Becca Paren of Auctane: Your Career As A Product

Reza Shirazi
Austin Voice of Product
8 min readJan 29, 2021

--

Treat your career as a product and work on improving it, shared Becca Paren, Senior Product Manager at Auctane, for my interview series Austin Voice Of Product. Our interview has been edited for clarity.

Don’t miss the next interview — sign up for the Austin VOP newsletter.

Austin VOP #94

What was your path to product management?

I did my undergrad degree in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I was always a very math and science person. I loved logic, I loved solving problems. I did programming internships throughout college, but didn’t like doing that eight hours a day. So I started looking for more hybrid positions and that landed me at Intel right after college, where I was a mix of a solutions engineer, product manager, and technical consulting engineer. I worked in high performance computing and I got to help build products that were checking the health of big computer systems. I was with Intel for four years doing that, and I grew immensely in that position. Halfway through is when I realized I was doing product management, but I didn’t have an official title and there wasn’t anywhere for me to grow in product specific roles. So I started branching out applying to startups, where everyone wears a lot of hats in their role, where I thought I would get a chance as an ‘official’ product manager.

I was brought on as a product manager at a 12 person startup in construction logistics called Trelar. I was there nine months and then went to another smaller company in January for three months — Briggo. And now I am at Auctane as a senior product manager. Looking back at college, I always really loved my theoretical math classes where we wrote a lot of proofs, which is like explaining how math problems worked. I loved understanding the technical side of things, but I wanted to explain things, I wanted to talk about it, and I wanted to understand why. So it makes sense why I am in product management.

What advice do you give to aspiring product leaders?

Something that I have talked about with a few different people this past year: I have had four jobs, four different roles within a 13 month period. And one thing that I like to think of as a product person is treating my career like a product. When I think of the products I am working on, I ask, are we in stability mode, are we just fixing things or are we in growth mode? So six months ago when I was looking for a role and I ended up at Auctane I told myself: you know what, I am in a growth part of my career right now. I don’t necessarily need a huge, long-term stable company. I don’t want to be working 80 hour weeks at a super small startup — I don’t think time worked equates to growth. But I want a role in a company that supports me growing quickly over the next two years. I want to do a lot more with my career and want the learning to get there. We do this for the products we work on.

But people often forget that you can treat yourself as a product and work on how to make yourself better. How do you iterate, how do you do everything better? And I have found that when I use that perspective for myself, I tend to learn more and grow better as well.

When I was deciding between a few different role offers last June this really came into play. Did I want to be working on a product that was building something that was newer or one that was maintaining the status quo with feature improvements? I wanted to be on something that was newer and that I could take ownership of, where I would be tied to something that would be launched. That would help me with my growth: launching something from start to finish and I was involved throughout that process.

What have you read/watched/listened to that has inspired you lately?

As part of the Masters’s program I was in we had a two part summer project and because of my past experience, I was super interested in exploring toxicity in technology workplaces. I did some literature research and sent out a survey to people last summer to ask about their toxic experiences and to understand how tech companies work. I shared what I learned in two blog posts just to get more people talking about it. Hearing everyone’s stories was inspiring and made me want to improve work cultures.

Tech and startup culture, in general, is something I am super interested in and not just from the perspective of product managers. I read a book last year: Bad Blood which is about Elizabeth Holmes and the company Theranos. That book kick-started my whole toxicity project. It helped me understand the workplace I was at and what makes a good culture and what doesn’t make a good culture. How companies acknowledge and address issues and how conflict is critical to their culture. A coworker suggested we read Thanks for the Feedback, which is the art and science of receiving feedback. I think it is a very common thing faced by product managers: you are taking inputs and coordinating with so many people, that you’re bound to give and receive a lot of feedback. I think teams that I have been on with conflict issues, were usually a direct result of feedback issues. How people give feedback, receive feedback, and the content of it can vary greatly between people, and a difference in processing it all can cause conflict. That book has changed my perspective on how to approach problems, how I talk to people, and how I present my feedback to others. I want everyone to read it!

