By Donna Smiley

Here’s the first confession—I’m in the last year of being able to say ‘I’m forty-something’ and I’m only six months away from being an empty-nester.  So, naturally, I decided to take a moment to assess my life!  I found myself wondering how someone who started out wanting to be a pharmacist earned a degree, instead, in Environmental Science, and then ends up in software product management.

Almost all of the product managers I know appear to have an innate need to break down the complex into simple, individual components.  In fact, they are almost annoying with the need to get at the root of everything and I’ve concluded that their need to understand how something works and to look for ways to improve it is just a fundamental part of their DNA.  It’s very likely that there were signs of this behavior even at an early age.  Maybe a future PM took apart their Mom’s sewing machine because the mystery surrounding how the movement of the needle and the bobbin resulted in the stitches in the fabric was just too great to ignore.  By the way, my brother took the fall for that incident so let’s just keep that confession between us!

In addition to providing a less destructive way to employ my analytical skills, I also found that product management presented me with a creative outlet. Envisioning and designing a solution requires me to mold and sculpt the ideas swimming around in my head until they come together in what I think of as a piece of software art.

So, having an instinctive need to analyze processes and the ability to apply a creative lens to the work certainly helped to build a foundation for becoming a product manager.  But, the real turning point for me was—and continues to be—the moment when the person using the software smiles and tells me “That’s it—you get it!  This is going to make it so much easier to do my job.” It is in that moment that I realize how much I love my profession because what we build at Serenic really does impact people’s lives.

Which leads me to my final confession—in my 20 years of working with software solutions, I have never worked with a more exciting product than Navigator 2009.  So even though the sign says, “Keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times,” I say throw your arms up because it feels like you’re flying!

Please watch for my future confessions (from a PM’s perspective) about Navigator 2009 and all the software art being created at Serenic.