How to Transition from Management Consulting to Product Management

What were your Initial Challenges when you First Joined Product Gym?

A lack of commitment, which wasn’t anyone’s fault except mine. I would go in waves and if you join Product Gym, they strongly urge that you follow the process. I would follow the process, but get demoralized sometimes because of the lack of time I had from traveling a lot during my job at the time. I was flying every week and always on the road, working relatively long hours. It wasn’t until I started applying and noticed that I was getting pretty far in the interviews, getting to third and forth round interviews that I started fully committing to the program.

Do you Enjoy your Current PM Job More Compared to your Management Consulting Job?

Yeah. I think that with product management, I have a lot more flexibility for finding jobs. At Product Gym, you are taught a lot of frameworks, so I’m not afraid of applying to different types of product manager jobs. I have more flexibility of what I want to find, and I personally just find the work a lot more interesting too. I like working at somewhere a little smaller, so I can wear a lot of different hats and learn a lot. So again, I think I can take control of my destiny a little bit more versus management consulting, you keep going up the ladder and the ladder gets shorter with less people allowed on it.

Did you Ever Feel Imposter Syndrome on Whether or not you Could Become a Product Manager?

A little bit, but I was a bit lucky because throughout my career, I did actually do a little bit of product stuff. For example, at a previous job, I helped rolled out a new claim system, which was huge because the company hasn’t updated their system for about 15 years. We were building a software and after that, I actually do have a data background. I didn’t have quote-unquote product management frameworks that a lot of hiring managers expect, but they’re so easy to learn and you can read about them too. At Product Gym, there are different instructors every week and you can always get different perspectives. Like anything, you have to mold that to yourself on how you can solve a given problem.