I have a concern that our growing use of AI to double or triple productivity and efficiency is making us lose our ability to think critically.

I saw early signs of this just after a few weeks of using AI for work but it really solidified for me when I was talking to a childhood friend (let’s call him Jeremy) who happens to work as a Senior Software Engineer. His engineering org uses Claude Code and their company, right down to the CEO, are huge proponents of leveraging AI to maximize productivity and efficiency.

I was sharing with Jeremy how I’ve been leveraging AI when it comes to requirements gathering, ticket creation and, at times, designing. He shared that he hasn’t written a single line of code in a month and that was common amongst his dev circle. He explained to me once he chooses his AI model (i.e. ChatGPT 5.5 / Opus 4.7), he prompts (via his voice) what he wants the AI to do, and even the bugs he wants it to fix, with not much investigation or intervention. Where he jumps in is in the validation and testing. That’s when he sees whether it’s slop or not.

While this may sound “lazy”, it’s strangely rewarded which makes it insidious. With these AI tools, the bar is also set higher where there’s increased pressure to release more features and functionalities. In exchange for that execution speed, we’re outsourcing the heavy lifting — and paying for it with our critical thinking.

I’ve had other SWE friends tell me that they have token quotas they’re expected to hit or else, they’d have consequences. That being said, they’re being monitored and in-house AI models are being trained on how SWEs are using it, increasing the chances of getting replaced by an AI if their employer wants to - but that’s a conversation for a different day.

All these said, whether one should or shouldn’t use AI needs the right judgement.

I’ve made it a practice to prompt (via my voice) how to respond to messages that are concerned or have urgency to them that I have to push back on, balancing the line of direct yet diplomatic. That’s obviously a message I want to get the wording exactly right on.

However, there are other instances, where I’m writing requirements, PRDs, where I’m referencing multiple resources — meeting transcripts, one off conversation notes, and other confluence pages, and I forced myself to think through the right scope and requirements for the different phases (i.e. MVP, Phase 2, Phase 3, etc.), the right tone and language for business and engineering teams, and how I’d present it to the broader team, highlighting the “what” and the “why”. It’s tempting to have AI do this all with a series of prompts but it’s that thinking that snowballs into outsourcing your responsibilities which could get dangerous.

How is it dangerous you may ask?

In certain pockets where I’ve had AI synthesize requirements (rather than me doing it), it gets obvious very quick when you’re being pressure tested on your requirements' rationale and you have to defend it. I’ve noticed that when I haven’t done the deep thinking work on my requirements and I’m pressure tested on them, my responses don’t land the way I want them to.

Product managers earn (or lose) credibility on exactly this: how well they can explain and defend the line from mission and vision, to roadmap, to the features they ship. When a PM can’t stand behind the requirements they wrote, that credibility takes a hit. Not always — but that’s been my experience.

Even though these are not blaring red flags, it’s worth questioning if it snowballs from here. I’ve started to re-evaluate my AI use strategy so I’m not outsourcing the key details that are uniquely my responsibilities vs. mundane work that doesn’t ask for the same level of in depth thinking.

I’ll leave you with this question: to what extent are you outsourcing the critical thinking aspects of your responsibilities?

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It’s not every day that I think to myself, “wow, if not for this piece of technology, there’s no way I would’ve accomplished [specify goal].” It’s technology that gives you back not just time but real energy. I want to talk about those.

Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD)

I know FSD isn’t accessible to everyone, but it’s worth discussing. Letting an AI drive and steer for you isn’t everyone’s comfort level, but it cuts driving fatigue dramatically — especially on long trips. When my commute was 30 miles each way, I relied on FSD almost entirely.

Most recently, I drove from Boston to New Jersey — easily a 5-hour trip — and let FSD handle 80% of it. I’ve noticed it performs best on highways. What surprised me: it changes lanes confidently, consistently reads what’s happening around you, and reacts immediately to things like cars cutting you off. I also appreciate that its driving style is reserved. That said, it doesn’t do as well with city driving in Boston.

The drive to New Jersey felt like a 2-hour trip instead of a 5-hour one. Few pieces of technology surprise me like this — it genuinely gives you more of your day back.

Personalized AI Agent

This one takes some setup, but building a personalized AI agent for your day-to-day tasks is a real unlock. One thing mine helps with is monitoring my email for anything important — I’m in the middle of wedding planning, so I have it check my inbox every hour.

I’ve also set it up to draft and post for me on LinkedIn, which makes posting far less tedious. Because the agent tracks my professional progress, it turns those learnings into social media content that we collaborate on. It sends me a batch of drafts Saturday morning; once I approve them, it posts on a regular cadence through the week.

It’s still something I’m tweaking, but I’ve found it incredibly helpful. I don’t have the capacity right now to draft every single post myself, so being able to use the agent this way is huge.

The real shift for AI — beyond the prompt-and-chat interaction — is when you start giving it autonomy. Autonomy is when you remove yourself from the task entirely, when you outsource it. That’s where the beauty is. It’s when you’re not wrestling with the tech, when it blends seamlessly into your life. That’s the point. That’s what FSD does for me, and that’s what I’m aiming for with my AI agent.

Prior to working in product management, I thought “important” initiatives were simply approved and prioritized, and product managers just needed to own the release of that product or feature. However, from my personal experience, it’s rarely as straightforward as that. There’s competitive analysis, aligning product and business objectives, identifying players that need to be involved, aligning priorities across different product teams, ROI analysis, and more.

In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the difficult questions and situations that Product Managers face as they plan and orchestrate the development of a new product or feature. In these scenarios, there’s never a “right answer,” but rather the “best answer” given the specific context. One thing my product manager mentor told me is that there are never right decisions, only right trade-offs.

Here are some of the common challenges that Product Managers encounter:

What’s More Important — Business Objectives or Client Requests?

Before you jump up and say “DUH, CLIENT NEEDS!”, it’s worth exploring the trade-offs.

As a Product Manager, you represent the voice of the client. However, you’re still accountable for achieving business objectives. This gets difficult when company and client goals don’t align. What do you do?

This is probably one of the most stressful decisions. One thing I was taught early on was to ask myself: Will this project help us keep the lights on? (which is probably the most important question). Other helpful questions I ask myself for client-specific initiatives are:

• Can this solution be used by others, or is it specific to this client and their setup?

• What’s the consequence if we delay this initiative by, let’s say, a quarter?

• Does this client represent a large enough portion of our revenue that we have to address their needs immediately?

I find these questions helpful in deciding which product initiatives to tackle next. Always rely on data and numbers to determine priorities.

Leaning too much towards company objectives, such as improving internal processes, can upset clients who may feel neglected. On the other hand, prioritizing client needs too much can lead to developing too many custom features, which is very expensive and often not scalable to other clients.

Whenever possible, it’s best to align product and company goals to find a balance between client needs and business objectives.

Aligning Priorities with Dependent Teams

This is common when working on large, complex initiatives that require multiple technical teams. Often, you need to go to each individual technical team, present the business case, and get buy-in. However, these teams have their own product roadmaps and initiatives they’re being measured on. What do you do?

In such instances, I’ve had to engage with the VPs and leadership of those teams, presenting my business case and highlighting how the initiative satisfies client needs and advances business objectives. I typically have product leadership from my team attend to provide support.

The goal is to have an engaging and in-depth conversation about your initiative versus other prioritized initiatives to determine what will yield the greatest value.

HIPPO = The Highest Paid Person's Opinion

If there’s anything more harmful to true innovation, it’s the HIPPO. Opinions should ideally not drive solutions; a data-driven approach and collaboration among technical teams, designers, and other relevant stakeholders should.

However, that may not always be the case. So, now what?

If you know you’re going to a meeting where a HIPPO tends to lead product direction with their opinion, come prepared with data and research. The best response to an opinion is grounded in data: what competitors are doing, industry trends, client requests, and any numbers that support your proposal. Demonstrating you’ve done your homework and research can counterbalance strong opinions.

By viewing product decisions as “trade-offs” rather than the “right answer,” stakeholders can think more critically about the product direction. Navigating these questions is never easy, but it gets easier with experience.

I hope you found this helpful. If you made it this far, comment “🤓” to let me know you made it to the end. Please like, share, and subscribe!

When I moved to a more established company, I was working on a fully functioning product that companies were already paying for. Instead of asking, "What brand new product can we introduce?" the question became, "How do we improve this existing product to bring more value?" Moreover, unlike startups, established technology has significantly more resources to launch successful products (using existing playbooks) and had the manpower to quickly address/resolve any issues with the product.

Despite these differences, the core role of a product manager (PM) remains the same: figuring out what to build and why, and determining which technical teams to involve in the process. Whether you're transitioning to a large established technology company from a startup or vice versa, these are some ways the PM role is similar in both environments:

Emphasizing with Users:

In startups, engaging with users is often more straightforward because you're in discovery mode, eager to talk to anyone and everyone. You're trying to understand who your users are, what to build to have the highest impact, and what the right business model would be. Within a week, you can interview users, pinpoint their biggest issue, and prototype a solution. This intense, fast-paced iterative approach is essential for startups to find product-market fit and scale.

