AMA: Bluevine Senior Director of Product Management, Aaron Bloom on Product Management Career Path

I use a simple framework for critical thinking and problem-solving: Define the problem: Break it down into a clear need statement. Understand dependencies, time sensitivity, and what you’re solving for. Once you really understand the problem, you should be able to explain it to somebody uninformed easily and in simple terms.  Prioritize: Evaluate its importance against your other work based on impact and opportunity size. Ideate solutions: Focus on options that balance impact and effort. The bes ...Read More

Like anything in technology, iteration is key. There are constantly new tools, apps, and best practices coming out to help your productivity -  so you need to stay agile to continuously improve your own system.  That being said, it's easy to get overwhelmed and overcomplicate your workflow. Having a baseline system that you fall back on can ensure nothing falls between the cracks.  For me that is using a repeatable framework in how I approach problems, and managing a surprisingly simple and unst ...Read More

Problem solving, collaboration, and communication are critical to being a successful Product Manager.  Being proficient in hard skills like user experience, data analytics, and project management are also important. But if you can’t get buy-in, or you can’t effectively lead the team to a successful product launch, your hard skills will have minimal impact on the business.  Besides this, think about the brand you are building for yourself as a Product Manager. I want my reputation to be someone w ...Read More

To expand your critical thinking, stay curious, and ask lots of questions. Early on you might need to focus on your specific area or role to ensure you are driving value for it - go deep so that you are a true expert on it. As you build  expertise in that area, look at other areas of the product and overall business / strategy.  The more you learn, the better you’ll be at connecting ideas, problems, and solutions across the product and organization.  As you do this, be intentional about defining ...Read More

Your ability to frame and articulate a topic is only as good as your understanding of that topic - be sure you deeply understand what you're going to talk about. Be targeted in the audience you're communicating too so that everybody is relevant and can contribute. Who you're communicating to will also determine the level of detail you provide.  Once you’ve done that to the best of your ability, I like to use a framework like this, with bullet points to ensure the message is easy to digest: Conte ...Read More

It can be hard to tease apart the line between Product and Project Management - especially since the role of Product Management can vary greatly from team to team.  At the end of the day, you should measure your success by the impact you’re making to the business, and to your OKR’s, not the size or type of initiative you are working. .  If you feel that you aren’t making that impact for the business, do a retrospective to understand the root cause: Really evaluate the work you are producing and ...Read More

Frankly, be humble, say yes to things that move the needle, and focus on delivering quality. Whether you’re the Chief Product Officer or just starting your career - sometimes building a process, finding a scrappy manual solution that doesn’t require engineering effort, or making a copy update can drive more immediate value than launching a greenfield product.  Besides getting the job done for the business, everything you work on is a learning opportunity that goes into your toolbox of experience ...Read More

We look for candidates who have relevant experience to fintech or know how to operate in highly regulated industries. To assess hard skills, we do a collaborative exercise where the candidate presents on a product they love and how they would improve it. This gives us a chance to see how they think about product - particularly how they define and measure problems and solutions. It’s a chance for us to see how you collaborate and what it would be like to work with you on a future initiative. Depe ...Read More

There is a lot of overlap between Product Management and Project Management and I've found good Product Managers are also typically good Project Managers.  Experience managing complex Construction projects will certainly be impressive to hiring managers, but you need to show that you understand how your experience maps to the software world.  Typically this means being ok with a less rigid and more agile approach that I don’t think is possible in Construction, but is often preferred in the softw ...Read More