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

featuring James Grinage, Rotational Product Manager, Facebook, New York (40.7° N, 74.0° W)

James Grinage received his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Rice University in 2018. After graduation, he worked as CEO of Cherrypick Analytics, a startup he cofounded during his studies at Rice that provided sports analytics using machine learning and computer vision. He started his current position as a rotational product manager at Facebook in 2019. In our conversation, we talked about his interests in entrepreneurship and product management, as well as his transition from working on a startup to working at Facebook. We concluded our conversation by talking about his advice to college students who are interested in product management roles.

One of the important takeaways from our conversation is that the mindsets that make a successful product manager and entrepreneur are similar. In his current role, James makes use of the experience he gained through his entrepreneurial endeavors in the past. He makes sure that “the current work issues are being executed on” as he looks through the “full bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem” to ensure that “it makes sense…to be working on the things [they’re] currently working on.” Further, he adds that being a product manager is “a lot of reading and learning and listening.”

Another important takeaway is the difference between product managers and project managers. In his daily job as a product manager, James writes product briefs, which entails “what is the problem [they are] focusing on, why is it a problem, how does it impact the consumer…what is the proposed solution, and what are next steps.” His job is really fast paced and involves a never-ending momentum, as he attends numerous meetings and “still find[s] time to sit down and do deep thinking and properly come up with these new ideas and document everything.” Whereas, according to James, project management involves more team and resource management rather than “deep strategy and thinking.”

James emphasizes the amount of experience students can potentially gain through extracurricular activities. He encourages students to “build things outside of school,” especially when it comes to preparing for a product management role. These “things” do not necessarily have to be tangible products that require coding. To him, a successful product manager should “validate that the problem exists by pretotyping it first.” The documentation process is equally important, so students should “get into the habit of documenting [their] ideas and explaining what the problem is, what the solution is, and the steps [they are] going to take to test the solution.”

James recommends the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup by Bill Aulet to those who would like to pursue a career in entrepreneurship and learn more about the thought process that makes a successful product manager.

Highlights from the interview

I want to know what was expected of you when you were a child or high-schooler, and did you basically adhere or stray away from that?

I’ll start off by saying, I’m a first generation college student, and I grew up just my mom and me, my dad wasn’t around, so a lot of what was expected of me was everything related to school, related to sports, and related to also being the “man of the house” early on. But I think the biggest thing for me was that my mom always put a big emphasis on school and specifically being an engineer. My mom grew up in Mexico, and from her understanding, the people that end up living the best lives were engineers. They had the best work-life balance. She assigned a lot of prestige to that. So early on I was always told, you should be an engineer and I would say I adhered to that, but partially because I was always in love with math and math was just something that came easy to me, so it just made sense for me to be an engineer. Once I got to college, originally I started as a computer science major, but eventually I switched to electrical engineering. So, I would say I stayed along the path.

Did you ever envision yourself as an entrepreneur? How did you end up actually continuing to work on Cherrypick Analytics after graduating?

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I like control, I like when my opinion has a lot of weight, so I always felt that entrepreneurship was the ultimate form of—this sounds bad—of power, but also at the same time being able to direct yourself in any direction you want, right? And it gives you a lot of flexibility. So, when I was younger, I never imagined it; I always imagined going into industry. It wasn’t until my sophomore year, like towards the middle portion of my sophomore year, where I started to imagine what it would be like to be an entrepreneur, and I started to catch the startup bug. And then me and friends would always just talk about different ideas, and it was a common thing to sit around at Rice, and just talk about different ideas, and then basically go back and forth on whether or not it’s a good idea, what it would take for it to be successful. Eventually I started to take entrepreneurship classes at Rice. The first half went over what it takes to start a company, and the second half went over what it takes to raise money. So, second part was funding, first part was strategy. And that got me excited, and that’s when I started to formulate an idea for a company with a friend at Rice. He didn’t take that class, but he ended up taking another entrepreneurship class, so a lot of our thought processes were around, “Oh, if we want to be entrepreneurs, we need to be educated about it.” We also started reading a lot of books. There is great one that [professor] Hesam Panahi gave us called Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup.

