[Laughter] [Music] hello everyone welcome back to my product chat Series today our production guest is Kirupa a product manager at Google and former pm at Microsoft in Salesforce he has been working in the industry for over 15 years our main goal is to understand the product management Journey at Google and his advice as to how others can transition into the field hiker rupai it's so nice to have you how are you doing great how about yourself I am great thank you for taking all the time today happy to be here so let's start with um before even like your journey I would like to know from you what's your definition of uh product management

oh wow it's a it's a great one to kick this you know interview off with so we'll look at product management is that it's about three primary goals it is what do I build how do I build it and once I've built it how to get it to the hands of users or customers now it's interesting in that all three of those questions they're dedicated fields of you know disciplines whose entire job it is to solve that where you might have research playing the critical role of like what do I build you might have the engineering team playing a big role in terms of like how do we build it in partnership with the design team and then you have our build up relations if

it's a developer facing product you have marketing you have very good Market activities that play the critical role of how do we now get the product we've built into the hands of the various people the job of the product manager is to be responsible to make sure that all three of those things are done really well without in many ways having the full Authority or the influence of having to be you know right on the line to say I'm going to be the one in charge for all of it it's a collaborative activity where right you're right in the middle of like multiple Venn diagrams and then when you have you know we have to get secondary tasks that are also critical to getting a product out the door which might mean

working with our legal department working with the Privacy teams working with a variety of other disciplines depending on the product you're working on depending on the industry vertical that you're in that needs to be involved it's really up to the product manager you know the running commentary but often here is that you know the success of a product is often shared but the failure is squarely on the product manager and so it's a it's a fun space you know if you have the right level of work ethic and interest to kind of drive through all those ambiguities and connecting the lines between all those

Venn diagrams yeah I really like that you actually summarized everything in like a very good ways thank you for that um can you tell me more about your background and journey and how did you transition into product management yeah

for me product management was always accidental I never really knew much about product management you know 15 years ago it wasn't a very common discipline where you could go like I'm formally trained to be a product manager with Great Courses and great Pathways for someone to go and become I want to be a designer I want to work in marketing I want to work in communication so I want to work in engineering product management was a little fuzzy wig area where you kind of knew that some companies had the discipline for product management but many of them kind of had other disciplines wearing multiple hats and trying to Cobble together very skills that needed to be what a product manager was and for me I was in college I was

looking for internship opportunities and I the two options for me were either product management or engineering and I've been studying computer science so for me naturally I was like oh yeah you know engineering seems like a very logical choice for me so why would I you know even consider all of this but during my interviews during my conversations and doing some of my research I realized that what I would typically be doing doing as an engineer I might be good at it but I won't be great at it you know I don't think I'll ever be considered a great engineer in any way shape or form but in on the side I've been for a long time blogging and building an online community where I've

been helping developers and designers just learned to be more effective at building applications and that had become one of the more successful websites on the in that particular ecosystem for quite some time and as I learned more about product management I realized that the things that I've been doing in terms of building an audience figuring out how to grow the market understanding metrics working with engineer and working with various teams to kind of help build a vision that I had for a particular product was very much in line with what companies were looking for into their product management and so I thought about okay you know you normally people say at least back then people said you don't want to make a hobby or if you don't

make a career out of your hobby I'm like let's give it a shot anyway and so so I did you know my journey into product management is partly because I really enjoyed the task that product management entails there's a whole long tail and even some short tail activities at product management I have no idea about and that is something I learned as I joined officially I joined Microsoft as a product manager and I've got to learn more about the Rope so the other side of product management especially the differences in how product management changes depending on the size of the industry you're in the type of product that you're working for and of course you know at a large company some of the skills you need to develop as a product

manager are very very different than some of the skills you are developed writing working on a company of your own in many ways and so there's a lot of relearning a lot of unlearning and a lot of just connecting the various dots that I had to learn in many ways over the course of my career and I'm still learning even now their days where I'm just like I had no idea that's a more effective way of getting something done so it's a never-ending journey I agree

yeah because I think product management is more like it's on the job training for sure you can get like some ideas at least from certifications and stuff but I think like you actually learned learn from like on the job training for sure because I have worked as like product manager in two different companies and it was very different so I completely agree with your point um so again with the last question I would like to you know just ask like a similar question what a product manager offers to the team because again it's very different company wise so as for the companies you have worked with what do you offer to the team

