What Even is a Product Manager with Jonathan Katahanas

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the rata, the official podcast of the UK competing society, where we explore the human side of tech. I'm your host, Olivia. And on this week's episode, we'll be talking to John about their experience at a lesson as a product manager. Alright, so tell me a little bit about yourself, Johnny.

Speaker 2: 0:32

Uh, so my name is Jonah. I'm a product manager at Lassie and I've been at LaSeon for about three and a bit years now. Um, I moved to, I was originally from Brisbane, so a UK student, um, I move to Lausanne, stopped working in kind of early 2017. And my current role is I PM. Um, what's called the cloud editor. So we have building a editing component that we are rolling out across all of our cloud products over time. Uh, the big consumers of it at the moment, a conference in JIRA and the kind of the underlying goal is to create this familiar editing, like content creation and consumption experience across, uh, across all of our products. So it's been a fun journey. I took over the editor. It was one team of about 12 people early February, last year or third March last year. Uh, and we're now at 40 plus engineers. There's four teams now, um, IPM two of them, and it's been quite, quite a steep learning curve of, uh, it's a insanely technically complex component with just so many dependencies. It's been a really fun journey. Um, and yeah, it came from, I came through their grad grad program, which I can talk about later if you want. And then prior to that, I didn't study a technical degree. I kind of wish I did. Um, but I didn't spend a lot of time. I studied business and commerce. Joel didn't do a lot of work at uni, but spent a lot of time working outside. So I worked at companies like red hat and then my final year at uni, I worked full time, uh, Microsoft running their innovation center, where I basically looked after how Microsoft engaged and supported the startup ecosystem in Queensland, which is pretty fun experience. That's my, uh, that's my TLD. Uh, it's not too exciting.

Speaker 1: 2:50

I think, I think it's very cool. I feel like you've, you've worked at like in a lot of, um, very like impactful roles. I feel like throughout your time from, um, handling startups with Microsoft and then like now like managing two teams that it lasts. I think it's very cool.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Oh, thank you

Speaker 1: 3:18

Too short there. Um, so I guess you, you started studying business in Comez. How did you kind of switch over to the more, I guess, like to work for more tech-related companies or what kind of prompted you to do that as well?

Speaker 2: 3:41

Good question. I actually wanted to do medicine initially. I have a, a lot of family members who like in the medical industry. Um, and I, I grew up, my dad used to spend most of the year laying in a third world country called Solomon Islands. So I lived there for a bit and they like health system. I don't know if I'm meant to swear on this podcast, but it was pretty fucked. Uh, it's still pretty fucked. Um, so that I was really passionate about wanting to go into medicine and I got back on the head, I got no P three, which wasn't good enough to get intimate. And I was really fortunate at the time. A lot of my friends who didn't get into med kept going and trying to go through the whole grad process, uh, through uni. Um, but like throughout my, throughout my childhood, throughout my schooling years, I was just really interested in technology. I just thought it was super cool. Um, and I decided to then pursue a, I started with a business and law degree, cause I didn't want to just do business. Um, but never wanted to be a lawyer. I love my dad who is one. I was like, that is not for me. I switched courses a bunch of times. Um, and yeah, like I said, I didn't really spend a lot of time at uni, but it was a good function for me to be able to discover the things that I liked. So I think that the best thing for me and what, like what made me realize I love tech was I just tried a heap of things. When I was at uni, I worked a bunch of different jobs. I did things that were just fun to me. So I like what does a personal trainer part time? Cause it was good money. And I like, I used to play a lot of competitive sport. I worked at mellow, uh, like selling coffee veins and then I just did a heap of different internships. So I was in at red hat. I was more on the marketing side and I found that really cool. Uh, as an opensource software company, the people there were just so passionate about the whole, uh, reason an ethos behind open source software. And that really peaked my interest because I hadn't ever been exposed or even knew what open source software was before that, um, all the way through to, I ended up a very good friend of mine from school. Uh, he runs hardware teams over in mountain view for Google. Uh, and we worked together on a startup with another person and that was more on the technological side of things. And I think it was just, I was kind of like fortunate exposure to it. And I got introduced. I was fortunate to meet a bunch of people that had come through, uh, the technology world working here and over in the States and like looking back to when I talk about my interest in inside medicine and growing up, being exposed to several countries, I guess another big realization I had when I was quite young was just like our infrastructure. And, um, even though you could argue a lot of government's technology sucks, it's still a lot better than other places. And a lot of the things that we have as a first world country with technology that is accessible really feeds into our ability to live a pretty positive life, um, here. So I started to realize that there was something there and like the thing that I just found cool to read about was actually something that I could do as a job. Um, and just spent more and more time in the technology space. And I think it got to a point where I didn't do it a technical degree. Um, so I wasn't totally sure where I could go in the technology space and I realized, and I don't know if you're going to ask me where I moved to kind of the PM side of things, but I realized as I was researching different places that I could do internships that, um, when I was looking at Alaska and a company that I really admired, um, I looked through all of the internships and there's this thing called product management was really the only thing that had some level of business slant to it. And I was like, what sounds kind of cool. So I applied to it and I'm like, I'm really glad I did because it's been the perfect match of being able to apply technology and build solutions for people that have some level of impact in their life. Like arguably building a issue tracker may not be as impactful as like doing eye surgery. Um, but I think it enables people to build the tools that then allow people to do that sort of stuff. So in a button, uh, it does, it, it does have a huge impact on society and yeah, just slowly moved into, I was kind of fortunate that I landed in a role that was this mishmash of everything that I liked from all the random internships I did and not much other things I like, uh, and allowed me to, to work on really cool technology with really cool and smart, interesting people.