For established technology companies, the process is more structured, and direct communication with users is less frequent. You'll often go through account managers and need to ensure the right stakeholders are on the call to have meaningful conversations about user issues. Regardless of how you get in front of your users, as a PM, your goal is the same: identify users' problems and find opportunities that will yield the most results.

Measuring Impact:

PMs consistently ask themselves: how do we measure success? There are two types of data to measure impact: qualitative and quantitative. For established companies, measuring impact tends to be easier because they have the infrastructure to track product performance, such as existing analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics, FullStory, etc.). I’ve found the volume of data to be there, and the work becomes selecting the right data to support your storytelling. Not to mention, you'll have a team of analysts and UX designers to support you with quantitative and qualitative research, respectively.

In startups, measuring performance isn't as straightforward. Often, I’ve had to rely on qualitative data, such as usability testing and brutally honest feedback, to gauge impact. As a Product Manager, this is where having thick skin is really needed.

Now, while it is possible to set up analytics, it wouldn’t be nearly as helpful given early stage startups don’t have an existing user base and volume of data to work with.

Cross-functional Collaboration:

The cross-functional nature of the PM role remains the same in startups and established companies. At a minimum, you partner with engineers and designers when building products. However, the scope of responsibility and speed of execution differ.

In established companies, roles and responsibilities are clearly defined, with specific ownership of a product or product area. Product launches happen at a slower pace due to the number of teams that need to be involved and more structured processes. When launching new products, it isn’t uncommon for legal, compliance, finance and/or PR to get involved. Established companies have a brand and standard to maintain, so while there product launches, it's not nearly the same speed or volume as it is in a startup.

In a startup, the team is small and intimate. In my startup days, I would work directly with a front end engineer, back end engineer, designer and product owner. Because of limited resources, I would often wear multiple hats. There were some days I did light wireframing, QA testing, and, even, backlog grooming - depending on what was needed at the tome. We moved quickly, launching new features and iterations almost weekly, embracing a "fail fast" mentality.

Whether it’s working in an established company or startup, you can gain valuable product management skills. Whether one is better than the other really depends on your personality and career development goals.

I hope you found this helpful. If you made it this far, comment “🤓” to let me know you made it to the end. Please like, share, and subscribe!

When I was working at a seed-stage startup, I was thrown into the fire. It was like literally drinking water from the water hose - so much so that at the end of the working day, I would go to the living room.. lay on the floor… and stare at the ceiling for a good 30 minutes. But don’t get me wrong, it was a good ass time because I was working with ambitious folks.

Nevertheless, with so much going on (and so much to be done), where do you start? This is what I did and something you can do too: Introduce the the voice of the consumer

Emphasizing with users as a team

One of the very best ways to add value immediately is to bring in the voice of your users. How? Through user interverviews and usability tests.

These frameworks are powerful because it help you answer these questions:

• Who are our users - their motivation, habits, and problem?

• What are our user’s trying to do that they can’t?

• What tools are they using to complete their task?

• how do our users feel as they’re trying to accomplish their ask?

• What are the potential opportunity to support and address our users’ problems?

There’s more than enough resources online to learn about these UX frameworks are but here’s why you want to apply them. First, Let’s talk about user interviews: holding 1-on-1 conversations with target users to understand their habits, motivation, and problems to identify our opportunities.

Bringing the team into the conversation

Introducing user interviews does a couple of things for you but most importantly - it helps the team emphasize with your target users. Now, it’s a powerful thing to include the team into your 1-on-1 conversation with users. Pro tip, as you conduct your user interviews, invite your technical team and have at least one of your engineers take notes. This will force them to emphasize with your target users.

As a team, you’ll have a collective understanding of users’ problems and assumptions. I want to emphasize this strongly: we’re not developing products because “we think” or “we feel” users will need it. We develop products because “we know” users need this because they told us. Plain and simple. It’s black and white.

Hitting the mark

However, let’s say your startup is a little further along and you already have a prototype/MVP (or even a full blown product). What then? You can still have a conversation with your by verifying whether your solution you’ve develop solves their problems. This is done through usability tests.

I find this to be effective because you’re putting your proposed solution in front of them and literally saying “hey I listened to you, understood what your needs and pain points are. Now, do you think this will be a helpful solution?”… and you stay quiet, let your users break the silence, and you let them freely interact and familiarize themselves with the solution. You’re not showing how it works, and you’re not explaining it. If it truly solves their problems, it should be self-explanatory, intuitive and effective. Plain and simple.

Now, I can only say this was helpful for me during my seed-stage startup days, and continues to be something I do today as a Product manager at a public tech company for national retailers. UX maybe seen as afterthought or 2nd priority but I see it as a differentiator and competitive advantage.

We only know if we’re truly adding value if our target users say we are.

Cool well I hope this was (somewhat) helpful. If you made it this far, you’re the bomb diggity. Also comment with a 👨‍🎨 to let me know you’ve made it to the end. Please like, share and subscribe!

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However, leading a group of high school/college kids is completely different (and IMO insufficient) compared to leading a time of experienced (5-10 YOE) designers, engineers, data scientists, and, at times, other managers. Taking it a layer deep, let’s assume technical team members are twice your age, more experience in the industry and have an opposing personality. It’s these layers and nuances that make starting and developing in leadership difficult.

Now, this is the approach I’d take if I was starting over from the beginning:

Establish a relationship with each individual team member

Trust is what you need to develop. While you don’t have dive into their personal life, you do want to (at the very least) develop a good working relationship. Two places I’d start is: 1) Ask how you can be helpful to them and 2) ask them how they’re doing. Let them know you have their best interest in mind and that you’re there to support.

Watch your current leaders attentively

The most effective approach to leadership is to know what great leadership looks like. Take the time finding a leader that you respect and ask to shadow them in meetings.

Let’s say you do.. What words are they choosing? How are they engaging their teams? How do they handle conflict resolution? How do they support certain teams (ie. design, engineering, data, etc.)? How do they address and handle any concerns that senior leadership asks? My favorite - how are they shining light on the team members who’ve contributed significantly to the initiative? These are really the main questions that I found myself asking today as I study the leaders at my company.

build credibility through your small wins

A leader’s foundation is their credibility. How well of a leader your judged is based on the perceived competence. Why? Because it signals to the team you have control of the initiative and the direction. That said, as you start out, start small and stack those small wins. As your confidence grows, steadily grow your area of responsibility.

What are some of the ways to start to stack these wins? Here are some of the ways to start:

1. Join your manager in a presentation, and ask to present a segment that lasts just 1 minute

2. Lead a discussion lasting 10-15 minute in a small meeting

3. Prepare a short presentation (w/slides) colleague your close with about a status of a project

4. Prepare a research project and present it to just your manager

Develop confidence through repetition

I’ve thought (and asked those who are years ahead of me): What’s the quickest way to improve my confidence to better lead and be more effective.

I’ve come to realize it’s familiarity with every tough scenario that gives you confidence. How do you gain familiarity with tough situations? By putting yourself in them, voluntarily. Now the kicker: how do you most effectively and efficiently develop your ledership skills and quickly? It’s a high volume of repetition and failing. How often can you present, lead meetings, handle client issues, etc. in a quarter/month/week? Maximize the number, My god is it painful, nerdwrackin, and hard but it’s the only way. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that can be rushed.

Minimize your safety net

There doesn’t need much explanation for this one and, personally, the one I struggled with the most. If you can minimize the support (ie. manager joining your meetings and supporting you), all the better. As much as possible, you want to take full responsibility and feel the full effect of your accomplishments and failures.

If the 20 year old me was sitting right in front of me, I’d tell him do more, more than your comfortable doing. Don’t think less of yourself with your failings.The more uncomfortable you are, the better. Keep at it. Don’t stop.

If you read this far, I genuinely thank you. Please subscribe and leave a comment.

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I think some of the best companies that’ve had a pleasure of working with and for have clarity about who they’re developing a solution for, and exactly what their problem is - what are they trying to do that they ultimately cannot. It could be an inefficient process or are users coming up with make-shift solution?

I believe these founders need to have of the industry and space they’re trying to build in. There’s so much nuance in a dynamic of an industry and the players within it that they need have not only an understanding of it but working knowledge of the space. Moreover, I think they need to have “product” sense. “Product” in a sense of understanding and thinking through their business from a macro and micro sense:

Micro:

• What’s the exact problem statement? How big is it and is it persistent? 

• who are the personas?

• What’s the user journey and what are they trying to accomplish (that they can’t)?

• What’s the (calculated) ROI?

• Etc. 

Macro:

• What’s been the trend in the industry and what’s happening today?

• Why is it worth introducing your solution today?

• Who are the big players in the space and what’s their competitive advantage? 

