Yi Luo
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Yoko Li, product manager, Transposit, San Francisco (37.7° N, 122.4° W)

Graduating from Rice University with a computer science degree and a mind of an entrepreneur, Yoko Li kept seeking opportunities to start her own business while exploring the technology market. She didn’t envision herself as product manager when she first entered the industry, but the opportunity arose when Transposit launched a new product. She took the role of product manager to lead the team in 2019. 

Throughout the interview, I found the product manager (PM) role to be a very flexible role, where the tasks, working environment, and team dynamics depend on the size of the company. In bigger companies like Google and Apple, PMs are more likely to prioritize engineering tickets based on what you hear from other departments. Depending on the product itself, they might not directly talk to the users because the company has a user research team dedicated to that. In startups like Transposit, however, a product manager is a translator between different people with different perspectives. Thus, you need to have “more multifaceted skills.” Communication is one of the most important ones. Yoko spends most of her time with customers to understand their needs so she can specify the products the engineering team needs to build. Her technical background allows her to communicate with the engineers very effectively. Startup PMs need to be more entrepreneurial, Yoko says. You need to clarify the project’s direction and push it through, which requires more leadership skills to convince people to trust your decision.

When talking about her experience working in a startup, Yoko likes that roles are not well-defined and that she could “create something that didn’t exist before.” She used to work as a very specialized engineer in a bigger company, but she did not enjoy the repetition aspect of the specialization. Wanting to acquire different skills, she joined an emerging startup called Transposit. The challenging side of working in a startup is that startups do not have a career ladder for you to climb, Yoko says; you must think hard about what to do for the next step. However, this downside for one person could be an upside to another. If you prefer a predictable job with a stable salary and projectable career path, a larger company is a better option.

Even though she enjoys her current role as PM of a startup, Yoko’s career goal is to be an entrepreneur. She has been determined to start her own company since her graduation, and she is taking steps to get there. To equip herself with enough firsthand knowledge of the market and the process of starting a company, she planned to join different types of startups ranging from a very early stage startup to a more later stage startup that was later acquired. During her years at Transposit, she has seen the company grow from a three-person team to its current state. She has learned how a company is shaped and how it changed over time. These experiences are very valuable on her path to build her own company.

For students interested in embarking on an entrepreneur journey, Yoko encourages you to understand the motivation behind this goal because this is a path that needs full commitment. She explained that it is important not to choose something “out of peer pressure instead of what you want,” because “eventually you will go down the previous path you were going to take anyways.” It may “not [be] worth the longer route to get there.” There were only around 60 people majoring in computer science in her class, and most of them went to companies like Google and Facebook after graduation. Now hundreds of students are majoring in computer science, and it is possible that most people now want to start their own company. What is most important, however, is not which path most people plan to choose but what you really want to achieve.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first envision yourself as product manager?

I actually never did. It [was an] opportunistic opportunity after I started working. While I was at Rice, I wasn’t sure what to major in, so I thought, “I’m going to major in something that’s needed in every field.” That’s why I chose computer science. After graduating, I became a software engineer and then started working at a startup years after I graduated. This opportunity just came where we’re launching a new product.

Can you describe what kind of work are you doing right now?

For product management in a technical world, like a tech company that has a tech product offering, what we do is talk to users and then learn about what kind of product they would buy and that would solve their problems. And then we work with the engineering team to build specific features. I spend my time talking to customers, working with the engineering team, sales and marketing and see myself as the glue for the team.

Can you explain some common misconceptions about this role?

This role is relatively new in the tech world; it can be very different from companies to companies. For a startup, a PM in a startup helps with everything—sales, marketing, customer success, design, and engineering. We help to make sure that the system works the way it should, and then different departments understand each other.

What do you think is the most important quality to succeed in this industry?

For this specific industry, I think it really depends on the type of a PM you are. A PM in a startup tends to be more entrepreneurial, so as a PM you really need to get clarity of different directions and help to push these directions through, and there’s more leadership skills required for you to convince people, and you need to have a very low ego. This role is different for a bigger company, for some companies, a PM’s day job is prioritizing engineering tickets based on what they hear from other departments. That is a very different job specification where PMs need to do a lot more due diligence in prioritizing things and why such technical tickets can or cannot be prioritized. They do not worry about making money because for a big company like this, everything is already figured out. I would say that for a smaller company like ours, you need to have more multifaceted skills: communication is one of the more important ones, of course, since you are the translator between different people with different perspectives.

I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you have a lot of technical backgrounds, like in computer science.

For a PM at a technical company, it’s still a technical role, where you still need to understand everything technically. You might not be the person who codes it up, but you do need to understand how hard or easy it needs to be. So, in that case, you are not the executor, but you still need a technical foundation in these things. That’s important also…because we’re working on technical products. To sell it to this audience, you need to speak their language.  At the end of the day, you do need a technical foundation to be able to do that. And in terms of talking to the engineering team, you still need technical credentials to be able to say, “I understand what you are trying to convey technically, and here’s what I think from a product perspective.” I would say it’s more technical communication where you’re able to convey what’s technically complex to people with clarity.

I saw that you do paintings and art in your free time. How do you see this artistic background and your technical background blend together?

I think the different skills you have given you the ability to empathize with different people. I can relate to our designers’ perspective better because of my passion in art. I am also able to relate to engineers because I wrote code for a long time. I would say it is more like being able to take that different point of view and being able to see yourself in different people’s shoes and being able to execute efficiently.

There’s a book called Hackers and Painters [Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age by Paul Graham]…This book was talking about how, at the end of the day, artists and hackers (people who built software) are essentially the same people. They both try to create something that did not exist previously. So, the philosophy here is the same, but it just takes a different path for execution.

What was your most memorable experience in your career that helped you develop as a person?

Years into my startup journey, [I realized] the reason I work at a startup is so that I can create something that didn’t exist before. I think the moment of reckoning for me was more working in a startup for a while, and ups and downs with that, makes me think more like someone who can build a company. I guess that’s an experience that shapes my career the most.

What do you like and do not like about the startup environment?

I like that the roles are not well-defined in the sense that it can be a downside for some people. “Not well-defined” means that you are not pigeonholed into doing one thing and one thing only. For my previous job in a bigger company…the role was very defined; I needed lots of specialized knowledge to do my job, and that was not very interesting to me because after I acquired my skills, I didn’t want to keep repeating what I did—although a bigger company has the motivation to keep engineers there since they are very good at their job. What I wanted to do is to acquire other skills. I want to switch to other teams to build different products using different technologies. But that’s not always streamlined in a bigger company so that’s why I like a smaller company like ours. I think the downside is the career path here. Because the org chart is so flat, I report directly to the CTO. So, there’s really no defined ladder to climb, so you really have to think very hard about what you want for the next step, whereas for a bigger company you can just climb the ladder—senior engineer to staff engineer to principal engineer, so on and so forth.

What is your advice for people who want to either work in a startup or start their own company?

Asking yourself why you want to do it, because this is a path that needs full commitment. When I graduated, most of my classmates joined a bigger company. Back then, we had 60ish people

in computer science. That is the road most people travelled. You really need to stay true to yourself and ask why you are doing it…and what is the motivation behind your choices.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.