Speaker 1: 9:03

That's very cool. I think it's, um, a very good, good journey because it is, you don't have to basically study to actively involved in the tech side of things. And I feel like, um, you, like, you're a perfect example of like how you can still, um, become really involved in tech if you're, if you're interested in it. Uh, so I guess, like I kind of around your interest in tech, what technology has like got you excited for the future, or would you be excited to work on?

Speaker 2: 9:38

What's an interesting one. I felt like it's a, to an extent technology, the technology is exciting. So things like if you can use and relate data in, in certain ways as, as you know, there's a huge amount of opportunity there. And like, I don't want to throw around buzzwords like AI and ML, but there is like data is the modern day gold. It's just a matter of figuring out how to use it in a moral, secure, private way that it can greatly impact in a positive way people's lives and how they do work. And just have I exist as a human being on a day to day, but equally like anything, it's a, it's a tool it's a resource and people can use it in the wrong way, even if they don't mean to. Um, so it's kind of this fun balancing act of finding out how to take something that's so valuable and turn it into something that's equally valuable for the people that are giving it to you. Um, so that interests me when I say like the biggest thing where it find my interest in technology is kind of where the people come together with the technology. Like, I'd say if I, if I think about my day to day work and what the future holds for me, the thing that excites me is I have this amazing group of people that are really passionate about different pieces of technology and different problems to solve. It's more the problems that excite me, that technology enables. Um, so yeah, I, I would take fun of like, uh, I would potentially not answer your question. So what excites me are, uh, the ability for us to continue solving problems in new and fun ways. And if I was to give an answer about what technology is interesting to me, uh, I would definitely say understanding how to use data in a moral way to deliver value to people. It's kind of cool to me.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So I'm kind of looking, looking back then. What, what, what have you been really passionate to work on? What have been your past projects that you've really enjoyed?

