<aside> 👋 I'm a product manager based in Minneapolis, MN with 10 years of experience in product and QA. I am a deep believer in user-centric product thinking and that outcomes > outputs

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Contact

📧 susan.greve@gmail.com

🐦 twitter.com/susangreve

🔗 linkedin.com/in/susangreve

🧑🏻‍💻https://www.susangreve.com/

📗 RTB;DWR (resume too boring; don’t wanna read)

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My introduction to Product was in 2013 when I worked under the tutelage of David Hussman (RIP) at DevJam (which was acquired by cPrime in 2017 after David became terminally ill.) I was exposed to many thought leaders in the agile and product space and knew I wanted to be a part of building products in a pragmatic, user-centric way.

I learned the importance of answering WHY before attempting to answer HOW.

But… I didn’t want to be another Certified Product Person who had never actually worked in software development.

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So I took a 2 prong approach to getting my start in an organic, boots-on-the-ground kind of way.

1. I started integrating with the broader tech community through a variety of volunteering opportunities for organizations like Lesbians Who Tech, Geekettes, and TechDOTmn.
2. Through these connections, I was able to land my first gig on a product team as a QA in 2016.

I worked for a small local company called ReachLocal which provided analytics and insights into digital marketing strategies. I worked with an engineer to automate regression testing using Selenium.

My second gig was on the Target mobile apps team working specifically on the Drive Up experience.

I learned the intricacies of REST APIs and how to interact with them. I participated in design sprints to build new features. I learned how to throttle networks to uncover performance issues. I helped build our automated test suites using Cucumber. I learned git and how to navigate Github repositories and code bases.

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The longer I was in it, the more obsessed I became with the notion that we (at Target) had an unimaginable amount of qualitative data we were not using to assess our product value. Of course we had business metrics which we were hitting, but I quickly noticed there were a few key user friction points (NPS detractors) that we were not actively trying to solve for.

Together with our Product Leader and UX, I built a measurable and repeatable mechanism to observe the impact of the features we were producing as they related to key pain points.

I was doing this on top of being the sole QA for our iOS, Android, and Team Member app.

This was when I knew it was time to quit my day job as a QA and make the move to product.

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