 So, what I'm hoping to do tonight with all of you is to sort of dive into some of the aspects of product management that you can gain some insights into going through startups or going through business school, or even if you're an engineer and you're just trying to figure out how to transition. There's a lot of experiences that we all go through that are very different, and in honesty, they all have some way to really tie into product management and build a skill that's valuable when you're trying to build great products. So, I want to start a little bit about me just to give you guys an idea of why you should even listen to a word coming out of my mouth, other than I'm a product manager. So I'm a product manager at Google. At Google, I've had both a software product manager role, and I'm currently in a hardware product manager role. Before being out here, I'm an engineer by training. I got a robotics engineering degree from WPI. I have an MBA from Bapson. Bapson College is pretty unique. There's actually a campus in the city. It's the number one MBA for entrepreneurship, 24 years running or 25 years running. But it just means there's an interesting way that they teach business school. I also founded a startup SI Devices. It was an energy management company based around hotels and businesses. And I've also done a little bit of work with military contracting working on robotics. So I've seen sort of the other side of the startup, sort of no process to see your pants just going as fast as you can in military where it's check all the boxes out of the eyes across all the T's. And I think it's really helped round me out, but just sort of give a little idea of where I come from. So just by show of hands, who in the room is an engineer? So when you guys are trying to become an engineer, you sort of probably went through a process of, OK, I want to be an engineer. I know that if I go to college, I will sort of study for four-ish years. I'll get a diploma, and I can get a job. Pretty well-known people understand that process. You might change out the college you go to. You might take a little longer, shorter than four years, but pretty basic. You might add a summer internship or try to do something on the side or even just a summer job. But again, that sort of process is pretty well-known. Anyone in the room in marketing? So if you look at that similar education path for marketing, it looks about the same. You can go to college. You can study and then graduate, get a marketing. You might change what you do in your summers. You might do a social media marketing company. You might look in the SEO and play around with it. You might have an Instagram channel that has thousands of followers. But when you look at product management, it's a little different. So everyone's here because either they're interested in product management. They are one. They want to improve their skills. And what I'd love to start off with is what are the phases of trying to become a product manager? And the first that I've always found and I know what's for me was when you realize that you want to be a product manager. I can tell you for me, I was reading a book and Ken Norton had a quote. And he was talking about, I like technology, but I'm not really into coding all the time. I love marketing, but every now and then I miss the technology. And sort of he talked about being in between all these places. And that's what really struck me and sort of pulled me into product management. So phase one is realizing you want to be a product manager. Phase two is like, man, I really want to be a product manager. And I will do whatever it takes to sort of get into that. And phase three is when you successfully land your job. Now, if you follow the same route that you would for engineering and marketing, you go, OK, let's go look into universities. And what you find is there really isn't an institutionalized way to get into product management. So being the resourceful people that everyone wants to be a product manager are you go to Google and you search and you go, OK, what can I do to be a product manager? And you just hit with waves of things. There's ads for product school. There's ads for general assembly. There's lists. There's articles. There's descriptions of what a great product manager is that contradict each other across the whole board. So you might try to dive a little deeper. And what I do is I always look for reputable names. So Harvard Business Review is one of my favorites, also Forbes. Here, one of the titles is how to become a great product manager. And the other is eight tips to being a product manager. And they talk about gaining core competencies, understanding emotional intelligence, learn to code, learn about UX. It's this long list of things that really to a lot of people are like, yeah, I have that skill, but how do I sort of connect? What's the next step? And what I found is, both when I looked for a product manager job, but also I went and sort of refreshed my search around what's out there. All of these recommendations falls into two buckets. And the first is learn the skills. And what that means is maybe for your product, everyone has unique experiences that fills out their skill sort of bucket. And there might be other ones you need to learn. So it might be you need to learn more about coding. It might mean you need to learn more about marketing. It might mean that you need to get some more leadership experience. It might mean you have to refine your soft skills. And the second one, which is a little harder to swallow sometimes, is you need to build a product portfolio. And what that means is, as everyone knows, you often can't get hired as a product manager without having product manager on your resume, sort of a catch 22 of sorts. But what it asks for is someone that has led a product, led an idea, and it could be as small as a side project. It can be as big as a product at a real company. And that's one of those experiences that people will look for. And it really gives you value for yourself to understand how you can become a product manager. So when I was looking at making this presentation and really trying to bring in some of my experiences, I sat down and I wrote out my outline. And then I realized everything that was on that paper was just sort of with one mindset. It was just mine, it was just my experience. And the benefit that I've seen in my time as a product manager and going to business school and getting in startups was you meet a lot of people, a lot of people who really have a lot of different experiences. And so I reached out to my network and I got some of the top product managers that I knew at a variety of firms. I talked to 13 product managers, six of them have engineering backgrounds, nine of them have been involved in startups at some point in their career or are involved in startups. And eight of them went to business school. And so I tried to blend in talking with them as well as my own experience to really bring out what's in the rest of this presentation. So I'm gonna use my career as like a shell to talk about key points just so we have a base. So my background's in engineering originally. I worked in robotics. I worked at a military robotics company doing bomb disposal robots and autonomous vehicles were fresh when I got out of school. When I was there, I realized what many of engineers in the audience might realize is I wanted to be involved in more of the conversation. I was told what to build, but I didn't really have too much impact onto what I was building. And that's what sort of let my mind stray at work. And I met one of my friends from college, Mike, and we were interested in doing something else outside of work. And we settled on doing an internet things company at the time, which was six-ish years ago, so in the infancy of it, focused on energy management and it was really around just saving power. And so when we were both at work, we decided to start a startup. Now, in that startup, we both were engineers, so we had one skill set down, but there's obviously a lot more that goes into launching successful products. Mike was a little rough around the edges and I was the person who could talk. And so I naturally trended more towards the business side, but I really