Some product managers are minted in MBA programs, and others are engineers who are equally talented with code and human beings.
My PM career began after a first act as a journalist for Bloomberg and other outlets.
In 2015, I moved to the Bay Area when my wife enrolled in a doctoral program at Stanford. Soon after, I began my startup career with Truvalue Labs, a provider of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data on companies. Truvalue Labs’ ambitions extend beyond the standard ESG data from ratings firms like MSCI: It aims to harness AI to comb through natural language data that is timely and at a massive scale.
While I started at Truvalue Labs writing and editing white papers and research, I became fascinated by the challenge of turning big data into a useful investment data product for analysts, portfolio managers, and quants. My years as a business reporter meant I understood the use case intimately, and I earned a role on the product team.
On Truvalue Labs’ small core product team, I work alongside Chief Product Officer and co-founder Phil Kim and Director of Product Management Eli Reisman. It is an invaluable experience to learn both strategic and tactical product management. I take part in an Agile environment development process from start to finish:
- Roadmap prioritization
- Define specifications, write user stories, and create proofs-of-concept
- Collaborate with engineers on Scrum team through sprints
- Prioritize bugs with QA team, groom backlog, and create business logic tests for data products
- Develop launch materials and maintain documentation