Melise’s Product Journey

At Colab, we believe that learning doesn’t just come from theory but through shared experiences, collaboration, practical application and an awesome peer group. Our community is made up of individuals from diverse backgrounds who each have had their unique career paths. 

We’re thrilled to highlight Melise’s inspiring journey of growth, adaptability and confidence as a product manager. Transitioning from full-stack development to product management, she found transformative value in our Product Fundamentals course and came away equipped with essential skills she applied when navigating challenges in her PM career. Melise has also embraced the strength of mentorship and community. She shared with our team how her time with Colab Cohorts reshaped her career and deepened her passion for supporting the product management community.

Career Beginnings

My career journey hasn’t been linear, nor did it end up where I imagined it would when I started. I grew up with a passion for animals and helping others so my first career choice and my first year at university was spent studying veterinary science. When I started and realised that I was unhappy doing this, I didn’t think I’d find a career which suited me. But now I’m happily a Senior Product Manager at the BBC in London working on building the best sign in and registration platform for our users.

I began in tech by studying computer science. This enabled me to pursue my other interests of problem solving and building apps that would help people. Upon leaving university I decided to go into full stack software development and did this for over 2 years. I loved many aspects of the job, such as building products that people used, however I soon became frustrated by my consulting job. I was building products that had not been built for the users that we had and soon our product didn’t meet the users needs and people soon dropped off. I was inspired to then move into product and build products that users loved using.

Breaking into product management with Colab’s help

Having this background enabled me to land a technical product manager role in the platform engineering team at Xero. This was an ideal role as it utilised my technical strengths in my technical knowledge as well as my interest and passion for product. Soon after starting my role, I decided I’d like to focus on filling the gaps in my product knowledge and gain experience in areas that I didn’t yet feel confident in. This is how I came to discover the Colab Product Fundamentals course which I eagerly signed up for. I envisioned this would help me gain the fundamental basics of product management which would allow me to succeed as a new product manager.

The course taught me many product concepts and techniques. I valued greatly how the teachers and  mentors were all current product managers who could share their experiences which brought the concepts to life, as opposed to being strictly theory. Most importantly it opened my eyes to different perspectives of how product roles could vary throughout the industry and how product techniques could be used in different contexts. I was lucky to be part of a great cohort and even made friends that I still keep in touch with.

Since graduating from Colab, I have managed to progress in my career to become a Senior Product Manager around 2 years after taking the course. I attribute some of the success to the content I learned through the course of which I found the lessons on product strategy and stakeholder management particularly useful. But also the presentation skills and networking skills I picked up on through the course. I’ve since been able to attend many great Colab events in London which have helped me continuously learn and push myself to keep growing.

A great example of how this course helped build my confidence in product management was an incident which occurred around 2 months into my first PM role at Xero. My team’s product experienced a large sitewide outage for 15 minutes which was extremely challenging for me as even though I felt comfortable with handling technical issues, I was still grappling with our stakeholder expectations as a new PM. I had only worked with stakeholders within my department at this stage, but with an outage of this size I had many EGMs and the CTO asking for updates. 

Applying my Colab learnings

However I was able to use my learnings from the Colab course to deploy the RACI framework and build a stakeholder map to get an understanding of who I needed to communicate with, who needed to be involved in decisions and who needed to be informed. This streamlined all the future work that we did with the relevant working groups to proceed with an investigation, document and share the outcomes and mitigations in a timely manner to all the right people. In the end we managed to resolve the issue and outline how we were going to strengthen the system moving forward. This built confidence in the leadership team which helped us get the correct work prioritised in the future roadmap.

Mentorship through Colab

One particularly valuable experience Colab provided me was the opportunity to be a part of their mentorship program, both as a mentee and a mentor. 

As a mentee, I learned so much from the mentor I was assigned who helped build my confidence in the product industry in London.

As a mentor I was able to build skills in coaching and knowledge sharing which have been extremely valuable in my day to day job. It has further helped me hone my skillset towards my aim of becoming a group product manager which helps others grow in their product roles.

Are you looking to build confidence and impact as a product manager like Melise? Or are you in software development looking to explore what it takes to break in and thrive in a product career? Colab is here to help supercharge your product journey!

Check out our upcoming programs and membership options. Follow us on LinkedIn for upcoming events and on TikTok for behind the scenes.

Feel free to reach out to the team at hello@colabcohorts.com if you have any questions.