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Zeitgeist PM

An NFT Anti-Case: We Built An NFT Game Just Before a Big Market Crash

From pork bellies to product management Making the switch from finance to product Aside from the great learning experience and amazing friends that I got from my first job after college, I get to tell people that in a past life, I was a commodities trader (agriculture futures to be exact, e.g. corn, soy, hogs, cattle). It always causes raised eyebrows, being a somewhat untraditional starting point for someone who’s now a product manager at a SaaS company building HR software. also For context, I studied in college. After graduation, I worked in finance at a small for a year and a half before moving across the country to join as their first data analyst. After 2.5 years at Intercom, I joined as their second engineering hire, where I now work as their first product manager. operations research and financial engineering proprietary trading firm Intercom Lattice There are many different ways to get into software product management from other industries. A common and successful way to make the transition is to get an MBA and then apply to PM jobs at Facebook/Google/Amazon/other large company that regularly recruit from business schools. But, maybe for whatever reason you don’t want to get an MBA, or maybe you’d rather work at a smaller startup (post-MBA PMs more often than not end up working at large companies.) Or maybe you already work in tech as an engineer, designer, or product marketer. I hope my experiences doing the switch “on-the-job” will be helpful to those people as well. Start with what you know Despite what you’ve read about there being a lot of transferable skills between finance/consulting and product management, it’s going to be hard to find a company (especially a startup) that’d hire a product manager who didn’t have some experience in product development. And unlike software engineering, where people without direct professional experience can get hired from their work on side projects, it’s a bit hard to dabble in product management on the weekends, especially when important skills like managing a relationship with a sales team can’t be found in an online tutorial. But luckily, if you work in finance or consulting, you’re probably a great candidate for a lot of other roles that startups desperately want to hire for! Because I already had data analysis skills, I focused on roles in analytics or data science teams as I searched for my first job in tech. But if you’re an investment banker, look for financial analyst roles. If you’re a management consultant, look for roles in operations. And so forth. It will take time Because you’ll have to spend time in other roles before landing a PM role, whether you go the MBA route or the on-the-job route, nothing is going to happen overnight. I quit my finance job in March 2014 and started working as a data analyst at Intercom. I did that for a year before switching to a product engineering role on their growth team. I was an engineer for the rest of my time at Intercom and for the first eight months at Lattice. All in, that’s over three years from leaving trading to being a product manager. From a pure time perspective, it probably would have been faster to get the MBA (though it was certainly cheaper to not). Which brings me to my next point… You will have to work a lot The topic of working hard (and long) has been a popular but thorny topic of discussion in the tech zeitgeist. Neither of the startups I’ve worked at valued being in the office every night till 11. But the reality remains that if you want to achieve unusual goals, you have to work unusual amounts. The people who are letting you do a job you’ve never done before will feel better about the situation if they know you’re dependable and willing to work hard to figure things out. For a while at Intercom, I was essentially doing two jobs during my transition from data analyst to engineer. The team still needed analytics support and we hadn’t backfilled the role yet. At the same time, I wanted to prove that I could keep up with the feature commitments I made towards our weekly sprints. For four months, I worked a lot of weekends and 11 hour days. There are usually many people who want to transition between roles at a company, and teams only have the capacity to mentor a limited number of people. If you work in finance or consulting, chances are you’re no stranger to long hours. Use that tolerance for the grind to learn more and be faster than the people around you. Make sure you’ll like the job For better or for worse, I think there are a lot of qualities about product management that make it very attractive to smart, motivated, but ultimately confused people. I’m not suggesting you need to have had a long burning passion for products to be a product manager (though I’m sure it’d help) but you should know what realistically what the role entails. For as enticing as being the “ ” is, there are just as many people out there saying “it’s not as glamorous as you think it will be.” And trust me, all that becomes very apparent as you’re setting up your company’s JIRA instance or when you have to be the one always . CEO of the product saying “no” This is a case where spending time in roles that are adjacent to product management is very helpful. It’ll expose you to product managers so you can see if their day-to-day life is something that you’ll actually like doing. Move toward roles that are closer to the product Be deliberate about moving closer to roles that will bring you closer to the customer and the product. If you are technical, spending time in software engineering is probably the best way to transition to product management be successful afterwards. Knowing how software is built is an invaluable asset when you’re working with engineers or trading off impact and difficulty. If you’re not technical (and don’t want to commit the time to learning), customer success/customer support positions are great positions that bring you in the trenches and expose you to exactly what customers are experiencing day in and day out. and And when you do make the jump to product management, do it in the same company. It is infinitely easier for people who know you and the quality of your work to take a chance on you compared to people you have no relationship with. Do the job anyways There’s an oft quoted saying of how responsibility is taken, not given. Once you’ve gotten close to the product development process, take it upon yourself to pick up tasks that a PM would do: volunteer to write help center articles, participate in design review, sit in on customer calls. Think about how your company’s product could be better and give feedback to the PMs. Tell your manager or other leaders at the company that you’re interested in working in product. Your manager isn’t a mind reader, so you have to let her know what you want. And you’re much more likely to get what you want if you’re doing that job anyways. Outside of work, read — yes, read the canon but really just read . Twitter can be huge time suck, but I find that if you follow the right people, there’s no better source that surfaces already curated reading material. establishment startup and product anything Try out new products and be an early adopter whenever you can. Think about why you like certain product experiences and what makes other user flows confusing. I like to describe a PM’s job as making a very large amount of small decisions every day, and you need to develop opinions and taste to make those decisions. An addendum: Be really lucky I’ve worked hard over the last 3 years, but I’m very, very aware that a large portion of it was due to : lucky to be in a position where I could take risks in my career, lucky to have found great companies with people I could learn from, lucky to have encountered leaders and managers who were willing to take a chance on me. luck There’s no such thing as the perfect role for anyone, and to be honest I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. But comparing the way I felt about my job while working in finance with how I feel now as a PM, the difference is night and day. The most important thing that I’ve learned from this journey is what it feels like to enjoy what you do for a living. Because once you know what that feels like, you never want to lose that feeling again and that is what will drive you towards the right things.

