How TpT’s Emma Hong Is Making an Impact as a Product Marketing Manager
Emma Hong spent the first year and a half of the pandemic in Singapore.
A worldwide lockdown certainly wasn’t what she had in mind when she decided to move there in 2019 to gain international work experience as part of the Associate Product Marketing Manager (APMM) program at Google.
“It was like an island bubble. Things were pretty safe, but I just couldn’t go anywhere,” she says, laughing.
After two and a half years in Singapore, and four in total at Google, Emma was ready to make some changes. She wanted to move back to the U.S. to be closer to friends and family, and she wanted to join a company where she could make a greater social impact.
“I‘m interested in the intersection of technology and applying that to social problems or social issues,” she explains.
Enter Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT), the go-to platform created by teachers, for teachers to access the community, content, and tools they need to teach at their best, where Emma has worked since September 2021.
We sat down with Emma to learn more about her path to EdTech and how she’s able to make an impact as a product marketing manager (PMM), and to get her advice for others looking to join the TpT product marketing team.
Making an Impact in EdTech
At Google, Emma often worked on one very specific aspect of a product, such as consumer insights. When she would come up with an idea she’d like to test, she would often wonder, “Has someone already done this?”
“And at a large company,” she says with a laugh, “that answer is often yes.”
So after four years, Emma felt ready to find an organization where she could make a bigger impact, not only in a social sense, but in terms of her contributions as well.
She’s found both at TpT.
As a product marketing manager at TpT, Emma is responsible for a whole host of PMM responsibilities, from go-to-market strategies for new feature launches, to positioning, competitor research, and consumer insights.
“It’s been a wide range of things,” she says. "And people are pretty open to changing aspects of the product and adjusting roadmaps when these opportunities can have a positive impact on the business, which inspires me knowing I can have a stronger influence and my ideas matter for the team.”
Having this kind of end-to-end influence on a product aligns well with Emma’s can-do approach to work. “If I see a problem, I always ask, what am I personally going to do to help solve that? Even if nobody's specifically asking me to do that, or if it's not specifically in my scope of work.”
Currently, she’s focused on TpT’s School Access subscription product, which has enabled her to create the kind of social impact she was seeking.
“Previously,” Emma explains, “teachers had to pay out of pocket for products and resources they needed for their classrooms. So TpT built a B2B school product so that you sell directly to schools, and they can offer these resources to teachers.” So far, TpT School Access has reached thousands of schools and has provided resources for educators across the country. The TpT School Access product continues to grow each year, and the team is excited to continue meeting the needs of educators as it scales.
3 Tips for Potential PMMs
Emma’s team at TpT is growing, and she shared a few pieces of advice for those looking to join the supportive and dynamic team.
- Be open to change and ambiguity: Knowing how to navigate change quickly and “being able to apply some sort of structure to navigate that change” is essential as a PMM. Being able to highlight past experiences where you’ve successfully dealt with ambiguity can help set you apart as a candidate.
- Embrace collaboration: Working collaboratively and cross-functionally is a key part of the job, and candidates should be prepared to demonstrate that they can excel in a collaborative culture. (Luckily, TpT’s culture promotes regular collaboration opportunities, both within your team and cross-functionally.) “Everyone's easy to get along with and super helpful. There's good rapport and a sense of humor,” says Emma.
- Show how you connect to the mission: Emma didn’t have formal experience with EdTech prior to joining TpT, and she believes it isn’t necessarily essential for others looking to join. Ultimately, the team wants to know more about how the mission resonates with you. “I think people love personal anecdotes,” says Emma. “Everyone's had impactful teachers in their lives, and that can help explain why this work is important to you.”
Understanding the issues affecting schools currently can also be useful. “A lot of the discussions at the company are around staff shortages in schools, learning loss among students, how schools recover from the pandemic, social emotional learning, and student mental health. So showing an interest in those kinds of topics, and some fluency there would also help.”
Interested in making an impact in the lives of teachers—and students—at TpT? Learn more about their open roles here.
How This Product Manager Prototypes Her Own Career: Insight from Teachers Pay Teachers’ Brooke Henderer
Prototypes are to product managers what decks are to consultants.
They're a way to showcase one vision of the future—to give people an opportunity to experience it and to decide whether to pursue it.
As a senior product manager at education marketplace Teachers Pay Teachers, Brooke Henderer is quite familiar with the practice. She's made dozens of prototypes for different work projects over the years.
Recently, she's started to think about her own life as a series of prototypes, of different future options that she's explored and that have taught her what it is she really wants to pursue.
