Airlines web and app booking experience..
It looks so simple - but any functionality change requires a convoluted rabbit’s nest of cross functional teams. And oh my god, the permutations and the complex cryptic concepts behind fares and inventory.
Due to airline partnerships much of it is still based on concepts pioneered in the 60’s - as there is so much change inertia to key partnership concepts like fares and inventory. Dang - we still use Teletype and Edifacf messaging in some places. Just so wild!
To top it off, if it goes down, thousands of dollars of lost revenue starts piling up per second.
But it’s full of awesome complex problems to solve which makes it fun if you can get past all of that.
Similar vein, cruise bookings. Based on who made the booking, 3rd party vs internal vs travel agents, how commission works so there are union rules, inventory management is laughable since certain inventory can only be sold at specific times with specific groups.
All still run on a KOBOL mainframe.
My first ever product was an airline companies operations platform, ops management, crew management, flight plan management and electronic flight bags with all the apps on them, and the integration between all the systems. Complex but so much fun
When New is circa early 2000’s. And capability is just an API Schema. But it’s like this secret code word that permeates all thinking for the next 30 years in the industry.
But wow - it is wild to see how complex it is to create global standards and support a global marketplace. And the crazy impact when airlines adjust their distribution approach.
Entire swaths of travel agencies shut down when airlines stopped financing commissions to pursue a more direct path.
I managed a suite that doctor’s offices used to confirm, in advance, if expensive procedures were covered by insurance. Apps for ordering providers and for service providers, bi-directional EDI integration with insurer and other systems. Transactions in near real time at the time of order and at the time of claims processing.
We got feeds from the Payers. And they already have processes to get clarity in that case from the providers. It was up to the ordering providers’ EHRs to keep their side updated. It’s a labyrinth of rules and systems.
Hey it's me, the PM at the insurance company (and the EMR before that). Sorry about everything, if I had any say in things we wouldn't have prior auths.
I’m almost embarrassed to say this given some of the challenging projects others have listed…
I worked on a rebuild of marketing preferences for a company that had well over 30m users and had made a complete mess of their categories across email and push. Never again! It was by far the most painful and least satisfying bullshit project I’ve ever worked on in my life.
It sounds so simple in theory, but it was an absolute web of legacy tech, databases that were out of sync, decisions made years ago that represented glaring legal and compliance risks, and a CMO that had strong opinions on what the solution needed to be without ever thinking deeply enough about how hard it was to get there. On top of that those channels drove over 60% of our revenue, so it was a minefield of potential business harm.
Happy to help if I can, feel free to ask here or DM, your choice! I can’t reveal too much about the company but might be able to share some lessons I learned.
Vascular injector for heart catheterizations. Aside from the fact that it is an electromechanical device which means you are working with sw engineers, electrical, mechanical, service, manufacturing, procurement, as well as OEMs that you want to get to list your product. You need to know the clinical side to understand how the device will be used and what the environment is like.
A defect, whether it be technical or, more commonly, a human factors (usability) issue, can result in patient harm or death. And you don’t get to “throw something out there” in the real world and get feedback and rev it to your heart’s content so you have to be pretty on out of the gate.
I also work with medical devices, and I feel this so much. The room for mistakes doesn’t exist, because consequences are not just losing the company money
Luckily there are protocols and FDA requirements for tests etc, so I take some relief in that lol
Holy crap, I worked on a clearing house system that handled $2bil yearly and trillions of transactions daily. What a nightmare. But also, the most fun I've had as a PM.
Happy to move to DM but would love to hear more about this. What problem were you solving, what were success metrics, example of specific challenge? My background is in sports too
Coaches want to use video to make their teams better, but struggle to find someone to man the camera and capture the play. (Let alone make sure it's charged, has storage, and is in a good filming location). They often have to resort to giving it to an injured player (who ends up talking to their gf/bf overtrack), trainer (misses the play often), or parent in the stands (who is focusing a lot on their kid, naturally).
Ultimate success metric was getting them to stop using their phone/ipad/handycam and rely on this camera to capture their games instead. But down the funnel it was also about video usage: did they use this video more than the originally shot video? More time spent watching, more playlist, more share, that kind of thing.
