Category: Career Talk

What happens when a product manager stops helping other people build their vision — and starts building her own?

Read and find out. 😎

☕ 7 min read

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I’ve spent my career helping companies figure out what to build, why to build it, and how to make it matter to real customers.

As a Software Product Manager, you get comfortable living in the tension between a half-baked idea and something that actually provides value. You learn to ask hard questions, say No to half-baked ideas, and hold the line between what customers want and what’s technically possible.

What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently? All of that experience is genuinely useful when you’re the one starting the company.

This is Part 1 of a series documenting my journey as a new founder — building a platform for creative small businesses. I’m sharing the messy bits, the pivots, and the moments of doubt. Because if I don’t write this down, I think it will all start to blend together.

The “I’ve Always Had an Idea” Phase

Like a lot of people in product, I’d been quietly contemplating the pivot to entrepreneurship. But starting a company always felt like a lot. Too much risk. Too many unknowns. Never the right idea. A jump that was a little too big because I’ve always been working within a team.

Then in 2024, I was thinking about my next career move. My current job was coming to an end. After a couple years in an enterprise setting, I wanted to work within a small, fast-moving team, but the right opportunity wasn’t showing up. And then, completely out of nowhere, someone messaged me on LinkedIn.

“She was also based in Chilliwack, had a vision for helping small businesses find local customers — and needed someone with a tech and product background to help bring it to life.”

That was Hillary. We met at a local coffee shop, shared stories and started talking about an idea. Why is it so hard to find locally made things? As a customer, you have to stumble upon local makers. The longer we talked, we realized, we could build something to make it easier.

Hillary brought finance, business consulting experience, and an existing vendor community from a six-week pop-up event she’d run. I brought the product lens and tech experience.

We opened a Word doc and started roughing out our thinking. Our unofficial PRD — product requirements document, for anyone not living in PM-land.

Step One: Prove the Concept

The first real question in any product management process is to outline the problem. And then asking “can we build something that proves this is worth building?”. That’s the POC — proof of concept.

Our first decision was choosing a platform. Do we build or buy? Maybe there was already a platform out there that could add our branding to. We needed something with enough flexibility to test our core idea without draining all resources and locking us into a dead end. After researching options, I landed on WordPress.

I’d recently got hands on experience with it, while building my own portfolio website. It had the plugin ecosystem we needed and a low barrier to get moving.

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Defining the MVP (And Actually Meaning It)

Here’s where my product management background paid off immediately. It’s so easy to ideate and dream of the perfect solution. I knew that “MVP” gets abused constantly. People call their fully-featured, took-eight-months product an MVP. An MVP is not a fully functioning product. That’s not what MVP means. It’s a minimum viable product.

For us, the problem we’re addressing is vendor visibility: a vendor profile page and a location-based map search.

That’s it. Could a local customer find a vendor near them? Could a vendor show up on the platform? If yes — we had something to put in front of our focus group.

Hillary and I collaborated on the design and customer journey. I dove into customer journeys and UX. Then finding WordPress plugins that fit our needs. By November, we had a working prototype.

Yay! If you want to see it in action -> Visit my archive of the POC

The Pivot (There’s Always a Pivot)

Here’s the part was reminded of: the first version of the thing will probably not be the right version. And that’s ok.

We had a prototype. A map and a couple sample vendor profiles. But our prototype had a real problem: it looked rough on mobile screens.🤮 The available WordPress themes didn’t reflect our brand, and the user experience on small screens was clunky. For a platform meant to serve busy vendors and local shoppers browsing on their phones, this was a blocker — not a nice-to-have fix.

So we went back to the drawing board.

“We needed to pivot. Failing fast is good.”

I went back to the platform research, looking for other options. We needed more control and customization. I started researching no-code development frameworks as a way to build products quickly.

If you haven’t explored this world, it’s genuinely remarkable. These tools take development concepts and make them visual — development knowledge without the need to learn specific syntax. It was exactly in my wheelhouse. And a fun challenge to get back into development.

I dove into Bubble.io tutorials. Within a 3 weeks, I learned the framework and rebuilt the MVP: mobile-first, clean design, intuitive UX.

It was exactly what we envisioned and much faster to deliver.

The “Wait, Can I Actually Do This?” Moment

I’m not going to pretend there wasn’t a moment of genuine surprise when it all came together. I felt a mixture of fear and excitement. And I found myself thinking: can this really be happening?

