“This was effectively my entry point into product management, although the title overstated the level of ownership relative to what larger technology companies would consider a PM role. The environment was resource constrained and execution-heavy, which meant I had exposure to everything from customer feedback and feature prioritisation through to QA coordination and stakeholder management very early on.
The upside of a smaller company was speed. There was very little process and decisions were made quickly, which forced me to become commercially minded fast rather than hiding behind frameworks. The downside was the lack of structured mentorship and product discipline. A lot of work was reactive and there were limits to how much strategic product thinking could realistically happen given the stage of the business.
The experience was valuable because it gave me operational grounding and helped me determine that I wanted to build a long-term career in consumer product management, ideally at larger scale businesses where product craft and analytics maturity were stronger.”