Ridgeline Waypoints: From Portfolio Manager to Product Manager

As I reflect on my first few months at Ridgeline, what initially seemed like another small step in my career feels more like the beginning of something entirely new. For those working in finance and considering a job in tech, this post is for you. My personal journey from portfolio management to product management was a long, winding road. I am thankful to have found a company that values my experience while providing tons of opportunities to learn. So I want to share my story, what I’ve learned during this transition, and ultimately help other industry folks decide whether to make the leap.

You’re Capable of More Than You Think

I started my finance career in 2007, almost by chance. I was working in construction, running a crew flipping houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. The investor I worked for smartly pulled up his reigns mid-2007, before the real estate bubble popped. I was out of a job and came across an opportunity to work at an investment company, mostly focused on administration and light accounting work. It wasn’t my first choice at the time, but given what followed, I feel fortunate that I took it.

I was out of my element, but I landed with an inviting crew of investment professionals. After a few years, I came to appreciate how inefficient finance was in general — full of manual, mundane processes for tasks like reconciliation, risk reporting, and analysis. My main focus was reconciliation, which consumed most of my week. It felt painfully inefficient, so I taught myself how to write macros in Excel. The result was that I automated myself out of a job, transforming a process that took about 40 hours a week down to an hour or two a day. I was hooked. I had a dream of working in trading and portfolio management, and automating this simple task paved the way.

Process automation was the first step toward totally reinventing myself, propelling me into quantitative finance, model building, and probability estimation. I was lucky to see the power of technology and automation early on — it gave me a huge leg up as a quant and kicked off a new chapter in my life. During my institutional finance career in San Francisco, I developed a strong understanding of the full trading lifecycle. I had the ability to easily context switch from trading to portfolio management to back-office and technical problems. I didn’t know exactly where this combination of skills would lead me, but I had a feeling I could help make firms more efficient.

So naturally, my next step was to start a consulting firm. Initially, I led projects to switch OMS or accounting platforms but quickly pivoted to building an OMS for equity long/short hedge funds. This also led me down the rabbit hole of cryptocurrency and blockchain, which I thought was the perfect combination of institutional finance and software development. The entire financial system was being reinvented for a singular asset class, and I saw an immense opportunity to gain an edge through quant modeling, machine learning, and building a software stack that rivaled what I had been accustomed to in traditional finance.

I thoroughly enjoyed these roles that straddled both finance in tech but found the tech side more aligned with my passions. I was raw and inexperienced in the VC landscape, sprint planning, engineering management, and prioritization of features. I compensated with grit and willingness to learn, just like I did during previous transitions. I had become expert at living outside my comfort zone — something all successful entrepreneurs learn how to do. Looking back, I found this to be one of the most important lessons in my career.

Aligning Passion With Opportunity

I recently pressed pause to figure out what was next. As I considered where I’d started and what I’d learned, I boiled down job criteria into four major requirements:

• I need to feel challenged and intellectually engaged.
• I have a passion for applying technology to operations and processes, and I want to continue getting better at this.
• I want to be able to dive into the weeds, learn systems, and sweat the details.
• I need a dynamic environment with ever-evolving challenges.

I’ve worked in finance for a long time, and while I’ve had roles that met one or two of the above criteria, it was apparent that if I wanted to meet all four, I needed to be working on finance software. I’d been a portfolio manager and trader long enough to be intimately familiar with the product landscape. I knew I could empathize with the day-to-day challenges in the front office. But I’m also motivated to fix foundational industry problems, which means building enterprise-grade, production-ready, scalable software. That’s not a solo project; I needed to find a team with extensive expertise building products for scale.

I distinctly remember the LinkedIn job alert for a product strategist role, in Incline Village, for a company building institutional tech in finance. I read the short description and thought to myself, “This can’t be true?! I know every order management system provider in the space, and there certainly isn’t one in Tahoe!” Clicking on the link, I was brought to the Ridgeline home page, referencing a name I knew well from my stock trading days: Dave Duffield. The PeopleSoft/Workday guy has a company in fintech? I was instantly intrigued. It didn’t take long to hear back, and I quickly began a two-month Zoom interview marathon while the rest of the world was shutting down. It was a difficult decision to leave finance. Still, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to dive into a SaaS tech company founded by the same guy who built two $10+ billion companies that totally changed their respective industries.

I have been at Ridgeline for about three months. I’m sharing everything I know about asset management and finance, but I’m learning just as much from the team. I didn’t quite know how I’d fit into the SaaS product management lifecycle; however, the team has been incredibly welcoming and encouraging. Ridgeline has a healthy mix of SaaS leaders and institutional finance professionals all working together toward a common goal — the betterment of asset management workflows using the best tech that 2020 has to offer.

The Difference Between Finance and Tech

Okay, that’s enough of my personal history. I want to focus now on what I’ve learned. If your background is in institutional finance, you’ve considered making the leap to tech, and you’re unsure how you may fit in, here are a few things to consider:

• Team first: My experience in institutional finance taught me that everything is a competition. In contrast, my experience at Ridgeline has been much more team-oriented. There will always be outliers, but in general, tech is more collaborative in nature.
• Process-oriented: Joining an enterprise tech startup has shed light on some of the internal processes that differentiate enterprise SaaS companies from institutional asset managers. New teammates need to feel comfortable with processes and procedures (mostly documentation of the “why”) that may not be prevalent at a small startup. This feels similar to my time in finance, given the heavy regulatory environment.
• Startup mentality: Yes, the startup I joined is growing and well funded, but it’s still a startup. That means all hands on deck, extra hours, and a willingness to tackle anything. If you’re working in institutional finance, you will appreciate the work ethic required to excel here, but that grinding is more collaborative and team-oriented.
• Culture: I assume our culture is similar to Apple or Google, and therefore much different from the finance shops I worked at in the past. Ridgeline puts a lot of emphasis on values, relationships, diversity, and inclusion. If you’re coming from finance, this is not the dog-eat-dog world you may be used to. If that’s your mentality, it’s going to be a tough fit.
• Passion for innovation: We are building a product from scratch. It’s a massive undertaking. A lot of the opportunity here focuses on WHY. Why do people do things in a certain way? Is there a better way to do it? We are not iterating; we are building from the ground up, and you need the courage to challenge the status quo.

All in all, I’m elated that my five-year journey from finance to tech led me to Ridgeline. While I occasionally miss the swagger of developing a quant model that times an uptrend perfectly, my experience in tech has been gratifying in a different way. We are building lightning-fast and moving mountains. My winding road from portfolio manager to product manager is complete, and I can’t wait to see where the next fork in the road takes me. I want to make myself available to anyone from industry considering a career path in product or tech (especially at Ridgeline). If you have questions I might be able to answer, or if you just want to hear more, please do reach out. Ridgeline is hiring now and will be for the foreseeable future.