A Year at Health Note
I’ve been at Health Note almost an entire year, and it’s wild to think how far I’ve come. The company has grown in parallel with me so I feel especially aligned to my surroundings.
Aaron Rau saw skills in me that I hadn’t discovered yet — I’m truly grateful to have met someone who saw a superhero before I did. Amy Reischer believed in me and trusted me with the truth. Tyler Jordan let me know from day one the importance of the job I was hired to do.
Problem was, I didn’t know what job needed to be done! This ambiguity of work in the startup space, especially on a Product team in the startup space, means the job description ends up writing itself.
I bounced across teams and learned pain points. I tried my hand on engineering teams to work toward understanding how they operate best. I synthesized what was in my head and turned it into documentation.
Around end of summer I was tasked with taking every Health Note feature and creating a video series that explained how each feature worked. It was endlessly difficult to put my face on a product feature video and explain the complexity in simple terms. I had to really know what I was talking about in order to convey its intuitiveness when it’s still an iterative, evolving product.
Fast forward to 2023 and I see the importance of the job I do. For the purpose of this post, it’s not important to spell it out. What matters is how everything I learned this past year is building me into a premium PM. There is no replacement for experience, but being thrown into the fire sure lets you know what you’re made of.
I made a point after finishing that video series that every working day I would produce one thing of value to Health Note. A video, documentation improvement, something tangible in addition to my regular duties that I can show a teammate. I don’t always hit that mark, but it’s the perfect yin to the yang of ambiguity in the product space.
Sometimes you just have to sit and think. Other times call for action. It’s like every other job. But being a PM is continuously rewarding, if you have the stomach for it, if you have tough skin, if your feelings aren’t easily crushed, if you can see the future, if you know how to code, if you know design or the market or business, if you can write …
I’m hoping that as Product evolves and solidifies that more people see the value in an exceptional Product team. I hope potential candidates consider it whenever they feel stymied by process in their own work. You could be the one to write the rulebook! The Product is the Docs, after all.
