I Interviewed A Product Manager To See What He Actually Does Every Day

======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ==== ======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ====

I took one computer science class during my sophomore year of college and, let me tell you, it was the first and last computer science class I will ever take. It’s a shame really, considering I want nothing more than to be a badass hacktivist and also happen to be real attracted to tech nerds. But alas, the language of the internet will never be my native tongue and I’m forever destined to observe from the sidelines as tech aficionados run amok, throwing parties in The Cloud.

I always assumed coding wizards came out of the womb crying in high-pitched Boolean strings. I assumed that by the time coders were old enough to pitter patter their little fingers over a keyboard, they were destined for a future of successful apps and very expensive blue jeans. I certainly did not anticipate the winding road some take to find themselves speaking the language of the interweb or the multiple non-tech careers one can have before diving head first into all things data.

This is especially true for N, a mobile app product/marketing manager and the subject of today’s interview. He let me poke around his brain, translating the ones and zeros into a picture of what it’s like to be a 30-year-old deep in the tech game.

If you were planning on doing LSD this morning, hold off. Read this interview first, and if you’re like me, I suspect his answers will get you plenty high all on their own.

What is your job title and how did you get there?

I’m a Mobile App Product/Marketing Manager. After graduating college, I worked as a copywriter at an Ad agency in Boston and also did some of the photography work for clients. The economy was absolute shit back then so the agency cut everyone after we lost one of our major clients to a competitor. After that, I worked at a nuclear power plant as a contract metrology lab technician for a refuel outage that lasted about 10 weeks. Once that ended, I was building stone walls, re-renovating houses for house flippers, and mowing lawns during the day. At night, I would wash dishes and cook pizzas until I got promoted to be a sous chef. Eventually, I got to tend the bar which was pretty cool because I basically drank for free with hilarious locals/regulars almost every night. It made it much easier to accept that I was a 24-year-old college grad in outrageous debt, and making shit money while living at home with no job prospects in sight, I couldn’t even land an interview to be a pyramid scheme salesman at one of those bullshit companies who try to sell you internet packages door-to-door.

One night, this dude came into the bar with his wife and they started talking to me while I was behind the bar. We talked a lot about life, music, and how fucked up everything is in our society. He was a really cool guy and his wife was super friendly but you could tell that they both knew way more than your average patron. Long story short, we kept drinking after my shift ended and he gave me his name. Turns out he’s in the book “The Child Called It” and he’s now a forensic psychologist. Needless to say, he’s been through some shit. He would come to the bar when I would be working pretty on the weekends and we’d drink and talk.

I remember telling him that I had a job interview at some electronics company as a Product Manager and he offered to prep me for the interview. We ended up meeting at some hole in the wall diner across the street from where I bartender and he taught me how to interview for roles that were way above my experience level. The guy knew his shit and he taught me a ton about business and economics and how to navigate the incestuous cesspool that is Corporate America. I ended up getting the job and I worked there for 4 years. I hated every second of it but I learned a lot and my co-workers were really good people so it wasn’t all bad. I then got into the tech space and became the Product Manager for the mobile app at a big office supply company that rhymes with “Shmaples.”

Now I work at an online pet supply company that rhymes with “Stewy” helping build the mobile app. I also have a side gig as a photographer that has given me the opportunity to travel and meet some really cool people. I got to shoot P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Reunion Tour which was pretty fucking wild and I’ve also shot for some cool brands like Converse, Alaska Airlines, Leica Camera, and Patron Tequilla.

What does your day to day look like?

My day-to-day usually consists of me waking up at 6 am, wondering why any of us still commute to offices when we have the internet, and then I walk my ass a mile to the train station, sit on the train for about 45 minutes, listen to a podcast (usually RBP or Touching Base with some JRE mixed in), get on another train, and then walk another half mile to our office on the other side of the city. Once I’m at work, things are cool. We have a daily stand-up meeting with our Product/Engineering team where everyone provides status updates and then the rest of my day consists of building out the roadmap on how to scale the app, meeting with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest of the tech illuminati and spending a lot of our company’s money while optimizing for ROI and efficiency to keep costs low, basically. I do some of the photo editing for our advertisements and then I have to manage the campaigns that drive app install volume.

How is work-life balance?

The work-life balance is pretty solid. For the role I have, I’m required to “be on” since the ad campaigns I manage run 24-7 so if something goes wrong, it’s on me to fix it. This is still very much a start-up type vibe here so people work hard and sometimes the hours are long but we get really good perks to hold us over and everyone is funny and cool to be around so that helps when things get stressful.

Wait, so you actually like the whole “we’ll give you free food in exchange for your soul” type of corporate culture?

