Co-op #3: Product Management at Clearco

In this post, I wanted to discuss my experience as a PM intern at Clearco for the past 4 months and some of the takeaways that I had.

My Journey into Product

As I was journeying through my first year of Software Engineering, something was slightly amiss with my experience. While I had plenty of opportunity to work on my technical skills, my leadership and professional interpersonal skills were languishing. I also felt very detached from the user problems that I was solving during my co-ops, as many engineers don’t often have the option to work closely with the customer.

Due to these reasons, I decided to pursue product management and determine whether it was a good fit for my personality and if it would be help me in my career goals. Product management spoke to me as it combined technical knowledge with deep appreciation and knowledge of the customer. As a PM, you would be in charge of defining product strategy and executing to get your product to launch. In my opinion, product management is probably the best career path for those interested in entrepreneurship in the future as it develops so many skills that entrepreneurs and leaders have to use on a daily basis. Furthermore, I knew I had 3 more co-ops after my F21 co-op, so it was an opportune time to experiment around and understand what truly makes me satisfied in work.

I set a goal in 2020 to get a PM internship for Fall 2021. I knew that I had much to learn and improve in order to make myself a viable candidate for a PM internship. Here was the plan I set out in 2020 and how I executed in the first few months in 2021:

1. Understand the PM position: I spent countless hours reading through blog posts, full time job postings, videos and more to develop a solid understanding of what product is about and the typical day of a PM. I especially paid attention to the skills that were commonly mentioned in job applications
2. Craft projects to develop your PM skills: armed with this knowledge from research, I launched Weekly Muse and worked on Blueprint’s Distress Centre project as a PM to develop PM skills.
3. Stand out: When applications started for F21 positions, I knew that my chances were limited compared to upper years; I needed to do something different. Since I had some time between my Wish co-op and the application due date, I created product breakdown decks for some of the companies that I was interested in. I would cold email these decks to recruiters and hope that this would land me an interview spot
4. Practice PM interviews: PM interviews are nothing like the actual job and needs preparation. With the help of Blueprint PM mentors, I practiced and mocked out a couple of product cases.

With all of this work, I was able to land a PM position at Clearco. Clearco (formerly Clearbanc) is a financial technology startup in Toronto that pioneered alternative forms of financing for ecommerce founders.

What did I do at Clearco?

At Clearco, I was part of the Core/CX team, which is responsible for the core founder experience throughout the application, especially for onboarding. I was paired with a PM mentor and worked along with 6 other engineers.

Given the rocketship nature of Clearco when I joined, everything that I worked on was crucial and needed to be shipped before I left. In other words, there was no intern project. Furthermore, I was often juggling a few different projects on my plate at the same time, something I never had to do as a SWE intern.

There there three major themes of work throughout my time at Clearco. The first was revamping our outbound onboarding process. At Clearco, outbound refers to warm leads that are guided by sales to complete a funding application. Our onboarding process for these leads wasn’t optimized and needed a total revamp. My second major theme of work was developing growth features. This required collaborating heavily with marketing leadership to launch key features, including Clearco’s first in-product referral features, to improve our acquisition and conversion metrics. The last major theme of work was customer success initiatives. Based off conversations we had with customer success and users, I had to prioritize and ship out solutions to make the founder experience on Clearco as smooth as butter.

As you can see, it was an extremely fruitful internship in terms of impact. Since the PM to engineer ratio is heavily skewed towards devs, I was able to have the impact of 6 engineers. Combining this with the fast-paced nature of the company, I was able to exert significant impact on the Core/CX team trajectory.

Being a PM was a completely different experience to that of a SWE. Some notable differences included:

• Barely any coding: it was odd for me to not code during my co-op. At most, I had to write a couple of SQL queries for creating some dashboards.
• Cross-functional collaboration: in my past experiences as a SWE, I rarely worked with people outside of my engineering organization. As a PM, I not only worked heavily with engineering, design, customer success, sales, marketing, legal, diligence and more, but I also had to continually manage our relationships to ensure that we can always get buy-in for our initiatives.
• Leadership: being a PM at Clearco was like a bootcamp in leadership. I learned how to effectively collaborate with others, define our strategy and back up all my decisions with data and insight
• Exposure to senior leaders at Clearco: I am not sure whether this is due to Clearco’s culture or if it’s a fact of being a PM, but I was regularly interfacing with senior leadership at Clearco in different functions. It required different communication styles, but it was really interesting to be part of these conversations. I never had this opportunity as a SWE
• 10x more meetings: given the cross-functional nature of being a PM, much of my day was dedicated to acheiving alignment between different functions. This manifested into LOTS of meetings. Some days were so bad that I was in straight meetings from 7am to 3pm local time with only 1 or 2 half hour breaks. Context switching is a necessary skill as a PM, which SWEs don’t have to worry about
• Analytics galore: being a great PM requires data know-how. I had to become a master at our analytics tools and cleverly design experiments or segmentations to understand key user behaviour. SWEs usually design how the data gets into the analytics tools, but we don’t often get to make decisions based off this data

Reflection and Lessons

In terms of growth and learning, Clearco is definitely one of the best internships that I have had. Not only did I learn how to be a professional PM and the steps I needed to take to further my craft, but I also learned an enormous amount about ecommerce and the pains that founders have with the current financial system.

The question of the year: do I still want to be a PM? This is something that I still don’t fully know. I can make a much more informed decision, but I have realized that there are some tradeoffs with the PM position, namely:

• You don’t build, you have to influence without authority. It feels quite weird to me to be in a job where I don’t build, as that has been the norm for all of my internships since high school. I do miss coding a bit (sans debugging).
• I don’t think PMs are valued fairly in the tech industry. Looking at levels.fyi, it’s a little shocking to see that PMs usually have a lower TC than SWEs and yet PMs do quite a lot of hard work and have to drive overall strategy. However, pay isn’t a big factor for me (and I really pray that it never will) and I don’t think this would be enough to deter me from being a PM
• Less things are in your control as a PM, as it often requires cross-functional collaboration and user insight and is not as straightforward as implementing business logic as code. It’s not at all easy and can be stressful at times. This is not to downplay the work of engineers, but it is just highlighting the different challenges that PMs have to face that engineers would have never thought about.

One key career learning that stuck with me this term was from Mastery. In the book, the author encourages readers to find career paths where you have distinct advantages and it feels like fun while others deem it as work. Product management definitely was fun and I can totally see how others might find it boring. I will have to continue to explore more in my next few co-ops to determine if I really enjoy this field and whether SWE is a better fit.

Here are some learnings that I will take with me from Clearco into other roles:

1. Being a structured thinker is a superpower: I vaguely remember coming to this revelation when I did debate back in high school but only focused on its benefits in the context of debate tournaments. When I saw the structured thinking at Clearco, I fully understood why it’s so highly desired. Laying out your thinking in a clear way is extremely difficult, but when it is done right, it can make a world of difference. It is probably the best technique in preventing problems from occuring. Unfortunately, we still bias rewarding problem solving (when things go wrong and you fix it) over problem prevention.
2. Be wary of being data-informed vs. data-driven: There’s a spectrum when it comes to the influence of data on your decisions. On one hand, you can rely on only your gut instincts (eg. “I like the stock”). On the other hand, you can rely only on data (eg. “I did XYZ technical analysis on this stock and based off ABC metric it seems to be the best time to buy). Both sides are not optimal, as you miss important information or you miss the forest for the trees. In many of the product decisions I had to make at Clearco, I often had to deal with uncertainity, especially when data was poor. Gut feelings and qualitative research is usually what illuminated the most optimal path in these situations
3. Prioritzation is key: what you don’t put effort in is probably equally or even more important than what you put effort into. I learned some pretty interesting prioritization frameworks that will serve me well in life.
4. Probabilistic thinking is key in uncertainty: one of the only certain things in life is uncertainty. Becoming a master at handling uncertainty is a skill that I really want to develop. Clearco taught me one strategy, which is to think in terms of probability and Bayesian statistics. It helped that I am taking a statistics minor and this is the natural frame of mind I am in when it comes to dealing with randomness, but seeing this math mindset used in product was extremely enlightening
5. Ecommerce is an uncertain business: customers and supply lines were fickle in the pandemic and I learned a lot about how these types of businesses operate.

Overall, this was a great co-op! Clearco is brewing up some really exciting initiatives and strategies in the next few years and I can’t wait to see how Clearco will perform. For anyone interested in being a PM intern, I would highly recommend trying it out!