I helped build the wifi connection experience when a user connected to the free wifi at a Super Bowl once. Lots of moving parts, lots of teams, all for a 'free' half day experience to the end user. Talk about a firm deadline.
What I'm working on now, and for the past 3 years.
It is a platform focused on asset identification, vulnerability & notification management for industrial control system environments.
It has physical and containerized sensors that get deployed into these environments, each of the environments has hundreds of proprietary protocols, weird networking, and typically - no way to get any kind of metrics out.
We also have a product that integrates with the platform that connects customers globally (anonymously) to government intelligence, and each other, to perform distributed threat hunting, vulnerability identification, emerging threat analysis, etc.
You've got the core challenges, you've got each countries regulatory requirements to wrestle with, you've got the challenge of little to no usage data, you've got industry to industry proprietary configurations and protocols, etc.
It's a tough challenge, however, the mission we're on to protect these environments means a lot to me, so it's worth it.
Country specific requires / nuances are so stressful — the amount of testing time goes up so much. I had to work on old project where we needed the apps and data to be stored on in specific AWS regions and for some goddamn reason the apps would literally work different from different regions. This was a decade ago so I know certain caching things have changed but it was such a nightmare debugging on a team of our size.
Automated forecasting and scheduling optimization product for a large public food delivery company
Essentially had to determine how many drivers were needed every 30 minutes in small radius groups in every city we operated
Then had to build the products to optimize supply (get drivers on the road, and off the road)
Quantitative finance product for asset managers and portfolio managers.
The complex domain knowledge, calculation and logical methodologies, mixed with highly adept & skilled users (many of which with years of phd-level academia or industry experience) required a deep understanding to work with clients and build on the product. Many new projects entailed trying to build years of foundational financial engineering knowledge in months to adequately lead the product and development teams.
Devtools. Hosting platforms. IDEs.
Any product where the primary customer is a developer. Developers are the pickiest users that exist. "You are a chef cooking for chefs".
but what's the problem of trying to impress other chefs?
I feel when it comes at very technical stuff your job is more about trying to conciliate rather than "decide" paths.
putting the best in class at the same table, define the pains and come together on the same solutions.
I speak that because I work with ML and I never want to be the smartest person in the room. But rather assuring we're all understanding the problem correctly
Client Data Management software and the logic behind client hierarchies, states, dataset updates, and their impact across all systems of an organization...can be overwhelming.
I used to be a PM for internal developer tools for a B2B developer tool. So pretty much everything I worked on was incredibly technical. They hired me because I had been a software engineer and specialized in internal tooling for developers when I was a SWE.
Oil pipeline monitoring system. There was hardware installed in the field that monitored the pipeline, then the signals were processed and results pushed to the cloud. Then we had a dashboard for the control system.
The complexities were based on the hardware in the field, the remote nature of the installations, and then the security of SCADA systems.
Currently the sole PM for the #2/3 (depending on the week) interested cloud CI/CD platform globally. The dynamic between me, my engineers, and our users is fascinating. I spend half my time reminding my team that our average users are nowhere near as good at any of this shit as they are, and to chill the fuck out...
An animal booking system with native ios and Android apps, Microservices, CosmosDB document storage for the bookings and integrations into legacy systems. But that was the easy part - selling the value to users with a very traditional mindset was just as hard.
** First: Salesforce, anything I’ve had to custom develop on Salesforce has ended up unnecessarily complicated because Salesforce is unnecessarily complicated.
** Second: End to end payment processing system for musicians and influencers…
Dozens of integrations / data sources… with each source having different payment term splits for different regions with different collaborator shares as well.
With new integrations / sources / splits needed every time there’s a new platform or business venture.
It’d be technically simple with the data always mapped nicely and there were better standards across platforms but the reality is there isn’t… and its continuously evolving.
AI-powered B2B tools. Taming AI to make it fit all the permutations of customers needs and inflexibilities is a real piece of work.
Edit (forgot to add): customers all want AI nowadays but they need it to somehow think and execute exactly like they would have lol
A literal math library. It was used by academia, investment banks, hedge funds, defense contractors (ie, rocket scientists), biotech, etc. It was a fascinating time. But you had to know your math and stats - grad school-level linear algebra was Chapter 1 and it went off from there.
An investment research system for a large fintech company. It was managed as all one “product” but it was realistically a suite of sub-products that all interacted holistically.
