How I went from IB to a Senior Product Manager in 3 years
Phynia Dam Hong
Background
My name is Phynia and I’m a Senior Product Manager based in Sydney, Australia at a global health tech company called Eucalyptus. I’ve been in a dedicated product role for a bit over a year, specifically working for one of Eucalyptus’ five brands, Juniper, where I’m building a medical weight loss program that is delivered through our App and health coaching service.
The beginning of my career looked quite different though. I studied a Bachelor of Commerce (Co-op) in the Finance & Banking Stream and took a grad role at UBS Investment Bank.
While I learnt a lot of valuable skills in investment banking (more on that later), I felt more extrinsically motivated to do my job there (ie. to do a good job for my team and perform well) rather than intrinsically motivated (ie. being passionate about the work and its impact), and the regular late hours were worrying for my future health.
Quite early on I realised that I probably wasn’t going to stay there long-term.
How my prior professional experience affected my transition
What scared me about transitioning to PM was thinking I needed to be very technical to succeed and not being respected because I didn’t have ‘the traditional’ computer science background. But this wasn’t the case at all. In fact, I came to really appreciate the more strategic and commercial skills I’d gained in previous experiences since these are being demanded of PMs more and more in recent times.
For example, some particularly valuable skills that I’d developed through my prior experience in finance that were well-suited to Product (and startup work in general) are;
Prioritisation and time management: the fast-paced nature of investment banking meant that I was comfortable juggling multiple workstreams simultaneously without getting overwhelmed.
Communication, in particular with senior stakeholders: Product involves negotiating with and managing many different stakeholders (the customer, engineering, sales, marketing, etc.) and so communicating over email, phone and in meetings with senior bankers and clients in IB helped me gain a bit more confidence in this area (which I’m still working on!)
Quantitative analysis: Excel modelling and knowing mathematical relationships between different variables and how they interact throughout uni and in IB has made it easier to interpret and crunch numbers to draw insights and make recommendations as a PM.
Detail-orientation: This skill is drilled into you in IB and it’s something that my manager says I was specifically hired for. Some examples where detail-orientation has helped include obvious ones like quality assurance (QA) before a feature is launched but also making decisions with many dependencies, managing projects involving different teams, and identifying risks or edge cases before they come up.
Quick and independent learning: startups are busy, sometimes quite chaotic, places and it’s unlikely that you’ll get proper, structured training. So resourcefulness and a capacity to learn independently is essential if you want to inspire confidence in your capacity to pick up Product Management.
However, there are some practical skills that form the core of product work that I needed to spend time learning, such as;
Running reliable experiments
Writing specs
Collaborating with designers and engineers
A lot of these skills were picked up on the job and felt quite natural because I wasn’t learning it from scratch which always helps!
For example, in high school and uni, I learned statistics and ran scientific experiments. I had read a few exemplar specs from other PMs in the business before I had to write them and writing specs is similar to product requests I had written as a COS to PMs, which requires you to explain the problem and desired features.
“Right now, I believe my core skills are adaptability, cross-functional collaboration and data-driven problem-solving.”
If you’re not fortunate enough to have colleagues who can help you develop these skills along the way, I was recommended books like ‘Lean Product Playbook’, ‘The Lean Startup’ and ‘Zero to One’, along with a resource called ‘General Assembly’ which could be helpful… but truthfully for the first few months in the PM role it was too hectic to take time to do courses. I was just told to ask other PMs.
Right now, I believe my core skills are adaptability, cross-functional collaboration and data-driven problem-solving. As a generalist, these have been valuable throughout each stage of my career from investment banking to Eucalyptus, and so think about how you use your existing experiences as evidence of those qualities.
How I planned and executed my transition from IB
My first step was to chat with a wide range of friends who worked in both corporates (private equity, banking, etc.) and startups (marketing, product) to compare the two environments. I also made some new connections after joining the Chief of Staff Network which had a Slack channel. I put out a post asking to chat to any COSes who’d transitioned from or to PM, connected with someone in the US and got great validation that this was the path for me.
After telling one friend about my career crisis, he connected me with the Founder of Kin Fertility as well as a gun Product Manager, both of whom had left corporates (McKinsey and Atlassian) to join Eucalyptus when it was only a 20-something person startup.
Being early in my career, I wanted to optimise for learning as much and as quickly as possible so they both recommended that I get a role in a startup. One of them encouraged me to join Startmate (a startup community that could help me get my foot in the door) and I’ve heard good things, but didn’t go through with it because the time commitment didn’t work with my investment banking work schedule.
These were candid and helpful conversations that genuinely inspired me to leave investment banking and helped me match up the general experience that I wanted with a position that would deliver that. Not only that, but through expanding my network through friends, I was connected to the person who would eventually hire me at Kin Fertility, so I highly recommend asking your friends (and friends of friends) if they know anyone who’s pivoted to Product or even just works at a startup, as you’ll quickly be directed to someone helpful.
