Meet the person behind the role.
Hi there! My name is Aivy and I started my journey in product management 5 years ago and now am a Senior Product Manager for the Client Growth, Onboarding team. As a product manager, my focus is to identify and understand user needs and problems, and help deliver features and products that will solve those problems for our customers. What gets me most excited about working in product management are the different types of problems I get to work on and collaborating with my team in building solutions. I love that it's a blend of science and creativity from digging into the data and metrics, and delivering a delightful experience to our users.
Take us on a journey.
My first job out of high school was at Baskin Robbins where I was an Assistant Manager & Cake Decorator. Looking back, I can see how some of my behaviors translated into fitting as a Product Manager. For example, I would guess what type of ice cream flavor customers would choose based on patterns in behavior and demographics, and use my learnings to segment my customer service to optimize my tip earnings.
After college, I had a strong desire to work in tech and started out as a Technical Recruiter helping engineers find their next work opportunities, and being able to speak with so many people in the industry led me to my start as a Product Manager. After recruiting, I joined an LA based ecommerce company called Caseology where I built my foundational skills as a Product Manager focusing on hardware consumer electronics. At that company, I learned to wear a lot of different hats and deliver various types of products for our users, including 3 different brands from electronics to health & beauty. After Caseology, I wanted to redirect my focus into building software and made the move to San Francisco where I joined my previous company, Bold. That was definitely one of the most exciting periods of my life as I really honed in on my skills with PM’ing and taking more responsibility with managing my own roadmap and then my own team.
Your ah-ha moment.
The a-ha moment that made me confident I wanted to do this work was building out my first test at Bold. It was so exciting and fun to be collaborating with all different types of stakeholders from design, engineering, and analytics, and working together to build a wonderful product for our users.
Digging into your role.
I think what really surprised me of how I got to where I am was the focus on helping people find their next job opportunity. I never thought this would be the industry I would be focusing on, but it makes sense now as I love helping people. I also love the variability of the actual work I’m doing day-to-day while working on the broader goal of helping people.
Advice for your younger self?
One piece of advice I would give my younger self about my career path is to try to talk to more people and understand the different positions available in the tech industry. I think there’s definitely something out there for anyone that is interested in tech, and it's just about understanding our strengths and how it translates to what we want to do in our career.
Advice for the future product manager.
The advice I would have for someone interested in a similar path is to find product managers and ask to have a coffee conversation with them about their experiences. It may sound daunting to enter the field, but there’s so many different ways to go about it and I think every product manager would have an interesting perspective on how they went about starting their journey.