An adjacent point: education background. I don’t think its as important as the working experience (not internships) that the founder has. When I was at Spotify (and even now at Pitney Bowes), the only people that had fancy degrees were everyone but the actual builders. Software engineers, designers, data scientists, and others came from schools that I haven’t even heard of. I can even say the same thing about the Product Managers that I’ve worked with and under. If there’s a genuine sense of community and camaraderie and cohesion to a team, I think that’s far more telling of a successful team than anything else. 

Most importantly, I think there needs a strong “why” behind building their business/product. I want to know why they even bother building? How deep does the problem hit close to home? 

When a team is pre-PMF, I believe teams need to be together (in-person) and actively talking to their (potential) users regularly. As a mentioned early, there needs a sense of camaraderie and investment from each member. 

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Welcome to Newsletter by Jerico! As you might have guessed, the name derives from my last name, and I'm excited to use this newsletter to share my interests, experiences, and career insights with you.

As someone immersed in technology and its impact on the world, I want to shine a light on some of the most interesting areas of the tech industry, such as AI, e-commerce, logistics, and supply chain. However, while these topics are important, they're not the only things I'm interested in exploring. I'm passionate about learning more about product strategy, UX design, and discovering websites with innovative interactions and UIs.

While the content of the newsletter may vary, I plan to publish it once a month to maintain a consistent cadence. Through my writing, I hope to inspire and inform you about the latest trends and insights in the tech industry.

Thank you for joining me on this journey in Newsletter by Jerico.

Growing through Discomfort

In this first newsletter, I want to discuss the importance of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to achieve growth and development.

As an introverted person, I tend to enjoy my alone time and avoid putting myself in uncomfortable social situations. However, I realized that by doing so, I was missing out on opportunities to meet like-minded individuals and expand my professional network. Therefore, I decided to challenge myself by attending tech meetups in my city regularly, sometimes as frequently as three times a week.

At first, I was extremely nervous and overwhelmed by the large crowds and the need to engage with strangers. However, I found that setting small achievable goals for myself, such as limiting my stay at the event or making one genuine connection, helped ease my anxiety and build my confidence.

As I attended more events, I gradually became more comfortable with introducing myself and meeting new people. Recently, I even brought a close friend from college with me to events, which made the experience even more enjoyable and less intimidating.

I encourage you to challenge yourself in a similar way, whether it's attending networking events, trying new hobbies, or taking on new challenges at work. It's important to remember that growth and development often require stepping out of your comfort zone and pushing yourself to try new things. It may not be easy, but with practice and persistence, you can gain confidence and achieve your goals.

Recent Developments of AI

I believe we are living in an exciting time for AI, as various companies are emerging with new platforms, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. In the next few years, we will witness a revolution and redefinition of how we work and earn money. While some roles may be replaced, new roles will also emerge.

As a product manager, I'm quite excited and interested in how this will unfold. I'm always thinking about new technological developments and their implications. In the past, I've worked on predictive model-type products, and I'm curious about how we can innovate in the way we interact with these technologies—not just through voice or text boxes. Can we explore sensors or other forms of communication to better engage with AI models? How can we use OpenAI's models (or AI models in general) to be more effective and efficient?

Personally, I would like to see an e-commerce-focused AI platform that provides information about changing consumer purchase behaviors. I'm keen on understanding how purchasing behavior may change with this platform and how we can extract new knowledge from that.

Thinking more broadly, there is also a need for an ongoing conversation around safety and guidelines, especially for the next generation. If AI platforms become more prominent in our day-to-day lives, how can we ensure that certain questions or content are censored for the youth or for those who are young?

In the past week or two, Elon Musk incorporated a new company called X.AI, which will compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I'm curious if Elon will start to pull data from Twitter, Tesla, and other companies for training purposes. This potential direction could start to raise philosophical questions about what is the right answer, truth, which is something that OpenAI is currently facing.

These are some top-of-mind items for me. It's a Saturday evening, and I would love to engage with anyone who has similar thoughts about artificial intelligence and what this platform and these capabilities may mean in particular industries. If you've made it this far, thank you for reading.

Noteworthy links

My new favorite browser: https://thebrowser.company/

One of my favorite postings

@jericolumanlanWait hol up 🥲 #productmanager #tech #product #softwareengineer #wfh #pm #vlog #blog #fyp #productdesign #startup #techtok #workintech #corporatelife #corporate #corporatetiktok #careertiktok #boston #siliconvalley #foryoupage #technology #techindustry #corporatejob #work #9to5 #humor #funny #relatable #corporatemillennial #corporateamerica #corporatehumor #corporatejokes #workjokes #worklife #workmemes #worksatire #wfhjokes #workfromhome #remotework #remotejob #job #jobhumor #jobsatire

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Shift in Mentality

There’s a real sense of confidence when you can definitively say “Yes.” towards something you want and “No.” towards something you don’t want. It’s not an “Ehh, I guess that’ll work” or “I think I’m comfortable with this” — none of that.

From a career perspective, I’ve always known what I wanted. I also knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I knew I’d always wanted to build great products. I knew I always wanted to become a better leader. My actions always reflected that and I’ve doubled down and become aggressive on those fronts. But there were other areas in my life where I wasn’t. Part of that was not having that conversation earlier on with myself to say “I’m fully committed to this”. Towards the tail end of 2022, that’s where I shifted that mentality and have become more adamant about what I want and fully committed to. In 2023, it’s doubling, even tripling down on that.

Productivity System

Being productive with the least amount of effort yet doing good quality work is my happy place. There’s one system that I’ve implemented to determine how what I do in a day. I rely on this system. It’s the following:

Where P = Priority and U = Urgency.

Given the matrix, each quadrant represents the following:

• Top-right: High Priority, High Urgency

• Top-left: Low Priority, High Urgency

• Bottom-right: High Priority, Low Urgency

• Bottom-left: Low Priority, Low Urgency.

With this model, I’d take some time before work started to plan out what I needed to do for the day or even the week. What I think this helped me really think through was “do I really need to do this today?” or “does this truly deserve my energy and time?”. I found that the more disciplined you are with this, the more accomplished and relieved you feel at the end of the day. I can safely say I can close my laptop at the end of the day without having to say to myself “I just need to do this other thing”.

Well, this is all I can muster today lol just came back from a buffet and so I’m ready for a nap 😴 Happy Thanksgiving y’all!

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If I had a way to describe how my career development journey has unfolded thus far, It’d be that it unfolded better than expected... and then some. That said, I wanted to explore how and why that is. I’ve been thinking about this for the past year but I now think I have a framework that explains it, or at least in part. The process I outlined is no way novel but not something I see written about often.

What I hope to accomplish with this blog is to talk through this framework that I subscribed to because it’s worked for me. I wanted to share this with you in hopes of it helping you at whatever capacity.

For those of you who want the summary of this blog post, it’s the following framework:

1. Establish a Goal 🎯

2. Research & Connect with Mentors 🧑🏽‍💻

3. Outline Plan of Action 🛠

4. Continue self-education 📚

5. Evaluate/Iterate 🔁
   

A little bit about myself — from the age of 16, I knew I wanted to be engaged in the tech scene but I wasn’t entirely at what capacity. In college and even after, I dedicated myself to exploring different career paths. Thus far, I’ve managed to…

• Work at creative agencies as a UX/UI Designer and Assistant Project Manger

• Worked at larger, fast growing tech company (Spotify) as a Product Designer

• Work at a startup with roles ranging from business oriented roles (i.e. sales and marketing) to product oriented roles (i.e. UX/UI design and Product Management)
  

My most recent milestone was breaking into product management. I’ve been wanting to accomplish this for the past 2 years and was able to do so earlier this year. Whether it is breaking into Product Management, Product Design or into tech generally, I used this same framework:

Establish a Goal 🎯

I believe it’s important to establish a goal that you can say you’ve achieved or not, simply black and white. I think it's very uncomfortable to do that, especially when you’re early in your career or are in the transition to a new career path. This was the case for me. More important than getting the goal “right”, I believe you need to dedicate yourself to an objective over a period time.

2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to become a product manager because I wanted to be a leader, driving product development. I dedicated my efforts towards that. Even though I knew product management was hyper competitive to break into, I still made it my goal.

At the time, I was in my final year of college, having just completed my 6 month product design internship at Spotify. I wasn’t entirely sure what exact skills or experiences I needed so I learned about the role as much as possible.

Research & Connect with Mentors 🧑🏽‍💻

As a first step to my research, I held informational interview with product leaders of all levels — Associate PMs, PMs, and Director of Product and more.

I wanted to understand…

• What these product leaders’ career path looked like and how they got to where they were

• What roles did they have prior to product?

• What skillsets did they have develop prior to product?

• What resources did they utilize to better position themselves?

• What they recommendations do they have for me to do to achieve my goals.

In 2020 alone, I held around 60 informational interviews with product leaders. In a nutshell, I was able to understand things like…

• There are plenty of different skillsets you can capitalize on to break into PM

• UX Design skills go hand in hand with product management

• Product development and leadership skills need to be proven in previous roles

• There are specific skillsets that cannot be developed by self education

With like this information, you’ll start to see trends in how these product leaders broke into their product roles and/or what they recommend you in doing as next steps. You’ll naturally start to paint how you can navigate your own career path moving forward to get to your goal.

