From teen coder to big tech product manager
Reflections on 5 years at Google and advice for aspiring product managers
Hey there! I'm Sebastian Hallum Clarke, a product manager on Google Maps in the company’s New York City office. This week I’m reaching my five-year mark of working at Google, so I wanted to share a bit about my journey, describe what my work involves, and offer some advice for aspiring PMs.
I’m publishing this piece in my personal capacity. The opinions expressed in this blog post are mine alone and do not represent any current or past employer.
The Road to Product Management: My Origin Story
Remember when you got your first computer? For me, that moment sparked a lifelong passion for building things. At 11, I saved up and bought my first machine: a white plastic MacBook. I quickly learned it was possible to not just use a computer, but also to build tools and apps for other people to use. My first big success was building MacDropAny, a utility that allowed users to sync any folder on their computer with the cloud, for easy access from anywhere and the safety of an offsite backup. Seeing hundreds of thousands of people around the world make use of an app I created was exhilarating and gave me a taste for the disruptive power of software and the internet.
That early success motivated me to keep building, and learning how to create awesome products. I studied computer science and entrepreneurship at Princeton, and then interned at various tech companies, including MongoDB, honing my skills and exploring different facets of the industry. At college, I led the development of an app for browsing the university’s course offerings, which is used to this day by thousands of students each semester to pick their classes.
I loved coding (and still dabble occasionally), but found that what I enjoyed most and was best at was the role in tech that’s known as product management. I was fortunate to be selected for Google’s Associate Product Manager internship. In my internship, I worked at the intersection of software, design, and law to make parental controls for Google Accounts easier to use – while staying compliant with the complex web of child privacy requirements. I really enjoyed the experience, and returned full-time when I graduated to the Google Search team. After an awesome year of bouncing around projects on Search, I rotated to the Google Maps team, where I’ve been ever since.
My work as a PM
So, what exactly does a product manager do? The essence of my work as a PM is to figure out what projects my team should investigate, build and launch. This involves setting team goals, brainstorming and designing potential features, and navigating our internal processes to ship product improvements to our users. I do this work alongside a stellar group of engineers, designers, researchers, analysts, and product managers spread across New York, Mountain View, and Seattle.
The Complexity of Mapping
I’m on the team of modern-day cartographers on Google Maps. We steward and develop the system that decides how businesses, cities, neighborhoods, street names, and other places should show on your map. Sounds simple, right? Not quite.
Picture a city: there are hundreds of thousands of businesses, streets, and neighborhoods crammed into several hundred square miles. When you pull up the map on your phone, we only have space to display labels for 10-15 of those places on your screen. And our systems have to be able to produce helpful maps for everywhere in the world, whether you ask us for a map of a whole continent or a single city block.
My day-to-day experience
I typically work on a dozen projects at once, with each one at a different stage in the product development lifecycle. It’s common for me to have a couple of projects that are on the cusp of launching, a couple of features that are experimentally launched to a small percentage of our users, and a bunch more projects in the design/development stage. I’ll also keep a backlog of problems that I know we need to fix, and “pet” ideas that I’d love to build when the time is right.
My scope and responsibilities have grown as I’ve become more senior. When I started as a newbie PM, I was mostly handed well-vetted projects to immediately execute on. Now, though, more of my effort goes into identifying which themes and problems my team should be working on, and then I support my team to dive into the details. I’m increasingly called on to provide guidance to partner teams that are seeking to add or change content on the map, too.
Product management involves a ton of communication – which I love. I don’t do any software development myself, nor do I have the artistic skills to design the visual experience of a map. Instead, almost all of my impact hinges on my ability to compellingly, clearly, and empathetically convey my ideas, analyses, and opinions through written and spoken communication. I’m in meetings between 35% and 50% of my working hours, and spend lots of time emailing and chatting with colleagues. I write documents outlining what I think we should build, and reports to convey my perspective on what I think we should launch.
Despite having “manager” in my job title, I don’t manage any people. Like at many large tech companies, all the engineers, designers, and other people I work with report up through their own management chains (engineers report to engineering managers, designers report to design managers, etc.). I get my work done primarily by crafting and building alignment on plans with our leadership team, and through the trusted relationships I’ve built over the years with my collaborators. It’s a bit of an unusual way to structure an organization, but it works surprisingly well for us.