For the record, I hate that. You can’t expect people to hang around for a long time just because you give them free snacks while not offering a 401k match or good health insurance or some other tangible benefit. That mirage only lasts so long before the lemmings get smart and start to ask questions and eventually revolt in the streets and light things on fire or something…but seriously, they take care of us here and that’s nice because most companies don’t give a shit anymore. A lot of Corporate America sees people as temporary workers and an overhead expense instead of assets even if their marketing/PR stuff says otherwise.

Do you feel “fulfilled” in your job?

I do, yeah. I have my days like everyone but it’s nice having the ability to see your decisions and performance impact the company. I’m the only person at my company who does what I do so it can be stressful but rewarding at the same time. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever be fully fulfilled until I’m working for myself and doing something I love every day but then again, that’s what everyone else wants too.

What do you fucking hate about your job?

Meetings. I fucking hate meetings. People, if shit can be done via email, HipChat, Slack, Skype, Spark, or any other means of digital communication then there is no point in having a meeting unless it’s super important to the business or you want to chill in a room for awhile and escape the desk (which I’m all for) but don’t get all high and mighty about scheduling meetings and requiring attendance like we’re some group of 5th graders and then act you figured out how to solve world hunger.

Is the money good?

The money is very good, all things considered. I live in Boston which is becoming a micro-San Francisco since all these tech companies are moving in so the rent costs and everything else are getting pretty insane. Plus we have Robotics and AI companies here so we’ll all probably be replaced in the next 10 years which is actually a comforting feeling because then I’ll have more time to do fun activities. I’m lucky though because I have a sweet living situation that is a lot cheaper than most people I know around here. I live with two of my good friends and our landlord doesn’t have a mortgage so she doesn’t raise the rent, she’s basically the nicest woman. It feels nice to finally be able to save money too even though I owe a house’s worth of student debt but I’m really banking on the economy to collapse which will cause civil unrest and no one’s gonna have time to pay back debts when they’re too busy trying to find food and new vices to lean on. I’m not looking forward to it but at the same time, I kind of am.

Where do you see yourself in five years professionally?

If I’m still living the office life, I hope to make it to a Director or VP role. I really hope to pursue my photography full time someday even though it’s really tough to make that happen. I don’t want to shoot boring shit like weddings or family portraits even though the money is fantastic. I really want to cover documentarian type of subjects. I’ve been working on a project that covers the heroin epidemic here so maybe something comes from that, who knows though. If that doesn’t work, I hope to start my own company and develop a decentralized app for photo storage and metadata for photographers on the go.

Like you, I have a real job (consulting) and a side hustle (writing) – often times I wonder what would happen if I just committed myself fully to writing. That being said, I also think that if I had the opportunity to write full time, it may lose its shine and become a chore instead of something I love. What do you think?

I thought that same thing when I was battling the thought of taking the jump into photography full time. I chose to keep it as a side hustle because I wouldn’t have to stress about where my next gig was going to come from and then be forced to take gigs that I don’t enjoy shooting and I think that would make photography seem more like a chore to me if all I could get paid for was shooting boring shit all the time. If I was forced to take shoots that I had no interest in, it would impact the quality of work I churn out if my heart/mind wasn’t in it. Honestly, if you truly enjoy something, it’s hard for that thing to become a chore. Although, there will definitely be day-to-day aspects that suck and will be a chore but the overall reason why you do it will still be there. No one wants to grow up and slowly die in a cubicle, crunching numbers, and making someone else rich but once you realize how much time you spend doing that shit, it’s really hard to find time to enjoy hobbies or allocate that little free time you have to get better at something else that could potentially be another career avenue. It seems like the two of us go out of our way to make time to do these side hustles and I think that bodes well for the future.

Have you ever dipped your pen in the company ink?

While we’re on the topic of ink and pens, I highly recommend writing with a blue Pilot G-2 07mm. Those things glide across paper like (insert sexual innuendo). On the topic of P’s and V’s, yes, I have dipped my pen in company ink and it was not the move. Her mom was the secretary at the company and she set us up. It was great at first but then things got weird very fast and they ended up moving her mom right next to my cubicle after we split which also was very weird especially since she kept inviting me over for dinner. The toughest part was that she was on the other side of the business that I had to interact with every day and try and finalize contracts with so that was awkward as hell. Imagine breaking up with someone and still having to call them every day to talk about metrics and ask for business favors…brutal.

What do you get to wear to work?

