https://anchor.fm/census/episodes/Data-Product-Management---Operational-Analytics-Conference-2021-ev8eio

Boris (00:00:00): Let's get going. This is really quite a crew, so I'm just going to have each of you introduce yourselves in a couple of sentences, and specifically like how you got into data, the various companies you've worked at and maybe a bit about why you became a product manager or how you ended up in the field of product management. James, you go first.

James (00:00:22): Great. Well, yeah, thanks for having me, first of all. I feel like this is a great stage and a great set of co-speakers, so appreciate the invite. Let's see. How did I get started in the data world? [inaudible 00:00:34] and pouring the data was ... I knew nothing about it, I thought I was going to be a lawyer when I started working at Facebook. But I got really interested in data and answering questions that people had, ended up sort of teaching myself the whole SQL stack at an exciting time and how it was being developed, helped sort of get the company to be using those high-powered data tools and systems.

James (00:01:06): And then finally became a data analyst myself full-time, then switched over into product management. Because I was spending so much time as an analyst, helping to improve our tools and connect with the engineering team, building our infrastructure and toolstack, they said, "Hey, we just want you to come do this full-time."

James (00:01:23): That was a great vote of confidence from those folks. And I sort of never looked back. I think that was in probably 2008 or 2009. And I was at Facebook then I switched over to Airbnb in 2014 as, again, sort of the first technical product manager, meaning I was a PM, but my tools and my products were all internal facing as opposed to external facing. And then left Airbnb at the beginning of 2020 to start a company, to keep building data tools and data infrastructure. That's my story.

Boris (00:01:57): Yes. That's pretty good. Adam, how about you?

Adam (00:02:05): I started working at Google in 2005. I was a quantitative analyst, and it was kind of before data science was a thing, but that's basically what I was doing. I was doing data science work there, working in search. And then in 2010 moved over to Twitter, I started building data science teams and leading data science teams there. And then the way I got into product management much more recently in 2018, I started working at Mixpanel.

Adam (00:02:39): And Mixpanel is a analytics company, and that's what I had kind of been doing my whole career and so it was kind of like a perfect opportunity. I'd always been interested in doing product management and so it seemed like a great opportunity to move into that area and figure out how to solve analytics problems for people in general instead of the internal stakeholders that I had been working with.

Boris (00:03:02): Interesting. So you had a lifetime as the customer and then you were like, "I'd like to take the other side of the equation and actually work on the tools themselves."

Adam (00:03:13): Yeah, totally.

Boris (00:03:15): Lauren, how about you?

Lauren (00:03:18): Yeah. I really started in the data space at Segment about five years ago. I started on their analytics team as a consumer of the Segment tools and all the tools in the ecosystem, and then always found myself wondering, "Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that for the Segment product?" and joined the product team four years ago to build products for data teams. I led our storage team for a while with our Warehouses and Data Lakes product, actually working with Mallika over at Census, and kind of thought a lot about the core data platform and how we can make data more useful.

Boris (00:03:51): And last but not least, Jeff.

Jeff (00:03:55): Cool. Thanks for having me, Boris. My name is Jeff. I'm currently a product manager at Google. I lead the redesign on Image Search. I first got interested in data product management back when I was actually working as a consultant and was doing a project related to big data analysis and learned about Tableau. I was just really shocked that a data tool could have such a great and delightful user experience. And it really inspired me to get into the field of data product management. So I joined at Tableau.

Jeff (00:04:33): I led their efforts on big data. James was actually at Airbnb at the time and was my customer. And so we talked big data a number of times then he convinced me to come over to Airbnb and I was fortunate enough to start working there on the data products team over there. And so at Airbnb, I worked on a number of initiatives, building out Airbnb's data catalog, our experimentation platform, platform for machine learning. And most recently, I made the transition over the Google where I'm focused more on machine learning aspect side of building data products. So that's my story.

Boris (00:05:19): Wow, nice. Okay. This is a really nice smattering of everyone's favorite tech companies. Not that my story matters, but I was a PM right out the gate in my career. I was a PM developer tools for seven years before starting my first company. And I thought this is perfect. I get to be a product manager, which I thought I found to be a really interesting discipline, it's like multi-faceted and you get to touch a lot of different things and you're not just pigeonholed into one thing.

Boris (00:06:00): But it was on developer tools, which is I basically sought out the most technical team I could find on in tech to be a PM in, which that was my compromise straight out of school of like, "I'll just go be a PM on the world's most technical team." Okay. PM is such a big word. And we even had a thread ourselves right before tonight about trying understand what do we even mean by product managers or data product managers? Because obviously in 2021, every PM at every company has to have some understanding of data.

Boris (00:06:39): But what I was trying to think about or talk about is, what does it mean to be a PM on a product that comes out of the data team in particular? And I guess a lot of that has to do with internal products. And so that's I guess my first question is like, what did your team assign as the responsibilities for a PM, especially when the stakeholders are internal, right? So it's like an analytics that you're building and you want to make sure you're serving your team correctly. James, you ended up doing both of these things, right? You had external customers at Facebook and internal customers at Airbnb, right?