Raul Cepin on Breaking into Product Management and Customer Discovery Strategies

If you are currently working in or aiming to pivot into the technology industry, you have more than likely heard of the infamous “Product Manager” role. The primary goal of a product manager is to ensure that the product meets the needs of its users and aligns with a business’s overall strategy. They oversee the development and management of a product throughout its lifecycle. This role is particularly common in the technology industry, but it exists in various other sectors, as well. Tools they build include websites, apps, software, hardware, API, data and more.

Why Has Product Management Become So Popular?

The prominence of product management can be attributed to the following factors:

• Social Media: Social media influencers in the career education space have been avidly praising the role of product management within tech.
• Job Outlook: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2024, product management is expected to grow by approximately 10%, meaning, opportunities are expanding. 
• High Compensation: According to Glassdoor, the average product management salary in the United States is approximately $157,000. A product management lead makes an average of approximately $200,000. Depending on the role, industry and overall compensation package, these numbers can skew. 

Curious to determine if this is an appropriate career route for you? Let’s explore that through Raul Cepin’s career journey.

Who is Raul Cepin?

Raul Cepin is an innovative Tech Product Management Lead building API & Data tools for small to large tech companies. Currently, he works at a Fortune 500 company called Wolters Kluwer where his key responsibilities are to:

• Develop roadmaps and product strategy necessary to automate compliance for banks 
• Managing a team of product managers and onshore/offshore engineers

Raul provides further insight into the complexities of developing products at work by explaining,

On a day-to-day basis, my job is to primarily ensure that I understand where the world is going in terms of digitization. The challenge is this differs state by state and county by county. Through this role, I have come to realize that innovation is non-linear, it's way more complex. It's easy to say that a particular problem can be digitized. However, it's harder to get all stakeholders aligned on a particular decision due to a series of competing interests. I must say, being in this role has been a really great opportunity for me to experiment in pursuit of solving problems.

Let’s explore Raul Cepin’s Career Trajectory:

Binghamton University Graduate

‍Raul received his B.S. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies with ambitions to make significant change in his communities through social impact and education roles. Although a short-term pursuit, it confirmed his passion for wanting to improve people’s quality of life through a career in tech as well as leveraging social media to create Social Justice Tech, a social enterprise assisting people with breaking into technology careers.

Technical Account Manager at Ogury

‍This role, which he describes as a “no-code engineer role” was instrumental in Raul’s Tech career.  While working at Ogury, a global adtech company, Raul took on this very technical role that typically requires someone with a computer science degree. At this time, Raul only had coding bootcamp experience. This meant that a significant learning curve would have to take place while on the job to fulfill expectations of successfully managing data dashboards. Despite the struggles that came with this role, Raul shined through by earning the company $4 million dollars worth of revenue in one quarter! Powerful results!

Senior Product Manager at Baseball Cloud

‍Raul was the first product manager of Baseball Cloud, a sports technology company. In this role, he built the first roadmap as well as created software development practices and lifecycle. He mentions that his key learnings from this role was how important it is to experiment and try out various approaches to observe what actually works. 

Founded Afrikaans, a Web 3 Startup

‍Raul and a few other gentlemen came together to build a web3 education and community platform. Together, they invested $100,000 of their own money and operated the business for 3-4 months. Unfortunately, funding ran out and they were forced to close down the business. A few lessons were learned from this:

• It is important to be conservative with spending. Be intentional about where your money is going.
• Only 1% of Venture Capital Funding is Allocated to Black Founders. Due to this shortage of access to financial resources for Black entrepreneurs, it is important that this demographic of entrepreneurs get scrappy and creative when solidifying their business models. Aim to not have to rely on fundraising. 
• Make mistakes early.
• Actively work on improving your leadership.

Why is Raul’s Story Important for Career Pivoters and Founders?

As an avid problem-solver, curious soul and empathetic leader, Raul found himself pivoting from a career in education and social impact to product management. While the two careers appear to be vastly different, what people may not realize is that they share a strong commonality: a goal to solve immense problems plaguing people’s lives. As an educator and social impact professional, you are actively working with adolescents, adults and families to ensure that they are relieved of trauma and are provided with the necessary resources to improve their daily lives. Product management is no different. 

While as a product manager, you may not be taking on individuals/families as a “client and/or case”, you are still responsible for understanding a target demographic's needs and exploring ways to leverage technology to improve their lives. Raul quickly caught on to this and realized that he could transition into an industry where not only can he make a significant impact in people and businesses lives, but he could also shift his own socio-economic status from low-income to high-income. 

Does Defining Problems and Customer Discovery Spark Your Interest?

Raul’s expertise is in defining problems and customer discovery. He breaks down three important items to consider when exploring these:

• Be curious; the type of curiosity that is also empathetic. You have to actively listen to users with no agenda other than just understanding the problem. Many professionals enter customer discovery with a solution in mind. You do not want to do this. It will limit your results by simply having you self validate your thoughts of potential solutions. You must ask many questions. Then, experiment.
• Customer discovery does not require you speaking to 100+ people. You need to interview, then, test. 10 interviews are just as valuable as 30,50, 80 interviews. Raul learned this while participating in the Bubble Entrepreneur Accelerator. 
• Understand your assumptions, then validate your assumptions. Make sure the people you're speaking to are the right types of people for the problem you aim  to solve; you may even find a problem you never expected. Sometimes you will need to speak to different groups of people, but make sure your approach is intentional.

Raul’s Advice to Aspiring Product Managers

Build something! Anything! and get a customer. If you can do that one thing, you're beating 80% of businesses in the world. For most people, when you talk to them about product management, they start talking to you about roadmaps, user stories, how to get better at JIRA and how to learn Figma. What they don't talk to you about is: (1) Have they built something that has solved a problem for people? (2) Have they received feedback that someone would recommend this product to someone else? Once you build that kind of product, you're going to start to understand the product life cycle. I don't think that product managers are made in case studies, I think product managers are made by building products. Then, those products become their case study in retrospect. So, my biggest advice to someone entering product is to go out and build. You can do these things today. Start marketing your work/product and see if people bite. And if people bite, double down on that! Overall, what makes a great product manager is really the design-thinking process, then solve, test and repeat.

To showcase your ability to build, you should consider doing at least one of the following:

• Creating a template in Notion
• Building a complex app on Bubble which requires absolutely no coding experience and I learned it by myself on YouTube
• Creating a 1-Page worksheet on how to create New Year’s resolutions 

Raul’s career journey is essential in that it reminds people that although you may have had initial career plans, it is okay to change that plan. You may find yourself falling in love with it and making a significant impact not only for the companies you work for but also improving your own life both socially and financially.

Interested in connecting with him? You can find Raul on LinkedIn.

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Interested in making a career pivot into a business and tech role? Check out these two resources I created for professionals like you:

25 In-Demand Business & Tech Roles for 2024

16 Journal Prompts for Pivoting into Business & Tech Roles