My First Product Job

Guy Peled

Director of Product

First product job

🐣 Transitioned to PM in the same company in 2009

Before becoming a PM

💼 Customer Success Manager

💻 3 years of exp. in tech companies

🎓 Economics

The Story

How did you land your first job as a product manager?

My degree was in economics which got me a position on the helpdesk of a financial software company.

Here’s my route to PM:

→ Helpdesk (2 years)

→ Product Specialist, sort of CSM but very sales oriented (1 year)

→ First product role

What helped you get that first product role?

I gained business and technical knowledge.

Specifically, how our products are being used by clients and how features technically work. Not code wise as I don’t know code, but at least which dev teams are part of the process of each feature. Things you learn while working on the helpdesk.

I looked for opportunities to perform Product Manager tasks. While on the helpdesk I created a pet project of building a searchable knowledge database for the helpdesk employees. It was sort of like building an internal product with end users etc. While I was a product specialist I wrote internal documents regarding enhancement requests raised by clients. The end audience of these docs were PM’s and eventually R&D people who treated some of these docs as specs. This eventually got me my current PM role. Was offered to me when there was a reorg in R&D/Product.

Did you ever build or lead any side-projects outside of work before becoming a PM?

Nope

The challenge

What was the biggest challenge in your first year as a PM?

Optimizing for the product/business and not for specific clients.

Connect with Guy Peled on Linkedin

How Guy Peled Got Into Product Management

Aspiring PM?

Yay! Almost there 🙌