 Hi everyone, I'm really excited to be here and welcome to this webinar by the Product School where we talk about how to use your background to be a better PM. And I picked this topic basically there are two tracks here that I want to talk about. One is I hear people, specifically people who want to get into product management. And I hear so many people talk about kind of their backgrounds in a very incoherent way. I often see people seeing it their background filled with twists and turns and detours as something that is a disadvantage. I think that there's still a notion out there that there's like a very direct route into product management, which is through a technical role, which is so true. You probably know this. There's so many really great talks about this out there. Really good articles do that. That's really, really not true. But because that notion still kind of lives, I feel like sometimes people struggle to tell their story in a way where they see their background as an advantage, rather than disadvantage. And I want you to learn how to see it as an advantage, because it's going to help you so much in your career as a product manager. And then the other track is that I really believe that understanding and storytelling, the two pieces, the two core pieces that we'll discuss today are the most important skills for a product manager. So mastering this is a very early stage in your career, or really at any stage, just growing it and nurturing it will help you so much as a product manager. So let's dive in. But before we do that, I did not forget to introduce myself. I kind of wanted to take this opportunity to already maybe show you a little bit about how I stitch my background to be a coherent story, because I have kind of a little bit of a complicated background as well. And I talked to a lot of PMs who shared this experience that I feel that I did not know what I wanted to be when I grow up. And I had many interest in many different things. And I saw that as a really big disadvantage compared to my buddies who knew exactly what they wanted to do. And they just went for it. They were determined. There was only one thing that interests them and they went for it. And I've always looked at that and thought that it's something that I should feel, but I don't really have it. And I had to wait until I got into product management to understand that it's a really useful thing to have multiple interests as long as you learn how to use them and how to talk about them. So I am currently a product manager at Spotify, where I work at the creator side of the business. I basically work on products and tooling for labels. And I absolutely love it. I think it's a job that's very well suited. My profile, I work on customer user-facing products. And it's in the music industry, which is a crazy place. But I absolutely love it. And I spend my time and my background is around a lot of musicians growing up and when I was a teenager. So this also very well suits my interest too. Before Spotify, I worked in Amsterdam for a startup called Impraise. This was a B2B SaaS startup and I got into product management there. I started out in customer success and customer support and that whole experience was really important for me to develop that core understanding for user problems basically. And to this day, I really recommend all product managers, wherever you start working, spend a day or two with your users and your customers if you can. If you cannot, then spend a little bit of time with those people who are in these customer user-facing roles. You'll learn so much and you'll be able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and users so much better. But also this experience at a startup really taught me how to work with different parts of the business. It taught me how to prioritize because there's a lot of prioritizing going on in the startup that doesn't really have resources. And many more things that nurtured me and grew me were kind of like sometimes I feel like rocketed me to do product management. Before that, I co-founded an organization that offered psychological services so counseling, coaching to organizations and individuals as well as schools. We had group sessions and our mission was to make mental health awareness and coaching and help very accessible to people and kind of make that part of people's lives. That experience was amazing. I think it came very early in my career but it helped me to understand the struggles of entrepreneurship and you'll not prioritize more than when you're running your own business. You'll not feel the pain of the day-to-day more than when you're running your own business and you're not wearing as many hats as when you're running your business elsewhere. So I did a lot of the branding, the design, obviously a lot of the business facing problems that we needed to solve. And then at the same time, I worked as a psychologist and worked with clients a lot and my background is in psychology. I graduated in Hungary as a psychologist and I worked with clients and started my career there. Psychology is one of those things that are very easy I think to position as a kind of a highway to product management because it will teach you how to talk to people. It will teach you how to empathize a lot with your users and customers and to kind of have that curiosity as a mindset and to relate. So that was a very relevant experience for me leading up to product management. But I also had a detour to art school. I studied as a photographer for two years and while I think that that's a good example that someone could see as okay that was too maybe wasted years but I don't see it that way at all, it helped me to develop a lot of my visual culture basically and it helps me to see details. It gives me an eye for composition. So I think this specifically is a good example of how to stitch that into your story. Something that maybe at the first glance