didn't know a lot of what I was doing. I had the engineering confidence of I can do it, but I didn't necessarily know exactly what I was doing. So I looked into what I could do to learn. And what I landed on was I should probably do an MBA, or go to business school. And the only reason that I landed in that area was I found Babson. And Babson was a huge startup-focused business school and I thought that was really unique. And so I applied and got into my MBA and I did both of them for a little period of time. And one thing to call out is the summer between my first and second year, most people in business school who might talk to you guys about business school will go and do internships. I actually got the startup into an accelerator program, so we are focused heads down for that summer. So it does alter the business school view a little bit. And then throughout business school, we worked on the startup. Startup ended up closing down. We'll share a little bit about that later. And then after business school, I had a small job leading a demolition robotics company. And then I came out here and I've been working at Google for about three years. So now to dive into sort of the key aspects of this. What I'm going to try to do is I'm going to try to overlay some fundamental product management skills on this timeline to show where they could pop up in startups or in business school. The first one that I want to talk about is this idea of doing everything. For those of you that are involved in startups or have been involved in startups, you know that there's a lot of tasks to be done and often not enough people to do them. And you might be an engineer that has to do some marketing. And you might be a marketing person that has to learn how to do SQL. And you end up trying out new skills that you didn't know before. And what that does is it makes it so that you can really understand these other functions and what's required of them to get things done. And as a product manager, you work with all these different cross-functional people and being able to relate and share some of their difficulties means that you can have a better relationship with them to get your products out the door. And another thing that you learn by doing everything is what do you like to do? And as you continue down your career in product management, you can also understand how to tailor the direction because product managers different at every company. Some of them are very engineering focused. Some of them are more marketing focused. Some of them are more strategy focused. And you can understand where you should be working based on sort of what stuff that you like to do that you've been able to try out being in a startup. And as you're doing all of this, another thing you have to learn is prioritization. One of the most valuable skills as a product manager is understanding how to prioritize the work you're doing and how to tell people no. The in a startup, you can hit that full bucket line a lot quicker than at a bigger company because everything sort of comes to you. Now, I have a story about saying no, which can explain sort of my startup background. So one of, my friend at Facebook shared on, is one of the quotes I have on the slide and he said, the moment that you can start saying no is the moment that you can actually start pushing products forward. And so that moment for me was when I was in my startup. I was at business school. I had a back injury and had to get back surgery. And I got to a point where it was recovery, startup, or business school. And I could only choose really two of them. And recovery wasn't an option that I could really say no to. So I had to choose, do I go full into startup or do I go full into my business school and see where that goes. And I made a decision to finish business school and it was a very hard decision for me. But it was the moment where I now know that I can step up and make that hard call. And that's as a product manager you often need to do. So I realize these colors just aren't working on the screen but I'll try to talk my best to it. The next thing that's really important as a product manager is being a leader. Even if you aren't necessarily having direct reports to you, you're looked to for guidance. You're looked to for product vision. You're looked to to say what do we do next? And there are aspects of both startups and business school that can help you really hone this skill of being a leader. Now, in a startup you often need to work across functionally but you often need to understand the people that you're working with because you're selling not only to the users but you're selling to everyone in the company. And being able to really, at the end of the day you believe in the product and you push the product forward. And at some point you will always need marketing help. At some point you will always need sales help. At some point you will always need IT's help and being able to understand them is super valuable. Now, another aspect of leadership is being able to lead the conversation. And I'm gonna put this one as something I learned in business school. Business school often focuses on giving people the ability and confidence to be a leader, to go talk to executives, to not be afraid to think that they're wrong, to just have that confidence to move forward. And in the business school there's often consulting projects that you work on. My example here is my first year in business school we did a consulting project with Fraunhofer based in Boston where we were implementing an augmented reality system to show off different forms of building construction techniques. And lo and behold, looking back that was my first time I was a product manager. So it's interesting to see how these things can overlap and opportunities like that come up in a safe environment when you're in schooling. And I wouldn't be fair to the rest of everyone's experiences to not mention that friends, family and just life experiences really help you build your leadership skills. There are things you can pull from startups there are things you can pull from business school but your friends and family always bring you there and the stuff that you do outside of work is huge. A huge one for me is I'm an Eagle Scout and I still fall back on some of the lessons I learned doing that whenever I have a hard leadership decision to do or to drive. The next thing that product managers are often faced with is having no resources. You will always run into a problem where you can't get something done and you wish you had three more engineers or you wish you had three more months. And this is a skill that I really think startups have a leg up on being able to teach. I got a story from one of my good friends Emily who runs a, I'm gonna make sure I say this right, shelf stable, all natural, synthetic free dog food company. And she's been doing it for a couple of years. I told her I'd get it right. She's been doing it for a couple of years and I asked her what was the most valuable lesson you've learned in startup? And she told me the most valuable lesson was being told no. And having people that she's tried to work on just tell her no or drop her. And the story she shared was she had been working for almost a year on getting a national distribution agreement in place. Now she had regional distribution but national was like the next step. And in the 11th hour, the distribution company just said, we're not gonna do it. And that's obviously a shock. And for her there was almost life or death for the startup. She had to find a way to grow. She was at this plateau. She needed to find a way to grow. And she looked internally and she relied on her creativity to understand what she could do next. So she initially had planned on simply going and growing nationally. And what she changed was she looked back into our network. She talked to people and they're now launching a, what is it? It's a marketplace where startups can come sell their goods in like a big sort of factory setting. The way that the model they're bringing in is it's flea market meets beta store which allows you to test marketing and sales and different sort of avenues there. And it's been getting great response in Boston. And she's super excited because it allowed