Welcome!

Setting up the stage…

Howdy, folks!

For those of you who don’t know me, my name’s Alex Stern. For a number of years now, I’ve been working as a Product Manager in various tech & tech-driven companies (Two Sigma as of late, Uber and Microsoft before that). Prior to making a transition to product management, I also got to try a number of other things: spent 2 years in Chicago getting an MBA & Master of Design Innovation from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, worked in venture capital for a few years & tried my hand in startups for a bit, all the while moving a few times across continents & also trying out living & working in a few very different places.

Throughout this time, I’ve had many chats with people who were either looking to do some of the same things I’ve done (e.g., trying to figure out what to do next career-wise, how to get into big tech, or what’s the best way to transition to product management), or attempting to do something that was close enough to allow my experience to generalize to a point where the insights stemming from it would be useful to them.

Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that while in-person chats can be incredibly rewarding, oftentimes you end up rehashing some of the same points over & over again. It also doesn’t scale very well — there are a lot more people I would like to be able to help than I could ever realistically have in-person conversations with. Finally, I feel that at this point, I’ve developed a distinct way to think about many of those career-related questions that might be worth documenting & can then be helpful to people who are looking to tackle the same, or at least similar, problems.

For those who don’t know me very well, I am no stranger to, for the lack of a better word, blogging — in the past, I published quite a few essays & articles on various tech-related topics — here are a few examples of those publications:

• How to Craft an Industrial AI Strategy For Predictive Maintenance

• Why AI investors don’t get it right

• Ecosystem Maturity Framework

• Reflections on the State of AI: 2018

• Apple’s Revenue Drop Was Inevitable

• Revisiting The Unicorn Club

However, at this point, I am less interested in writing about general technology trends & news — there are plenty of people who already do this very well that you can subscribe to (I suggest starting with Stratechery, if you are looking for that sort of thing — it’s great!). Rather, I would like to focus on a few specific areas, namely:

• How to think about your career, esp. during early (0-10) years

• Pros & cons of going to grad school for those looking to change careers

• Navigating recruiting in a new country

• Choosing between various work functions in technology

• Navigating early & mid career journey in tech

• Strategies for maximizing total compensation

• How to break into product management, etc.

The list above is by no means exhaustive — e.g., while I have a lot of experience with product management, many of the insights & topics I intend to discuss here should remain quite relevant to data scientists, software engineers, product marketers, and so on, as well as people just considering careers in technology. You will also almost surely see some posts from me that touch on technology trends & other things — but the main focus will remain on building successful tech careers, and things that can help you with that.

My intention right now is to attempt to post on a regular basis (I certainly have a long backlog of topics that are worth exploring at this point) — but let’s wait & see how it goes!

In the meanwhile, if you want to chat about anything, or have suggestions for the topics you consider important that you’d like me to cover, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at me@alexstern.me or on LinkedIn!