQ for folks within Professional Services transitioning to Product. In fact, the majority of PMs at the company have followed that path. Working in client services gives you a great foundation for product, including:

• A deep understanding of our users and their needs
• A problem solving mindset
• Great written and verbal communication
• The project management and organizational skills needed to drive a project forward

After doing some research on my own, I decided Product was a path I wanted to explore further.

My Journey to Product

I knew Product was a hard role to break into, so where to start? Below are some pieces of advice I was given along the way. (And by the way, these rules apply to any career transition, not just to Product.)

1) Don’t Keep It to Yourself

When making a career transition, it’s usually easier to do so internally at your current company than by looking externally. But that doesn’t happen unless you take the first step by bringing it up with your manager. At ActionIQ, all the managers I’ve worked with have been open and receptive to these types of conversations. For any fast growing company, it’s an important strategy to retain talented people.

So as a first step, in my monthly career growth discussion with my manager, I mentioned that my 1–2 year goal was to make the jump to Product Management. My manager helped connect me to the right people in the organization to explore it further.

2) Be Confident It’s The Role For You

One benefit of switching teams internally is that all your conversations leading up to it are essentially an extended interview process. And just like when you apply for a job at a new company, the interview is a two way process: not only does the team need to be confident that you’ll be successful in the new role, but you need to assess if the role is a good fit for you.

Short of doing the role itself, the best way to gauge if it’s a good fit is to talk to those currently doing it. What followed the initial chat with my current manager were coffee chats with PMs on the team to learn about their day-to-day work, what they liked about it, what was challenging, and take in any advice.

3) Be Patient

Even if the role seems like a great fit on both sides, the timing can be half the battle. Especially at a smaller company, the team might not have an open headcount at the moment. If that’s the case, patience and communication are key. Set up a monthly 1–1 with the hiring manager to keep the conversation going and continue to focus on your current role.

In my case, it took about six months for a PM role to open up and that gave me plenty of time to focus on #4…

4) Prepare Like It’s An Interview

I’ll admit, it’s hard to learn something without doing it. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to absorb everything you can about the career you want. Ask those on the team for recommendations on books, podcasts, articles, and even online courses that can help prepare you for the job.

When the open PM role was finally posted, I went through the same interview process as any other external hire. Just because you know the people interviewing you doesn’t mean you have the margin to slack off: treat it just like you would any other interview and prepare for tough questions. After all the time spent getting to this point, you wouldn’t want to ease up at the final hurdle, right?

Growing into the Role

I officially joined the product team about 9 months after that first conversation with my manager. While it was gratifying to finally start, it was also just the beginning of a new set of challenges.

For one, Product Management is a lot more open-ended of a role than I was used to: How should I spend my time each day? What problems should I focus on? What does “good” look like?

It also came with more authority: How do I decide what features to prioritize? Am I making the right decisions for the company and our customers? How do I keep our customers happy without saying “yes” to every feature request they have?

Fortunately, ActionIQ offers a ton of great resources for any employee looking to advance in their career:

• 30–60–90 day plan — My manager created a plan that outlines the focus, key projects, and learning goals for your specific role. This helps create transparency around what you should be working on and how you’re expected to progress.
• Book clubs — A great way to learn something new is to read about it and discuss it with others. Actionites organize a number of book clubs on different topics to do just that, covering everything from deep technical topics to market and industry news.
• External learning opportunities — Whether it be sponsorship to attend industry conferences, online courses through Udemy, or bringing in industry experts to speak, there’s always resources available at AIQ to learn outside of your day-to-day work.

With the support of the team, these resources, and on-the-ground learning, I was able to effectively contribute and take on my new responsibilities faster than I had expected.

Takeaways

At ActionIQ, internal mobility is seen as a win-win: It offers employees the ability to take on new challenges that are aligned with their career goals and allows the company to retain a more engaged, productive, and satisfied workforce. (Did I mention we’re hiring?)

While not without its challenges, my own career transition has been a thoroughly rewarding experience. I hope that if you’re looking to make your own career switch, some of these tips help you through that process.

ActionIQ is a leader in the massive and fast growing category of Customer Data Platforms (CDP). Our product brings order to Customer Experience (CX) chaos. ActionIQ’s CX Hub empowers everyone to be a CX champion by giving business teams the freedom to explore and take action on customer data, while helping technical teams regain control of where data lives and how it is used. We are backed by top-tier VCs Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and March Capital. Enterprise brands such as Autodesk, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Hertz, Atlassian and many more use our CX Hub to achieve growth through extraordinary customer experiences.

Learn more at https://www.actioniq.com/

Read our product blog at https://www.actioniq.com/blog/

Explore our career openings at https://www.actioniq.com/careers/

Want to get in touch? Contact us: https://www.actioniq.com/contact-us/