her to diversify the stuff she's working on. But again, none of this would have happened if she wasn't resourceful when she was told no. An area of product management that is often taken for granted but falls into sort of every aspect is communications and sales. At the end of the day you have to understand what your product vision is but you have to make sure everyone around you understands what your product vision is. And then you often need to sell that product vision to the executives. You need to sell that product vision to the engineers. And then you also need to go or turn around and sell it to the customers and the businesses and make sure that they want to buy it. And this is a nice blend of skills you can learn and skills you have to experience. What skills you can learn is figuring out what is the right medium to share this. One of my friends who's a product manager at Google shared with me that he understands when to bring the right medium to elicit an emotional response. His example was they work on protecting accounts from being hijacked. And the engineers understand to an extent what they're doing to help users but he brought a person in, a customer in, to talk to them at a big forum conference and all of a sudden everything became real. The numbers on the screen were more about the person. And he said that that was a skill that he learned both in business school and the way that the professors would bring in emotion but also he had a strategic consulting job and he added to this type of conversation with executives on a regular and being able to see that was huge for him. Next thing that I'd say you can get from business school is being able to convince the execs. It sounds like an ominous task and something that you're like, oh, I can only ever do this by trying and failing. I had a class in business school called Management Consulting. It was taught by one of the founders of Accenture and one of the areas that there was a folks on and I've talked to a few people there's something similar almost in all business schools is what is the type of exec you're talking to? What are their goals? How do you interact with them? How do you win them over? And the business schools incentivize for you to understand that. So often they'll bring in execs for you to talk to and do a trial and error with them to understand what wins and what doesn't. When you're in a startup doing something like this with an investor, you sort of go in and you can prep all you want and get experience all you want but unless you know an investor, the chances are you're trial and error. See where you go after the first time. So it's a safe environment in business school to learn some of this. Now, on the startup front there's different values to be learned. I talked about selling internally and selling externally. I know that I've done thousands of cold calls but I want to talk about one of my friends Mallory who's a PM at Wayfair. She actually runs like their entire front end on Wayfair which is really crazy. Now that as I dug more into it she started off door-to-door sales. She was selling crafts door-to-door and she told me that one of the biggest values she had was understanding how to tailor her message to the person that she had to talk to and she said she learned that 100% through sales and I would say something similar from cold calls. The last one that I think is really interesting on communication is how do you share your ideas globally? How do you work with a team that isn't here? And one of my friends who works at a satellite company said 25 to 30% of our entire workforce is overseas and we tried conference calls, we tried emails and what we settled on was the more documentation we had the easier it was for people to understand what was going on because if there was a language barrier if there was a time zone barrier you wouldn't waste a day of getting back. It would just be like the data is all there. He said an added benefit is you don't forget things when you write them down which I can attest is very important. Now I was talking with one of my friends who's a PM at Facebook and I asked him what was the one thing that you thought most important as a product manager and he said to hate to be cliche but look at the meta. Look above what you're working on. Often you're so heads down on the project you're working on or so heads down in the details that you often forget to understand why you're doing what you do. This is actually a skill I think you can get from startups but often you are very heads down all the time. In business school there's an interesting blend so for the engineers in the room or for those who know engineers often you're taught to get the root of the problem. I need to solve this solution. Let me dive as deep as I can to find a solution and at business school they teach you to look up. They teach you to ask the question why and continue to ask the question why until you can't ask the question why anymore and the highest level of asking why is often like how do I create shareholder value and that could be for investors or employees or customers and then understanding where you are to get there helps you really sell that story of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Now another thing that you lose when you're focused and heads down is you often don't understand what's going on in your organization and another example that my friend at Facebook shared was if you think that you're doing something great but it's not great for your boss or it's not great for the engineers working on it or it's not great for the company maybe you should rethink what you're working on. So understanding that you need to look at the whole entire organization and what they're trying to do is super value for product management not only in selling but in just getting people to want to work on the products that you're doing. And the last thing is a lesson I learned in business school which is just making sure that you check in. In business there's a framework called the balance scorecard and the balance scorecard allows you to add areas in which you check in on so timeline execution, headcount utilization, market share, stuff like that and it wants you to grade it and then it wants you to cycle back every quarter or every month and that type of regularity has really allowed me and other product managers I know to understand how things are going well or not and it makes sure that you check in on areas that you normally might forget. Now, we're in a product manager talk if I didn't say understand the user I probably would have failed as my job to this point. So another aspect that everyone needs to know is how do you understand your user? Now I'm a strong believer and I have a decent amount of startup background that understanding your user is not something that can be taught. It has to be something that you really experience and so all the examples here are from startups and so doing raw user research you can get the ideas of it from a book you can get the ideas of it from online you can get the ideas of it from business school and you might even be able to do one or two but until you've done it a few times you're not comfortable with it and you aren't gonna be pulling out the same amount of information that you normally would. One of the exercises that I did in my startup and I've done with other product managers that I work with is the bar test and what that is is whatever product you're doing and some of you guys might already do this whatever product you're working on you know the key questions you're trying to answer for users and you also know who your competitors are and for example, I worked on the Google Pixelbook the new laptop from Google and so we are competitors against the MacBook and the Surface and when I travel and see someone using a Microsoft Surface I'll always just be like hey, how do you like this? Can you give me some things that you would do differently or why do you use this? The reason I call it a bar test is I would always challenge people to when they're out at the bar or out at dinner they see someone using their product or a similar product, just ask them one question and it's what would you do differently about what you're using now and the way that it helped