Outline Plan of Action 🛠

While this may not be a step by step process, this could easily be understanding what experiences and skillsets you currently have, and what you skills you lack/need to acquire in order to best position yourself. Some questions you may ask yourself:

• What experiences do I currently have or don’t have?

• What are my strengths and weaknesses?

• Where can I start to develop my missing skillsets/experiences?

• What resources do I have available to me right now that I can use to better position myself?

When I started planning how I’d break into product management, the only relevant skills I had were my UX design skills. However as a product leader, a good portion of your contributions is project management related, specifically in how you execute, manage and successfully ship products. Based on my research and informational interviews, some of the experiences I needed to have under my belt was leading cross-functional meetings, carrying a project along from beginning-to-end, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders and more.

I want to make this important note before moving on —you don’t need your dream job to be your next role. You may realize that you need to work in different roles and gain new experiences before landing your dream job.

Prior to my first product role, I landed an assistant project management role at a creative consulting agency. I viewed it as a stepping stone to my first product role. Understanding the type of project management experience a product manager needed, I asked to spearhead meetings, coordinate with different internal stakeholders to give them updates and more.

While it may be quite frustrating but detours to “sharpen your axe”, per se, may be necessary. I know I wouldn’t have been successful in my first product role if I didn’t have this project management exposure.

Continue self-education 📚

Whether it be continuing to connect/discussing with mentors or reading online material, I believe it’s necessary to continue to learn and as as habit. I think you need to be constantly picking up new knowledge about the product management role and downloading new knowledge in the industry that you want to work in/interested in. Most important than gaining new knowledge, how are you going to use the new knowledge coming in to help you best position yourself?

As I was continuing to learn about product management, I was constantly evaluating and thinking how I would tell my story and how to best position myself when I go into interviews. If I was asked this behavioral or situational interview question, how would I frame my answer to best demonstrate my capabilities as a product leader? If I was asked a question about a skillset or experience that I didn’t have (or that I don’t have extensive experience in), how would I answer that question? If I was asked about recent developments of a particular vertical, can I refer to an article to show I’m doing my homework?

Personally, I would even continue to network and find product leaders so I can practice how I’d respond to “tell me about yourself”. As these product leaders wanted to learn more about me, I was practicing how I demonstrate my product background, communicate the silver lining and share my Plan of Action.

Evaluate/Iterate 🔁

Out of all the points that I’ve written so far, this is by far the most important. You need to be constantly evaluating your Plan of Action. Why or why not isn’t my plan working? Do I need more feedback on my Plan of Action? Have I structured my day where I’m progressing at a steady pace? While you don’t want to be overly pensive, you do need to think of your plan critically. Simply put, the foundation of this process is based on iteration and constant reevaluation.

I think you should also give yourself a strict timeline and outline a Plan B. Truthfully, prior to the assistant project manger role, I had given up on searching for product management roles. With my qualifications at the time, I knew I wasn’t competitive in the market for even the Jr./Associate Product Manger positions.

After an extended period of time, you will unexpectedly catch a break and you’d have achieved your goal. My first product role came rather quickly and somewhat unexpectedly. More important than that, as soon as I offered the job — because I’ve been learning about it for 2 years, I understood what made an effective product leader, and understood what skills I had and what I needed to develop — I showed up to work knowing the type of value I could bring to the table. It then became a question of identifying and executing when the right opportunity came up.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @JericoLumanlan. My DMs are open!

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It seems like product roles have caught the attention of many fresh grads recently because of the unique responsibilities and challenges product professionals face when launching products. 

Product management has, personally, been a role that I’ve spent the past couple years learning about and trying to break into. I’ve held a number of informational interviews with product leaders, north of 60 interviews in 2020 alone; in addition to articles on Medium, podcasts, YouTube videos.. really anything that help me have a holistic understanding of what it takes to be an effective product manager. 

Earlier this year, I was fortunate to land a Jr. Product Owner role at an early stage startup. I wanted to share some of the learnings I’ve made in past gigs that contributed directly to me securing this role. For those that are working towards a product role, this isn’t a one size fits all big I hope this article helps.

Let your experience speak for itself 🗣
First thing that I’d make sure of is you have proven track record of building product or having relevant work experience. Entry level Product roles are competitive and thus have relatively high bar to other entry roles. You’ll need to demonstrate why you should be considered. As someone who is at the forefront of product, you’ll need to show some proof that you’re reliable, can execute on projects on time, and work with different departments,for example. You may not have all these skill sets but at least show you’re working on some of these skills that define a product leader.

Speaking on my personal experience, I’ve landed a product design gig at a larger tech company, Spotify, designing personalized playlists and have been an assistant project manager at an creative agency, helping execute client projects. All to say, when I talk about myself in an interview process, I speak on my leadership and product experience and my contributions in these type of roles, and how this next product role is contributing to my future product career goals. 

Develop T-shape skillset 👨🏽‍💻
Furthermore, there is something to be said about those who have multifaceted skill sets — own it and sell it. Having an arsenal of skillsets will separate you from the rest. If you’re a business and computer science major... if you’re a cognitive science and graphic design major... if you’re a marketing and graphic designer major.. you should be doubling down on these skills as it shows you can wear multiple hats and can speak and connect to different stakeholders. 

I’m a business major and have a background in User Experience Design, and that is at the forefront of my story and how I sell myself. I’ve always been fascinated about how design decisions impact business performance and metrics, and I speak on that. 

Develop leadership & Project Management skills 👨🏽‍💼
Coupled with your unique skillsets and experience, I’d find opportunities where you can develop your leadership and project management skills. As a product leader, you are primarily assessed on the success of a product. This primarily entails how you manage and push projects forward. 

I spent 8 months at a creative agency, supporting a project manager that spearheaded a giant website release. The client had made 5 acquisitions in the year previous and needed to consolidate their website and brand. I had watched my project manager lead meetings, hold clients accountable for deliverables, set expectations with key stakeholders and even damage control when the client was disappointed. It’s seasoned professionals like these where you need to just soak all that knowledge In like a sponge. 

Position yourself accordingly 🎯
Lastly, I’d determine what type of company you want to work at, a more established company or a startup for your first product role. 

Speaking from personal experience, I’m most activated in ambiguity and in smaller team settings. While I maybe wearing more hats than other more traditional product roles and where my responsibilities are not etched in stone, I’m gaining breadth of knowledge. My responsibilities at my startup really depends on the what the company needs at the time. That said, I’d say that’s the advantage of joining a startup if you’re early in your product journey. 

If you’re comfortable with uncertainty and are able to just figure it out, startups will propel you in your career. However, if you’re more activated in a structured setting, where responsibilities are a little more clearly defined, you may want to look at larger tech companies. 

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @JericoLumanlan. My DMs are open!

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Even though I’m transitioning to more of a product position from UX, I’ve been finding myself relying on my UX skillsets and tools, specifically Personas, Journey Maps and UX Research. That said, I want this post to focus on how these tools and skillsets not only help us gain more insight into our targets users but also allows us to better collaborate with our stakeholders. 

Personas

Before we even start to come up with ideas and solutions, we should start to understand who our target users are through personas. 

A Persona is archetype of a target user. This tool gives us insight into their needs, pain points, and goals. It also outlines background information such as behaviors, age, occupation and info of the like that influence how we design the solutions. 

That said, Personas are powerful tools that allows all stakeholders to empathize with users which will give direction and set boundaries to the type of solutions we can provide. More importantly, Personas help us shift our conversations from what we think our users want (which stem from personal judgements and opinions) to what will actually solve users’ needs. 

It’s been eye opening to see conversations with my own stakeholders shift from talking about solutions to speaking in the narrative of the target users’ experience. 

An example is the following taken from Nielsen Norman Group:

During my time at Spotify, I’ve noticed the product leaders harbor and encourage all ideas brought up. What I’ve noticed, more often than not, non-designers has had a rolodex of ideas for different solutions. 

Sales and customer success representatives, for example, work closely to the target users and have the leverage of recalling specific users and what their problems are. I’ve noticed that they’re the first to come up with design solutions. By getting other stakeholders thinking and excited about ways to solve our target users’ problems drive innovation and new ideas. This will also make them feel a sense of ownership in the development of these solutions. This is exactly what you want in design collaboration.

Journey Map

While Personas is a tool that’s used to describe the target user, a Journey Map is a tool that communicates a target users’ step-by-step process to accomplish a particular goal. Journey Maps are also powerful tools to emphasize with target users at every step in their process of achieving a goal. 

While there are different variations of journey maps, it should have at least these 5 of these core elements:

1. The persona (target user) who the journey map focuses on

2. The scenario/situation that the target user is in to achieve the goal

3. The journey phases which captures the target users’ sequential stage in their journey

4. The behaviors, thoughts and emotions that the target user experiences throughout their journey

5. The opportunities which identifies the stage in which we can enhance the users’ experience 

An example is the following taken from Nielsen Norman Group:

By piecing together the target users’ entire journey into a cohesive narrative, every stakeholder present will start to see everyone’s hand in providing the target user the optimal experience in achieving their goal. This will help bring alignment amongst all stakeholders. Moreover, I’ve seen this tool to be effective in determining which new features should be prioritized. By having everyone around the table sharing and getting aligned on which has the highest value-add based on the users’ journey, departments can start to work together in creating new features and experiences more effectively. 

