What Camp Counseling Taught Me That I Still Use as a Product Manager 14 Years Later
The activities director had a whiteboard and about 30 minutes. He drew out the summer schedule: 3 sessions, 2 weeks each, 5 activities a day. 180 activity slots total. If you were the primary counselor for an all-day activity, you’d teach that lesson 30 times.
He let that math sit, then said: “You’ll be pumped on day one. By week four you’ll be running on fumes. But the campers showing up on week five? This is their first time. They deserve exactly what the week-one kids got.”
I was 17. I remember it to this day.
I spent 8 summers at Camp Marist in New Hampshire. First as a camper, then as staff. The last few summers, while my friends were doing internships, I was teaching dance choreographies and running color war. I started to worry I was wasting the time I should’ve been building a career. Looking back, I was getting the best firsthand training I could ask for.
My camp roommate, who now works as a climate change diplomat at a global non-profit, said it best when I visited him in London last year: “No one can tell me that’s not communication when, at 18, you have to talk down a panicked parent because their kid hasn’t written home in 2 days.” And: “Nothing teaches change management like being in charge of 20 kids when it starts pouring rain.”
Both true. But the thing I come back to most is that whiteboard session.
I’m almost 8 years into product. I’ve walked the same onboarding flows hundreds of times. I’ve run the same edge-case tests until I could do them half-asleep. I remember one testing session before a big release where, by run 30, I was speed-running the steps just to get through it.
And I could hear him.
The people hitting that product for the first time are experiencing it with fresh eyes. Maybe even excited. They don’t carry your 30 runs of context, your shortcuts, your assumptions about what’s obvious. They deserve the same level of care, energy, and attention you gave it on run one.
That’s the thing about PM work that’s easy to lose. You live in the numbers: MAU, conversion, activation rate... At Uber, I genuinely couldn’t picture how many trips were happening every minute. The scale makes abstraction feel necessary. A few thousand riders lost an item last weekend, you note it, you watch the trend. The percentage moves, not the people.
But there’s someone out there who can’t find their kid’s favorite toy. Or their friend’s phone from the night before. And the flow that’s supposed to help them is the one you can now do in your sleep. That’s when it’s easy to forget there’s a person on the other side of the metric. Someone who may be using your product for the first time, or the last time because you stopped caring. And forgetting is where bad products come from.
The thing I keep coming back to is a camp director in New Hampshire telling a group of teenagers that the kid showing up on week five deserves everything the week-one kids got. Because for them, it’s the first time.