yeah I'll give you a general answer first and go specifically into what I brought into the team generally there are several types of product managers they come in different shapes and sizes in terms of skill sets they bring to the table and it very much is also depend on the type of company you're in and the value they are Prov provide for product management itself you know in one of the things like the two typical buckets I often look for which are the product managers is are they the kind of product manager who can be great for taking a product from zero to one so essentially all the early stages of conceiving selling you know coming up with the vision working with the right stakeholders to come up with the plan

and then being able to start working on the version one of the product that's a very different skill set than the other bucket of product managers which we often run into or are they great from going from one to two or one to three or two to four you know essentially once you hit pretty much cruising altitude or do we have that kind of people in place to be able to make sure that we can navigate the turbulence be able to find Optimal paths to better and you know larger destinations as time goes on so those are the two big buckets of product management in terms of where you can find people and where they might slot themselves into their other subcategories you might see online that

people recognize as well the other part is in the company you're in there are many companies that have the role of product manager but if you ask them what does your day-to-day job look like it is often not very product manager-centric it's often project Centric in many ways and that's completely fine as well you know the trick is for you to identify what parts of product management appeal to you what are you uniquely qualified for what are you good at and making sure you can find the right company that kind of respects those kind of values and the way I can think about it is if you care about product management you want to work in product focused companies where companies build products they learn from

the mistakes they make and keep iterating on it and they have the all the process in place for being able to sustain that now to get to your question particularly one of the things I also think about product managers is they'd be domain experts in a particular different field something that gives them a unique insight into what someone might want to do without having to go through a lot of the more fundamental kind of question asking that often goes into it and because of a background with developers with design tools developer tools and just really being passionate about how do you make developers successful in building applications I kind of navigated myself into roles where I get to be in teams in companies in products where they place a very high

value on developer experience and because I get to work with people who share a lot of value through this area I can lean in on my expertise and some of the information that I have around what would be the right thing to give people to solve a particular problem as it pertains to app development or language development or any of those kind of things and that's one thing I bring to the table the other side also as I learned from Mostly my side projects I also write books on the side and I do a lot of marketing for them myself it's really around once you build a product that's basically I'd say the halfway point for you to say you're successful in having built something is how do you

go from having built something to actually Market it how do you get it into the hands of all of your customers with the right level of fidelity so that way you're not spending too much time on a marketing plan that never goes anywhere but you're also not just throwing stuff over the wall that looks very hastily done and so I have some level of this tribal knowledge a lot of mistakes I made and learning from those that I like to bring to my roles as well in terms of okay you know if we had to be creative in solving this problem how do we make best use of our resources our talent and our marketing teams and develop relations teams to have the most outsized impact without having to do too

much of the early kind of you know wheel turning that often happens in large companies it makes sense okay that's

actually very inspiring like you write books to books too do you have it like

already published yes yes you know I I think about seven books have been published so far my eighth one is going to be out in about a month it's a third edition for my JavaScript books okay I

need to read that thank you for letting me know about that um the other thing you mentioned about like project manager so a lot of time like companies confused about like product managers but project managers I've heard this with business analyst too um what are the differences like in those three roles because a lot of times when like I'm looking for jobs a lot of people tell me just apply for business analyst roles if you can't find prep product managers like what's the actual difference between these three roles

I think the actual difference is the The Horizon the the field of view that you have in each of these roles as a product manager it falls largely on you maybe exclusively on you to have the full end-to-end vision of where a product is where it's going to go and how you imagine it going from there to the next levels whereas if we look at project management specifically or business analysts specifically your your tasks and things you're focusing on are very scoped to a particular part of the problem space you know if you look at the full range business analysts have played critical role in partnering with product management ideally in identifying The Right Use cases right go to pricing strategy or the way to adopt

a product or way to figure out how do we navigate you know competitive complexities and project management is a big part of the execution phase of many projects and also the concealing phase as well it's like or do we have all our ducks in a row to make sure we have the right usability studies the right research activities done and once we have all those activities as part of this building the product our are we in the right Cadence are we communicating to our stakeholders effectively and all of these are also activities that a product manager may do but I the best ways through a good partnership where product management and business analysts and strategy and and project managers all collaborate closely to make sure

that each skill set has their own unique strengths that they bring to the table and it also could be a case where some product managers are very good at project management in which case they may prefer doing some of this role in some cases a business analysts might have strategic insights that may greatly influence program for a product and if the company or the organization working allows for flexibility where your time title and your role don't kind of pigeon for you into being something very specific you have the opportunity to kind of create a more collaborative environment where each person independent their title is able to bring their right skills to the table to make sure the right product is being built the team is overall very healthy and

