Product manager at Look

Exactly just one year after I had been hired as manager of racing services, I was promoted sideways into the company’s product manager job. This was a brand new position within the organization for which, as you might have guessed, there was no figment of job description.

The only idea was that I would liaise between our various sales forces or distributors, and the company’s research and development department, in an effort to get the right products out of the production line.

This job wasn’t easy. Not only had the position to be created from scratch, but it was hard to make it work under Look founder Beyl’s autocratic rule. He was basically filtering everything that entered the research and development department and was quite dogmatic about what he wanted the future Look products to be.

I was trying to warn him against the impeding onslaught of Salomon and his slew of convenient products, but he would always temper my energetic bursts of passion with comments like “Salomon, Salomon, Salomon… That’s all you can say, but mark my words, Salomon is a giant with feet of clay and they’ll soon collapse!”

During all that time, Look was in the red and the company was reacting by putting out dubious products like the LK5, a plate binding requested by the French sales force that always had the ears of Mrs. Beyl and was wreaking havoc on any kind of long term, disciplined product development strategy.

I was pulling my hair out and was realizing what bad career choice I had made, especially in a spot like the town of Nevers that was planted smack in the middle of nowhere...