Coming into CS 177, I was excited to apply the design thinking skills that I had learned from taking my previous HCI classes. I also had no idea what it meant to be a product manager, despite many of the people I knew in the field of HCI preferring it over being a software engineer. In terms of teaching me the roles and expectations of a product manager, I thought that the class was effective in conveying the volatile nature of the job.
While I’ve worked on several HCI courses, I think that having assigned roles and being flexible with who had what role gave me a lot of perspectives. I think what was especially valuable was how each teammate had a different skill set, and being able to learn their take on different roles. For example, I came into the class with the most experience on the engineering-side. However, when my teammates with less engineering experience took on the role of engineering, I was able to learn a lot about their research on the tech stack. Alike, I expanded upon my Figma skills from our designer and many market skills from our product manager with a strong background in economics.
I think that one of the most valuable lessons that I’ve taken out of the class is to understand the constraints that designers and engineers have. When reading up on startups and their successes or failures, I’ve noticed that a common issue is miscommunication between the designers and engineers. I think that being both a designer and engineer, even on seemingly trivial tasks such as just researching the tech stack or making verbal contributions to the UI, gave a lot of perspective in helping understand how people operate within these roles. I thought that one of the most difficult and intimidating tasks of the PM was to evaluate whether or not how hard they should push engineers and designers to meet a reach goal. Through this class and the guest speakers, I gained a lot of clarity to try and not give hard deadlines for reach goals. Furthermore, I learned the importance of malleability as a project manager. It is necessary to be flexible and adaptive to the team I’m working with.
If we had more time, I wish I could have spent more time as the designer. After taking this class, I would love to try and work professionally as a product manager in some capacity. In terms of where my strengths are, I think I am definitely weakest when contributing UI/UX ideas. I would love more practice in doing user research, and being able to directly convert customer ideas into features of an actual product.