executing and working in a very good Cadence

wow okay I like that answer um yeah I know because collaboration is so important like whenever you know I was just reviewing my resume right now like a few days ago and I was reading like some tips on like how can I make my resume better for product managers and the main word was collaboration so as you mentioned like with project managers or with business analysts we need to collaborate that's a really good point um just want to ask you for you like what's a day in the life of a product manager at Google

yeah it no it's an interesting question because every day for me is different that's like I took I took a pause for a moment to see can I come up with a coherent narrative unlike the many things that I do on a typical day and the answer is no you know my my one and a half seconds of awkward pausing indicates no I wasn't able to come up with a narrative there but every day varies you know I work on a handful of products you know I work in the Firebase org which is really a team that is built around creating products that help app developers so their mobile or web be able to build products that have a great user experience but you don't really know all the complexities

of back-end systems authentication where's data stored how does the data get to out from a local machine to a database all these important things that developers need to think about but they may not have any expertise or interest in thinking about Firebase helps solve that and so that very much fits into my particular Hobby World of how to make developers more successful and in some of the products I work on it completely varies this week we're having a big conference that we're going to be having in New York called firecon that's been taking up a fair amount of my time where I'm reviewing scripts I'm working with the various stakeholders to make sure our releases are going in the right way we have the right approvals privacy

legal and security and so that was a more of a more of a unique you know day-to-day activities for me over the past week and a half or so typically it would be a combination of making sure my team is set up for Success they have all the details from me that they're not blocked on anything that I can potentially help with I typically tend to go through a lot of feedback either on social media or our customer bug reports and just pick a customer here and there and say you know I'm just going to Ping them and ask them if they want to chat with me to share more about their experiences good and bad about using our product and I try to do about

one or two of those a week just you know casually no it's not really foremost it's me and you know any engineering team member wants to join me getting on a call and just chatting about another developer and going what do you think what do you like about it not like about it keeping it very much a a low-key event they're also more formal activities where we're doing a large values of research studies and I tend to play a big role in like defining the questions we work on and making sure that what we are actually getting feedback on is something that also can be aligned to what the products are building and oftentimes you might get feedback but it may not be actionable and so if we can somehow tweak the

feedback to make sure that it still fully captures the you know person's mental state at that time but also it gives us in touch into efficient a product those are all time consuming activities in some ways and then a large part of my role of course is also being the chief evangelist for a product internally you know for a product manager having externally people never products important but sometimes I find it's more important for people internally especially teams here collaborating with teams that you're dependent on for various capabilities or teams that are depending on you for certain capabilities to be fully you know informed on what's going on not just on the details of the exact specific thing you're delivering but more to long-term vision

now why are we here what is the important part of the thing you know five years from now what is the impact we would have had and being able to answer all of these questions at a very high level and also at a very granular level are all some things that I spent a fair amount of time creating artifacts for whether it's documents or decks or actual meetings and chatting with people and so that's a range of activities and there's like probably a billion more things that some days have that you know I probably wouldn't be able to capture in the time we have remaining here wow

okay so that's a lot of work like day to day wise but do you think like every day is so different but do you think the career is rewarding for you

oh yes you know I I really enjoyed the work that I do and for me that's what I always optimize for in many ways you know careerism you know there's so many things about careers that are fully outside of your control there are things that you can control which is how much can I learn how much can I bring into this promise base based on my experiences and am I willing to readjust my privacy previous assumptions if I get new data and learn things and so that's the thing that I feel I have fully within my control which is you know what can I bring to a table based on my skill set the other two things I think will help in careers in general is do you

have a great manager do you have a manager you get along with that has your best interests in mind and can also offload and can handle some of the things that you are not probably the best at and so it's a complimentary relationship oftentimes especially if you become a product manager and you've been friends for a very long time you can go into more detail on what are some of the skills that product managers might need early in their career versus later on in their career and the last ones in the industry you're in you know I've been very lucky to have been in situations where both I had great product managers who were my you know who were good mentors and provided really good insight into how I can

