# Product Management and Beyond with Dmitry Lyalin by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm) [Dmitry Lyalin](https://twitter.com/LyalinDotCom) traces a path from early programming curiosity to product management, with stops in engineering, teaching, advocacy, and marketing along the way. What makes the episode stand out is how connected those roles feel. Product work is not treated as paperwork around shipping. It emerges as a practical mix of customer understanding, communication, technical judgment, and a steady desire to keep growing. Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg A conversation with **Dmitry Lyalin** | 47m ## About this conversation This episode starts with the kind of computer origin story that still resonates because it feels hands-on and self-directed. Dmitry Lyalin talks about early bulletin boards, learning through experimentation, and entering the industry without following a conventional academic path. That background matters because it sets the tone for everything that follows. Curiosity, initiative, and the willingness to learn in public are not side notes here. They are the foundation of his entire career. From there, the conversation shows how product instincts can develop long before someone has the title. Dmitry describes engineering work that pushed him toward customers, problem framing, and the practical reality of how software gets used. He is candid about not needing to be the strongest coder in every room in order to add value. Instead, his strength comes from pattern recognition, empathy, and a habit of asking what the user or business actually needs. A particularly strong section focuses on teaching. Workshops, developer education, and advocacy gave Dmitry a way to translate technical detail into something other people could act on. Later work in marketing expanded that same skill in a different direction, forcing him to think about launches, positioning, and communication at scale. One of the best ideas in the episode is that none of these roles were wasted motion. Each one sharpened a different part of the product toolkit. By the end, product management comes into focus as a unifying role rather than a mysterious one. Dmitry talks about growth, career transitions, AI as a practical tool, and the real responsibilities of a PM. The emphasis stays grounded: help teams move, clarify the plan, listen well, and communicate in the form the moment requires. For aspiring PMs, it is a reassuring picture of the job that values range, judgment, and people skills just as much as process. ## What you'll hear about - A nonlinear technical career can be strong preparation for product work. - Customer empathy often starts inside engineering roles. - Teaching is one of the fastest ways to sharpen product communication. - AI is most useful when treated as a tool, not a prophecy. - Strong PMs unify people, plans, and execution. ## Jump to a topic - [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=0s) **Early computers and bulletin boards**: Dmitry looks back on the systems and communities that first pulled him into programming. - [8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=480s) **Learning outside the degree path**: He reflects on entering the industry without college and what that means for technical careers today. - [12:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=720s) **Finding product instincts in engineering**: The discussion shows how customer focus and problem framing started shaping his work long before product titles did. - [16:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=960s) **Teaching developers at scale**: Dmitry explains how training workshops and developer education became a major part of his career. - [24:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1440s) **From advocacy to marketing**: He talks about broader go-to-market work and how earlier technical experience made those transitions possible. - [28:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1680s) **Using AI as a practical tool**: The conversation turns to intelligent agents and why their value depends on how thoughtfully people apply them. - [32:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1920s) **Choosing product management**: Dmitry describes the moment he realized product offered the next meaningful growth challenge. - [36:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2160s) **What product managers really do**: He breaks down the PM role as one of unblocking teams, assembling plans, and aligning different perspectives. - [44:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2640s) **Communication and people skills**: The closing advice centers on listening, speaking clearly, and learning how to work well with other humans. ## To learn more - [Dmitry's Twitter](https://twitter.com/LyalinDotCom) ## Transcript The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors. ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=0s) - Kirupa Hi everybody. In a few moments I chat with Dmitry Lyalin, someone who I have worked with professionally for many years across multiple companies. We chat about everything ranging from how we got started with programming, his experience across various engineering disciplines, and, of course, a favorite topic for us: a lot of things around product management. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Right, Dmitry? Great to chat with you. For the audience, can you introduce yourself? ### [0:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=28s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yes, hello folks. My name is Dmitry Lyalin. Currently I'm a product manager at Google, the same place Kirupa works right now, and I'm excited to be here. Kirupa and I've crossed paths for many years, and I'm so glad we're back together again. ### [0:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=42s) - Kirupa Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for taking the time to chat as well. One of the things I've always found really interesting about you is that you always have this deep passion for computers and programming and just the whole world of working with developers, which is how you and I got connected many years ago. So how did you get started? Not everyone wakes up and says, 'I can't wait to spend time working with developers, learning about their problems, and solving things for them.' So I'm curious to know what your journey was here. ### [1:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=70s) - Dmitry Lyalin Sure, I'd love to talk about it. I found computers in public school in Brooklyn, New York. I was a little kid, and PCs such as 386 or 286 machines running Microsoft DOS were starting to appear. One had a game, a QBasic game. The teacher opened QBasic and said, 'Hey, this is code, and it's a game.' They ran it, the game ran, and my career was made. That was the magical moment. I saw it as maybe a nine-year-old or 10-year-old. I could be getting the age