Yeah. So I was actually an English major in college and had no idea what I wanted to dio with my career. I ended up really just thinking about a tech startup because I figured it was a place I could work hard, learn a broad range of skills, um, and kind of explore different areas of the company. Um, So I ended up actually looking at top venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and recent investments that they had made, um, in order to figure out kind of companies that would probably be hiring. And we're early stage. And that's when I found Piazza, which is the first company I worked at. Um, they didn't have any open jobs, but I guessed the email address of the CEO there on Guy basically told her that why I liked the company from what I had researched and also why I thought I would add value and that I would be kind of open to any role that she would be willing to hire me into eso. She actually hired me as her personal assistant. Um, so I moved from Boston. Uh, Thio, Palo Alto, California. Started working as your assistant I was the only non engineer at the company. It was just five people at the time. And so I got to just really start to fill in the gaps across the organization. So everything from office management to user support, uh, thio que weighing and testing the product. Um, And through doing that, that type of thing, I realized that I loved kind of solving the underlying problems that customers kept asking about over and over on, But product might actually be a great fit for me. Um, So I built out our first paid product there. I got to do all the sales, all the customer success and the product management itself. Um, and actually, through building that paid product, I met the CEO of my current company handshake, um, actually sold him. I was on a ski trip with him and his friends, and I, like, pitched him the product I had built for him to purchase. Um, just a regular customer. And he decided to stay in touch with me and and ended up hiring me few years later, uh, to be the first person on the employer side of handshake. So you guys, employee number tenant handshake, um, and then have gotten toe really specialize in product here, Um, watch us grow from from no revenue Thio building a massive sales team and a really successful business. So it's been It's been a crazy, really exciting, um, career so far. And I just fell in love with product and and definitely that will be kind of what I what I dio for the rest of my career. Uh, and I yeah, it's just it's a great fit for me.

Yeah. So, um, there's a few different areas of responsibility. Um, the biggest one to help inform everything else is just to really get a very close read on your customers. So what are their goals? How are they using your product? What are their top areas of request? Um what areas of innovation? Based on what you know about their goals and roles, they will have a massive impact. So I spend a lot of my time on customer calls and also just very close to the sales team, the customer success team and the account management team. Um, the second big bucket is making sure that we have product road maps, and they align very well to our company goals. Um, so knowing our customers really well knowing, you know, we have a revenue goal, we have certain product metrics and goals and and impact that we'd like to have, making sure that our feature roadmap aligns well aligned with customer needs and those goals and then kind of making sure over time, we are tracking to hit um, and then the final bucket is around kind of specific feature development. And in that process, So based on the road map that you have working with design. We're working with engineering truly plan and test and build out features that align well with that road map. Andan Also all the kind of cross team collaboration and communication to successfully launch those features enable the team to train customers the sales team to sell it on dust. Our customers in general to be able to use them effectively, Um, in terms of my work hours. Yeah, so it definitely varies per year per time of year. And I won't. I worked at three pretty small startups where I personally actually, I love to work. Ah lot, Eh? So I would say that handshake like it's not ever dictated that I work on weekends. It's not ever dictated that I work more than 9 to 5, but I find myself I just really enjoy what I do. And so I typically will start the day around seven or 8 a.m. And I'll typically finish, you know, between five and six PM sometimes seven andan. If I'm inspired on an idea, I might work all night and just kind of want to work on the weekends. But there's not pressure to work more than you know. Those set hours

So I think there's There's two major buckets of pain points. The first is internal. So all of the kind of cross team collaboration and communication. Um, as a product manager, you sit at the hub of sales customer success account management, the leadership team engineers designed. So you have just so many different people, um, that you not only have two very clearly communicate to, but often, you know, disappoint or have to say no to ideas that they have priorities that they think should be priorities. Um, so just 11 example is and will often get a specific feature request, you know, from somebody who works closely with customers. And it might seem like really high impact thing to them. Um, it might seem like it would be easy to build, and so a big part of my job is is kind of communicating. Well, here are priorities and why. Here's why that doesn't make sense to do right now. Or it does make sense to dio um, and also kind of helping bridge the gap between engineering effort and those customer facing teams. Because sometimes it's not not as a parent, why it would be difficult for us to implement or why it may not make sense for our kind of business goals and mission. Um, then there's another set of pain points around, especially at hand shape. It's even more complicated because we have. We have actually three main customers. We have universities, we have students and we have employers. And so you see pain points arise where on we have, like three product teams, and each one focuses on a specific customer so often you have to do kind of extra diligence to make sure that by releasing a feature toe one customer group, it's not negatively impacting the usability of of the other customer group, the goals that they have on ditz having a positive impact across the entire market place, um, so examples there could be, You know, you want to feature that you don't think will actually change anything on that side. And then there are edge cases and and kind of smaller things that you wouldn't have thought of that actually do matter a lot to the stakeholders. Eso The best way to overcome that is just a ton of communication between product teams and being really transparent around what your shipping what you're building well ahead of time so people can flag those things early