My Path to Becoming a Product Manager

My career at Sharethrough began in the Solutions Architect role. My publisher operations experience from the last company helped me develop empathy with the processes and tools the team at Sharethrough was employing, and learn about the external business stakeholders. I sat in on internal operations meetings, and sales calls, as well as in engineering planning and retrospective meetings. Once more integrated with the product development process, I realized we didn’t have a solid release process, so took on the task of writing and publishing release notes to our business teams. Over the first 6 months, I learned so much about the relationship between the business and product teams, that my next step was to scale up on what it really meant to be a product manager.

As I learned, being a PM wasn’t simply running meetings with engineering, accepting user stories and writing release notes. I began to shadow the PMs more and saw there was a holistic ownership over the entire product process. At this point, I filled in some more communication gaps and began to meet with Marketing, working on competitive matrices, developing user guides and holding training sessions for our users (at this point, all internal users) for the new features that had been developed. At this stage in the company, with a headcount of about 60, it was starting to become apparent that more formalized processes were not just nice to have, but really a required part of scaling the business. It was an exciting time for the company, and for me, as I had realized the next step of my career trajectory and officially moved into an associate PM role.

About a year in, I had gotten a good grasp of the main skillsets and facets of the product management role, and since then, with Sharethrough’s headcount approaching 200 (!!), I’ve taken advantage of the ever changing landscape and opportunities in and out of the office to better myself. From learning new specific hard skills and tools that would enhance the work I do day to day, to leadership and facilitation work that I am extremely interested in, there’s always more to soak in. It’s fascinating how all-encompassing of a role product management is, especially as an organization continues to mature at a growing company.

This is an excerpt of my longer post, ‘My Path to Becoming A Product Manager’.