One year has passed since I was promoted to a Product Manager position: first six months as an Associate (a Junior grade), and then I stepped in as a fully-fledged Product Manager. And that was a drastic shift that made me revisit some aspects of my work and added a new dimension to my view on product development.

In this essay, I want to summarize my experience with the insights I collected throughout the year. Some of them might be obvious to a more experienced audience. But for me, some were revelations, and some were hugely underestimated initially. It is a good exercise to conduct such a personal retrospective, and others can benefit from that as well.

Recently I was looking for a Junior Business Analyst to join my team. I considered candidates with little or no experience in IT. And that was an excellent experience for me. For the first time in my career I:

• wholly owned job requirements for the position
• made a final decision to hire someone or not
• was not doing the tech part of an interview
• interviewed Junior-level specialists.

It is different from interviewing a Middle or Senior BA. You can discuss various topics with more experienced professionals: practical cases, challenges, techniques, recent articles, etc. But that is hardly applicable for the Juniors as they can share only their background and knowledge of theory with the ability to apply that in practice, at the very least.

There is a 2nd revision of this article, so please read it instead. This, as my first published post in this blog, will stay here as a reminder of my bad writing.