Speaker 2: 12:04

Um, so I can give you kind of a journey of said last. And when I came in, I started working on, I was like a road mapping tool, um, which has turned into our like premium offering for JIRA. So it basically allows teams to build out ride maps. And that was like, what I enjoyed about that was the people listening, maybe the problem space. And I'm sorry to, to my manager at the time, but I really enjoyed the people. I was most passionate about what we were shipping at the time, even now looking back now, it's really fucking cool. Um, then I moved briefly into the mobile space, which I found really interesting. Um, I worked on IPM, the JIRA mobile apps across Android and iOS. Um, again, that was, I think what I found super interesting when I look back at my I'm still, in my early years, it was more the linings that I was having versus the actual work I was doing. Um, but I really loved being able to work on mobile. It's such a like important piece of how people go about their day to day life. Um, I think about the thing I'm most passionate about is what I'm on now. Um, I get really excited about stuff that I can like for me to understand impact. I think I, to an extent have to use it. And the editor, like the way that you create conference, uh, content in confluence, the way that you read content, uh, in JIRA, et cetera, like is something that I used on a day to day basis. We were rolling out a new, this new experience and it was probably a little bit painful and had a bit to read quite a lot of improvement that was required. Um, so I felt a bunch of that pain when I was in other teams and I was like, I want to be other side of that. And it was super exciting for me to go in and work with people to solve some pretty gnarly problems. And then specifically, like feature-wise thing, that's been super exciting. We have this concept of SmartLinks and basically it's, there's a problem out there where like today there is an explosion of SAS apps, but so historically they would be like people would buy kind of quite a, uh, contained suite of tools. So they would buy like say Microsoft tools and then use Excel for a heap of different things. They use it for charting. They'd use it for analytics, I'd use it for reporting, like all these different things. And now we're in a world where there was so many specialists, SAS apps. So all of those things that has mentioned that Excel could do like kind of, well, there are apps that just specialize on one part of that. So like amplitude is a tool that just does analytics and reporting really, really well. And because of that, like the benefit is we now have these amazing specialized tools to do specific parts of the journey of the work that we have to do, but it also creates a heap of context switching. So no longer are we in one or two apps to do all that work we're in 10 20, 30 apps. Um, and this just requires us to move between them. So smiling's basically is trying to, we're trying to solve the problem of how do we reduce the need to context switch. And the first part of that has been, we've created, we've built like services and common UI that enable us to pull in URL back data from various providers around the web, um, like get hub like Dropbox, like Google and then show, show them in our products in rich, contextual ways, everywhere from like a very small there's like inline view, which is simply like we pull in favicon and, um, the title metadata, and then automatically resolve that for people all the way down to a user can choose to like switch that view to a full embed, to make an embedded design or embedded amplitude charts. So people don't have to click out of a conference page to go do that. And that whole process has been, we've kind of gotten to this pretty amazing site recently where we invested a lot in building out the underlying architecture and services that power, this thing it's now gotten to a point where like one dev can spend half a day and build a new integration that then immediately works across confluence, JIRA, Trello, Bitbucket for like millions and millions of users. So as an example, we spent a week with seven devs three weeks ago, and we built 11 new integrations for fall. So we have, we added like support for Salesforce and Intercom and a lot of big providers that immediately worked across four of our products. Um, and it took almost no time just because of the, the way that we architected it under the, under the covers. And then that problem kind of extends to, um, when you think about context switching, the whole idea of showing rich previews is interesting for consumers of the content. So as arena means you don't have to then move outside of your context outside of a conference page. Um, but as a creator of that content, there's still this problem of trying to bring content into a page or into a JIRA ticket from a third party. So we've been looking into, um, and spiking, which I don't know if you know the concept of spiking, it's basically writing some hacky spaghetti code to figure out if something is, uh, is viable. We'll have, we could build it in testing like technical assumptions. We've made working on trying to understand how we can create in product search that allows you to search across all the products you interface with, whether they're inside of LaSeon tools or saying Google. So what's an example of a user in a conference page. Who'd be like, I need to bring in a Google drive file and really easily just search it in confluence and pull that in without having to leave the page. So that whole, that whole area of there's a shitload of apps now that people use in a cloud first world, and we need to address the need to context, which is definitely the thing that is by far the most exciting for me at the moment that was a massive brain dump. So I apologize. I hope you followed that.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Yeah, that was good. Um, it's, it's very interesting to hear about how the, how old they integrations kind of work because I like, I use confluence a little bit, um, uh, at my work and, um, they do have a lot of integrations that's for sure. I think you can pretty much add anything to it, which is very cool.

Speaker 2: 19:02

Yeah. This takes like a slightly different slant on that, which I want to go into, but I'm happy to discuss this at another time. Yeah. Kind of trying to build the native phages versus things that you have to go. And there's also a lot of friction and users having to find apps they want to then integrate with it last in, we kind of build under the four DS integration. So it just feels like this common native experience within our products. And you will start if you're using cloud, you'll start to see these roll out over time.

Speaker 1: 19:35

Very cool. Um, so I guess like, um, kind of a different, a different topic, more focusing on like, cause you worked a lot during university. Um, how did you find, I guess your university preparing you for work or did you find that it was more like the experience that you got while you were at university, like for external things that really helped you?