engineers connect the way that it helped some of our business people connect was actually really, really effective and the second aspect of sort of understanding users is how do they get feedback to you? So I don't know, has anyone here ever had to answer a support call for a startup or not a startup? It's an experience, isn't it? You get to see users in unique situations either they're angry, sometimes they're happy I know that's not always the case but they're angry or they're lost and they need help and one of my friends, who's a PM at Dell EMC now there I'll make sure I say that, right? He worked in their corporate system as a corporate systems engineer which he was a guy that worked with the call centers he understood the support questions coming in and for him it was how do I route this type of problem to the product manager to get solved and he was understanding what people were stuck on and that's a user need and that's what product managers are all about solving but for him and the reason that he wanted to become a product manager was often the problems that he presented weren't getting solved and so being able and even for people who don't do support calls, if you get a chance I highly recommend just picking up the phone and answering a few. You'll learn stuff about your products so you never knew where a problem. Another area that often comes up is creativity. People talk about creativity and say oh you're either creative or you're not and I would say that as a product manager you have to have some level of creativity like there has to be a little bit of left and right brain going on but there's opportunities for you to flex that muscle that will allow you to sort of see things differently. In a startup, we've all heard the winners right? Coming up with a unique business model Airbnb, Lyft, the list goes on and on and on any time that a startup does something differently someone is flexing that model of creativity with a lens of how does it impact our users and I could never stand up here and say creativity is invaluable in startups and that is a skill you won't develop. But what I will share which is probably news for some people is that business schools can also give you great opportunities to flex that creativity in a different way. Often in business schools you have the opportunity to interact with really high level executives at companies and that's because these companies will go to business schools and ask them to solve a problem. They'll say hey I want to get into new markets, I need to understand if I have another user I can get into and they'll rely on business school students to try to solve those problems and the benefit that you get is you can't fail. You're solving a problem, you have advice and you can present it to someone who could listen. I mean it's a consulting type job so they don't have to listen to what you're saying. But it gives you a safe environment to fail and so you can really try some of these things and try to be very creative and see how it's received. The last area that I wanna talk about is something that you may have heard about if you're a product manager you've definitely experienced and that's the idea of imposter syndrome. For people who are just getting into product management or even people who have just transitioned to a new company doing product management you always hit the idea of I shouldn't be doing this. Why am I here, why is someone trusting me to make sure that we're solving this for the users and you get over it from experience and I'm sure other people who have experienced it you get over it but it's a little hard and it's really just a confidence thing and what I wanna share is that there are ways that you can gain confidence specifically around imposter syndrome both in startups and in business school. So in the startup realm everyone comes into a product having these lofty goals of I wanna change the world I wanna reinvent the way people commute I wanna do all of these things and what I found and what I found from talking to other people in startups is if you can break down lofty goals into very manageable milestones and celebrate those milestones it allows you to really feel confident and it allows your team to feel confident that you're succeeding in what you're trying to do and that helps break down some of these ideas of doubt all imposter syndrome is just doubt in yourself or doubt in your team and it's not really real it's just something that you will experience in product management and on the business side the biggest opportunity that business school gives you as I talked to you before was the ability to access really big name companies and be able to present in a safe environment. I wanna share an idea that my friend Sebastian who's doing a startup now I had with me and he said business school gives you a safe environment to experiment because at the end of the day everyone's trying to learn and he said you can go talk to an executive because they know you're in school they know you're trying to learn and for you you know that they know that and so you have already this big weight has been lifted and he said for him confidence in the real world is just understanding that we're always learning and the example I wanna share from business school is I actually work with Sebastian on this but in business school you have access to case competitions which are sponsored by big companies so we were doing a case competition with Toyota and they were asking how do we bring hydrogen fuel cell cars to the world? What do we do? And we were part of 10 schools that were involved in this and we proposed a rollout strategy. Now I don't work in the automotive industry I literally was just in business school and our team of four we were selected we were the ones that had the idea that they liked and we went and presented to their US VP I don't remember the exact title but the guy who runs Toyota US and that's something that in a startup realm is like the like I won as much as I can I wanna start growing this company huge and in business school it becomes something that you can get access to it's a real thing to have access like that and that really helps you build confidence around I can do this and so that's my side in business school for the imposter syndrome. Now as you can see here or can't see because of the colors I apologize on that one there's a lot of aspects that you can pull from startups there's a lot of aspects that you can pull from business school and at the end of the day depending on your experience you might need you might not ever need to go to business school you might not ever need to be involved in startups to become a great product manager but what I'm saying is the path is unique to each person and there is no wrong path also. Now what I wanna do I have quick couple slides is just summarize some of these topics so I tried to pick out the high level values that a startup in business school brought and then one slides were talking about the key differences so in a startup we talked about building a product portfolio in a startup you will have the opportunity to build a product portfolio regardless of how small or big your launch will be it is a product that you get a chance to work on even if you're an engineer that's just doing some of the product management stuff you will gain a huge network startups will give you access to other startups to investors to incubators to accelerators but that network will be very specialized a lot of people in the network will have done one experience really well or they might have tried and fail at one experience really well you'll get a chance to understand many roles because you don't have the resources to hire a team of people to do marketing, sales, website, engineering you'll probably get to do a few of those you'll get down and dirty with the users you can't work at a startup without having to have face to face interactions with the users and at the end of the day everything that you build and everything that you shape is to solve their problems and if you're not the product manager the product manager will be bringing them to your attention as often as they can and the last thing is sort of you learn the hard way there is no safety net there is no teacher there are