My Product Management portfolio
My name is Hernan Chiosso and I am a recovering HR Professional.
My name is Hernan Chiosso and I am a recovering HR Professional.
After many (many) years in HR in Tech leading teams and departments, I am pivoting into Tech in HR, going back to my design and development roots, leveraging the acquired experience in working with products, people and teams.
As part of my transition to Product Management, I have done a lot of reading, podcast listening, and had a lot of interesting conversations with experienced and aspiring Product Managers.
A few common threads emerged:
Product Manager (like Solutions Architect) is something you can’t really go to school for. You get the title after you have proved capable to do the work. (Or simply start calling yourself that, like most people do.)
The best way to acquire the experience is to go and build products. Lots and lots of them.
You may have done the work without the title and without realizing it. You need to look at your experience through the lens of Product Management to understand what products you’ve worked on.
Building a PM portfolio can provide evidence of the work you have done, so here is mine (this is a work in progress and I will keep adding case studies as I finish them):
Case Study: Developing a recognition platform for a technology company
Case Study: Ensuring fair pay and basing compensation decisions on data (with Payscale)
Case Study: Udemy for Business implementation (with Udemy)
I am currently working on developing the following ones:
Case Study: API Integrations (BambooHR, Udemy, ITX Website)
Case Study: Skills Inventory
Case Study: Module Inventory for CMS
Way back when I was a Project Manager (we’re talking beginning of the century, and I an totally dating myself), I also worked on a few others worth mentioning:
A simple CRM for a client in Argentina
A pilot website for a transit card administered by a bank in Argentina
ITX’s own intranet and knowledgebase
ITX’s Careers Page
ITX’s own internal CRM/Administration system
These are more remote in time, and Agile practices were just nascent, so they may not seem all that relevant, but all of them had in comon some of the same activities:
Lots of interviews with users to understand their pain
Feature planning and prioritization
Experiments and iterations for improvement
etc
What did you think about these Case Studies? How would you improve them?
Please leave your comments and/or reach out to me with any feedback on your own journey into Product Management.