How Orit Tepper got into Product Management

Orit Tepper

Product manager

First product job

🐣 Transitioned to PM in the same company in 2016

Before becoming a PM

💼 Project Manager

💻 3 years of exp. in tech companies

🎓 Business Management and Administration

The Story

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

My transition into the tech space was slightly coincidental. After completing my undergrad in Exact Sciences and Optometry, I realized that while I wanted to help people, my passion wasn’t there. Even after finishing with high grades and landing a dream job of working for one of the best optometrists in the country, the day to day just felt mundane.

A few months in I pulled the plug. I wanted to be surrounded by a dynamic culture that motivated me to bring my best abilities forward; to interact with people and lead ideas, get shit done. It was exactly in that moment of change that I saw a then acquaintance who was familiar with some of my volunteer and side projects that I had been involved with at the time. She worked for a startup and prompted me to apply.

A month later, I sent my cv. A day later I was interviewing for a role I wasn’t fully clear on, but it said project management in the description and hey, I love project management. Two interviews later I was hired at Moovit as a Localization Manager in the Product Management team.

What’s localization? I had no clue. They used it as a verb, a noun, and an adjective all at once. I thought something was lost in translation.

I soon understood that Localization at Moovit was no joke. It wasn’t just translating a product into another language. It was making every aspect of the product, from the language, the design, the app store screenshots - including the timezones, graphics, texts and industry terms, look and feel as if it was a product developed specifically for your city.

Open Moovit in Paris, Delhi, Helsinki, Shanghai Tel Aviv or Buenos Aires, or even a small remote town in Romania and you’ll likely find that the bus stations and lines and transit types all look and feel like the ones you’d see on the street at the local bus stop. It boiled down the specific dialects in some cases. As Moovit evolved from supporting a few languages to 45 languages in over 1500 cities in the world, and we added more and more products and features, we saw our product adopted by thousands then millions then hundreds of millions of users worldwide. A localized UX was my mindset for every initiative I led = from user testing to in-app campaigns and UX writing.

Of course by that point I was a project manager handling a multitude of different aspects of the product and working closely with Dev, Support, Operations and Marketing teams. The more I took on, the more I loved the world of product. I proved myself as a quick learner, a doer, and user centric. And when it came time to lead new product initiatives, I took my chance and ran with it. I was lucky to work on a product and in a company that truly brought value to people’s lives, and it opened my chakras for helping solve the daily obstacles that people face through technology.

My big takeaways are:

→ Don’t just do a job because of inertia. Not making a decision to make a change is essentially making a decision.Think of why you qualify, not why you don’t qualify. Bring your best traits to the table.

→ Product managers come from all sorts of backgrounds and teams. I was an optometrist dammit!

→ Now is always better than later. Not “I’ll wait for X, then I can do Y”. Most of the restrictions we place on ourselves are in our head. This is especially true for woman.

→ Reach out! Met someone who knows someone who knows a product person?** Talk to them. Learn. Ask for help. Everyone’s been new to something at some point.

Did you have an MBA before getting your PM job? How did it help?

Gave me a broader sense of tools, terminology and industry know-how. Better understanding of how people got to where they are and how I compared among them. Proved to myself - first and foremost - that I was a leader

Connect with Orit Tepper on Linkedin

How Orit Tepper Got Into Product Management

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