So, there I was, a software engineer with an impeccable relationship with Stack Overflow, deciding to make the jump into product management. Why? Maybe I thought it was time to stop debugging code and start debugging people’s expectations. Plus, I heard PMs get to “own” stuff. Who doesn’t want to own things?
The first day, I confidently walked into the office, armed with my new vocabulary: “synergy,” “roadmap,” and “user pain points.” Little did I know that “pain points” referred to mine by the end of that week.
My first task? A product meeting. Easy enough, right? I sat down, ready to drop some “actionable insights” I’d read about on some tech blog at 2 AM. Then they hit me with, “Can you give us a guesstimate on the projected metrics for Q4 based on the current KPIs?” I blinked. KPIs? Metrics? Suddenly, every piece of jargon I’d practiced evaporated like water on a hot pan. My mind screamed, “Call an API! Debug this!”
Instead, I cleared my throat, “Right. Metrics. Q4. Totally got this.” Spoiler alert: I did not have this. I threw around percentages that may or may not have added up to 100. No one questioned me, which I took as a win. Maybe product management was just acting confident, right?
A week later, I was assigned my first task: oversee the launch of a new feature. Simple. Just a launch. Until it wasn’t. The engineers threw technical terms at me that felt like the software version of speaking Klingon. The marketing team wanted it yesterday, and customers wanted features we hadn’t even thought of yet. I spent most of the week smiling awkwardly in meetings, jotting down notes like, “Figure out what on earth a go-to-market strategy actually is.”
The day of the launch, I was pumped. Everything was in place. Or so I thought. Five minutes before the feature went live, I received a Slack message from a developer: “Small bug, should we delay?” My internal monologue: Define ‘small’ in this context.
I made the call to launch anyway. What’s life without a little risk, right? Turns out, that “small bug” made the app crash for every single user trying to access it. So yes, I’d launched a product…straight into disaster.
But here’s the thing about product management: it’s all about adapting. Sure, I might have tanked a launch, confused some stakeholders, and messed up a few metrics, but by the end of the quarter, I learned that sometimes the best product isn’t the perfect one—it’s the one that teaches you the most.
Also, I learned what KPIs actually are. (You can Google them.)
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