Final Self-Reflection – HomeFood

As a data analyst/data scientist, my previous internship experiences were mainly at start-ups. Without a clear boundary among different positions at these smaller companies, part of my job was coordinating between the business intelligence team and the engineering team since they often did not speak the same “language”. Back then, I thought I was taking up a lot of product managers’ responsibility by collaborating, coordinating, and communicating between teams and balancing different expectations among stakeholders. Those internship experiences constituted the most important reasons why I joined the class. I thought I was doing that part of my job pretty well, and I was a bit tired of my work as a data analyst pulling out different numbers on a daily basis with no say about higher-level decisions. Thus, I signed up for the class to learn more about product management and hoped to see whether it fit me.

At the beginning of the quarter, I learned a lot about what product management is and is not. Unlike many people who held misconceptions about product management with an emphasis on “product”, my misconceptions were centered around “management”. I wanted to learn more about product management because I wanted to turn data analysis results into business insights and actionable plans, and I would like to have the authority to say, “ok, here is what we are going to do next” to the entire team. To my dismay, I learned that product managers have no authority but responsibility. Another important thing I learned about product management was how much the responsibilities of product managers centered around product. Looking back, my misconception seemed really silly. It looked like what I wanted to manage back then was not product but people. However, from the class, I learned that being a product manager is about understanding and supporting user needs, monitoring the market and developing competitive analyses, envisioning the roadmap of a product and aligning different stakeholders on that shared vision, etc.

I put what I learned about product management into our group project, HOMEFOOD, through which I not only gained additional perspective on product management, but also participated in designing and implementing the product. I got to experience the most rewarding part of product management — trying to deliver products that provide real value to real people — through experience prototypes and assumption testing. Compared to my job as a data analyst speculating what users might need, I simply went out, talked to targeted users, and asked them directly about what they wanted. Despite all those misconceptions about product management I had, I found from the class that the ultimate goal I want to accomplish remains consistent — deliver products that provide real value to real people. By rotating roles of product manager, designer, and engineer in our team, I also figured out the role I would like to take on in achieving my goal in the future is being a designer. I would like to bring about what users want to them directly by participating in the design process myself. To that endeavor, I applied to several Ph.D. programs in learning science and technology and wanted to learn more about designing educational technologies for traditionally disadvantaged student groups. Even though my goals seem entirely different now than when I joined the class, I really learned so much to get here.

If we had more time, I would like to learn more from the business perspective of the product development process. Although it is not tied directly to my future career goal as a designer, what we learned already on the business side in class gave me a more comprehensive understanding of the design process. I believe the business perspective will also continue to play a crucial role in the future if I want to scale the use of the learning tools I design.