Hi Stella! What made you transition from Hedge Fund to PM in Tech?

I have always really loved people. I love learning about people, understanding different ways of being, thinking about how to help people through individual decisions – or the way we organize ourselves at scale.

When I was in college, that translated into nonprofit work focused on community building and education for migrants.

I started a nonprofit with a colleague and our focus was on education for non-English language speakers. People who had immigrated from other countries– the goal was to provide education at grade-level.

I focused on the humanities and social sciences in college. When I graduated, I didn't really know about the wide range of career options open to me at that time. I saw it as: there's finance, there's consulting, or there's continuing my schooling and going into government or law. 

At that time, I had a fellowship to pursue a fully funded masters degree in France at Sciences Po. But I wanted to learn more about industry before I pursued further schooling. So I did go and join a hedge fund and it was an amazing experience. But during my time in finance, I really missed that feeling from my work on the nonprofit; the feeling of actually building with the team. I was analyzing returns or analyzing currencies. But I really missed that feeling of working with people and building something.

I was reflecting: 

I think I need to make a career shift because this path is currently lacking what really gives me energy . 

And openly, I was also dating someone who lived across the country from me and was a software engineer in San Francisco. I never thought I'd be making a decision based on my love life. But I thought – I might as well consider what job opportunities could be open near this person. And that very quickly led me to technology.

Within tech, I discovered the role of a PM, which I had never even known existed before. It was like everything that I loved about the work I did on the nonprofit, blended with the strategic and quantitative work I’d honed at the hedge fund: understand the user, think about things that can make their life better and marry that with reasonable, logical business strategy and implementation decisions to make well reasoned investments for your team and company. hen Pulling in my academic and extracurricular work in literature and theatre, there is also the dimension of storytelling: product management also involves marketing, narrative and vision.

And I was like, this role just seems like so much fun. And then when I looked at the peers I knew who had gone down that path, they were all people that I really resonated with. I was like, oh, that's a pretty strong proxy. All these people who I think are super awesome and very energized and fun and creative have all chosen this path.

So that's my winding way to how I learned that PM was even a thing and how I became interested in it. 

How did you make it happen? 

I was working at the hedge fund and I acknowledged I want to make this move into tech and I want to work on consumer products. And so I immediately started trying to figure out what are the main skills that I have today that I should be emphasizing and the skills that I may be lacking that I want to make sure I have in my toolkit before I go apply to these jobs.

I basically did a broad survey where I talked to as many people as I could who were working in the types of jobs and also did a lot of reading online about what skills may be helpful and one of the things that I had a hypothesis that would be useful for me was a bit of a programming background.

I took some online classes from MIT on intro to computer science. I started to feel a bit more confident. I don't think you have to do that by the way, but it just made me feel extra confident when I was going into my conversations. 

And then I felt like I could start applying to companies and go into my job search. 

I got a ton of rejections.

Every time I applied to something cold, my email, my resume was immediately screened out. And I think this was because my liberal arts and finance background.

I was still getting a ton of rejections, like a ton of rejections. So then I had to basically find the companies that had enough similarity on paper with my resume that they would consider me, even if they weren't actually what I thought I would be best at. So I was like, okay, I'll apply to FinTech because FinTech thinks I will be good because I come from finance, even though I'm much more of a consumer product person.

So that helped me get some interviews. 

The thing that moved the needle for me was finding an alumni from my school who had a strong product position at LinkedIn, and he posted about it on LinkedIn and I reached out to him.

He said, reach out to the hiring manager. So I crafted a cold email for the hiring manager, but didn't hear back. Two weeks later, I just followed up on the email again with even more reasons that he said I would be great for the team, and luckily he responded and then I got through the interviews, and I got the job.

And then one other important thing happened here, which was I was very open with people about my goals.

A friend whose brother was an engineer at Google took my resume to his senior PM and urged him to consider me for a PM role.

I still thank this person because that was a really pivotal part of my overall career. Google then interviewed me for a product role, which I was super lucky at the time because I again had no industry experience yet. And I actually did got great feedback on the onsite but ultimately they wanted to see hands on work with engineers before approving my hire. 

Their feedback was: you haven't worked with engineers before, so we actually want you to go and get hands-on experience with engineers and then come back. 

So when I went to LinkedIn and did product strategy and operations for two years. At the end of that, I still was itching to explore product management. I wanted to help drive the vision and critical decisions for my team, and to learn about more parts of the tech stack – including new and innovative technologies –  beyond consumer apps.

I emailed the same recruiter who I had talked to before at Google and was able to be fast tracked to an onsite. Again, I am so grateful for that initial person who helped advocate for my candidacy the first time around.

One other thing I would say is just also for folks to know from a confidence building standpoint: I got the first job at LinkedIn, I went there, and it was amazing, I learned a lot, and then when I applied to product roles again a year and a half later it was much easier.

After just 18 months, it was a completely different process for me looking for a job. I had multiple offers and a really fun time through all of the interview processes, learning about different teams and types of product work. And so it was also a good reminder to me sometimes it might take a little longer than you wanted to reach your goal. But if you keep working towards that thing you are adding more skills, you are getting more confidence, you are becoming smarter in the ways you want, and things will work out.

What else do people need to know going into this process?

There are two things that I want to acknowledge up front.

So one is, in my opinion, too much of a mystique and a prestige around these things that are just regular jobs. Everyone has the capability and ability to do one of those jobs if that's what they want.

And then separately network effects are very important. I think that it's important to recognize who can help, who you can have conversations with and who can help you get through the door when you're trying to make the awesome person that you are known to the recruiters of the company.

So definitely don't underestimate the importance of your network or building a network when you're trying to get any job, including in tech. 

For my journey I was really lucky to be coming from a position where I had gone to a school that has a lot of name recognition, but I think you can come from any school and still have a great path.

Just calling out the levers that helped me!