As a technical product manager at Mastercard, I help my team navigate three questions:
1) What should we build? Meaning the direction that product development should take to best add value for existing and future clients. Since I work on a developed product, my team focuses on enhancing the product’s user experience by improving existing features and adding features that serve our clients.
2) What can we build? Even though we come up with great ideas in question 1, we, like every other product team, have engineering and timeline constraints. So it’s important to understand what’s feasible to build and which features are most important; having the most direct impact on product value.
3) When will we ship? Once we settle on questions 1 and 2, we go into execution mode on development. The challenges in this phase are the development obstacles, such as external dependencies, which often pop up unexpectedly. So as a technical PM, I work on tackling this problem to minimize the impact on the development timeline and coordinate with the stakeholders throughout the process to make sure everyone is aligned.
Networking helped me tremendously in obtaining this opportunity. Through networking, I was able to obtain a referral from someone at Mastercard and asked to come in for an interview. The job market was tough when I was recruiting and is certainly, if not more challenging today. I believe networking is important for any candidate looking to make an impression with a company and discover job opportunities that may be a good fit.