Highlights
One of the projects I most enjoyed working on is a feature on the map that shows small photos right on the map for the most interesting and popular places in a city or neighborhood. This launch was an awesome collaboration spanning teams from New York to Tokyo. This was a tough project because there were dozens of different variants of the “use photos on the map to help people discover places” feature that we could have shipped, and my task was to navigate the team through to launch a delightful and helpful version of the feature that best satisfied trade-offs between many competing goals that we had to juggle.
I’ve loved my time working on Google Maps. It’s super rewarding to contribute to building a tool that billions of people rely on each month to learn about interesting places to visit and navigate around the world. Humans have used maps for millenia, and my team and I have the privilege and responsibility to curate a map used by over a billion people each month. I find that pretty motivating.
Advice for Aspiring Product Managers
How to become a product manager
If you're looking to break into product management, here's my two cents:
Get experience building something people love. Find a problem, create a solution, and iterate. It doesn't have to be perfect – the learning experience is invaluable. There’s no substitute for first-hand work building, empathizing with users, and figuring out what they need.
Strengthen your technical skills. Almost every day I deal with complex technical topics that I’m able to handle more easily and with greater credibility because I have first-hand software development experience. An engineering degree is much less essential, however, if you’re doing a mid-career switch from a different role – like consulting or startupland.
Read "Cracking the PM Interview". It's an excellent overview of product management and contains great advice on the recruiting process.
Seek out internships and new grad programs. Many tech companies offer specific PM tracks for college students and new grads. I haven’t used them myself, but APM List and APM Season seem like helpful websites that collect new-grad and intern PM job postings across the industry.
Pitch yourself to startups. At small companies, founding teams are often eager to hire engineers with strong product skills who can operate independently. If you’re willing to juggle many hats and want to move quickly, startup life can be a great fit.
PM vs Software Engineering
Many computer science students wonder whether software engineering or product management roles would better suit them. Both of these are awesome, rewarding jobs that tackle difficult problems and have a big impact. My general advice is to evaluate what you are best at and what you enjoy doing most.
As an individual contributor product manager in a big tech company, your primary outputs sum to “agreed plans on what should be built” and launched features. To achieve that, you’re in 15 to 25 hours per week of meetings, doing analysis and synthesizing research, writing persuasively, juggling dozens of relationships, and working directly with people much more senior than you. You’re empathizing with users, putting yourself in their shoes, and dreaming up what they need. You’re influencing without authority, context switching between projects multiple times each day, and working independently, without direct instruction about what to focus on.
As an individual contributor software engineer in a big tech company, your primary outputs sum to “approved technical designs for how to build things” and features that get launched. To achieve that, you’re in ~5 hours per week of meetings, doing technical design, solving technical problems, writing code, doing code reviews, running experiments, and analyzing their results. You’re debugging problems with your code, perhaps participating in an on-call rotation to leap into action when things break, and dreaming up ways to improve the architecture of your systems. You probably focus on one or two projects for several months at a time.
What would you prefer your days to look like? Which of those bundles of skills do you think you’re best at now, or have the greatest potential to be excellent at in the future? Let your answers to those questions guide your thinking.
In some respects, the roles of a product manager and an engineering manager converge as seniority increases. Some of my most valuable thought partners have been the engineering managers I’ve worked with. They too participate in many hours of meetings, and much of their time is also occupied by the question of “what should we build next?” – albeit from a more technical perspective. Engineering managers typically dip in-and-out of all of their reports’ projects and rely heavily on their communication skills to get work done. Not all software engineers become managers, but if you’re a product-minded engineer, there are often opportunities to flex these skills as you become more senior.
The Path Ahead
Five years in, and I'm still excited every day by the challenges and opportunities as a product manager on Google Maps. We have some great improvements in the pipeline – some of which are launching soon, and many of which are still just on the drawing board.
I’m keen to keep developing my skills, and pushing myself to have even greater impact. Earlier this month I started mentoring a batch of seven newly-hired associate product managers in our NYC office, and I’m excited to support their growth.
Got questions about product management or my journey? Drop them in the comments below.
Thanks to Hugh Peterson and Anna Wang for feedback on drafts of this post.