“I see careers as a chain of rings. In some cases, you can go back to school and come back to hit the ground running. In some other cases, you are moving from one ring to another to get closer to your target ring.”
Stephen Soward (BBA ‘16) is currently a Product Manager on the Dropbox Growth Monetization team. Stephen co-founded UX Research company, Campus Insights, during his junior year at Ross, focusing on helping companies to better understand Gen Z and Millennial users. Under his management, Campus Insights signed contracts with GoFundMe, Chegg and Venmo within two years. He joined the Business Leadership Program at LinkedIn as a Global Sales Associate after graduating from Ross in summer 2016, while working on Campus Insights part-time until Fall 2017. During the half year when he worked on Campus Insights full-time from September 2017 to January 2018, he closed the Campus Insights acquisition deal with Harvard Student Agencies (HSA). Stephen joined Dropbox as a Product Insights Program Manager right after closing the Campus Insights deal and transitioned internally to Growth Product Manager in September 2020.
1 What was your career plan in college? What resources in Ross helped you in achieving your goals?
Even if my experiences seemed scattered in multiple fields, my passion for understanding users was the needle threading them together. I grew up in the Bay Area, where entrepreneurship was huge. Ever since high school, I spent lots of time getting feedback on Facebook games and on products my cousins built. It was also common practice for someone coming into a coffee shop asking for feedback on the latest thing they were building. So I got interested in seeking ways to “make products user-centered” even before college.
I applied to Ross my freshman year because I had a strong interest in entrepreneurship. Starting from there, I got more involved in entrepreneurship classes and looked into user research (Information Science) programs as a minor. At that time, Information Science could only be declared as a major so I ended up only enrolling in the BBA program.
I developed a robust foundation in business and honed my technical acumen through dedicated entrepreneurship classes. This educational journey not only equipped me with essential skills but also immersed me in the dynamic field of entrepreneurship. This immersion eventually paved the way for my collaboration with my brother in co-founding a market research company named Campus Insights. I initiated Campus Insights during my junior year, while my brother was in his freshman year at Boston College. Our primary focus was assisting companies targeting college students in gathering valuable feedback from this demographic. Central to these companies was the pressing question: “What are college students thinking?” Notable entities such as Chegg and Quizlet sought our services to better understand the challenges and preferences of college students in their learning journey. This venture provided a unique avenue for applying Ross curriculum in the lens of practical business experience. As we expanded Campus Insights, we formed a cohesive team of six individuals located across Michigan and the East Coast. To support our college-centric business model, we leveraged campus resources, including open office hours within the broader entrepreneurship community and access to student lawyers through programs like Michigan Law and Boston College Law.
My engagement with entrepreneurship classes during my junior year facilitated a pivotal moment when Y Combinator (YC) teams were introduced to the program. During this opportunity, we pitched our Campus Insights ideas to them, further refining our business model. The culmination of our efforts resulted in the successful sale of our company to Harvard Student Agencies (HSA), which currently boasts 16 student agencies.
Classes like design, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) are more common these days. But back in 2015, this user-centered education was still in its early stage and not that accessible. We were happy to build this business that offers college students opportunities to conduct user research, which might be a work done by someone with three to four years’ of experience.
Our then-founding team is now in product management and user experience. It is really cool to see how this startup also helped all founding teams to build up the HCI foundation. Now it (Campus Insights) is on the 4th generation team, where new cohorts of college students come and run the business.
2 Building a company is both time-demanding and energy-demanding. Junior and senior years are also the most demanding years among college students. How did you manage to work on Campus Insights while in school?
Having the opportunity to establish a company is a privilege. I was fortunate not to be in a position where I needed to seek part-time employment to cover my school expenses or fulfill other obligations. This lack of additional commitments provided me with the chance to transform Campus Insights from a concept into a viable business. As college students, we also had flexible schedules. Instead of working 40 to 50 hours a week, we were able to join a team of six that each put in 20 to 25 hours. This flexibility allowed us to accommodate team members facing heavier workloads in a given week. Our clients, Chegg and Quizlet, were valuable supporters who entrusted us with paid projects. Consequently, it was challenging to approach them and request a delay due to academic commitments, such as exams (laughter). To manage both my academic and entrepreneurial roles effectively, I made the intentional decision to step down from numerous extracurricular activities during my sophomore year. Instead of being involved in four or five organizations, I directed more of my time towards networking for Campus Insights. This entrepreneurial journey seamlessly complimented my BBA curriculum, allowing me to apply concepts from marketing, strategy, and accounting classes directly to my business. As a founder, my daily routine involved rigorous self-questioning: “Does this strategy work? Why doesn’t it work? How can we make it work?” This reflective process became an independent study session outside the traditional classroom setting.
My brother and I were fortunate enough to have clients who were willing to pay us to do the work. But during the first year of our business, we were mainly doing pro-bono work. No matter if it’s for college founders or post-graduate founders, there is always the first year or two that your business is in the pre-revenue phase. All the business expenses will need to be funded out of pocket. Being able to say “I’m ok with taking a lower salary and pushing through my business” is not something that everyone can afford.
