Want to break into Product Management? Four mPharma PMs share their paths
I might be biased, but being a product manager is awesome. You get to think big-picture and figure out the best ways to both delight users and grow your business. But you’re also involved in day-to-day prioritizing and coordination — so when your team gets something across the finish line, you get to share in the satisfaction of delivering concrete results. It’s the best of both worlds.
So how do people break into product management? From what I’ve seen, there’s really no standard way. Case in point: mPharma’s four PMs took four different paths.
To give you a sense, I asked everyone on the team to tell me about their own personal path to becoming a PM. So now, in order of mPharma tenure, I present to you the widely cited Four mPharma Paths to Product Management! (Just kidding, this is definitely the first time anyone ever said that.)
“Trojan Horse”: Get to know the business from within a different team
Edith, the PM for our patient program Mutti, got her shoe in the door at mPharma as a finance associate — but she didn’t know Product was where she wanted to end up.
“For me, it was about being able to experience problem-solving in a new way — I have always been keen on solving problems that truly matter to stakeholders. To that end, I was focused on being able to apply knowledge from my finance background in the tech space. I had no idea at the time that what I wanted to do was called product management; and that I had, in some ways, delved a bit into PM while on the finance team.”
“Run and Jump”: Build up related skills elsewhere
I got hired to be the Analytics PM based on previous work outside tech, but which nonetheless helped me gain related skills. To brazenly quote myself:
“Before mPharma, I was a global health and nutrition consultant at the nonprofit Results for Development. I worked on a lot of different projects, ranging from analyzing more than a billion dollars in foreign aid for global nutrition to putting together a strategy for how the Australian government could invest in nutrition innovation. Across them all, I got experience structuring problems, prioritizing solutions, and building buy-in. So when I reached out about roles at mPharma, the team asked me to interview for an analytics PM role. Once I figured out what that meant, I was super excited to take the job!”
“Starter”: Found the company!
Dika, the PM most focused on supply chain and billing processes, is also our only Group PM at the moment. He says he got into product management without even knowing that’s what he was doing:
“I am an accidental PM. In 2011, I did not even know what a PM did. I had co-founded DealDey.com with my friend Sim (who went on to found Konga and uLessons), and he was working as the commercial lead. Because we sold a lot of beauty and female fashion services at the time, it made sense for us to hire a female leader to take over what I was doing. So I volunteered to take over managing requirements and our software vendor engagement from Sim. We did not even have roles at that time so we didn’t call it that, but that was how I became a PM.”
(BTW, this is also how Dan Shoukimas, our Chief Product Officer and one of mPharma’s co-founders, got into product. He had a background in UI/UX design.)
“Sliiide to the Left”: Gain experience and skills in a different tech role
Percy, the PM for our consumer retail pharmacy programs, was a QA star before shifting over to product. He explains how that motivated him to become a PM:
“QA gave me a ground experience on the curve as it gave me a different perspective on how to use a product, understand users, and have empathy for the customers. Though I was passionate about quality software, I always had my eyes on PMing as well because you never run out of problems and there’s always a new dimension to influence how things should work. What piqued my interest in this journey was basically connecting with users to understand their problems and come up with solutions for them.”
So there you have it! That’s how our team of four PMs came to be in our roles. And as you can see, we come from various backgrounds.
Want to join us? Check out mPharma’s career page to see current openings. And don’t worry if your background is different — maybe you’ll be the one to make it the Five mPharma Paths to Product Management!
