hi everybody in a few moments I chat with Dimitri Leyland someone who I work 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 Dimitri great to chat with you for the audience can you introduce yourself

yes hello folks my name is Dmitry Lyalin uh currently I'm a product manager at Google same place Kirupa works right now and I'm excited to be here group and I've crossed paths many years and I'm so glad we back together again

yeah absolutely and so thanks for taking the time to chat as well one of the things I always felt really interesting about you is that you always have this like 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 do you get started you know not everyone wakes up when it says I can't wait to spend time working with developers learning about their problems and just solving things for them so I'm curious to know what your journey was in this

sure I'd love to talk to you about it well I found computers in school I was in public school back in in Brooklyn New York I was a little kid and PCs were like 386s or 286 machines were appearing running Microsoft DOS and one of those machines had uh like a game like a q basic game so the teacher opened up Q basic and and they said hey this is code and it's a game and they run it and the game ran and my career was made basically like that was that was the magical moment I saw that as a I don't know I'm gonna say maybe like nine-year-old 10 year old something like that I could be messing it up but I was pretty young and I just started to to

just harass my parents endlessly that I really really wanted to get a computer and this was just a little bit of luck my parents you know didn't have a lot of money we were immigrants to America at that time my father was working two jobs you know the usual stories apply but you know I was their only child and I really wanted something and I claimed that it was going to be really great for me and so they finally a couple of years later bought me an IBM 486 SX and that's where I wrote like my first piece of code with my own hands on my own computer and I think that's probably why we're talking today

what programming language we're using

qbasic cube is my first language your

first language and we had the IBM was it running Windows 3.1 at the time or is it

still dos yeah yeah 3.1 and those like my cousin taught me how to do those commands and how to edit auto exec files and stuff and then uh you know in Windows I learned how to use the UI and run all the applications it was it was such a magical time I mean you know I feel blessed that I I got to see computers in such a kind of simple state but already just powerful enough to to have programming languages that were accessible to kids like me who had those education or like I didn't know anybody I didn't know anyone who coded it was like completely just myself I saw something in school and years later I was doing it directly because even in school we didn't have like 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 felt fell in love with it yeah that's where my journey began

how did he learn how to use qbasic we're using some books or what was your path there

it's hard to remember right I don't want to lie to your audience but I'm sure it was books I mean there was no internet to go to eventually three of us or four of us in in my class we all kind of started the program and I know we we taught each other things and that was probably the worst programmer out of all my friends uh two of my friends are still you know 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 um I discovered bulletin boards so I started to like connect to bulletin boards like early internet I remember some someone showing me the first

browser you know I think it was Netscape one or something you know like and I didn't even think about the internet as the future at that time it was like oh it's you know this this local computer you did things on the computer and then you connect to these bbs's bulletin boards and you socialize you get files from them you know you you learn things you play multiplayer games that was the thing that was starting where it was like you take a turn in the bulletin board then the next person calling in took a turn so I kept seeing this potential and it really just stuck with me so badly that I just learned how to program over the years eventually I kept on the Microsoft track you know starting

to basic then I learned Visual Basic then I became a Visual Basic developer at my first job I I didn't go to college I just went to a startup right after high school I really I was in love you know I did a lot of things that if my son tries to do I'm not sure how I feel about that I was like let's just give this college thing I think I think I know what my future is and it was it was really you know looking back it was it was such a reckless it's a scary thing to do but at the time you know I was 18 I was Brave or stupid I don't know you pick you pick your the right word there and I learned

the program I I was like a web developer you know like a very basic web developer I knew JavaScript a little I knew CSS HTML there were no Frameworks to learn thank God I was just basically doing all of everything raw and Visual Basic was my back end you know classic ASP and it was like I remember getting my first job you know right out of high school like I applied to a startup and and they were so hungry those were the.com days before the crash they're like oh you have a pulse all right come you can you can program great here's the job personal tiny tiny salary but you know I didn't it didn't feel like that's me at a time and I started I started being for real