Speaker 2: 20:04

Maybe if I did a different degree, like COMSOL have a different answer for you, but I would say I found the content of my calls pretty pointless. Like you learn some like core concepts that are definitely valuable at the end of the day, it was like a piece of paper that helped me get a job. What was valuable was the ability for over an extended period of time with the, like the student label on me, I was able to get a lot of experience and was allowed, allowed me to get the jobs that I have today. Like not if I hadn't have gone to uni, I wouldn't know as much in terms of content that I learned at uni, but I probably wouldn't be that bad off. Um, but the difference is I just wouldn't have had the time and the ability to go and learn things outside of uni. Um, so my, I, I definitely learned by doing in my, the things that I find the most valuable, uh, have really been things that I've learned outside the uni space. When I got really good, I've been very fortunate to have some awesome mentors over the years. And, uh, a lot of the ones that I had in the very early days, he sits on boards of companies over in the Valley in us. And he was like, then so many people, especially students, I look up like mom's talking bug and bill Gates. And they're like, well, they dropped out at uni and then just created these amazing tech empires. But they're like be very, very, very, very, very minute, few. And it's not to say that you're not going to get there, but, um, especially in the tech industry nowadays, there's just so much competition for jobs. And when he was in senior positions in, in large corporations and he was like the first thing that a lot of the time they do, and this was a number of years ago. So it may change. It probably changes to an extent today, but they'll basically just look at the ones that have a degree and look at the ones that done. And that's their first, their first cut of continue looking at for jobs and her did not work out. So they just stick the ones that don't have a degree in a pile on the side and kind of forget about them, say, Hey, it was like, kind of sucks. But if anything, having that piece of paper helps. Um, and I'd say that like, that still exists today, at least in that last scene. So I'm one of the leads for our associate product management program, which is like our two year rotational PM, um, program. And I've just been through the hiring process. I'm currently placing inside teams in it last year, uh, interns and grads that we've, that we find. Um, and throughout that process, we definitely look for ones that has degrees. So I think most around that out, it really comes down to, uh, it sucks, but I don't think the world yet is at a place where, uh, unless you start something yourself, as you're looking for a job at a company like last year and Google, et cetera, we're in a smaller place having something behind you, a piece of paper behind you, so that you've committed to university is pretty crucial.

Speaker 1: 23:28

Yeah, for sure. I guess like, um, on, on the topic of like, uh, like you said, you received like mentorship while you at university, and that was like really valuable. How did you actually find those mentors or how you create those connections

Speaker 2: 23:46

With people that supported you and you'll like learning and all of that stuff. That's a good question. Um, thanks, firstly. I was like lucky to be introduced to people by people. I knew that I think that was a bit of coincidence there. Second part is I'm probably a bit of a, a Dick. I, I, uh, I have no issues. Like I don't really see hierarchy or have issues just going up to someone and asking them something. So I would, if I found someone interesting that heard talk or even found some interesting online, like I would literally just call email, um, called, uh, message them on LinkedIn. And I think the thing that I learned that helped me the most is the fact that you're a student, like people, no matter how senior they are, how busy they are, if you play the student card and you word a request in the right way. A lot of the time in like surprisingly surprisingly lodged hit right of people will, will agree to have a chat to you. Um, and like generally I have, I literally had like a templated email where I would say like, hello, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd find out something about them and tell them that I was like super interested in what they were doing. And, um, I talk about like something along the lines of how basically I'm kinda new to the whole world and I don't really know that much. And I'm really looking to, um, learn from people that, uh, leaders in the field and have been there, done that. Um, and I asked them for, I have like a really specific ask of like, would you be, I know you're super busy, but would you be willing to have a quick 30 minute chat? So I can ask you some questions about blah, blah, blah. And then I always would say, I always try to offer them. I always show that I want to offer them something, but I don't really have anything to offer in return. So I generally have a line that was like, I not really sure what I can provide in return, but I hope that like what you teach me, I'll be able to pass on to someone in the future and then I'll close it out. But yeah, if you really hit the things that I found more successful, a play the student card really hard, um, be really humble about, you know, no shit and, uh, and really drive home the point that you want to learn from them. Because if you tell someone you respect them and you wanna learn from them, that usually gives them the warm fuzzies, um, and then B and you have to be genuine about it that you want to offer them something in return, but you really can't. You don't know what you can offer, but you'll pass it on to other people. And I'd say like a lot of the people that have seen around the world have had help in the past and the people you want advice for people that are arrogant assholes, and generally those sort of people will give up their time to have a chat to you. So that was, I think it was around out that question in my early morning, Friday rambling ways was I was fortunate in that I knew people, uh, that introduced me to people when I was very, like, never be afraid to ask, but I knew someone that knew someone. I would just say, if you're comfortable, please introduce me. And then I'd also cold email people. And that worked really well. I've set up a speaker series at Alaska and now for our grads. And we've had everyone in from like cofounders of LinkedIn to heads of, like they say, Google VC, they're like part of their venture capital arm. Um, and it was really a mixture of trying to find people that they knew or literally just cold emailing them. So never be afraid to do that.