Now, you might be thinking, what are the first steps in creating Personas and Journey Maps? The answer is User Experience Research, or UX Research. 

UX Research

UX research is an activity where dedicated UX Designers, Product Managers, and/or other product leaders engage with target users to collect insight into their target user(s). While there are a number of different methods of UX research, one I’ll be focusing on is user interviews. 

Let’s say you want to understand how a users discover new podcasts, for example. I’d ask the following sample questions:

Introduction 

• Tell me about yourself

• Do you listen to podcasts?

• What type of podcasts do you listen to?

• What do you enjoy/not enjoy about podcasts?

Main questions

• What apps do you use when you listen to podcasts? Can you show me on your phone?

• Walk me through how you discover new podcasts?

• Tell me about a time when you listened to a really good podcast and wanted to find a podcast similar to that?

Conclusion

• If you had a magical wand and you could change anything about the app that you’re using now, how would you want to discover new podcasts you love easier?

Right off the bat, you’ll notice I have a structure and a flow. While I tend to write all my questions out, I also ask ad hoc questions when I hear something unexpected or interesting. I try to unpack and understand why they are saying what they’re saying by simply asking them why and if they explain more. 

As soon as you complete 5-7 of these user interviews, you’ll start to notice some similarities and trends in these answers. This should be the basis of what you build your Personas and Journey Map. 

User interviews, for example, is something that should be done in a regular cadence so you’re constantly learning about your users and updating your Personas and Journey Map. Keep in mind, the aim of the Journey Maps and Personas should never be to make them “complete” but complete enough to engage in dialogue and have alignment with your stakeholders. 

In conclusion, Journey Maps, Personas and UX Research are powerful tools to have in your arsenal as you’re building product. These methodologies should be used to gain more insight into your target users to better design solutions to solve their problems, rather than build solutions that you think they’d want/need. 

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! Feel free to connect with me on Twitter. DMs are open!

Having spent a little bit of time in startups, i wanted to share some my experiences and things I’ve noticed that stood out to me.

Why you shouldn’t work at a startup

Lack of set processes/structure ⚒🥲

More prevalent with early stage companies, startups lack structure and are more in a do-what-you-have-to-do-to-get-it-done type mentality. While some see this as a positive (i.e. autonomy), it isn’t the type of environment for everyone. Often times, you may find yourself having to define the process. In instances when processes already have been established, it’ll most likely change depending on the goals of the company.

Before I had joined my startup, there wasn’t a set product design process. Not to say UX/Product Design was an afterthought but design didn’t have a formal process the way the engineering team did. As soon as we stared seeing larger projects that had different timelines and how our processes wasn’t the most optimal, we started to shift our processes to follow more of the product design lifecycle. We started in Airtable then moved to Miro. We started using different models to capture the work at each design stage. Shifts happened over a weekend. All this to say, things change quick.

Lack of mentorship 🚫👨🏽‍💼

I’d say because of the speed and the amount of work that needs to be done, you’re not likely to get much mentorship or guidance. I’d imagine this would be more important if you’re earlier in your career and/or you feel you feel you need a level of guidance. If you’re capable of navigating in ambiguous situations and being able to just figuring it out, you’ll do fine.

I’ve completed 7 internships and startup my own startup, and I still feel unsure how to move forward. It helps if you have a supportive team to be a soundboard for you but sometimes you just have to figure it out on your own. Moreover, I’ve had to supplement my growth and learning by reaching out to individuals in my professional network to pick their brain and learn from them. This is something that has been extremely beneficial for me in my career development and personal life overall.

Lower market value 🤡💸

If you’re looking into an earlier stage startup, don’t expect to be paid what you Google, especially if you’re junior level. Generally speaking, companies simply don’t have the financial capabilities to compensate employees what is “standard”.

Why you should work at a startup

Prepare to learn a 💩-ton

While being paid less than larger tech companies is a con, you shouldn’t look to work at a startup for the pay. If you were to take away anything from reading this article, it’s this: join a startup to maximize your learning.

When I was at Spotify, my first week was dedicated to onboarding — getting set up, getting to know my team, eating out with the team, etc. I only really started to do work towards the end of the week/the beginning of the following week. On the other hand, the onboarding at my startup was only an hour max in the morning lol. During that onboarding, I was asked if I had all the tools/software.. then I was sent off to work. Within the first 2 weeks, I’ve got to know the entire company, familiarized myself with the entire software platform, sat in on sales calls to understand their workflows, supported/planned for usability testing, and started early about initiatives for the quarter.

Visible impact 🦾🔥

Since you’re learning at high speeds and getting work done quick, you’ll start to see your value... or lack thereof. You’ll simply see it because if you’re not going to do the work... well then it’s simply not getting done or someone else will have it do it for you. Nevertheless, seeing the fruit of your labor isn’t something that’s seen as instantly or obvious at a larger company. The chance of being noticed at > 50 startup (early stage startup) vs. 5000~ (i.e. Spotify) is not comparable.

These impacts are something you can be proud of and something where you can say to yourself “I supported my teammates and my company by doing...” XYZ and so forth. One of the initiatives that I was involved with was usability testing for our software platform to identify user experience and functionality improvements. Seeing the development and sales team work alongside to carry out this initiative was rewarding to be a part of.

Wearing many hats 👨🏽‍💻👨🏽‍🔬

This goes hand in hand with lack of structure but thought to shine the positives of it. Depending on your skillset, the lack of structure can be in your favor if you can play different position on the court. This, therefore, makes you more of a valuable asset to the company.

For me, I’ve been able to do work as a Jr. Product Owner (my primary function) but also support UX/Product Design depending on the company’s needs. One day I could be gathering product requirements and helping build sprints...other days I could be leading usability testing and even developing low fidelity wireframes.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter @JericoLumanlan. My DMs are open!

Now, for the blog post…

This is the blog post that I’ve always wanted to write. For over a year, I’ve been trying to find ways to break into junior product or project management role. I wanted to work in a role where I was cross-functional, where I could develop my leadership skills and where I could be relied upon for the completion of an initiative. 

To date, I’ve spent 5 months at this digital strategy consulting firm and there are a ton of lessons that I wish I had started developing more of in college. Nevertheless, I hope you find these learnings useful!

Develop effective communication skills 📣

One of the biggest lessons I’ve had to learn was how to communicate effectively and when to stress certain details. I’ve found myself needing to be hyper focused during meetings. What was the client’s expectations? Who amongst the client’s team was going to aid us and how do they contribute to the success of this project? I had to learn how to be very meticulous with the details. 

Once my project manager and I gathered the initial requirements, we put together the process and executed. Again, another process that required us to be very detailed oriented, not only in the planning of the process but also the communicating of the process to the client and other stakeholders. 

I found that in order to be effective, you’ll need to be able to grow to be comfortable in communicating in all channels, whether it be email, 1:1 meetings, group meetings, and even task management software (think Asana, Trello, etc.). 

Dumpster fires everywhere… all the time 🗑🔥

As someone early in my career development, I thought of project managers as individuals who orchestrates and manages the execution of the project — all forwarding moving tasks. This was, however, only partially true. I came to realize that a considerable, if not most, of your days is spent putting out fires. There were a lot of fires throughout the process but always seemed to come together in the end.

As a way to circumvent this, I noticed my project manager 1) knew how to set expectations with stakeholders when she noticed things started to look off, 2) knew who to talk to solve issues and 3) always spent the extra time to make sure she was able to have everything under control by the end of the day. 

Key responsibility: Manage expectations 🤝

I touched this in my previous lesson but it deserves it’s own point. If there’s anything that took away from my experience as an assistant project manager is that your job is to manage expectations. 

Speaking solely in the agency world, managing expectations of your clients is everything. What are you capable and not capable of doing in the timeframe given? Do you have the right people involved to achieve their vision? Do they have the budget necessary to achieve the results they want? Does everyone on clients’ team have the bandwidth to achieve the defined goal? These are all necessary questions that need to be addressed in order to satisfy your clients. The last thing you want is for them to request a task that you don’t have the resources, appropriate personnel or timeline appropriate. 

Ideas to develop Project Management skills 💭

While landing an assistant project manager is rather tough out of college, it’s possible. I think, however, you’ll need tangible evidence and examples as to how you demonstrated a project management skillset. There are a number of ways you can gain some (and possibly all) of the skills and here are a few that come to mind:

1. University clubs 

I, personally, did not join any career oriented clubs in college so I’m not one to speak so I’ll keep this one short. I’d imagine joining an Entrepreneurship or business-oriented club and then striving for an E-board position will position you well. Since E-board tends to make large decisions and requires those to strategy and organize, you’ll want to get involved on that level. 