manage my career how can become a better product manager and so on and it just happened to be an industry that over the past almost 20 years has really grown by Leaps and Bounds you know everyone is doing things with software you know the internet has software technology and industry it's on the hottest markets for a long time and even now is still pretty hot and so those are two things that I did not you know have any conscious plan of making my way through these stages I just happened to be at the right place at the right time and I benefited greatly from it so I'd say luck you know I'm definitely people that believe that luck plays them you know an outsized role in your success in in most things

but definitely in careers especially in product management where being at the right place at the right time is as important balanced by making sure you have the right skills and the right attitude to be able to take advantage of the tuition when you are able to see that there's a problem here I have some Opera opportunity you know have some ideas let's go ahead and make it something real

makes sense yeah because a lot of times I would say that I was just reading some articles about product management in some situations when you have like some managers where they don't accept some ideas at that time we're just sticking to the issue that the company is facing and we're not able to bring like new ideas to the team and we're not able to implement the uh Implement on the team so definitely um again luck is very important there that you get a chance to experience new things with time but generally like from your perspective um since you got into product management through internship so for future like early grads or other professionals what do you think could be the best way to transition into the

field except for the internships

it's a it's a tricky one because it depends again on the industry you're in we're in technology specifically at this point in time I think product management is fairly well established people are like yep we see there's a very distinct career path and a ladder for product management just like there's one for engineering or design or research and and all the other various angles that play into the kind of products that we've built whether it's consumer products or more platform developer facing products or back-end products the best way to really get into product management which is always a chicken egg problem many of the roles you might see on LinkedIn or like always job posts they're like you must have X number years of product management experience

and if you're a student in college it's like wait how do I get X number of years of experience as a product manager if I'm trying to apply for my first job as a product manager how does that work and and that goes into a little bit of more some of your knowledge of product management can actually play a big role here because the title of product management there's various activities you may have done over the years as part of any projects that I worked on any side you know jobs you might have had or internships you might have had in general that may not have had the title of product management but the work you did that the kind of activities that you performed were fully in line with

product managers expect and so that's one way of making sure that if there is a requirement for product management that you're very familiar with the role of product management is and what are the expectations of you in that role and whether you already have experience as a part of that and highlighting it as well I'd say that you know in general it's a good advice people say that you don't use the same resume for every different type of role over and over again what optimize it for the type of job you're applying for so you're applying for a job as a business analyst you'd have your product you have a resume tweak with the right keywords to optimize for what the person reading it might be

looking for and certain product management as well we definitely want to emphasize Less on I built these various type things as great technical detail but more in terms of why they choose the problem that I chose what is my thinking behind product strategy that maybe I can highlight through my work here what are some activities what are some of the experiences that I built that even though I might have let's say to pick an example I might have been an engineer on a product but I was the primary person who had to translate customer feedback who had to for Creative Vision for where does their product go and that vision went beyond just engineering and architecture details but actually touched upon information about our competition where user needs are where

the societal Trends where they're going and try to blend all those things in into a cohesive narrative and that's one way of being able to do some of that as well and the other approach is in many cases one of the things that product managers especially if you want to be successful in product management I do believe that you having domain expertise in whatever field you're in is actually a great start and so if you're interested in product management there's a very good chance that you can actually start off in a role that is more engineering focused or ux folks or any of the various roles that are focused that are not product management in terms of title but have the stretch opportunity for you to explore product

management and specifically you know there are many roles where you can be engineering and have roles and responsibilities to touch upon product management or you can work in finance or you can work in a strategy and business operations that all touch upon various aspects of it as well and once you get familiar with that then you can choose that point do I then stretch into a saying okay I want to officially not transition to product management because I've done enough product management activities and I enjoy it that's a big thing as well because a lot of people have this idea of what product management is you know they have this like very glamorous point of view when it's often it's like a Survivor bias kicks in where you think of like you

know famous CEOs and I think with moments and movies and you know and and common cultural you know memes we're like oh the product management like the best job ever and then we actually started doing the role of a product manager like wait it's actually a little bit more different it's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of pressure and it's often a case where you know I always like to say that product demand is a loneliest discipline that you could possibly work in because you might have other people that are product managers but the things you're facing the challenges you are trying to go through are very uniquely your own and that's something that you have to be comfortable being able to navigate and

and be able to be happy with and so taking up little small opportunities where I'm going to do something that I'm you know either I studied for or I have an opportunity a company to start working in and I'm going to you know explore product management for that angle and the other approach of course is that you go formally into an MBA program or something that actually helps you learn more about product management I always consider that more of a riskier bet in many ways because you know I think maybe 20 30 years ago the value of an MBA to product management was probably very different than what it may be today because some of the core ideas of product management are often a part of

