In a world filled with opportunities, the A Day In The Life Series is here to shine a light on the many different career paths you can pursue, with sage advice from amazing women who are doing the work! Throughout the series, we’ll hear from women in many different roles across many different industries with one major thing in common - a desire to help you win with whichever path you pursue.

In today’s A Day In The Life segment, we had the privilege of connecting with Brittany Nicole Crosby, Product Manager, Google Health (Care Studio), to talk more about the life of a product manager. Check out our conversation below!

Tell us about yourself.

I'm a connector. I enjoy driving business relationships/organizational needs and creating structure out of chaos. While the majority of my career has been in the Health IT industry (outside of a brief stint where I joined a startup that focused on enhancing customer service experiences through AI-driven chatbots), I've changed roles several times throughout my 14 years in the industry -- including 2 changes just last year. In my current role, I am a product manager for our Care Studio tool, working at Google Health. Outside of work, I'm a poet and an escape room enthusiast. I've completed over 40 escape rooms around the country, and I'm in the process of designing my first room with my husband.

How would you explain your job to an 8-year-old?

In my role, I am responsible for aligning the needs of our users, who are mainly doctors and nurses, with the requirements for our business goals. I work with a team of doctors, nurses, engineers, designers, program managers, researchers, and market/business experts (and more!) to identify priorities, mitigate risks, and establish requirements for our product. We want to build a tool that exceeds expectations for our users, those doctors and nurses who want a more integrated, organized view of their patients' health records so they can use this information to provide better care.

Tell us more about your career journey.

While Product Management is now widely known as a career path, it wasn't something I was aware of when I started my journey. Originally, my goal was to become a physician, which was inspired by my older brother, James. James passed away in 2007, when he was just 23 years old. He was born with sickle cell anemia. As a kid, I remember road trips around New Jersey where my mom would take all three of us kids to James' appointments and being so grateful for the care that my brother received from his entire clinical care team. And while I knew there wasn't anything I could do to change the situation for my brother, I wanted to pay it forward by going into medicine.

I graduated from Dartmouth as a pre-med student, and thanks to great mentors, I felt confident about starting that path -- until I had my loan conversation when it came time to graduate. As a first gen student, I didn't really know how to navigate the financial part of college. And when I thought about the cost of med school on top of it, I decided it would be best to work for a few years and then continue my studies.

I also graduated during a recession, so I wasn't going to be picky about what I did -- I just wanted someone to hire me! Luckily, I landed a job at Epic, right around the time of the HITECH act, when electronic health records were just starting to take off. And it set off a career journey and passion that's been driving me since. On a personal note, back to my childhood, I saw what a burden it was to navigate through the US healthcare system. My mom was responsible for all the care coordination for my brother, often while she was working two jobs. She scheduled appointments, remembered all parts of his (paper) medical record, and made sure James received the prescriptions he needed and knew what/how to take them. And then, on top of that, the bills! When I worked at Epic, I saw this from a different view. As an implementation specialist, I saw the end-to-end process of a patient entering the health system, from scheduling to clinical care to billing. And we worked with large, cross-functional teams to launch electronic health records across the globe. Through my time at Epic, I traveled to health systems in 40 different states to support these EHR go-lives. I also traveled internationally to support a handful of Epic's "first-in-country" go-lives in Denmark, the UK, the UAE, and Australia. It was a great opportunity to learn about healthcare delivery in other parts of the world.

After my 7 years at Epic, I decided to leave the healthcare industry and Wisconsin to join a chatbot startup in Austin, TX. But I realized fairly quickly that my heart belonged in health IT. I was consulting for a few years on EHR projects and physician optimization programs before one of my friends reached out to tell me about roles at Google. She was on the Cloud team and put a referral in for me as a program manager. I was rejected during my first attempt to get into Google, despite all the coaching my friend provided. That said, I was really happy in my consulting role and picked up a contract in London. That ended up being lucky because I also met my husband at that time. My friend urged me to reapply to Google, and it was also great timing. Google had started ramping up their focus on health and they were working on a project that organized information across the longitudinal health record -- my dream role. They needed a program manager, and I joined as a UX program manager before moving into a front-end/features program manager. About a year ago, I worked with both my mentors and sponsors to start a Product Management rotation. There's a good amount of overlap between program and product skills, but they are still very different roles and responsibilities. However, with my role changes, I remained on the same team, supporting our Care Studio product.

What are your main responsibilities in this role?

- Analyzing and synthesizing the customer and marketing perspective with our user experience and technical capabilities - this translates into making sure our design and engineering teams are equipped to deliver on our shared vision

- Alignment across the organization: discussions with our executive team as well as other cross-functional partners on our priorities and progress

- Customer relationships - understand requirements and requests

What does a typical day look like?

