What have you been up to these days and what was your path there? 

I’m a product manager at 6sense. I had a very windy path here - from finance to diplomacy to sales to customer success to product. 

But I love making product. I love doing what I do. There are days where my brain hurts but I just love it.

Tell us about your journey before tech

I was born and brought up in Bangladesh. I came to the States for undergrad and I majored in economics and minored in math and German.

I graduated around the time of the Great Recession, in 2010. 

That was one of the first reality checks for me. I learned the hard way that it was very difficult to get a job. I majored in economics so I just thought I’d go into Wall Street at a time when everybody was getting laid off of Wall Street.

Eventually I ended up landing a job in banking specializing in oil and gas financing. Essentially, these projects become incredibly big and incredibly complex and there are several tranches of financing involved.

I worked there for a couple of years but soon realized that I didn't like working with spreadsheets. That was the time when this old mentor of mine randomly sent me an open job position in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the role of Chief Economic Advisor to the Norwegian ambassador to Bangladesh. 

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a mission in Bangladesh. They're the world experts in deep-sea oil and oil and gas drilling. And at the time the Bangladeshi government was sending out RFPs for rights to drill in the Bay of Bengal. So Norway and their national oil company Statoil were looking for an economist familiar with the Bangladeshi government. 

Long story short, landing that position was one of the proudest moments in my life because it was an incredibly rigorous interview process. The job was great, the perks were amazing, and I spent a lot of my time between Bangladesh and Norway. But soon I realized that even with all of the great things about the job, there was not a lot of incentive like there was in the private industry.

I was young, I was hungry, but there was such a limit to what I could do with the Norwegian consulate. Of the 20 or 30 projects that I worked on, I think only a couple got implemented.

So after a while, I started thinking about getting involved in tech – tech was taking over everything. And I constantly had this feeling that time was leaving me behind. Even though I had made it really far in diplomacy when I was really young, I started realizing that I might have to restart my career in tech. But I bit the bullet and I moved to the US to break into tech. 

How did you break into tech from diplomacy?　

It was a very humbling process. I went from being one of the youngest advisors in the history of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to being completely lost in terms of what I was supposed to even apply for. 

I didn’t know what half the roles were. 

Quite frankly, I don't even remember the positions that I applied for. 

I just remembered the roles required a lot of tech experience and of course, I had none. 

I got interviews, but I kept getting shot down. The feedback was that I didn’t have tech experience and that they just didn’t know what to do with me. 

Looking back, had I had more resources to know better what was out there, I think I could have moved to a mid-career role closer to where I wanted to go. Instead, I started at the bottom of the ladder as an entry-level sales rep (Business Development Representative).

I got the job because one of my distant relatives who lived in the Bay Area was telling me, “You're not gonna like this, but sales is the easiest way to break into an organization. You're literally going to start at the bottom of the ladder, but I would say if you join a fast-moving startup, you can go wherever the hell you want.”

And yeah, so I swallowed the pill, and actually 6sense was the first company I interviewed with for sales.

I went in and my manager at the time saw my resume and he immediately called me out. He was like, “Dude, what are you doing here? You're way overqualified for this position.” And I was honest with him. I was like, look, I'm looking to break in. I'll help you meet your numbers. But I'm looking to transition over to product. 

He was incredibly supportive. 6sense had about 50 employees at the time. And he was like, yeah, in six months, if you will help me meet my numbers, I'll help you go wherever you want to go. 

How was it first joining tech as a BDR mid-career?

I had some idea of what to expect, but I'm not going to lie, when I joined, every other week, I would literally need to go into the bathroom and hyperventilate.

The BDR job is a great job, and I think it would serve everyone well to go through it once. You cold-call people, you try to get what you want, but you do it tastefully. And I think that's an incredibly valuable skill set that a lot of people overlook.

But I think I just turned 30 and I felt like I was starting over again as a BDR. The longer I was at the job, the more I felt like all my years of experience before amounted to nothing. So I had a bit of a mini existential crisis.

I was really good at it. That's not to say much. I'd like to think that anybody who's in their thirties with job experience should be good at an entry-level job. 

How did you figure out you wanted to do Product Management? 

I just knew I wanted to get more into tech.

And so my first step from BDR was actually into a CSM (Customer Success Manager) role. 

The head of product recommended I look into Customer Success because I didn’t have a Computer Science background. Because we were small and we didn't have a support team, Customer Success Managers at the time needed to troubleshoot and we had to know the platform intimately. So I moved into the CSM role and transferred to Product Management from there after about another year or two. 

You made the transition from BDR to CSM and CSM to Product Manager pretty quickly. What helped you to make these transitions? 

The first thing I did was set expectations early every time. Everyone I knew where I wanted to go a year in advance. 

I used every opportunity to evangelize my dream. 6sense has a big customer conference called Breakthrough and we had a corner where you took a Polaroid of yourself and wrote down your next “breakthrough” in your career. I got my photo taken and I put it up there and I said, “next year I'm going to break through to product” and tagged everyone, the CCO, the head of product, everybody. 

Doing this a year before you want to transition takes desperation out of the equation and it gives everyone plenty of time to prepare. You don't come off as somebody who's suddenly going to their manager saying “I'm frustrated. I can't freaking do this anymore. I need to move.”

One point of detail here on communication is one thing I did when my promotion to Customer Success was taking too long – I wrote in my manager's review a very diplomatic note. Something like “I was told that if I met my numbers, I would get a transition in six months, but it does seem like I am given a bit of a moving goalpost.” And thankfully my skip manager, my manager's manager, who's still with the company now, by the way, fantastic guy. He literally called me up and he was like, “yo, what is up?” And then I told him again pretty passively and delicately about my situation. And yeah, like within two months I was in the CS team.

What were the challenges you had transitioning to your roles and how did you deal with them?

I have ADHD and I’ve never been the best student. As a kid it was something very difficult to cope with because at the time I was growing up in Bangladesh, they didn't believe in things like ADHD. 

But I actually think being aware of my weaknesses in this regard gives me my competitive advantage. 

When my CCO actually asked me, “Why should I hire you?” I told him that as someone who has ADHD and has to really work to learn, it actually makes me a better teacher because you can accommodate the least common denominator. I always felt like I could be a good teacher because I am dumb, right? And CSM requires you to be a good instructor. And my CCO actually loved that. 

The other challenge was the fact that I started in tech with no technical knowledge.  When I was first looking at tech, one of the biggest deterrents for me was that I did not have a bachelor's degree in computer science and I felt like I would have to be competing with people who had 4 years of academic experience. Looking back, I realize that so much of this feeling of “Am I behind?” was in my head. And these are ghosts that I had to deal with. 

But one of the things I did to work on that is that I made the effort to take notes on everything and learn directly from engineers.

Often I'd go to the engineers and anything that I could do that didn't require heavy coding or whatnot. I'd be like, “Why don't you teach me so I can do this and I don't have to come bother you next time.” 

We didn't have a support team and instead of flagging engineers every single time, I'd literally go and tap them and be like, “Can you tell me how to do this” And for any product area that nobody wanted to touch, I started becoming an expert in that area.