other disciplines as well collaboration is a big part of it how do you how do you communicate now how do you identify various ways of taking a big problem that would be vague maybe unspecified and breaking into more actionable pieces and so my general view is that an MBA is great for being able to get you in the door you know if you if you're able if you want to be a product manager and you're not able to get into more of the traditional means where my current company I'm working at does not have an opportunity for media product manager and everywhere I'm looking for they're looking for someone to experience and they're just not able to make that work then I think NP is fantastic you know it

gives you a signal to various recruiters essentially that yes this person has the fundamental skills they've done things that give them the right lovability to be successful in a product management role but once you get into that role though everything else is again up to you on how much have you learned how do you how do you process new information how do you handle ambiguity it falls back on you again so I'd say that an MB is not really you know in traditional view people think it would say a career accelerator in my view it's not it's more of a door opener you know it opens the door for you you get to go in but you might not have been able to do before but once you're in there though

you're back on a level footing with everyone else who's a product manager who may not have had a formal background or may not have any background in an educational background at all some of the best product I've ever worked with worked in very different disciplines did not do the the typical kind of you know academic activities one might imagine and they're still very effective at their job which I think product management gives you a lot of wiggle room and being successful but the hard part of course is getting your foot in the door in the first place which kind of goes back to oftentimes right place right time yeah some amazing points so

just want to summarize so according to you um there could be different ways to get into product management so there's internship there's MBA program um there's like internal um you know you can jump around like internally and then the other one could be that you might have like some experiences not as a product manager but so you can basically link your past experiences to somewhat product management um and put it on your resume according to the job description as well like use some keywords and then try to apply for the job so these are some of the ways that you think could be helpful right

yeah absolutely and they your Mobility is greatly increased if you're in a company that is rapidly growing that has more roles that need to be filled than there are current areas which means that there's often opportunity for it to stretch and go from like okay I'm doing things right now I learned some skills I want to do something different otherwise you may have to you know choose which company work for initially to kind of understand and get the basic skills and then go to a different company where you can then practice your skills as I say product manager in much greater debt and for me I always enjoyed large companies partly because of the mobility that it provides because you can work on a certain thing but okay I think I've

learned enough here and I think I've seen what the the ceiling of what I can do in this particular role is and transfer something else without having to change and it all depends on every person is different and what their comfort level is and what their preferences are and so they enjoy large companies enjoy small companies do they like to do their own thing where they want to start their own startup or their own business and those are all very valid paths for you to consider yourself a product manager and and the results will of course be very different depending on what you're optimizing for right okay makes sense

um how about like if you have interviewed in the past um like some candidates what you actually look for so first of all you get the resume of them it's so hard um basically there's so many soft skills that are required for product manager rather than you know any certifications what do you look for in a resume and what do you look for in a candidate when

you get to interview yeah it so the way I interviewed depends on how much experience the candidate already has if someone is fresh out of college doing their first role as a product manager my question typically is why product management you know I really want to get into the details of are they doing this because they read about it they're fascinated by the various details that go into product management and making sure that if they were to get in this role do they fully know that this is the this is the full end to end of our product Mentor often does you know these are the highlights that are often shown but there's the other side of product man that is an important part of it and

then they use this opportunity for them to usually ask me questions about what is the role going to be like and that gives me a good signal into how much are they aware of the industry they're about to be applying to what their teams might look like and and what are they looking for in their career you know what is their you know they wanted to work for the next 20 30 years what are some things that they're looking for that I can potentially maybe help them out or make sure that a team a job is appropriately suited for them and so that's one way of thinking about for you know new product managers are still apartment in college if your product manager had let's say a few years of

experience I'd like to talk about what they built how they built it how was their impact what how did they collaborate how did they essentially was it a problem with handed to them in this case it would be a product manager within the one to two kind of Hillary category or was it a problem space that they defined they found opportunity and was like it's a vague area I think there's a way we can tie some of these pieces together to create something new would this be a zero to one product manager and depending on where they fall within that the kind of questions the kind of things they might ask of them would be very very different now if I'm interviewing a more senior product

