How I Overcame the Technical Gap as a PM at Holistics

October 1, 2025

When I joined Holistics back in the 2.0 era, it felt like I’d been dropped into the deep end of a data warehouse. Holistics is a proper business intelligence platform—ETL, modeling, SQL, dashboards, exports—the whole buffet. Our users were mostly analysts, the product was powerful and unapologetically technical, and even our public docs read like they were written for veteran data folks. Fun times for a fresh grad, right?

To add extra spice, I was PM number two. The first was our product lead. Everyone else was busy doing things, so onboarding was basically “here’s the product, holler if you get lost.” (Spoiler: I got lost a lot.)

The scramble to get up to speed

I tackled it the only way I knew how: inhale everything.

  • I read our public docs end to end—even the tricky bits at docs-v2.holistics.io.
  • I clicked through the product like a curious customer, breaking things and then asking engineers why those things behaved the way they did.
  • I binged support tickets, FullStory sessions, and every internal meeting I could sneak into.
  • Nights were for analytics blogs, ETL explainers, and figuring out which competitors (hello Metabase) were doing what.

Honestly? It was still slow going. The docs were dense, internal notes were thin, and my SQL chops were… let’s call them “aspirational.” I’d never touched ETL in my life. Even brand-new engineers needed time to grok Holistics, so you can imagine me frantically Googling acronyms during standups.

Where the gaps showed up

Knowledge gaps

  • Holistics spanned the whole data value chain, but the public docs were written for seasoned analysts—lots of jargon, few stories.
  • Internal documentation was scattered: loose bullet points, no single place to understand how pieces fit together.
  • With only two PMs, onboarding was mostly “ask around and hope someone has context,” so I spent a ton of time stitching knowledge together from meetings and Slack threads.

Skill gaps

  • I wasn’t technical in the Holistics context, so even good docs would still take ages to digest every detail.
  • My SQL knowledge and ETL experience were shaky at best—I knew almost nothing about ETL when I joined.
  • I didn’t have practice use cases or a demo dataset, so actually understanding the whole feature set meant fumbling through the live product.

The turning point

Around that time we took on a customer project: help them set up Holistics end to end and build the dashboards they needed. Our CTO floated the question—who can own this? Everyone was swamped, so I volunteered before I could talk myself out of it. Remember, my SQL skills were still shaky and the work was basically “write queries until things sing.”

Saying yes forced me into the steep part of the learning curve. I learned SQL by actually shipping the reports, figured out ETL while cleaning their Google Analytics plus spreadsheet data, and picked up visualization instincts by building their charts. Consulting with the client sharpened my analytics mindset. None of that felt like classic PM work, but I couldn’t even use my PM toolkit without understanding the product at this level.

It was hard—long nights, lots of rewrites, and moments where I wondered if I’d bitten off too much. But it was the right kind of struggle: one with a clear goal and a customer waiting on the other side.

Fast forward

The payoff was worth it:

  • I learned the product inside out, not from theory but from real use.
  • My product sense sharpened because I understood customers’ pains firsthand.
  • Today Holistics has better docs, discovery and requirement templates, more PMs, and way smoother onboarding. We earned every bit of that maturity.

What I took away

  • Even if you’ve memorized every PM framework on earth, it’s pointless without deep product context.
  • Learning by doing—trying the product with real use cases, shadowing the JTBDs, spotting the gaps—tells you what to prioritize fast.
  • When you’re the new kid, say yes to the scary projects and ask the questions. That’s how you catch up before the train leaves without you.

So that’s how I bridged the technical gap—by saying yes to the scary project and letting the struggle do its job. If you’re the new PM on a highly technical team, grab the messy challenge. You’ll come out the other side with stories, scar tissue, and way more confidence than any onboarding checklist could give you.

And if you ever need someone to debug SQL with moral support and snacks, you know where to find me.