potentials for you to find mentors but at the end of the day a lot of times you're just sort of tainting it by the seat of your pants and seeing what you can do but the benefit there is you'll find solutions and often you'll find unique solutions that no one else would have come up with that if you went on any textbook they would have told you to turn left and you turned right and that's really a unique aspect that you can get from startups and in product management is often what differentiates a okay product manager from a great product manager on the MBA side it's a little more tactical so a lot of people maybe in this room but that you might know they're career switchers and if you can't get a product under your belt MBA will give you some credibility there is no way that I could sit up here and say an MBA in your resume won't make you more enticing to a recruiter or a gatekeeper at a company HR company they will see that and go oh I'm not saying it's right but I'm saying that that is a thing Business School gives you a safety net as I said before you have this alluring of your learning and you have teachers and advisors and people know that you're there to really push the boundary of what you're doing so you have this inherent safety net because you're in school you will get a network both pre, during and post Business School one of the things that people bring up is the network you gain from Business School is often more important than the classes that you take there are very few places in your life that you can bring such high caliber people together in one location and give you a common thread to relate against I think one best example that I can say is I know someone who runs international shipping in Peru the largest international shipping company in Peru I have no idea when I would ever meet someone like that other than in the Business School he's awesome by the way another thing that Business School is trained to do is to boost your confidence from day one they want you to be successful because it makes them successful and they will figure out any way and try any way to give you that access so that you feel more confident when you leave because at the end of the day if you leave and you get an okay job it looks bad on them but they really do want you to feel confident and they will try to teach you how to get some of that skills and the last thing which I mentioned is they try to push the thought process upstream so they push you to ask the question why now earlier before I actually ended up making this whole talk I had to share key takeaways to be posted on the internet before the talk so I'm gonna try to relate everything to them I tried not to change them because I actually do think they're still really valid and the first one is an MBA is just as much about a network as is about the education 60, I'll give you that 75% of what you can learn in business school you can learn yourself but everything else is network and experience that you can get almost nowhere else and I would say the value is more so in the network and experience than in the actual education startups foster large but often unstructured range of experiences and opportunities and what I mean by that is in a startup you'll get a chance to do anything you might be hired as an engineer you might be hired as a marketing person you might be hired as a support you might be hired just to answer phones and any startup at some point will ask you to do more or there might be an opportunity where you can inject yourself to do more but often it's not hey if you do your engineer hey your engineer if you go do some UX stuff that'll be a good stepping stone for you to then do some strategy stuff that'll be a good stepping stone for you to then become a product manager those type of journeys are not often mapped out and it's a lot on you to try to figure out what should I try to push and the opportunities are vast so it's easy to get lost and that's where it brings in the last point which is just a piece of advice that I found from startups and MBAs always plan two steps ahead if you're targeting to become a product manager or you're targeting to develop a product on the side or do a side project at home why are you trying to do it? If you want to become a product manager to impact users, awesome. If you want to become a product manager because someday you want to start a company maybe going to start up for a little bit first would make sense. If you want to become a product manager so you can be the general manager of a portion of a big business maybe business school would make more sense. They train a lot more general managers than they do product managers. So just thinking sort of about what that next step is is incredibly important as you take the leap into startup for a business school. And that's sort of all I have. I went a little bit over on time, I apologize but any questions? Yes, so I had to repeat the question because there's some people on the internet so what he was asking was being in the startup he has a lot of chances to be introspective on sort of how you're doing and how the startups doing the question was how can you do that in business school or how does that apply to business school? And I would say on the business school front what I found and again this is really just all I can comment on is what I found is the introspection that hit me going through it was why did I go to business school? And that's what I found is the biggest one for me and that's why I always recommend people to look two steps out. Like I can sit here and sell a good story of this is the path that you can go down to get to product management but that aha moment for me of being a product manager actually came after business school for me. So I went to business school because I was doing a startup and I didn't have all the skills I needed. I knew that there would be something that I'd hit a wall on and I thought that business school would be a good opportunity for me to learn it. Awesome, so the question is what are my learning strategies and how do I approach self improvement? And what I can say is each job that I take, each area that I try to focus on, I try to make sure that I know what the people that work in that area need to know. And that doesn't mean that I'm an expert but for example, I started working on hardware for laptops. I've done hardware a bunch of times, I've never done laptops. And I spent probably a month or two just diving into how does the mechanics work? How does the software bring up work? What is the marketplace? So like what is the TAM and where do you sell? So for learning, it's understanding who I want to relate to and then I learn enough that I can have a conversation with them. Yes. What are some of the tools that you're sort of go-to tools that you have used or that could be anything but including software? Yeah, so the question was what are some of my go-to tools as a product manager? And I'll say for me, some of the tools that I go to the most or I'm gonna put it into two categories. There's tools that I use to sort of keep track of the project management side. And then there's tools that I use to make sure that I'm actually working on the right product. And so it's the project management. I love to use tools like Basecamp or Asana. I've used them many times. Also I've had to use sort of the homegrown ones of Excel sheets and stuff like that. It all depends on the team you work with. Some of them really like the structured ones. Some of them really like to use Gantt charts. And then the other side is making sure that I'm in touch with the users in the marketplace. So I frequent a lot of online, I guess, blogs, but it's not just in technology. So one of my favorite blogs is Core 77, which is actually a designer blog. And the reason that I like it is because a lot of the skills that designers are taught are around understanding what users really want versus what they say they want. And so I get a lot of really interesting articles there. And then I also practice my quote unquote bar tests that I was talking about before. Like I will just ask people random questions around the stuff that they're using and the stuff that they love because it just allows me to keep up to date on the way people view