We sat down with Brooke to hear about how she got into product management, how she's applied her PM skillset to understanding what it is she wants to do with her life, and what advice she has for people who are looking to do some self-discovery and self-prototyping of their own.
A three-part framework
Brooke tried a lot of things in college. "I was definitely one of those people who did not know what they wanted to do," she says. "I had such broad interests that it was really hard for me to narrow them down."
She took classes that interested her, from chemistry to economics, and applied the same approach to her extracurricular activities, exploring everything from jobs in retail and customer service to internships in sales. "I really enjoyed getting to work with customers and helping people in some capacity," she says. She was particularly interested in tech—"It felt very future-proof," she notes—but realized that tech sales wasn't for her. "I didn't love the repetitive nature of being on the phone all day," she says. Becoming super-specialized wasn't appealing, either.
"I didn't want to be a craft developer because I don't know how to code. I'm not going to be a designer because I don't know how to design," she says. "I got really lucky stumbling upon product management, because it has the aspects of the customer-facing side of things I enjoy, and sales, but is also a mix of more creative and strategic work on different levels, and gets me exposure to a lot of different kinds of work throughout the day."
After getting her first PM job with Intuit from a career fair, Brooke stayed with that company for a while before looking for something new. When she set out to look for her next challenge, she had a clear framework in mind. Brooke was looking for:
- A mission she could connect to. "During my time at Intuit, I discovered that what ultimately motivates me and drives me is creating something for someone else and ideally creating a positive change for them. It was really important for me to know that whatever I was building or doing, it was something good for someone else," says Brooke.
- A smaller company. Brooke knew she wanted to work somewhere that wasn't so big that she wouldn't be able to be in the mix with different tasks each day. "There's something about doing something different every day and not having a lot of repetition that I really enjoy," she says. "And I'm comfortable with the rapid change and quick adaptation of smaller companies, because we're always building new products and we stay flexible to changes."
- A product roadmap that interested her. "I just knew that if it wasn't exciting on the surface, it probably wasn't gonna keep me there for long," says Brooke.
Teachers Pay Teachers met all of her criteria, and Brooke realized it was the place for her from her very first interview. "It really stuck out to me how clear the mission and strategy was, and how much love every single employee and leader had for educators," she says. "It was genuine."
She felt particularly drawn to TPT's mission. "Our strategy has to do with unlocking funds for educators so they don't have to reach into their own pockets to get the resources and tools they need. It's a really unique opportunity to work somewhere where the business goals align with doing something really good for customers," says Brooke.
Stepping back from a job to consider a life
After Brooke got her first product management role, she expected her questions about her career to abate. They didn't.
"Getting that first job was this big thing. Then you realize, 'Oh, this can grow, this can change, this doesn't have to be the single thing I do for the rest of my life.' So how do I make sure I'm still in a career I like, and that I'm figuring out how to hone in on my interests over time?" she reflects.
She started applying her product manager skill set to her own life.
A book called Designing Your Life helped, she says, by teaching her how to ask herself what she wanted out of life beyond her job. It led to her realizing that she really enjoyed building tangible things, so she decided to explore content creation.
After taking a film class and producing a short documentary, Brooke realized she wanted to stay in product, and credits her exploration with her renewed sense of commitment to and peace with her career decision.
"Going through that process, taking the film class, doing those things really proved to myself, 'Oh, there's actually not a whole lot of other things that really fit what I want,'" says Brooke.
"Because I was able to prototype those things and try them out, it helped me feel better about doubling down on staying in product. It made me feel more secure in the path I was choosing," says Brooke. "I learned other things I might like, but that might be better as hobbies for me."
6 tips for self-discovery at work and beyond
If you've wondered if you should blow up your life and start all over—and if you should, how exactly you're to begin that process—Brooke has some perspective for you. Spoiler alert: it's a gradual approach.
- First, recognize that there's no single right path for you. "There are many possible futures you can have, and they're all great," says Brooke. "The best thing you can do is just not to be afraid. Don't feel like you're stuck and can't try anything new."
- Try a "good time" journal. Keep an activity log of all of the things you do in a given day and note how much energy you get from them. "You could do it for a week or for a day," says Brooke. "I think you'll be surprised at what you learn about what fills you up. What type of things were you doing? What types of people were there? What role were you in? What sorts of things were there—computers, sticky notes, whiteboards?"
- Be more conscious of your schedule. Once you know what kinds of things drain you, Brooke suggests adjusting your schedule to better absorb them. For example, if she has a long day of draining meetings, she'll schedule some time to talk to a customer right afterwards, since those chats always give her energy. "Not everything in work is going to be perfect," says Brooke. "But as much as you can fill your bucket up with those things that give you energy, you can use that as a guide to help you figure out where you want to go."
