Profile
How Bryant Discovered a Love for Product Management Within His Work in Operations
About
Challenges
Resources
Bryant Navarez
Product Manager at Bain and Company
Transition Summary
Sales Operations @ WorldPay
Senior Business Analyst @ Bain & Company
Product Manager @ Bain & Company
Hi Bryant! What do you do?
Hey! I’m Bryant, I work at Bain Boston. I'm currently a Product Manager for our global pricing configurator tool, which is what partners are currently using to price out any case that they're going to deliver in the future. I've been doing that for almost two and a half years and it's been interesting. I like it a lot.
Tell us how you got into product and where you started off in your career.
I studied a degree in finance specifically tailored to the energy industry. And right after undergrad, I actually went into financial services.
But it was not it was not the area that I wanted to be in. So after financial services, I actually took up an internship in Boston where I was doing business operations, working with a lot of legal documents, working with a lot of channel partners, and practically creating processes in a tool and software called Salesforce to basically tie things together.
And then after that internship, I landed a role at WorldPay. And I was in the sales operations or the sales enablement org. And sales operations has so many hats that you wear. The whole aim while I was at WorldPay was to help enable more sales.
And that's what I spent two and a half years doing. It was an interesting ride. I really liked everyone that I worked with at WorldPay, all my colleagues in London and San Francisco and Cincinnati.
Out of the role that I was doing and all the hats that I was wearing, what I really enjoyed was actually working with my users, which are either functional teams that help turn on sales. So like your credit risk, your underwriting, your regulatory compliance teams, your legal teams, working with them, working with our sales teams and our relationship management teams who were doing the selling.
In the end to build out a, not just a process, but also a tool. Again, we were working with Salesforce, but there was a lot more customizability. And I was in the seat of being like a product owner or like an associate product donor, working with these groups to enable different features in that tool, different versions and keep trying to push sales forward.
And so I really liked that aspect of it and that aspect of working with users, working with engineers in the end, creating a change, testing a change, collecting data on a change that is all products, right? In other words, that's product. But I didn't know that’s what it was at the time when I was looking for the next step in my career.
So eventually I did place my thumb on it. I realized I'm actually doing product [management] in my own way. So then when I was looking for a new role, that's what I focused on. I started recruiting in fall of 2021 and I landed at interviews with Bain and it was really awesome.
How did you decide that Product was the job you wanted to do?
Yeah, I think mentorship was a big one. I did have a colleague in London. She helped me break down the entirety of my role into the things that I like to do.
And what helped me place my thumb on it was when I was being given more projects that required the typical, sprint development process, the product discovery process. And that I started learning it little by little by my colleagues at WorldPay on how enable from start to finish all the way up until the email that goes out to your users that, this is live, it's been tested, it's working, here's data to back that up, like what the data we're collecting.
So mentorship was big on that. My mentors were not product professionals though. They were in similar roles as me. So the nitty gritty of product [management], I learned just a lot of research online on what a typical product manager does and the differences between product management, internal software development, and consumer software. So B2B versus B2C.
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Tell us about the resources you used to learn about product!
Apart from just Google, the networking is huge, talking to people in product helps you a lot. But starting off, because basically when I moved from Worldpay to Bain, it was moving from sales operations into more of a mini product manager or an associate product manager trying to become a full on product manager.
At that point I was under an experienced senior product manager who was helping me learn the ropes. And so the couple of resources that she gave me online Mind the Product, which is a website that it just gives you. a plethora of knowledge on all different types of product topics from discovery to launch to scaling.
Another one that I actually follow both on Spotify and on Instagram is Lenny's podcast. He's great. He interviews so many different product managers from what we're working from Airbnb to Google, even the famous Marty Kagan, which was going to be the third source, like the very first place that you can go to get a whole basic level of fundamentals 101 on product management.
Marty Kagan, he's an author from the Silicon Valley group. He released a book called Inspired. It's actually on my shelf. He breaks down product management from start to finish. Get his book if you can, he's really good at just explaining the fundamentals and what makes a good product manager.
Then I actually did a certification on product management from product school.
It was an eight to twelve week course and you meet every week. And the instructors are currently professionals at Meta, professionals at HubSpot. They just bring in different product managers, and they teach you products from start to finish.
What were some of the challenges that you faced along the way and how were you able to overcome those?
I was trying to take my role and then transform it into what I'd want my role to be.
So I had to push away all the things that weren't exactly product related and just focus on the things that were product related. And then the way that I did that. Was just through mentorship.
My mentors at WorldPay actually helped me put it right in front of me. They helped me secure product enhancement projects.That's how I was able to just create a list of all that I've done that would qualify me as an associate product manager.
The second is I would definitely say, having the courage to jump. Because a lot of times when you are looking to transition or pivot, you almost feel unqualified. And so I had to get over that mental hump as well, that I'm not qualified for the product role. I do other things and it's not product.
But that was another thing that I had to overcome. It was just like a mental block that you can't move into this role because you're not a traditional product manager, even though they're asking for someone with product experience.
I guess that was the next challenge was how do I get the phrasing right when I'm having a product interview. Describing what I was doing in the language of product management like adopting agile methodology, product enhancement, product development, product scalability, how you contributed what, how many users did you acquire, how many users did you retain, how many users do you activate just off of this one process, et cetera. There's so many different metrics to do it.
It was like leveraging what I learned at WorldPay And translating that into a product interview like how did you do what they want you to do but at your different org. That was a challenge. And it, yeah, it just took a lot of changing of phrasing.
How did you land an interview at Bain?
I just did it through, I did it through LinkedIn, actually.
Now I know it's really hard to just apply through LinkedIn. And I guess the job market right now is a lot tougher, but back then it was a LinkedIn search.
And it was interesting because I didn't, I wasn't referred by anyone, I was not referred by anyone, I just went in cold, and I took the resources around me to learn about Bain.
Transition Tales