MY JOURNEY INTO PRODUCT
One of the most common questions I get is how I got my start in product management. To be honest, it was complete luck and at the time I didn’t know the opportunity would actually turn into a really fun and rewarding career.
Check out the podcast
Check out the Path Into Podcast episode where I go into greater detail with Aaron Airmet and discuss how I got started, what it was like and the moment I knew I loved this job.
One day in 2003…
Debbie Klarfeld walked up to me asked if I’d join her in her office. At the time I was working in business operations for a company which was called USIS. I didn’t know Debbie but I knew she was my boss’ boss which scared me.
Debbie: “I’m starting a product management team and I think you will be a great fit, wanna join?”
I didn’t know how to respond. I had heard about Debbie but had never met her, she was acting on advice from Dean Johnson who had given me my first opportunity to move into the professional world so I figured it was a safe place.
Me: “Maybe, can you pay me more?”
That was my response, I wanted more money. Truth is, I froze and was horrified at how I responded. I didn’t know what product management actually was and wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t say PROJECT management.
And that is how I got my start in product.
Oh, the trends I’ve seen in my career!
I had the good fortune of being one of the first SaaS product managers. No, really! I started my career before the term SaaS was coined and just a couple years after the concept of using the internet to deliver a service began. Since then, I’ve experienced a lot of trends in product management, development and SaaS.
My first PM role can be defined as scrappy. Unlike today, we didn’t have tools, data or even communities of other product managers so we had to make a lot of decisions based on our gut. Here is what it was like operating back in the early 2000s:
Patterns were not even a blip on the product radar. There were no established design patterns, UI patterns, research patterns. Everything was new to everyone.
There were no designers or even the concept of design. Design was done by developers. (gasp)
We developed everything in Waterfall. The Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/) had been published two years earlier but none of us were even aware of this newfound process.
SaaS was really just a sign-in page where the users could sign in and get some file which was typically produced manually.
Product managers spent most of their time working on PRDs.
Email was our only method of communication (Outlook) and Excel ruled the day.
We had desktop computers and landline phones on our desk.
Finally, what little research was completed was done face-to-face (really rare) or over the phone.
My first job
I started my professional career at USIS in business operations. Dean Johnson took a chance on me and hired me to do some research / analyst work on a set of criminal investigatory products. USIS was a strange entity, it had been part of the OPM (government agency) until 1996 when it was privatized to reduce the size of the civil service workforce.
USIS provided investigations on people and entities to ensure a safer workforce. USIS had contracts with the government and commercial businesses and I worked for the group which did background screening for pre-employment purposes which meant we would look into your background and share information with your employer so they could reduce the risk of hiring the wrong person.
It was just 18 months after 9/11 and no employer wanted to hire the next terrorist. Nor did they want to hire a sex offender or a trucker with a history of DUIs. So USIS produced ‘dossiers’ on potential employees. These dossiers included criminal histories, work and education backgrounds along with many other types of information. The products I managed were criminal background checks and they were
Ordered via our app
Fulfilled manually by checking with thousands of sources
Delivered via our app
This was the very early stages of product management and it was the early days of SaaS. In fact, we didn’t even call it SaaS. It was just the ‘website’ which is funny to say today.
I was hooked
I didn’t seek out this career, it just fell into my lap but I do recall the day I fell in love with it. It was sometime around 2005 / 2006 and I was sitting in a dingy, windowless office I shared with 5 other people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was reviewing revenue numbers for a new product I had advocated for and launched just about 90 days earlier. It took me a year to convince the executive team to make this investment so I really stuck my neck out.
Obviously, I believed in this new product but never realized just quickly it’d be a success. 90 days after the launch and we were already looking at a $1m ARR run rate!
Guardian: the first commercially available national sex offender registry
Employers don’t want to hire sex offenders - especially employers with vulnerable populations like education and healthcare. At the time, verifying that a potential employee wasn’t a registered sex offender wasn’t easy because the information wasn’t centralized. It was about 10 years after states started to create registries and sex offenders were known to move from state-to-state to avoid having to register in the new state and employers couldn’t afford to check the registries of all 50 states because it was expensive and time consuming.
I was managing a host of criminal background products including checks for sex offenders. Every time I met with a client they asked if we could just conduct a national search so I knew there was a tremendous need for a national solution.
At the same time, I quietly been tracking the development of the National Sex Offender Registry which was sponsored by a federal agency and designed to search all states in a single search. This new site searched the registry of all 50 states which is exactly what our clients wanted. After some rigorous testing we deemed the site credible and we began offering the national option.
Packaging, Pricing and Cannibalization analysis:
This was the first product I had created and it was a massive success but it wasn’t easy. I had to advocate for the investment an because it was a new type of product replacing other products there were real concerns of revenue cannibalization. This was my first experience in working with packaging and pricing so seeing the revenue growth was especially rewarding.