We pitched our senior design project as Cherrypick Analytics so that we could work on our startup while taking the senior design class. We got to a point where we felt like we found a pretty decent product market fit throughout senior year, and we made the conscious decision to not apply to any industry jobs. This was essentially the moral contract that me and my cofounder made at the time was, “All right, we’re not going to apply to any jobs; this is what we’re going to do,” and then we just gave it everything we had throughout senior year. We hit summertime, or we hit graduation, we rented an apartment, and we found other roommates so that we could live as cheaply as possible…And then we did that for as long as possible. I mean, essentially we did it for about a year.

So now, as a rotational product manager [at Facebook], what is the essential difference between a regular product manager? I know that you have relocated recently, so I’m assuming it’s like changing teams, but can you define it more?

As a rotational product manager, you rotate across three different teams every six months…for example, I was just on Facebook Portal, which is a hardware device that Facebook makes to do video calling with friends and family. Most people don’t know about it, but I requested to be on a hardware team because having an electrical engineering background, I am interested in a physical product, so I thought it would be fun to work on hardware, especially because it’s very different to work on hardware from software. But yeah, to answer your question, three six-month rotations, so I was in San Francisco working on Portal, now I’m in New York working on Instagram Shopping and Facebook Marketplace, and then in July I’ll be in New York again…then at the end of the program, I roll off onto one team, and stay on that team indefinitely. But the whole point of the program is to condense a lot of growth into a short period of time. Your classic route for being a PM is, you start on a team and you stay on that team for a long, long time, and then something major happens that requires you to find a new team. But the issue with that is you learn the techniques and the strategies just for one area…So that’s the hypothesis that Facebook is working off of, that by exposing you to three different areas, you will have this new formed idea of what it means to be a product manager.

How easy is the transition between the teams, especially considering that you only work there six months at a time for the team?

Starting on a new team is always hard, mainly because—it depends on the problem space, but part of the onboarding process is…as a product manager, you need to know everybody. So I joined this team early January, that first two weeks, and even today I had a meeting where I met somebody for the first time. But you have to get a lay of the land, and you have to understand the space holistically from every angle—so from finance, from legal, from privacy, from policy, from engineering, from design, from research, from quantitative research, from all of these areas that you don’t necessarily know even exist, you have to meet all these people so that you’re aware of all the hoops you need to jump through when you go through the process of ideating a new feature, or a new product, and then getting the green lights from all those people, executing on it from an engineering and design standpoint, and then shipping it to all of your customers. So, it’s difficult in the sense that it’s a lot of reading and learning and listening. You just have to be a sponge and just take in as much information as possible so that you can move fast, because like you said, you only have six months, and at the end of the six months, they measure how much impact you had on the team. So if you take two months to onboard, you only have four months left to execute, so a lot of it is just fast-paced, meet as many people as you can. If you look at my calendar, my calendar is just booked all day long, of just back-to-back meetings. So, it’s difficult, because also in combination with that, a lot of being a product manager is writing. You need to write what we call product briefs, so you need to write a strategy for your team, and then within the strategy of different work streams, and you need to write product briefs for each of those work streams. And a product brief just entails—what is the problem that we’re focusing on, why is it a problem, how does it impact the consumer, how does it impact Facebook, what is the proposed solution, and what are next steps. So having to meet everybody, and then still find time to sit down and do deep thinking and properly come up with these new ideas and document everything, is—it can be really tiring, but also it’s so fun, so, I really can’t complain.

From your experiences, what are some misconceptions about your job, or product managers in general?

I think a common misconception, and this is just in general…people conflate project management and product management, which is a very—they are very different in my opinion. The way I would define project management is, you have a set goal—you have a deliverable, and then you have the team that’s going to execute on that deliverable, and it’s your job to make sure everybody is doing the right thing. So it’s a lot of micromanaging of other people doing tasks; it’s not a lot of deep strategy and thinking, whereas product management is a combination of project management, but also having a holistic view of the product. You have to have your hundred-foot view of the project and make sure that the current work issues are being executed on, so that’s the project management lens, but then you also have to have that ten-thousand-foot view, the full bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem, and you need to make sure that…does it make sense for us to be working on the things we’re currently working on, where are we going in the next six months, where are we going in the next year, what is our strategy for getting to those places in the next six months and the next year, and then, yeah, and convincing people of that strategy. So that’s the first one is the misconception of project management, product management. Other things, it’s different at every company, I would also say. So, another misconception is that you have to code to be a product manager. That is not the case, at least not a Facebook. At Google it is, but at Facebook product managers don’t code.