2. Internships 

Landing a project management internship in college isn’t an easy feat but again, possibly. These internships can be quite competitive and you’ll need to have signs on your resume of, at the very least, potential that shows you have the capacity to do the work expected. 

During college, I completed 7 internships — none of them were project management related — but I was able to tell a story around why I wanted to become a project manager and was able to speak on the type of skills I wanted to develop and why. At the college level, if you’re able to construct a compelling and concise story about what the role means to you and your future plans, I think that’s a huge plus. 

3. Startup

My final suggestion to start to develop your project management skills is starting your own company. Definitely one of the more challenging of the avenues, particularly as a college student, but if you’re able to grow your team to where you start to run a team to execute on projects, that’ll be the best and the quickest way to pick up real project management skills.

During my final years of college, I had started a startup and had up to 6 players who were involved. While I did not hold a formal manager role, I still was able to touch on some project management and leadership that came with trying to build an MVP. As a way to learn and build skills, I found starting my own startup trumped all internships — Hands down.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! If you have any comments/questions/concerns, feel free to connect with me on Twitter @JericoLumanlan. My DMs are open!

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At the age of 16, I knew starting a business was on my professional bucket list. Towards the tail-end of my junior year, I co-founded a startup, Worksense, alongside two students from Tufts University to help build a product that will help companies in their DEI journey.

In the year I was with Worksense, my sole responsibilities was helping strategize product and designing the product itself. I was also involved in our pre-seed fundraising, helping build relationships with early stage VCs. A year in, when we off-boarded, we had raised 50k in committed capital by some Angels and was mentioned in a Forbes article.

I had learned a great deal during this time period and I thought to share some of these learnings for anyone who’s thinking about or has started a company.

Starting out, the team is everything

Yes, the concept/idea is very important but the execution of the concept/idea is arguably even more important. I’d say a big factor of how well a team executes is based on the relationship the co-founders have with each other. Personally, it is critical to understand what makes your co-founders tick, what makes them ticked-off and how they react to stressful situations.

Since my co-founders and I were still students, it was more of a reason to be understanding and supportive. Balancing the lifestyle of a student with starting a business is a challenging feat. However, I would be lying if we didn’t come across frustrations due to expectation differences. However, the better you and your co-founders can talk through issues, regardless of magnitude, the smoother your sail will be. My co-founders and I had a great level of transparency. We weren’t hesitant to speaking our minds, listening to each others’ opinions and concerns, and moving forward as a unit.

Be clear with the type of value you’re bringing to the table

I’m a product professional. I have an interdisciplinary background — not only do I have college training in business/finance but I also have a background in UX/Product Design. By the time I had graduated, I’d completed 7 internships, ranging from accounting at a large private bank, to a sales and operations role at a 6 person startup to a product design role at Spotify.

All this to say, I had a number of skills and experiences that I was able to draw from if needed. My entire skillset wasn’t used but I had a tool kit if and when I needed it. Not only was I able to think about the granular details of creating a developing the MVP but I was also able to speak to and understand the impact this had to not only the business as a whole and industry at large.

Additionally, you’ll need to be clear as to how you fit relative to your team. Do you have a skillset that they don’t have? Do you have experience/perspective that is a value-add to the company? One of my co-founders was a software engineer (with experience at Microsoft) while my other co-founder had launched a startup prior and a VC at Contrary Capital. We all had complimentary skills to one another.

*Side Note — if you can help your co-founders grow, that’s one of the ultimate value add you can bring to the table. Not only are you contributing to the success of your business but also to the success to your teammates.

Seek mentors

This is absolutely a must. If you think you don’t need anyone’s assistance/mentorship during this arduous journey — cool. For the rest of you (and I wish I told myself), find mentors, plural, that all have a unique skillset that can provide guidance and perspective of different areas of starting a business.

I believe having someone on your side who has gone through the experience of starting a business and can give some foresight into what challenges you can expect to see is priceless. Even though what they experience may be totally different from what you will experience, it gives you something to chew on or at least prepare for.

Keep in mind, They might not have the answers you want/need, but talking through your current thinking and/or what you’re experiencing, and for them to relay them back to you can be more than enough.

Be clear with what you want to get out of this experience

Every single time there’s a conversation around a startups, you’ll never fail to hear how difficult it is. Elon Musks describes starting a company “…like eating glass and staring into the abyss”.

As a student, my personal priorities was different from those that are committed full time entrepreneur. While priorities depend on a per person basis, but my utmost priority at the time was graduating college with good academic standing. Nevertheless, I wanted to experience how difficult it is to start a tech company, and the necessary work needed to launch a product, gain traction and develop relationship with VCs. This is all a build up for the time I start my own company in the future.

Now, know some student entrepreneur put more emphasis on their startup than their academics. Cool. Regardless of how you spend your time, I think you need to be deliberate with it. Understand your “why” because you’ll run up against some hardships along the way.

*A little rant about time management — The most important thing that I learned was: Yes, you can plan your day, week, or month, to an extent, but I’ve found that you’ll run into obstacles that were unanticipated. Therefore, all that time you put into planning your time is irrelevant and you’re caught spending time putting our dumpster fires. Conversely, obstacles could come into play where expected milestones are pushed back and this back logs your timeline.

Know where to draw the line

Quitting, while may have a negative connotations attached to it, can be a mature decision if done for the right reasons. Regardless if you view your venture as a hobby or a serious business, you will still need to put in sweat and hours. You may run into circumstances where you’ll need to make sacrifices (i.e. leisure, sleep, family time, etc.) to follow through with your venture, possibly more so than you think you would. Regardless of the magnitude, sacrifices are sacrifices and it is difficult.

As these sacrifices accumulate, you may find your quality of life decrease. If you can find a way to balance everything and you’re happy in how you’re moving forward in your business, and/or you’re able to push that much further, all the power to you. Keep pushing.

However, I make this point because I drew the line/left my startup because I felt I needed a lot of reflecting to do as to what I wanted out of my post college life. Yes, I was busy and was learning a lot but I wasn’t sure I was paving my career path in an industry that I knew would make me happy. Nothing scares me the most of putting your head down for X-number of months/years to only look back and regret how you’ve spent my time.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! If you have any comments/questions/concerns, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerico-lumanlan/

Covid-19 has made me reflect on my last 5 years of college. If you were to ask me what has been the period of most growth, it has to be when I wasn’t in university. Literally. I had taken a gap year; but instead of traditionally taking it right after high school, I took it after my sophomore year of college.

For those of you who are looking for the conclusion, I’ll spare you a few minutes. I found my gap year to be an amazing opportunity to learn about myself and what I’m capable of doing. I had set out the simple goal of gaining experience at a startup in any large city. By the end of my gap year, I managed to squeeze in 3 internships within a span of 9 months in both New York and Boston. I wrote more about that experience here. While these internships were great experience and looks nice on resume, I enjoyed the process of securing them more so. It taught me a lot of myself and how I want to shape my career moving forward. If you feel you need to take a step back in order to take two steps forward, I encourage taking a gap year.

I feel like gap years should be focused around you and what you want. You steer it how you want to and whatever results you get, that’s all you. I knew at the time that there wouldn’t be another time that I could just do what I want for an entire year so I took the plunge.

Some people who I’ve spoken with has mentioned that taking a year off is too long and isn’t the easiest to plan for. I agree with that. However, It’s important to specific outcomes for your year off, and I viewed my plans as loose and temporary. If and when you do decide to take time off, you need to be constantly reevaluating and making changes as needed — both to your goals and plans. You will inevitably bump up against roadblocks or unexpected circumstances so you have to be willing to adapt. Yes, I had a general idea as to how I wanted to spend my gap year as a whole, but I was more meticulous on my week-to-week agenda.

The reason why I took a gap year was because I didn’t take the opportunity to have a mature conversation with myself as to what I seriously wanted out of college. I felt there was some maturing to do. Also, I started hating the day to day routine of learning theories and concepts in my intro business courses because I didn’t know how it applied to an actual business. Just as any college feels at one point or another, I felt like I was just attending class and then being tested on the material. I was craving hands on experience in areas that I was interested in.

At the time, and still to this date, I wanted to start my own company in the tech industry. I, however, needed to build up my credentials and the best way to do that was by working for a startup. I then decided to dedicate my gap year to building up my resume.

So, I set out to apply to all startups I came across, regardless of whether I was qualified for it or not. However, it took far longer than I thought. I must have applied to hundreds of job openings: Searching on all possible job boards I knew, filing out applications, tailoring cover letters, and even sending out cold emails. I dedicated around 8 hours a day. I just needed a foot in the door. Meanwhile, I was cold emailing potential mentors. These conversations gave me some foresight into the tech industry and gave me some ideas as to how I could steer my career path. One of these individuals invited me to the Google office for breakfast.

The number of rejections and failed interviews was very high but I simply saw these obstacles as numbers game. I just focused on the next one. And the next one… And the next one. I promised myself I was going to use this time off gaining work experience so in kept my head down and plowed ahead.

