You Don't Know What You Don't Know
Mark Bertrand took a hard left on his path to getting a finance degree.
"I wanted to build things," he says, before telling me the story about his first product venture - an aggregator site for helping contractors get plans printed. He invested a small sum of money to hire an initial developer, and then when the funds ran out, took over the maintainance and taught himself to code in .NET.
Mark is the first to admit that he didn't know anything about the technical stuff back then. But his story shines a light on his enterprising side, a quality that serves him well today as Senior Product Manager of Growth at Sprout Social.
Much of Bertrand's journey, from his early contributions to Chicago's tech startup scene to the reconditioning of Sprout's mobile app through scaling Growth from a team of one, has been about learning on the job.
Mark sat down with 100 PM to share advice on organizing your first dev team (mostly as a survival tactic for fostering better team relations), creating value for customers in the first 30 days, and why PMs need to know their shortcomings.
The interesting thing about being a product manager in general is that you don't manage anybody. Mark Bertrand
Also in this episode:
- Scaling a team from zero
- What PMs should know (or not) about Sales & Marketing
- How to be entrepreneurial in a large organization
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