Eddie: Welcome to episode 7 of the WebJoy podcast.
I'm your host, Eddie.
In this podcast, we interview guests about their origin story and what
makes them excited and joyful to be part of the tech community.
I hope you enjoy today's episode "So Many Options to Learn" with Emily Patterson
I'm excited to have Emily joining us today.
Emily say hi, and let people know a little bit about who
you are and what you do.
Emily: Yeah for sure.
Thanks for having me on Eddie Hi everyone.
My name is Emily Patterson.
I am the Director of Product Management at Fortress Information Security.
So I am helping build cybersecurity software for
critical infrastructure companies.
Anyone who provides your power in the United States.
I've been in technology for about 15 years did that math the
other day got very depressed.
I've worked in a lot of different industries, primarily in B2B SaaS
so I've done immigration SaaS, I've done health tech, and most recently
I've been in cyber security So this is my second stint in cyber security
and it's a really great field.
Can't recommend it enough if folks are interested in it.
I do product management.
I've gone through the gamut of levels of product management from individual
contributor to running my entire team.
In general have really spent a lot of time around technologists and working in
different contexts and making different connections with folks et cetera.
So very excited to be on this podcast with you, Eddie and talking
about what I like about it about it, cause it's easy to be negative.
Eddie: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so how did you get involved in product management?
How did you decide, oh, Hey, this sounds like a thing I'd like to do.
Emily: Yeah So product is one of those fields that back when I was in college,
that was definitely not a thing at all.
So I knew I wanted to get into technology.
I did my undergraduate degree at Boston University and I started
doing some consulting work and got familiar with what opportunities
there are actually in technology.
One of the things I really thought I was good at and things that I liked
was working around software engineers.
I'd taken a couple coding classes in high
school and college.
To be honest, not very good at it.
can't debug my own code for my life, so it's really limiting for
a developer career path so I was working as a project coordinator
type person and a business analyst.
When I was very early in my career, and then from the business analyst role, I
kind of morphed into product management.
There was a large rebranding, that a lot of tech companies did in the late
zero zeros early tens, to move away from the title of business analyst
to product manager, product owner so that's kind of how I got into it
and I've just been in it ever since.
So I started my career writing business requirements.
BRDs in the waterfall world, PRDs in the agile world.
who just did a
rebranding, but doing a lot of that documentation, working with the
engineers, getting work planned, getting roadmaps made that sort of thing.
It's just been my life ever since.
I'm pretty good at it now, I like to think.
Eddie: Yeah.
I'm sure you all, if you've made it this long, I think you're
probably pretty good at what you do.
What is it about product management that keeps you excited?
Keeps you kind of plugged into things and enjoying what you do.
Emily: Yeah product is one of those roles that actually can be pretty exhausting.
I certainly have burned out in my career a couple of years ago.
I had a pretty pretty tough mental health couple of months there.
After, you know, really just giving your all to a company
and it really can drain you.
And I try to caution younger, early career product managers to not let that happen.
Cause it's very easy You owe a lot of people, a lot of things
as a product person you owe your engineers, some good explanations and
business justification and context.
You owe your stakeholders information about what's coming up next and
what's happening and if, anything has gone wrong wrong and you owe
your customers follow ups and release notes and all those sorts of things.
Product management can very easily be too big of a job, to be honest with you.
There's a lot you have to do, and there's a lot of responsibilities.
I think as a group product managers tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves . We
always have to be showing up for our team and showing up for our boss and showing
up for the C-suite and showing up for our customers, and our other stakeholders.
And it can be really exhausting to, and you forget that you also
have to show up for yourself.
So product for me has always been a thing that I just really like building stuff.
I like seeing it go from an idea to a real thing that people use I work
in B2B SaaS so one of the things that I get a lot of joy from is actually
helping other people do their job.
So when you're in B2B, someone is trying to be an accountant or trying to be
an immigration lawyer or trying to be a Cybersecurity engineer or analyst
and your software is helping them do a better job at what they do . So
you're literally enabling someone to do their job and that can be really
powerful to think about at scale.
Cause if you are working in marketing technology and you have 50 big customers.
Think about how many people that's impacting, not only the marketers, but
the people receiving the marketing, right?
So actually even the smaller things that you do can have a really big ripple
effect And if you take really good like pride and care of your products
and you keep improving them and giving them love and care and affection.
You can really have a big impact on how someone's day goes.
If you think about that, some random cybersecurity engineer like logs into
my product on a daily or weekly basis.
And that's a part of their life.