One other book I read last year for school was The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly. He is a partner at IDEO — so very design focused. It is an interesting book for anyone dealing with products because it talks about the different ways they did brainstorming, how they iterated on designs and how they worked with customers.

What is exciting about the product you are working on now?

I work at Auctane. Under Auctane we have multiple shipping solution brands, which are ShipStation, ShippingEasy, ShipWorks and ShipEngine.This space has a ton of room for growth and opportunity which is exactly what I was looking for in my career as I shared in my earlier answer.

As you may know with covid-19 this past year, the shipping industry has accelerated as more merchants ship more volume via e-commerce orders. We want to help our merchants, who are shipping their products around the globe, to grow and succeed. Our software platforms help them do this by being a central place for their shipping needs, such as importing orders to a centralized portal, printing shipping labels, and tracking inventory.

I work on the platform team, focusing on logistics and inventory initiatives for our suite of brands. I’m working on logistics solutions for customers who may ship products themselves and also connect to existing warehouse providers to ship their products. Outsourcing fulfillment to a warehouse can save a merchant valuable time that they could be using to grow their business and can make their processes more efficient. So as these merchants are having some of the busiest years for their e-commerce businesses, I get to help improve their experience as they grow. And our products are growing along with them, which is pretty cool.

Our tagline is: Wherever you sell, however you ship, exceptionally efficient. We are trying to make the whole process more and more efficient. It is problem solving. How do we make it the most cost efficient? How do we make it better for merchants who have their own unique way of using our product? So that leaves a lot of exciting things for us to work on.

What is your biggest product challenge currently?

We have a lot of typical product challenges, but I think our biggest one now is of all of these great choices, what do we build first? It is really a product prioritization issue. Because of the pandemic, e-commerce sales have just increased tremendously. It was a big industry already, but I feel like the pandemic fast-forwarded the e-commerce industry to where we would have been three or four years from now. So we are in a position where things moved quicker than we originally planned. People are shipping at different volumes than we originally planned for. We have a lot of awesome things that we want to build to support the market, especially as our merchants are growing so fast. So there is a big challenge of prioritizing what incremental value we can rapidly add for merchants and partners to take advantage of the current market opportunity, while also building towards a longer term roadmap strategy.

And we have a lot of partners to build integrations for: marketplaces, different carriers and postal services, companies that keep track of inventory. So being able to build a scalable solution while keeping these unique integrations in mind has been an interesting challenge as well.

How might we build a stronger product community in Austin?

I will start by saying that Product Job Club has been a super great support group. It was really nice to have a small group where I could talk to people especially as I was going through multiple job transitions. I have gone to meetups and I like them for certain things, but I was not getting out of them the type of connection you have with a small group. And I have stayed part of the group even though my cohort has completed because it has been so helpful.

I am curious how we can expand more of these small group interactions so that you meet more people but in a smaller setting. You are able to grow those connections where it does not feel awkward. There is a little structure and that helps. Sometimes it is easier to do things like that than build connections with folks in a big meetup.

Last question, what is your favorite product?

One of my favorite products right now is Fitbit both the hardware and the app. I love competition. I love friends. So I love friendly competition and gamifying things and data. And Fitbit is such a cool encapsulation of all those things. I track my movement, my sleep my exercise, my energy, and I love to see different trends. When I am sick, my heart rate goes higher. Or when I sleep different amounts, I can tell my energy is different throughout the day. I like to draw my personal conclusions from that data. It is very interesting for me to look at all that information about myself to help me feel better and be more energized. And it is also fun that my partner has a Fitbit and we try to beat each other in the number of steps we take each day and stuff like that. So it is just a cool product that does a lot of different things well that I enjoy using.

Thank you, Becca!

Austin VOP is an interview series with current and future product leaders to build a stronger product community in Austin. Please like, share and tweet this article if you enjoyed it.

Don’t miss the next interview — sign up for the Austin VOP newsletter.

--

--

I am passionate about building products and building community. PM by day and community builder at Austin Voice of Product: https://austinvop.com.