What are you up to these days?

My name's My. I’m a PM at Workday where I primarily work on our design system, which is a collection of design component code libraries that helps product teams create and launch products quicker.

What did your career transition sequence look like?

I started out my career as a technology consultant working primarily in the media and entertainment industry. I did that for about two years before I transitioned into a PM role within the media entertainment industry. And then I moved to Workday after that!

How did you start in the entertainment industry as a tech consultant? 

Honestly, I think the common theme in my career just happens to be luck. I applied for one job and I got it right away.

I stumbled upon consulting very randomly at a college career fair. I decided at the last minute to stop by a table because the name sounded interesting. Turns out they did consulting services for media entertainment and they worked on all the things behind the scenes in media that you might not think about like pricing strategies and data collection for ads.

 And I just joined after that. 

How did you make the transition from consulting to PM?

I didn’t know what a PM was out of college but about a year or two into my career in consulting, I was assigned on a staff augmentation project as a product/project manager at Warner Brothers, which is essentially where a consultant temporarily fills a role a company needs. 

It was a few months into that role where I was really seriously considering product management more. 

I ended up getting Scrum certified and took Fundamentals of Product Management through the Stanford Continued Studies Program funded by my consulting firm.

It was basically a six to eight weeks course over the summer, all virtual. It's very popular and it basically runs through all of the fundamentals of product management. You learn about marketing analysis, doing your wireframing, running a scrum team in a group, defining requirements, and the program culminates in a pitch for your project. 

I would say all of that was actually really helpful to help me understand what I could expect as a product manager and help confirm that it was a career path I wanted to look into. 

After doing that for a year that team eventually started hiring and I was like, “you know what? I might as well. I like this team. I might as well make it full time.” 

So when my consulting project lead asked me “How did you find the work so far? We're contemplating putting you on more projects,” I was just pretty transparent with them and said, “Hey, I really appreciate more learning opportunities. But as a heads up, I'm also interested in pursuing product opportunities.”

And it just ended up in them saying, “Well, if that’s the case, we'd like to hire you on board.” 

I didn’t really have the traditional interview process because I had already worked with them for so long so it was just more of a fast pass 

What’s the difference between PM roles in entertainment vs tech? 

I think PM roles are different based on industry, but also disciplines. My PM role at Warner Bros was very data focused. Whereas my role at Workday is design focused. 

Another difference was the relationships between the PM role and other cross functional teams. 

At Warner Brothers, it was marketing, campaign, data science. At Workday, I work with different teams like our accessibility team and our globalization team.

How did you transition from Warner Brothers to Workday?

As a rule of thumb, I recommend that everyone look into the job market considering new roles every year or so.

So honestly, when I applied to Workday, I was thinking I’d test out some interviewing skills. But I ended up interviewing with a team that I really enjoyed. But I will say what pushed me to apply to this role specifically was the emphasis on design. So at Warner Bros working in data specifically, we didn't really have access to designers.

So anytime we had a new internal tool, you were mostly reliant on whoever's building that tool to provide the actual UI for it. But for the most part, it usually doesn't look as nice as a polished end customer product.

So because I've never had a chance to work with design before I decided I might as well apply and really fill that gap. 

I think after my second round of interview is when I decided, yeah, this is actually a team that I am very interested in joining. I had about three different interviewers that were engineers and it gave me a lot more insight into their team culture, which I realized was very strong. And in one of my interviews, we ended up wrapping up early so we just spent time talking about Video games. It was nice to know that if I did get an offer and if I did choose to join this team, our focus isn't always going to be work. They were actually interested in my day to day life and the hobbies that I have, which was really nice.