wrong, but I was pretty young. I began endlessly harassing my parents because I really, really wanted a computer. There was some luck involved. My parents didn't have a lot of money; we were immigrants to America, and my father was working two jobs at the time. The usual stories apply. But I was their only child, I really wanted something, and I claimed it would be great for me. A couple of years later, they finally bought me an IBM 486 SX. That's where I wrote my first piece of code with my own hands, on my own computer, and I think that's probably why we're talking today. ### [2:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=145s) - Kirupa What programming language were you using? ### [2:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=148s) - Dmitry Lyalin QBasic was my first language. ### [2:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=153s) - Kirupa Your first language. And we had the IBM. Was it running Windows 3.1 at the time, or was it still DOS? ### [2:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=156s) - Dmitry Lyalin Still DOS, yeah, yeah, 3.1 and DOS. My cousin taught me how to do those commands and how to edit autoexec files and stuff. Then, in Windows, I learned how to use the UI and run all the applications. It was such a magical time. I feel blessed that I got to see computers in such a simple state, but already just powerful enough to have programming languages that were accessible to kids like me who had no education around it. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anyone who coded. It was completely just myself. I saw something in school and years later I was doing it directly, because even in school we didn't have a programming course or anything. This was a random chance moment where a teacher showed us something, and years later I got to do it myself and just fell in love with it. Yeah, that's where my journey began. ### [3:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=205s) - Kirupa How did you learn how to use QBasic? Were you using some books, or what was your path there? ### [3:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=211s) - Dmitry Lyalin It's hard to remember exactly. I don't want to lie to your audience, but I'm sure it was books. There was no internet to go to. Eventually, three or four of us in my class all kind of started to program, and I know we taught each other things. I was probably the worst programmer out of all my friends. Two of my friends are still software engineers today, just like me. So that really stuck with all of us at that time. But I remember the first, probably, year I was by myself. I discovered bulletin boards, so I started to connect to bulletin boards, like early internet. I remember someone showing me the first browser. I think it was Netscape 1 or something like that, and I didn't even think about the internet as the future at that time. It was like, oh, it's this local computer. You did things on the computer and then you connected to these BBSs, these bulletin boards, and you socialized, you got files from them, you learned things, and you played multiplayer games. That was the thing that was starting, where you took a turn in the bulletin board and then the next person calling in took a turn. I kept seeing this potential, and it really just stuck with me so badly that I learned how to program over the years. Eventually I kept on the Microsoft track, starting with QBasic. Then I learned Visual Basic. Then I became a Visual Basic developer at my first job. I didn't go to college. I just went to a startup right after high school. I really was in love. I did a lot of things that, if my son tries to do them, I'm not sure how I'll feel about that. I was like, let's just give this college thing up. I think I know what my future is. Looking back, it was such a reckless, scary thing to do. But at the time I was 18. I was brave or stupid, I don't know. You pick the right word there. I was a web developer, a very basic web developer. I knew JavaScript a little. I knew CSS and HTML. There were no frameworks to learn, thank God. I was basically doing everything raw, and Visual Basic was my backend, classic ASP. I remember getting my first job right out of high school. I applied to a startup, and they were so hungry. Those were the dot-com days before the crash. They were like, 'Oh, you have a pulse? All right, come. You can program? Great. Here's the job,' for a tiny, tiny salary. But it didn't feel like a small thing to me at the time, and I started being for real in it. I remember having that moment of, wow, this is real. I thought this is where I could get, and I got here, and I attribute a lot of luck in my journey, so to speak. ### [6:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=366s) - Kirupa Yeah, and did you find that making the transition from programming things for fun to going to the job was a big leap in things you had to learn and understand on the fly, or were you already well prepared from your earlier experimentations? ### [6:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=380s) - Dmitry Lyalin Oh, it was a leap. I built the website for my friend's father's music business. That was my first real paid gig, and the fact that he paid me just shows how nice he was, because I messed up the project. As far as I'm concerned, I did not deliver any of my promises, but it was the first time I had to do something on a schedule, on a deadline, and ship it out for another human being. It was stressful and scary. It was probably the first time I had that work-stress feeling in my whole life. You know, that feeling we all now know from our real jobs. Transitioning to this first real job, the things that were surprising to me, as somebody who again had no formal education in this, were that there was a system to track bugs. All of a sudden I had to look in that system. I think we used Jira at the time. I had to look in there, see what was assigned to me, be accountable for closing things in a timely fashion, and learn the database. For my own purposes, I had just been doing pure web development, static HTML content and maybe some dynamic backend thing, but it wasn't data-connected. Nowadays everything is data-connected, so it sounds crazy, but back then there wasn't as much of it. So I had to learn databases, I had to learn how to be part of a project team, and I was very lucky that I had mentors. It's why, to this day, I really try to mentor every human I can, because I think about the few people who took care of me in that first job. There was this one gentleman, Rudy. He was a wonderful guy, still a wonderful guy. He sat me down and taught me database development. He literally said, 'Look, you can't do this job very well unless you know how to write a SQL script.' If you don't have people like that in your life, life gets a lot harder. So I always encourage people to help others, because we just have each other, man. That's all. ### [8:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=485s) - Kirupa