Written by Shivam Dubey
About the Author
Current Position: Growth Product Manager @ North One
Education: Bachelor of Accounting and Financial Management, 2020
ACE Consulting Group Involvement:
Executive/Sr. Director (2016-2017)
Managing Director (2017-2018)
What were the top three highlights of your student life at the University of Waterloo?
In my third year, I went to Kingston with a team to compete at the Finals for Queens University's ICBC conference. We absolutely bombed, but it was a joy competing with and getting to know students from across Canada.
In the same year, I became interested in non-profits. It was a world I knew nothing about. Around this time I had the chance to speak with Adnan, a UW Alumni who had started an education non-profit called EduGate with the mission of improving children's education in Latin America. I convinced him that ACE could help his non-profit. Our team ended up collaborating with EduGate on the design of a curriculum for a week-long education workshop for Nicaraguan middle schoolers.
In my final year, I took AFM 417 with Frank Hayes. During that course, we got to work with DarwinAI, a Waterloo-based startup innovating on machine learning techniques. At the time, DarwinAI was looking at how it could use its ML product in different industries. As a project team, we got a chance to research different possibilities and provide the company with our recommendations.
How has being a part of ACE impacted your professional life and/or career trajectory?
It's safe to say that if I hadn't joined ACE, I would've stuck to a more conventional SAF career path. It was critical in providing me with experiences that made me comfortable enough to try something different.
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.
Why did you want to become a Product Manager? What do you find most interesting about your work at NorthOne?
For my fourth co-op term, I worked as a Market Research Analyst at a software scale-up called Think Research. At the time, the company had around 200 employees and had raised a bunch of money from VCs. The company had invested in creating multiple different software products, some of which were not performing well because they didn't have 'product-market fit'. In essence, the products that the company had poured millions of dollars into developing didn't effectively serve the needs of the target customers and was struggling to gain traction. I spent weeks sitting in on sales calls with customers where, despite having beautiful powerpoint slides and a polished sales pitch, we would consistently lose out on deals. It was a really painful process.
My foray into product management started with me trying to find an antidote for this pain. I started talking more regularly to Product Managers both within and outside of Think Research, and began reading and trying to learn as much as possible about how successful companies find, maintain and expand their product-market fit.
I'm still new to the profession, but my favourite part of the PM role thus far has been the blend between analytical and creative work. It allows me to work on projects with highly analytical professionals like software developers and data scientists, as well as very creative professionals like product designers and brand marketers.
What advice would you give to accounting and finance students looking to pursue career paths outside of accounting and finance?
I’ve always been wary of generic advice as so much depends on context. So, take this with a grain of salt.
One quote that always resonated with me is: "We learn who we are in practice, not in theory." Don't spend too much time theorizing. Try lots of different things, and see what you like and are good at. Co-op jobs and school clubs are a great low-stakes way to do this.
Find mentors in the domains you want to excel in. The ideal is to find people who already have a proven track record.
Read more. There's a ton to learn from really smart people on the internet. I've linked a couple of my favourite 'career advice' articles below.
Leave the consulting/professional services firm. Consulting is a decent place to start your career but there are real drawbacks if you stay too long. The biggest problem with consulting is those who are giving advice have no real way to tell if their advice actually works, the feedback loop is almost always broken. Another related problem is the business model. Consultants are primarily concerned with getting rehired by clients and often less so with solving real business problems (no one will pay millions for a quick fix, even if that’s the best solution). Eventually, you want to find a place where you have skin in the game.
Articles on career advice: