TL;DR (you should!)
🏢 In 2020, I was fascinated with the banking world, mergers and acquisitions, and finance. I started applying to banking jobs in London - where I eventually secured an internship spot for summer 2021.
🤨 Even though I liked certain aspects of the job, banking made me realize what my priorities were. On top of that, I learned three main career pillars that I still carry with me today: politics, managing expectations, and communication.
🤯 I ended up rejecting the return offer I had at the bank (80k+) without a clear career plan. Mentors and friends helped me during that difficult period.
🚀 I discovered Product Management. I kept focusing on building my profile and "doing stuff," like creating a no-code MVP for a friend's startup idea - leading to where I am today.
Know yourself
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu
"And with this offer, we would like you to be part of our new analyst class for next year." It was September 2021 when I heard back from the recruiter at the Investment Bank where I worked during the summer. They were offering me a great position - the possibility of finally breaking into one of the most sought-after grad-placement schemes: a spot in the new Investment Banking Analyst class for next year.
Back then, it was quite tempting. It seemed that all my efforts during those summer months (and years of studies) would have finally been repaid. I was envied a lot by my peers, and everything seemed to be paving the way for a rapid, growing, and exciting career in banking - in Europe's finance (!) holy grail place: London.
However, something really did not feel right. The more I reflected on how far I had come, the more I thought that being an analyst was not necessarily the right role for me - with the backing of my peers and one of my mentors, who was not against the idea of me grinding my way out of Excel formulas and PowerPoint presentations.
Breaking in
All of that actually started a while back. It was September 2020, and in order to graduate, my master's program required me to do an internship abroad - meaning in any country other than Italy, where I was studying.
And so, the application journey began, chasing opportunity after opportunity in Europe. At the beginning, I must admit I was not particularly fond of banking in general. However, peer pressure, a relentless willingness to apply to any summer internship available, and an explicit reluctance to try anything consulting-related pushed me in that direction with some success.
Do not get me wrong though, banking is a great career path. Probably one of the most prestigious and financially rewarding options a business graduate could pursue straight out of school. You get to meet incredibly talented people and expose yourself to C-level executives which, as a 25-ish-year-old, you would (probably) never meet otherwise.
Anyway, after a bunch of application questionnaires, countless rejection emails, and unanswered applications, I managed to get a chance to interview for one of the prestigious Investment Banks in London. I finally was in the game, ready to show everybody my STAR (Situation, Task, Achievement, Result) prepared answers and my valuation skills.
It did not take me too long to figure things out, and faster than I thought, I was offered a spot in the internship program, which, if successful, would have granted me a passepartout for my banking journey.
Learning, learning
And so it began. Summer 2021, my first experience working abroad. I rapidly fell in love with London and the thousands of opportunities it offers. Less so with the weather, which during those months had not been particularly favorable to me.
Thinking back, banking for me has been an accelerated learning moment where most of the things I saw there helped me later in my career. I consider it the foundational ground for my next steps, and even though I later decided not to proceed down that path, it allowed me to bring home some precious learnings that I still carry with me today.
First, politics. There's a famous quote that goes more or less like "just because you don't care about politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." Well, guess what, that applies in your job as well. Politics is really everywhere, and luckily for me, I got an incredible opportunity to learn its importance from the get-go. As an intern in a big bank, there is not much you can do. Attending calls and taking notes are among the most common tasks you perform on a daily basis. However, those occasions gave me the possibility to sit down and observe how people interacted if a certain stakeholder was present or not. Needless to say, behaviors changed, and so did interactions, based on the incentives and hierarchies at stake.
Second, managing expectations. Expectations are everything, and making sure to manage them with stakeholders is probably one of the key aspects of any career - especially in banking where everyone fights very hard for their few hours of sleep. This became very evident once I started working on tasks that my analyst delegated to me. It happened once that I had been told to prepare a presentation by next Thursday. With diligence, I started crunching the numbers. After a few hours, I was ready. It was Friday. "I think I am ready to send this," I told my senior colleague. His answer amazed me: "Mauro, this does not go out before Tuesday, even if we are ready now."
Third, communication. It may sound pedantic or obvious, but being able to communicate effectively makes the most of any situation. Throughout my experience at the bank, but also today in my role, communication has been key to the success of any interaction I have had. Being able to articulate a concept and break it down into smaller pieces is something that not everyone can do. And that's what I learned as well in my banking experience: crisp, solid sentences make the most impact in the messaging you want to convey.
Fourth, resilience. Needless to say, banking has taught me a great deal of endurance and discipline. No matter how difficult or repetitive the task was, I learned to sit down and ruthlessly execute. No excuses, no walking away, despite my aspirations of changing the world.
