I like to think of myself as a product manager who has dabbled in just about everything at one point in time or another! My journey into product management certainly took a circuitous route, but looking back, the seeds were planted early. In college, I split time between my two majors—computer science and philosophy. I loved both wrestling with challenging technical problems and diving into difficult moral quandaries, especially those complex questions of how or why we should use technology – not just how we can. That blend really set the stage for how I approach building products today.

After college, I started my professional journey as a software engineer. It absolutely scratched the itch I had for wanting to create something tangible and functional. I contributed to a Java-based financial management application, diving deep into the code. But, as satisfying as writing code was, I quickly found that it wasn't enough for what I truly wanted to do; something was missing. Perhaps a different type of "writing" was what I needed, so I moved from engineering to technical writing. My focus shifted to crafting documentation that helped users truly understand how to set up, configure, use, and troubleshoot enterprise-level applications, with a heavy focus on financial investment compliance monitoring. I really enjoyed getting a deep understanding of the software being created and what it was capable of doing for users. But, as I learned more, I’d inevitably notice myself finding things that weren’t quite optimal, or workflows that were broken in the user's journey, and these imperfections frustrated me—I wanted to do more than just document; I wanted to make the product better!

You’d think this is where I made the pivot to product. It’s not… yet. I continued to dabble in analyst work while still doing my tech writing and random coding here and there. My role had morphed into a sort of "jack-of-all-trades," and that worked for a bit, but I just couldn't silence that voice in the back of my brain that would speak up when I'd come across deficiencies and brokenness in applications I was working with. Seeing a clear need to increase quality and standardize our processes, I pushed to start up and manage a quality assurance team. The organization I was at surprisingly didn’t have a dedicated QA function; engineers simply tested their own code and shipped it! Finally, I thought, I was going to make sure our applications were in tip-top shape before they got to users, ensuring the delivery of high-impact and squeaky clean solutions.

And they were, and I was happy being able to create useful artifacts and processes, deeply understand our apps, and ensure a high level of quality. But something still wasn’t quite clicking. I would get hung up on listening to users tell me that, even though a function wasn’t technically "broken," it wasn’t doing what they wanted or expected, or they’d simply want something the app didn’t even have. In my QA manager role, I didn’t have the direct power to introduce these kinds of strategic changes, so I tried to persuade those who did to make them. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. I realized I wanted to be the one who could truly give users more of a voice than just passing on their suggestions to those above and around me—I wanted to be in product management, even if I didn’t quite know that’s what I’d been circling around for so long.

But there I was, becoming an advocate for users , making business cases, looking at metrics, and pitching features. Naturally, I then pivoted into product management, starting down the 12+ year long journey I’ve been on. It may have taken me a bit to get there, but the seeds of product management were planted early and continued to grow with each new chapter of my journey.