it doesn't really go on there. And in my free time I love reading. I am obsessed with cycling. I also built a track bike. I'm sailing in the summer. I am super into music. I love independent movies and also photography obviously. And I'm just like flashing these just so that you get to know me a little bit better but also because there are so many things from your hobbies that you can pick out as fish into your story. For instance, music. Music was a hobby and an interest for me for many years before I joined Spotify and now I think it helps me to connect and to stay enthusiastic about what we're doing in the company mission. So I think that your story and the data points of your story can come from very many and sometimes kind of unexpected places. Do not be scared to use these from wherever it comes from. It's all parts of who you are. If there is one core message here that I want you to understand and grasp and really connect with is do not feel like anything is wasted. Try to use everything that you've done in your career and your life and your education and your experiences. So obviously we'll talk about how to write your story up and then in this example that I just gave about my story, I did that in a way that I kind of understand who the audience is. I mean obviously unfortunately you don't sit in front of me so that I really see who is really listening to this talk but what I suspect that you want to understand my career and you want to know how I got to work as Spotify. So that's kind of the story that I picked out and assembled here. There are many other things about me that I don't think is relevant right now but in other cases I would be able to use them. So very important point to understand who your audience is and kind of put your story together in a way that it tells some information that's relevant to them. Cool. So I mentioned that the two core pillars that we'll discuss today is understanding and storytelling and obviously we'll talk a little bit about how to apply all these things that you've learned, what are the different areas where you can apply understanding and storytelling. So let's dive into the understanding part. Why is understanding important? You might ask and this wouldn't be a serious presentation if it didn't have a serious quote. This one is from Socrates, to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom and I honestly truly agree with this. You cannot work with things that you can't understand and you definitely cannot sell something that you don't understand. So when we think about those two tracks, so one when we said that we're going to focus on people who are starting out in their product management career and the people who are already in there and they can use understanding and storytelling to strengthen their skills, this is more relevant to maybe the first group when you're telling your story to a recruiter for example. If you don't understand your story, if you don't understand the different elements of it, I can guarantee you'll get a question about your background, especially if you have a colorful background and that's basically a ball that's like thrown up in the air for you that you can grab and say that yes, that I did that because of this, I learned that from it. And I think it's a brilliant and effective technique to using when you're applying to a job. And so let's talk about how to practice getting this understanding. I'd like to really dig into first and foremost into your values. And I say this because our values guide us and help us to understand who we really are and how we behave in different situations and what's core and importance to us in life. And I wanted to emphasize this one because me personally, I applied to Spotify because my personal values overlap largely with the company values. So some of these values like playfulness, sincerity, or collaboration, passion, these are values that are very important to me as well. And I thought that knowing that about myself and seeing a company that puts it in its flags, I thought that that's going to be a good idea for me to go for. And it was because I could see how these, the important things overlap and then you know that you're at the right place. I want you to dig into your career and education choices. And I really urge you to see these as part of your story rather than waste of time or something that you did before you really found out that you wanted to be a product manager. And you see that now as a waste of time and you could have come into product manager so much earlier. No, you couldn't have and maybe you could have, but you would have missed out on so much that you can use from those different parts of your life and your career and education choices. So I really, really urge you to unwrap these and try to understand why you made these choices and what you learned from them. And even if you think that something that you did was really, really a mistake, there's no way around it. There's always so much learnings in mistakes, obviously, and you know, even if you think about like product development principles and the fail-fast principle and the fail-fast and learn, there's always the learning part that is core to failing because that's what we do as humans. We fail and we learn from them and we should know better next time and we should kind of, you know, it should impact our future. The next question that I think is important and could help you to understand kind of your background and what you want in life is your role models or people that you look up to and I, you know, I want to understand why. And this is, by the way, also a question that you could get in an interview, so it's really good to be prepared about it. The next one, under the next two is goals and your dreams. So goals are more specific things, so I don't know, two to five years out. What do you want to accomplish? Where do you want to be two to five years? And then