Favorite Parts of Working in the Software Industry as a Director of Product

I've worked in consumer goods, specifically with food products, as a founder of my own startup. As a product manager, I was at Western Digital, working on data storage and computer hardware. Currently, after a career break, I'm working on B2B software products. We're developing AI and machine learning software for brand agencies and e-commerce platforms.

I've been across three very different industries. Something I really enjoy about consumer goods and food products is seeing people directly interact with them. It's fascinating to watch someone pick up a product for the first time, hold it, smell it, and examine it.

It's like seeing a baby play with a new toy. Watching a potential customer tap into a primal, almost childish side to experience your product is captivating. The warm feeling you get when they try your product, eat it, and are delighted by it is one of the best feelings.

I imagine that's what a chef feels. Especially when I was a founder, I worked on a coffee chocolate product that solved a pain point in my own life. I was a tired, broke college student needing caffeine to get through school.

This was a solution I made for myself. Seeing that resonate with friends and a wider community at Berkeley, and even nationally and globally, was amazing. We shipped products to Australia from the Bay Area.

I also got to be very hands-on with my product. The first few iterations were made in a friend's kitchen, then our fraternity kitchen, and eventually a commercial kitchen. Being hands-on and getting quick feedback from friends and users was something I really enjoyed.

In a larger company like Western Digital, with tens of thousands of employees globally and billions in revenue, I managed product lines worth hundreds of millions of dollars in my early twenties. I enjoyed that I could do things as a founder that I didn't have the money for before.

If I wanted fancy new equipment to speed up production, or a new design scheme, these things could happen overnight in a large company. I really enjoyed having the resources of a large operation to bring ideas to life. I was no longer limited by startup resources or my own technical expertise.

If I wanted to do something, I could call upon financial resources and, most importantly, people. I could ask an industrial designer to create a new design pattern, and it would be on my desk the next week.

In my current role in the software industry, it's very interesting compared to my previous two experiences. I'm now working on a software product versus a physical one. In physical products, the iteration cycle from version one to two is long because you're making physical changes in the real world.

This involves engineering, supply chain operations, and can take weeks, months, or even years. But in software, iteration cycles can be as fast as minutes with the right team. As soon as an idea comes to mind for a problem and its solution, it can be implemented almost immediately.

You can see the impacts much more quickly, and scale your impact to many different places much faster. This keeps up with how fast my mind works. I used to be limited by waiting for things to get back to us, which took weeks or months, but now I can run as fast as I want.