Continue Journey at a Company Intern
Some of you may have read my journey as a product management intern (if you haven't I recommended you to read it here). In that article, I decided to continue my journey in product management.
Besides the reason, there's an opportunity in Traveloka why is product management my choice?
First, I love creating product concepts. During the internship, I am exposed to create a product concept based on data, benchmarking analysis, and user research interviews. I really enjoy the process of it. Second, I have challenges understanding technical things. Sometimes I need challenges that push me out of my comfort zone to go beyond. Although it's not enjoyable, I know this technical understanding will be useful especially during this digital era. Last but not least, the work is not boring because you deal with lots of stakeholders (designer, engineer, marketing team, operation team, etc). You can learn a small part of their knowledge and in the future, it's really possible to jump into that career.
I kick-started my career in product management as a fresh and ambitious employee because at that time I had just graduated. I'm excited to learn anything and ready to be exposed more and more. In my internship, I only dealt with one project and mainly in the planning stage. In my full-time job, I am assigned to multiple projects and do end-to-end product development (planning, execution & maintain the product). So there's a significant difference in job scope and responsibilities between an intern and a full-time employee.
What are my struggles when I start my career in product management?
Lack of technical understanding
Since my background is in Pharmacy, I don't know about tech or engineering at all. To describe how clueless I am, it's as simple as I don't know the difference between a front-end engineer and a back-end engineer. If you're also as clueless as I am, don't worry because I've been in that position.
In the first 3 months, I got feedback from an engineer that said I didn't have technical context so it was difficult to work with me. It's not a surprise because at that time I didn't understand the explanation from engineers & lead meeting with engineers is a nightmare for me. I adapt and learn by always asking my teammates or my lead, then I try to imagine the context in my mind and restate to validate my understanding is already correct. By doing it continuously, in the next 6 months I got positive feedback from that engineer. He said my technical context is so much improved and working with me is not a hassle anymore. In product management, you're not expected to master the technical context but when you can understand it in general, it definitely makes your work so much easier with the engineers.
Being flexible and always able to manage the expectation of all stakeholders
My projects did not always go smoothly, sometimes there are bumps on it. For example, there's a missing requirement in the middle of the development process or a sudden change from external that we can't avoid and we must cater to. Every bump that I experienced really honed my logical, problem solving, and stakeholder management skills on how to create a win win solution.
Handling multiple projects once at a time
In Traveloka, the product manager also acts as a project manager as well. So we're expected to create a good product requirement, execute and maintain it well. Since I deal with multiple projects at a time, sometimes it makes me overwhelmed. To overcome this I always prioritize the project & task that I need to do every day and upgrade my time management skill.
Survive during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic really hits the travel industry including Traveloka. During this period, there is some reprioritization from the upper management regarding the OKRs company so we need to reassess all the project to make sure it's still relevant to the company's goal. There's a time when we hold the feature development and help the customer operation team to handle the refund & reschedule cases. The picture beside is an award given by the company to my team as a part of the COVID Firefighter & COVID ranger team.
Wrapping up my story here
I never imagined myself to be in this career. Reflecting back, in the beginning, I was so clueless and didn't know how to create a feature. Now, I got so much better and have already made several features in Traveloka. I believe there will be more challenges ahead in the future and I'm excited to get through it.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-i-continue-my-journey-product-management-yobella-priskila
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