Yeah, that's very true. One thing we'll return to later is that you mentioned you didn't go to college and went straight into the job market. A common conversation, especially around computers and technology, is whether having a degree is even important. Many of us did go to college and were underprepared when we entered the job market anyway. Some of us earned degrees, yet still faced that disconnect between what school taught and what professional work demanded. We had the same leap you described, where translating academic and theoretical '10 bucks' environments into real examples required a massive amount of relearning. I'm curious to get your take on it. You have a son now, so if his interests were in computer science and he wanted to do more with computers, how would your guidance change? Or would it be the same for him? That question matters because his path doesn't necessarily have to mirror either your path or the conventional college route. ### [8:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=534s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, I think when I did it, I call it really crazy because of just the time that it was. If I didn't make it in the programming field without the degree, I was in trouble, right? At that time there really wasn't a 'hey, take this boot camp, become an engineer' kind of world. It was just a different time, so I definitely see my own experience as being, because of what it was, like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that really scary thing. Now that I look back at it today, it would be less scary. Today there are a lot of options for people to take a course, learn, and it's more acceptable that this is how people become software engineers. What I think I would still tell young people is, well, I don't like to tell people what to do. I don't like to tell a young person, 'Hey, you have to go to college,' or some path like that. They need to figure it out for themselves. There are no two journeys that are alike. But I'll tell them what my opinion is. My opinion is that if you have the support of your family and you have time, college is not a bad investment. You can learn things there. You don't have to leave college as a software engineer. You can become a software engineer while you're in college. That's kind of my mindset. You can learn so much nowadays from great training courses that are really on point for turning a human into a software engineer who can be part of a team, so you can do all of that. But in college you can take other courses. You can learn math, you can learn science, you can learn how to interact with people, things that, if you rush past all of that into work, you're going to miss. Obviously it's time and money, so there's no simple answer. It's a calculation. You have to do that calculation for yourself and think about it. But I always would tell my own son, let's use that as the example, here are some reasons why I think you should, and we'd have a conversation about it. Beyond that, he's four years old. I'm not sure I'm ready for that talk. ### [10:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=652s) - Kirupa No, that's very true. I have a five-year-old daughter, so these are all things that the back of your mind always keeps going to. How would life be different for them 13 or 14 years down the road? The world has changed so much if you look 14 years into the past in each of our lives and how the world reacts to education and on-the-job training and so on. So that's always a fun topic and one we'll probably be chatting about years and years into the future. Now, you're doing a startup, what next? I'm curious, because you and I touched base when you were in marketing and you were at Microsoft, but it's a big jump between many things between then and there. I'm trying to connect the dots between your passion for programming and ultimately the path you've taken. ### [11:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=699s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, I feel like this conversation is almost like a 3D version of my LinkedIn profile. One of the things I really enjoyed about being a software engineer, and I was a software engineer for about 12 years, was that I started when I was 18 and over those 12 years I went from the most junior person on a team to a team lead. I managed people, probably poorly back then. I've learned a lot since then. I architected solutions, and one of my superpowers that I developed was realizing that I'm not the best engineer on the team. Very, very often, honestly, there was always somebody who was like, 'Oh yeah, I code C++ games in my spare time,' and I was like, Jesus, I never even opened C++ in my professional career to make something production. It's not that my output was bad. I was just always a higher-level programmer, but I saw problems. That was something I was passionate about. Who's our customer? Let me talk to them. Often, in the early days, they didn't have customers outside of the company. I was doing something inside a company to benefit some business units. So I would go and meet them. I would show up on the floor with business people and tell them, 'Hey, I'm your engineer.' They'd be like, 'What are you doing here? Nobody ever comes over. We just magically send emails to you folks and things appear for us as software products.' I cared about the humans, and I still have friends from those days, people who were not engineers but became my customers and are still my friends, because that's how I approached every problem. I approached it from a human-centric place first: who's our team, what are their skills, who are our customers, what are their problems, what solution can we deliver for them, and on what timeline? Let's involve them early in reviewing the requirements of the thing we're building. A lot of these practices today are pretty normal, but back then I swear they just weren't. Teams were too far away from their customers. They delivered solutions after months or years. The solutions were often not the right solutions or they were missing key features, and everybody was upset at each other. I was like, why don't we solve that by talking? I also realized you can talk to other teams. So often I would get into a situation where someone would say, 'Well, it's the networking team.' That was like a thing. I was like, what do you mean? Who is it? Who's the human? Where are they? Which floor do they sit on? Let's go talk to them. And I went and talked to them, and again we became friends. Like, 'Yeah, Dmitry needs a deployment out, it's an emergency, we'll do it because we like him, because he talks to us, because he respects what we do.' I found that was my superpower. Towards the end of that 12-year journey, I was tired. As a software engineer, I had just finished shipping a very major product to production. I was working six days a week, nights and weekends. I was the team lead. I had like three engineers under me. I wasn't their