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Product Manager Onboarding

  It is all about the stories. This is my 3rd week working as a Product Manager (PM) and I can truly say that the experience has been really interesting.   As I approach the one-month mark I can say I feel mostly comfortable with all my co-workers (even though we started in the middle of a pandemic and we are all working remotely) and as days go by I feel much more productive than when I started. Maybe what I am about to share is not exactly your situation but I find worth sharing it. My on-boarding experience has been totally different like I said due to the pandemic, however, there are 3 things that I would encourage any new PMs out there to do: 1. Don't be shy!   What do I mean by this? I have placed it as my number 1 on my list, because I find there is tons of information online about processes, flows, workloads, statistics and metrics, planning, project management and much more; but there is very little information about how is the life of a PM in daily basis, especially when
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The Need for Agile

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  As I start exploring different blogs, books and courses (which I probably recommend on future posts) I go back to my good old Agile Methodologies.   By definition Agile methodology is "a type of project management process, mainly used for software development, where demands and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customers". Now, if we look closer we can see how a Product Manager fits in the middle of all this, a PM has the mission to be at the center of this whole process, but not as the source but more of a balance core who handles multiple tasks and wears different hats.   Agile brings a perfect balance between Planning all the way to Deployment/Review, this balance is not only kept by the PM but by the different inputs from clients and developers who at the same time value each of the tasks and the effects of spending time on a specific product.   In previous jobs I have applied Agile as a way to t
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My First Philosophy

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No, I don't know it all   It is only half way through my second week as a PM and I'm already losing my sleep. Have you been there?   All I can think of is when I get to do some meaningful work and radical changes? How soon can I learn everything that entails about this business? How soon can I become a better writer and use proper words to express these ideas? The problem is the more I think about these things, the more anxious I get and the more blocked my mind becomes.   I only have one option is to rely in my own ability to overcome any obstacle, whether the obstacle is within or from the outside, by doing this I let myself "go with the flow" and allow others to exercise their ability to help me grow in this new position. Major Setback   I know! 10 days in this new job and I can already foreseen something in me that will prevent my ability to deliver: "My own ability to resolve issues". One of the beauties of being a developer is how much fun it i
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My First Week

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  I created this blog with the intention to track my progress as a PM. So recently I decided to switch careers, after almost 20 years working as a DB/Web Developer I decided to transition into a more business role.   There are many reasons about my decision, but maybe if you are reading this, you might find yourself agreeing with this idea, as I was getting older it seems like the world around me was going faster than I was and I couldn't keep up with it and by this I mean that my ability to learn new platforms and products didn't seem as sharp as it used to. Why was it important for me to make this transition?   Well, here it comes the part that I want to write to be memorialized forever on the internet. I have been a systems oriented guy since I was in high school, I was good at programming and better at resolving logical problems but I had an instinct about business that not a lot people have (at least that is what I have been told by many peers) and also I can connec
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