A website makes it real
As a product manager, at times it can be tough to hang on to the joy of crafting software products.
I was 12 years old when I picked up a copy of "SAMS Teach Yourself HTML4 in 24 Hours" from my middle school library. My family had recently bought our first computer, and after a few weeks of playing PC games on it, I was ready to move on to the internet.
Over the next four weeks, I pored over the pages of the book. Painstakingly typing each <div> tag into notepad, saving the file as a *.html file, and reloading internet explorer every time I made a change to see a new piece of content come alive on my PC monitor. Writing line after line of markup - I created a website for my middle school class. My older brother helped me upload it to a free hosting service, and the next day I delighted my classmates with their own little piece of the internet.
I was reminded of this experience by a Squarespace ad on YouTube that ends with the tag line - "A website makes it real." I can't help but marvel at the genius of Squarespace's marketing team. Never has a marketing slogan captured the thrill of entrepreneurship in such a poetic way.
Like most people of my generation in India, I didn't grow up with the internet. I was 10 or 11 the first time I ever used a browser. And the idea that I could, with minimal investment, create something and put it on the internet for the world to see was empowering.
In undergrad, four friends and I - fellow trivia nerds - decided to start a student business hosting live trivia. Yet again, the first step was to create a website. This time, I didn't enjoy the benefit of having a captive audience of classmates. And I learned the hard way, what it was like to put a product out there and then go out and cold-call potential customers, convince them to visit our website, learn about us and finally hire us to host their trivia event.
Years later, as a young PPC analyst, when I persuaded my company that I could be a successful product manager - my first project? You guessed it - building the marketing website for a new browser extension my team had developed.
As you become a more experienced product management professional, it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of product management: the documents, the tasks, the goddamned dashboards. But I encourage every aspiring product manager to experience the joy of setting up their own website and sharing it with people they value. I promise you - it'll only make you a better PM.
Here's a video I came across on LinkedIn of the Amazon India team launching the first iteration of the "amazon.in" website. Listen to the cheers as the browser switches from a 404: server-not-found error to the Amazon India homepage. I imagine this was the culmination of months of effort by a passionate team of builders hustling to get a new business off the ground. I'd like to believe it was at this precise moment when a website made it real.