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