TLDR; I took a product management class (IEOR 186) at UC Berkeley during my junior year of undergrad, interned part-time as a PM intern for a year at a startup, and then interned as a PM at Nasdaq in New York. This led to my product manager role at Aisera, and I’m excited to see where this leads! 

Throughout life, I wavered among a multitude of career choices: journalist, pediatrician, artist, software engineer, consultant, marketer, entrepreneur, designer, and the list continues. After the chaotic transition from high school graduation to a new undergrad career at UC Berkeley, I finally narrowed down my career prospects to roles within design, marketing, and software engineering. Yet none truly intrigued me in just the right way. 

Seeing my dilemma, my friends introduced me to the SCET Certificate in Entrepreneurship & Technology at Berkeley. I then discovered, applied to, and was accepted into an exclusive Product Management class taught by Ken Sandy, who at the time was the VP of Product at MasterClass and is now an incredible product leader and speaker in the PM community. The semester-long class had all 30 or so of us from various undergrad and graduate backgrounds (an even mix of engineering, business, and design) divided into groups of 5-6, learning how to design, wireframe, and prototype our own MVPs based on each group’s startup idea. For those curious, I worked on a mobile app for networking using selfies and social media platform integration in order to better remember people you meet at networking events or other large gatherings, called “Briefmeet.” (That can be a story for another time.)

By the end of the class, I was infatuated with all that product management had to offer! I soon learned of conDati, an early stage marketing analytics startup of only about 30 strong. Before long, I was working in my first Silicon Valley startup as a general intern trying a little bit everything – platform engineering work, UI/UX engineering, data science, QA, marketing, and product management. Though it was valuable learning among such diverse teams, I loved being at the center of everything the most. I led the QA team and interned in PM for a little over a year – later transitioning into another PM intern role at Nasdaq, which finally led to my most recent full-time PM role at Aisera.   

The advice I often give to people who want to break into product is always to do the research to see if PM is for you, take a class if you can, and if you can’t break into product at a large company right off the bat, start at a startup. I like to think that product management is a developed mindset forged through seeing a business through its every aspect, because a PM’s day-to-day responsibilities can often be something different at every company. As I’m still relatively early in my career, I do ponder where product management may take me in the future – some product people later become principal PMs, group PMs, new founders, venture capitalists, CPOs, or even all of the above at some point in time. Being in product provides the flexibility to fully see a company from perspectives I’d never have experienced working in teams such as engineering or marketing. This provides the ability to more easily pivot into other leadership roles in the future, which I’d hope to use to lead my own business someday.