Oded Korczyn: On Becoming a Product Manager

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This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. 

Over the past two weeks, I’ve talked about how you don’t need experience to become a product manager and how you can gain experience right now. I regularly hear from folks who want to move into a product role, but don’t know how to make the shift. To further illustrate what you can do, I interviewed Oded Korczyn, a newly hired Product Manager at AfterCollege.

You’ll notice that Oded had never held a formal product role, but he had plenty of applicable experience. I advise AfterCollege and helped them bring on Oded as their first formal product manager. I sourced and screened candidates and Oded stood out during the process, even though many other candidates had far more product experience.

Let’s hear from Oded.

Why did you want to move into product management?

Oded: Because this is something I enjoyed doing in my startup, I felt I was doing a good job, and I love the feel of creating and improving new and useful products. Not having engineering skills, product management seemed like the obvious choice.

What was your background before you took your product management role?

Oded: My background is in cultural anthropology and I received my PhD from Stanford University. Human behavior and interactions, in all their nuances, always intrigued me, but I decided to move away from academia because I felt that I could not make a mark on the world outside of academia. I co-founded and was the CEO of Geotrio, a start-up that created a platform for digital tours, which built extraordinary products, (for web, mobile, and Facebook platforms) but, ultimately, was unable to generate enough revenue. Being a smallish startup (we had 6 employees in all), I had to don many hats simultaneously: marketing, sales, product management, were all part of my job. Next I joined Badgeville, where I was a senior producer, which meant helping Badgeville clients design and implement effective gamification-based strategies to best engage their userbase.

What did you do to stand out during the interview process? 

Oded: Not sure. I tried to be my self. I tried to (honestly) placate the fears of each person I spoke to. To answer their tacit questions. For the CEO, that I will be a valuable asset and that I am looking for a long-term employment. For the VP of engineering, that I am a fast learner (and he would not need to spend too much time training me) and that I would alleviate some of the workload he has been handling; for the engineers, that I will treat them with respect and work in harmony with them without revolutionizing production and create chaos in their lives.

What would you recommend to others who are looking for their first product management role?

Oded: Do your homework, both before the interviews (study as much as possible about PM practices, read as much as possible about the company and the people there) and after (I took an agile crash course to make sure that I was up to speed).

Concluding thoughts: In his responses, Oded hits on three things that I think he did very well. First, he knew his audience. He did a ton of upfront research. He knew who all the executives were. He was familiar with the product. He came prepared with questions and ideas about both the product and the company. He was sure to address the concerns of each person who interviewed him, even if these concerns weren’t explicitly stated. He definitely did his homework and showed that he clearly understood the business context.

Second, he did a great job showing how his past experience applied to a product role. When talking about Badgeville, he could have talked about all of his responsibilities, which I suspect looked a lot like an account management or sales engineer role. Instead, he highlighted the specific elements that were a lot like being a product manager. For his startup experience, he highlighted his role as the product leader. Now not everyone is going to go out and start their own company (nor should they) to gain product experience, but we talked last week about you can gain plenty of product experience without writing any code, nor do you need to start a company. Just do the product work and then show it off.

Third, he identified gaps in his skill set and worked to fill them.

Oded is a great example of someone who focused on the skills required to get him to his dream job. What’s keeping you from doing the same?

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series.