Upside Career Growth & Development

Tell us about your recent promotion or role change. 

I started at Upside in 2020 as a chief of staff for Wayne Lin, a role that gave me broad visibility into the company’s strategy, product and cross-functional teams. I learned about the unique challenge of growing a two-sided marketplace business and collaborated with teammates across product, operations, sales and marketing to drive forward complex initiatives.

After 2.5 years, I transitioned to a product manager role, where I had the opportunity to go deep rather than broad and have a more direct hand in delivering value for consumers and retailers.

And over the last 1.5 years, I’ve worked on the technical integrations and UX to power our Pay with Upside feature, as well as a major redesign that gives users more choice in how they earn their cash back. This work led to my recent promotion to senior product manager focusing on our entire discovery experience.

What will this new role or skill let you do? 

My transition to product management has been full of learning — how to ensure the products we build support our company strategy, the technology we use (and its limitations) in order to work effectively with engineering and how to rigorously prioritize based on goals, capacity and projected impact.

Stepping into a senior PM role means I’ll have a bigger playground on which to play! I’ll rely on the collaboration, communication and execution skills I’ve already developed to begin influencing the strategic direction of our discovery experience and our consumer app overall. I’m particularly excited by the challenge of building discovery features capable of adapting to each user’s unique situation: their preferences, their habits and the specific offers around them.

How would you describe the culture of internal mobility and upskilling?  

My career at Upside is a testament to its strong culture of supporting internal mobility. When I first expressed interest in transitioning out of chief of staff, my former manager suggested product management to me! Despite my hesitation (read: imposter syndrome), he assured me that if it wasn’t the right fit, we would find something else. That gave me all the confidence I needed to take the leap knowing I’d be supported every step of the way — and I was! I am endlessly grateful to my former manager, my fellow PMs and my engineering and design partners, all of whom had a hand in showing me what it looks like to be a great PM.

If you earn the trust of those around you through high performance, the sky’s the limit! I’ve seen coworkers transition from sales to accounts, from analytics to product, from strategy to marketing and more. In some cases, we have even created brand new roles to facilitate an internal transition. Upside genuinely invests in helping people grow, whether that’s through internal training, mentorship programs or simply fostering an environment where people feel empowered to explore new career paths.