As a product manager, you’re often surrounded by talented engineers doing the actual building. You influence and guide, but the code isn’t yours. Building this prototype myself — watching the thing work because of decisions I made and work I did — felt different in a way I didn’t expect.

“Do I take the leap and fully commit?“

It also came with a decision I couldn’t delay any longer. My contract was coming to an end, and an extension wasn’t looking exciting. I had to choose: jump in and give this everything, or keep it as a side project while taking a safer full-time role.

I’ll tell you what I decided in Part 2 — but I think you can probably guess.

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We’re living in an era where the technical barriers to getting something off the ground have genuinely never been lower. What would have required a full-stack developer and $100K ten years ago can now be validated with a no-code prototype and a few weeks of focused effort.

Whether the product is a success, is a whole other story.

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I get asked what is it that I do. A lot. I’m a Product Manager.

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This is typically met with a blank stare, unless the person has directly worked with a “PM” before. I frequently have to follow up with further explanation.

What is a Product Manager?

Depending on who has asked this question, I’ll give a slightly different answer.

I do this because, context is key. Product Management is a complex role. Someone that isn’t familiar with SAAS or software development might get lost in a lengthy answer.

There are countless articles out there that try and explain what Product Managers do. Just type “product management” into a search engine.

All three of the statements are true. All are part of the bigger picture of what it takes to make product successful.

The truth is, it’s hard to explain.

And it’s hard to explain because Product Management at it’s core has a lot of variation within the job responsibilities. It all depends on the company and product.

If a product is new, a role may skew towards Sales and Marketing, until a product-market fit is found. For more established products with a stable user base, a Product Manager will need to focus on execution and optimization.

The way a company structure’s it’s Product team also has an impact on the responsibilities of each person on the team. In his article “Are Product Managers an expensive luxury now?”, Alex McMurray examines the value Product Managers can provide.

Product Managers can serve as gatekeepers – for decisions at least. They offer critical analysis between customer needs and technological capabilities. This leaves engineers to do what they do best; coming up with the solution.

It’s important to have the right ratio of Product and Engineering. Otherwise, companies run the risk of too much overhead and undermining the value of a Product Manager.

How do you make Product Management a career?

By the nature of Product Management, there is endless career growth. That is quite an exciting concept, isn’t it? The skills of a Product Manager are transferable between industries, markets and the product itself.

The 280 Group touched on this point in their recent “Growing your Product Management Career in an Uncertain Economy” webinar. Companies hiring strategically will focus on attitude, curiosity, and problem solving approach.

Within Product Management, there is also an opportunity to focus on specific aspects. Product Managers can specialize in :

• Product Marketing,
• Product Development (Product Owner),
• Product Growth,
• GTM.

Switching to new companies is an excellent way to accrue skills and knowledge.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the only way to grow in Product Management is by changing companies every 2-3 years. In my own experience, I’ve been able to take advantage of career growth as the product matured. My responsibilities shifted as the product grew into a product line. I was able to take on roadmap and strategy responsibilities that were previously held by more senior members of the team.

I realized I liked managing a product more than managing people

There is another common type of career growth that I should mention. In most business careers, taking on “people management” responsibilities is the only option. I made the shift myself as a way to gain leadership experience. As the VP, Product at Buyatab, my responsibilities were focused on managing a team of Product Managers rather than Product Management itself.

After a couple years though, I realized I liked managing a product more than managing people. That is the great thing about Product Management. Career growth doesn’t have to be linear.

What’s next for me?

Throughout my latest job search, I’ve answered the standard set of questions. It’s mostly variations of “What are you looking for in your next role?”. I usually answer based on what I’ve seen in the job description.

There was one conversation though that took a different approach. The person I was talking to didn’t have a specific role to fill. I was curious about the team he was building and distinctions within Product Management roles. He asked me to describe my best day.

Pause. I took a minute to consider.

What’s your takeaway?

I hope that after reading this you have a better understanding of Product Management. If you managed to read this whole article, there are plenty more out there. Checkout ProductPlan’s Ultimate Guide to Product Management for a more detailed explanation.

If you love change and variety as much as I do, maybe Product Management is for you. I love connecting with others in the Product community and can go on talking about the nuances for hours.