Timeline:

2022: Thinking of exploring different career paths within Home Depot. Unsure of what I wanted to do, I began cold-emailing different individuals and leaders in different spaces to learn about their teams and work. I knew I enjoyed taking customer needs and creating dashboards that helped them with their jobs. Up until that point I had only held roles in data analytics/business intelligence. Discovered the product management space and decided to join the internal mentorship program, where I chose a sr. product manager as my mentor. Spent that summer learning more about his role and team and engaging with my fellow mentees. By the end of the program, I realized this was something I wanted to seriously pursue. I reignited my cold emailing approach and started connecting with internal product leaders from different spaces, to understand how product is being applied in different business lines of The Home Depot. Met many cool people, but no traction made on moving towards a product management role.

2023: Started the year focusing back on my role at hand, being an analyst. My team was working on some cool stuff that took up a good bit of my time. My product desire was temporarily paused. However, towards that spring I decided to take some action and build some skills that could support a career in product. I used that momentum and signed up for the Google UX course which suddenly redirected my attention away from PMing. As an analyst, one of my favorite tasks was creating dashboards. I was able to channel my creative energy to tell stories visually with data. UX took this to a whole new level, with much fewer limits. Going back to what sparked my interest in product, this was a tangible application of taking customer needs and research to design experiences. This summer I again signed up for the mentorship program but chose a UX leader as my mentor to understand what they do from a day-to-day. This course and program brought me out to October. I had now reached the 2 year mark in my role and was at the peak of my interest of trying something new. It was at this time I took a more direct approach of choosing open roles in the internal job portal and emailing the hiring managers to gather what they are looking for in their candidates. I exclusively targeted UX and product roles. It was at this time I had achieved an interview for my current role as associate product manager in supply chain. I had gone through 2-3 rounds of interviews and the first week of December had received an offer.