manager someone's been there for quite some time or if they've been a manager of product managers for quite some time ask them about essentially what is about product management that they really like how do they grow people's careers what are they really looking for in terms of product management you know what is why are they working for as a product manager what keeps them as a product manager and what are some things that change about all this and those seem like very softball kind of questions for very senior individuals but the answers you might hear from that give a great deal of insight into how much introspection have they done about themselves you know it's often too easy just to fall into the routine of I built

something great 20 years ago and where the coattails of that you know for the next rest of my career which is not a bad thing but when working in some of these industries like the ones I'm working in right now where everything changes every couple of years you need to be able to be very Adept at being able to go and realize that okay you know what it did back then may not be relevant anymore do I have the right level of self-awareness to recognize my strengths recognize my weaknesses and be willing to learn and be able to take advantage of all the collective skill set of the people we're working with because we work with really smart people everybody brings with them a certain

sense of you know skills a table that can be combined in the right ways to create some really great situations that can allow great products to be built and teasing that apart with senior you know leaders is a very tricky task in many ways but it's one that you know as a as an interviewer it's often my responsibility to be able to you know work through that and identify what would make them really successful makes

sense okay so as for like you mentioned about the early graduates that you ask like what's their interpretation of as like a product manager um do you prefer them to have like a certification or any specific skill that you would suggest any early graduates to have

not nothing formally you know I don't I pretty much use the blank State you know the interview at that time I for most part I'm often don't even read resumes in great detail and it's like okay you know is this the person's name okay this is what their interests are in and then the interview itself be the one that they use as an opportunity to explain to me details about what would make them clear this role and so on the thing that I often found very successful especially with you know new graduate students is that the site projects made them work on you know they might even realize that their side projects so they might be working on something that just you know like oh yeah yeah I just been helping my

my family member with this thing you know in our over the weekend those are the kind of things that actually if you tease that part like what exactly it is that that person does or very much in line with like a product manager might do you know I don't expect people in many ways to be like I'm a planetary product manager have I done exactly the same things that I'm working on day to day right now I look for more of transferable skills you know collaboration is an activity that happens across all disciplines across all stages of your life in many ways days and you can sense whether someone is very collaborative or whether they're more of a you know top-down kind of a thinker where they basically specify

something needs to be done and they expect everyone to react to it and that's also not a wrong way of thinking many companies for example operate in a model where it is very top down and some companies operate in the very Bottoms Up kind of a model where you start with collaboration and then do each layer then collaborates closely and then presents a shared mission to a common node of leadership somewhere you know in the point of view until you have to be careful to make sure that you're interviewing for someone who's approach for product management matches your company's approach for product management as well you know I worked at you know I'll say that you know in many ways Salesforce is very top down and

past experience Microsoft and Google everybody Bottoms Up and the approach of and just knowing that gives me a different approach to how I approach problems in those situations and also when I interview people how I would I would look for them to approach it as well do they have the awareness that did the decision making process so maybe very different between both these areas and for early graduates you can get a sense of it based on just their experiences with projects and all the side things they have done that can easily be applicable to them and also with new graduates there's a large amount of learning that's going to go into place as well so I look at my role there's not just being able to navigate

and answer their high level questions if they were to in this case report to me more of a how do I help them learn all the very skills that go into product management how do I help them navigate you know inter team activities outer team activities and how do you go to market all the various things that they're looking for because and at that point you really don't know what kind of product manager you are are you a zero to one optimized product man or your one to two kind of optimized product manager do you actually enjoy project management there are so many things that are unknown at that point so it's kind of a case where where you know my goal is to make that person successful in whatever

role they're in and oftentimes maybe a case that you enter the role as a product manager and you're like you know I actually really enjoy users design and user research a lot more and it's like great let's figure out how we can transition you into a role that best takes advantage of your skills because for the most part so much of it is unknown when you join a company you know you can be joining a great team in the you know not so great company you can joining a not so great team in a great company you'd have a great manager you could have a not so great manager so many of these things are you know one of the things that only once you get into

an organization we really know the details of you know ins and out and especially larger the company you're working you're trying to get into the more unknowns you have in terms of how things are going on average there's a very good chance that certain companies are known for certain reputations but that you know as averages typically go there always are exceptions and so there's a certain level of unknown on both sides for the candidate applying and also you as trying to you know interview and all these things so my general approach is let's give people the benefit of doubt if they're willing to learn if they have a good approach to collaboration or respectful then and then everything else we can figure it out as time goes on and it only applies

to early early stage and employees once you've had experienced the product manager my expectation would be that you have a strong idea of what you're looking for and what you're not looking for and why you think this role would be appropriate because you've done this wallet product management each team the all the various angles of it so you should be able to have a more articulate

