A little background: Due to familial/personal circumstances, I studied a non-tech discipline through grad school with the goal of eventually getting into tech. After finishing, I eventually found my way to joining the founding team of an early stage startup where for the next 6 years I ran around like a headless chicken. Whether due to lack of education, experience, mentorship, or volition, I learned very little about how to systematically build a product and business. The whole experience was taxing.
I left the company to spend the next couple years working on my mental health. It became clear that much of my ineffectiveness was due to deeply-rooted fears, self-hatred, and maladaptive behaviors from severe childhood trauma.
Now at 36, I do find myself in a much better place. I've arrived at more of an understanding of who I am, my values, the kind of life I want to live. But I do feel as if I've squandered almost a decade of professional potential. I have good intuitive product and design sense, but have very very little in the way of effective skills, such as understanding and facilitating a product development process. Additionally, I have a very small network, if one at all.
Where do I go from here? Do I seek a mentor / life coach to help me build a practical path forward? Back to school? And where do I begin building a professional network? Will a company even look in my direction at this point?
Thanks.
The difference with Product Manager vs. Project Manager I think is really a Product Manager will have to acquire or start with in-depth knowledge about the market a product operates in. In some ways a product manager might be a superset of skills including project management. There could be organizations big enough where these are different roles though. If you have knowledge/experience and interest in some domain, start there since that is helpful.
There are project mgmt classes and certifications like PMP or Scum Master. I don't think highly of orgs that require certifications on things like this, they tend to focus a little too much on strictly following a certain framework's guidelines as rules. They could be a way to get a job and some experience under your belt. I think the PMP cert is shorter if you have a college degree and it does require doing PM work as part of the cert, has different levels, etc.
If you can code, the path back into tech from a lost decade is pretty straightforward - practice up on coding interviews, spam enough companies with resumes to get interviews, then do well on the interviews. If you can ace a coding interview then people will overlook time in your past that you spent unemployed or working for failed companies.
If you can't code and don't want to then I'm not really sure what to advise. It depends on what sort of job you want, exactly.
https://jondouglas.dev/free-book
I talk a lot about limiting beliefs and the mindset that will make you successful in teaching yourself a hard skill like coding / data analysis / product management / etc.
Good luck!
Copycats are better off learning how to invest in themselves through introspection. You know the saying that goes "Every time you point a finger at someone else, there are three pointing back in your own direction"? Because character is destiny, the best an imitator can do is desperately say things as if uttering the magic words will achieve anything.
FYI, 'if' is a conjunctive adverb, which doesn't require a preceding comma since it's not a coordinating conjunction. Improving the way you write will improve your thinking process :) As the poster says, "Hang in there, kitty!".
Reading your post, I get the feeling that your professional potential is probably higher now in some sense that may not yet be clear.
For example maybe the previous years weren't exactly skill -development time in the building sense, but maybe they taught you to be even more of a ninja in terms of knowing what you don't want, or won't do. So your big-picture skills may have grown.
Your writing also points at a lot of other hidden strengths, probably newly-relevant strengths as well. For example you clearly have the ability to improvise. If so, a big question moving ahead is whether you are willing to embrace the convergence of somewhat orthogonal topics like "doing the chicken thing" and "documenting it so well this time that you become a subject matter expert in at least chicken runs, but likely also the processes you want to know well."
There will be lots of other questions here too, for example your journey is clearly that of an autodidact, so should it be kept more subjective and less conventional, to accommodate more of your latent passion and attention to your own drive? This option is rarely pointed out to people with such gifts.
Just some thoughts, good luck with whatever you decide to do.
I would start by reframing this experience away from something negative and into something positive, and re-examine the assumption that you learned very little.
Just because the startup was ultimately not successful does not mean that the experience was not valuable and that you didn't learn anything from it.
Often we dismiss or fail to realize our own abilities because they see obvious to us. The reality is that virtually nothing is obvious to everyone, and what might appear to be self-evident to you might be deeply insightful for someone else.
I would start by listing out all the ways in which you experienced failure during your startup experience, and for each of these, what you learned from that failure.
> I have good intuitive product and design sense, but have very very little in the way of effective skills, such as understanding and facilitating a product development process. Additionally, I have a very small network, if one at all.
You've already identified the areas in which you are lacking. Take a course on product design. Your lived experience will give you a much better understanding of the course material than someone without it. Go to events related to industries that interest you in order to expand your network. Reach out to people who are successful in the ways you want to be and ask them for advice.
Good luck!
If you want to become a PO at 40 I think you’ll have to somehow find roots for if from the experience you do have. Else do you really want to start out as a junior analyst and work your way up?