365 Days In a Product Manager’s Life: Day 7 — Discovering the Why.
After a very successful first week at my new job, I spent some time today to think about “why.” Why am I in this role? Why am I working on this specific product? Why do our users need a solution to their problem? The answers to these questions have inspired this Day 7 article within the series. Accordingly, I want to share a tiny piece of perspective on my why.
Looking back at my story, I wish I could’ve figured out my purpose and why early on to make the process shorter, but I definitely don’t regret anything. We learn things about ourselves and pick up exceptional lessons through every experience, which should be cherished. However, it is imperative to always self-assess and look back to ask yourself why things happened the way they did, both in your life and PM career. It all starts with curiosity.
Everything that I have learned and experienced in my life up to this moment has led me here. From a young age, I was absolutely thrilled about anything related to computers and building software. However, I ended up going to school for Finance. Weird right? This is the first time I mention this publicly; I was intimidated by the imaginary difficulty of passing math classes at a collegiate level if I pursue computer science or computer engineering. This was the last time I ever made a decision based on intimidation. After a couple of years working in Finance after college, I realized that I couldn’t have spent the rest of my life staring at excel spreadsheets and made a career switch into tech marketing. My experience in product marketing was great, but I was still curious about the why behind products. Accordingly, I decided to get into product management to get behind the wheel and become involved in the building process.
Curiosity fuels many of this world’s innovations and discoveries, and behind every curiosity is a reason. When the apple fell on Newton’s head, he didn’t disregard the incident as most people would; he stopped and asked why (at least this the story we know). This curiosity has led to one of the most important findings in human history and still impacts our lives daily; Netwon’s “why” created history. I am also sure that if we look at all the other greats in our history, we’ll find out that their “why” drove them to become who they are. This highlights the criticalness of having a strong purpose behind everything we do to translate it into productive impact. Stay curious, my friends!