in it and I remember having that moment of like wow this is this is real like I I thought I thought this is where I could get and I got here and in I I attribute a lot of luck in my journey so to speak

yeah and did you find that make a transition from just programming things for fun and then going to the job was there a big leap in things you have to learn and understand on the fly or were you already well prepared from your already experimentations

oh it was a leap so so I I built the website for my friends father's music business that was my first real pay 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 delivered 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 for another human being and it was it was stressful and scary it was probably the first time I had that work stress feeling in my whole life uh you know that we all now know from our real jobs and transitioning to his first real job it you know the things that were

surprising to me somebody who again had no no formal education in this there was a system to track bugs all of a sudden they had to look in that system I think we used jira at the time I had to look in there I had to see what was assigned to me I had to be accountable for closing things in a timely fashion I had to learn the database I had never for my own purposes I was just doing pure web development you know static HTML content and maybe some some Dynamic back-end thing but was not data connected nowadays everything is data connected so it sounds crazy but back then you know 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 you know this few people who took care for me in that first job and like this one gentleman who his name is Rudy he was he was a wonderful guy still you know still a wonderful guy he sat me down he taught me how to database development like he literally said look you can't do this job pretty hard unless you know how to how to write a SQL script and you know if you don't have people like that in your life life gets a lot harder so I always encourage people to you know help

others because we just have each other man that's that's all

yeah that's so very true and and one of the things that will touch back with you a little bit later on is you know you mentioned you didn't go to college and then you went straight into the job market and we see a lot of conversations that came up especially when it comes to computers and technology and so on is is it even important to have a degree because many of us did you know some of us did go to college and we were underprepared anyway we did job market we had the same leap they described where translating from what was academic and theoretical and you know 10 bucks environments to real examples was just like a massive amount of relearning and so I'm curious to get your take on it

you know if you you have a son now would you how would your guidance on you know if his interests were in computer science and want to do with more computers how will your guidance change or would it be the same for him as well

yeah I think you know when when I did it I call it really crazy because of just the time that it was you know if I didn't make it you know in the programming field without the degree I was I was in trouble right like at that time there really wasn't you know hey take this boot camp become an engineer kind of kind of world so it was just a different time so I definitely see my own experience as being just because of what it was kind of 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's a lot of options for people to to take uh

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 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 you know like or some path like they need to figure out for themselves there's no Journey that two Journeys that are alike but I'll tell them what my opinion is my opinion is if you have the the support of your family if you have you know if you have time college is not a better investment you can learn things there you don't have to leave College as software software engineer you can become a software engineer while you're

in college it's kind of my my mindset so you you know you can you can learn so much nowadays for great training courses that are really on point to turn a human into a software engineer that 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 in you know past all of that into work you're going to miss those experiences and obviously you know it's time it's money so you have to really you know it's not it's not there's no like simple answer it's uh it's a calculation you have to do that calculation for yourself and think

about it but I always would tell like my own son let's use that as you gave an example I would tell him here's some reasons why I think you should and we'd have a conversation about it beyond beyond that I that's he's four years old I'm not sure I'm ready for that talk

no that's you know very true you know I have a five-year-old daughter so you know these are all things that the back of your mind always just keeps going in it's like how would life be different for them 13 14 years on the road because the world has changed so much if you look 14 years in 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 it's a fun topic and one we'll probably be chatting about much further you know years and years into the future yeah now so you're doing a startup what next because you know I I I'm curious you know like how because you and I touch base you were in marketing and

you're at Microsoft but it's a big jump between many things between then and there so I'm trying to connect the dots between how your passion for programming ultimately that you that you've done that path

yeah I feel like this this conversation is almost like a 3D version of my LinkedIn profile it's like yeah um so one of the one of the things that I I really enjoyed as being a software engineer and I was a software engineer like for about 12 years so I would you know started when I was 18 and for 12 years I went from the most Junior person on a team to like a team lead I manage people probably poorly back then I've learned a lot since then um I I architected Solutions and one of my super powers that I developed that I realized like I'm not the best engineer on the team often like very very often I'm just being very honest with you it's

