My Self-Reflection

What a quarter it’s been! I’m writing this as I’m still hacking up a storm and recovering from the flu, but I still feel positive emotions when thinking about my experience in this class.

Coming into the class…

I had taken CS147 and 247G and tried a PM internship, so had some experience within the classroom environment working on these quarter-long projects and trying to “walk the product walk.” Wanted to sharpen up my PM skills and learn more from Christina.

 

Throughout the class

love my team — I’ve come to consider each of them a real friend. Everyone on our team is very good at empathizing, which is why I think we worked so well. We were proactive and communicative if one of us was going through a hard time, and others were able to support them whenever needed. We also made efforts to spend time together outside of class/work time, which I think helped to solidify our team chemistry and dynamic.

For me, the most challenging part was thinking about the more business-y numbers side of things: market sizing, resource allocation, projection, etc. I just found it so hard to get a sense of these things and feel confident making claims. But I’m glad that these were all things we had to think about, since PMs need to have this business understanding to understand product place and growth.

I really appreciated getting to hear from different guest speakers throughout the quarter, and also that they weren’t all white men. Since I’m still figuring out where I see myself full-time, it was hugely helpful to hear about all of their experiences in the real-world, both the successes and the fumbles.

When I was a PM intern, I wanted to be relatively more hands-on in the design realm than others, but I never had to build every component of every screen myself. For this class, though, I was the designer for the last few weeks, so I built the entire look and feel prototype in Figma. I had worked on team projects in Figma before, so it was definitely a challenge to build solo (then of course get feedback from teammates), but I’m really proud that I made these screens myself, and it’s given me a lot more confidence as a designer. I’m actually eager to learn more about design now, too.

 

Going forward…

I’ll definitely continue to pursue product roles, either in the intern or new grad capacity throughout the next couple of years as I wrap senior and coterm year. I learned that I really love being hands-on in the iteration product process; I love talking to people and gathering feedback, and using that information to see how these conversations translate to product features.

I also learned that I do not love the business, gronud-up stuff — my brain doesn’t work like that, and I don’t think it wants to. For instance, thinking about things like funding or staying afloat as a startup never felt particularly interesting to me; maybe because I didn’t have the real-world stakes to motivate it.

Overall, I learned a lot about what it would take to build a product from the ground-up in this course and am very happy I took it.

 

Special thanks!

  • Christina, for her expertise and mentorship throughout this fast-paced and, at times, stressful process. And for reminding us in this Stanford environment that it’s okay to take a breath.
  • Shana, for the kindness and listening she showed as our Head TA, always being attentive to student needs and looking out for our well being.
  • Gilbert, for being an awesome TA to work with throughout the quarter, who both put faith in us and pushed us to deliver even stronger work.
  • And, most of all, my three teammates Amrita, Neel, and Monique. They were all pillars for me throughout this process both in doing the work but also being a source of emotional comfort and warmth 🙂 Super grateful I got to be on this team.
Jin-Hee Lee

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