the products they use. Yes? Okay, so let me make sure that I understand the question. So the question is, before I was going to start up, I talked about like sort of picking up some skills that would make sure I was successful there. And your question is like, what's the equivalent to if you're gonna go to business school? Is this more around sort of what can get you into business school or just what will make you the most prepared? So one of the things that I think is super valuable in business school is you have a lot of high performers in one location and they all work in different industries. And so you have the opportunity to talk to someone who's like a kick ass marketer or to talk to someone who's like the sales champion of Dell. And just being able to lift your head out of the books to make sure you're learning from the people around you. It's probably, does that answer your question? Okay. Yeah. You said you were essentially a career switcher. So how hard was it to get into a product management level from an engineer? So getting into product management from engineering, it was a lot of proving to people I knew what I was doing. A lot of times people have those skills sort of deep down and learning to market yourself is part of a product management. So for me, I actually got a job as the lead of a consumer robotics division out of business school. Luckily, there's always a little bit of life that goes into everything because the company that I did engineering at was expanding from military to consumer. And they knew that I had just done business school. And so I only got into it because they said, hey, he knows how to run a group because he went to business school. So that's what I was saying, like, there's no way to really, people still think business school has a lot of benefit. So from my experience just dealing with product managers, the background that you have will allow you to relate to a portion of the people you work with more, but there really is no like skill set that I would say is useless for product management. Ones that come out a lot stronger, specifically in California, is gonna be computer science, masters or PhD in computer science, more masters in PhD, part to the point of like how deep you dive versus how not deep you dive. I know lawyers who have done it. The idea behind lawyers is that you are able to relate to people. Lawyers often have to relate to all the jurors and stuff like that. But I mean also marketers. And I mean, I've seen people who have literally, my friend Mallory, she was a door-to-door salesman. And now she is a technical product manager, taught herself SQL and web development on one of her jobs. So like there's really no limit. It's a lot more about the person and it just helps tailor who you can relate to. Yeah. For me, the next step is either trying to get into owning a broader product portfolio. So a few products at a larger company or doing another startup. What's the title feature that people add to your product? And how do you go about persuading your team to factor that in? Okay, so the question was what were to do to identify new features and then how do you get your team to support you? So the way that I personally look at new features is there's sort of two buckets. There's the bucket where you should always sort of be in touch with the market and the users and continually doing general quote unquote user research to understand trends. And sometimes features will come from there. And the other side is just understanding what's going on with your product. And a lot of the times the features that are easiest to sell are the ones you learn from a user having an issue. The ones you learn from sort of like the support calls that we talked about. Those are the easiest ones to sell internally because you can just like point and say, hey, 10 users couldn't find the enter button. We probably should move it. Or 10 users really wish that they could mail us a check versus pay using Venmo. Maybe we should think about adding that. And so selling that side is a lot easier. Selling the general trends, it's all about convincing yourself first. If you can sit there and say, I believe that we need to build this feature, then you understand the people you work with. You can understand what they would need to believe that we should build this feature. Sometimes it's what is the target adjustable market for this. Sometimes it's what is the user, it's the specific user that we'd be expanding into. Sometimes it's how much would it cost. And so it's really understanding who you gotta pitch it to and then finding that data for them. Yes? Obviously you have, you would say, looking back, I wish I had done more of this during my MBA that compared me much better. Or I wish, or it could be something that you'd spend more time or an activity you haven't done better at all that you wish you could. What do you think would be very useful in the first six months of the meaning that conduct you fully beyond this side? I think that for me, the question was what would I have done differently to impact my first sort of six months as a product manager? And I think during my first six months, I focused aggressively on how to get my job done. And I didn't reach out to the network that I had developed to ask for advice, to ask for guidance. And I think that that's probably the biggest mistake that I had when I first started product management. I had talked to my network all the way up to getting the jobs and all the way into even getting me some of these jobs. And then as soon as I got into the role, it was let's make it happen, let's understand the users, let's understand the people. And I sort of went into autopilot for a little bit and I realized that there's more than just accompanying you're in in order to be successful at the product you're launching. Is that good? I was just more asking about something that you would do with the MBA. Okay, got it. So yeah, so during the MBA, the only thing that I wished that I did differently was I took some classes in investment banking just because I thought they were interesting. They were like more numbers focused and I probably would have replaced those with more marketing classes. Yeah. So I didn't reach out because as I started, I sort of got into, at least in my mind, the autopilot of what being a product manager was. At the time, again, this was like first six months of the product manager job was like, okay, I got to talk to users, talk to the people in the company, get people behind me. Like there's stuff that you could read on a book, right? But I forgot that there's so much more than just what you can write down as like a flow chart of things to do. And I just didn't reach out. So I think it was just, I was excited and I wanted to apply a lot of the skills that I had gotten and it was like an opportunity and you wanted to do a great job. And you didn't think that you needed other people's help and you, I mean, everyone needs other people's help. Yes? I'm sorry, I only applied to Babson. Because I was doing the startup and their focus on entrepreneurship, it was really the only one that, I thought could align with what I was doing. So when they offer a work on this internal sell, can you add a view to kind of pitch a new future within the product that's coming out? Let me see, sorry, so the question was, what was an example of a difficult internal sell for a new feature and new product? Yeah, not new product. And how did I approach it? Would you be okay if I talked about how I killed a product? Yeah. Okay. It's better. It's just the first one that popped to mind. So when I left business school, I was tasked with leading a group that was doing consumer robotics. And the first day, the CEO handed me a list. He said, hey, look, we're working on five products. We can only do two of them. And it was sort of like a, whoa, got some real stuff to do. And so what we had to do was we had to, they were products that often people had as pet projects, engineers were really behind, a VP was really behind, but they weren't really based in users. I think that if you're at a company where all the products have to have user needs and have to really have like a user base you're addressing, that type of conversation becomes easy. You