Initially, I thought my CS 177 experience would be similar to that of a product manager at a big tech company. However, in reality, my product management experience was more similar to that of a co-founder or a product manager at a start-up. To my surprise, the class ended up being more focused on entrepreneurship (i.e., how do I de-risk a business?) than product management (i.e., how do I get to XYZ metric?). Although this was unexpected, I do believe my takeaways from CS 177 are valuable. I learned a lot about myself—this class made me more aware of what type of environment I want to work in and provided more clarity about my career goals in product management.
Although the roles were rotating, I noticed I naturally am a product manager or designer in a group project. These are the two roles that seem intuitive to me. In my opinion, my value-add contributions revolved around slide creation, look-and-feel prototyping, and user research synthesis. When I was in the engineer role, it was challenging but very rewarding. I learned a lot from my peers who had a stronger technical background. It was a great experience working on a generative AI product, such as Flowy, because there were many technical uncertainties we had to deal with, as a group. I believe that the Flowy team is addressing a very real problem, but the execution of the solution remains to be an evolving challenge.
Although I was aware of the frameworks shared in class, I learned a lot about the power of consistently applying these frameworks to a problem. It’s like training a muscle; it’s challenging and a bit painful but in the end, it’s worth it. The frameworks, such as the participatory roadmap, the three types of prototypes, user story mapping, assumption mapping, and learning/testing cards are tools that I hope to apply to ambiguous situations, whether that be at a big company or a start-up.
If I had more time, I would love to implement agile methods in my group project (i.e., syncs, JIRA tickets) and gain more visibility in the technical implementation towards the end of the project. This was difficult to do, given the time constraints of the class. I also wish I spent more time applying the appropriate conflict resolution processes. We often had conflicts within the group but we dealt with them in an ad-hoc manner because we were tight on time.