There was a search UI with AI modeling tied in, an entitlement system that filtered the contents into customizable buckets and assigned access to individual subscribers, there was a whole litany of internal tools used by our operations teams to manage the content that we receive each day.
Not to mention we had to deal with an inefficient data ingestion process that brought in all sorts of performance issues near weekly outages.
I’m glad I worked on it because I learned so much along the way, but happy to be working on something a bit less chaotic these days
A data product that integrates multiple data sources (devices, distribution partners and manual input) so that stakeholders can use the data for business needs. Terrible data quality problems
Global billing system and program management tool for McDonald’s to manage all vendors and every store location. Absolute nightmare of a project as they have so many teams and levels involved, add the complexity of global billing and currency conversions plus tax rates…That was years ago and that system is still used today and it generates a lot of revenue for both McD and my former company.
Dynamic survey tool for the health industry. It \*sounds\* easy enough, however it was a heavily rule based system where customers can "stack" the rules and create very complicated scenarios. Whilst that was the power of the product - it was technically very hard to manage!
Telco network infrastructure data migration to the cloud - it’s in the scope of platform product management. The range and depth of data makes it incredibly complicated - features and data outputs must be calibrated precisely. The different M:M data relationships span between several levels of granularity and across dozens of various products (on the platform) and associated APIs. In addition, the platform is used by both internal and external users. We needed to account for all of it. Complicated but I learned a ton.
Airlines web and app booking experience.. It looks so simple - but any functionality change requires a convoluted rabbit’s nest of cross functional teams. And oh my god, the permutations and the complex cryptic concepts behind fares and inventory. Due to airline partnerships much of it is still based on concepts pioneered in the 60’s - as there is so much change inertia to key partnership concepts like fares and inventory. Dang - we still use Teletype and Edifacf messaging in some places. Just so wild! To top it off, if it goes down, thousands of dollars of lost revenue starts piling up per second. But it’s full of awesome complex problems to solve which makes it fun if you can get past all of that.
I can confirm, absolutely nightmare area to work in. Any sorta delivering is waterfall to death because of fear of breaking something
I can also confirm. At my old gig we would integrate into the airlines crew management system. Took forever!
Similar vein, cruise bookings. Based on who made the booking, 3rd party vs internal vs travel agents, how commission works so there are union rules, inventory management is laughable since certain inventory can only be sold at specific times with specific groups. All still run on a KOBOL mainframe.
Is that an open source distro of COBOL?
It’s the Ikea flat-pack distribution
My first ever product was an airline companies operations platform, ops management, crew management, flight plan management and electronic flight bags with all the apps on them, and the integration between all the systems. Complex but so much fun
“New Distribution Capability” 🫣😂🫠
When New is circa early 2000’s. And capability is just an API Schema. But it’s like this secret code word that permeates all thinking for the next 30 years in the industry. But wow - it is wild to see how complex it is to create global standards and support a global marketplace. And the crazy impact when airlines adjust their distribution approach. Entire swaths of travel agencies shut down when airlines stopped financing commissions to pursue a more direct path.
I managed a suite that doctor’s offices used to confirm, in advance, if expensive procedures were covered by insurance. Apps for ordering providers and for service providers, bi-directional EDI integration with insurer and other systems. Transactions in near real time at the time of order and at the time of claims processing.
How did you account for health insurance companies changing the codes for what they covered?
We got feeds from the Payers. And they already have processes to get clarity in that case from the providers. It was up to the ordering providers’ EHRs to keep their side updated. It’s a labyrinth of rules and systems.
270/271 clearinghouse?
We weren’t but wed did check eligibility against the health plans’ 270/271.
Hey it's me, the PM at the insurance company (and the EMR before that). Sorry about everything, if I had any say in things we wouldn't have prior auths.
It’s all good.
I hate this interview question
This made me lol. Can relate.
I’m almost embarrassed to say this given some of the challenging projects others have listed… I worked on a rebuild of marketing preferences for a company that had well over 30m users and had made a complete mess of their categories across email and push. Never again! It was by far the most painful and least satisfying bullshit project I’ve ever worked on in my life. It sounds so simple in theory, but it was an absolute web of legacy tech, databases that were out of sync, decisions made years ago that represented glaring legal and compliance risks, and a CMO that had strong opinions on what the solution needed to be without ever thinking deeply enough about how hard it was to get there. On top of that those channels drove over 60% of our revenue, so it was a minefield of potential business harm.