- Carve out enough time for deep work. Even if meetings do bring you energy, too many of them will make you feel like you're unable to make progress on any longer-term goals or even to think about what your personal goals are. Make sure you're getting at least a few hours a week for heads-down work, notes Brooke.
- Set boundaries, including around breaks. To avoid the constant interruptions of Slack messages and emails, Brooke responds to them at certain times of day. She also has scheduled small breaks that she sticks to. "It's about actually standing up and stepping away from your computer," she says.
- Ask if you can shift enough within where you are to meet your needs, or if a bigger shift is needed. Sometimes it's enough to adjust smaller parts of your life, whether that's what your schedule looks like or even the company you work for, in order to feel more aligned with the things and activities that bring you energy. But sometimes it's not. "Long term, you need to think about changes you want to make," says Brooke. In that case, the same advice applies, just starting with a bigger scale. "Everything might not be clear just yet, but you'll figure it out as you go."
Learn more about Teachers Pay Teachers and their open roles.
Tech Meets Education: Watch Our Virtual Event with Teachers Pay Teachers
Teachers Pay Teachers and PowerToFly came together to discuss one of the most powerful tools in life: education. The PowerToFly team were joined by the leading marketplace for educational resources, Teachers Pay Teachers, and we dove into how tech is shaping the future of education, where engineering and education intersect, and how you can get involved.
Speakers from Teachers Pay Teachers included:
- Randi Gray, Senior IT Manager
- Jillian Silver, Tech Lead
- Linda Wang, Senior Product Marketing Manager
- Charlotte Weiskittel, Group Product Manager
- Danielle Leong, Data Engineer
- Michelle Cummings, Vice President of Content
Three Tips for Parenting in the Age of COVID
Parenting in the age of COVID has been a significant challenge -- as others have written, the Parents Are Not All Right. Even for families fortunate enough to have stayed healthy and relatively insulated from economic fallout from the virus, the impact on mental health, professional perceptions, and interpersonal relationships is considerable. In balancing my own responsibilities as a working mom and Senior Product Manager at Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT), I have had to make hard choices about what to prioritize in any given moment.
Fortunately, TpT has responded to this challenge by instituting a number of supportive policies for working parents, not least: increased flexibility around working hours, distributing responsibilities across the team where possible, and providing opportunities for group support through Slack and other remote means. Our work at Teachers Pay Teachers is more vital than ever as we help teachers across the country access resources to support distance learning -- and hopefully in the process, provide some relief to parents!
For other working parents struggling with the very real challenges of balancing parenting with professional responsibilities, I would offer a few suggestions:
First, communicate your challenges. When you've been an all-star employee but suddenly have trouble committing to anything more than the baseline, your team may not immediately understand the sudden "availability change" or be aware of everything that's happening behind the scenes. It's important for team members (particularly those without children) to understand that it's not a question of personal willpower or efficiency managing schedules. It's a mathematical impossibility. In our house, even with an extremely well behaved infant and my husband contributing as much as he can, the reality is that childcare is a full time job and there are simply not enough hours in the day to contribute in the same way. By proactively communicating with my team at TpT and emphasizing what I currently have capacity for given the circumstance, I know that I am doing what's best for my team, my family, and myself.
This too shall pass: know that this is temporary. The world has changed and it may not go back to normal for some time, but the current period of maximum social distancing won't last forever. It can be difficult to accept yielding to the demands of parenting over professional advancement in the short term. However, I've continued to remind myself that the current crisis is impermanent and that these tensions should abate somewhat when it is deemed safe enough to allow for childcare services to resume. Routinely carving out a couple of minutes a day to take care of myself and "hit reset" has been most helpful to keep this perspective top of mind. This can be anything from 5 minutes of breathing to 30 minutes of yoga (when I manage to squeeze it in, baby crawling underneath me and all!).
Keep moving forward. At the end of the day (which is often sometime in the late evening), I know I'm providing as much effort as I can for both our child and TpT. While it is impossible to strike the ideal balance in the current circumstances, I'm incredibly grateful for the support Teachers Pay Teachers (and my team in particular!) has provided. Our mission of unlocking the collective wisdom of teachers is more important than ever, and I couldn't be more grateful to be part of that effort -- before, during, and after this storm passes.
Until then, continue to maintain social distance, wash your hands frequently, and remember to go easy on yourself -- you're doing what you can, and that has to be enough!
