Product Manager, Private Pilot
I like flying airplanes, and I like product management. Sometimes I wrote about one, sometimes the other. And sometimes I write about both at the same time.
I took this photo while departing iconic KSBA on my first 150nm solo xc. Just under the wing is UC Santa Barbara. As I finished a climbing turn over the water, I took this photo with great satisfaction: I was fulfilling a vision I had at 18, watching departing GA traffic from an ocean view dorm at the Anacapa. Achievement unlocked!
My journey to product management (and General Aviation!) was not typical, but they each have a lot in common.
Tonight I'm writing this from an undisclosed location deep in the heart of Silicon Valley, CA where I have a PM Interview at one of Scott Galloway's "The Four". Wish me luck! During my preparation, I spent a lot of time on the Product Design question and evaluating products I use, products I like, and products that I think need improvement.
I’m an unabashed aviation geek and analogy addict.
After decades of “life getting in the way” I finally started flight training in earnest this year, completing my first solo on June 26th, 2017. Flight training is an intensive, holistic exercise in learning a set of skills that are nothing like anything you’ve done before with training based completely on attention to detail and learning from failure.
Just like Product Management!
Since publishing my original article 7 Product Management Lessons from Learning to Fly, I managed to get a PM job at Google and ship a redesign of an internal tool with one of the greatest engineering teams at the company. While we were in design of the MVP, I was furiously working towards my FAA checkride while--unbeknown to us--hurtling towards the global pandemic of Covid-19.
Here are 5 more product management lessons I learned while preparing for my checkride
My old Wordpress site was dying. I added an elegant custom theme but it seemed to be breaking the site after a few years. My site performance started getting slower, and I was embarrassed by glacial page loads and broken components.
I noticed that colleagues and other product people I follow have really simple sites that load fast and look great. I wanted to redesign my site...