Speaker 1: 27:55

Yeah. I feel like it's almost a little bit similar with the podcast as well.

Speaker 2: 28:00

Yeah. You're a great example of how to do this. I'm just not very senior exciting, but it's the same concept.

Speaker 1: 28:10

Cool. Um, yeah, I guess, I guess like bringing it back to the, the work side of things. Um, I think we'll move on a little bit to talk a bit more about like a lesson itself, cause I'm sure a lot of, uh, listeners are pretty interested in a bit more what it's like to work at Alessia and what the kind of like the culture is and from a firsthand employee. Um, so I guess how would you describe like the culture in the workplace at Alaskan

Speaker 2: 28:44

Culture and just like the general day to day, this is going to sound super cliche, but I would say that at last in, I've worked at a lot of places that I'd love and I would recommend people work for red hat at the drop of a hat. Microsoft was amazing, but they were, they were amazing and like aquatic corporate way, like for big, big enterprises, they were just good people that we worked with. I'd say like Atlassian is quite different in that the culture and the values that you see. Like we have values of like open company, no bullshit players, a team, et cetera, like seek first to understand all these things, um, really is kind of lived by to the point where we have a really strong, uh, blogging or just like open collaboration culture. So you will write a page and people from everywhere would start commenting on a like providing advice or feedback. And then we have people will blog about every part of their life from like having massive depressive episodes to, um, um, their experiences being trans to they're having a baby to they're taking time off for some reason, until like a big company announcement and people are just super open and super supportive of each other. Um, and also happy to, like, you can have like golden flame Wars, you're going to have some serious flyballs on, on confluence, which doesn't put you at risk of getting, getting, let go, or getting into trouble. Um, but people really go at it. And it's, it's awesome because it's quite a, a, a, I guess an open, safe culture where you can just say it, how you see it and disagree with someone. Um, and a blog. A recent blog is actually a really good when we talk about like kind of inclusiveness. There's a blog that, um, one about LG BTI, que uh, members of our, um, community shared about like, this is the first job. It, literally, I read it yesterday is the first job where they felt comfortable, like coming to work and being themselves to the point where like one day they just rocked up to work in these really quite eccentric, tight, small pride pants. Um, and then he was in a lift with Scott and Scott just to add to him and was like, you look fabulous. Um, and I think that like kind of a Peter Mises, our culture of you can be who you are. You can say what you think. And obviously like, there's a line there. You don't want to be an awful, um, but it is a very open culture of sharing. I'd say the other thing that like, I really love is it's a super flat hierarchy. So like Microsoft, they're still very, there's a very obvious hierarchy and there is an obvious hierarchy like Scott and Mike bought a fan of this and there's VPs, et cetera, but you can talk to any of them, like as a grad, I was presenting and in rooms with Scott and Mike and having like sparring, which is kind of like our feedback sessions with them. So there's this super, like, you are just viewed as an employee, like everyone else and show that you have a title, but you get responsibility. And I'm like, what you have to say is important. Um, so that was super, that's a super cool part of it. And then the last thing that I think, like I've been very fortunate where the person that hired me to it and is one of my best friends in Sydney now. So my first team that I landed in, uh, uh, my closest friends in Sydney, I lived with one of them for 18 months before I moved in with my girlfriend, our whole team, that whole team, like the OJ team just spent two weeks working from Byron. Literally we came back a week ago. Um, so I'd say like the connections that you build, and I don't know how to articulate this, but the friendships you can organically build it at last year, just given the, uh, the environment that it LaSeon seems to create. I don't know how it happens, but it just does, um, really leads to like quite fruitful relationships. Um, and then there's all the other things like they treat you so well, you get compensated exceedingly well. Um, you get, and we're very fortunate in that extent, you get really great benefits. Like when we were in the office, it was we'd get food, like amazing parties, literally all the time. They would just go out of their way to make our life amazing. Um, but now that we're home, they've gone out of their way to make it life amazing here. They've given us like pretty significant budgets to set up our home. Um, they're constantly, like we're now allowed to work anywhere in the world. They just announced that moving forward, even after COVID, and they've been very open about, like, they're trying to figure out how to do this remote work anywhere in the world thing, long term really well. So like what benefits they give us, um, how we actually do work, like what devices they need to give us. And they have an open page where they have like all the decisions that haven't made. I need to everything from like how they compensate us to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as I make the decisions and like they thinking I'm most decisions, I just appear on that page and they're super open about it. So I'd say like, they really go out of their way unbelievably. So to look after you, and this teething problems is like, like anything, especially where a company that's just exploded and continues to grow. It just an absurd pace in terms of number of employees with figuring out how to get bigger as a company while it's not losing touch with our culture. Um, so yeah, it's not like always sunshine, like rainbows and lollipops, but it's pretty fucking awesome. And I'm the sort of person that will call it out and see it. So I didn't think so. You'd be the first to know, um, I it's, uh, I feel very fortunate that I get to work here.