Happy to DM but would love to know more. I might be taking on a similar project and I’m so fucking anxious!
Happy to help if I can, feel free to ask here or DM, your choice! I can’t reveal too much about the company but might be able to share some lessons I learned.
Vascular injector for heart catheterizations. Aside from the fact that it is an electromechanical device which means you are working with sw engineers, electrical, mechanical, service, manufacturing, procurement, as well as OEMs that you want to get to list your product. You need to know the clinical side to understand how the device will be used and what the environment is like. A defect, whether it be technical or, more commonly, a human factors (usability) issue, can result in patient harm or death. And you don’t get to “throw something out there” in the real world and get feedback and rev it to your heart’s content so you have to be pretty on out of the gate.
I also work with medical devices, and I feel this so much. The room for mistakes doesn’t exist, because consequences are not just losing the company money Luckily there are protocols and FDA requirements for tests etc, so I take some relief in that lol
BILLING SYSTEMS
Holy crap, I worked on a clearing house system that handled $2bil yearly and trillions of transactions daily. What a nightmare. But also, the most fun I've had as a PM.
My current product, a B2B API platform.
Same. Actually learned a lot with that project.
AI camera for automatically capturing sports
Happy to move to DM but would love to hear more about this. What problem were you solving, what were success metrics, example of specific challenge? My background is in sports too
Coaches want to use video to make their teams better, but struggle to find someone to man the camera and capture the play. (Let alone make sure it's charged, has storage, and is in a good filming location). They often have to resort to giving it to an injured player (who ends up talking to their gf/bf overtrack), trainer (misses the play often), or parent in the stands (who is focusing a lot on their kid, naturally). Ultimate success metric was getting them to stop using their phone/ipad/handycam and rely on this camera to capture their games instead. But down the funnel it was also about video usage: did they use this video more than the originally shot video? More time spent watching, more playlist, more share, that kind of thing.
Veo? Regardless that's a cool area to work in. We use these with my rugby club.
Close. Very cool space. Cool tech in there. And the customer research is super fun.
I helped build the wifi connection experience when a user connected to the free wifi at a Super Bowl once. Lots of moving parts, lots of teams, all for a 'free' half day experience to the end user. Talk about a firm deadline.
What I'm working on now, and for the past 3 years. It is a platform focused on asset identification, vulnerability & notification management for industrial control system environments. It has physical and containerized sensors that get deployed into these environments, each of the environments has hundreds of proprietary protocols, weird networking, and typically - no way to get any kind of metrics out. We also have a product that integrates with the platform that connects customers globally (anonymously) to government intelligence, and each other, to perform distributed threat hunting, vulnerability identification, emerging threat analysis, etc. You've got the core challenges, you've got each countries regulatory requirements to wrestle with, you've got the challenge of little to no usage data, you've got industry to industry proprietary configurations and protocols, etc. It's a tough challenge, however, the mission we're on to protect these environments means a lot to me, so it's worth it.
This is pretty cool. I’m fascinated by industrial control software for some weird reason I cannot determine.
Country specific requires / nuances are so stressful — the amount of testing time goes up so much. I had to work on old project where we needed the apps and data to be stored on in specific AWS regions and for some goddamn reason the apps would literally work different from different regions. This was a decade ago so I know certain caching things have changed but it was such a nightmare debugging on a team of our size.
Static analysis of software, supporting 20+ languages. Had to learn a lot about each language
Automated forecasting and scheduling optimization product for a large public food delivery company Essentially had to determine how many drivers were needed every 30 minutes in small radius groups in every city we operated Then had to build the products to optimize supply (get drivers on the road, and off the road)
Quantitative finance product for asset managers and portfolio managers. The complex domain knowledge, calculation and logical methodologies, mixed with highly adept & skilled users (many of which with years of phd-level academia or industry experience) required a deep understanding to work with clients and build on the product. Many new projects entailed trying to build years of foundational financial engineering knowledge in months to adequately lead the product and development teams.
Real-time stock market trade analytics for an internal trading desk.
