Breaking into Product Management

Product Management is the hottest role in tech right now. Simply put, PMs turn ideas into realities. They’re in charge of product, vision, and strategy. But what does a PMs day-to-day actually look like? And how do you become one? Fortunately for us, Christina Gee (Babson ’17), has the answers.

Christina Gee began her career as a Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft before transitioning to a Program Management role where she worked on the welcome screens experience on Microsoft’s product line. Christina is currently a Product Manager at Affirm, a fin-tech company that operates as a financial lender of installment loans or consumers to use at the point of sale to finance a purchase.

The following interview summarizes Christina’s answers to FAQ from Babson, Olin, & Wellesley (BOW) students about breaking into product management.

Q: What exactly are Product Managers and what do they do?

A: PMs are at the intersection of UX, Tech, & Business. The PM is similar to being a conductor of an orchestra. People look to you to set the vision and pace and bring everyone together. They help to understand the user and and business problems and form a vision for how a product will help solve those problems and execute on building the problem with their team.

Q: What’s the difference between a Product Manager and a Program Manager?

A: Project managers organize the overall flow between departments. Product managers, on the other hand, can focus on either the vision and strategy of the product while managing the projects it takes to build the product.

Q: What courses at BOW will help me prepare for a career in PM?

A: Talking about coursework is great for interviews! Some great courses to register for are:

• Olin & Babson — Integrated Product Design
• Olin — Human Factors of Interface Design
• Olin — User Oriented Centered Design

Q: Do I need to have a technical background to become a PM?

A: Anyone with any background can become a PM. The most important skill for any PM to have is empathy. You will probably need to be able to read code, but not actually code yourself. You need a more high-level understanding of concepts if you plan to be a product manager in tech. (Ex. How do servers talk to each other?)

Q: Do you have any recommendations for finding a mentor and/or apprenticeship prior to getting a PM job?

A: Reach out to alumni in the BOW network! And even if they don’t have time to mentor you, they have PM friends who they can refer you to. I actually found one of my mentors by connecting with a Olin alumni at Microsoft and she helped refer me to my current mentor.

Q: How did you land a PM role at Microsoft upon graduation? How do you prepare for that interview and what made you stand out as an applicant?

A: I ended up at Microsoft after graduation but I was actually in a marketing position as a Business Intelligence Analyst. I interviewed for a few PM roles prior to accepting my marketing position at Microsoft but ended up getting rejected. After going through that interview process one thing that I noticed was that I struggled during the execution interviews. When someone asks you how you measure success I thought you just needed to think of a few metrics. Turns out you need to provide structure to these metrics. If a PM asks you how you would measure success of launching FB messenger instead of saying “# of messages per user and # of group chats” you could create a framework around how you group users: low, medium, high and go into the metrics that define each user (ex: avg # messages per day, initiated messages, # group chats they participate in) Then success could be moving the largest number of users — let’s say they were medium users, into high users and you’re still able to measure that. Based on that, I realized I needed to try to go into a more analytical role which is how I decided to become a Business Intelligence analyst.

Along the way I had a bunch of coffee chats with former marketers who transitioned into being PMs and came across a director who I connected with a lot. We kept in touch and when the time came and there was an opening on his team he invited me to be the very first person to interview for it. There are a few things that help you during the interview: always take a step back and ask the bigger picture questions. If someone is telling you to build an app that helps golfers find their golf balls ask “why” and “who are we designing this for”?

If it turns out this is an app for wealthy people who are beginner golfers then maybe building a golf-ball finding app isn’t the right need. These balls are getting lost because these new golfers have bad form. And they have bad form because no one is coaching them. So perhaps the golf-ball finding solution isn’t actually a good app idea and you should pivot to an app that coaches users on how to improve their swing. If you are able to show that you can think high level and empathize with users you can stand out as a candidate.

Q: How has working remotely been as a PM

A: It’s been tough — so much of your job as a PM is going to meetings and talking with teammates so I miss that in person interaction. But that being said, it’s nice that everyone is remote so that there is some inclusion when we’re having discussions. I imagine it’s much harder to work remotely if everyone’s physically in the same room together. But I’m really lucky to work at a company where people are super attentive. Everyone turns their web cameras on during calls to show they’re engaged and paying attention and whenever I need someone and I ping them on our internal chat communication they’re pretty quick to respond.

Q: What quantitative skills do PMs typically use?

A: It depends on what stage of the product lifecycle you’re at! Is this a new product? Is this a mature product? Is this a dying product? If it’s a new product you’re going to look for stuff like page views, click throughs and sign up rates. If it’s a mature product you may focus more on retention and engagement metrics. Typically it’s always good to use ROI because at the end of the day it is a company and you will be trying to make money but it can be more challenging to track like a Google Photos PM would have a hard time tracking ROI due to the nature that no one spends anything on the app. I’d always ask myself: What’s the “north star metric” we’re shooting for? If we had to distill it down to a single metric to look at on a dashboard, what would we use? How does this metric roll up to the greater mission that we as a company are trying to solve? When you’re A/B testing it’s good to brush up on stuff like statistical significance and confidence intervals.

Q: What was the transition like between working at Microsoft and Affirm? How did you know when you were ready to switch between companies?

A: It was a pretty big transition for me. Microsoft is a HUGE corporate company vs. Affirm is a large startup. I found that things move a lot faster at a startup which was what I was looking for. I also wanted to try to work in a space where there are a lot of user pain points — financing can be a huge headache and super anxiety inducing. Some concepts are not transparent like deferred interest or compound interest and I love that Affirm’s mission statement is to make honest financial products. This is super important as a PM because I can champion for stuff like transparency to users and help them to understand the full cost of the loan to reduce that anxiety. On the other hand, Microsoft was a great company to start my career. There was a lot more formal mentorship and structure in place on how to do basic PM stuff like running an effective meeting with cross-functional stakeholders, understanding how to ship a product etc. You know when you’re ready to switch companies when you feel like your growth has plateaued.

Q: What is your biggest piece of advice to aspiring PMs?

A: Network. I know it’s a word I would cringe at while I was at Babson and can seem very transactional but it’s what helps get your foot in the door. On average for every PM position there’s about 400 people that apply. That means your 1/300 chance gives you an even lower acceptance rate than getting into Harvard. By having people vouch for you or refer you then your resume at least gets seen by a recruiter and you can get an interview. Reach out to people for coffee chats! You’d be surprised how many people are willing to help you out. Especially if they’re from Olin, Wellesley or Babson!

If you would like to learn more about breaking into project management, check out Christina’s article: What I Wish I Knew as a Non-Technical Major Breaking Into PM or connect with her via LinkedIn!