Complexity doesn’t have to be complicated

My name is Dan, and I’m very good at digging. Once I start digging, I tend not to stop until I get to the bottom. This is what’s made me so effective in my product management career — from Startup to Fortune 100, and back again. 

For example, I was asked to manage a set of APIs when I was promoted at Nike in 2018, and I knew I couldn’t represent my users (front-end programmers) well for that kind of product. So I started digging. I enrolled in an online code school and learned JavaScript and front-end Web development during evenings and weekends. I didn’t stop until I felt comfortable having deep conversations with my new “customers,” so I could represent their interests well in design and prioritization discussions with my own teams. And I’m now able to dig even deeper with my engineering partners, as appropriate.

No matter the opportunity at hand or the specialist I’m collaborating with, I pride myself on digging as deep as we need to go to arrive at the best strategy and execute — whether I’m discussing the problem behind the feature request with users, tech-debt tradeoffs with engineers, affordances and signifiers with designers, or topic X with partner/stakeholder/leader Y. And I learn a lot in the process.