“PM is not a defined career path. It’s not a degree you can get in school. Nobody is automatically qualified for it as a student. Developing natural capacity in related fields, such as computer science and UX design is critical to PM.”
Calvin Schemanski (BBA ‘12) is currently a Senior Product Manager at Ford Motor Company. He focused on entrepreneurship during his undergraduate career at Ross. By his sophomore year, he had already co-founded a pedicab service in Ann Arbor as well as Petoskey, MI, a tourist destination. With passion in both entrepreneurship and marketing, he joined a startup right after college and served as a Chief Marketing Officer until late 2013. Calvin then took a sharp turn in his career, shifting into a software engineer role and became Chief Technology Officer at BestFoodFeed in 2022.
1 Tell us something that is not on your resume.
Hi, I’m Calvin, I majored in Business Administration during college at U-M. My focus was on entrepreneurship during Ross and I graduated in 2012 and now a product manager at Ford Credit. I’ve been married to a fellow Wolverine for 7 years and we have a beautiful one year old daughter with another baby girl on the way.
2 What did you do out of college? Did you know product management then?
When I started college, I thought I would work in an entrepreneurial role post graduation. Not long after stepping into Ross, my high school friend and I founded a pedicab service in Petoskey, MI, a tourist destination, and later expanded to Ann Arbor. We were owner-operators of the business and also hired some employees to drive the cabs as well. I ran the company for three years during college and gained first-hand experience with many areas of business, including sales, marketing, operations, HR, customer service, product strategy, and accounting/finance.
Right after college, I was recruited by a former U-M classmate to join a tech startup he was launching called BestFoodFeed. My main area of focus was marketing, but you truly don’t have a fixed role in a startup – you wear all kinds of hats. When our marketing strategy gained traction and needed to scale up, I picked up web development and created a social media marketing platform from scratch. Picking up coding may seem strange after graduating with a BBA, but I realized it was a skill I needed to develop in order to accomplish the overall business goal of scaling up a social media marketing strategy. That was nothing related to my business college degree. But it all came naturally to me, especially when working in a startup, there was no way I could pick only one field to focus on.
Looking back, I don’t think I intentionally chose every single step of my career to be around entrepreneurship. There were lots of coincidences. My own passion also played a huge role in driving me towards that path, where I started my own business in college, and spent the first decade of my professional career in a niche startup. Product management was nowhere a choice I was even aware of.
3 Lots of business students in Ross want to work in the tech industry but find it difficult to transition into the field. How did you make the sheer transition from a pure business major to a lead software engineer?
One question I kept thinking about when working on BestFoodFeed’s social media marketing strategy was “How can I automate all the things I need to do manually so we can grow faster and enter more markets? ”. That was the very beginning of my software engineer transition. I started learning the basics through online coding courses and shadowing our engineers. Then I designed and built a simple web app that I could use to streamline our content and community management process. When we saw how well it was working, we iterated on it, got more internal users, and it sort of snowballed from being a product just for a few employees to a full-blown web app for a few thousand of our most active community members. Through each of those stages of the product I kept growing my coding skills and expanding my areas of understanding until I became a decent full stack web developer.
4 How did you hear about product management and why did you decide to get into PM? What was the transition like?
The main trigger for me transitioning to product management was when my wife and I found out we were having our first child. I really enjoyed the startup life, but I also knew it wasn’t going to be a good fit with this big change for our family and that we needed more work-life balance and stability. But what to do next? I reflected on the skill sets I accumulated in the past decade as well as where I felt my passion truly lies. I realized that, while I enjoy coding, my passion goes beyond that. The thing that got me truly excited was seeing the product strategy, design, and code come together into a product that users love. After sharing this realization with my wife, she pointed out that I was describing Product Management. It was then that I decided to try to transition into a product management position.
I applied to Ford’s Senior Product Manager position, started in the Loyalty team and now in the Payments team. I was surprised by how specialized PM roles can be in large organizations because I was used to a startup where one person could easily be the PM for the whole website or mobile app. But at Ford Credit, I am only focused on the Payments part of the application, and not even the whole part of Payments, just the backend API of the Payments API (laughter). People tend to think of a product as a mobile application or website as a whole. But the “product” a Product Manager refers to has far more varieties than we expected.
There are definitely PM opportunities. In Ford, there are product managers coming from a variety of backgrounds. Some of my colleagues were business analysts in the payment sector who transitioned to PM internally. The nature of the product impacts internal transition. Because of my software developer background, I looked for technical products that are related to coding. It turned out the API product has been a great fit for me.
Finding a product complementing your background will definitely make the transition (to PM) easier. Think about what your background is and how that can fit in the product. For example, if I decided to step out of software engineering and go directly into business-focused products, it would be both difficult for me and my employer. However, if you have been a business analyst, this transition is not as hard. And after getting into Ford, the coaching received from my manager enabled my smooth start at Ford.
5 Can you give some advice to current U-M students? What resources did you find useful during your time in college?
My advice can be completely outdated. I can’t even remember when I stepped into school last time (laughter). The training from my undergrad business classes took me a long way. I mainly took marketing and finance classes then, which involved case studies. It gave me the first taste of running a business in real life. The skillsets of how to think about business strategy, acquiring new users, competitions were all gained from case studies. And I still believe this frame of mind is hard to pick up in real-world jobs, where you would be demanded to hit milestones for employers and leave little time to build up systemic frames. Even my first decade career seemed nothing close to PM, marketing applied in startups was transferred to PM now, in which role I set vision and strategies for business.
But above all, PM is not a defined career path. It’s not a degree you can get in school. Nobody is automatically qualified for it as a student. Developing natural capacity in related fields, such as computer science and UX design is critical to PM.
Do you have any questions about product management that you would love us to cover in the coming episodes? Tell us here.