manager, but I was basically telling them what code to complete and what to write. I was writing code, working with UX, working with the customer, and I was exhausted. I'm like, I don't think I want to do this anymore. It was a very scary moment. If you told 18-year-old me that this was my path forward, then 12-years-later me was like, is there anything else I can do? I'm tired. At Microsoft, at that time, I was a consultant working for customers, and I had shipped like five production customer applications during four, four-and-a-half years of that work. There was another team of engineers that did training and mentoring and also helped customers with support issues. It was the Premier Field Engineering team at Microsoft. One of my former managers in consulting went over there and became a manager of those engineers, and he and I had the same idea at almost the same time. We asked each other, 'Hey, can we talk?' He's like, 'Yeah, I'm hiring a support engineer. Do you want to be a support engineer?' I was like, 'Yes, please, anything. Just give me something fun to do.' Back then the interview was basically one interview. It was like, 'You're hired. I've worked with you for years. You're a good engineer. You can do this job.' I was like, that's probably the easiest job offer I ever got. So I accepted, and I spent a year and a half doing crazy stuff. One customer, totally randomly, was like, 'Teach our Visual Basic team C#. Where's our course?' And the team was like, 'What course? We don't have a course. Go build it.' So I built my own C# course from the ground up. I used to be a DB programmer, so I understood their language and what they were going through. I had made the same transition myself a couple years before. So I sat there with like six customers in Texas and taught them C# over a totally customized two- or three-day workshop. I still talk to some of them. Apparently they liked what I did, and I was so inspired by, wow, I can teach people. I can educate them. I was doing evangelism for Visual Studio releases to these customers, again usually to groups of three to five or six people at most. Then one of my friends at Microsoft, Brian, who I loosely knew, reached out to me. We got connected somehow and he was like, 'Hey, there's this job opening. If you want to do what you're doing now, but at a huge scale, like educate at a huge scale, you gotta check out this marketing job.' I thought he was crazy. I was like, marketing? Why? I'm not a marketer. I don't have a marketing degree. Those were my expectations. Then I talked to the manager, and that manager turned out to be a former Premier support engineer. So he was exactly me in the past. He was like, 'Oh, I know what you do really well, and imagine doing what you do at scale.' At that time, I should also add, I had started speaking at user groups, and that was another coincidental skill that helped my career. Talking in front of people and presenting is a skill we're developing, and I didn't have it. I was good with a small group. If you had put me back then in front of a group of 50 people I didn't know, I would have been terrified, shaking, every part of my body rejecting the idea of doing this thing. And I forced myself onto a stage over and over and over till I got good at it, and I got to the point where I wasn't afraid anymore. So I came to this marketing job and they were like, well, you're going to have to execute at scale, promote Visual Studio at scale, work on websites, work in business development, and even speak at conferences and things. And I was like, wow, I'm putting all these skills I've kind of picked up by chance in life—my programming skills, my presentation skills, my evangelism skills—into this job. I became a marketer through that chance, and it was one of the best times of my life. I spent seven years there. I did so many things I couldn't even begin to talk about them. That's where we crossed paths. ### [18:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1112s) - Kirupa Yeah, no, that's actually really interesting. I want to step back a little bit, because teaching is an art. Not everyone is very good at being able to teach people, yet you seem to have been a natural at it. How did that come about? Was it that you were just naturally a great teacher, or was it something you picked up as a skill over your career? ### [18:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1132s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah. The way I've approached it whenever I've taught people, and I've done workshops at Microsoft events and smaller training schemes, is from a very simple perspective: if I didn't know this topic, what would I want people to tell me if I was just starting out? So my view is always that if the version of you before you knew this topic got all the information in the right order, then the person you're telling is probably going to get it too. I don't have any more of a script than that. I just apply it and try to break things up. I always believe any topic can be broken down into many, many smaller chunks so people can learn it progressively. The rest is just caring about your audience, taking the time, being prepared, practicing, going through every example, and making sure everything you're asking them to practice actually works. This is where my tediousness around liking things to be well done really paid off. I spent a bunch of time making sure my labs were working, my script was right, and my code samples on screen were accurate. If people needed help, if they needed me to come over and look at their problem because they broke things, I could always come over and help them through it. In my five or so times delivering formal training to customers, I always followed that model and it worked. In later years I had really great partners helping me out. I remember a big TechEd event back in the day where we had hundreds of people wanting to take this topic, and I could not have done it by myself. That's where the superpower of other humans comes in. Have friends who are willing to help you and reach out to them and say, 'Hey, do you want to do this workshop together? Do you want to take half the content?' For me, I can't complete this in time. That's another way you can be good at what you do. Take other people's help alongside the journey. People want to help you more than you know. That's my suggestion to young people all the time. ### [21:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1266s) - Kirupa Yeah, one of the biggest fears is just asking for help in the first place. Yeah. ### [21:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1270s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yes. I don't know why, but at least my impression in the industry in general is that asking for help is seen as a sign of weakness, and I'm always like, no, it's actually not. It's a great thing. It's one of the biggest things you can do to scale, get things done, collaborate, and make people along the way who