My Biggest Takeaways - 6 Months into Product Management
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My Biggest Takeaways - 6 Months into Product Management

Trekking into Product Management: My first six-months travelogue

I am excited to share key takeaways from my first 6 months working in Product Management (PM) at Fiksu: an industry leading mobile ad-tech firm based in Boston, MA. I’d love to hear in the comments section below if you have any tips/advice from your own PM adventures. Strive for success and keep grinding! Thanks & follow me on Twitter

The way this post is organized: Key takeaways followed by my background

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If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. ~John Quincy Adams

Product Manager? What?

Since I interned as a PM at Fiksu in Summer 2014, I kind of knew what I was getting myself into. However, six months into my first full-time gig, this turned out to be a whole different ball game. PM differs company to company and you can’t go to school to learn this trade-craft. Learn-by-doing is the only way. Some PM organizations are more business centered, some very technically focused, and the rest an interesting mix of both. My experience thus far falls into the third bucket where I’ve been able to learn/contribute across a wide spectrum. It’s really been an amazing learning curve! Every day has been different and below is a list of the various “hats” I’ve been wearing in these first 6 months:

  • First and foremost: ensure the success and growth of products I’m responsible for (described below) all the way from ideation to launch, and post roll-out
  • Participate in client calls and speak with customers/stakeholders to solicit feedback for existing product, identify their pain-points, and discover new product opportunities and pivot product strategy accordingly
  • Writing Product Specification documents for new product and feature initiatives. Design/wireframe user interfaces (UIs) and the user experience (UX) for products and features
  • Prioritize product initiatives for the engineering teams I work with on a weekly basis. Work with engineering in an Agile software development lifecycle (SDLC) incorporating Lean methodologies
  • Understand the company’s product roadmap and short/long term strategy and contribute to it by performing Product Opportunity (PO) Assessments on a quarterly basis
  • Debugging day-to-day issues that arise relating to automation and the API integrations described below
  • Work with colleagues in Product, Engineering, Business Development, Business Intelligence, Operations, Marketing, and Sales during various stages of the product lifecycle
  • Keeping up with the latest and greatest happening in the tech world and mobile industry, performing competitive analysis and identifying industry trends
  • ….and much more

The People! Soak it all in…

People are any company’s biggest asset. I’m lucky to be surrounded by extremely bright and talented colleagues not only in the Product organization, but also throughout the company.  As mentioned above, PM is a learn-by-doing métier. One of the other ways that benefits me to gain experience and become a better PM is to ask people lots of questions, understanding what they’re good at and why they’re good at it (strategy, leadership, creativity, design, etc.), and absorbing from their experiences and execution.

I’ve had the opportunity not only to work with people in Boston, but also with virtual teams internationally including Helsinki, Finland where the engineering team I work with is located. While working with a development team located offshore has its challenges, it’s been a superb learning opportunity both work wise and culturally, as I get the opportunity to work with people from diverse socio-cultural and educational backgrounds having divergent working styles.  

Continuous Improvement

PM is such a field where one has to continuously learn and keep improving their skills across a variety of disciplines and strive for continuous self-improvement. I really had no way to prepare for the job besides perusing various Quora threads or books that described the generic PM responsibilities and associated necessary skills. Working on a wide range of projects in these first 6 months gave me an opportunity to identify what I’m good at and what skills I need to fortify further. Here are my thoughts on a few of these areas:

  • Technical – Fiksu is a B2B company that produces both internal and external facing software products. In the fast paced software development world we live in, I found it extremely important to understand the technology stack & architecture of my company as a PM so I can keep in mind the possibilities and limitations of what is/isn’t possible when spec’ing and designing products/features. It’s also important to be technically versed to gain credibility/trust from engineers.  At Fiksu, PM’s work VERY closely with engineers on a daily basis. Coming out of school, one area I needed improvement was being able to speak their “language” of technology and code.  My goal isn’t to become a full fledged developer, but I wanted to be in a spot where I could understand/participate in discussions about technical topics at a high level and if push comes to shove, open the company’s repo on GitHub and dig into the code to understand what is going on for debugging purposes
    • As foundation, I started by learning about the Internet and how the web works. I took a comprehensive web development course in my free time learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the Ruby on Rails framework. Since I work with APIs significantly, I also took a step back to learn what APIs are and API design
    • Learning technical things isn’t a “one-and-done” process. The biggest step from here is to execute various projects in my spare time in order to reinforce the concepts/technologies learned. Not to mention, this process will help build a portfolio of “things” I can showcase and be proud of
    • Many more to-do’s: learn about cloud technologies and devops tools, algorithms, deeper dive into databases and their design, how to think about tradeoffs when deciding between technologies
  • Design – One of my favorite parts of PM’ing has been wireframing/designing the UI for new products/features and thinking about UX. I’ve been using Balsamiq, a fairly popular software, to produce wireframes/mocks. Balsamiq is great, but has its limitations, as mocks are going to look cartoon-y/stripped down and one is limited in the amount of controllers possible to use to express ideas and interactions
    • I want to learn UI/UX best practices/design techniques for web and mobile apps. I want to study various products (not just limited to SW), good and bad, to understand the reason behind their successes/failures
    • Learn to use Sketch to produce high quality mocks. Sketch has been exploding in popularity amongst Designers (gradually drifting away from the Adobe creative suite)
    • Learn to use InVision to prototype/design mobile apps
  • Other Areas – deeper dive into agile development methodologies including SCRUM & Kanban, the art of prioritization, thinking more strategically (long term) and not just living in the exact present when spec’ing/designing features, working more efficiently with international (& local) development teams, winning over and motivating people, and the art of influencing positively

Background

June 1st, 2015 marks my 6-month anniversary of working as a Product Manager at Fiksu (my first full time job). 2 years ago in Spring 2013 I was getting ready to graduate as an Electrical Engineer from UMass Lowell and wasn’t sure where I wanted to start my career. I loved technology and business, but was unsure what my career options were. Shortly before graduation, I was admitted to the Master of Engineering Management (M.E.M) program at Dartmouth College. I would be sharpening my engineering/analytical skills, taking MBA courses from the Tuck School of Business, and not to mention buying myself time to figure out what I “really” wanted to do. Flash forward 15 months to Nov 2015, I finished up the M.E.M. and was ready to begin my full-time journey as a PM at Fiksu.       

What is Fiksu?

Mobile is king. If you don’t have a mobile presence as a company, especially in the form of an app, you’re not winning. The iOS App and Google Play store play home to millions of apps in all shapes and sizes. More than 60% of the time people spend on their phones is spent in app. APPS ARE IMPORTANT! Fiksu helps brands, agencies, and app/game makers acquire precise audiences of mobile app users by leveraging its massive data store of actionable mobile data (2.4B device profiles, 11.7T marketing events) and using programmatic technologies and intelligent optimization. Fiksu is a 5 year old venture funded start-up with ~250+ employees based out of Boston and throughout the world including Helsinki, London, Tokyo, and more.

What I do at Fiksu? 

At Fiksu, I deal with all things automation! I work to programmatically integrate Fiksu’s platform with industry leading network/media partners (think AdColony, Google Adwords) in the form of Reporting & Ads APIs. I’m also working to deepen our integration with Google by leveraging their Ads API to build tools with the goal of helping internal teams run mobile advertising campaigns efficiently and profitably. In addition, I wear a bunch of other hats on a daily basis :-)

Umesh Bhavsar

Sr Product Manager at Verizon Wireless

8y

I am glad you are building your technical knowledge base, as this is only way you will earn Engineering’s respect. Talk their lingo. Too many times I have seen Engineering dismiss Product managers requests/feedback as Engineering believe Product managers do not understand the time and cost required to build products. Also by building your technical base you can control exactly what is built – no more, no less.

Emmanuel A.

Strategy | Technology | Energy | Management

8y

A well written and insightful piece.

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