In the very beginning, I came on as the 8th employee and worked in support - so, not a professional if you will, but a support jockey. You know, one of those guys.
I took the part time job back then because I was a little bored. My main job at the time was the "Web Master" for small government organization. It wasn't a challenging job but it paid well and fit my family needs at the time (being a mom of two young girls). This part time support job gave me a little extra cash working from home and the product gave many, many puzzles to figure out. It was like candy for me for 4 hours a day, 3 days a week. Exactly what I wanted.
It was a complex product and each support ticket that came in was mathematical word problem of "how do I do...". I spent the next two years putting myself in the position of small and large business and providing solutions to their specific equation. The software continued to attempt to meet the needs of new customers by tweaking existing functionality - patching and hacking their way - and eventually becoming one of the most flexile products in our space.
Over the next four years, we would grow to gain large enterprise customers and I went from the support team to Key Account Manager to the Customer Success Manager and lastly, into the newly formed Product Team as a PM. Up until two years ago, we were developer centric, which made for some interesting frankenstiened features and overall application. Two years ago, our head of Marketing became the director of Product and I became the Product Manager.
In fact, I was the product specialist. I knew/know our users and product inside and out. I could tell you what every dial and lever was for and list a number of customer use cases to go with it.
I learned to take what I knew and balance it against the technical landscape, the needs of the whole, the needs of our business and to find solutions that would propel us forward in ways that met both the customer, attracted previously lost customers, reduced growing technical debt, should reduce support onboarding needs, lessen Launch Specialist time to launch.
So, in short, if my calculations are correct (so far, so good in our Beta) I will have increased our T:P, reduced support needs, and increased launch revenue by 50% (probably more like 90% because I have reduced the current complexity by that much).
I have potentially taken a multi million dollar app and improved it by... let's be conservative and say 10%.
Now, lets look at the project:
I began with a team of ~4 developers, one senior and the rest were essentially new hires that didn't know the system.
My proposal turns our main functionality inside out and upside down - it's kinda revolutionary. The senior dev understands the use case, likes the idea, and sees an opportunity to end technical debt. He's going to build, he pretty much has to, in an entirely new code base. In short, with this decision, we are now rebuilding the entire application.
My initial estimates from the dev team: 6-8 months. "Okay, let's go then" I say.
I have basic documentation that outlines the project at a high level - but I never write another piece of documentation. What I write is Jira ticket after Jira ticket after Jira ticket.
I spend the next 8 months fighting with my dev team. They don't believe the use cases and pressure me to prove it. None of them know the system or the customer but "they know tech" and because we've had a dev centric operation up and till now, they believe they know the solution better than me. None of us truly understand (or believe) what a Product Team is for.
Of note: by this time of the project, I have obtained my Product Owner Certification but no one, absolutely no one on my team believes this or considers it valuable. No one else on the project has taken any agile training (but they've read about it), and none of us are on board with a process. Everything is ad hoc. I am one product owner and (by this time) 6+ developers - and I'm asking a lot of them.
One year into the project (already well past our initial estimate) we are half way done. We've got the new core functionality built, we've tested it with users, we even have an enterprise customer using it live and the company hires a new VP of Development (...and Product).
What's left is essentially to make the refactored platform reach feature parity with the existing. At this point, all we have is the core functionality, now we have to add the rest. It must work with all the bells and whistles (that product, me, has decided are necessary. For certain, some were cut out) that the existing product thrives on.
Our new dazzling, jazz hands, fast and loose, get shit done VP is basically a god send. He snaps the developers to attention, brings in agile training, re organizes teams, removes blockers that should never had existed (Dear Developer, you are not the Product Manager or Designer). My team of developers gets some more new senior developers and they're good... they learn the product, they educate themselves against the use cases I provide, they begin to trust me.
Our new dazzling, jazz hands, fast and loose, get shit done VP then finds/makes the budget to hire more Product Managers - because, up and till now I have been the only one working on a project that touches every.fucking.aspect of our application. ALL OF IT.
Side note: Our director of product and I have both been wary of brining in new PM's because the learning curve of the application is so steep that they would be of no assistance to me given that I would have to stop what I'm doing to train them - and I am already running as fast as I can with ten spinning plates or more at any given time.
So, here we are now. The project is 95% complete and we are taking on beta users - already proving value by taking on enterprise customers our sales team would have turned away previously due to their complex use case. Customers and customer facing teams are excited. The new core functionality completely removes workaround hacks that were mind bending to achieve as well as achieving configurations that were previously just impossible.
My mandate was to get the functionality in their, rough and ready for the next project which was core UI/UX. Make it useable, not pixel perfect, and then we re-skin the UI.
Great. That's what I've done.
However. HOWEVER!!! No one remembers this "mandate" (because, you know, it was two fucking years ago and as I said, very loosely documented). The new PM that will be leading the UX, who is so fucking smug, arrogant, and condescending, does not know how the previous system worked, what the problems were, or understand how we solved the problems so how could she ever appreciate how revolutionary I have been? How key I am to the future successes of our platform (numbers pending, but I'm hopeful).
I feel that she looks at me as a "cute example of a start up who 'done real good'" for a non professional PM. Pat pat pat on my head.
She's a very shiny PM, I'll give her that. She's got all the buzz words, documentation, workflows, expectations, boundaries... yeah, she's got it all. And she's right, I have no experience with any of that. Her existence has shown me up as the hired muscle. And, it would appear, that she loves that type of reflection. Maybe? First appearances strongly suggest this.
To add insult to injury, our yearly kick off motto is
"What got us here wont get us there."Lovely...
If you're in a similar business and position, I know you might be saying, Girl, you gotta get up and show your value, this is on you! No one can take this away from you if you do the work!
and you would be right.
What I would like to say is that... my god, I am so tired and coming super close to being defeated. Mentally and emotionally. I feel like I might just take the loss and hand her the moon flag with a "fuck it, take it" and she can cross the finish line with all the glory having run the final 100 meters of a marathon.
I'l be on a stretcher somewhere with people saying "well, if you had just maintained a different pace and had better sneakers and nipple tape and told the people not to change the route.... It's a good thing she was there to save it for you, hey?"
And I'll just respond, "Yeah, thank god for her" and avert my eyes.
I started this project when we all knew and accepted we were "a scrappy start up" and now, that's no excuse.
I'm not saying I'll let myself go out like this, but that I feel like this needed to be said; whether or not I will have what it takes to raise myself, in a manner that I can be proud of, is the question I face and have no idea of the answer to.
But everyday I wake up, I humbly accept that I made every wrong decision at the same time as taking every next right step given the circumstances, and that only a handful of people (which does include our founder and CEO) will ever know this.
Most importantly though, at the end of it all, this platform that I have come to love, is going to be kick ass. And in my heart of hearts, I will know that I just answered the biggest support ticket ever. Building upon what our founder created, I have given our customers (the foundation of) what they need to live the lives they want. That makes me happy.
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