There’s no 1 way to break into product management, and I find that many PMs have varying backgrounds. A diverse set of experiences is helpful to set you apart from others, so just make it work for you!

Some advice I would give to entrepreneurs before launching a venture is to (1) Understand if there is a need in the market and (2) Whether you have product-market-fit and a unique value proposition.

At the end of the day, I took a very unorthodox pathway to obtain my CPA. I do have a lot of friends who stayed at one firm the entire time in co-op, but it’s important to remember that there isn’t a right path – it’s important to determine what you want to get out of it for yourself.

The most important lesson I learned was that prior to building a company, an application, or a solution, founders should do deep diligence around the problem that they are solving to validate that it is a big enough problem that needs solving.

As I was working with early-stage startup companies, I started wrestling with a set of questions. What can I as an AFM student do to help a startup? What kinds of financial advice do startups need? What does strategy even mean for a startup? The challenges these companies were facing were very different than the ones we had learned about in class. I was hooked.

I’ve always been fascinated by the work IDEO does. For those that are not as familiar, they are a design consultancy firm, that focuses on human-centered systems design. They have an open challenge website where they post big problems, and accept any submission, proposal from people anywhere. And a recent open challenge was how to shape the food system for 2030.

Don’t assume that being a professional is the same everywhere. We’ve come to associate the North American office culture with the way that things are done everywhere – and it’s not quite true. You’ll need to learn that working styles can be extremely different depending on who you are and where you’re from, and to not take things personally when something unexpected happens.