become your friends and colleagues. Asking people for help is one of the best ways to make a friend possible, as long as it's for a genuinely good reason. Nobody likes to have their time wasted, but I always tell people, look, if you ping me in chat, no matter what the topic is, and you're like, 'Dmitry, please, can you help me?' I get random people all the time, and I'm so happy to help. To me it's a great feeling. I reflect how I feel in others. I think others feel like me, and I've seen it from them over the years. ### [22:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1324s) - Kirupa Absolutely. So you're doing marketing now at Microsoft. This is when you and I crossed paths quite a bit. It was probably in the Visual Studio org or the developer division. My memory is getting fuzzier as the years go by. It's a transition, though, because you were doing trainings for companies, but now, if my memory is right, you're working with product teams on how to plan launches and how to better adjust the narrative for things like that. That's a shift in terms of what you'd done before. So how did that come about? ### [22:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1357s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, well, let's talk about what marketing was for me. Again, a very personal journey. I was in a very special team at a very special time. We were part of the marketing organization, and pretty much nobody on my team was a marketer. We were all software engineers one way or another, or people who had found a passion for this space through their hobbies. We had a very difficult job: we had to market to developers at the scale of Microsoft. So the way we did it was to ignore normal marketing and focus on what I would want to see from Microsoft to get my attention. How would I want to be communicated with? What kind of level of trust would I want to be given? All of these things were how we built the things we did. We launched Visual Studio releases, collaborated on better blogs and better documentation. We did things that traditional marketers don't focus on, but in your marketing team for developers, your first question in any product launch is, do you have documentation? If you're an engineer, you ask that question because you know that's the first thing your customers are going to look for once they discover the product. So I really spent a lot of time being a developer and bringing that perspective into marketing. It was a wonderful time. It allowed me to do a lot of different kinds of things. I got to launch Visual Studio releases, I got to launch. NET releases, I got to work on developer conferences, digital and physical, and all of it was very different. I felt like my job changed constantly. Through that whole time I got to leverage small pieces of everything I had ever done before. It was like, hey, create a training workshop for our customers to support this launch. I'm like, oh, I know how to create training workshops, and now I have a vendor that can help me build it, so I just have to build a skeleton of what the workshop needs to be and make sure I line up a couple of good reviewers that I trust on the subject matter. So it was all about managing the details using the knowledge I had about developers, and that was my seven years of experience. But I also got exposed to things I would never have learned otherwise. People ask me sometimes whether I would do it again if I had to restart my career, because now I'm a product manager and I'm a very happy product manager. I would say yes, I would have done marketing again because I learned the value of business development. I learned the value of revenue generation. I learned the importance of branding, the importance of good marketing, the importance of strong social media. There were things that I got to learn and see the data around that the PM legitimately doesn't have a reason to get involved with. So to me, I feel very well-rounded to be where I am today because of my, I would say, three big steps in my career where I did very different things. ### [25:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1525s) - Kirupa If you had to take a step back, as a marketer, what is the misconception that engineers and PMs typically have about your role that you wish they didn't have, that would make your job easier? ### [25:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1539s) - Dmitry Lyalin Oh, I mean it's a loaded question, but I'll try to answer it. Back when I was doing it, a lot of teams had experience with non-technical people being in that role, because the team I was on was a fairly divergent step from what marketing typically was. Marketers are super valuable people. I'm not trying to say marketing isn't valuable. They have a special skill set, but they're often not technical, they don't understand what engineers are doing or why, and this was a constant misconception I was fighting personally. A lot of times you're working with non-technical marketing teams, so I would say the more common misconception is that marketing is a distraction. It's like, I have to deal with marketing. Marketing is fundamentally a huge part of the reason you have customers, and if you're building something and you want to have customers, you want the whole machine to support you. It doesn't matter if you're at a small startup where the marketing team is one person, or at Microsoft scale or any big company where you have groups of people helping you. Work with them. Understand them. This is a general rule that applies to all cross-functional relationships, but marketing is so important to make sure there are ads supporting your product, social media supporting your product, and the best agency building your websites. If you have more technical marketers, they can help you review your blog posts and your go-to-market plan. In a big organization, marketers often have a horizontal view that developers don't understand, because again, it's not their job. They understand what's going around the company and can help bring things together. We often had to do this where team X and team Y were about to do things on slightly different days of the month, and it was like, you folks should combine. It's going to be so much more powerful to make a developer day and bring all these topics and all of this effort together on your behalf in order to get people to look at your release. So that's the kind of misconception I would fight. Marketing is super important. Be friends with your marketing team. ### [27:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1668s) - Kirupa Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, and you've probably seen a lot of the articles and news that talk about how AI assistants and all these things will put marketing and some of these roles in jeopardy. What is your take on that? ### [28:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1683s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, I mean all technology changes the