Career Switcher

Yes, I'm a bit more seasoned than the typical APM candidate. I'm a career switcher, sort of like my uncle who managed a Walmart tire department after serving as an electronics technician in the Air Force.

As a career-switcher, I have to discuss why I'll be successful switching to product management in addition to why Walmart.

I first became aware of product management while at Yahoo. (Every week I had lunch with a different group at Yahoo's Sunnyvale campus.) My group didn't have a PM but my side-project led to three UX patents with PMs. (I also have a UX patent for a video surveillance product at a previous company, where I built the back-end.)

I will be successful as a PM because I'm already successful at the intersection of business, technology, and users. I've been working with investors and startups to help the latter succeed. I help startups tell the best story that they have and if that story isn't good enough, I help them change so they have a better story. I have also taken classes in product management and venture capital and want to continue learning, albeit in a hands-on situation.

Engineers like to work with me as do business people, including marketing and sales.

I haven't worked as much with designers but .... (I've built enough UIs to prove that I'm not a designer.) Yes, I realize that PMs aren't engineers.

I will be successful at Walmart because I've already worked at very large scale. I like relevant data but will do without when appropriate and adjust as it comes in and the KPIs dictate. (I've written the first line of code at two funded startups.)

In most cover letters, the applicant writes about relevant accomplishments but I'm going to quote one of my LinkedIn references, Rick Lazansky, https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-lazansky-442b1/, discussing some of my PM-relevant

behaviors.

"I've gotten used to [Andy] knowing about technology that I didn't think that he knows. He has a very broad technology knowledge base, well beyond what his background suggests. He's not just broad, but when an area really interests him, he can bring himself up to the level of current academic researchers more quickly than anyone else I've worked with."

"Since he has been involved in Sand Hill Angels, I've discovered that Andy has another side. He has provided significant help to startups in other areas such as product marketing, pitch, and business. He's still learning the language so his vocabulary occasionally lets him down, but his insights are often extremely good."

"Andy is surprisingly social. He successfully 'herds the cats' to run Sand Hill Angels' meetings (not just 'lead without authority', but lead a group of alpha-types that has no central authority) and the recipients of the aforementioned insights are happy to get them even when those insights are fairly critical."