Written by Nicole Tam
About the Author
Current Position: Product Manager at Lyft
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Honours Mathematics at the University of Waterloo (Computing Minor and Business Specialization)
ACE Consulting Group Involvement:
Associate (2017-2018)
Executive/Sr Director (2018-2019)
How has being a part of ACE impacted your professional life and/or career trajectory?
ACE had a big influence on my professional life. While I gained a lot of technical knowledge from client work and learned a lot about start-up culture, the most valuable lessons I learned were about building a network and having confidence in everything that I do. ACE taught me the importance of mentorship and branching out. As a first and second year student, I didn’t feel like I knew much about the career options that were available to me. By having honest conversations with upper year mentors, I was able to discover a path for myself and grew my network which eventually led me to pursuing a career in product management. These mentors taught me what I never would have learned in my courses at school. ACE also gave me the confidence to be honest with what I wanted my career trajectory to look like, and to go for it. I was given opportunities on ACE that I never would have thought I was qualified for - leading projects, pitching to startups, and running local events. Without having this initial exposure early on in my career, I would not have had the confidence to make big bets on myself.
What is your favourite ACE-related memory?
Definitely all the socials! I loved getting to know all the ACE members on a more personal level. To this day, I’m proud to call some of them my best friends. There isn’t a specific get-together that sticks out (although Christmas is always fun because of Secret Santa!) but I’m glad I took time out of my schedule to hang out. Building those interpersonal connections is so impactful and I know that even if I reach out to any of them today for anything, they would not hesitate to reply and help me. I really appreciated the effort that all of the upper years put in to organize and encourage us to go to the socials. Looking back, I felt that at times I could have prioritized school work instead of a social, but if you ask me now what I remember about my university days, it’s definitely not the extra hours I put into studying for a midterm.
How has your math background helped you when working in the fields of business, consulting and product management?
Most people assume that math is a very theoretical field and doesn’t have much application, but I have found that my math background has been crucial towards succeeding in my field. As a math major, you’re constantly being introduced to new ideas and being asked to prove theories. To succeed, you have to pick things up quickly and build logical thinking skills. This translated directly in all my co-ops. In consulting, the ability to quickly ramp up and structure your thoughts is a big part of the role. As I transitioned into product management, I found that the key to solving product-centric problems relies on my ability to come up with a logical way to break down a larger problem into smaller, bite sized chunks which we can eventually tackle. As a recently graduated full-time product manager, I find myself relying on my structured way of thinking to be able to present problems more clearly and methodically find solutions. These fields (consulting, business, product management) also tend to get chaotic at times - by nature, there are a lot of moving parts in the day-to-day. Having good fundamentals such as structured and logical thinking are useful as you grow in your career.
What advice do you have for someone looking to break into the field of product management - what are the key skills involved, and how can one develop them?
Having gone through the product management recruitment process and early career stages, I can shed some light on some early stage PM skills that could be useful. While every product role may look a little different, the broader skills to focus on are product sense and execution.
Product sense is typically an evaluation of someone’s ability to solve a problem. Some skills to develop here would include critical thinking, creativity, and structured problem solving. Execution is an evaluation on someone’s ability to successfully deliver a product. This would include having a good understanding of the metrics that drive a product, the ability to build a tactical roadmap of what needs to be done to build this product, and potential risks and mitigations (just to name a few). Product sense can be built by doing case studies. This will build familiarity with open ended problems and how to narrow it down to more specific and tangible issues.
Execution skills can be difficult to build without having experience - while there are execution focused case studies, there can be a lot of things to think about. For early career PMs, I would encourage taking the time to execute on projects even within a small team - whether this is a school group project, a project at a hackathon, or even just a totally unrelated side project. There’s no 1 way to break into product management, and I find that many PMs have varying backgrounds. A diverse set of experiences is helpful to set you apart from others, so just make it work for you!