- Product Manager, Yammer
- Years at Microsoft: 4
It was the end of a 5-hour-long interview. I was hungry. I was tired. And so I momentarily forgot how to be
nice and answered questions with the kind blunt honesty I usually reserve for the bar. I thought surely I had blown it.
Skipping lunch was a stroke of luck for me, though, because the hiring manager, Cindy Alvarez, wasn’t looking for nice. She needed someone who could invent a role that didn’t exist — full-time product copywriter — and convince everyone else in our (mostly male) engineering org that the role mattered. I suppose my hunger-induced honesty was convincing enough.
Several months later, we had one of the toughest conversations of my career. “Kate,” Cindy said, “You’re very enthusiastic and that’s great. But a few things…”
“You need to slow down by at least 45 miles an hour when you talk. You need to think about how you structure your arguments before you make them. You need to waste fewer words setting low expectations for what you are about to say. You need to use data wherever possible. You’re right – Product Managers here don’t care about copy. You have to convince them why they should. Prove to them why they should listen to you.”
The people-pleasing, English major in me withered on the spot. How was I to go about this? Confrontation made me shrink in my chair during meetings. The speed and confidence with which our product team operated made me doubt my very right to be sitting in it. And data? Forget it. I would have to rewire all of my social training when it came to communicating. When I told my mother over the phone that night, she rightly called it some of the best advice of my career.
Here comes that part you knew was coming about faking it until you make it. But “faking it” isn’t quite right. Because if faking it leads to making it, then it’s not really faking it. It’s learning on the job.
If I could monetize the amount of self-doubt I’ve felt in the last three years, I could buy a yacht and call it quits (which would be ironic anyway, because I’m terrified of the ocean and I get dreadfully seasick). But here’s what I learned:Not everyone else doubts you the way you doubt yourself.
Looking back, I all too frequently let self-doubt throw me off the scent of what I really wanted and what I was really capable of. Years went by this way. But slowly but surely, with constant prodding from many mentors, I started questioning my own self -judgement.
I got louder in meetings (every 1:1, I’d remind Cindy of her promise to let me know once I’d reached obnoxious-level orange). My peers cared about data, so I became familiar with most of our past A/B tests and used them to support my points. I won a few big A/B test battles under the flag of “copy matters” and then touted the results shamelessly to any audience I could capture. I made the same points in different words and this time people listened to me. I made friends and allies who spent hours training me on my weaknesses and who regularly stuck their necks out for me because they knew what I was capable of even more than I did (I’m looking at you Andre Bach, Stephanie Hsu). I tried my best to slow down when talking. I even consciously lowered the tone of my voice while presenting.
Ultimately, I did convince people that copy mattered. It mattered so much that we hired another copywriter. And two years later, I did the unthinkable – I started wondering if I could convince people for a living and become a product manager. I made the switch 7 months ago and if you told me on my first day at Yammer that I would someday qualify for this job, I wouldn’t have believed you.
These days, I think a lot about how I view myself, versus how others view me, versus reality. I’m still mastering the delicate art of how to separate self-awareness from self-sabotage. But I’ve come to see first-hand that as a woman in tech, quite often it’s not what you’re saying but how you’re saying it…and changing the course of your career might be easier than it looks.
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In her role as Product Manager at Yammer, Kate decides what features to build and how to build them well. Kate likes (most) dogs, mountain biking, and cheap ramen