not that my output was bad but there was always somebody who was like oh yeah I code C plus plus games in my spare time and I was like Jesus I I never even opened C plus plus you know my professional career to make something production so I was always a higher level programmer but I saw problems right that was like something that I was passionate about who's our customer let me talk to them often in 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 and I would show up on the floor with business people and I would tell them hey I'm your engineer and they'd be

like what are you doing here nobody's overcome like we just like magically send emails to you folks and things appear you know for us as software products and I cared about the humans and I still have friends from those days like people who were not Engineers but working became my customers who are still my friends because that's how I approached every problem I approached it from a human-centric approach first like who are the who's our team what are their skills who are our customers what are their problems what solution can we deliver for them on what timeline let's involve them early in 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 you know teams were styled away from their customers they deliver Solutions after months or years the solutions were not the right Solutions often right or missing key features and and they would go on these long you know everybody was upset at each other and I was like why don't we solve that by talking and they also realize they can talk to other teams so often I would get in a situation with one company I was like well it's the networking team you know like that that was like a thing I was like what do we what do you mean who is it like who's the human where are they Which floor do they say let's go talk to them and I went and talked to them and

we became again like friends like like yeah Dimitri needs a deployment out you know it's emergency will do it because we like him because he talks to us because he respects what we do and I found that was my superpower so my career towards the end of that 12 year journey I 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 I was the team lead I had like three Engineers under me I wasn't their manager but I was basically telling them what what code to complete what to write I was writing code I was working with ux I was 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 I'm like if I thought that 18 year old me but this is my path forward and 12 years later me was a colleague no like like is there anything else they can do I'm tired and I looked at and I was at Microsoft at that time as a consultant so I was working for customers and I had shipped like five production customer applications uh during like four four and a half years of that work and there was another team of Engineers that did like training and mentoring and they also help customers with support issues is the Premier field engineering team at Microsoft and one of my former managers in Consulting went over there and became

a manager of these engineers and he and I just had the same idea we almost like at the same time asked each other hey can we talk and 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 I'd love to train a customer Mentor a customer I was like what's the interview and back then it was like one interview it was like you're hired like I know you have worked with you for years like you're a good engineer you can do this job I was like that's the easiest that's probably the easiest job I offer I ever got so I accepted and I spent a year and

a half doing crazy stuff like one customer like totally randomly teachers teach our Visual Basic team C sharp and as the great where's our course and the team was like what course we don't have a course called build it so I built like my own from the ground up C sharp chords and I used to be a DB programmer so I understood their language and what they were going through that I didn't I did the same transition myself a couple years before so I sat there with like six six customers in Texas and I told them C sharp over like two or three day workshop that I totally customized and again I still I still talked to some of them like they apparently liked what I

did and I and I was so inspired by like wow I can teach people I can educate them and I was doing like evangelism for visual studio releases to to these customers again always to a customer from me to like three to five to six people at most um and then one of my friends another friend at Microsoft who I Loosely knew Brian he reached out to me and said or have you shout out to him we got connected somehow and he's like hey there's this job opening that as a premier opinion with Premier Engineers did he's like if you want to do what you're doing now but a huge scale like educate but educate a huge scale you got to become you gotta check out this

marketing job and I thought he was crazy I was like marketing of why I'm not a marketer I don't have a marketing degree those are my expectations they just talked to this manager and this manager turned out to be a former Premier support engineer so he was exactly me in the past and he was like oh I know what you do really well and imagine doing what you do at scale and you have a passion for developers um at that time I guess I should also add I started speaking at user groups and this was another like coincidental skill that helped my career because you know talking in front of people presenting that that's that's a skill we're developing and I didn't have it I

was good with a small group if you would have put me back then in front of a group of like 50 people I didn't know I would just be terrified shaking unable to like like every your body just like rejecting the idea of doing this this thing and I forced myself to a stage over and over and over till I get 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 gonna have to you know executed scale like promote digital Studio at scale work on websites work in business development you're going to have to 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 of life my programming skills my presentation skills my evangelism skills for this job and I became a marketer for that chance and uh 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 but uh where we crossed paths yeah no