Keeping it true
But learning is just part of the game, and if I can now sit writing this long-form piece, it's because I believe I have stayed true to myself. What I mean by this is that I believe I had the courage to think that banking was not effectively my piece of cake, despite my initial aspirations and peer pressure.
True, being an analyst could have taken me quite far in my career. It could have opened up many doors in various industries and well-paying jobs. However, its values and lifestyle did not fundamentally align with my professional, and most importantly, personal aspirations.
This became particularly clear to me during the first feedback round in the midst of the internship. One of the key feedback points I received revolved around the idea that I was supposedly asking "too many questions, just because I wanted to appear." I remained quite perplexed; I did not understand. From my point of view, this was not really the case, as the various questions asked were truly a way for me to learn the job and figure out if I wanted to pursue it long-term. The underlying message was pretty clear though: do not mess around and execute your task. Full stop. Funny enough, as I changed my attitude from "proactive" to "mind your own business," the feedback at the end of the internship improved exponentially. Red flag.
Hierarchies. Before starting, I could have barely imagined the amount of hierarchy and political savviness one would have encountered in such an environment. Analysts, senior analysts, associates, vice-presidents... Hitting reality made me realize how little of that fit my personality. And how much I wanted to strive for impact and responsibility, rather than a certain title or doing the grunt work for a couple of years to then climb up the ladder.
Among all of this, what made the cut for me was the (in)famous work-life balance aspect. We all know how bad it is, and how stressful the job of a banker can be. If you don't, read here. However, working long hours did not really bother me that much, given that it was only for a limited time span (a summer) with a very concrete goal (getting the return offer). It made me worried for the longer term though, as its implications for my loved ones, my family, and my health would have been disastrous.
The way I see it is that in banking, there is really almost never the opportunity to switch off and forget about work. Work becomes your life, and as such, you are expected to clock back in whenever it is required. Going for a run? Better not go too far away, as you might need to work. Planning some activities during the weekend? Think about it twice and always carry your work laptop with you, as the bomb might explode and the "pls fix" with it. I realized that the price of being constantly on was simply too high, and I took steps in another direction.
What else?
It was not easy though. Even if I was quite certain that banking was not really my cup of tea, I remember the period after the internship as one of the most stressful ones of my entire existence. See: I had invested the previous year in picturing myself crunching excel and powerpoints. I even got a return offer. Why the hell was I then so uncertain about going back to that role? Couldn't I have just accepted my fate as it seemed I was pretty good at what I was doing? I did not have peace, and I remember contemplating the idea at a certain point of even pausing my studies and going to work for a startup in Berlin. Just to further validate if banking was really not what I wanted to do.
It was in that precise instance though that mentors and friends really helped me figure out what I could do next. And if I were to give you a piece of advice, it would be to build a solid circle of "advisors" whom you can count on. In my case, it really helped me to discover new jobs and get the right confidence infusion I needed to make that path change.
I discovered what "Product" is quite randomly. One night, I was spending some time out in Milan with friends from the university association I was part of. Between one beer and the other, we started chatting about what we were doing and wanted to do next. "I build digital things," my friend said. "But are you an engineer or what?" I replied sarcastically. "Not really, but I work with them to figure out what we should build." It did not really take much more than those words to convince me that the guy was really working on something cool, something that involved an interdisciplinary set of skills that would have allowed me to unleash my passion for technology, which had been dormant. "I am a Product Manager."
The spell was cast. I started to devour all the content on LinkedIn, trying to figure out what this was all about and, most importantly, if I could do it. If I, a business student, could effectively join the mission of building delightful digital experiences with very little coding experience. And mentors here came in as fundamental. Between the months I decided to reject the return offer at the bank (a 70k+ entry-level offer) and landing my first product internship, it was hard. I had zero certainty that what I had in mind could become a reality, with good peace of my imposter syndrome. Mentors helped though. They kept reassuring me that Product Management, as I had learned from my friend, could be a very rewarding and great career and that I did not necessarily need a Computer Science degree to break in.
And so I started to execute, little by little. Among the dozens of pieces of advice I had received back then from established PMs during my endless networking sessions, one stood out particularly for me. "Mauro, if you want to be a PM, do something. Queries, code, whatever. But do something." And I did. My first "real" product experience was helping out a friend with his startup idea. Again, we sat down and executed. I learned quickly the concept of an MVP and discovered the magical world of no-code tools, which we used to design and fully implement a marketplace for private flights in Italy. In parallel, I was ramping up my knowledge of engineering software systems while getting confidence infusions every now and then from my mentors, who always believed I could do it and made me accountable for the choices I made.
And luckily enough, in June 2022, I landed my first product role, managing backlogs and delivering features in the best way I could. Without knowing exactly what I was doing, but with the certainty that I was going in the right direction.