I try to split my day between collaboration time and deep work time. I'm not always successful here, especially because things come up that I need to react to. But throughout the week, I tend to keep Mondays and Fridays light on meetings and use Tues/Wed/Thurs for cross-team collaboration. I work on a distributed team with colleagues across the US and also in London and Tel Aviv. My customers (right now) are mainly in the US. Throughout my day, I'm usually interacting with my customers or my core team. I'm working with both managers and individual contributors across different roles (other product managers, engineering, design, business development, marketing, research, program managers, legal, clinical safety, privacy, etc.).

I spend a good amount of my day learning, influencing, and documenting.

What do you enjoy most about the job?

I admire and enjoy the people I work with, both internally and externally. We are working on difficult problems and we want to make a difference. Being part of a talented, passionate team who is optimistic while grounded keeps me motivated.

I'm also grateful to our users, the clinicians who are the backbone. I'm deeply familiar with the harrowing stories and statistics around clinician burnout. I don't make any decisions without a clinical voice. My goal is to support, in any way I can from the technology side, tools that bring back the joy to medicine. I've had my own health issues and I've shared my brother's story - at some point, we are all patients. And I'm in awe of our clinicians and what they are able to achieve. For me, on the product side, my #1 job is listening to them and their needs.

What would you consider the most challenging aspect of the job?

Not specific to product management, but it is exacerbated by my somewhat recent role switch: Imposter syndrome! It's not always clear when I'm doing a good job. It's clear when I mess up, for sure, but it's challenging to know if I'm doing the right thing. Some of the bets you're making today will pan out and others will fizzle. You're constantly operating with partial information. I enjoy this part of the role and realize it is part of the growth, but I do have a lingering feeling of "Am I being useful? Is this the right thing to do?"

I'm sometimes asked to compare program management to product management. To me, program management feels like chess. It's challenging, takes a particular skill set, and there are so many different permutations to the game. However, you are dealing with complete information. To compare, Product Management feels like poker. You're reading the room, you're dealing with incomplete info, and you hope you've played your cards right!

What would you say are the top 3-5 skills needed to succeed in your role?

-Influencing without authority - despite what you heard about Product Managers being the "mini-CEO", I have absolutely no authority over anyone on my team or adjacent teams. It's a constant flow of managing requests and prioritization. Google culture is also very bottoms-up, which has its benefits for creativity and collaboration, but it also means you're spending time convincing people of the why. And as a data-driven company, this is done with numbers. Which leads me to my next point...

-Storytelling with data - data is useful but not very memorable. People remember stories. To do this well, you need a narrative with your numbers. Give people a reason to care. Give them something they can debate and react to. Balance the logos with the pathos and ethos.

-Research - as a product manager, I'm constantly placing bets on what I think will happen next. I am not a prognosticator so I'm relying on evidence across different sources to make judgements about where I think the market will go, balanced with what users want. Having strong research skills can help refine what comes from your intuition. And, like any good scientist, when you get new evidence that refutes your initial hypothesis, then you change direction.

-Project management - I'm biased here because a significant portion of my career has been in project management and it's absolutely helpful as a product manager now. As a product manager, I'm producing roadmaps, flagging risks, and understanding constraints. Having this level of organization becomes critical as I need to negotiate to move the product forward.

Recommended but not necessarily required: Domain expertise and technical background. Depending on the maturity of your product and the existing strengths of your teams, there are different flavors of product managers needed. Sometimes, someone with a strong business angle is helpful, other times, you want someone who is deep into the technical design or the user experience. You'll need to be at least fluent in all of these areas, especially with software development cycle and best practices, but not necessarily an expert. So, whatever your background is, it's more of a matching game for your ideal product.

What advice can you give someone who is looking to pursue a career as a Product Manager?

As mentioned, product management (as we know it today) is a relatively new field, which is exciting. One piece of advice I was given was "have strong opinions held loosely". I'd recommend developing your point of view of the products you use (or choose not to use) today - what's working for them? What's not? What would you change? These thought exercises are helpful.

As far as getting into the role, there are a few paths. I've had friends who get their MBA and start through a PM internship before later joining a company as a PM. Others move into it from an adjacent role (Engineers, Designer, Program manager), like I did. Others get into a part time role or join a startup where they realize a defined product role is needed. There are many paths to do it. I'd recommend creating relationships in the industry you want to be in and keeping an eye on the Careers page.

Thanks for tuning into the A Day in the Life Series! Be sure to check out the other segments for a glimpse into other roles you may be interested in pursuing.