How are you able to secure this job at Lyra? 

For me, it really came down to probably three things. 

The first one is having an organized resume that you build over a career. I had a wide breadth of experiences across a few top companies through college internships that I was lucky to obtain. I mainly got them by learning how to better communicate through professional settings, such as having well structured resumes and organized answers to typical behavioral questions.

When you think about it, the interview is really confirmation of your resume as a, “hey, let’s make sure you are who you are”. Try your best to get experiences and if not, practice and try different hobbies. Find what you like through multiple ways and keep learning. 

To that point, second is persistence. To give you context, I probably applied to 400 different roles over four months. You just keep applying and applying because you should. The market is rough, but if you aren’t in the market, jobs won’t come to your lap. Connections and luckiness can play a role, but my persistence helped me obtain all my experiences without connections.

I would say persistence is really key for the second point and just making sure you can find roles that match similar to your experience. It doesn't have to be exactly what you were doing earlier. I did Consulting and Product Management, which is very different from GTM now, but in each role you still do similar things. For example, you solve problems and work collaboratively across multiple teams and multiple functions.

And then from there, it's just the level of expertise.

If you're a former consultant going to look for a new role, say as a Product Manager, an Associate PM role would make more sense than looking for a manager role. Sometimes you have to not care about titles.

And, the last thing I'll just say is, it's really just luck. 

There are definitely a lot of companies that reach out that you interview with and a good amount of the time it’ll depend on the hiring manager - how they're feeling that day, their perspectives of you, what time of day it is. One thing I realized is you have to believe in yourself and be confident going into the job market that, hey, I’ll be okay and find something I like eventually. My approach was: don't be afraid of the daunting darkness of looking for a job. It's always worth looking around, even if you can’t see that well. 

How do you prepare for your interviews? 

I found that pretty much any job now that pays over six figures will have you do multiple rounds of interviews.

After you get an interview, you'll have a solid week to start planning out what you want to say (or at least try to push the interview date so you have enough time to prep). 

Most importantly, you want to look at context - What does this company do? How does this role fit in it, what does it look like day to day? Because every role is different, understanding what level of expertise you need to know would be great going into the interview.

For example, PMs at Google, Microsoft, are very tech focused, PMs will likely need to know SQL, Python, or something similar. PM at Capital One for me, was a bit closer to a business analyst leading a product roadmap. Capital One in that example, you didn’t need to know much tech. Makes sense for a financial institution though.

For any business job, any tech job there will be a case for the company to make sure that they know how you think and what you have learned. And I would say this is actually the most helpful because the type of work you do during the interview is usually the work you'll be doing on the job.

When I was applying for consulting back then, there were a lot of case interviews. Taking any idea, like – we found a brand new dinosaur that the scientist wants to sell, what do we do? How do you manage the stakeholders? What should we look at? How do we test it? What is the life cycle? So on, and they're different, but the point of the interview still gets you thinking – this is what the job's going to look like. 

At Lyra, I was given basically a dummy data of sales data and told, Hey, help create quotas and goals and structure compensation. Share insights from different market types and segments, and share thoughts on how to optimize.

And now that I'm a couple months in my role, I have repeatedly said out loud and also to my teammates of, wow, this is exactly like the interview. So use the interviews to really help you understand the type of work you'll likely be doing. Because it's not just getting the job, but also it's wanting to take the type of work you do at that job at the end of the day. 

For each interview specifically, I did two things. First is just the data gathering: what kind of terms you should know, how things interact with each other, how technical it gets, and so on. I find YouTube to be very helpful. It's basically a free bootcamp. I would not recommend paying for a bootcamp. You can find a lot of things online. 

And second is just building that repertoire yourself. I created a Google Docs of 20 background questions or so I might get asked. It makes sure I can have an answer prepared for each one of my experiences. And I'll quickly refer to that before any interview to refresh my mind because honestly I'm not gonna remember it all. 

What helps is putting all the notes down and creating a summarized notes of what each role is. This is what the role looks like. Here are key terms. So for product management it would be product market fit, product life cycle, AB testing, anything to that sort. I wouldn't really lean too heavily on deep diving, but rather starting from wide scope and deep diving, when it makes sense. And then doing the same for your experiences, so now you have one central place to remember everything you want to be prepared for. Keep building on that and it becomes a personal library.

Where did you find mentorship in your career? Did you get help from your network to land your role?

I don’t have a lot of mentors myself. Other than getting pretty lucky with managers at my jobs. 

I’d highly recommend looking at friends and alumni. Luckily, I was in a fraternity on campus, so it was pretty easy for me to reach out and say “hey, tell me about your role, tell me how it's going.”

For friends, it was a similar idea: “Hey, I'm interested in this, what’s it been like for you”. A friend reached out and said, “hey would you like to share ideas and think of a company idea,” and so on. Meeting new friends is good.

And it is definitely hard if you don't have the network, but, I will say it is not impossible. Every job I've applied to and worked for, I've used zero connections. 

Given your wide range of roles, can you tell us a little bit more about the similarities and differences between your different roles in consulting, product management, and sales strategy? 

Initially in my Corporate Strategy role, I think the main takeaways I got from it were first, communication.

Structuring a lot of what you're saying, actually making sure it's understandable because the people you're talking to don't have a lot of time or just want the main point of what you're trying to say. 

Second would be just comfortability with talking to different types of people across levels. Talking to different people of different levels of scopes and desired insights.

Like when I became a product manager, the questions switched: How does new tech apply to Capital One? Where can we use it? Is there a tool we should buy? Is it something we should build? What does it look like long term? Should a team own it? And so building all those questions similar to a startup of what's the value here? Is there any value? And if not, what should we do about it? And what does Capital One take at the end of it?

So it was definitely more of a technical and operational angle working with some SWEs and Designers. 

At Capital One, I tried to vary my experiences as much as I could and learned the basics across a lot of subjects. For example, I have a machine learning certification with UC Berkeley from when I was working at Capital One. 

Finally, at my role at Lyra I think I actually found a pretty nice balance here of finding better work-life balance and finding a job where we're still a little bit early, given we're a late-stage startup. We’re starting to transition to be more strategic and I think it's finding that balance of how to support three teams that recently started and is going to need my support to grow and win more deals. 

All work I’ve done has always involved solving a problem with a team and using some math or reasoning behind it. I think building insights will be the most important part to learn.