In these posts, APMs share their journeys of how they found the APM program and knew it was right for them.
Ryan is a recent graduate of the APM program (class of ‘20) . Here is his story on how he came into the product management and the APM program at Yahoo.
When I started college, I thought I was dead set on being an electrical & computer engineer. As I started diving deeper into these fields, my perceptions of them changed a lot though. My EE classes were mostly things like solving differential equations, and while CS was fun, a lot of the course work was overly theoretical.
At around the same time, I met people like Don Norman who had just set up the Design Lab at UCSD, and I started learning about other fields like design. I met a few folks in the new design department that were cross-listed as faculty in CS and Business, and they approached these fields in a very different light.
Inspired by learning a breadth of topics, I explored internships in marketing and consulting, and did design freelancing for about a year. Eventually the Design Lab held a talk with Adobe, and one of the speakers talked about being a product manager. I immediately chatted with them after, and later followed on twitter.
A few conversations later, I had my first Product internship on Adobe's design tool, Adobe XD.
I instantly felt the role was a fit, and went on to do another PM internship at an AR startup, and am now doing the APM program with Yahoo at Verizon Media.
Eyan is an APM1 (class of ‘22). This is his story of how he ended up in product management, starting in high school.
Before I talk about my story, I wanted to say that one of the coolest parts about the APM program is that all APMs come from such a diverse set of backgrounds. If your background isn’t similar to mine, that should give you all the more reason to apply.
My APM story starts in high school where I started learning about engineering through FIRST robotics, a high school robotics competition. It not only put computer science on the map for me, but I also learned that I loved using teamwork to solve complex engineering problems. Since I primarily focussed on the mechanical parts of the robots, I started college as a mechanical engineering major.
Fast forward to my freshman summer, I started taking additional classes in computer science and entrepreneurship. Through them, I came up with what I thought was a cool idea for what ended up becoming a social e-commerce platform. I teamed up with one of my teammates from FIRST and we ended up starting a company. We won a few entrepreneurial pitch competitions which gave us enough money to grow our team to a few people. My teammate, now cofounder, led the technical aspects of the platform, and I worked on “everything else.” I loved every aspect of working on “everything else,” it wasn’t purely technical, or business, or design. It was working in cross-collaborative teams to solve really ambiguous, real-world problems. Every single day of my schedule looked entirely different.
Fast forward to two years later, I switched from majoring in mechanical engineering to computer science, started taking classes focused on AI (mainly deep learning) and Human Centered Design. The company I cofounded hadn’t succeeded as I hoped, and I had to find something I wanted to do after college. While I loved both computer science and data science, I didn’t feel like I was cut out for software engineering or research. Design and business jobs felt like I’d be too far away from engineering challenges.
I felt stuck having to choose between one of those three career tracks, that’s when I learned about the APM program. It would allow me to work on all of those problems simultaneously without committing myself to just one of them. It was also heavily collaborative which I loved. I did a PM internship to confirm this is what I wanted to do, and the rest was history. While I think all the APM programs are great, I chose the Verizon Media APM program because I felt that as an APM, you were given the most responsibility and had the largest opportunity to make an impact on the company and on its users.
Becca is a recent graduate of the APM program (class of ‘20). This is her story of how she transitioned from a PhD in Mathematics to the APM program at Verizon Media.
I entered college unsure about my career path. I loved solving puzzles though, which led me to major in math and conduct research in pure math every summer. After graduation, I wanted to keep solving puzzles with more application to real world problems, which led me to a PhD in Computer Science at University of Southern California.
While in the PhD program, I worked on various applied machine learning projects and learned that I cared a lot more about the application of these algorithms for the end user rather than the research and publications needed in a PhD program. I honestly felt lost at that point and questioned what made sense for my next step.
I met and talked with friends in the industry that noted that what I was doing in my PhD was similar to product management roles in tech companies. I explored this idea of a PM role more by reading books and articles, reaching out to PMs in my network, and eventually applying to the Verizon Media APM program.
Now as a PM, I see how in reality, the skills I needed as a PM I had been developing through my research and teaching experiences I had in grad school.