We are willing to think that entrepreneurship is something anyone can do without barriers. But there is still lots of work we can do to make it more equitable.
3 In addition to your entrepreneurship experience, you also spent several years in Sales and Product Insights before transitioning into the PM role. Was PM on your radar in college or after you graduated and in industry? How did you make the transition into PM?
PM has always been on my radar throughout college. Even if the first two full-time positions I got out of college were not Product Manager roles, those were great opportunities where I deepened the skill sets that are essential to PM. When I was doing user research in Campus Insights, I was helping my clients to think about product strategies. The folks I presented my work to were stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including company founders, engineers, designers, researchers.
The main question I asked myself out of college was – “How can I round out my background?” UMich education helped me to build up a well-rounded foundation. Going through the rotation program at LinkedIn fresh out of college offered me exposure to recruiting and sales. Because of the recruiting learnt from the LinkedIn rotational program, I was able to hire 6 college students for Campus Insights. I left LinkedIn in the fall of 2017 in the midst of Campus Insights’ acquisition process with HSA. Once that acquisition and new team onboarding process, it seemed HSA had more than enough people that they did not need us anymore there (laughter). So I decided to take a step back to piece together my skill sets. I was asking myself, “I’ve already got solid skills in leadership + user research from Campus Insights and Go-To-Market strategies from LinkedIn. How can I bring these two worlds together?” That brought me to the Dropbox Product Insights team, which was under Dropbox’s growth team. As the first group of Product Insights Managers in Dropbox, I was able to bring in my user centricity + user research experience and combine them with sales + GTM skills to see how to bring customer-fueled growth to Dropbox products.
If you look into Dropbox products, we have more than 500,000 touch points with users via sales and customer experience conversations. But back then, nothing was done to these organic interactions with customers. So my job was to figure out how we can take insights from these conversations turning into actionable insights into our product growth and GTM strategies. That was a really great opportunity for me to combine my two sides of the world into one role. I was still working with a variety of stakeholders, such as designers, PMs, PMMs, which gave me an opportunity to step in. If I want to solve problems for customers, there are a couple seats on the table that I can be at to influence. I had great relationships with PMs on my team then. An opportunity opened up. The PM manager reached out to me asking: “Stephen you mentioned you were interested in PM and now we have a position. Do you want to try PM? We worked with you and saw you were really user-centric. And you have a business background. Even if you do not have an engineering background, you are strong in the other two fields, user-centricity and business sense.” I formally became a more transitional PM. That lateral transition helped me to build lots of relationships that helped me move internally. In the past three years, I have been on the growth product team in Dropbox focusing on new user acquisition. It enabled me to still utilize my generalist skill sets to play a role as PM on the team.
4 It’s encouraging for students from non-technical backgrounds to learn that it’s possible to move laterally within an organization. What are the critical skill sets as a PM?
I think there are three aspects of a PM skill set verticals:
- User centricity
- Business growth
- Engineering vertical
Different PMs spike on different verticals. For me, I spend more time on user centric ad business growth. It is not a deal breaker if you don’t have a technical background, but lots of decisions are made based upon technical trade-offs.
These are the three common routes for people to transition from other roles into PM. For example, if you are a Solutions Architect, Software Engineer, Technical Program Manager, you might work closely with the PM. This will be a great opportunity for you to figure out if PM is the right fit for you by observing and asking the PM you collaborate with. Product strategist and operations might be an adjacent role that are a better fit for someone with a BBA or MBA background. Maybe you are a Chief of Staff, Financial Analyst, that you have a really great understanding of the business growth vertical which you are capable of bringing to the table. And your company or team can coach you on the other two verticals.
I see careers as a chain of rings. In some cases, you can go back to school and come back to hit the ground running. In some other cases, you are moving from one ring to another to get closer to your target ring. I’m on the monetization and growth PM team, which organically involves more users and business. But for some PM positions such as app development, might have more focus on engineering. As a future career focus for me, I’m trying to move closer to the core of the product, which can be a move from user and business verticals to engineering verticals. Instead of focusing on the PM title, you can also think about which area of PM you want to focus on and match with strengths. Ideally, your interests, passions and strengths align.
5 Tell us something that is not on your LinkedIn/resume
I’m a pretty active marathon runner. When I say that, people usually think I’m an “intense” runner. But what I really enjoy is seeing when I’m not training that much, if I’m still able to finish a marathon. The SF marathon was the longest running I’ve done so far. This is probably not something you should do when you are not training regularly…The run is 20-22 miles in total but I stopped at 10 miles (laughter). I like running with friends and the lack of preparation makes it a fun challenge to go an extra mile on racing (laughter).
Another fun fact was my instagram followers made my decision to move to New York City. You know, as a PM you’re gonna delegate tasks and empower stakeholders. So when deciding where to move next from SF, I created an instagram account with 16 cities and had all followers vote for which city to move to next. And here I am in NYC.
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