 Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session. My name is Dutton Kataria, and I work as a senior product manager at American Express. I'm very excited to be here today talking to you about beginning your PM journey. So you might ask, what makes me somewhat qualified to be talking about this? Well, I started my career many years ago as a software engineer. I enjoyed that for a while, but soon started asking myself if that is something I wanted to do for foreseeable future. Now, as I came out to be no, I was a happy engineer, but I realized I could stretch myself to focus on why we were doing what we were doing rather than just thinking about how that needs to be done. Made a conscious choice of doing an MBA, came back into the tech industry over the next few years with a variety of roles relocated from India to the UK during this period. And luckily, at that time, got a chance to watch from an arm's length what product management is and what a product manager does. So I would say it was around 2015 or 16 when I started dabbling with the idea of getting into product. However, the actual transition took a little bit more time. And after a brief consulting stint, finally was able to get into product about four years ago at American Express. So in product terminologies, I have pivoted a lot. And when I go through this session today, I am going to try and share my own personal experiences from my journey, things that I learned along the way and things that really helped me. My approach and thought process towards certain things, the choices that I made, the decisions that I took, that shaped me and led me to where I am today. So my hope from today's session is that by the end of it, you all leave with some food for thought on how you might want to approach your own journey. Things that took me years to understand and learn. I will sincerely try and attempt to cover. If not all, then at least a few snippets of it in this session. So why product management? This is an absolutely fundamental question that you should try and answer for yourself. Something that I did very consciously. Over the last couple of years, I have taken my fair share of product interviews and very rarely I have gotten a convincing answer to this. So why do you want to move into product? What is driving that decision? Suppose you're an engineer or a consultant or a UX designer or part of the sales function, what do you think is missing in your current role? What is product management going to offer you? Is it something that you're going to enjoy doing for the next two years, five years, 10 years? Appreciate product is a very hot topic right now. We need the technology industry, e-commerce space, startups. And yes, it is a rewarding career as well. But your own personal decision to move into product should not only be based on these aspects of the role, rather you should think through if you are going to be a good fit into product management. And talking about my own thought process, a few reasons why I decided to move into product work, I love the cross-functional nature of the role. I still love it. Working with engineers, designers, user research groups, marketing teams, data analysts, et cetera. If you think about it, none of these teams or people directly ladder up into product manager. So product management is all about making things happen, working with a wide set of stakeholders, always being available for your engineering and design team. You're rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty, diving deep in the nuances of your product and ensuring that if something goes wrong or doesn't work as expected, you are the first one to take accountability and ownership of the situation and then fix it. You figure out so many things as you go along the way and these aspects of the role very strongly resonate with me and I absolutely love solving real-life customer problems that also fit in with the company's strategic vision and drive the business forward. Now these are the good things. There are challenges of the role as well. There are a lot of meetings and then there are a lot of emails. There is a lot of context-switching. One moment you could be solving a production bug with your engineers, the very next you could be presenting to your business leadership. So calling it multi-tasking doesn't even begin to do the justice of what the reality is. So overall it is not a role that is going to allow you to be just an individual contributor. It is going to require you to work with teams, play a leadership role in guiding your team in different stakeholders to a shared goal and vision. So it's very important that you have an absolute clarity that the role is the right fit for you and you're the right fit for this role. My humble opinion, don't consider this as just another job. Think this through as your career. Different types of PM roles. Now a very quick whistle-stop tour of different types of PM roles that at least I have personally come across. So not saying that this is an exhaustive list. This is purely from my own experience and there could be many more different types of PM roles depending upon the industry or the company. However, the requirements of these roles itself and the skills that are needed to perform any or all these roles could very well be overlapping. And that's why it becomes important for someone who is wanting to transition into product to understand what these roles are because chances are skills that you already have or the responsibilities that you're already performing in your current capacity may be relevant for these roles. So looking at these business-focused PMs, they would typically sit at the intersection between technology, design and business. They will own the product vision and the strategy. They will have a deep understanding of their customers. They will create road maps, go to market strategy and then execute on that road map. Technical PMs will focus on platforms, infrastructure solutions, building developer apps, APIs, processes that enables business capabilities to be built more efficiently. Please do note that a lot of aspects of this role also overlap with the business-focused PMs. Both PMs typically operate in an environment where the foundational product build has already happened and what they are trying to do is optimize the current product feature sets by running a series of experiments, taking qualitative user research insights into future iterations, monetizing the current product features. So they will focus less on the actual product lifecycle, rather they will focus on improving the existing business matrix. Design PMs would typically focus more on web experience design, mobile app design, content strategy, how users interact with the digital experiences or different communication channels. Marketing PMs, the product marketing managers will have some amount of marketing background or knowledge, which is beneficial as marketing should ideally be built into the product from the beginning. These PMs will work more on creating the web content, communication channels, communication materials, go to market strategies, but their interaction with the engineering team, building the actual product is going to be minimum. So once you have gone through the why and the what, it's important to also understand then how you're going to begin your journey. With something, literally anything. Product management is all about making things happen. So if you don't have a direct PM experience, the next best thing that you can do is by building something as a side hustle. That gives you a learning into what a PM does and also demonstrates your skills that you can identify a problem. You can break that problem down into multiple different potential solutions, develop it and then execute on the solutions. This could be your YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog, focusing on an idea and then marketing, talking about it, or an actual product and app, or a e-commerce business or a service business, anything. Networking, I can't emphasize enough the importance of networking, especially if you're new into product management. Learning from others who are either already doing PM roles or can give you advice on transition is generally a very good idea. Identify PMs in your personal or professional network. If you don't have a direct contact in your network, ask for recommendations who can get you introduced. This will be important to understand what a PM does in their role and how you can learn from them. Reaching out to someone completely unknown through a professional networking platform is also okay and it will likely yield you results, but it's a number game. You might send a message to 10 people and only one of them responds, but don't get deflated because of that. So please do note that goal of this exercise is not seek a job referral. Rather, it's about establishing a personal connect and building a relationship. If you are able to establish a network with someone in the product community and are able to demonstrate, you have the necessary skills, the right attitude, willingness to learn, it's only going to be a matter of time that the job referral then automatically becomes a natural outcome of this process. Find a mentor. I think they're all very lucky to be in this day and age where the power of technology and internet has given us access to so much literature and just different avenues to learn almost anything about anything. A few years ago, you could have found mentor possibly only in your immediate company or the social circle, but now you can literally find it from any part of the world. You'll be surprised to know how many people out there are going to be willing to help you if you just approach them with the right context and with the right intention. What I have learned from my personal experience is that if you don't ask the question, answer is always no. No one is going to know if you need help in a specific area. No one is going to know you're wanting to make a transition into product management. And no one is going to know if you're wanting to learn a specific skill. So please help them help you. In key to a successful mentoring relationship is to be very specific and have a clarity on what help you need from your mentor. It could also be that you can identify multiple mentors both within and outside of your organization, but my recommendation will always be to outline the objectives of what you're wanting to achieve from the mentoring relationship. Hackathons. Again, a good forum and event to network with a different set of people. It's a time-bound collaborative and deeply focused event which allows you to demonstrate your skills and talent to ideate and define a problem, come up with solutions, building a working prototype to solve that problem in a very short span of time. In addition to be able to do some hands-on PM work, it is a great networking opportunity. At least in my personal experience, I have seen many people getting their first break through someone who they met during Hackathon even. So again, the message is talking to people really helps. Shadowing other PMs. This is assuming that you already have an access of product managers in your existing company or the role that you currently perform. It's not very straightforward and it's going to depend upon the dynamics of your company, your immediate leader. But if you think you have an opportunity to take on additional responsibilities and even a remote chance of learning from someone in your close vicinity, please try and take advantage of this. It could just be joining few meetings and listening in how the product manager operates, what they do on a day-to-day basis. Though every day could be completely different in a product manager's life, but essentially it's about watching and learning. Sponsors. Consider sponsors as your advocates who have seen your work and can proactively vouch for you if they know an opportunity is going to come through. The only difference between mentors and sponsors, I personally feel is that you reach out to your mentors, you try and find your mentors, but your sponsors find you. But this would be someone who you have previously worked with. They have seen your potential. They can pass it forward to someone who might be looking for fresh talent. There are associate product manager programs as well that big tech companies offer. I have not been directly associated with such a program in my own personal experience, so I won't be able to talk about that. But you should feel free to do your own research and find out if an associate PM program is on offer with a company that you might want to work at. Please do keep in mind that if you are from a non-PM background, getting into a product might mean starting from a junior position and then making your way up. This isn't necessary, but just a watch out. Okay, skills that will set you apart. Storytelling, now this definitely is your secret weapon as a PM. I would not say that storytelling is an art that either you have it or you don't have it. In my humble opinion, it is a skill that you can learn over a period of time. The idea of this essentially is how you are setting context for everyone and bringing them along the journey with you to deliver on the product version that you have. You are communicating about your product to the stakeholders who may or may not necessarily have the same level of intricate detail, helping them realize why is it important, what's in it for them, what value it drives, what customer problem it solves. That is the heart and soul of it. It is essentially moving from the transactional aspects of the product management to conveying that narrative in form of a compelling story that engages the audience and steers them on the path of making that product a success along with you. Leveraging the power of data. This is another powerful skill that you should learn. It's not saying that you need to be a data expert, but it is very important that as a PM who understands how you evaluate the performance and success of your product. For that purpose, you will need to become comfortable with using data and learn how to look for problems and potential opportunity areas that data is informing you. This is necessary not only to take fact-based decisions so that your problem solving, your product development approach is not biased or opinion-based, but what it also does is, it allows you a mechanism to collect insights for how the product is being perceived by your users and customers. Building a product complemented with data is going to make an overall story very impactful. Influencing without authority. This is absolutely bread and butter for any product manager. There's essentially saying that you are enabling to play an entire symphony with a full orchestra without yourself playing any of the instruments. The role of the product manager is such that it requires you to lead and guide many stakeholders over whom you don't have any direct authority. Important thing is to build a culture of trust, collaboration and partnership. What I typically try and do is defining what the success looks like and developing shared objectives and goals. When you as a PM can drive your team, your business partners and stakeholders to feel inclusive and proud and passionate about things that they are building collectively, bringing them along the journey, that's your true success as a PM. Another good way of influencing without authority is by becoming an absolute subject matter expert in your area. So people who don't necessarily want to listen to you, also have to listen to you, but you need to stay humble and operate with a lot of humility and share that knowledge with them to influence them, to stare them on the right path and enable them to educate that this is what the thing that we're trying to build is the right thing to build. Learn about the business and its economics. So I personally think to excel as a product manager in any industry or in any company, what's always going to be important is to understand the true nature of your company's business. Who the customers are, how does your company make money? What are the revenue generation streams and what are cost pillars or expense centers? It is only by having an overall holistic understanding of the entire business model. You're going to be able to relate all the above points and formulate a coherent product vision that solves the customer problems and also ties in with the company's vision, mission, and strategy. Things that I learned along the way. I'm going to end today's talk by leaving you with a bunch of cliches. Few of these statements are borderline philosophical, but essentially this is how I approach product management or in general, my life. I think our personal and professional lives are so tightly intertwined that how you approach a particular situation in your day job automatically starts reflecting in how you approach your personal life and vice versa. So it's important that we have some fundamental guiding principles along the way. And these are my basic tenets which I have developed and evolved over time and I sincerely strive to follow them. Time is finite. It's a PM's worst enemy. I'm sure even if you're not a PM, you would wish that you had more than 24 hours in a day. Some people say time is precious. Some say time is money. I will probably go a step further and say time is life. That's all we have. So as a PM, it's a daily realization and a constant battle on what you should be building, how you're going to maximize the limited time and capacity that you have, what is the most important problem to solve. And this all is going to define the success of your product's performance as well as your life's trajectory. Outcome over output. Well, years ago, when I wasn't a product manager, I used to take a lot of pride in saying that I'm working well out of the day. I'm very busy. The work is very hectic right now. But this mindset and internal dialogue started changing a few years ago when I got into product. I started realizing and valuing productivity and the value that gets driven out of the work delivered is more important than the number of hours that go into getting the job done. So this is going to be a mindset change for pretty much everyone who make their transition into product. It could very well be a single line of code or a small UX change or content change even that drives the business benefit. So ultimately you start redefining how you measure your own success when you transition over into product. Culture is more important than strategy. There is a wonderful quote on this. I think it's from Peter Drucker. If I'm not mistaken, which says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the most sophisticated, wonderful strategy laid out. But if the culture around which it is based is not right, it's not going to be sustainable for long term. And culture I feel is a function of values and people. You define the values that you stand for and then you find people who really believe in those values. Culture does percolate from top down, but as a PM, it is your responsibility to build that culture for your team and everyone around you that you work with. You need to make sure that everyone's voice is heard, junior or senior, doesn't matter. Everyone has an equal opportunity to share their ideas. Encourage people to voice their opinions, their concerns and then be open to changing. You pretty much have to let go of your ego. You don't need to be right all the time. You need to create that atmosphere around your team of psychological safety where everyone feels connected and part of the team. And even if someone is trying to do something new and fails at it, they are still backed and supported for at least trying because that's where learning growth happens. That's the only way in my opinion where collaboration happens, innovation happens. And mutual trust and success then automatically becomes an actual outcome of that process. Confidence without clarity never works. How I define this for myself, at least in my personal context, is when I say I believe this, I am confident. And when I say I know this, I am clear that this is how it is. It is like saying I believe it is going to rain today versus saying that I know it is raining outside. One is a mere assumption and another is a fact. The idea here in the product management context is that you can never assume anything just to look or sound confident. You have to absolutely know the facts, how they are and all your decisions, choices of what you build, what you don't build, things that you do and things that you don't do should be focused on raw facts rather than opinions, sentiments or assumptions. And finally, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. There are no shortcuts, there are no hacks. This isn't a role that gives you instant gratification. You think about an idea today and it comes to life tomorrow. It just doesn't happen, at least not in my experience. There is a lot of patience needed, a lot of discipline needed and diligence needed to bring a strategy and idea to execution. There are product features that can, at times, take months to be delivered. So obviously the challenge then is to stay on course day in and day out. If you don't want to show up for yourself, you show up for your team. You continue focusing on things that you control. And because if you as a product manager lose faith, your team and your partners are not going to see language at all in the vision that you're trying to write. So you are in this for a long time to be very clear when you start your journey, when you transition into product that this is not something that gives you instant joy but there is a lot of satisfaction at the end. With that, I leave you with some useful references. You should look at this. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I have really found useful. So we're spending some time going through this. So that I end today's talk and I wish you all the very best in your journey. Thank you.