How to Transition from Project Management to Product Management

Coming from an International Background, What Were some of your Job Hunting Challenges?

There are so many things that I don’t know where to start with this. So, I will just say a couple of things about moving here to the United States. Three years ago, I still had a job in Russia, and I was working remotely for some time, but I couldn’t really support myself and I needed to start working on something else. I was astonished because being in Russia, I got used to the idea that my education is pretty good, and my knowledge and network worked very well. Usually, I was able to nail the interview process with a company within one or two weeks at most. That was the average time to get a pretty decent job there.

When I came here, I quickly realized that nobody cares about my university. Nobody cares about my experience. Nobody cares about anything that I thought would matter here, and I was pretty freaked out.

Do you Feel like Product Gym’s Classes Adequately taught People how to do Parts of the Product Manager Job?

Yeah, absolutely! I love how the classes provide breadth. Like Rich always emphasizes, there are a lot of product managers out there, each coming from a different background. I think it is always useful to know how they see the profession and how they see the work processes (everything from their own perspective). It adds to your overall perspective and broadens your mind. In other words, and this is always useful when you go to interviews, you’re kind of trying to find your own particular approach to communicating with those teams and managers.

What Advice can you Give to those Going through the Job Hunt?

You have to be consistent. You have to fight for your life be here, not just in New York City, but to work where you work, live the life that you live because it’s such a privilege that we have. I didn’t know that I have a privilege before coming here as a person who lived in Russia with a particular education and so on and so forth. So I think that just fighting for yourself, fighting for your future, fighting for everything, is really important if you really want something, and should you never stop.