Speaker 1: 35:22

Yeah, that definitely sounds pretty awesome. Um, it like, yeah, it seems like a very like, uh, free and easy environment. And it's really good that they're looking to have it so that you can work from anywhere the world and feature. I think that'll be really enticing to a lot of students who maybe want to try and live in another country or something like that after they graduate and have like, completely have the option to, um, I guess like within the freedom, there's obviously like many, many different roles at Alexian. Uh, is it, is it like flex very flexible to like move teams and kind of look at, uh, work on different projects?

Speaker 2: 36:07

Yeah. Moving teams, definitely. Um, I mean, there's like an internal by law and to be fair, we have to advertise any job that we have both externally and internally, and you still have to go through like a interview process internally. Um, but it honestly depends like job to job, to like design and engineering, hates people that have moved a bunch of times between different teams and different projects. And even within your team, you will inherently move amongst like teams of quiet. When you think about a team, it's not just a team of 10 and, you know, direct team of 10 engineers, it's kind of the broad old that you live in. Um, so you can move around, uh, and that comes down to kind of intricacies of like how you do head count. So like, you all will get funding for someone so they can kind of move quite easily in between, um, within their own. Um, but as a PM, like we have a defined program, which is two years where we rotate you, you do two, one year placements, um, and that's to get experience across multiple projects across multiple teams. So not Microsoft Google started this with Marissa Marsh. She was the one that created like this concept of an APM program. And they, a lot of the ABMS now are like VPs. Um, and then their program was you get mentorship, you get to, I think they did one year orientations. I contact hardly remember it. And then you do it like a two week research trip where you go all around the world. So Alex is like, basically the same as that. Um, well we have two, one year rotations. We'll give you mentors when working on really cool traineeship for you. So we had like the national acting Academy and the guy that like trained huge Jacqueline came in and did a, when I was at, in the program, did a, a course on like how to present with impact. Um, we do all kinds of different things. Uh, we had a really Epic two week trip that was going to take, uh, I was going to chaperone, but it was going to take out kind of an IPMs. We first, firstly, going to go to Vegas also, we're going to LA. And we had like lined up together to the spice X factory and get a tour around there. Cause they're a big customers of ours. Um, basically all of our tools we use to launch, uh, to do all the recent launches with space X. Then we were going out to like global summit, our like yearly conference in Vegas together. Then we were flying across to Europe and we were going, uh, wait a minute. We going, we were going somewhere in Germany. I think we were going to Berlin or Munich. Then we were going across to Paris. And then we were going to across the UK. Um, we had lined up all of these customer interviews and also like culture trips, just to understand the culture of the country we're in. So doing fun things like cruises down the sand in Paris and like Ghana laundries and understanding like the day to day life there. Um, so there's definitely a, uh, like I'm trying to sell a pain program, to be honest. Now that I think about what I'm saying, there's definitely depends on what program you're in, uh, and design have less specific programs, but you definitely can move PM. We have a specific program as a grad that you come into. Well, I, part of it is you are a hundred percent, um, and teams, uh, scrambling to get IPMs. Like there's a really strong brand as APM. So it's like the future leaders. So I've just put out an ask, we're trying to place interns, which I've just done. I put out an ask the people that wanted it. And I just got so many projects. I have eight interns coming in and we got significantly more asks for them. Um, so we really provide like the pick of the litter of projects to put them in and they, they get some level of preference that answered your question in a very roundabout way.

