Building intelligent systems,
one product at a time.

My story

How I found product

I didn't grow up around product managers. I first heard the word by accident, in a park in New York, when I was sixteen. I was there on a high school exchange program, dropped into a city that ran on a completely different rhythm than home, and I spent that year comparing everything — how people talked, how things worked, what was better and what wasn't — just out of pure curiosity and too much energy to sit still with. One afternoon a guy struck up a conversation after a pickup football game, told me I played well, and we ended up talking for a while. At some point he mentioned what he did for work: product manager, at a big company. I was impressed. I also had absolutely no idea what that meant. Years passed. I studied engineering, then went back and did a second bachelor's in accounting. Somewhere in between I was working in digital marketing and sales, and that's where I started noticing project managers everywhere, in every company I touched. They reminded me of that guy in the park, except he'd said product, not project, and nobody around me could really explain the difference. I looked for a class, a course, anything that taught it properly. There wasn't one. The only way in seemed to be inside a company, so that's where I started paying attention. I kept my head down and took notes quietly for a long time, until I ended up team lead, managing a group of people who sold a product day in and day out. Selling it meant hearing the same complaints from different clients, over and over, and somewhere in that noise I started seeing patterns, real gaps in the product itself, not just in how we were pitching it. So I reached out to the product team behind it, ran an intensive round of customer feedback on my own, and brought them a set of suggestions. A week later I was in two meetings with that team. They were genuinely glad I'd done it. That was the moment I decided to make it official — I went and did a master's in Project Management, mostly to get the frameworks and the fundamentals I'd been reconstructing on my own. Not long after, I landed my first real job as a product manager.