amanda.k
Community Manager
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3 min 25 sec read
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Alodia Picture.jpgAlodia Cano is a Lead Sr. Product Manager for Community, focusing on managing Khoros platform (our forum!) & Community capabilities. She’s been with Autodesk almost 5 years, and has learned the ins and outs with 2 different roles across 3 teams. Her tool of choice at to keep life organized? MURAL, which she uses almost every day to take notes, manage tasks, plan work, diagram ideas and workflows, document, collaborate, and so much more. 

 

 

Question: What degree did you graduate with, and how has it affected your career? Or, what education / training do you have that has helped with your role?

Alodia: I went to school to be a doctor but ended up interning at a radio station for a summer and felt like it was a better fit for my skills and interests. I decided to shift my career direction and worked in Media & Entertainment for several years. Working in broadcast, radio, and gaming, you have to be agile, a strong communicator, a creative problem solver, and understand the value of prioritization. As a Product Manager, these are foundational skills that has helped me manage a portfolio of products with a large and diverse customer base.

 

Question: How would you describe your role at Autodesk? What does a typical workday look like? Which skills and qualities are important to be successful in your role?

Alodia: Product Managers sit at the intersection of the business, user experience, and technology to represent the needs of the customer. When working with products that have so many kinds of customers (both internal and external) with different needs and priorities, my day is filled with prioritization discussions, looking at data and research to validate those priorities, aligning the team on those priorities, and documentation. Communication is central to everything I do – knowing how and what to communicate based on your audience. Asking the right questions, empathy, and uninhibited ideation have also been valuable.

 

 

Question: What do you find interesting about your role? What are the challenges? What do you find satisfying about your work? 

Alodia: I love solving problems, working with the team to identify possible solutions, and looking at data to see if it solved the problem. I like to approach everything like a science experiment – what’s the hypothesis, what tests can we run to validate it, how will we know if it solved the problem. What’s challenging is understanding qualitative and quantitative data and how to integrate those insights into the priorities. Sometimes quantitative data can suggest a feature is highly used, but it may not be because they like using it; it may be because it’s a workaround.

I once worked with a B2B product where the leadership team was adamant about keeping a feature that seemed duplicative of the search function. The analytics showed that it was one of the most used features. By looking at the customer’s whole journey, screen recordings of users interacting with the feature and interviews, it showed that they resorted to using it because search did not allow them to search by product ID. The team assumed customers would search by product names or terms, not by ID. However, based on the recordings and additional research, I validated that they would prefer to use search if it supported that use case.

 

 

Question: What advice would you give to a student who is interested in pursuing a role like yours? Is there anything that you would have done differently before you graduated to prepare for your role?

Alodia: Don’t underestimate the value of your soft skills. In this role, I always have to remember the people who use it. All the data in the world will not factor in the thoughts and various ways people work when using a product. Having empathy, building relationships, developing your story telling skills will make a huge difference in how you might factor those variables into your solutions.

 

 

Remember, @alodiac is happy to answer any questions or give more specific advice below! Let her know you've read her interview by giving a "like"!