Welcome to build a new channel on seeking wisdom where we're going deep in how to build products and product teams.

I'm Maggie, PM here at Drift, and I'm super excited to be joined by

Martin Erickson, a giant in the product community, founder of mind the product, the world...

The world's largest product management community and conference. Founder of product tank,

also the co-author of The Book on Product Leadership, an executive and residence, a veteran

product person, and the list goes on. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate

it. Thanks for having me.

I just wanted to start really quickly with sort of how you got to where you are. I think

a lot of the seeking wisdom audience are practitioners and we haven't really made the leap

to experts. So how did you first get into product and then make that jump and into advising product

teams?

So I started actually building stuff online way back in the 90s.

So I was kind of tinkering at home in high school, 94 and 95, just as the web was exploding.

And back then I was, I guess, a web designer and a web developer.

And as much as I knew how to do HTML and CGI script, which is all web development was back then.

And I started universities.

I went to business, international business administration at a university in Sweden, but probably spent more of my time in the computer lab than in my classrooms and lecture halls.

So I actually dropped out after two years and went and kind of started working as a web designer

web developer in Stockholm for a couple of startups until the end of 1999 when everything kind

of went bust.

And I ended up moving to London and working for Monster, the jawboard, as a product manager.

And suddenly I was like, oh, there's this whole, like, library of knowledge. Did you know that you wanted to be a PM or that's something that sort of happened? I just knew that I had kind of developed this idea that I was a good generalist. And then I had a little bit of design skill. I had enough kind of technical skills to work with developers. But I was never going to be an art director. I was never going to be an engineer on its own. And then I had enough of that business studies, even though I dropped out, that like that combination of those three things was a really good generalist role. And I think it was first when I moved to a monster that I kind of discovered that there was this whole title and kind of skill set around it. So then how did you go from, you know, your first experience at product in London at Monster to one of the world's experts in product? I think it was just, you know, as with everything I hope, I think it'll be a theme of what we're going to talk about today is kind of it's a journey of learning, right? So I started as a practitioner. I was working on the team rolling Monster out to the rest of Europe. And back then it was much more kind of hands-on. So we were building up local teams. We were helping them figure out what are their local requirements. We had product managers and every team. And in a way, totally the wrong way to do it, but in a way we were kind of a filter between them and the engineering team, which is back then actually based here in Boston.

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