“Learn about their work, what their day-to-day looks like and what helps them succeed in their role.”
Once I was at a startup (and particularly in my role as Chief of Staff), it was natural to get exposure to Product and I worked alongside several PMs at Euc. I was fortunate enough to become good friends with one PM in particular, which was invaluable. We would talk a lot about her work, bounce ideas off one another for fun and I generally got amazing exposure to how PMs think, prioritise, conduct research, analyse metrics, design products and run experiments.
I’d highly recommend going out of your way to befriend your colleagues in Product, asking to work on projects with them, and being clear with your manager that you’d like to get more experience in that department. Learn about their work, what their day-to-day looks like and what helps them succeed in their role.
Once you’ve secured a PM role, I’d recommend thinking through a problem and trying to get time with someone more experienced, like a Group Product Manager, to discuss it together and see how they’d do things differently.
Advice
Things that worked really well and I would recommend trying yourself;
Find someone to talk to who has done it before. Look into your own network whether it's on Linkedin or before a networking event and see people's backgrounds. See if they did something similar to you before PM or moved FROM PM to your current role. Then prepare questions to get their take.
Before the move, go out of your way to prove you can learn things quickly and independently. For example as a CoS, when other teams were busy, I stepped up and wrote copy, built landing pages, designed ads in Figma and shipped them on FB, wrote email campaigns and conducted customer interviews - all of which were new to me but pretty central to a PM role. Showing a willingness to learn helps build up the case that if you were to change roles, you would figure things out.
Move laterally into a PM role. It seems much easier to learn the ropes, grow your network and trial PM work internally rather than changing companies. Startups are often very fluid work environments with like-minded, often young, professionals, which is perfect for these transitions.
If you’re moving laterally, it’s essential that you do your current job well, especially the parts that relate to PM work like; problem-solving, quant/qual analysis, research, stakeholder management, project management, communication. Obviously, it helps if your manager is giving you tasks and projects that help highlight these qualities.
When it comes to working with designers and engineers for the first time, it helps to be humble and to make an effort to understand their craft by asking questions when things get a bit technical. Adapt to their ways of working so your lack of technical experience isn’t a blocker for you moving work forward.
Embrace failure. As a banker, you are trained to be a perfectionist and the expectation is that your work should have zero errors before it’s shared. This thinking can be pretty difficult to shift but the change is necessary when transitioning to PM. As a PM you need to have an ‘MVP’ mindset to test your ideas before investing a lot of time and resources, and it’s okay to make mistakes and to learn from failure.
If I had my time again, I’d like to;
Learn more about the product design craft and how designers think. There are a million ways to solve a problem (not all of them are good) and designers have best practice processes and principles that they use to find what is often the optimal solution.
Watch more content from Reforge and try to apply more of it to my work. Reforge gives you access to other people’s real work that they’ve done for other companies and is a powerful tool for independent learning and growth.
Have known how best to prepare for the large number of meetings you’re required to run and be in as a PM. I am pretty extroverted and even for me it can be quite tiring. Don’t let that stop you from trying PM as I know many fantastic, successful introverted PMs, but think about how you can match that with your personal tolerance for meetings.
Why I chose Product Management
Naturally, I didn’t immediately land in Product. In fact, like most people, I really didn’t know much about that function in a business to begin with.
I had developed an interest in entrepreneurship and D2C brands after working part-time at a Private Equity firm during uni. It had ‘startup vibes’, by which I mean;
“I gravitated towards Product because it’s a nice mix between the analytical and business skills that I’d developed through IB, and the customer-focused/people-oriented creative work that I was passionate about.”
it had only been founded a year before,
there were only 5 employees,
our office was in WeWork,
the structure was quite flat so I worked directly with the CEO and
our investment mandate focused on startup to scale-up companies
Understanding how smaller businesses operate instead of advising large corporations gave me a different perspective and played a part in helping me decide to leave investment banking in search of a job at a startup that I felt would have more direct impact and purpose.
I only got exposure to Product after transitioning to a role as Chief of Staff to the Founder of Kin Fertility at Eucalyptus. The scope for CoS was/is quite ambiguous - in a great way - so I got to wear many hats in the role helping with anything and everything a founder would do (including Operations, Growth, Product & Engineering).
I gravitated towards Product because it’s a nice mix between the analytical and business skills that I’d developed through IB, and the customer-focused/people-oriented creative work that I was passionate about. Also, the problems to solve vary a lot (day by day and across industries) which keeps things fresh and interesting.
What's next with PM experience
One thing I appreciate about PM is that the skills are very transferable and there are plenty of different directions you can take your career. In my current role, I hope to achieve a diverse skillset from PM that taps into creativity, quantitative analysis, strategy, technology and people skills. I think this will set me up well for wherever I choose to move, whether that’s a different role at Eucalyptus, moving to a different company or starting my own.
There aren’t many careers that demand such a range of skills from you all at once, which is why I think PM is a great playground for learning to run a company, especially at a startup where the lines between different roles can be blurred.
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