
As a consultant, I enjoyed working on a variety of projects for different clients and industries. In these projects, I could constantly observe, apply, test and refine my own framework of thinking to address new business cases and challenges, from which I improved my skills, got promoted and thus gained quite a lot of sense of achievement.

Having said that, I hardly ever experienced an entire project from the very beginning to end in all these projects due to all kinds of reasons. Because of this, I could barely felt a sense of accomplishment from the success of the project. I frequently perceived myself as an observer and an outsider, while as an "external vendor", I truely was.

## Inspiration

After several IT-related projects, I finally worked on a business strategy project again. I enjoyed tackling with data and generating ideas from the findings through financial analysis which I was quite "familiar" with. However, I couldn't help but wonder how the use of digital marketing, automation and other digital solutions may help the company's operations run more efficiently and generate more revenue.

I came to realize that while I do have decent business sense and enjoyed working with data, I am not a gifted strategiest. While I was not trained as a developer in my past education background, I've accumulated experience in IT projects and  have been interested in learning coding. 

I started wondering if there is a position in which I could grasp the business needs quickly through data, develop and implement the solutions by working with both developers and business owners? 

## The Opportunity

My husband, who was still my boy friend at the time, was working with a Singapore E-Commerce start-up company. His boss was looking for a project manager to help with their first mobile app development project. And my husband introduced me to them.

I joined the team and introduced the Agile Menifesto and MVP concept, working with one product manager and four developers led by the CTO together to launch the MVP version of the iOS mobile app. 

It was the first time for the team and me myself to work on a mobile app development project, and it turned out to be a success despite the tight deadline and limited resource.

I found I could fully apply my expertise and experience in such projects, and I also realized I enjoyed learning and considering how to define the needs of users and prioritize the demands and solutions. was proud of my achievements in such projects and felt a great sense of ownership over this digital product.

After conducting further research and thorough consideration, I made a decision. That was to change my career from a consultant to product manager.


> To be continued...


From a Consultant to a Digital Product Manager - Part III

How I Became a Product Manager?


Prior to pursuing an MBA, my career goal was to work as a management consultant. I was adamant about pursuing this career goal during my MBA program, participating in all kinds of consulting club activities and joining different consulting internship programs.

Honestly speaking, I was never the smartest student and I lacked the talents to excel in case interviews. However, after graduation I eventually became the only few graduates in my cohort to work as a management consultant.

Because I participated in a summer internship program and demonstrated my value and culture fit, I was fortunate enough to receive the offer from Skylight Consulting, a boutique consulting firm in Japan.


## The Start of My Career as a Consultant

Prior to working as a consultant, I had a very limited understanding of what a consultant does -- Consultants make money by helping clients solve challenging problems with solid business skills.

However, I failed to see how those case cracking techniques would help in my actual work. And even When I interned with KPMG strategy team, I wasn't able to gain an understanding of how to approach a business problem and come up practical solution. I started to doubt myself if I was suitable to pick up this career path.

After I joined Skylight Consulting, this anxiety continued and I couldn't unwind even during the new hire orientation. I aimed to be the best new consultant in my batch in the 3-month training program, and managed to achieve my "goal" by learning the fastest and getting the best evaluation.

## So What? 

Ironically, I was the only new hire who wasn't able to get assigned to an client-facing OJT(on-the-job training) project right after the 3-month training, since there happened to be no English-speaking projects available. My inability to speak proper business Japanese prevented me from offering the fundamental value as a consultant in this nation.

I came to recognize the reality -- The value of a consultant depends on what you can delivery to fufill the clients' needs. It doesn't necessarily to be something challenging. The clients will only pay for what they need. 

**However, one thing, nonetheless, is crucial: the capability to understand the clients' true needs. If I only concentrate on showcasing my skill sets and neglect the real needs, I will never be successful in my job.** 

> To be continued...



From a Consultant to a Digital Product Manager -Part I

How I Started My Career as a Consultant?


During the internship programs, I worked on business cases, conducting extensive research and studies on marketing and financial analysis, which I later found that this is just a typical way consulting firms teach the junior consultants the fundamentals of business sense and logical thinking.  

However, I've never ever thought about a further crucial task or competency that consultants perform on a daily basis. That is **project management**.

## Learning Programming as a Management Consultant?

From the second month I joined Skylight, all new hires were put on a 2-month training program, which was called _IT project training_. During this training program, we started to learn programming from scratch by ourselves and at the end we needed to deliver a couple of IT projects.

The purpose of this training program was to equip new hires with project management skills and basic understanding of IT, which the company believed would help us communicate better with clients and partners.

The training I joined had Machine Learning as its theme. This was the first time I learnt Python. I discovered that machine learning was not difficult to start learning after creating my own NLP (Nathural Language Processing) programs.

I valued this learning experience, which eventually inspired me to be a product manager. However, at the point of time, I didn't know how it would help me to work as a management consultant.

## From Business Analyst to "Project Manager"

The first project I joined, and most of my batchmates joined, were IT-related projects. As OJT members, we usually assisted the project manager to create basic documentation, such as MOM. With the understanding of the projects gets deepened, we will gradually take on discussion deck preparation, reporting slides creation and business requirement documentation, etc.

I was firstly assigned to a company internal project to rebuild an HR software system using the waterfall methodology. I skipped the MOM-writing phase and focused on documenting the business and technical requirements. Interestingly, I even used HTML and CSS to help with the front-end design for this internal project. This reinforced my interest in software development projects.

After the business requirement documentation was completed, I was successfully assign to a client-facing project. From then, I worked as a PMO team member and then project manager in the project teams on several PMO projects involving various project types and industries, but basically those that were IT-related.

I've gained some insights into software development life cycles by working with both Waterfall and Agile approaches, learning from those successes as well as failures of the projects. 

> To be continued... 


From a Consultant to a Digital Product Manager - Part II

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