world. Look at where we are compared to 20 years ago. People 20 years ago wouldn't recognize the world we live in many ways, on the technical side of the world. So I would say intelligent agents are a tool. They're not intelligence, as far as I can tell based on what I've been reading about this topic. They are a way for you to do what you do, hopefully better, faster, with more access to data in a more natural way. So it's all about seeing this as a tool. I don't think it replaces everybody. Of course, there might be somebody who gets replaced. I can't predict that, so I'm not going to try to predict something where I'm not an expert and I don't spend my day job thinking about how technology is going to completely replace whole professions. I just look at the technology as it is today, where it is today, and it's very far from replacing anybody. That's my opinion. Maybe I'll eat my words when watching this video many years from now, but at least where we are now doesn't feel like it. At the same time, anybody doing any technical field, like we are, should be learning this technology, using it, and keeping an eye on it, because it's a powerful tool. What I'm about to say is not apples to apples by any stretch, but it's analogous to when people went from having code editors that were basically text-file editors to whole integrated environments with debugging and all that capability. If you were like, 'No, I'm going to use Notepad for the rest of my life,' you would have missed out on all this productivity and capability, and eventually you would have been replaced because you didn't have the right skill set. I think this is the same kind of journey for now. Then let's see how it goes. Man, it's hard to predict. ### [29:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1791s) - Kirupa Yeah, exactly. IntelliSense didn't exactly replace developers. Maybe it did, but it definitely made developers more productive and freed them up for higher-order things that they're more uniquely qualified to solve. ### [30:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1805s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, yeah. Anybody who thinks marketing can be replaced by an AI bot has never tried to coordinate 10 teams to agree on a launch date for a product. The moment AI can do that, it can have the job. But yeah, if it can do that part of it, that people-wrangling aspect of it, then it has a lot of jobs. ### [30:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1826s) - Kirupa Yeah, perfect. So now you're in marketing and you made this switch to product. Talk to me about that, because your career is really fascinating, and that's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. You've made many leaps, and often it seems to come from an area of deep curiosity, like, I could see this, I'm curious to know more about this, I think I can offer value here, I'm going to try something new. So same playbook: product management. How did that come about? ### [30:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=1854s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah. When I was in marketing for a long time, I was very happy, and I didn't foresee myself changing my profession again in my life. But I wasn't against it because that's what I did when I was an engineer. I didn't stick to any one vertical. When I decided not to be an engineer full-time, I switched multiple times into different professions, and within marketing I switched probably five or six times into very different marketing jobs within the organization. Change, for whatever reason, was never scary to me. It was like, oh, something fun, let's go do that. But I definitely hit a point where I had two feelings. I felt like I wasn't learning, like I could do my job in half a week and still do my job. You know that feeling where you think, I got this to that level of detail. And the second thing was that I just wasn't happy. I didn't have this excitement in me anymore, and my wife even noticed. She was like, you seem more upset than usual. I was like, yeah, I'm thinking big things. I don't think I want to be a marketer anymore. I think I've learned everything I've wanted to learn. I think I've done everything I wanted to do, and I didn't feel stretched anymore. I asked myself a fundamental question, which I still ask myself all the time today: am I growing? At some point maybe that won't be an important question, maybe at some point I'll see retirement over the horizon and be like, okay, I'm just finishing my career. But I'm so far from that emotionally that if I'm not learning and growing, I want to change. Product became that next challenge. I saw what product managers did. I worked with them all the time. As a marketer at Microsoft, I spent my whole day talking to either marketers or product managers. Those were basically the two groups I interacted with, and I knew so many of them, including you. Amanda Silver was probably the first person I reached out to because, as a lead in the PM team, she had very broad visibility into the available jobs. I said to her, hey, you know me well, you know I work hard, but obviously I have no proof that I'll be a good product manager. I think I will. I'm sure I said something smart, and she said, hey, why don't you interview for this role? So I went and interviewed for one role and they didn't like me. The team voted no. I was like, okay. But then there was another team that needed a PM in the same wider organization, a very different role, and it was very close to what I used to do when I was a consultant. I used to build a lot of XAML applications, and this was the XAML tooling PM role. So, to make a long story short, I became the XAML tooling PM as my first PM job, and eventually I got to work on. NET and other things at Microsoft. It was a really gratifying career, but I was so thankful that people took a chance on me. I had no track record as a PM. What attracted me to PM was how amazing it felt to be part of the engineering team and not need to write code for a living. To this day I still build samples and toys and everything, but writing code full-time wasn't the thing. Even after many years away from writing code, I still didn't want to go back there as a full-time job. Yet, being part of the product team, I could actually make decisions about what a product looks like and I could actually solve developer problems, and I'm very passionate about that. I love solving developer problems. It's what I think about when I'm driving. I'm always thinking about how to make developers' lives better for whatever product I'm involved with. On the marketing side, there was a very clear cutoff on where I could add value. As a product manager, I realized, hey, I could be the one making some of those decisions. So I took a shot, I did it, and I fell in love. Honestly, I don't know if I'll do another job. Maybe my title will change, but this product thing is where I feel really, really comfortable