Name: Nkem Nwankwo
Title: Product Manager, Microsystems
Twitter: @nkemnwan
How did your earlier career choices lead you to your current role?
I’ve always been a nerd. I decided I wanted to be a computer engineer when I was in middle school. I now realize it was a great privilege to even know about such a role at that age. I graduated [from Georgia Tech] with a Computer Engineering degree and surprisingly, got a role out of school doing exactly what I studied – another privilege. During my first job out of undergrad, my whole software team turned over as a result of promotions and I suddenly became the most team-specific senior person there. My manager appointed me to the Product Owner position temporarily and soon after that became my permanent position.
In some time, I realized that I had no knowledge of the business aspect of things. When I say none, I mean ZERO, I was very much an engineer. I knew my end goal was to be in the entrepreneurship space, so I decided I needed to round myself out and apply to business school. Fast forward 2 years, and the tech product manager position was the closest thing to having a tech company within a corporation, so it just made sense for me.
How did you set yourself apart from other candidates for your current role?
Well the big thing about product management is that every company does it slightly differently. Microsystems demands a lot from its product managers. I did 3 short answer questions, 2 assessment tests, a data analysis assignment, a phone interview, then about 5 – 6 onsite interviews before I got an offer…yeah…a lot. My differentiation points were apparent in the amount of research I did on the company and its clients. Product management requires you to be in tune with your customers’ needs and pain points, so it’s important that you place emphasis on trying to understand where they are coming from and where they actually need to go as opposed to where they might be saying they want to go.
Describe a typical day in your work life.
My day honestly depends on where we are in my product’s life cycle. When I started at Microsystems, I took ownership of a product that just launched. At that time, my day consisted of sitting in on customer calls with the sales team and creating playbooks and sales scripts to guide them through the key selling points for my product. In addition, I made marketing bullet points and suggestions for its external facing pages as well as monitor user analytics to drive future product direction. Now I’m right in the middle of development of another product, so I define user stories, create mockups, do customer interviews, go to trade shows, drive marketing direction, create product roadmaps, and make sure that engineering has everything they need to keep being great.
What is one surprising thing about your job?
Prior to this, I had no interaction with sales in a corporate setting. I also hated doing anything marketing related. To be honest, I still do. In my heart and mind, I’m still an engineer. Being here made me realize how critical these functions are to a business though. I have to do something sales or marketing related every day, and that’s definitely been a stretch for me.
What is your life mission and how does your current job intersect with that mission?
Ultimately, I would like to be a serial entrepreneur, starting in the technology space. At a point that makes sense, I’d like to start business in Nigeria, my country of origin, to help improve the economy there. My job right now is helping me round out the experiences I was missing earlier in my career. I’m learning how much money there really is in the B2B space and how much of a different beast it is than B2C. Overall, I’m happy with where things are going right now.
What are your top three tips for those aspiring to work as a product manager or at your company?
- Stop thinking about why you specifically like a product and start thinking about why people like you and people unlike you like it.
- HUMBLE YOURSELF. Don’t be embarrassed to ask stupid questions. Seriously sit down with engineers and ask them for a small piece of their time to understand what’s going on under the hood. You earn so much respect by being interested in the technical side of things.
- Ask for extra work. If you’re not a PM at your current company and you would like to transition your career in that direction, ask the PMs at your company to throw something your way. PM is never a straight path.