opinion on it so more like it's more like an experience that you're getting and then once you have that experience you can see like if you really like the product management field or if you are more inclined towards like project management

correct I mean it's a I I oversimplified it but in some ways it could be that you enjoy product management just not in this particular team that you're in or just not in this particular part of the company in which case a big opportunity would be okay how can I help you find the right rule for product management in some of these areas so it's a a lot of it is a kind of a you learn along the way both you know like you mentioned earlier so much of product management you learn on the job and because product management so many soft skills so many things that cannot be objectively measured cannot be something you can see up front go like oh yeah I'll be writing

code in C plus that little Clarity for the most important product management very rarely exists it's Minima in many ways to choose your adventure kind of a book in some ways and that you might have a strong perspective on how you want to do something and that is something that's fully logical it is something you can actually influence and change when you go into an organization and because of the ratio of product managers to other disciplines you know most companies and most teams probably have one product manager for 10 20 30 40 engineers and uxpn and so on there's a lot of influence that a product manager has and so it's one of those roles that is scary in some ways but also fantastic if you're absolutely

you know interested in kind of looking at problems holistically and identifying how you can work with people to solve them in a way that helps everyone be successful and of course your customers at the end because that's the ultimate reason for why you do most of the things that you do I agree so

um so before getting like further into it I was just wondering you mentioned about coding do you think coding is helpful for product managers to know

it depends on the kind of product you're working on and it depends on the kind of customers you're serving and so there are several layers of looking at how we want to think about how technical a product manager needs to be okay on one hand that you know let's assume that you're working a technical product you want to be technical enough to be able to work with the engineering team and be able to have a good conversation with them so if they're explaining a trade-off for example you're able to parse it you're able to make sense of it you're able to go okay you know what are some Alternatives you can consider and windows alternatives are provided you're able to then you know articulate a

direction you think we should go to that to me is foundational in terms of how technical you need to be as a product manager the second level is let's say your customers are very technical as well let's say you work on a product where people are going to be tinkering with it everybody writing code against it or so on in which case it is important as a product manager to be able to resonate with your customer really empathize with them so either I think you are the more technical you can be in understanding their pain points the more effective you'll be able to translate what they're saying into actionable steps that you can do to improve your product going on the road now that's the second level of

competence but the third law of confidence the one I always tend to you know encourage product managers to aim for is to be domain experts in their field can they be so knowledgeable about something where they can see Trends in the industry where they can go present at conferences and present more of a thought leadership point of view on it and that's like the part where I'm always like if you can aim for that if you can aim for that particular level of visibility and knowledge go for that level but so yeah so the three levels essentially that makes sense okay that

actually answers my question um I was wondering how to stand out as an applicant like um well that um like most of the time the recruiters are actually just looking at the resume so if you have any connection with the uh with the recruiter what do you think like what should be more important I've heard like cold calling is very important like you can just reach out to people on LinkedIn but just want you to know like what's your take on that

there are two ways of trying to make this work one is definitely reaching out your career it's a game of numbers you know make sure you're paying recruiters make sure you think their careers that are relevant to the particular team or job you're applying to and you know assuming that they have very little time to read a long essay on whether she reach out to you make it very clear up front on why you are the right person for this role highlight any parts of your skills anything that would be very relevant you know think of it almost get Twitter form we have 240 characters to essentially you know emphasize what makes you more interesting than the other thousands of other things that I've gotten through email or LinkedIn

and so on right the other angle and this is like the long game and if you can pull this off you're in a great spot is how can you make yourself so appealing that recruiters reach out to you voluntarily and that's where I always feel like if you have the ability to work on something interesting side projects and also public facing component to it like a blog or a website or so on definitely be willing to share it with others you know I always responded great to be able to teach people that's something I always thought about because like you know I enjoyed doing all this because I want to teach people to be more effective at whatever they're doing whether it is the product

management whether it is being a developer or a designer and so I share a lot of content online for free not for the goal of like I want to you know work somewhere as a new and I'm looking for a new job because in this natural part of like solidifying what I've learned you know responded by explaining and teaching I'm more knowledgeable about this and I can retain that knowledge better and through those activities I find it's much easier when people kind of like oh this person probably has insight into something so I'm going to reach out to them and if you're in a situation like that maybe that's much easier because recruit is reaching out to you and you don't want to be in a