After a month of applying straight, I landed an internship. Things fell into place, one after another, where I landed 2 consecutive internships afterwards. Within the span of 9 months, I had land 3 internships, back to back. Yes, the experience looks good on the resume but I’m more proud of how I managed to find and secure these opportunities. It made me more confident in betting on myself and relying on my work ethic.

Taking a step back, this allowed me to add color on my resume and lends itself to great conversation during interviews. I continued to push in my career development. These experiences contributed in me landing internship at Spotify and a Private Equity/Search Fund. These experiences also gave m the confidence to start my own company alongside my co-founders (where we raised $50K in committed angel funding and mentioned in a Forbes article), all before I graduated.

For anyone who’s considering or on the fence of taking time off university, I’d say go for it. With the right mindset, it will be time well spent regardless of what you do.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! If you have any comments/questions/concerns, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerico-lumanlan/

I think we’re experiencing a positive shift in how money is being perceived and handled, particularly with millennials and Gen Zs. For the more recent generations, the advent of technology has affected them not only in how they interact socially but also in how they manage their financials. I personally wish fintech app is as entertaining as a scrolling through TikTok but the two are worlds apart. One of the more popular fintech apps out there is one you may have used to split your 4am drunk meal with, Venmo. That’s because the top two fintech areas is digital payments and personal finance. There’s also Mint to track our financial spending, Apple Pay to make payments, and others, that are making their way to our day-to-day lives.

Aside from the consumer behavior point of view, we’re noticing positive signs from the fintech industry, particularly when it comes to growth and sentiment from venture capitalists. According to CB Insights, we’ve seen a total of $120bn of fintech funding from VCs in the last 5 years, 59 of which are unicorns, valued over $200bn.

While these numbers are jolly and happy, fintech companies offer a value proposition that traditional financial service cannot. It is also worth noting that I’m not saying fintech companies will takeover banks, rather work alongside each other. Financial services, such as banks, offer scale (access to capital, distribution, trust intermediary), infrastructure (existing connectivity and data access) and expertise (market structure and regulation and compliance). On the other hand, fintech companies offer a unique set of user experience that is more user friendly and personalized.

Due to the nature of these fintech company that tend to be more commonly seen as apps, we’re seeing these fintech companies offer technology like artificial intelligence, or AI, (to enable the personalized capabilities), “as a service” approach, and more, that we are familiar with. Just think of Spotify. Spotify’s personalized playlists become more enjoyable and accurate the longer you use and become more engaged with the app, with a $10.99 “as a service” payment model, billed monthly.

Fintech APIs

These fintech companies, however, aren’t possible without fintech APIs. Fintech APIs is a topic that isn’t as widely spoken about relative to the fintech service itself but are equally, if not more, exciting to discuss about for their disruptive or enabling qualities.

APIs, generally speaking, are platforms that serve as building blocks to allow developers to build products faster. APIs allow software developers to focus on their core competencies rather than reinventing the wheel that the foundation that fintech companies build on top of. A popular example of a fintech API is Plaid. Plaid makes it possible for fintech companies to access users’ bank information in a seamless and secure manner. This API is critical for apps like Venmo, Robinhood, Acorn and more to be possible.

Okay Jerico, that’s cool or whatever. So what?

The relationships the younger generations and/or individuals who live paycheck to paycheck don’t have favorable experience with traditional banks. According to the World Economic Forum, 28% of millennial and Gen Z trust their banks to be fair and honest. Meanwhile, 50% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck often experience entirely different financial services system. Generally speaking, this demographic tend to rely on banks more but are given a more limited range of options and tend to be more expensive. That being said, the beauty about fintech APIs is that they will enable future fintech companies to not only enter the market faster but also give consumers more choices, better products and at lower prices.

That’s nice, Jerico. How does it enable fintech companies to go to market faster?

Before a fintech company can start building their product, it must meet a series of prerequisites, such as special approvals with licenses, sponsored banks, core systems, and more. In order to complete these prerequisites, it takes around 2 years before these companies can start building what they want. The following is a simplified version of a consumer side, banking stack. Each layer of this cake has their own checklist that must be completed.

Imagine what would happen if companies do what Amazon did to computing and storage, focusing on offering layer of the above stack as a service? That’s exactly what these fintech API companies, like plaid, are doing. They’re treating each layer of this cake as a SaaS product. We’re even starting to see companies like Hydrogen that are aggregating APIs to increase the rate of launching a startup. This will ultimately change the way our communities will interact with banks and our perception towards finances will change.

All things considered, I anticipate there will be a continued shift in user behavior. The first thing that comes to mind is we’ll see an increased financial literacy and maturity in the newer generation where every aspect of their financials (e.g. student loans, mobile payments, etc) will be handled on a smart phone. We’re already seeing individuals as young as 18 start investing in companies in the public market with Robinhood, researching ways to make the best investment for a certain ROI. Whether it is in investing or managing personal finances, I believe we will see the younger generation take more control of their financial situation.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! If you have any comments/questions/concerns, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerico-lumanlan/

I used to struggle with networking, having dabbled with different approaches and strategies. I tried methods like attending networking events, meetups and professional university clubs to simply DMing professionals on LinkedIn. I thought to put together some thoughts that I wish I’d known when I just started networking.

To date, I’ve been very fortunate to have mentors and people who I can reach out for professional advice, whether it be from top tech firms, such as Google and Disney, to individuals who run small and successful businesses to even venture capitalists. And this all started with a simple cold email. In fact, I found 2 out of my 6 internships in college with a cold email.

In college, I constantly heard that I needed to get out there and network to make professional connections and find opportunities. However, as an introvert myself, I’ve always struggled networking in larger group settings and have always found it easier to conduct conversations with 1–2 people. Even 2 people is 1 too many, at times.

In larger settings, I generally get overwhelmed and am not as comfortable conducting myself the way I want to. It also doesn’t help when I don’t open up immediately and tend to have a hard time holding small talk. For those of you who generally feel the same way, I think the following strategy may be something worth trying, if you haven’t already — and that is using LinkedIn, Twitter and email to find professionals you look up to/find interesting and reach out to them to get time on their calendar for a call.

To give a little bit of context, I’ve spent the last year trying to find ways to break into product management in tech, utilizing both my background in business and UX/product design. However, when I first found out about the product management career path, I didn’t know the skill sets, knowledge base, experiences and educational background needed to become be an attractive candidate. So then I thought to myself, let’s see how many PMs I can get over the phone and pick their brains on how they got to where they were. To date, I’ve had calls with at leas 50 PMs. My step by step process for LinkedIn looks like the following:

1. Find professionals who have interesting backgrounds

This is simply searching for the position title, company, and/or location of professionals you want to connect with.

2. Compose cold email → main point: respectfully ask for 10–15 mins of their time for a call

In a previous article, I gave a specific example as to how I compose my cold emails, and how it got me a breakfast with a designer at the Google Office in New York. In short, you want to introduce yourself (who you are, what your background is and you may even add your goal), your specific intention as to why you’re reaching out (e.g. Have 10–15 minutes of your time, portfolio review, etc.) and a closing. Short and concise. Additionally, you’ll want to personalize this email to each individual you’re reaching out to. Keep in mind. some of these professionals receive a fair number of cold emails so leaving a great first impression is critical.

A point that I think is worth bringing up and emphasizing is that you’ll soon realize that reaching out is purely a numbers game. A rule of thumb I like to keep in mind is for every 10 cold outreach I send out, I expect to receive 1 reply, or a 10% response rate. On some days it’s more than 10%, on others less.

3. Preparing & holding conversation

The absolute advantage of having calls is you’ll be able to prepare. Energetically, you’ll find this will be easier to manage. And as soon as you finish the conversation, the networking is over and you can rest and reset. As an introvert, this is amazing as I feel I have far more control over how I want to network.

I think if there’s one thing you take away from this article, it’s this: have a polished 30-second personal pitch. Yes, your email outreach is technically considered your literal first impression, but I believe your initial 30 seconds of your personal pitch (introducing who you are, what you’re interested/goals are, accomplishments, etc.) will, yes, give the individual on the receiving end context to exactly who you are but ultimately set up the tone of the conversation. This is the time when the person on the receiving end will determine how serious they should take you.

Furthermore, as progress in the conversation, I think it’s also important to be present in the conversation. Allow the conversation to take its course and try to be relatable/make a connection. This isn’t the easiest at first, and some may not find this natural, but developing your own way to lighten the mood (i.e. cracking a light-hearted joke), for example, can steer the conversation to a more enjoyable one. This takes time and shouldn’t be forced 😅.

Nevertheless, there are still times I find myself stumbling or having some mental blocks during these conversations. You’ll also just find people who are simply not as engaged. When I find myself in these situations, I make sure I have a plan to fall back on, which is having a list of questions ready. Try to have questions for different “phases” of the conversation. For example, at the beginning of the conversation, I’d ask….

• I’d love to learn about your background and journey into product, and ultimately how you ended up as a Product Manager @ (insert company here)?