that's actually really interesting you know and 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 just you just are generally naturally a great teacher or was it something you picked up as skills over your career

yeah so the way uh the way that I've approached it you know I'm I mean I I think I whenever I taught people and I've done like workshops at Microsoft events I've done this like smaller trained scheme so I've done a bunch of training and I've always come to it from 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 right so my my view is always the Train That's all training is if you can make it so that if the you before you knew this topic got all the information in the right order then the person you're telling to is probably going to get it too right so it's not I

don't have any more of a script than that and I just applied it and I tried to break things up I always believe in in this idea of that there's you know any topic can be broken down into into many many smaller chunks so people can can learn it you know progressively and then the rest is just uh just kind of caring about your audience right like taking the time being prepared practicing going through every example making sure everything you're asking them to practice actually works you know this is where the the tediousness that I have of like I I like things to be well done um was really paying off right I spent a bunch of time trying to make sure that my labs are working my script was right

my code samples on screen you were accurate and then if people needed help if it needed me to come over and talk to them look at their problem because they broke things up I could always come to you and help you through it so in my five or so times that I've delivered like a formal training to customers I always followed that model and it worked and um you know in later years I had really great Partners helping me out so I remember a big Tech ad event ticket was a Microsoft conference back in the day and we had hundreds of people you know want to take this topic and I could not have done it by myself and that's what the superpower of other

humans comes in like you know have friends who are willing to help you and reach out to them and say hey you want to do this workshop together you want to take half the content you know for me I can't I can't complete this in time and that's that's another way that you know you you can 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 is my is my suggestion to young people all the time

yeah one of the biggest fears is just asking for help in the first place yeah

it's uh yes I I don't know why but at least my impression I've always seen in in the industry in general is that asking for help is a sign of weakness and I'm always like no it's actually not it's actually a great thing it's actually one of the biggest things you can do to both scale and also is get things done and collaborate and also make people along the way who become your friends and your colleagues and and so on yeah yeah for sure asking people for help is one of the best ways to make a friend possible right as long as it's a genuinely good reason right nobody likes to have their time wasted but I always tell people like look if you if you ping

me and chat no matter you know what what the topic is and you're like Dimitri please can you help me I I get random people all the time and I'm so so happy to help right it's to me it's a great feeling that I again I reflect what how I feel in others I think others feel like me and I've seen I've seen it from them over the years

absolutely so you're doing marketing now at Microsoft this is when you know you and I cross paths quite a bit it was probably in the visual studio org or the developer division you know my memory is getting fuzzier as the years go by it's a transition though because you were doing trainings for companies in your role as marketing but now we were you know my memory is you're working with product teams on how to plan launches how to better adjust the narrative for things like that that's a shift in terms of what we've done before so how did that come about

yeah yeah well sort of like let's talk about what marketing was for me right again a very personal Journey um I I was in a very special team at a very special time we were part of the marketing organization and pretty much nobody in my team was a marketer we were all software Engineers one way or another or people who just found the passion for this space through their you know for for their hobbies and we had a very difficult job we had to Market to developers at scale of Microsoft so the way we did it was to normal marketing and focus on what would I 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 you know you know transition to me like all of these things were how we we built the things we did and we we launched Visual Studio releases we collaborated on better blogs better documentation you know we did things that traditional marketers don't focus on but in your marketing team for developers your first question in any product launches do you have documentation and if you're an engineer you ask that question because you know that's that's the first thing your customers are going to look for once they discover this product so I really spent a lot of time being a developer having that that perspective and marketing it was a wonderful time it allowed me to do a lot of different kind 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 feel like my job changed constantly um and through that whole time I I basically got to leverage small pieces of everything I ever did before right because it was like Hey create a 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 gotta build a skeleton of what what the workshop needs to be I need to make sure I align a couple of good reviewers that I trust on the subject matter so it was all about just like managing the details

