What A Product Manager At A Creative Production SaaS Company Wishes They Had Known Before Entering The SaaS Industry
Evan, a Product Manager at a B2B SaaS Marketplace, advises aspiring product managers to "start small and try out your own development," suggesting building small projects using AI tools to gain practical experience and demonstrate initiative. This early hands-on experience, even something as simple as a "python project," would have significantly strengthened their own early career trajectory and made transitioning from psychology into software development easier.
Product Management, Software Development, Prototyping, Project Management, AI Development
Advizer Information
Name
Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
Majors
Industries
Job Functions
Traits
Evan Bradshaw
Product Manager
B2B SaaS Marketplace for Creative Production
UCSB
UCSB: Engineering School, Master of Technology Management (MS)
Psychology
Technology, Advertising, Communications & Marketing
Product / Service / Software Development and Management
Greek Life Member
Video Highlights
1. Building small projects and prototypes early on, even using AI tools, can significantly boost your product management applications.
2. Showing initiative and satisfying your curiosity by building things, even small projects, is crucial in demonstrating product management capabilities.
3. Participating in competitions like the UCSB new venture contest provides valuable experience and exposure for aspiring product managers.
Transcript
Q9: Wish I'd known this before entering the industry.
Here's the cleaned transcript:
What have you learned about this role that you wish someone would've told you before you entered the industry?
In product management, I've learned that it's meaningful to start small and try out your own development, your own little project, or your own little software thing. It's easier than ever to build prototypes by working with AI, whether that's building your own GPT in the ChatGPT store or using Cursor to see how AI can help you build a Python project.
It might seem like a small project, but it's really important, especially when you're in school, to show the initiative of building and satisfying your curiosities as a product manager. I wish I knew that earlier because I would have probably worked alongside other people who were building smaller projects.
This would have made my case for being a product manager a bit easier starting out. Knowing I wanted to end up in a software development environment, I definitely could have picked up some skills and exposure earlier that would have been appreciated in interviews.
So, I suggest working with people and building small experiments. At UCSB, the New Venture Contest is a great example of one way to start small, which could lead to outsized results.