Then I may try to dig deeper into a particular subject that they brought up…

• You’ve mentioned you had your initial start at (@ company), what experiences/lessons helped you the most?

or I may steer the conversation Into…

• For someone of my background, how would you suggest I navigate forward in my career development?

And maybe towards the end…

• At the early stages of your career, did you have there any resources that helped you in getting to where you are today?

• Are there any individuals you intro me to who may be able to share their perspective with me?

Definitely not prescriptive but some questions I have on hand, ready.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Once you’ve had enough practice of reaching out and holding these conversations, it only becomes more and more natural. You’ll find yourself gaining confidence and having these networking conversations will become intuitive.

And with that, I hope you found this article useful! If you have any comments/questions/concerns, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerico-lumanlan/

Networking tips for introverts was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I thought to explore an industry/market that I’m completely unfamiliar with and a space that I’ve been hearing more and more about. This space is agriculture technology, or agtech. What is agtech?

AgTech represents the application of technology — especially software and hardware technology — to the field (pun intended) of farming. AgTech is an industry that encompasses diverse solutions to almost every step in the food production process.

I thought to specifically target agtech in Canada because it is larger in size than the US yet has far less people. Also Canada, specifically Vancouver, BC, is my home city so there’s that :)

For those that want the quick facts (based in 2019) and upfront conclusion here it is:

• As of 2019, we’ve been seeing very promising growth in the agtech, specifically investment of farm tech startup space, growing 370% year-over-year.

• One of the probing challenges is the overall adoption and usage of advanced technologies is uneven.

• Canada has as skills and labor crisis in agriculture, with projections of 123,000 worker shortages within the next decade

• Novel farming systems (e.g. indoor farms, insect farms, aquaculture, etc.) have noticed the largest growth

Startup facts:

• Invested: $4.7bn

• Investment growth: +6.8%

• Unique investors: 940

• Biggest deal: $205m

• Deals: 695

• Deal Growth: -13%

With that being said, let’s dive in!

Overview

A space we’ve been seeing a healthy amount of growth in is the agriculture technology space, with autonomous tractors and drones becoming more prominent. With the more advanced technological progress we’re seeing, it also calls for more skills from farmers. Canada is in a fortunate position as it has the land to product such raw goods but we’re seeing a decline in global exports and productivity staying stagnant.

As of 2019, we’ve been seeing very promising growth in the agtech, specifically investment of farm tech startup space, growing 370% year-over-year. Farm tech has seen a total of $4.7 billion in overall investment, a 6.8% year-over-year growth (according to Venture Pulse report). The largest deal we saw was ProducePay’s $205 million debt financing to fund upfront payments to farmers selling products on its platform.

Due to Covid-19, there is an expectation there be a drop in investment but some investors may read it as an investment. Already, we’ve been seeing signs of online services connecting farmers-to-consumers becoming more in demand. Farm-to-Consumer eGrocery which has shown small portion of farm tech landscape is expected to become more of an attractive space during these times.

Challenges with agtech

One of the probing challenges is the overall adoption and usage of advanced technologies is uneven. This is particularly because of the difficulty of implementing such technologies. For activities such as collecting cow milk, it is straightforward and simple to automate. This, however, is not the case for activities such as fruit picking that requires a level of judgement. Nevertheless, one thing we’ve noticed is the bigger the farm and/or the younger the farm is, the more likely they are to integrate advanced technologies as part of their workflows. Furthermore, there are some industries, such as poultry production and aquaculture, that are experiencing some growing pains. In the aquaculture in specific, human capital investment has been halved to meet global demand. Nevertheless, In the instance that specific sectors are capable of automating human-intensive activities, such as those in greenhouses and field fruits, we will see changes when it comes quantity of laborers than skills. The more opportunity there is for machines to automate activities, the more bandwidth workers will have to interpret data.

Here are some key points as to why individuals choose to automate:

• 7% industry vacancy rate

• 67% face hiring pressures

• Rising minimum wage

• Foreign labour restrictions

• Changing food safety regulations

• Improving workplace safety

Agtech in Canada

Agriculture in Canada faces its own specific difficulties that’s worth noting. Canada has as skills and labor crisis in agriculture, with projections of 123,000 worker shortages within the next decade. Canada’s share of global exports has fallen since 2000, falling behind countries like China, India, and Brazil. These are only a snippet of the difficulties face. Should Canada close their agriculture labor gap and accelerating investments in agriculture technology, it could gain $11b in annual GDP by 2030. Should this hypothetical situation become true, it would make bring the agricultural GDP to $51b, making it bigger than automobile assembly and aeronautics combined.

Agtech Startup Activity and M&A

2019 saw the highest global tech funding, seeing growth year after year, particularly during 2017 and 2018. Novel farming systems (e.g. indoor farms, insect farms, aquaculture, etc.) have noticed the largest growth, increasing 38%, when it comes to deal volume and activity, which is due to the fact that startups raising later stage rounds. It should be mentioned that farm management software such as sensing and IoT is the most active category due to the proliferation Whilst North America is one of, if not the, leading contingent for agtech, Asia is catching up, owning 28% of the activity, most of which are seed stage.

In terms of M&A and exits, we saw a slight decrease in 2019, observing around 20 announcements in a number of spaces, such as farm management, advanced breeding and microbiology, precision equipment, and more. Over half of these deals, however, were digital farm management. Alternatively, we saw growth in partnerships with equipment manufacturers and retail distributors to improve internal operations and grow markets. According to Verdant Ventures, they expect a spike in deal volume, particularly with resource efficiency technologies, commodity monitoring and handling technology and profitability optimization technology.

I believe the agtech space is promising and will only be more of a hot topic in the coming years as our resources are finite. We will need forward thinkers to implement novel ways of incorporating technology in the agriculture space to sustain the demand. I believe such individuals will be the true heroes of the future.

Sources used:

2020 Farm Tech Investment Report

Agribusiness Trends and Drivers of Change

AgFunder Agri-FoodTech Investing Report — 2019

Farmer 4.0: How the Coming Skills Revolution Can Transform Agriculture

AgriTech Startups in Canada

AgriTech Startups in Toronto

Last week, Joe Rogan announced a multi year licensing deal with Spotify and that his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, will be exclusively on Spotify’s platform on September 1st. In my opinion, this is undoubtedly Spotify’s strategy of enhancing their ad capabilities around podcasts, a strategy that became evident when Spotify acquired Gimlet and Anchor last year. Spotify’s podcast strategy l comes down to one thing — network effects. For full disclosure, I learned this in class :)

For those that want the upfront conclusion, here is what Spotify’s doing:

• Spotify is restructuring the industry by centralizing ads

• Spotify attracts established podcasts content creators → attract more listeners → attract more advertisers → increase bottom line → increase pay for podcast content creator → attracts more podcast content creators (and the cycle continues)

Now let’s dive deep into the analysis.

While podcasts aren’t the first thing that people think about when they think Spotify, they seem to have more control of the podcast ecosystem (as shown below). Spotify’s been strengthening their position in the podcast space by doing to podcasts the way Google and Facebook did to the internet — centralize ads. With how it stands, the podcast industry is highly fragmented which is not ideal for advertising.

According to Porter’s Essential Test, a theoretical strategy framework that explains the conditions under which diversification will truly create shareholder value, the podcast industry is generally not the most attractive industry. So why get involved? It is worth mentioning that a section of Porter’s Essential Test mentions one reason an entity can enter an industry is if they believe they can restructure. This theory seems to hold true and is evidently what Spotify is trying to do with their strategy with ads. It is obvious that Spotify isn’t interested in creating podcasts, rather consolidating the advertising around podcasts which will in turn restructure the podcast industry.

Recently, Spotify released a feature for podcast creators and advertisers called Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), enabling Spotify to insert ads in real time. With SAI, Spotify is capable of providing podcasts and advertisers detailed analytics such as ad impressions, frequency, reach and anonymized audio info, such as age, gender, device type and listening behavior. However, Spotify requires its own content to insert these ads. The more podcasts Spotify has, the more opportunities Spotify has to insert ads, growing their advertising capabilities. If we think about it, this is exactly why Anchor and Gimlet was acquired. Gimlet provides Spotify podcasts (to insert ads) and Anchor lures more podcast content creators to grow podcast ownership. Since Podcasts are a fixed cost, the more listeners that can be added to the platform, the more profits will be added to the bottom line.

Having considered all the above, it should make sense as to why Spotify pursued the licensing deal with Joe Rogan. If Spotify attracts more podcasts on their platform, particularly established and big name podcasters on their platform, they will attract more listeners. As Spotify increases their listener base, they will attract more advertisers who want to insert their ads into Spotify. Ultimately, the more advertisers are on Spotify’s platform, the more revenue Spotify can generate which they can offer podcast creators. It’s this cycle (which is shown below) that Spotify is capitalizing on as a way to grow their podcast position in the market.

Spotify never fails to surprise and is constantly thinking ahead. This transaction is a big win for Spotify. What I’m still wondering about is Apple and what moves they’ll make in the future as Spotify is making strides towards becoming the leading audio platform in the market.