About me
I started my career working for startups blending business consulting with data science and product development. I then worked as an analytics-focused management consultant to further hone my technical skills, before going back to being a Product Manager for data products, first at PepsiCo, and now at CKDelta.
Outside of work, I have a variety of interests that I learn, think, and (sometimes) teach about. These include rock climbing, science fiction, environmentalism, current affairs, and public speaking. I occasionally write about some of these on my personal website.
The backstory to this Substack
When I started working on data products (and discovered that ‘product management’ was a thing a few months later), I found my impostor syndrome tamed: My role was by design not that of a technical expert, but rather that of a generalist who speaks the language of their customers and champions their needs. Neat!
But then, as I started reading up on product management, and even take a couple of courses, I found that impostor syndrome had peaked up again: Why am I not able to relate to so many parts of what these PMs are talking about? What A/B testing can I do on a 20-user product? And ship something with half-broken data to an enterprise client or internal team? No way. Why can’t I find anything about the challenges I am actually facing? It was both demoralising and frustrating at the same time. I was used to googling my problems!
Fast forward a couple of years ago, and I realised that while I’d worked as a product manager, I was not alone in finding the learnings of PMs from big tech and B2C apps only somewhat relevant. I read Building Products for the Enterprise, a great book that helped me appreciate some key differences between the products I’d worked on and those most PMs wrote about. Still, more questions were left unanswered, and I figured them out through a mixture of luck, learning about the technical domains I was in, and, well, the hard way that most on-the-job learning happens.
Fast forward once more, to today (or, well, a few months ago): I realised that the lack of content that could help me get to the answers I was after quicker (or at least validate my thinking) means there is an opportunity for me to share the lessons I’ve learned. These are lessons that since then sometimes feel trivial, or obvious, either because I’ve internalised them so much in the last couple of years, or because they’ve come from my past lives as a data analyst, management consultant, and web application product manager.
