One of the first questions I often get from people when they learn about my background is “How did you get here?”, so I thought for this post, I would try to answer that question. From the professional perspective at least. I’ll leave the larger existential question alone for now. Hopefully this post may also provide a lens through which to view the rest of this blog.
I graduated from college with a Civil Engineering degree. I’d always had a fascination with bridges, highway overpasses, and public transit. But while the result of civil engineering was pretty cool, I knew early on that I wasn’t interested in working in the field full time. There were things I really liked about it. Designing something functional out of simple materials. Working in a team and being a part of building something. Seeing it come together before your eyes – it’s a field of engineering where the results are highly visible and its greatest feats end up being landmarks.
But being drawn to something more on the people side, I took a consulting job out of college. Working for a small firm outside of Boston, I did operations improvement work for manufacturing plants, oil & gas facilities, and various industrial environments. I was on the road Monday-Thursday almost every week for two years, traveling to Texas, Alberta, Florida, and New Brunswick.
What I loved about that work:
- Boots on the ground – On site, all the time. Out in the field and on the factory floor. Understanding how things worked, getting my hands dirty, and improving things right then and there.
- Leading people – Bringing together VPs, machine operators, shift supervisors, and quality assurance analysts. Understanding what each person had to contribute and helping them achieve so that the team could drive bottom-line results.
- Data-driven – Emphasis on getting the facts, running the experiments and taking the measurements ourselves, and doing the analysis. Winning over people with long-held assumptions by showing them the data. Data is empowering!
Things I missed while doing that work:
- True ownership – As the road warrior consultant, I didn’t get to be the one to own the result. My job was to facilitate somebody else owning the result. And once we hit our target, I flew away and never got to see how things really worked out.
- Technical environment – I missed engineering. I didn’t really want to be the design engineer, but I liked being around them and having the focus be on how something worked technically. As data-driven and results-focused as my consulting firm could be, there’s always a fair amount of fluff involved in anything that falls under the field of “management consulting”, even though I learned a ton doing it.
- Building community in my own life – I LOVE to travel, and I continue to do as much of it as I can within reason. But it’s strange to spend the majority of your life living on site getting to know clients and building relationships with them, and then after some period of time often leaving and never really talking to them again. Those people were such a big part of my life! It’s nice to have a team at work where we are all fully invested in what we are building together, we can spend time getting to know each other in and out of the office, and really see things through over a period of time. And most importantly, I get the opportunity to incessantly brag about our awesome product to the rest of the company.
Product Management
The six things above are what led me to product management and why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for the past two years. It’s boots on the ground work, leading people, and using data to drive decisions and results. I have ownership over my product and get to build a vision for it and take it from concept to launch. I bring people together to develop and implement technical solutions to complex problems. And I get to know and be part of an awesome team of people who like coming to work and being challenged everyday.
So that’s how I got here, and that’s why I do what I do.
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