using the knowledge that I had about developers and that was my seven years of experience um but I got I got exposed to things you know I learned things that I would never have learned otherwise people ask me sometimes like would you have done this again like if you had to restart your career because now I'm a product manager and I'm very happy product manager but I would I would say yes I would have done marketing again because I learned the value of Business Development I learned the the value of the revenue generation I learned the value the the importance of branding the importance of good marketing the importance of you know strong social media like there were things that I got to learn and see the

data and experience that the PM legitimate doesn't have the reason to get involved with so to me I feel very well-rounded to be where I am today because of my diff like I would say three big steps in my career where I did very kind of different things

if you had to take a step back and 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

oh I mean it's a loaded question but I'll try to answer it I mean back when I was doing it a lot of a lot of teams um had experience with non you know non-programmers being in that role right because the team that I was on was a fairly you know Divergent step from what marketing typically was right a group of marketers and marketers are super valuable people I'm not trying to to say marketing isn't valuable but they have a special skill set uh but they're not technical they don't understand what Engineers are doing or why and this was a constant misconception I was fighting personally but this doesn't often apply a lot of times you are working with non-technical marketing teams so I would

say the biggest more common misconception is that marketing is like a distraction almost right it's like I have to deal with marketing marketing is fundamentally a huge part of the reason that you're 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 if you're on a small startup with like the marketing team being a person or if you're the micro Microsoft scale or any big company where you have groups of people helping you work with them understand them this is like a gen general rule that applies I think to all cross-functional relationships but marketing is so important to make sure that there's ads supporting your product the social media is supporting your

product that there's you know the best agency is building your websites that if you have more technical marketers they can help you review your blog posts your go to market plan and in a big organization marketers often have a horizontal view that developers don't understand uh because again it's not their job yeah so they they understand what's going around the company and they can help bring things together we often have to do this where a team X and team wire we're about to do things and slightly slightly different days of the month and it's like you folks should combine like it's going to be so much more powerful to make you like a developer day and bring all these topics and and make all of this effort that

we're going to put in on your behalf in order to get people to look at your release bring it all together so I would say that's that's the kind of misconception that would fight and marketing is super important be friends with your marketing team

yeah no that makes a makes a lot of sense and you've probably seen a lot of the Articles and news that talks about how AI assistance and all these things will put marketing and some of these roles like you know in Jeopardy what is your take on that

yeah I mean all technology changes the world right and you know it's like technology is I mean look at look at where we are compared to 20 years ago I mean people 20 years ago wouldn't recognize the world we live in in many ways uh with this on like the technical side of the world so I would say uh intelligent agents are a tool uh they're not intelligence as far as I can tell you know based up I've been reading a lot about this topic like 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 I would say it's all about seeing this as a tool I don't think it replaces anybody there I

mean of course there it might be somebody that gets replaced you know you can't I can't I can't predict that so I'm not gonna go try to predict something that I'm not an expert and I don't spend my day job thinking how technology is gonna is gonna completely replace whole professions I just look at the technology as it is today where it is today it's very far from replacing anybody this is my opinion maybe I'll eat my words watching this video many years now but at least where we are now doesn't feel like it but at the same time anybody who's doing any technical field like we are should be learning this technology using it keeping an eye on it because it's a powerful tool it is uh you know I mean

what I'm about to say is not Apples to Apples by any stretch but it's like analogous that people went from having code editors which were just like text file a lot of you know text file editors to whole flash integrated environments with debugging and capability and if you were like to say 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 don't have the right skill set and I think this is is the same kind of Journey for now and then let's see how it goes man it's hard to predict

yeah exactly like intellisense didn't exactly replace developers maybe it did but it definitely made more developers productive would freed them up for things that are more higher order that they're more uniquely qualified to solve

yeah yeah anybody who thinks uh marketing can be replaced by an airbot has never tried to coordinate 10 teams to agree on a lunch date for a product uh the moment AI can do that it can have the job but uh yeah they do have a lot of jobs you know if that's if you can do that part of it that people wrangling aspect of it