your dreams, what are your aspirations like? What are your wildest dreams? How do you want to change the world? It's so important, you know, to know that about yourself, it will guide you and it will make your efforts more concentrated and more targeted. So yeah, these are questions that you could use to just like pull out a pen or paper or your notes and do a little bit of a self-discovery through these. And I wanted to give you a technique that I use when I work as a psychologist. A lot of psychologists use this actually. This is kind of your timeline or your life timeline basically. You just like draw the line and then you mark all the most important, most relevant experiences that you had. So this could be anything. This could be any experiences that you had that you think had a transformative or important impact on your life and that will already get you in the mindset of the storytelling part that we'll talk about in a minute. And what you can also do that will help you to understand how these different things impacted you is to draw a line on top of it based on how you felt about these things and that will help you to identify whether you think these were good choices or bad choices or and then you know when you have like a bad choice you can look into like what happens, what did you learn, how did that impact your choices later or your events later in your life. And then another resource that I actually recommend you to do is the Myers-Briggs personality type. Very widespread, super popular. You can access it through 16personages.com and you'll recognize it probably because a lot of people use it. So just don't take it in the script. Don't take it super seriously but it will help you to understand your different pillars for your behavior and hopefully put you in a better position in terms of like understanding yourself. Cool, so now that we did some you know discovering in the understanding phase which obviously takes a lot of time and take your time with it but when you have that and I call this previously data points but these are basically the learnings that you'll have about yourself and then you can stitch that into a story and you know we'll look, we'll talk about practicing storytelling. So why storytelling important? Storytelling is a tool for your audience to understand, empathize, inform connections with you through your story. I argue that storytelling is one of the most important tools that anyone has because as humans we connect to each other through stories and a good story has a really big impact. Storytelling will help you to create and make your narrative crystal clear and you would want that narrative to be crystal clear when you are applying for jobs for example, when you will tell the story over and over and over again the different tweaks obviously understanding your audience so if you apply to a job that is very different from the previous one don't tell the same story, pick out different things from your background. Let's talk about how to practice that storytelling. There are basically three different questions here that you can ask when you have that story to kind of double check if your story is comprehensive and these are also things to keep in mind when you're forming that story. So first off who do you want to influence through the story? Again understand your audience and then digging a little bit deeper what do you want them to feel and what do you want them to do? So talking about hiring or interviewing you want them to hire you right like that's your goal that's why you're telling them your story you will get them to do that through tweaking your story in a way where you're like heading towards that goal so I want you to have that end goal in mind and work towards it and you'll find that making sure that they empathize with you and they understand the choices that you made so they feel will help them to get to where you want them to do. And just to call out a few things here when somebody tells a story the audience very implicitly like this is kind of a passive question but implicitly everybody asks that basically why should I care? Why is this relevant to me? Why am I listening to this story? What's the relevance to me? So keep that in mind and make it relevant to the people that you're talking to. And I think that this is one of the hardest things to do is to simplify and make your story clear and you'll probably need to do that over and over because simplifying is one of the hardest things to do because you'll have to cut things out of it. You'll have to make sure that it's not bloated it's straightforward it's simple to understand it headstores that goal that you want to want to achieve. It's a lot of lot of work and you know don't be scared if you don't get it right for the first time and you don't need to have like these you know super well-prepared like stories that you can pull out but it's good to understand these like tracks that you tell your story or using or kind of like on these tracks. I want to stop for a second here and pull in the other track that we talked in the in the beginning about which is skills that you use as a product manager. So I dares to say in the beginning that understanding and storytelling are two tools that product managers use a lot and that one of them or two of the most important tools of a product manager toolkit. And I'd like you to think a little bit about how you can use storytelling in product management or what are the areas that storytelling is being used in product management and if you think about something like a strategy or you know heading towards a vision or maybe putting together a business case maybe a data story you know understanding what you're trying to tell how you how you understand the data and what the data tells you that's a story or even like you know a good product brief is a very long written story. There are so many core moments when you'll use storytelling