That's what they get paid to do.
If you don't enable them to do their job well, you're kind of failing at your job.
So it's a responsibility but I love having that kind of an of an impact.
Right now we literally secure the grid of the United States.
That's a big thing, right?
I get a lot of personal satisfaction from those moments, when you take a
step back and really think about the big picture on on what we're doing here
in software I think it's easy to kinda get swept away and in the bugs and the
backlog and you know, oh my goodness.
The sprint and story points and all of that stuff Thinking about the big picture.
It's really fulfilling what we do if you really think about it and
your product is providing, a good service and hopefully everyone's
product is providing a good service.
Eddie: And if it's not you may want to think about things reflect a little bit
Emily: you might consider maybe another company company . But that's what
keeps me coming back every day, to be honest with you I just love building.
I love working with engineers.
I really appreciate hanging out with my fellow nerds on a
regular basis I think it's great.
I found myself a couple years ago after I burned out trying to think what else
would I do with my life and I have decided that this is just what I do with my life I
can't imagine myself doing anything else.
To be honest.
Eddie: That's awesome.
I think two things that stood out, first of all, I love that idea, product
managers are showing up for everyone else.
You've gotta show up for yourself too.
I feel like that's probably gonna end up as a quote somewhere on a page in
marketing about this podcast in some way.
Cuz I love that quote.
That's amazing.
You probably should use that quote if you haven't like on your
Twitter and different things.
I that's excellent.
But also with your story it seems like not only have you been in a lot of B2B
spaces, but it sounds like you've been in a lot of B2B spaces that really
are kind of public utility focused.
The grid, cyber security , I believe you said kind of healthcare and stuff.
Emily: Mm-hmm and not everybody I think needs to follow a path of needing to
work in a place like that necessarily.
It takes all sorts for sure.
And even the fun stuff is there to give people joy and pleasure
and things like that But yes, it definitely makes the tough days easier
to recover when you can think about the good that you are helping to do.
I know a lot of people actually trying to get into like climate
tech right now for the same reasons.
There's just the appeal of doing something for future generations and for the good
of the earth and for other people and that sort of things I think there's more
of an appeal now if you're thinking about a career change or a different
industry, I have found it to be a great motivator in my day to day work.
Eddie: Awesome that's great.
As we do with this podcast, we talk about, Hey, what's something that
brings you joy in the tech industry.
And so I wanna extend that question to you, Emily, what is it that you've
found or noticed that brings you joy that you'd like to talk about today?
Emily: Yeah.
So the one thing I have been doing is standing up a product management
incubator, which we could talk about a little bit later but in doing that,
I have been exploring and looking at a bunch of different B2B SaaS tools that
maybe I don't get to use in my day job but I know other people get to use in
their day job and so I have been looking a lot at like Miro and some of the other
collaboration tools like Mural with an L at the end, Figma, all of these kind
of tools that product managers use, even Atlassian with Confluence and Jira.
What I've been seeing lately is this trend, and I love it of just a lot of
best practices and knowledge sharing.
So when you sign up for Miro, you're not just getting a whiteboarding
tool, and someone just put this on Twitter that I saw like yesterday or
today or something like that, you're also getting all of these templates.
And if you look at the templates, they have done an amazing job of writing like
"this is a jobs to be done" template.
Here's what jobs to be done is here's how you would use this template.
Here's how you could use this template.
Here's who generally is using this template.
This is great for product managers and designers and UX researchers.
And they've done such a good job of creating that content.
Not only are they doing it for retention and conversion and tracking those metrics.
They're making it more valuable as a product But I mean, it's out there.
It's free to look at.
You can go look at the Figma help pages.
You don't have to be a Figma customer to go see their support section And they have
so much knowledge sharing that they're doing about best practices, about how they
use tools about how tools can be used And then I thought Miro was a great example,
cuz you could learn like all of the really big product manager frameworks that we
use Very simply by clicking through all of these templates and reading about them.
I thought it was so great to see.
I've seen this on a bunch of other tools too, and it I think in my
opinion, not only is it helping obviously their retention and metrics
et cetera but it's also allowing people who don't have access to that
information to learn about it, which is traditionally been the gate, right.
On a lot of technical topics and in product management, especially, it's
really hard to know what goes on over there, unless you already work in
a tech company, unless you already work with the software development
team in some capacity, and you've interacted with a product manager
before and you can see them work.
Like what do they do over there exactly?
And now you can just go Google this and there's 18,000 Medium articles and
20,000 Google search results or whatever, probably 2 million Google search results.
