I fundamentally believe we are put on this earth to love and serve each other. If you have read the book Drive (by Daniel Pink), it supposes we’re all motivated by mastery, purpose, or autonomy, and that one of these is our major motivator. You could say I’m most motivated by purpose. Given that purpose and mission motivate me, and I believe we are meant to love and serve one another, it amazes me that it took me so long to get into a career in product management. I think my entire career was pulling me in this direction, it just took me a bit to really understand it and move with it.

I started my career as a software engineer working on mainframe disaster recovery software at IBM in 1999. I had one of the best leaders I have ever worked for right out of the gate. I learned a TON from him and this team about what it truly means to be a high performing team. The excellence on this team was astounding, and the community they built for each other as a team has carried me through my career and shaped the leader I am and the kinds of teams I want to work with. I was on this team for 8 year. I then moved into java development (what I learned in school) for IBM working on IBM Director, a storage management hub. Again, the team was amazing, my boss was great, and I picked up a lot more on my journey. It was here that I first learned about product management. Along with my programming and testing, I worked with our vendors to give requirements, negotiate SOWs, work out timelines, and work to build a solid product that was usable, feasible, and valuable. After 7 more years there, I left IBM to join USAA as a tech lead java developer working on financial crimes projects in 2012. It was here that I spent a year working on implementing analytics into fraud and cyber operations. After a year in IT, the business sponsor said “Hey I’m building a team of data scientists and I need you to come “tech lead” them.” I knew what predictive models were but I didn’t understand the math or data strategies. He was confident that I could learn that part, but what he really wanted was an IT rigor around building models. He wanted to follow an agile process, and he wanted to build quality in so that it didn’t take so long to deploy. THAT I could do. Then he also had me serve as product owner to IT since I could speak the language. It was in this last role that I started to find my purpose and over the last 11 years I have learned so much.

Product management is all about being of service by solving problems, addressing pain points, and making peoples lives/jobs easier. And being a leader in product, it’s all about teaching, coaching, and guiding people how to do all that. It seems so simple but in reality there is so much that goes into it. People are multifaceted and organizations can be complex. Add to that external factors like regulations and laws and the job is not easy.

So I have decided to do what I like to do best: to love and serve by teaching, coaching, and mentoring through telling stories from my experiences of building technical products over the the last two and a half decades. My hope is that you enjoy the journey.