Joy Ting Charde Product Manager · Artist · Public Servant
Posts that sound like you — not like LinkedIn. Fresh ideas, real voice, art meets product.
🛠 Product & FinOps🎨 Art + Product🔄 Career Reinvention🏛 Gov Tech
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Story
2 months into my PM role. Here's what I didn't see coming.
I walked in thinking product management was about managing a product.
It's actually about managing ambiguity.
Week 1: Imposter syndrome so loud I could barely think.
Week 4: I shipped my first feature and nobody knew how nervous I was.
Week 8: I'm starting to trust the instincts I built in 19 years at a library.
Here's the thing nobody tells career pivoters: you don't start from zero. You start from somewhere else. Every stakeholder meeting, budget decision, and community program I ran at Troy Public Library was training I didn't know I was getting.
The tech is learnable. The judgment takes decades. I brought mine with me.
The skill that makes me a better PM has nothing to do with tech.
It's listening.
8 years teaching elementary school: I learned to read a room in 30 seconds.
19 years in library management: I learned the loudest stakeholders are rarely the most important voice.
14 years running Joy Ting Art: I learned that feedback is a gift, even when it stings.
Product management is fundamentally about understanding people — what they need, what they say they need, and the gap between those two things.
The tech is learnable. The empathy is what separates good PMs from great ones.
5 PM lessons I learned at a public library before I knew what PM was.
Before I was a Product Manager, I was Business Manager at Troy Public Library for nearly 19 years.
1. Your users have wildly different needs — design for all of them
2. Stakeholders don't always know what they want until they see what they don't want
3. Budget constraints force creativity (a feature, not a bug)
4. Community trust takes years to build and seconds to lose
5. The best product in the world fails if nobody shows up to use it
Libraries taught me human-centered design before I had a name for it.
What unexpected career experience made you a better professional?
Pattern design taught me what product school never could.
When you design a repeating pattern, you're solving a constraint problem.
One tile. It has to connect perfectly on all four sides. The eye has to work whether it looks at the tile, the full repeat, or the thing printed on fabric or a phone case.
You have to think at multiple scales simultaneously.
That's exactly what product management requires.
The feature has to work.
The feature serves the sprint.
The sprint serves the roadmap.
The roadmap serves the user.
Multiple scales. One coherent vision.
Turns out 14 years of pattern design was product training in disguise.
I've been an artist for 14 years. Here's how it makes me a better PM.
Most people think art and tech live in separate worlds.
They don't. At least not in my life.
When I'm designing a pattern, I'm thinking about:
→ Where the eye travels
→ What works at scale vs. up close
→ Iteration — every piece is a prototype
→ What to cut, not just what to add
Sound familiar? That's product thinking.
Art taught me to hold a vision while staying open to what the material wants to do. Great PMs do the same thing every day.
Don't let anyone tell you your creative background is a detour. It might be your edge.
[Add a piece of your art here 🎨]
I post my art on the internet. It's terrifying. I do it anyway.
There is nothing quite like putting something you made with your hands out into the world.
And watching 4 people like it.
One of them is your mom.
But here's what 14 years of Joy Ting Art has taught me:
The making is not for the likes. The making is for the maker. The sharing is practice in being seen.
And being comfortable being seen? That's a leadership skill.
If you make things — write, paint, design, build — keep sharing. Not because the algorithm rewards you. Because the practice of showing up is the whole point.
I spent 19 years at the same organization. Then I left.
I joined Troy Public Library in 2006. I was good at my job. The community became family.
Nearly 19 years later — I walked out the door.
Not because anything was wrong. Because something was calling.
I wanted to know if I could do something completely new. I wanted to prove — to myself, mostly — that my skills weren't organization-specific.
So I applied for a Product Manager role at a state technology agency. I got it.
The hardest part wasn't the interview. It was telling myself I was allowed to want something new.
If you're sitting somewhere stable and feeling that pull — the pull is information.
Teacher → Library Manager → Product Manager. The through line surprised me.
On paper, my career looks scattered.
Elementary school teacher for 8 years.
Library Business Manager for 19 years.
Artist and pattern designer for 14 years (ongoing).
Now: Product Manager at a state tech agency.
But when I look at what I've actually been DOING across every role?
Understanding what people need, designing something to meet it, and managing the gap between vision and reality.
Teaching is product management for 8-year-olds.
Library management is product management for a whole community.
Art is product management for a solo creator.
I didn't make random choices. I followed a thread I couldn't see until I looked back.
What thread runs through YOUR career?
When people find out I'm a PM at a state IT agency, the reaction is usually a polite smile.
"Oh. That's... nice."
Here's what they don't realize:
Government tech impacts millions of people.
The stakes are higher than most startups.
The problems are harder and more meaningful.
I'm not building an app for slightly faster pizza delivery.
I'm helping build systems that affect people's healthcare, their kids' schools, their access to services they depend on.
If you want to do work that matters at scale — government tech deserves a second look.
The most underrated PM skill in government work? Knowing who actually makes the decision.
In the private sector, the decision-maker is usually clear. In government, it's... a journey.
There are stakeholders. Then there are stakeholders behind the stakeholders. Then there's the policy that predates everyone in the room.
What I've learned:
Map the approval chain before you pitch anything.
Find the person who has said no before and understand why.
The loudest voice in the room is rarely the person who signs off.
19 years in a public institution taught me this the hard way. Turns out library governance and government IT have more in common than you'd think.
What's the most bureaucratic approval process you've ever navigated?
I manage Jira, Salesforce, Zoom, OpenAI, and Anthropic contracts for New York State. Here's what I'm learning about FinOps.
Most people think software licensing is just renewing subscriptions.
It's not. It's one of the most expensive and least-understood areas of government spending.
I'm currently learning FinOps — the discipline of managing technology costs like a business decision, not a line item.
A few things that have already changed how I think:
→ Unused seats aren't just waste. They're a failure of visibility.
→ AI tools have a completely different cost model than traditional SaaS — token-based pricing requires a new kind of governance.
→ The FinOps Foundation says 90% of organizations now manage SaaS costs. Government is just catching up.
If you work in public sector tech and haven't heard of FinOps yet — it's worth your attention.
What's the most surprising thing you've discovered about your organization's software costs?
We spend millions on software that people barely use. And we barely talk about it.
The average large enterprise has software sitting unused at 30-40% of capacity.
For government agencies managing hundreds of SaaS tools — Jira, Salesforce, Zoom, Microsoft, specialized applications — that number can be even higher.
Why? Because buying is easy. Governance is hard.
Nobody celebrates the PM who canceled three underused subscriptions. But they should.
FinOps is the discipline that's trying to change this. Not just for cloud — for every tool your organization pays for.
I'm in the early stages of learning this framework and I'm already asking different questions about every contract renewal I touch.
What does smart SaaS governance look like in your organization?
Product Manager · Artist & Pattern Designer · FinOps Learner | Building digital public services at NYS ITS | Certified Scrum PO | Bridging creativity, technology & community
About / Summary
I'm a product manager, artist, and lifelong learner who has spent 25+ years at the intersection of creativity, education, and operations.
After nearly 19 years managing operations at Troy Public Library — where I learned that great institutions run on great systems — I made a bold pivot into tech. Today I'm a Product Manager at the NYS Office of Information Technology Services, where I manage enterprise SaaS products including Jira, Salesforce, Zoom, and AI tools that serve New York's communities.
But I never stopped creating. For over 14 years, I've been designing patterns and making art through Joy Ting Art — because I believe creative thinking and analytical thinking aren't opposites. They're superpowers when combined.
Currently learning FinOps to bring sharper governance to AI and SaaS spending in the public sector. Certified Scrum Product Owner. Perpetual student of what it means to build things that actually work for people.
If you're interested in product management, public sector innovation, FinOps, creative entrepreneurship, or the journey of reinventing yourself — let's connect.
🎨 Artist | 💰 FinOps Learner | 📋 Product Manager | 🏛 Public Servant
Strategy
What Actually Works
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Best time to post
Tuesday–Thursday, 8–10am or 12–1pm. Consistency matters more than timing — 2x/week beats 1x/day for 2 weeks then silence.
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Your unique angle
Art + FinOps + Gov Tech + Career pivot. No one else on LinkedIn has this exact combination. Lean into ALL of it.
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End with a question
Posts that end with a genuine question get 3–4x more comments. Not "thoughts?" — a specific, answerable question.
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Add your art
Posts with an image of your work get 2x the reach. Art posts that connect to a PM insight = your signature move.
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Ideal length
150–300 words sweet spot. Short first line that stops the scroll. Line breaks every 2–3 sentences. No long paragraphs.
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Repurpose everything
A good LinkedIn post = a newsletter section = a Twitter/X thread = a story for a job interview. One idea, many formats.