or you over the use storytelling in your career as a PM and it perfecting them and perfecting these like understanding a storytelling capabilities will help you to be a better PM. Let's talk about this a little bit well in in this section which is talking about applying what we've learned here. So again just iterating on the track number one when you become a PM so when you apply for jobs you'll use storytelling and you should use understanding to form those stories. I also think that it's a very useful technique to identify the blind spots and kind of the growth opportunities in your career and really having like a 360 view of your story and and your career and your entire life you know leading up to this point when you really just want to be a PM will help you to identify that what are the areas that you still need to develop them. And the last one is when you seek mentorship I really urge you to reach out with a clear goal in mind. I get a lot of questions and a lot of people reach out to me asking for a chat or you know just asking for mentorship and it was challenged them to you know to to really tell me what they want to get out of it. This will make it so much better for you and I would even think that you will get like more results when you reach out to people asking for mentorship when you tell them what you want, how you think your story is developing, how like what are the parts in your story that you think maybe touch or is relevant to that person that you're asking to help from and what do you what do you want to get out of these conversations with them. And then the second track which is when you're already a PM and you want to use these skills I'm 100% sure that this will allow you to become a better PM and you will be a better product if you master the skills of understanding and storytelling. So the understanding I call them muscles so the understanding muscles you strengthen and you use a lot when you want to understand core user needs when you want to empathize with your customers when you're really getting in the shoes of your users and that is a crucial number one rule in order to build good products for your users. So a lot of resources out there talk about this actually so I don't really want to get into it but for example the brilliant jobs to be done framework when you're really mapping user needs, user pains, user jobs like these are all relying on that empathy that you will need to have or you need to have as a PM. So practicing understanding at such an early stage in your career will help you so much to be a better PM and be a better product. And then on the other hand the storytelling muscles you'll use as we mentioned the strategy or getting buying from your stakeholders or your leadership group. You'll also use it a lot when you're motivating your team. You'll need to tell a good story to your team to get them on board and to make sure that they're motivated towards a goal that you're getting to. There are all these very core tools that you'll use that's basically all relying on storytelling and perfecting that storytelling. So these are super important techniques that will help you to be better at your career and it will help you to build your career as well. So I just wanted to stop for a second and talk a little bit about imposter syndrome and in case you haven't heard about it just google it. Imposter syndrome is when you feel that everybody around you is more capable and they know so much more about something that than you and you are just an imposter basically among them. And I think that more and more people started to talk about it but it's still not that so much out there. And I will want you to know that everybody feels imposter syndrome at one time in their career at least one time. And so I just wanted to share that understanding and storytelling helped me a lot when I tried to fight imposter syndrome because it helps me to kind of get my strong footsides like that solid foot on the ground and to understand that this is my story it led up to this moment. These are the things that I can use in this role. These are the learnings that I have and these are the things that I still don't understand and that's okay I can talk about this to people and get mentorship and be very specific what I want to mentorship about. So I think imposter syndrome and everything basically like anxiety related becomes very overwhelming when you when you don't really understand it when you cannot really like put little like barricades around it and say that this is it and nothing more. So I also urge you to to practice understanding the storytelling to fight imposter syndrome. So just to wrap up a quick word about diversity and how important that is in product themes. I also am spot-ified there are so many product managers in many many many different backgrounds and you know I talked with people who came from photojournalism or people who studied a lot of music obviously there are a lot of people who studied music and they are my teacher sorry my manager used to be a teacher and that's such an important skill set I think it's brilliant when it comes to product management. There are so many different backgrounds and I want you to know that that will help you to build better products and to use that kind of team knowledge to have different perspectives and utilize those different perspectives and really just like talk to people you know listen to their stories because everybody has a unique story and in product management that is such an important background to have and urge people to have like urge people to share their stories and and share how they use those different skills that they they gain from those like very you know colorful backgrounds. So thank you so much for for listening in and I hope you found this useful again just understanding storytelling and practice and and this is going to be great for you and your career. Thank you so much.