nowadays. ### [35:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2104s) - Kirupa Absolutely, because product management is such a wide range of roles and responsibilities. In many ways, people do have different categories of product managers that they typically think about, but it does have a long runway depending on our hobbies and how much you evolve, because people change, people grow, and what keeps me motivated in product management is that it evolves in many ways with you. You can stretch it a little bit so it can still be what you're working on while focusing on something you're now more passionate about. So same question again that I asked from the marketing side: what is it about product management that you wish people you worked with knew more about, so they can better help you out in the long run? ### [35:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2149s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, for sure. In a big company, product management has become pretty well established. I'm excited to see that, because it really wasn't for many, many years. There were a lot of questions like, why do we need PMs? I think most people working at the Microsofts and Googles of the world don't have that question anymore. I think we've had concrete value. But people coming into the profession often ask me, if I become a PM, what am I going to do? It's scary. As a coder, I know what I would do, but as a product manager it feels like you're thrown into this void without a lot of definition. The way I describe the value the profession brings is that we are unifiers. We are sitting in a place to unblock our engineering team from anything that keeps them from having success. That includes making sure they have a good plan. Sometimes it's cobbling a plan together from a lot of different ideas. Sometimes it's providing a first draft of the plan. As a product manager, you're not alone. You're not on a mountain saying go this way and everyone goes that way. It's more like you're on the ground with your team. I did a very different thing in my life. I was a volunteer police officer when I was young with the NYPD, and sergeant was my highest rank there. As a sergeant I was on the ground with a bunch of volunteer police officers and I'd be like, okay, you guys move that barricade over there, you two stand over there, make sure traffic isn't coming through. I would organize people to that degree. When I became a PM, I felt like that was what I was doing again. Move the barricade over there, please. I think it's a good idea if that barricade wasn't in front of our customers. Let's get rid of the barricade. So I was basically pointing in the right directions by having the time to look around more, to look at customers deeper, to look at data deeper, and to look at what solution we're building and help the engineering team make sense of it. Not because engineers can't do this. That's a fallacy, that PMs do something nobody else can do. It's just that this is what we're allowed to do with our time, and that is magical. An engineer has a sprint backlog. You have to go build your code and get rid of your bugs. As an engineering manager, you have to make sure your team is unblocked and effective. As a PM next to them, you can spend time on the customer and spend time in the data, and that is what makes this role so special. What you do varies greatly. Sometimes you're writing a document. Other times you're forcing people into meetings for a month. Other times you're forcing a hard decision to be made and stopping it from blocking. Other times you're advocating for the team to leadership or to other teams around you to make sure the work can get done. It's a tough job, but it's extremely rewarding, and if you do it well, everybody knows why you're there. I think it's definitely doable. I know lots of very successful PMs out of college nowadays. It's really fun to see that. ### [38:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2331s) - Kirupa Absolutely. One of the things that has always evolved with the PM discipline is that when I joined as a PM many years ago, there was still this question of what value PMs really provide. At Microsoft, you had program managers, and product managers, and marketing people, and you also mentioned that a lot of marketing people back then weren't very technical. At least in similar divisions I was in, we had the technical product manager, which was a marketing person who worked very closely with engineering teams to translate some of these requests in a more sensible way, and we've evolved greatly since that point of view. Now when I look across the industry, I think product manager is what we do now as part of the engineering team working on various projects. Marketing is its own discipline. I think the role of technical product manager fell into developer relations to a certain extent, where they spend a lot of time interfacing between the engineering team, the marketing team, and the outside world. I'll be curious to know how this changes going forward as well, because the roles are changing, and I think partly it's because awareness of the roles has changed. Technology has made a lot of things simpler. Things that were very difficult back then are more straightforward now. Or maybe we don't need a dedicated person for this. We can have a person who does job A, but also B and C, because they now have more time to process some of these things more effectively. So that's actually been pretty interesting. The other big thing is that back then it was always a case where you needed to have industry experience to be a product manager, especially when you were coming into the field. Nowadays it's become more of a career path. We have a career path now where product managers can start at a more junior level and then have a trajectory where they can go because there's been data and experience, whereas before it clearly was a choose-your-own-adventure book. No one really knew what you did, but you knew there was a product manager involved. When things went really well, it was like, okay, I don't know what they did, but I knew indirectly they did some really great work. It's an evolving field in that sense, so I'm curious to hear your take on it. What are the most important skills a product manager should have to be successful? A common question I get from so many people is, I'm currently in college and I want to be a product manager. What's important? There's the literature and then there's the actual on-the-job answer that you and I might deviate from a little bit. So I'm curious to hear your take on it. ### [41:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2485s) - Dmitry Lyalin Yeah, for sure. Let's narrow this down a little more. Product managers can work on many different products. At Google, for example, you could work on Gmail and ensure people have the best email experience in the world. You could work on machine learning where your customers are Python developers, nobody sees a UI, and it's all