The key to success in product development is a thorough understanding of who you are developing. To build a product that has value, you need to understand the character it will use. For me at Evisort, this means spending hours on the phone with the general counsel to familiarize myself with the day-to-day work of a lawyer in a company. What are the pain points? What parts of their work do they really enjoy? What keeps them up at night? “At the heart of every product is the desire to make a person`s life easier or easier. If we listen to the customer and give them what they need, they will return the favor with love and loyalty to your brand. We are looking for a manager to lead the Collaboration Tools Legal Tech product category, including hiring I joined Evisort while it was still a team of five people working at Harvard Innovation Labs in Allston, Massachusetts. (Today, we have 30 full-time employees in Silicon Valley and Boston, and we recently closed a $4.5 million venture capital funding round led by San Francisco-based venture capital firm Village Global.) I was a typical sleep-deprived law student who dutifully went through the core courses of law school. One of these classes was Contracts”Š””””Š, frankly, my memory of the material is limited (No, unfortunately, I can`t tell you about old English common law cases about the meaning of consideration). But as a product manager for a state-of-the-art contract management company, I learned infinitely more about law, economics, and people than I could ever have had in class.
Here are three of the invaluable lessons I`ve learned along the way, and a few reasons why you should consider a career in product development: Good luck to anyone looking to get into product management. If I can do it, so can you! Until next time, stay strong and keep sticking to your dreams. If you`re feeling inspired to take the plunge into product management, feel free to set aside some time with me to have a conversation! There are many steps in my own journey from employee in a law firm to product manager at a tech company that were an absolute coincidence. The following tips are specifically for people who work in a non-technical context, but are interested in entering the technology industry and especially product management. However, if you want to satisfy your curiosity about what product management means and perhaps collect one or another pearl of wisdom, you can read on at your leisure. I had no technical training when I started at Evisort. Today, I supervise several teams of engineers around the world and lead complex software development projects. I don`t think you need specific training to be a product manager.
It`s as Lauren Chan Lee, Director of Product Management at Care.com says: It`s been less than a year since I worked as a product manager at a growing legal technology company, and honestly, I love it. The excitement of creating something users love, teaming up with brilliant creative engineers and designers, moving maps around Jira, and taking stock of our progress during the sprint as we plan our next release cycle – these are all concepts and working models that I wasn`t very familiar with during my tax law work – but love again and again, that it`s part of my job as a product manager. and helps me wake up every morning with a new sense of purpose and a new desire to create value for our users. Product managers have the opportunity to be creative problem solvers, autonomous designers, and responsible team leaders. But at the end of the day, product managers serve the customer. Francis Brown, head of product development at Alaska Airlines, puts it this way: These lessons are universally valuable. In fact, law firms and other professional organizations could probably benefit from implementing some of the structured task management principles inherent in the Scrum team process. So the bottom line is: with the right mindset, anyone can be a product manager, and if you invest in the work, it will set you up for any next challenge. She`s right: you need to know your value. For me, this meant using my familiarity with the legal profession (after studying law and working at a corporate firm) to design features specifically for lawyers who use our system. This meant using the interpersonal and team management skills I had gained through experiences as a salesperson, athlete, and business partner to communicate effectively with my engineers and complete tasks on time.
The role itself can mean different things to different people. Some will say that you are the primary communicator of a development team, the channel between design, engineering, and business, or even a mini-CEO who is largely responsible for the success or failure of your proposed function or product. By answering the above questions, you can still have a better understanding of what you know and don`t know about your current industry and where you can apply the industry knowledge you gained from working in your particular profession and apply it as a product manager in the technical “subfield” working in your industry to solve these problems.