yeah perfect so now you know your marketing you made this switch to product so talk to me about that because your career is really fascinating and that's part of the reason I really want to talk to you is that you've made many leads and oftentimes it was just from an area of deep curiosity about I could I see this I'm curious no more about this I think I can offer value here I'm going to try something new and so the same Playbook product management how did that come about

yeah so when I 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 right but I wasn't against it because that's what I did when I was an engineer I I didn't stick to any vertical like if switching the kind of verticals I was in when I decided not to be an engineer full-time I switched multiple times you know to be in different professions and I was in marketing I switched probably five six times it's a very different marketing jobs within the organization so change for whatever reason I don't know why it just was never scary to me it was like oh something fun let's go do that right they want me or I can grow but I

definitely hit a point where where I had two feelings I I felt like I wasn't learning like I could do my job just by you know doing half like half a half a week and I could do my job you know that feeling like I think I got this to that level of detail and the second thing was I just wasn't happy I didn't have this like this excitement in me was dying and my wife even noticed he was like you seemed upset well you know you seem more upset than usual I'm like yeah I'm thinking big things I I don't think I want to be a marketer anymore I think I've learned everything I've I've wanted to learn I think I've done everything I wanted to to do and I

wasn't being I didn't feel stretched anymore and I asked myself fundamental question which I still ask myself all the time today am I growing right and I think at some point maybe that won't be an important question maybe at some point I'll see retirement Over the Horizon and I'll be like okay I'm just finishing my career but I'm I'm so far from that emotionally that if I'm not learning if I'm not growing I wanted to change the product became that next challenge you know I saw I saw what product managers did I worked with them all the time as a marketer at Microsoft I spend my whole day talking to either marketers or product managers it was basically the two groups I interacted with and I knew

so many of them including you and I went to talk Amanda silver was I think probably the first person I reached out to uh because she had like you know as a lead in the PM team she had very broad visibility and available jobs out there and I said to her like hey you know me well you know I work hard but I have obviously I have no proof that I'll be a good product manager I think I will yeah you give I'm sure good reasons 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 like he said no like have the team voted no and have the team

voted yes and I was like okay but then there was another team that needed a PM in the same the same wider organization very different role and it was uh 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 so I became to make a long story short I became the xaml to the npm as my first PM job and eventually got to work on dotnet and other other things that Microsoft it was really really gratifying career but I was so thankful that people took a took a chance on me right they I had no track record as a PM What attracted me 2PM was was just how I felt amazing it was

to be part of the engineering team not need to write code for a living you know I still to this day build samples and toy and everything but like writing code wasn't a thing and I still after even many years away from writing code I still didn't want to go back there as a full-time job I like to think her I didn't want to do it full time but yet being part of the product team I could actually make decisions and what a product looks like and I can actually solve developer problems and I'm very passionate for that I love solving developer problems it's it's what I think about when I'm driving I'm always thinking about how to make developer lives better for whatever product I'm

involved and on the marketing side it was a very clear cut off on where I could add value and 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 and you know honestly I I don't know if I'll do another job like I don't think you know maybe maybe my title will change but this product thing is where I feel really really comfortable nowadays

you know absolutely because product management is such a wide range of roles and responsibilities in many ways it's almost as if like you know people do have different categories of product managers that you typically think about but it does have a long runway in depending our hobbies and how much you involve because people change people grow and product management and what keeps me motivated in product management is that it evolves in many ways with you or you can just stretch it just a little bit to have it still be what you're working on while focusing on something that you're now more passionate about yeah so same question again that I asked about from the marketing side what is it about product management that you wish

people you worked with knew more about that they can then you know better help you out in the long run

yeah for sure well I think in a big company product management has become pretty well established I'm I'm excited to see that because it really wasn't in for many many years there was a lot of questions like why do we need PMS I think most people working at the Microsoft and Google's of the world don't have that question anymore I think we had concrete value but I think people coming into the profession often ask me like if I become a PM what am I going to do like it's scary like it's just you know as a coder I know what I would do but as a product manager it feels like this you're thrown into this void without a lot of definition and the way