situation where you know you the ideal situation is like you're not looking for a new role but someone reaches out to you and you're like oh yeah I think this would be a good opportunity let's have this conversation and so this is a long game you play the long game here by trying to build up that repertoire of someone that people can rely on for race activities and if there's a recruiters love that kind of thing and so they often ping you all the time and so that's the opportunity opportunistic view of how you want to position yourself outside of cold

calling I love that I don't care um so once you're in the field like once you are a product manager how to learn and grow in the field

there are several ways you know one of the nice things that exists now that did not exist you know 15 years ago and I wanted to you know when I was in Project first is that there's such a great amount of both free content and even paid content on YouTube on LinkedIn learning and and so on which gives you a lot of great availability of quality material from people who've been product managers for quite some time as well you know which is always great because so much of it is experience you learn things by making mistakes oftentimes with product management as opposed to going for like I'm going to do the right thing it's often a case where okay I tried this it didn't work out I'm going

to add that to my set of knowledge that I've gained now to make different mistakes for the same mistake again and so if you can learn from some experience they can short circuit some of the mistake making so that you make more different mistakes but not the same ones that you've made or some of us told you that they have made the other aspect is to find good mentors find someone in the industry that you want to work with that you also wouldn't enjoy learning from as well that you whose products send in many ways respect and it doesn't have to be within the same company you're in oftentimes in the jobs you're in you'll be given an official Mentor but with the with LinkedIn the distance between

someone being a stranger and someone being a mentor are often just one direct message away and so I definitely look forward you know encourage everyone to say to look Beyond just your industry oftentimes you have ideas like that's an eye that's like the ideal product manager over there if I want to be a product manager when they want to be just like this person the reality is that they probably have the same you know issues around the same challenges that you run into all the time and if you really just ping them and say hey would you be going to give me a 30 minute chat on product management or any of these topics they're more likely going to be like absolutely happy to because in the process of chatting about

these things there's a lot of knowledge like it's a very high bandwidth environment as well where a lot of information is shared and so always take advantage of apprenticeship opportunities locally and not locally as well we're always a zoom call away these days and it turns out yeah it's very

important like especially when I was trying to look for internships meanwhile I was trying to know more about product management and at that time I was just reaching out to people on LinkedIn and I got to know more about product management they were always you know willing to tell me more about it so that was really cool um just one last question what are your future aspirations or goals within pm and um do you have any advice for future pm

I think for me the thing about product management I always enjoyed and I always want to just keep learning more about is how do you build an effective teams how do you make teams of individuals not just product managers but all the various teams are collaborating with how do you help them be more successful and how do you help them enjoy the craft of software development it's a lot of things that go into it just like oh this is like not done well or which we could do differently well let's say we had the opportunity to do things differently how do we do that and so with every you know every Sprint every release or every product that I like to work in I like to

look for opportunities where here's a core fundamentals of the things we need to do with making your product good but how can we make it more effective how can we more cohesive as a team and especially now that a lot of us are working in more remote hybrid kind of environments where the way you form your team Dynamic is greatly much different than what it used to be where everyone would just go to like one you know event on the campus or in your office or in a meeting room it's not attributed so how do we evolve teams to still have the same level of cohesion and and team bonding in many ways that you would normally we have to figure out how to do

it in a more digital remote first and you know asynchronous environment that's something that I'm actually learning and trying to figure out how to make this all work really well and for someone who is starting out as a product manager I'd say just enjoy it you know have a good idea of why you want to be a product manager have a good sense of why a customer would ultimately want to use your product and then everything else in between the larger gray area just floor learn from people and figure out what the best way is in closing and understanding some of those gaps because the only things you might have Clarity on really are why are you a product manager and why would someone want to

build a product you're building on everything else in between is so dependent on the people you work with the industry you're in the companies you're there at so be open to learning new experiences Making Connections that you might not need to be made and once you've made all those connections take a step back and introspect solidly understand why is it that things work the way they did why is it things did not work the way they did because those are the kind of foundations of the product manager that you build and you have to build it on yourself there's no no one else can really do that for you and it's about tutorials online they'll help you also because so much of product management is experiential it's

something you have to experience you have to go through you have to try succeed or try and fail and knowing exactly why you succeeded and know that the why you failed are both very important points uh parts of the coin in terms of how to be successful with a

product manager yeah I think reflection is very important um again thank you so so much [Music]

thank you