Career Background / Sharing Progress = Finding Solutions / Career Insights
Max Milhan is building more intentional roadmaps by sharing wins and progress, tightening the screws each week, to chart a better course. As the Lead Product Manager at remote fintech company Rhino, Max is on the front lines of helping property managers and renters alike build a better renting experience.
Max was a Finance major at the University of Colorado, where he assumed that your first job out of school would be adding the word “analyst” to whatever your major was.. Of his post graduate job offers, technology consulting and the array of experiences it offered seemed the most interesting.
He joined Perficient and became a certified scrum master. Embedded within a telecom company, Max helped them build software in a similar capacity to what he later learned was a Product Manager. Through his various projects, he helped teach software engineering companies how to adopt scrum (an agile software building methodology).
Next, he moved over to management consulting at RAS & Associates. After a few years he reflected back on his work and realized he had the most fun helping build software. When a friend mentioned that his startup ParkiFi was looking for someone with “agile” experience, Max jumped at the opportunity.
ParkiFi helped track, analyze, and fill open parking spaces using a combination of hardware and software tools. This was Max’s first taste of early stage startups and there were no billable hours in sight. The team built and embedded parking sensors into spaces that could detect a car above them, transmitted that data to a gateway with a cellular modem, which sent data to the cloud to provide parking lot operators a real-time view of their parking lots.
He managed an array of operational responsibilities and got plenty of up close product experience too. But ParkiFi eventually shut down and Max moved north to Boston.
Through a Boston Product Management group event at Drift, Max heard how PMs described their roles and it helped flip a switch in him to tell a better story about how to better position his experience. That community was hugely helpful to his Boston onboarding and he credits Adam Sigel for running Boston Product and Jake Cohen for getting him into the Slack group in the first place.
In Boston, he joined another early stage startup called Authess, building machine learning tools in the edtech space. It was his first true Product Manager experience where he got to do a bit of everything – product management, design, product delivery, QA & client services.
He lived in Brighton and rode the T to and from work for a couple years before moving to East Boston. He loved frequenting Cunard Tavern and Santarpio’s in the neighborhood if you ever find yourself over that way.
Next, Max moved to Dispatch, a software company for large enterprises that managed networks of service technicians. His first week on the job he nervously pulled his boss aside to let him know he thought there might have been a mistake. Dispatch’s customer support team was reading json logs and the account managers were writing SQL queries. Max couldn’t do either!
So every Friday his boss, Sam Robinson, would sit down with him next to a couple of drinks and dig into the code. Max learned to ship code into production and now, when a feature works great but the button placement is wrong, Max can just jump in and fix it himself.
Fintech & real estate were verticals that always appeared to Max because, on the side, he’s a small real estate investor. The thought of combining software and financial products for property managers and renters made a lot of sense. In lieu of placing a security deposit down,
Rhino helps make apartment moves and requirements like ahem, broker fees, ahem easier to handle financially. So instead of putting down a whole security deposit up front, you just pay a monthly fee for a financial product.
Max joined the company through a period of rapid growth. Starting from a vague goal of “making property managers happy & using the product more” to “move the activation rate from x% > y%”, he’s helped forge a strong partnership with analytics to measure everything they do. High performing product development is driving impact you can measure.
Max is responsible for the activation of business in their B2B(2C) model. He helps make it more turnkey for property managers to offer their financial products to more renters. He also helped Rhino identify a company that had a solution to handle traditional deposits; they ended up acquiring that company in January of 2023. Now, property managers have one place to satisfy a security deposit whether customers choose the insurance product or the traditional deposit / escrow product.
Sharing Progress = Finding Solutions
Max makes an intentional effort each week to share his personal and team’s progress in order to help source solutions to the problems his team is tackling. He has found that sharing updates is a critical exercise in a product management organization and even more important in a remote culture.
He shares what he and the engineers are working on publicly so peers across the company can provide input and course correct as needed.
He makes sure to share wins, misses, and any roadmap delays so that anyone else across the company can relay potential issues or information to help prioritize tradeoffs. Sharing wins builds momentum across teams. It makes goals feel more achievable and results in more wins. Sharing issues early allows you to make trade-offs in plans.
If it feels salesy to talk about accomplishments, Max shares that the best way to flip that script is to think “I want to highlight all the good work the engineers and designers are doing”.
As the week wraps up, Max reports out on the progress they’ve made, changes to their plans, and what actually happened. It only takes 15 minutes to send out a weekly update on their various pod Slack channels to keep visibility high and the messaging consistent.
Career Insights / Learnings
Decision Making Framework – “Inspired by Jeff Bezos’ Regret Minimization Framework I recalled when I thought about joining a startup for the first time, the offer was a little bit less than I was making and I didn’t know how to value the equity component. I made a pros and cons list of how to make it work. I asked friends for advice. I was so stuck on what to do. Finally, one friend stopped me and said ‘does this get you closer or farther to the work you want to be doing in 5 years? If it’s closer, you’ll make it work.’ That advice made my decision so much more clear. A lot of decisions that we think are analytical are actually emotional decisions.”
Accountability is a Conversation – “It’s ok to protect your team. But you need to take responsibility and hold your team accountable for results too. If you are doing someone else’s work, it will keep you from scaling your impact. It’s ok to hold your peers accountable. Not in a mean way but in a radical candor kind of way – what is preventing your success, what scope can we cut, what can we take off your plate to make you more successful. It’s hard for conflict avoidant people but very necessary in a high performing team.”
Notch Your Wins – “Keep a victory notes files, whether it’s client feedback or a good review, and keep them in a file somewhere in the cloud, not on your work machine. Any time you have success, put it in there. It makes it easy to fill out performance reviews and is a great place to refer back to when you’re feeling imposter syndrome.”
Being Your Fun Self – “Usually at a new job it takes me a couple months to let down my professional facade. But, one day, inevitably a weird quirk of mine will show itself and people are overwhelmingly relieved to know that I’m another weird human trying to figure it out at work. If we all put on professional facade, we’re missing out on genuine connections at work.”
What does Max want to achieve in his career? Happiness. One day it might look like leading a large product team at a growing software unicorn. Or it could be owning a little software company in an important niche that employs 10 people. Either way, Max is continuing to tackle hard problems that need creative solutions.
If you want to learn more about Max, you can find him on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. Excited to see all the great work you continue to produce and products you help shape in the quarters and years ahead, notching wins and sharing updates along the way!