60 days in

I have been quiet on this end for practical reasons. I was first busy and I was then trying to figure out what I can share since I now work at a publicly traded company and it is a learning process for me to decide what to say and what to keep to myself and protect my ass and that of my employer.

Now that I have mental space for it and I am sitting on a flight/bus/just trapped somewhere for over 30 minutes, it’s time to capture a bit of what’s happened in my first 60 days of work, hopefully while keeping in line with my new legal situation. And by 60 days, I mean 60 working days, not calendar ones, so I have excluded weekends, national holidays, and the likes.

I started a new Product Manager role in March. I expected to be crazy busy during the first 3 months onboarding, but I was crazy busy during the first 6 weeks. I felt fully onboarded after being in the job after that time. I have now attained a rhythm of work that feels balanced. I know better and would expect some busier periods to be ahead of me (which are always exciting), but hopefully not slower ones as that’d be just boring.

Let me share a bit of the context in which I work for you to get the picture before I share what I have achieved in 60 days.

Team set up

I work day-to-day as part of a product team that has 7 dedicated engineers including an engineering lead, two web engineers, one mobile engineer and three backend ones. Fully dedicated to this team are also a product designer and I, as the product manager.

There are other supporting roles that work with us but also with other teams under my group area. These include: a data analyst, a QA engineer, and several commercial functions including product marketing, business operations, sales and marketing.

There are many functions and teams I need to consult or coordinate with such Finance, Legal, Security, and many other product teams.

Working location and team distribution

We are a fairly distributed team. The engineers all work from various locations in Finland. We do have a HQ in Helsinki but most of the team works from home.  The product designer works from Germany, and marketing and product marketing are divided between Germany and Israel. The sales team is virtually everywhere.

How does that affect me? 

Well, I am still learning to find my rhythm but as I approach my third month I think I am starting to settle into one. The time difference is small or null with one hour being the maximum gap between any team members .

The truth is that this is the first time I hold a remote job. I have done remote gigs, but never a full time job. The dynamics are somewhat similar to the last 2 years in my previous job. Buuuuut, there are some significant differences:

In my previous job I was part of the HQ. 

This meant I had access to events, interactions and benefits that are not typical of a satellite office. There is an office in my city but there are no direct team members in it. Other department folks work in areas where we sometimes have an overlap but it’s minimal, making it non-valuable for me to go to the office, because the space is also limited and having team members mostly abroad means spending my time at the office locked in a phone booth as many discussions happen synchronously in video calls. No, thanks.

In my previous job, working remotely came enforced by the pandemic of COVID-19. And it came after 5 years of being in the job. That meant that I had met and worked with my previous colleagues mostly face to face, until we were forced into lockdown. Even with those from other offices we had plenty of opportunities to get together. By the time we were working remotely we had already established  strong relationships with all the nuances that being in the same physical space allows. In here I have had to spend a bit longer building relationships and I am not convinced that the quality of these will reach the same level that they would if we were working in a culture with a fully remote mindset or with full face-to-face interactions. In other words, evenly distributed across all teams and their members. There is an unevenness in our set up that results in some relationships being naturally stronger than others. We are not always well prepared for handling situations where 7 people are in a room and 3 other are in 3 different locations participating remotely.

Cross-functional dynamics have a local-global pull push to them

Most dynamics are similar to what I experienced previously. The twist comes with a team of around 30 people doing sales, who are located in the 15 countries where the product I work with is available.

While this is mainly a consumer company, the area I work in is B2B so my previous experience with B2B has come in handy. My experience working on a product for salespeople also helps me understand a lot the ways of working of these 30+ folks, although admittedly the flow of communication is a new level for me. They are all in different markets and while there are many common needs and requests, there are also important nuances we need to take into account. So this is another learning point in my prioritization and feedback processing skills. Previously all salespeople I worked with were exposed in the same as I was to our international customer base. In this case, I am exposed to all but they are exposed only to their local market which creates gaps in how we understand each other. So I am still fine tuning how we prioritize in this environment.

Company size

I have not felt too much the difference between working at a 1,000+ people company (the biggest size I had worked at until this) compared to an almost 10,000-people company. I suspect this is because the unit I work in is like a little startup of its own that has some overlaps and requirements with other parts of the company but that works pretty independently for the most part. Then again, this could simply be a case of “you don’t know what you don’t know”. I do admit there is a lot of information I have flowing around me that I intentionally ignore because if I engaged I would not get work done. Would some of that information be for my benefit? Probably…

So what can one do in 60 days of work?

A lot! In the first 35 days of work (about 7 weeks in) I had gathered learnings from all aspects of the business that inform product decisions: I interviewed all the sales team, participated in customer calls and even made a couple of in-person customer visits, learned from competitors thanks to my colleague in product marketing, and got answers to tons of questions with the help of two well versed data analysts and I learned a lot about the existing product with the help of our designer, and the engineers. All of this input was used by the 8th week (close to day 40) in a series of workshops to update our roadmap for the second half of the year. Admittedly, I benefited from the company roadmapping cadence which was in full swing. That made it easy for folks to be opened to collaboration. I suspect that if I had joined in between roadmapping cycles I would have been caught by the force of delivering while trying to figure out what we were doing. I still had to do that, but I had the privilege of also figuring out the answers to the big questions without the friction.

Have I shipped work, you ask? I have seen the team shipping, yes. But none of the work shipped so far has been the work I have contributed to prioritize and explore… This has been anticlimactic. I definitely want to see certain things live already, but this is the pain of being the product manager: I can’t deliver the baby faster if I get an extra woman or two to do so. I guess this also comes from working in a big organization. Even if we have a solution in its early stages, it is a solution that is one way or another embedded into the bigger machine and we can’t just get out of it.

See you in another 60 days!

Happy Wednesday,
Maria 🌺

PS. On the quest to find my rhythm of work as a remote member of my team, I have taken on the habit of working every now and then from a cafeteria. The white noise of crowds around me help me focus while shaking off the dullness of literally working every day from home. Travelling and working from other locations (but not for a “business reason”) is a new experiment I’m starting. This way I get to know more specialty coffee places and visit friends 🙂 This one is from Stockholm: Café Pascal.