Speaker 1: 40:24

And also, I guess, speak a little bit about the graduate program too, which I think is quite good. So the graduate program is like you have, you work on two different projects for one year each, and then you have, um, a bit of a, a two week trip at the end

Speaker 2: 40:44

In the middle, which is very different now with COVID. And we're trying to understand what can we do a, there's going to be all the ABMS from the U S and Australia. And we're like, can we do a domestic trip? We're trying to figure out what we can do now so that people don't lose that experience given their current scenario.

Speaker 1: 41:08

Yeah, it is a bit unfortunate, but also unfortunately out of the control. So have you found, I guess the switch to work from home? All right.

Speaker 2: 41:20

Surprisingly, so like very much so I'm the sort of person that works better by being with people and being able to just drop by someone's desk and talk to them versus on like Slack. So when I had, we were working, I remember the day they were like, we got an email being like, we have a suspected contact in with a covert case in it last year. And like, literally just the middle of the day, everyone was like, get out of the office now. So we like packed up and just never went back. When that happened. I was like, fuck, this, this is the worst thing ever. And I have loved working at home. I like totally go back on my word and my thoughts back in the day, I am significantly more productive. I can roll out of bed or go to the gym and do exercise and like be at my desk five minutes after I wake up. Like, I am ashamed to admit I did this morning and I'm just like a ton more productive at home. I definitely miss the interaction. So when we, they do it in the offices, I'll probably going for like once a week or so, but they've really provided us with everything that we need to the point where we can now, like they're trying to get us air on chairs to send out to our homes. So it can be even more comfortable. I think everyone's adapted. We were kind of already ahead of the curve in remote work and like just working as distributed teams. So to me, I honestly, haven't like, I'm fortunate in that. Fortunately, I don't have a kid, but I'm in a fortunate position where I don't have anything that can really distract me at home versus I think it's probably tough, especially now that schools are closed in certain areas for people that have kids, I have like homeschool, they can, but when that's no longer the case, I assume that the experience will be very similar to mine, which is a lot more productive, has not changed my ability to interact or engage or feel connected to my team. So, yeah, I love it. Is there any last thing you'd like to add or any last advice you should totally all come and work with me? No, I think my biggest advice, if I look back and they possibly was give, is you in a really fortunate position students that you can try a lot of things. So literally try as many things as you possibly can as many jobs as roles as you possibly can. And the benefit of doing that is, and the benefit that I found was I found like the times when I loved the internships I did, although like random work that I did, what was great, but the most valuable, well, it was when I found the things that I didn't like, because that allowed me very early on in my career to kind of hone where I thought I wanted to go. And what I found was interesting to me, so be really open to opportunities. I a girlfriend's the complete opposite where she's very focused on, like knows exactly where she wants to go. I was like, I don't really know what's going on. I kind of directionally knew what I wanted to do and the industry I wanted to be in, but I just took opportunities as they came. So I'd say, well, that's dependent on who you are as a person is potentially through the same thing. You'll be surprised where it kind of cheap. Um, and yeah, you're only a student once like play that card as much as possible. People were always willing to help students. And then again, come and look at it last year. Love

Speaker 1: 45:05

Good, fantastic sales pitch for a lesson,

Speaker 2: 45:09

Specifically technical people. We really like technical PMs are amazing. I have a lot of devs that interviewed at last year and it could have been devs in it last year. And we were like, we also have a really amazing product mind. Like you think strategically, you think about the cost of welcome. We'll be a PM. And I decided to take a PM path instead. So like computing students comp slash students, a hundred percent who we're looking for as PMs, so apply.

Speaker 1: 45:38

That's all we have for today. Hope you learned a little bit more about last season and the side of technology that is product management. Please join us again in two weeks from now for our next episode until then come join our community@selectougcs.org.