that I describe the value that that you know the profession brings we are unifiers you know we are sitting in a place to unblock our engineering team from anything that locks them from having success you know and 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 by providing a first draft of the plan as a product manager you're not alone you know you're not like on a mountain saying go this way and everyone goes this way it's more like you're on the ground with your team it's you know I I did a very different thing in my life I was a volunteer police officer when I was young um with the NYPD and I was a sergeant as

my highest rank there and as a sergeant I was on the ground with a bunch of volunteer police officers and I'd be like okay you guys moved that barricade over there you two stand over there make sure traffic isn't coming through you know like I would organize people into that level degree when I became a PM I felt like that was I was doing again like YouTube carried a barricade over there please you know I think it's a good idea if that parakeet wasn't in front of our customers you know let's get rid of the barricade so I was basically like pointing in right directions by having the time to look around to to look at customers deeper to look at data deeper to look at what

solution we're building and try to help the Ingenuity make sense of it not because Engineers can't do this right it's it's um that's a fallacy that PMS like do something very different than what other people can do it's just that that's what we're allowed to do with our time and that is magical right an engineer like you have a Sprint backlog you got to go build build your code get rid of your bugs as an engineering manager you have to make sure your team's unblocked and they're being effective as a PM next to them you can spend time on the customer you can spend time in the data and that is what makes this role so special what you do varies greatly I mean you

you know this so well right it really depends sometimes you're writing a document other times you're forcing people into meetings for a month other times you're forcing to make a hard decision be made and stop you know stop it from blocking and other times you're advocating for the team to leadership or the advocating for the team to other teams around you to make sure the work can get done and it's it's a tough job but it's extremely rewarding and if you do it well you know everybody knows why you're there and I think it's definitely doable I know lots of very successful PMS out of college nowadays like it's it's a very it's really fun to see that

absolutely and one of the things that always evolved with the PM discipline is you know when I joined as a PM many years ago that still was a question what is the value PMS really provide I think Microsoft you call them program managers and product managers or marketing people were and then you also mentioned for a moment 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 close to engineering teams to translate some of these requests in a more more you know sensible way and we evolved greatly in the in a since that point of view I think 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 on discipline I think the role of technical product manager I think it fell into like I think developer relations to a certain extent where they spend a lot of time interfacing between the engineering team and marketing team and the outside world and you know I'll be curious to know like how this changes going forward as well because the roles are changing and I think partly it's because just awareness of the roles technology has made a lot of things simpler things that were very difficult back then or more straightforward now or maybe we don't need a dedicated person for this we can have a person that 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 you know pretty interesting on that and the other big thing also what's actually interesting is that back then it was always a case where you need to have industry experience to be a product manager especially when you are you know coming into the the field nowadays it's become more of a 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 from an adventure book no one really knew what you did but it was kind of like one of

those things where but you knew there's a product manager involved I think when I went really well it's like okay I don't know what they did but I knew indirectly they did some really great work and so it's a it's an evolving field in that sense and so I'm curious to hear your take on it what are the most important skills a product manager should have to be successful you know a common question I get from so many people is that I'm currently in college I want to be a product manager what's what's important and you know there's the literature and there's the actual on the job answer that you and I probably might deviate from literature a bit on so I'm curious to hear your take on it

yeah yeah for sure and let's let's narrow this down a little bit a little bit more right every you know product managers can be from many different products you can be a product manager like let's use Google as an example you can be working in Gmail you could be making sure people have the best email experience right in the world you could be working on some machine learning thing where your customers are python developers and you know no one ever sees like some UI it's all about models and python code Etc you can be a product manager that's delivering developer services like we do right products that developers touch and interact with on the clis and consoles so product managers can be very different you can also have product