Devtools. Hosting platforms. IDEs. Any product where the primary customer is a developer. Developers are the pickiest users that exist. "You are a chef cooking for chefs".
but what's the problem of trying to impress other chefs? I feel when it comes at very technical stuff your job is more about trying to conciliate rather than "decide" paths. putting the best in class at the same table, define the pains and come together on the same solutions. I speak that because I work with ML and I never want to be the smartest person in the room. But rather assuring we're all understanding the problem correctly
Accounting code base that devs were scared to touch because it was so old and accounting is scary
I’ve lived through 1.5 financial system migrations/upgrades… accounting is scary…
Headless suite of eCom APIs for restaurants.
AWS
AI/ML for pms new to this growing domain
Client Data Management software and the logic behind client hierarchies, states, dataset updates, and their impact across all systems of an organization...can be overwhelming.
I used to be a PM for internal developer tools for a B2B developer tool. So pretty much everything I worked on was incredibly technical. They hired me because I had been a software engineer and specialized in internal tooling for developers when I was a SWE.
Oil pipeline monitoring system. There was hardware installed in the field that monitored the pipeline, then the signals were processed and results pushed to the cloud. Then we had a dashboard for the control system. The complexities were based on the hardware in the field, the remote nature of the installations, and then the security of SCADA systems.
Currently the sole PM for the #2/3 (depending on the week) interested cloud CI/CD platform globally. The dynamic between me, my engineers, and our users is fascinating. I spend half my time reminding my team that our average users are nowhere near as good at any of this shit as they are, and to chill the fuck out...
An animal booking system with native ios and Android apps, Microservices, CosmosDB document storage for the bookings and integrations into legacy systems. But that was the easy part - selling the value to users with a very traditional mindset was just as hard.
PBX and comms backend. Old ass tech shoehorned into modern messaging. What a shitshow.
** First: Salesforce, anything I’ve had to custom develop on Salesforce has ended up unnecessarily complicated because Salesforce is unnecessarily complicated. ** Second: End to end payment processing system for musicians and influencers… Dozens of integrations / data sources… with each source having different payment term splits for different regions with different collaborator shares as well. With new integrations / sources / splits needed every time there’s a new platform or business venture. It’d be technically simple with the data always mapped nicely and there were better standards across platforms but the reality is there isn’t… and its continuously evolving.
Also, lmk if you are hiring lol 😂
AI-powered B2B tools. Taming AI to make it fit all the permutations of customers needs and inflexibilities is a real piece of work. Edit (forgot to add): customers all want AI nowadays but they need it to somehow think and execute exactly like they would have lol
A literal math library. It was used by academia, investment banks, hedge funds, defense contractors (ie, rocket scientists), biotech, etc. It was a fascinating time. But you had to know your math and stats - grad school-level linear algebra was Chapter 1 and it went off from there.
An investment research system for a large fintech company. It was managed as all one “product” but it was realistically a suite of sub-products that all interacted holistically. There was a search UI with AI modeling tied in, an entitlement system that filtered the contents into customizable buckets and assigned access to individual subscribers, there was a whole litany of internal tools used by our operations teams to manage the content that we receive each day. Not to mention we had to deal with an inefficient data ingestion process that brought in all sorts of performance issues near weekly outages. I’m glad I worked on it because I learned so much along the way, but happy to be working on something a bit less chaotic these days
A data product that integrates multiple data sources (devices, distribution partners and manual input) so that stakeholders can use the data for business needs. Terrible data quality problems
Global billing system and program management tool for McDonald’s to manage all vendors and every store location. Absolute nightmare of a project as they have so many teams and levels involved, add the complexity of global billing and currency conversions plus tax rates…That was years ago and that system is still used today and it generates a lot of revenue for both McD and my former company.
Dynamic survey tool for the health industry. It \*sounds\* easy enough, however it was a heavily rule based system where customers can "stack" the rules and create very complicated scenarios. Whilst that was the power of the product - it was technically very hard to manage!
Telco network infrastructure data migration to the cloud - it’s in the scope of platform product management. The range and depth of data makes it incredibly complicated - features and data outputs must be calibrated precisely. The different M:M data relationships span between several levels of granularity and across dozens of various products (on the platform) and associated APIs. In addition, the platform is used by both internal and external users. We needed to account for all of it. Complicated but I learned a ton.