go, look, company is focusing on 25 to 34 male female who work in tech. This person is 17 and works on a farm. Maybe we shouldn't be making products. The way that I approached it was we actually kicked off a series of user research studies focused around defining the voice of the customer needs, it's a different term depending on what industry you're in. And what we did was we came back with the voice of the customer for each of the product areas that we were working on. And we correlated the features we were building and the addressable market for each of them into like sort of like a, I mean, it was a graph, right? It was a chart of all the things. And we were able to eliminate two very easily just because it was like, we're building this and it doesn't align with what the user needs and the market's nothing. There was one that was very difficult and we were planning to, making sure I could talk about it. Yes, we were planning to make a robot that would live on your window, be solar powered and would clean the window for you. Residential, non-commercial, and I know. And what we ended up doing there was the voice of the customer showed us that people would like a way to clean their windows without having to open them and like fold them in and like wipe them, right? So potentially valid use case, right? But what they really hated was that it cost more than a dollar or everything was $5 was like the price of someone's willingness to pay. And selling to internal people around the fact that, hey, this is gonna cost 10X or whatever X of that price and it wasn't gonna provide the value that you think it would was very difficult. And it meant we had to actually bring in some users to talk to that group, to talk about why they wouldn't see a value in that. And then that was actually the way that we were able to get that emotional response that we needed to quote and to kill that product. Like a focus group? Yeah, it was a focus group. Yeah, yes. Are you talking, so the question is around what would be vice-round delivery? Are you saying more to just like people in general or to crowds or to executives or, all right. So talking to groups of people or groups of people that might seem intimidating, which could be a room of all of you or an executive or an investor. What I found is when I first started doing it, I got really nervous before I were talking to people. And in the startup realm, I didn't really have a choice. It was sort of, you're gonna go talk to this person. And once you learn that if I sat up here and messed up everything and just murmurled my words and did everything wrong, the chance that it impacted me in a negative way is pretty minimal. So for startups, it was getting over that hump. And then in business school, what I learned in terms of delivery was I'm a big person, not everyone who presents as a big person, but just accepting the size you have, but filling the room. And so I can't move right now, but I can tell you that I probably would have been a little more engaging if I was over there and not behind the laptop. And I probably would have been a little more engaging if I could have walked around with a microphone to ask questions. And there's just sort of like little things that you can try. I once was giving a presentation to, in a case competition to the executives of a company called Newmont Mining, so the world's largest gold mining company. And I spent 80% of the presentation three feet away from their CEO because I had watched other people presenting to that group and no one was engaged of the panel that was like judging versus the CEO. And afterwards learned that that was like, really a good approach, but it could have been a sort of like fall on my face awful approach. And I think just being okay with knowing you can fail with public speaking is my best advice for public speaking and do more of it. Like every time someone's like, hey, do you want to come do this? I'm like, yeah, sure, we're not, it's some work pulling presentation together. It takes a little more than, you know, time, but then I get to talk and meet all you guys. So like it's great. So, yes. So the question was, what are my feelings towards human interaction designers and how that background can augment a team? I think that anyone who has a design or a research and design background is incredibly valuable to a product team. And I think that the reason being is a few. One is they know how to do research and talk to users. They're confident when they present their results. A lot of times you'll find people who do user research will say, hey, I talked to 10 people and like they said X, Y, Z, but I'm not really sure if I talked to enough people. If you have someone who has human research, human interaction in their background, they know that like if I talk to X amount of people I'll get a result that actually matters. And then they can also sort of go around a design and they'll do wireframes and they'll help you with that. So I think there's a value to it. I think that having too many of them can be a problem because they sometimes disagree. If I'm going to launch anything that has a front end user interface, I want one. Because I have two reasons. One is I need help designing it because I am not a designer. And a lot of engineers who could build it are not designers. They might have ideas, but that's why we have a lot of apps that might look like MS-DOS. But having a human interaction designer can help you not only design it but also test it and optimize it. So anytime there's something 100% user facing. Yes. It doesn't make you do that in marketing courses. What's why is that? From my experience, I believe that marketing also wants you to understand users. Sales and marketing are all about how do you tailor something to your audience? What does your audience actually need? If you get a chance to read any sales books, they often say you're not selling to a person, you're solving a problem with them using the product that you have. And if you can't do that, you can't sell to them. And I think marketing just has a lot of the same sort of traits that you'd want in a product manager because you have to understand the user. That was, I guess, for my reasoning. And I probably would have gotten a chance to do more marketing collateral, which is always useful because I'm not a designer. Yes. I think at the end of the day, what you're gonna need to do in order to get into product management is you're gonna have to sell that the product that you're saying you worked on, you worked on. And it's not like, hey, I built this. It's like, what are the users? What are the user needs? Why did we build this? What are some of the functions we went through? How did we get people on board? If you feel that the product you're working on, even as an engineer, you're involved in those types of conversations, that's a product that you can talk to, that you were effectively either co-product manager or product manager of. Sometimes there's not product managers on the roll. Yeah. So you're talking about transitioning to a well-established firm from a startup or just like if you went the other route. The two ways. So you went to an established firm and you were trying to build into a product. A lot of the bigger companies actually are realizing that product managers are hard to get and they often don't understand the products right away and making and building someone and educating someone internally to be a product manager may be a better option. So a lot of these bigger firms actually have programs that are for rotations, are for going to like learn about product managers, like senior product managers will have classes where they teach engineers around this. So in a bigger company, there's opportunities there. It's often a longer process. Research and understanding users and product. All that sounds very, very similar to what the UX researcher role will be. So I guess my question is how do you see the differences between the UX researcher and a product manager? That's a great question. So the question is a lot of the building of what a user wants and some feature and the features that come out of those research is a lot of what a user UX researcher will do. What is the difference between that and product management? And I