From Pork Bellies to Product Management

Building a successful search takes more than technical smarts, but if done right is one of the most rewarding products you could work on. Everything is a search problem. From finding the keys in our pocket (thanks, AirTag) to looking up a long-lost lover on LinkedIn — seeking things and answers is a problem that predates civilization. When historians look back at our lives, they will proclaim how this was the time when . Our era marks the transition from search being used for survival to one of expanding our knowledge. humans industrialized search on a scale that touched every facet of our lives It’s hard not to see the impact. An average person conducts ; more times than I can remember to drink water. three and four searches each day is the most website on the planet, logging 5.6 billion searches daily. Google.com dominant approximately We have been looking for answers to life’s questions for centuries, but . To cope with the newfound convenience, we have honed skills for sifting the informational zeitgeist and learning to pose questions in ways a machine can understand. it’s never been so easy, expansive, and quick to do so “You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.” David Epstein, Range Servers, algorithms, and programming languages aid us in this struggle, a compass for mapping the optimal route from query to knowledge. For those of us building such search tools, our problem is knowing that when our users search for anything, there are . So, how best to approach this? few guarantees we will provide relevant answers The secret to a great search Being an excellent search product team is the same as being a great team for anything else. The : Understand and help your users solve a valuable problem and work from there. principles are almost cliche backward When my team and I built our first search engine on (Reference management software for researchers), the key to our unexpected success was understanding that Mendeley search was not just about helping academics find research papers. What was important was , leading to improved user retention and product growth. understanding that finding relevant results for our users was key to a better onboarding experience Thanks to focusing on longer-term product impact, we . Instead, we concentrated more on the holistic user experience and prioritized , such as explaining result relevancy or assisting users with choosing better keywords. didn’t get distracted by arbitrary goals like optimizing result relevancy features that built trust Had we doubled down on search , I doubt we would have achieved our double-digit growth and engagement. vanity metrics like response speed or % of clicks in the first 10 results I’ve noticed that many who enter the field of search have technical backgrounds and t’s not hard to understand why. Search products are inherently more technical, speculative and experimental than many other user-facing features. Having the skills to navigate the technical complexities of search, so you understand its limitations and capabilities is . However, , which blinds us to opportunities. a significant advantage when planning and working with engineers people tend to over-index on this knowledge For example, when building our search, the goal was to help our users become more productive. Doing a good job, we reasoned would . As a result, everything we chose to learn, research, build and measure around search was based on those goals, not vanity relevancy metrics like DCG (Discounted cumulative gain — a fancy way of measuring the number of clicks on the first couple of results). increase user engagement, retention and satisfaction Our role is to . connect a love of the problem with the available technology We need to be technical enough to understand the vocabulary of engineers, but not so much as to place restrictions on our goals based on any present technical limitations. To combat this, I would instead , e.g. Graph databases and general language models. Aim to build a product roadmap in the medium-term future, and you will always be prosperous. recommend planning around any given technology trend rather than its current absolute that anticipates what is likely to exist The other thing to understand is that . Users provide many perspectives, which ensure the quality of results will be interpreted very differently. Rarely are there single correct answers for everyone (a bit like real life). . everything in search is speculative Our users could provide different satisfaction levels for the same results for the same query on the same day Finding peace with the ambiguity of search work means discovering ways to . The best way to achieve this is by focusing on skills that facilitate robust working methods and ensure strong teamwork. reduce uncertainty In other words, : communicating, empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, dealing with ambiguity, inspiring others, and connecting deeply with users. practicing the “art” of product management in search more valuable than the “science” I can’t emphasize enough not to fall into traps like ensuring response times need to be under 100 ms or results need to be 80% accurate or whatever three-letter acronym metric is currently in vogue: DCG, eDCG, Rank K, MAP. I mean, be , but shouldn’t let them dictate goals. We need to remain user-focused, not search-focused. aware of them In many ways, search products are a . Like any good product team, . sum of destructions we need to predict a little bit at a time and then verify If you find yourself stuck for solutions, the best advice I can offer is to approach complex search problems by . building a platform where people can provide their raw components and tailor them to their needs For our teams, that means creating clarity