About the Author
Hey, I'm Jericho Mendoza. I'm a Product Manager working in AI. I'm still figuring this all out. But most of what sets me apart in this job I learned somewhere else, in a room with no laptops in it.
Before product there was dance. Seven years of it, alongside study and work, through a degree and evening shifts. I choreographed. I directed productions. None of it was ever meant to make me better at my job.
I did it because it mattered to me.
What that involves, mostly, is months of coordinating people toward something that exists, at the start, only in your head.
They trust you with their time, their bodies, their effort. Once someone has handed you that, you push yourself in ways you never would for a pay cheque, because it isn't about you. It's about the vision, and the people who decided you were worth believing.
I learned that a piece built to impress reads as hollow no matter how well it's executed. I learned to cut the section I was proudest of when it was serving me rather than the work. And I learned to push a group hard while making sure every person in it was actually all right.
The last production I choreographed was built out of stories. We spent the early weeks sitting in a circle on a studio floor, telling each other things most of us hadn't said out loud before. Then I spent months turning what I'd heard into something an audience could feel without ever being told whose story it was. Nobody watching knew what they were looking at. The people on stage did, and that was the point.
I was just making something I cared about, with people I cared about.
Watching it turn from mine into ours. That was one of the two things that kept me there.
The other was the teaching.
I taught beginners who had never set foot in a studio, then intermediate dancers who could already move better than I could, then conceptual classes for people who wanted to know why a piece worked rather than how to copy it, then camps of a few hundred who'd signed up on a whim. The level mattered less than I expected, because every room came down to the same thing, which was finding the precise place a person was about to get lost, and arriving there before they did.
And then there's the moment you learn to watch for, when someone who has spent an hour certain they can't do this simply does it. It's gone in half a second, and they almost never notice, because they're too busy counting. You stand at the front of the room and say nothing, because the moment was never yours to take.
I kept chasing that feeling.
When dance ended in 2018 I wrote that I'd keep creating, keep teaching, keep paying it forward. Then I went and built a career instead, and let the promise sit there.
Most of that career was spent as a business analyst, executing someone else's vision as well as I possibly could. There is real craft in that and I don't think it's the lesser job. But when I moved into product and set the direction myself for the first time, the feeling that arrived was one I'd had years earlier, the first time I stopped dancing in someone else's piece and choreographed my own. I wasn't expecting to recognise it.
I certainly wasn't expecting to find it at work.
So the creating came back without my asking for it. Bringing people together toward one goal and ending up with something none of us could have made alone is just what I want to be doing.
The teaching is the part I've had to go looking for, and the timing isn't accidental.
Work is being rebuilt around tools that didn't exist two years ago, and nobody has the map yet. Every honest PM I know is circling the same question, which is what this work becomes when the thing you ship is non-deterministic and can't be fully specified before you build it. The artefacts I built a career on assume a system that behaves the same way twice. Requirements assume you can describe the output. Acceptance criteria assume you can define done. Most of that holds up badly against something that reasons, and a lot of us are rebuilding the craft at the same time as we're shipping with it.
I don't have the answer either. I'd rather work it out somewhere people can watch me get it wrong, because the alternative is working it out privately, and privately is how it slides.
I called it Inquisitivity because curiosity is the part I'd want to keep if I had to give the rest up. We are more than our jobs, and staying curious is worth more than optimising for anything.
The dancing was never a career move. Neither is this.
So if your work is being rebuilt around something that arrived faster than the instructions did, what I write here is what I wish someone had written for me. Plain language, no assumed background, and no pretending any of this is settled. I spent long enough on the other side of that gap to remember exactly where it gets confusing. It's the same job as the studio, really. Find the place someone is about to get lost, and get there first. Which is what I told myself I'd keep doing, back when I stopped dancing.
Inquisitivity is me keeping that promise.