Why I Switched From Full-Time Product Manager to Freelancer
A few months ago I decided to switch from my full-time Product Manager position at PayFit — a desirable position as the company is one of the fastest growing European startups currently — to become a freelancer. Few people around me understood this decision. 6 months after this change, I wanted to share in more details why I did this.
1. Growing the skills I want
As I grew in seniority in my Product Manager job, I realized I would need to spend more and more time learning soft skills (leadership, negotiation, vision, etc.). But something was tickling me: I was really interested about UI/UX design. I had basic skills and I wanted to become more advanced. This was really challenging in a full-time job. I knew I could explore this discipline during my free time but this was not more than wishful thinking.
That’s when I decided to become a freelancer. I joined Mozza, a crew of product strategists & designers founded by my friends Adrien Montcoudiol and Maxime Braud. When I joined them, my first project was to define the product strategy of a new travel app from scratch. I had been working on product strategies for the past 3 years at BlaBlaCar and PayFit. But very quickly, I had the opportunity to work on a UI/UX design project. This field was quite new for me. I had self-trained myself at it for around a year but didn’t have any educational background in design. I loved it: it challenged me a lot and my client was delighted with my work!
Very quickly after, I gained an even stronger interest in UI/UX design. I’ve been building my own product design culture by:
- reading blogs on Medium like uxplanet.org, uxdesign.cc to stay aware of UX trends
- staying aware of good product flows with websites like PageFlows or ReallyGoodUX
- following design leaders like Luke Wroblewski and Julie Zhuo
- following creative guys on Dribbble to be aware of the current UI trends. I really like the work done by Divan Raj and Netguru for instance. ⚠️ You’ll find amazing UI inspirations on Dribbble but don’t rely on it for complex UX flows.
- looking for high-quality content and courses, like the great e-book by Refactoring UI
- getting feedback from my peers at Mozza on my UI work
- training myself at redesigning websites I enjoy. I took a shot at redesigning a football statistics website I find very rich in content but poor from a design perspective (WhoScored):
2. Learning to teach
One of the things I wanted to get better at is oral communication: structuring my knowledge and expressing it in a clear way. Teaching and mentoring enabled me to keep growing those soft skills.
I had the opportunity to teach a product management course at HEC Paris in the Entrepreneurship class. I uploaded my slides on SlideShare:
My friend Emile Ledure also enabled me to give a UX design course at ISCOM, a communication school in Paris. This was quite challenging as UX design was a new field for me. But the feedback from my students was really positive. Although I had many areas of improvements (especially a better balance between theory vs. practice), most comments were super positive, with a NPS of 81.
Finally, I also became a mentor for startups in the LIBERTÉ LIVING-LAB startup accelerator. I advised FinTech startups on product & growth topics. This enabled me to get better at challenging ideas and asking the right questions.
3. Freeing up time for side projects
One thing that pushed me to move to freelancing was that my mind was often caught by ideas of side projects I wanted to explore further. It was almost impossible in a full-time job. During evenings and weekends, it’s really challenging to make progress on those projects. You need a lot of energy which is hard when you have a demanding job in a startup.
Earlier this year I had the idea of an app enabling friends to find optimal meeting point when they’re looking to go out in a restaurant, a bar or a park. I wanted to take this idea as an opportunity to improve my web development skills. I started coding a simple Ruby on Rails app in the evening and weekends. That’s how Graviti was born (see the “behinds the scenes” here).
It took me 2 months to have a working version with almost no frontend.
When I became a freelancer, it took me less than 1 month with my friend Romain Chambe to ship a much more advanced version of the webapp, with internationalisation, a link sharing feature, a responsive layout, a landing page, etc.
We didn’t push further the concept as we’re currently busy on other projects but I personally really enjoyed this experience as it was intellectually very stimulating for me. I learnt backend and frontend development skills that I’m convinced will be very useful for me in the future.
I’m also working another project linked to football statistics with my friend Yann Pringault, called Ballistic. Our vision is to make football statistics entertaining.
4. Pimping my lifestyle
Working from anywhere, remotely. This perk of being a freelancer is often called “digital nomadism”. I personally haven’t taken advantage a lot of this yet but my friends at Mozza have done so a lot in the past 3 years with their retreats. They gathered in many places around the world — Morocco, Thailand, Bali, San Diego, etc. — to continue working on their projects and created rewarding interactions.
Since I’m a freelancer, I have more flexibility in how I work. With the Mozza crew, we’ve gathered for a few days in Lisbon for a summit to discuss our vision for the upcoming year and redesign our website. I also regularly spend longer and more frequent weekends in my family back in Alsace. I’m planning a one-month trip in Mexico and Colombia to work remotely and perfect my kiteboarding skills.
There are 4 reasons that led me to freelancing: growing new skills, learning to teach, working on side projects and pimping my lifestyle. It’s possible to do all 4 of them but you have to be careful not to “scatter”. When you meet this new world of opportunities, it becomes very exciting. You can be tempted to do many things at the same time. My piece of advice would be to stay focused, experiment one or maximum two things at a time in addition to your freelance projects.
As I had quit my job, one of the main fears I had was to find clients and make sure I wouldn’t run out of money. That’s when Mozza guaranteed me they would find endless projects for me thanks to their huge network. As a result, I became a freelancer with peace of mind and more free time than someone starting this adventure alone.
You’re a full-time product manager or UX/UI designer and would like to become a freelancer as well? Contact Mozza, our crew is growing!
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