managers building hardware and like again it's an unlimited number of things they could be working on so let's let's look at a product manager who is in a technical space right because you know we're probably talking to some people who are in the technical space who are watching this video and that's where me and you are most comfortable with um so if you're if you want to be a product manager for developer products and you're coming out of college right or you're just entering college and this is your goal the question I would say and this is the same question matter what you want to product manage is do you have a passion for the thing you want to be a product manager in now this

is not a requirement lots of people find passion after they begin their career but it helps right so find a passion and if your passion is Hardware try to become a PM for Hardware if it doesn't work out maybe fall back on something else just to get the experience but at least it'll give you some path to head towards then as you're heading towards it your skills will mostly be generic but then there's going to be a few specifics so if you're going for let's say Hardware get to know Hardware learn everything you can about Hardware it's such a great opportunity before you get to that PM in your Hardware team become a person who understands Hardware how is Hardware assembled how is stuff Source you know

get get us broader view into that industry as possible because that industry knowledge is going to help you same as in people becoming TMs in my world right in your world where do some programming you don't have to your goal is not for you to become a programmer right the goal is for heat of empathy for your future customer the goal is for you to understand the terminology of your future customer whatever thing you're going to pm get that understanding terminology empathy and some understanding of like the broader thing that's happening so that's a very important skill it's like a let's call it a bonus skill you can probably get away with like learning that on the job but if you get there with with this

mindset you will be ahead of many other people the next more foundational skills that you need that are just like fundamental to every PN is communication TMS communicate they write they speak and they listen and those are things that are all very different and some of them are harder than they sell um as a PM you have to be able to articulate to people what you need you need to articulate to them you need to understand from them what they need from you and you need to communicate broad enough that people get all on the same page and sometimes that's a meeting sometimes that's a deck sometimes that's a doc sometimes that's a tweet you know many ways to communicate nowadays but you need to you

need to learn this communication skill and as part of that it's people right the most fundamental thing is people you you should get good at interacting with other humans you should be able to talk to to new new people you've never met before you should be able to stop talking and listen to them I struggle from that sometimes I'm a talker you know so it's not you know it's not easy to do all these things but this like talking and listening and communicating in different forms will save you so much grief uh becoming a PM the next thing is organization you need to find ways to get organized and it's it's it's not a battle I think you'll ever win you'd never get to the point where like

well I've learned how to organize myself and now I'm always organized if you're if your career is growing you're going to get randomized there's going to be a lot of things for you to do but as a PM that's that's a huge part of how you add value you do things time in a timely fashion and trust me when you don't you'll feel the guilt and that'll inspire you to get this skill figured out one way or another um and then finally you know you you as a product manager need to need to learn what what you do as a product manager in the context of where you you're working and that's a skill you kind of you can prepare for it you know in in classes nowadays and

courses online they'll teach you the various document types you're likely to have to generate and they'll teach you the various styles of like communication you have to do and they'll teach you how to analyze data and how to engage with customers but you're gonna have to learn how to bring all of that together into like an execution executable package of activity and you're gonna have to learn how to apply that to different problems because not every problem you solve the data not every problem is solved with customer engagement and you have to start building up a skill that understands the difference between all those things what they give you and what they don't give you and learning how to like apply that like we talk about Chad

GPT eventually and how to use the Bots you know how to how to apply all the skills all the tools you disposal well to be able to do your job um there's plenty of times where people have said to me the data shows X and I'm like the data can just can't be right you know and we and then I take out the customer development Playbook let's go talk to customers make sure the data is right and you talk to customers and they're validating the hunch that the data seems to be off like this is not what customers are actually wanting or experiencing um other times you're going to do the opposite where you're going to bring in data into like look we're not heading in

the right direction but if you don't learn that there's tools and you don't know what all the tools are and you know this video today is not about teaching you every tool but like there's a toolbox and a lot of it is soft skills and a lot of it is just knowing how to engage in certain directions and get information out of it and that's going to be super important

that's a fantastic answer right there I think should be recorded and played back at any PM Boot Camp or MBA program out there Dimitri thank you so much the time you know like this was absolutely thrilling and can't wait to see all the other stuff that you keep sharing and doing as well so

thank you Cooper great talking to you