Zero to PM: My first 5 months as a product manager fresh out of college
Three lessons in PM that books could never teach me
Around this time last year, I breathed a sigh of relief as I closed all of my product management interview prep tabs. Each click of an X lifted a weight off my shoulder, decluttering my mind as it had my browser. Recruiting was over, I got the job.
I remember spending +100 hours in my spare time unraveling articles, devouring highly recommended books, and overpacking as much PM in my brain as it could hold before concepts would start springing back out.
Who knew that, despite cramming my brain with theories, anecdotes, and principles, I could never be adequately prepared for stepping into the role myself?
Books and videos cover theory in a perfect world, but the real world is imperfect. The real world introduces people and events as variables that you can’t calculate yet that can drastically change your performance.
Over the past five months, I learned a few things that nothing except actually being in the role could prepare me for.
About how frequently I’d question my abilities and qualification
As a senior in college, I was considered top of the chain. I had four years of college experience under my belt, more than every other class (except the super seniors, though they’re lumped with the seniors in my head.) I knew which classes to take, which professors not to take, where to study, and which orgs to join. My fellow seniors and I– we were suave, at least in the eyes of freshmen. We had that coolness factor simply because we were seniors with four years of college wisdom, and we could legally drink.
When I started this entry-level PM role, my social capital was reset to zero. I was once again the baby who’s just been birthed into the corporate world with nothing to my name. I knew nothing about the company internally, which training to take, who the best managers were, where to find the best coffee and snacks in the building, and which Slack channels to join. And, to rub salt in the wound, everyone here could legally drink. On this new campus, I was the fumbling, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed freshman who looked up to the senior PMs.
I felt incompetent and small starting out. In one of my projects, I was in charge of a feature launch that was delayed multiple times due to code freezes, an application migration, and a misaligned deployment schedule with a dependent team. My inner critic would pester me: You should’ve asked the right questions to the engineers beforehand to set the right timeline expectations. You should’ve worked faster, harder, and more diligently to avoid this. If you had a technical background, you would’ve seen this coming!
In another one of my projects, I was working with multiple dependent teams to scale an existing feature to a new global market. While ramping up on this project, I’d already reached an impasse. It’s not like there were any disagreements (yet), but rather no one would respond to my questions and pleas for information. Again, my inner critic would prance on my shoulder touting: Of course, no one would respond to you, why should they? Your questions and requests are dumb and not worth their valuable time.
Things never seemed to work out the way I planned them to, and I couldn’t help but blame myself. However, my manager reassured me that a lot of those things were just out of my control. She put it into perspective: I’m coming into a large, relationships-based, functionally-structured organization as a newbie with zero social capital and zero work experience. I can’t anticipate everything. Escalate when you’re blocked. It’s not your fault.
Dear diary, give yourself grace and permission to fail as an entry-level new grad. Make a lot of mistakes and learn from them because forgiveness for not knowing now is a lot easier than later.
About the importance of owning who you are and voicing your beliefs
Growing up in an Asian household, I was taught to just do my job, go with the flow, keep my head down, stay in my lane, and let my work speak for itself. In the American corporate world, especially as a product manager, that couldn’t be further from what you should do.
In my first month and a half, I was often invited to small and large group meetings where I never said a word. I’d sit and nod, trying to absorb what was being said and make sense of it, and then leave. I felt guilty for being there and adding extra clutter and noise to the room even when I said nothing.
As a PM, you’re hired and paid for the way you think. You create value for the company when you share your opinion and make good decisions. What kind of PM am I if I don’t say something useful? Of course, I was still onboarding onto the product, the customers, the industry, and the job itself. These meetings were purely observational learning opportunities. I had to give myself grace.
Following my 90-day mark, I was asked more and more often, “Kaci, what do you think?” whenever the wider PM team was discussing a problem, approach, or situation. I’d feel an instant pang of panic reverberate throughout my body.
Yes, I had a better understanding of the product after playing around with it. Yes, I formed a clearer picture of who the customers were after reading customer feedback and leading customer interviews. Yes, I strengthened my grasp on the industry and its competitors after perusing internal decks and articles online. Yes, I could pull from these repositories of knowledge to proffer a meaningful, informed opinion that my team could seriously consider. But everyone else in the room already had a deep, growing knowledge of all of the above. Could I really add anything new? What do I know that they don’t?
Maybe not much. Maybe my knowledge was incomparable. But as it turns out, the knowledge you lend to the team sometimes isn’t as important as your perspective.
One day, I told my manager that I felt like I could never contribute something worthwhile while I was so new to the team and the company. Everyone seemed to know everything already, and that didn’t leave much space for me.
She shook her head and posed, “You carry with you so many unique perspectives as a Gen Z, Vietnamese-American woman coming out of college that we (the team) couldn’t bring to the table. That is already so valuable. We want to hear from this perspective.”
It took a while for me to internalize what she was saying. But she’s right. It doesn’t always matter how much we know about something. We don’t have to be the subject-matter experts of our fields. Some of the most creative thought comes from the woven, disparate events we experience in our lives starting in childhood. Each of us has a uniquely constructed perspective that’s been shaped and sculpted throughout our life: every experience you go through and every person you encounter chip away at how you see the world until it forms the lens we look through today. Apply that to whatever repositories of knowledge you have, and that becomes your value worth creating a space for.
Dear diary, remember to honor and celebrate your unique portfolio of experiences, knowledge, and insights by sharing it. Everyone, including those you’re building for, is better off when you do.
About how easily PM can easily transform work into life
In product management, there’s so much to learn, so much to read, and so much you can do as someone who’s supposed to have a whole closet of hats to wear. As someone both new to PM, new to the company, and new to the 9–5 schedule, it’s been a challenge for me to draw the line between when work ends and when life starts. My backlog of work would multiply by the hour:
Complete HR & compliance training.
Read through project doc.
Read through dependent project doc to understand first project doc.
Research what microservices are.
Set up interview guide.
Respond to Slack message. Respond to another Slack message. Set Slackbot reminder to respond to Slack message 1 & 2.
Set up calendar invites for 1:1 meetings.
Learn data schemas.
I was itching to complete it all as soon as possible, so I could start adding value to the company and not anchor the team as a dead weight. And so I kept going past 5 pm, and past 6 pm, and sometimes past 7 pm so I could continue checking off pre-requisite boxes to prove my belonging and worth.
The more I did this, the more life felt less vibrant and exciting. Is that all to it in life? To work and meet your company’s KPIs year over year? To grow only in your career and nothing else?
There’s so much more to life than that. Life’s about growing more into yourself and your potential: exploring and doing more of what you love, exercising and eating healthy, building and strengthening relationships with those you love, and simply loving and feeling loved.
Your growth continues no matter where you choose to invest your time. Just be intentional with how you want to invest it, and make every second of that time count.
The PM Diaries is a new outlet of mine to document my career journey. But secretly, it’s a forcing mechanism to surrender my thoughts to pixels & paper and produce something I could call my own, all at a sunk cost of $5/month. Here’s hoping that $5 stretches further for you than it does for me.☺
~ Kaci