Self Reflection

When I entered this class, I drew upon experiences from past internships and thought of product management as a loosely-held umbrella term for a troubleshooter of sorts. I still believe this, to an extent, but I kept an open mind to what Christina, the CAs, and the guest speakers had to share, so I am ultimately fortunate to better understand the various layers of responsibility that underly this “troubleshooter.”

I did my best to ask questions, but I found my greatest growth in the class from active listening (which was tough at times, but thankfully the breaks helped with that). Through listening, I continued to wander deeper into the depths of product management, and in the end, I learned that it can get as dynamic as you can imagine, if not more. I leave this class with more questions than answers, and thankfully I am content with that. I believe this is exactly the mindset you need to move forward as a product manager.

Unlike a traditional lecture-based/PSET class, I found that the primary deliverable in this class, our group project, did not necessarily or easily translate over what we learned in class. But this was not in the “lecture didn’t teach us” way (again, shoutout to the teaching team), but more so that our ideas for our product brought in their challenges that required us to stretch the idea of what was possible, and pivot A LOT, to meet our milestones. I think it was interesting that we also rotated roles during the quarter. While I wish I had more time in the product manager role (since it is a product management class), I feel that being in the designer and engineer roles definitely gave me a deeper appreciation for those roles and also the product manager role. I finally understood the “product manager wears many hats” saying, but I also understood how a product team balances and respects one another’s responsibilities within the team. While the manager’s flexibility can be a key determinant of success/progress, I now believe that flexibility within a team, especially its willingness to work with and support each other, is important as well. However, I think what distinguishes the PM, from my experience, is their ability to make the team aware of this and motivate their colleagues to work with each other and support them as needed.

Even though I learned more business than I have in a CS class, if I had more time, I would like to learn more about the business side of PMing and be able to flush out more of the business challenges that face our product. I would also like to learn what the next steps would be like for a product like this. Given our time constraint, I do not think we were able to conduct more thorough assumption testing to create a product that matches users’ needs, especially the chef side of our app (we mostly engaged with students).