and access to relevant information that help people make autonomous decisions. For our users, that means building flexibility into our tools to allow users to identify novel ways of solving their problems. . Sometimes we just need to build the tools, features, and ways of working that enable us to do things independently. We don’t always need to understand all the complexities of a user’s problem Search is the Best Product Interestingly, search . changes our perception of the world and our ability to live within it It changes to text, changes reading (thank you snippets), how to understand, and even what it means to be literate. Our readers can now easily find connections that an author never intended. “Search engines have become sense making engines, helping to chart, connect and explore infinite textual maps.” , founder of Ness Labs Anne-Laure Le Cunff Really what a search is, is . a bunch of little problems with a bunch of little solutions Building such products brings the responsibility of knowing that . These are opinions from which we formulate praise for our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts, and our highest hopes. (Paraphrasing philosopher Richard Rorty, 1989) we enable anyone to form opinions that justify their actions, beliefs, and lives Our greatest challenge as search people is that users are messy. We have to work knowing that . The challenge becomes . user queries are highly variable and usually not well formulated understanding a user’s intent when even the user doesn’t know what they want Philosophy rarely rhymes with software engineering, but a big part of building a search is figuring out what your user means. In the hope of more clicks, I see teams building ever more complex personalization, semantic and segmentation models that aim to filter out irrelevance and boost the familiar. Morally, I believe this is a mistake. Recommender or historical click boosting solutions built into search . assume that users wish their future results to depend on historical behavior It’s an assumption that if executed over a long enough time and limits our ability to express ourselves. One of my favorite philosophers, Isiah Berlin, would call this an attack on our — the set of words we carry about that justifies our actions, our beliefs, our sense of the world, and our place within it). We would call this an “echo chamber”. robs individuals of optionality final vocabulary If you plan to do such things, always . , for example, released a feature that allows you to your recommendations. It’s not only good for society but also good for business. ensure you do so transparently Medium.com understand and refine I’ve found that the . “If your model will suffer from perfect transparency with customers, you’re in an unbeatable position,” venture capitalist Jesse Beyroutey. primary source of a company’s dominance is whether it designs its product and business model to be perfectly aligned with its customers’ interests not says Building a great search is the same as building anything else that’s great: assess the opportunity, then define what needs to be made. My day looks like many other product managers: I get up in the morning, check metrics, prioritize tasks for sprints, write user stories, refine with my team, and conduct research. . If you can fall in love with the problem, then being voracious in taking the time to learn and understand what makes search work becomes second nature. The qualities of a great search team are adaptability, optimism, and humility Here are some : resources I strongly recommend , Doug Turnbull and John Berryman (Book) Relevant Search , Max Grigorev What Every Software Engineer Should Know About Search , James Rubinstein Measuring Search: Metrics Matter , Daniel Tunkelang On Search Leadership James Rubinstein Search Product Management: The Most Misunderstood Role in Search? , Frode Hegland (Book) The Future of Text What’s so satisfying about working on search is . There are many exciting problems and pieces of technology to play with, plus, you get to work with intelligent people (engineers, analysts, data scientists). knowing that the tool you build brings people so much value Don’t feel discouraged if you don’t think you have the technical know-how for the job. . If nothing else, this is the most crucial skill I find technical PMs forget when working through tricky issues. Though in their defense, one could argue I’m simply being naïve and merely passing the hard work onto others. A great advantage non-technical product managers bring is a problem-first approach The of working with search is its ability to . The pace of change is fast, with new groundbreaking models or frameworks released monthly. There are many , and it’s to feel like the downside induce a sense of relative deprivation upon its makers technological distractions easy world is leaving you behind. Most of your daily work is and , deduplicated, synced, and working at scale. Plus, users will keep coming up with creative ways to break your service. less cutting-edge AI more keeping data up to date However, the great thing about . Every search solution can look and feel very different. search is it’s not a solved problem Doing a great job at search . How often can you say you were able to on something that achieved ? can mean the difference between a person having an informational revelation or missing a lifetime opportunity work that “No learner has ever found that he ran short of subjects to explore. But many people who avoided learning, or abandoned it, find that life is drained dry” Maria Montessori, Italian physician . Also published here

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ZEITGEIST PM

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Since n.d.

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