Well, currently I am wearing jogger sweatpants, Allbirds wool sneaker things, a Nike zip-up knit hoodie in the office so I’m pretty dirtgrub’d out right now but we are getting hit with a blizzard and I wasn’t feeling the whole getting dressed thing. I usually wear a button down and some jeans or chinos. Basically, if you watch the show Silicon Valley, it’s not too far off from that. It’s really causal here so there is no dress code besides not looking like a bag of asses when you walk in.

Now that you’ve “made it” in your job, do you feel pressure to acquiesce to other societal expectations? ie: buy a house, get married, etc.

I don’t really feel like I’ve made it but I am glad to be in a better position in life than I was. I don’t think people ever feel like they “make it”, I mean, look at Elon Musk, the guy has accomplished more than everyone and now he wants to get the fuck off this planet and I can’t say I blame him. My best friend and I are working to invest in a multi-family house instead of buying our own single-family homes and calling it a life. We’re trying to get some passive income in case our jobs don’t work out for any particular reason. I want to retire sooner rather than later and I’m not banking on my retirement fund to get me there. I don’t really feel pressure to get married even at age 30. I’ve been with my girlfriend for a year and things are going great. No need to rush a good thing, ya know? A lot of my friends are in a similar spot as me in life so that’s cool but the few who have tied the knot or have had kids seem almost surprised that shit isn’t as easy as they had originally thought. Listen kids, nothing in real life seems as it does in all the Facebook photos and IG/Snap stories…it’s all a big lie that’s a veneer masked over utter paranoia and the need to fit in and be liked by strangers who don’t give a shit while simultaneously not liking themselves lol, I’m just kidding…or am I?

If someone came up to you on the street and told you they wanted to get into your industry, what are three tips you would give them?

I would tell them:

Have an interest in figuring out how things work and understanding the framework of how things are connected from a technical/business perspective. Also, understand this in regular life and maybe even dabble with recreational drugs like LSD to get an even brighter picture. Most of the time, people are trying to solve problems so being creative helps a lot.

Don’t take yourself or your job too seriously. There are a lot of egos in this field and people lose sight of the fact that we’re trying to over-innovate for the sake of innovating and bragging but a lot of this shit isn’t really making a meaningful impact unless you factor in pure free convenience at a cost of your own personal data. Some of these people seem to forget that they are building the very tools that are going to use this collected data in order to teach an artificial intelligence software algorithm that will eventually replace them. If you have a willingness to learn on the fly and see down the proverbial road, you’ll be just fine. Remember, all e-commerce tech is, is fulfilling a demand that isn’t always needed but doing it faster and with fewer touch points at a cheaper cost.

Learn how to code and write automation scripts so you can replace yourself because I don’t know about you but I don’t feel like working forever. On a more serious note, coding changes the way you think and look at things. It makes you better at understanding data and how to properly analyze it for useful outcomes.

N is the first interviewee that didn’t reach out to me, but rather I solicited myself. He was in my head long before I was in his, some could say I knew him tangentially through this very site. After months of admiring this internet typist from afar, I couldn’t help myself – I slid into his DMs hard. I wanted to peek behind the curtain and let me tell you, I wasn’t disappointed.

N and I talked for a long while, most of which I can’t publish here because it’s classified or entirely defamatory. It was certainly the most informal interview I have conducted, almost immediately I abandoned my notes – prodding into N’s personal life probably far more than he anticipated. I remember hearing ice clink into a glass about an hour in.

“Are you making a drink?” I laughed.

“Seems like we’re going to be here a while,” he replied.

I too had a drink in my hand. I glanced at the timer on my phone as it crept long past the hour mark. I wondered if he was just being polite, entertaining my musings and life questions, the way a store clerk placates a little girl. Was my nervousness palpable through the airwaves? My trepidation must have been tangible all the way from DC to Boston.

While we were on the phone, the service was shoddy at best, but N has this uncanny ability to make you feel heard. He can parse through the bullshit and elevate a conversation to its most pure form of reality.

He’s an empath, that was clear to me almost immediately. He strips life down to its naked, most vulnerable reality because he knows all of the harmful expectation and soul-draining obligation we put on ourselves means nothing in the end. We talked a lot about what it means to be happy, versus what we’re told will make us happy.

So, that’s N. He’s a tech guy, a photographer, and after this call, I sincerely hope – a friend.

Oh and also, he’s one hell of a writer. What does he write, you ask?

Well, if you know, you know.

If you don’t, rumor has it they call him Nived. .

55

Respond

Email this to a friend

Hey, I saw this on Post Grad Problems. Check it out.

CallMeVictoria

Life is messy, let's get dirty. itwasvictoria@gmail.com

• @callmevictoria
• @itwasvictoria