about models and Python code. You could deliver developer services like ours, which developers touch through CLIs and consoles. Product managers can also build hardware. They can work on an unlimited number of things. Those roles can be profoundly different even though they share the same title. The customer, interface, technology, and way a PM measures success all depend on the particular product. Let's focus on a product manager in a technical space, because people in that space are probably watching this video, and it's where you and I are most comfortable. If you want to manage developer products and are entering or leaving college, ask yourself the same question you'd ask about any product: do you have a passion for the thing you want to manage? Passion isn't a requirement. Many people find it after beginning their careers, but it helps. The question matters no matter what kind of product you intend to manage. Having a direction gives you something concrete to learn about before the first role, even if your eventual career takes you somewhere else. If hardware is your passion, try to become a hardware PM. If that doesn't work out, perhaps fall back on something else to gain experience, but at least you'll have a direction. Most skills you'll develop on that path are generic, with a few specifics. Learn everything you can about hardware. Before joining a hardware team as a PM, understand how hardware is assembled and how things are sourced. Use the time before that PM role as an opportunity to understand the actual work behind the product, not merely the product-management process around it. Learn the industry's vocabulary, constraints, suppliers, and assembly process. Get as broad a view of that industry as possible, because industry knowledge will help you. Similarly, people becoming PMs in our world should do some programming. Your goal isn't to become a programmer; it's to develop empathy for your future customer and understand that customer's terminology. Whatever you plan to manage, gain that understanding, terminology, empathy, and a sense of the broader developments. That's an important bonus skill. That broader view lets you follow conversations that would otherwise be opaque and recognize the practical concerns behind customer requests. It also makes it easier to ask informed questions without pretending that your goal is to do the customer's job yourself. You could learn it on the job, but arriving with this mindset puts you ahead of many people. The next foundational skill for every PM is communication. PMs write, speak, and listen. Those activities are different, and some are harder than they sound. You must articulate what you need, understand what others need from you, and communicate broadly enough to put everyone on the same page. Communication has to work in both directions. It isn't enough to tell people what you need; you must accurately hear what they need from you, then choose a form that makes the shared understanding clear to a broad group. Sometimes that communication is a meeting, deck, document, or tweet. There are many ways to communicate, but you need to learn the skill. Fundamentally, it's about people. Get good at interacting with other humans. Talk to new people you've never met, and be able to stop talking and listen. I sometimes struggle with that because I'm a talker. It isn't easy, but talking, listening, and communicating in different forms will save you a lot of grief as a PM. Each format asks for a different kind of clarity. Listening is as important as presenting, particularly when a new person understands part of the problem that you don't. Those human interactions are a central part of the work, not an accessory to it. Next is organization. Find ways to get organized, but I don't think it's a battle you'll ever win. You never reach a point where you've learned to organize yourself and will always be organized. If your career is growing, you'll get randomized and have many things to do. A huge part of a PM's value is doing things in a timely fashion. When you don't, you'll feel guilty, which will inspire you to develop this skill one way or another. The challenge keeps changing as the scope of your career grows. A system that handled yesterday's workload may fail when more requests arrive, so organization is an ongoing practice rather than a skill you finish learning once. Finally, learn what product management means in the context of your workplace. You can prepare through classes and online courses. They'll teach you the document types you'll likely generate, styles of communication, data analysis, and ways to engage customers. But you'll have to bring everything together into an executable package of activity. Courses can prepare you for individual pieces of the job, but they can't fully prescribe how those pieces fit together in a particular team. Execution means choosing among them and turning the choice into timely, coordinated activity. You'll also have to apply it to different problems. Not every problem is solved with data or customer engagement. Build the ability to understand what each approach gives you and doesn't give you, and when to apply it. We can eventually discuss ChatGPT and how to use bots, but the larger goal is to apply all the skills and tools at your disposal well enough to do your job. The important skill is judgment: knowing when one tool can answer the question, when it cannot, and when several tools need to be combined. New tools don't remove the need to understand their limits. People have told me, 'The data shows X,' and I've responded that the data simply can't be right. I take out the customer-development playbook: let's talk to customers and verify the data. Sometimes customers validate the hunch that the data is off and doesn't reflect what they want or experience. Other times, you do the opposite and bring in data to show that you aren't heading in the right direction. Customer conversations and quantitative data can check each other. A hunch can reveal a measurement problem, while data can challenge a confident story that isn't representative. Neither source should automatically win without examining what it actually captures. You need to learn that these tools exist and what they all are. This video isn't about teaching every tool, but there is a toolbox. Much of it consists of soft skills and knowing how to engage in particular directions to get information. That will be extremely important. ### [47:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2838s) - Kirupa That's a fantastic answer right there. I think it should be recorded and played back at any PM boot camp or MBA program out there. Dmitry, thank you so much for the time. This was absolutely thrilling, and I can't wait to see all the other stuff that you keep sharing and doing as well. ### [47:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQJ_x79SDjg&t=2858s) - Dmitry Lyalin Thank you, Kirupa. Great talking to you. 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