What skills do you find utilizing in your current position, and what can college students do to help them actually prepare for becoming a product manager?

I would say the first thing is being able to break down a problem to the core. I think a common issue people have is they’ll think about an idea and they’ll start with the solution. They’ll start with like, “Oh, it would be really cool if you could do this.” But they don’t think about the underlying problem, like, “Why is it cool that you can do this?” It’s cool—like for example, why is it cool that I can call an Uber and go from A to B? It’s…cool because beforehand, I would have either had to walk, which takes a long time, and there’s issues with weather, and prior to that, the other solution is if you’re not in a big city like New York where you could call a cab, you have to take public transit, or you have to get a friend to drive you, or you have to deal with these other solutions that effectively are super cumbersome. So I would say entrepreneurship allows you to really think about people problems first.

You need to start with the problem and then think about the solutions. From being here at Facebook, the best product managers are the ones that start with the problem and then think about the solution. There are product managers that just start with the solution, and then you have to go through all the steps of making up what the problem is in order to go in that direction, but that’s—it doesn’t lead to a good outcome. So that would be the first one…and then the second one is being able to MVP something…coming up with the most basic version of the solution, and thinking about, what is the way we can properly test this without having to build out the full feature set. And I think this is something I see an issue a lot. I had a friend that just made a fitness tracking app, and he built out the full suite of features, like the whole thing, and then started beta testing, which is realistically the worst thing you could do. What you should do is find—what is the number one problem you’re trying to solve, build the only feature, the main feature that solves that problem, don’t build anything else, don’t make it pretty, just make a robust solution around that, and then test that. And then as issues, other issues or requests come in, you build out the feature set. So having that mentality as a product manager is super helpful, because it allows you to execute on projects super fast, whereas I’ve seen other product managers that have a team build out the full solution, when in reality, 85 percent of that solution hasn’t been verified by people problems.

What can a college student do that could help them prepare for your current position?

Build something. I feel like there are a few things. One is build things outside of school. Come up with ideas and build them. You don’t need to build it from a coding standpoint. It could just be an idea that you want to test, and not every MVP needs to be tested through code; it can be tested manually. So, for example…doing food delivery on campus, technically the end solution ideally would be an app where you could request…[food]…and then somebody goes and gets it. Yes, that would be the most ideal solution, but to first test it, really what you should do is you should create an email account or a Facebook page, because it’s so easy to do, and post that page into all of the relevant Facebook pages…then update and say, “Hey, we’re doing delivery service from this time to this time, message us if you want us to get you something, and then do Venmo for the transaction,” right? You can—and then this gets into the topic that I think the book talks about, pretotyping versus prototyping. So, doing that, actually going out of your way to start something new, and like I said…I think people get caught up in this false understanding that they have to build out the full solution, but in reality you should validate that the problem exists by pretotyping it first, or prototyping it, but if you prototype it, it should be very, very minimal.

Entrepreneurship classes help. I think another thing that’s important is, if you do have an idea, making sure you talk to customers and get into the habit of documenting your ideas and explaining what the problem is, what the solution is, and the steps you’re going to take to test the solution. Documenting that to get a product manager role would be super helpful, because…you can show in your interview, you can bring it and be like, “This is the stuff I would do before even going out there and starting; I would fully think through the whole process.”

Did anything I asked spark anything else that you want to mention, or do you want to mention anything else to college students?

I would just say that, for the computer science majors, and electrical engineers, and most engineering majors in general, I think people don’t realize how fun and exciting it is to be a product manager. They get caught up in all of the prestige and success that can come from being a software engineer, which by all means is fantastic and it—the reason why it has that aura about it is because it’s real, there’s a reason that Silicon Valley is founded by software engineers, right? I think that nobody is fully aware of what it means to be a product manager, and not a lot of students end up becoming product managers. There’s not that much awareness, so my main takeaway, or feedback, is I hope people look into it more, apply to more PM internships, especially because getting a PM role without doing a PM internship in undergrad is incredibly hard, really, really hard… So, I would just say that if you are interested, you should definitely do an internship in it, because once you get out of undergrad and you start working in an industry, say as a software engineer, it’s so much harder to switch over from a software engineer to a product manager. So, it’s worth getting a taste of it when you’re in undergrad because it’s easier to get a taste of it then, and it still keeps the door open in the future in case you want to go back to it.

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