Product Board was the other one that I was looking at, they do a really great job of
trying to tell you, not only about their product, but about product management
in general, like here's how to do this.
And I just was on a mini conference with them and got introduced to their community
and they have put up a whole community and, obviously, to support their product.
But in general it's free to use.
Anyone can log in and just ask a bunch of questions and there's a huge amount
of knowledge sharing that I see.
they're also really helping people understand what happens behind
the scenes, how people do that and the Dev Community has this too.
They're the same way.
They have so many resources that are totally free and open
and you just register and like, woo here's all your stuff.
You can really get yourself acquainted with what goes on and, how it works.
You don't necessarily have to pay $15,000 for a bootcamp.
To understand if it's something you're interested in, which I
think is super duper important for people trying to get into tech,
trying to transition around tech.
If you're a UX person and you think maybe you wanna learn how to code I maybe you
don't wanna pay a bunch of money to get a CS degree or something like that.
Or go to a bootcamp and those sorts of options that exist.
It's so much easier to just dip your toe into.
I was just chatting with the alumni group from Boston university,
my undergrad this morning.
And I was talking about that in the same lines as like, when I was in college.
If you didn't take a class in it you really didn't know about it.
There was none of this stuff out there.
It was really hard to know what was going on in the tech field to understand
what career options are available to you and how does that team work?
And if you decide, I don't wanna code there's a million tech jobs that
don't involve coding and It's hard to tell what those are sometimes,
but now all these resources are out there and you can go find out.
It's amazing.
It's so great.
I was telling someone about being a technical writer.
Like you can work in a tech company and use your english major.
I'm serious.
You can use that English major that you have from your liberal arts college.
And you could be a really great tech writer and make a bundle of money and
work in these great companies and get all these perks you don't have to be
an English teacher to use your degree and I think that is the one thing that
I've noticed lately in the last like five or seven years, product marketing
is like a really big thing now.
And developer relations they produce a ton of great content for free.
That's their job is to say, Hey, you could use this tool in this
context and do this and you they just help you do your job better.
You don't have to hunt down somebody and beg them for their time or spend
a bunch of money going to classes or certifications or anything like that.
You've got these things that are available to a lot of folks.
And all it takes is the internet and a couple of hours that you commit to it
and you can learn just so many things.
You know I was poking around at cloud security the other day.
I don't have ton of cloud security experience, so I was learning about
it and it's so easy now to access resources and everyone has written a
book there's books about everything.
Doesn't matter what the topic is there's gonna be a book about it.
Like someone's written a book about the very niche thing.
One of my Twitter buddies just published a book about platform product
management, like extremely niche.
And it was super helpful and very well written And I just love that.
I love that.
people can go on Gumroad and publish a book.
And now there's this super niche topic that you can pay $5
for and have a book available.
And it's just so different than if you didn't have an O'Reilly media contract in
2001, you weren't gonna get your stuff up.
Be thoughtful about what you're signing up for but just the fact that there's
so much available I think is incredible.
And I love it.
And it's so great for decreasing the barriers to get into different
jobs inside of the tech world.
I remember in high school, like shelving Pearl books.
I worked at our public library and I had the computer books
section, which was awesome for me.
Cause I got to read them sometimes on my break.
But that's what we used to do.
Right.
You checked out a Pearl book from the library and then you went
home and you tried to do it.
You didn't have a tutorial on your screen on YouTube that you could
literally code along with and it's a total game changer, I think for
people to learn in different ways.
If you can't just read a book and understand it, most of us, I don't think
can do that to be totally honest with you.
I think especially in technology, a lot of us are visual people, like we
want to see it and understand it to fully like process what's going on.
And just having the ability to be like, you could read a book or you could watch a
YouTube video, or you could read this blog cause it's shorter or you could listen
to a podcast or an audio book or something like you've got so many options to learn
about whatever developers, relations, product management, there's like 18,000
product manager podcasts right now.
And I love every single one of them.
And I try to listen to as many as I can.
Cause it's just so fun.
How much is out there.
I love it.
Eddie: I think that's great.
I think the different formats is a huge thing.
I have two toddlers . I don't have a lot of time to sit and like read
books so I listen to podcasts and that way, like I still get to consume
stuff while I'm doing other things.
Whereas in other times I've just wanted to read and I haven't
wanted to listen to anything.
You wanna sit in the quiet right.
On a rainy day.
Emily: Only someone with toddlers and babies can really, I think
comprehend like, yes I would like to sit in the silence.
Eddie: Absolutely.