think that a good way to put it is when you're launching a product, you need a user need and that's like the core of what you're doing. And I agree, user researchers are great at making sure that we can identify those and really make sure we're adjusting the ones that'll make the most impact. But on top of that, you have to build the product. So you need an engineering team and you need to understand what the requirements are to do that. And on top of that, you need a market strategy. Like how do I go out into the market with this? Like is it something I'm gonna sell online? Is it a free application? Is it a price application? And you need a support channel. You need to understand like when the user comes back, how do I deal with that? How do I manage that loop? And the product manager thinks about all of those things. Again, like I focus a lot on the user need because that's the core in selling all of this. Like I couldn't go to a support, even an external firm, a support external firm and go, hey, we're gonna build widget A. We need you to support it without being able to at least put a little bit of a spin of why we're doing it. So that's probably, user research and user need is core, but there's a lot of other supporting things to get it out to market and make sure it's successful. Yes? Oh, absolutely. What do you think? Yep, would you like to, so the question is, share a little bit about how you build a product vision. Would you be interested in short-term vision, long-term vision, just product vision in general? Both, okay. Depending on where you're a product manager, if you're a product manager in a big company, often you're selling both. And usually the long-term vision is something that you can sell to get reputation and get understanding of where you wanna go, but the short-term vision is how you get resources and effectiveness. In the startup, it's a little changed. You're selling the long-term vision and then you're building milestones to get there because people are only following you for the long-term vision, so that's the upside. In terms of building out the vision, I think that it's really about a few things. Identifying the user need, as he was saying, but it's getting yourself excited about it because you need a user need. You need a market that you can actually grow in. Like, if two users need it, you might have a product, but you're gonna have to figure out some way to sustain your business. And you need to have a plan to get it into those user's hands. And you need to have a plan in order to make some sort of sustaining money. And those are really the areas that build out that vision because at the end of the day, you're selling everyone on it, especially if it's something that you're the product manager for. You're selling finance on it. You're selling marketing on it. You're selling sales on it. You're selling engineering on it. And if you can't have those things, you're really stuck. Yes? From a marketer's perspective, because I had a question similar to that is, as a marketer coming in, isn't that necessarily a value proposition? Yes. What is your product need or the marketplace that you're trying to fit in? And if that's the case, the difference between a larger firm versus a startup would be that you would, as a project manager, would have to come up with that value proposition versus in a larger firm, isn't that value prop given to you from the marketing department? Depends on where you work, so. Or does the product manager come up with the best proposition and give it to the marketer? It depends a lot. So product management varies company to company, industry to industry. I can talk a little bit to technology. So at Google product management, sort of works with all of the groups to build what the value prop is, to build what the technical requirements are. And then we'll also get very deep in with the engineers in order to make sure we're solving problems and getting things done. From some of my friends that work in Microsoft, it's more marketing focused and you are more marketing than engineering. And in startups, sometimes you have someone on the core team that's really strong at marketing, or really strong at engineering management, or really strong at sales, and you might defer to letting them work on that area. And I think that's the balance of product management. Sometimes there's an area that you're really, really good at and there's an area you're weak at and you're pulling people in to help you get that done. It depends on the company, it also depends on the group you're with. Like if you're in a group where you might have a marketing person assigned to you, but as a product manager, you're not confident in their ability or you don't agree with the value proposition that they're coming up, it's on you to convince them that they should change it. Yes? Well, it's not that Joe already has engineers working on the product quite a wide. If you're new to the product, how do you go about establishing credibility and enjoying the team for the ideas that you have? This is a good question. The question is if you are new to a team, new to a product, new to an engineering team, how do you go about establishing yourself so that you can continue to be successful in that role? And the first thing that I can say is patience. When you come into a role that's established, the last thing that you want to do is start throwing stones and start trying to enact changes because you will like instantly and almost forever be written out. And so the best thing I can say is get to know the engineers, get to know the product, help the engineers and the team unblock some things, but don't have an opinion until you've been there for at least six months if you can afford that. Sometimes you can't afford that and you have to make changes earlier, but take the time to really on a soft skill side establish yourself and help them out because in the long term, it'll be better for you. Yes? So to continue that question, for up to say that six months that you're getting to know the engineers and you're getting to know the product, from the perspective of the team that you're a product manager for towards a certain path and you're just sort of giving the immersion of all of the data is, could there be a perception of like this guy doesn't do anything? So my assumption based on his question was that the team had a vision they were working towards and they didn't want to change it. So you're still going to be doing your job, so to speak, making sure that you're going towards that vision and things are happening and the right people are talking and the right doors are getting opened and closed, but what my suggestion is not to change the vision as soon as you come in. So like you can do small things, but don't come in and start waving an ax around. And any team, let me close this, any team that you're going to join will understand that you're going to take some time to get to know everyone and understand the product fully and if they've been doing it for a while and have had a few product managers come in, they'll appreciate it. Because for anyone that comes in that takes the time, there's three that come in that don't. Okay, you had your hand up. It's a hard question. I think that it's really, so the question was there are companies that have more marketing focused product managers and there's companies that have more engineering focused product managers and is there one avenue that's more successful than the other? I think it's really company specific. When you look at a company, the strategy coming from the executives is often what dictates the way the company runs. And sometimes executives are focused entirely on how do you market it and what do you market and who like in that area. And then sometimes they're focused on we want to build new technology and we will build new technology tailored by the users, but like we want to build new technology. And if you are a product manager and your view of sort of which side marketing or engineering you should fall on doesn't agree with the executives. You might be in for an interesting ride. So you want to make sure you pick a company that sort of aligns with your beliefs as well. Cool, thank you guys so much for the opportunity to talk to you.