Our people are core to who we are. With a year spent at Artium comes a brief reflection of the path to craft, successes along the way, and how to continue to learn and grow. Today we sit down with Tyler Holland, a product manager, to discuss his path to product, empowering teams and organizations, and learning through doing. 

What is your craft? What brought you to it?
I am a product manager at Artium. I started my career as an application developer, but ultimately, I found myself as the point person on every project that I worked on; acting as sort of the nerve center between the various stakeholders and not just writing code but shaping the vision for the products I helped create. I enjoyed that role and made the switch to become a product manager. I’m naturally more drawn to understanding the context of what's going on with the business and navigating product decisions to suit, helping to align the interested parties on a vision, and leveraging my experience as a developer to collaborate with engineers on the best path to delivery.

What are you most proud of from your past year?
This year it was taking a step beyond the delivery of a single product, which is typically how I have been engaged, to coordinating multiple tracks of work with a rather large team on Starz in the quickly evolving field of data pipelines and analytics. After a successful initial project launch, the client asked me to expand into a hybrid product / program manager role, working with stakeholders from a cross-section of the international streaming giant, and empowering a team of more than a dozen engineers to execute on high-availability data enablement and cloud infrastructure migration. It took a lot of juggling to align the sights of a dynamic organization, but it was an experience that left me feeling prepared for exciting new horizons.

How do you keep learning / refining your craft?
I spend most of my time just doing it. Lately I’ve had time to read more of the perspectives making an impact in our industry and absorb their thoughts about how to approach product, drive team success, practice continuous discovery habits, etc. We have a great reading list shared among our product team. But primarily my development in the craft has been driven by hands-on delivery with the benefit of working alongside other thoughtful teammates.