So I think that's awesome.
Those different formats, but I think one other thing that I think is really cool
about the information sharing about what you're talking about is that these tools
actually also open up the information, sharing across functional areas.
So for example I actually was the one who introduced Miro at my last company.
I was like, Hey, I'm gonna use this.
The pandemic had started and I was like, I need a way to be able
to engage with the team visually.
So I started the trial of Miro and we just happened to use it with one
of the product managers one time, and then he fell in love with it.
Then the product team ended up using it more than my team of
front end engineers and designers.
But they made sure that every time they did a planning sheet,
that we were added to it.
And so we could see their thoughts as they developed.
And when it was time to start talking about where they're
at in the discovery process.
They could walk us through the highlights and we could go down later
and dig in as much as we wanted to.
But suddenly as engineers and as designers, we got to see the
discovery process that our product partners were doing and it made
it so much less of a black box.
It made it feel like we were more partners and we were actually
able to share information.
And we understood where they were coming from, and so that helped
take down some of that like product engineering barrier, if you will.
That sometimes exists.
Emily: Yes.
I love to hear that.
One of the things that I always try to coach more early career product
managers is , there's no such thing as sharing your work too early.
Just share it.
I don't care what state it's in.
Be a hot mess, huge rough draft, bunch of errors in it I don't care.
Share it anyway.
It's just so nice to give people that transparency and
allow them to follow along.
Right.
Everyone likes to To understand what their colleagues are
doing on a day to day basis.
And product managers, especially, it's not as cut and dried as I coded a thing.
Here's the thing I coded.
Now you can see it.
QA has tested it.
Here's the thing I built You know it's it's not always that not
always that straightforward for other functions, not just product managers
obviously other people who do more conversational work and more relationship
building and things like that.
Always kind of you know have that issue of like, well, what did you do today?
Like, whoa, look at my calendar but being able to share those conversations
in that way is super powerful across an organization for alignment,
uh, for trust building, right?
Like you don't feel like your product partners are in a black
box and they're not talking to you.
Oh my goodness.
It feels like you're on the same team, which is especially
in a full remote Organization that is a very important thing.
(laughing)
Eddie: Yeah absolutely.
Emily: I started in September, my first fully remote role.
and I really appreciate now how much extra effort sometimes you have to put
into showing and giving that visibility especially to your engineer teammates
Eddie: Yeah, absolutely.
It's trickier.
I've been remote since 2015, so definitely there's a lot of tricky things when you're
remote of like, how do I communicate?
And create human connection when you're so far away and stuff.
Emily: And I think that's another thing that the SaaS tools
right now are doing so well.
I've seen probably like 10 different startups in the last
six months that are like let's all have a coffee at the same time.
Like the coffee bot on slack.
Hey everybody, it's coffee chat time.
And we're all gonna hop on our cameras and have a coffee chat It's just so
fun to see like people coming up with answers to these things that like I would
describe them as inconveniences a little bit to be honest with you, but they
do bring, you know a smile of people's faces and they, I think they improve
especially fully remote companies They definitely improve the quality of life.
Eddie: Like you said, there's definitely a ton of those and some
of them operate better than others.
But, I think the heart of all of them is in the right place of connecting people.
So that's cool.
Emily: Absolutely
(laughing)
Eddie: As we wrap up here today, one thing we always like to do before the
end is to just see if there's anything that you've been working on that you
think might be helpful to the community.
Anything you'd like to share,
Emily: Yes, so I have recently, as of March stood up a product
manager incubator program.
So this is a program aimed at underrepresented
backgrounds in technology.
So non-men.
Right?
So if you identify as not a man, hey, yeah, let's hang out.
Um, and if you are not white, basically for lack of a better phrase right
Eddie: Essentially if you are not me
Emily: Not Eddie, Yeah.
Eddie: You're It.
Emily: I was looking at some of the big tech companies and they're
diversity inclusion reports and the numbers are just still not great.
So I'm trying to find like ways that I can help, especially in product
management I've spent a lot of time being literally the only woman
in a zoom meeting of 15 people.
And it's 2022 at this point So I'm trying to do my little part to fix it.
So right now.
It's free.
I'm not sure if it will always be free, but it will absolutely always be low cost.
I can promise you that a hundred percent the point is
that we're not charging $4,000.
For product manager certificates that may or may not be impactful,
but it's a free program right now for underrepresented folks in technology
to learn how to be a product manager.
And we do the whole product management life cycle.
So we teach you how to do the things, but then we're actually applying those things.
