Delivering a feature during my first 90 days at Upsun

Joining a new company as a Product Manager is always a challenge. You need to deep dive into the new system, understand customer profiles and needs, get a hold of a business strategy. However, the best way to truly learn the ropes is by owning a meaningful deliverable from day one. This is the story of how I shipped a new feature during my first 90 days at Upsun.

I joined Upsun early November as part of the Platform Core team. I've got a background in building PaaS for a different industry and I just love working on highly technical products. Being a natural learn-as-I-do person I was very excited to get my hands dirty and do some meaningful work.

Lucky me, I was available to take over a small feature several weeks after joining the company. The feature was focused on providing a possibility to limit the application of the variable to specific applications. It was already in progress with the API's development done and console design in progress.

From my perspective it was great to take over something that was already in progress and not to do the whole product discovery/delivery from scratch. Why so? When you join a new company as a product manager you need to learn a lot of things. Having a feature in progress to lead gives you a focus, which is especially precious on such a broad and complex product as Upsun.

What was also very helpful and encouraging - the help and support from my manager and my colleagues across different departments. Building a product involves multiple people across various departments: product, design, engineering, marketing, data, and many more. All my questions were answered, every time I got stuck someone was here to help me out. What happened is that I was given time and context to figure everything out, which is extremely precious for a new joiner.

I was not necessarily expecting to deliver the first functionality in my first 90 days, especially considering the Christmas period being part of these 90 days, but I did. It was possible due to a good on-boarding process and a great company culture. Product management is a team sport and I had an amazing team to make this first feature see the day. 

If you want to learn more about this small feature, check out our docs. Otherwise stay tuned for more posts about Upsun and our ways of working.