So we're building with no code tools and all of the members of the cohort
are literally building a product at the end they're going to be able to
chat with some really great product leaders, get some feedback on their
product and how they built it and their techniques and their presentation skills.
That's important too, get some really actionable feedback and then actually
have not only a polished, beautiful presentation they also have a real product
that they can show potential employers.
And build some credibility that I have built a thing before I have experience
you can hire me for this, you know product owner, APM, early career product manager
role and allow hiring managers to just be more confident that the person they hire
is gonna be able to land and keep up.
That's all we're trying to do.
Right.
Cause that's the biggest issue for product managers.
Especially in junior roles, early career roles is it's really easy to
get over your head to get overwhelmed.
People are so busy, they don't have time to mentor sometimes, which isn't
great but it happens, totally happens.
So giving them more skills so that they can land in these
roles and be successful, right?
Cause it's not just getting the job, it's staying in the
job and staying in the career.
I think it's been a big success.
We've already had two out of our six people get new roles while
they're in the program, where they haven't even finished yet.
And we've got people who are getting a lot of traction on resumes and job
applications and things like that And the products they're designing are so cool.
I'm meeting with two women are building out a gifting suggestion service.
It's so cool to watch them think about it.
What would make that different?
What would make that special?
What would make people wanna use it.
Actually go through it's really about going through those thought process.
The product at the end of the day is fine, the important
part is that they did the work.
They put in the reps.
It's kinda like running, you don't just sign up for a marathon without training.
You've gotta do some training.
And that's how I feel about product management as a product leader and
as a former hiring manager, I used to hire a whole bunch of product folks.
It's really important to be able to have some experience actually doing
the work so you don't get overwhelmed.
That's what I'm working on is called InTheLab Product Management.
The website is InTheLabPM.com.
I did get the.com label thumbs up Uh and we're just in the process of a pretty
new rebrand with our great designer.
If anyone out there knows someone who wants to get into product management
from outside of tech, or even from inside of tech, if you're in a CS role or an
account executive role or something like that, please, tell them to sign up.
We're starting our next cohort in the fall.
Very exciting
Eddie: Awesome.
You have a specific month that you're planning on starting?
Emily: Oh yeah Great point.
Just as a caveat here, the program is run by me and me, and I'm the
staff of InTheLab Product Management.
So I'm doing this all out of pocket.
Bootstrapped.
There's no money flowing anywhere except out of my out of my wallet
Eddie: Out of your wallet
Emily: We're trying to coordinate stuff for the next cohort right now.
I am thinking the next cohort's going to kick off in the
August, September timeframe.
I'm hoping to time it so that it wraps by Thanksgiving because nobody
wants to be dealing with this during the rush up to the holidays and then
hopefully that cohort goes well, we'll be kicking another one off in January.
But there's an open application.
It's super easy.
There's four fields that you have to fill out.
So if you hear this and you're interested at all, please feel
free to pop your name in there.
And I am personally reviewing everybody's LinkedIns and we'll
personally be reaching out to everybody, as we get towards a start time.
Eddie: Thank you for joining us today, Emily.
It's been a pleasure chatting.
Emily: Thank you so much Eddie It's been great.
Eddie: Thanks for joining us for Episode 7.
"So Many Options to Learn" with Emily Patterson.
You can find out more about Emily on her Twitter @epatt6.
You can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as a link
to Emily's Twitter in the show notes.
If you enjoyed this episode, help others discover it as well
by rating and reviewing it in your favorite podcast directory.
And following us on Twitter at @WebJoyFM.
Thank you for listening and have a great day.
Next episode of WebJoy.
Grace: I think of designing my life as like a big experiment, a big experiment
of seeing what brings me joy and what I like to do and what I'm good at.
And just trying a lot of things out and testing stuff, because as
a designer, or as myself, I used to feel like I need to be perfect.
I need to wait for the perfect time I need to ask for permission.
to, make sure everything's like pixel perfect.
But then that really held me back from actually executing things.
so I think of myself as having discovery and and just testing things out and seeing
what I like the most and what I'm good at to see what I can make the most impact.
it's also like having an infinite mindset of just seeing what
works or what doesn't work.
and iterating from there.
keep improving instead of worrying about being perfect on the first try.
So I kind of seeing designing my life as like designing a product and collecting
data and using that to keep improving.
And it's always fun to learn because I feel like when I'm learning,
I'm growing and I'm improving.
And so that feeling that excitement of learning new
things is what keeps me going.
Eddie: Like a Big Experiment" with Grace Ling.