 Hey everyone, my name is Nameshah. I'm a product manager at Microsoft and I used to be a data scientist and I successfully made the transition to being a product manager. So this is a presentation on my journey of self-assessment which I've also shared with several people and it's really helped them. So hopefully this journey of mine where I spent three to four years being a data scientist across various teams in Microsoft, also spent some time in a Fintech company, American Express and then move into product management has value for you as well. So without quickly, you know, deep diving into my details, which I'll probably share with the product school later on and you can also get access to. Let's go into what the agenda of the talk is, right? So we're gonna spend a minute or two on understanding who this talk is for. So if the stock is not for you, feel free to pass it on to someone for whom it makes sense. Second, we're gonna talk about, you know, what the traits of a product manager are and this is important to know because you will need to understand whether you have these traits. And finally, we go to the self-assessment plan which as I mentioned, I used and a bunch of people have used and it's really brought them a lot of value. So yeah, let's get into it. So yeah, who should be listening to this talk? Essentially there are folks in three buckets, I'd call it, who get value out of this talk. So the first kind is, if you're someone who's pre-interview, you know, you're not in a PM role yet, you are thinking about making the move, you probably get to receive an interview call, you're kind of fidgety. So this talk will give you clarity about whether you like the idea of product management or whether you really want to be a product manager. The second kind of folks, I think, several folks who will gain value out of listening to this are the folks who are interviewing for a product manager role right now because this self-assessment plan will help you improve your skills. And finally, also PMs who are early in their career. So you just landed a new product manager role, you wanna understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and understand what your blind spots are because you don't have as much experience. This talk will really hit the nail on all of these things. So if you're not any one of these people, feel free to stop listening and send it to someone who will get value out of this. So going to the second part of the talk, let's talk about what the traits of a product manager are. Again, product manager and not program because they're quite different as roles. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about this here but product school actually has a lot of good resources on what the differences are between product, program, project, all the different PM roles that are out there. And it's good to know before you jump into trying to become one. So there are a lot of definitions around what a product manager does. And if you probably see the job descriptions of various roles out in the market, you'll have slightly varying descriptions. But at the end of the day, a product manager is somebody who solves a user problem by any means necessary, within reason, to bring the company closer to achieving its goals while staying true to mission. I know that this is throwing a lot of words. So let's take an example and understand it quickly. So let's say the company we're talking about is Uber and you want to be a product manager here. The goal of the company is, among other things, to make money. And the company's mission is, this is actually taken from their website. So there are company that connects physical and digital worlds to help make movement happen at the top of a button. So if you're a product manager at Uber and your goal is to make money, you will identify user problem, something like, okay, going in cabs with unknown drivers has safety issues, right? You will solve this problem by any means necessary. So let's say, as a product manager, you ideated and envisioned that you would be creating an emergency alerting system on the Uber app, which can be activated with voice. Again, it could be any different solution, but this is just one of the solutions, right? Finally, by implementing this feature, you reach your goal, right? Users trust Uber a lot more now. They're gonna pick you over the competitors. They're gonna spend more money on the app because they're gonna book more rights on the app. So basically, this is the job at the end of the day that a product manager has to do. And this any means necessary bucket is how they do it. So that is what we need to kind of go into. And at this point, if you haven't been clear about, this is what a product manager does, I think you definitely need to rework on what this role means to you, right? So now that we're clear about what a product manager does or at least expected to do, here's the self-assessment plan that you kind of need to think about doing. If you are either think about making the jump, if you are having second thoughts about that, if you are already a PM and you want to become an even better PM, right? So let's go to step one. Most of these assessment plans, which are catered to yourself, start with reflection, right? You need to kind of start with seeing where you are. So do you find yourself exhibiting the traits of a product manager, right? So let's look at what these traits are and we'll see how much you probably are exhibiting these traits and figure out what to do next. So I usually like to explain with examples because it's easy to envision yourself doing this rather than as a theoretical concept. So let's take an example. Let's say you're a software development engineer or a data scientist at DoorDash, right? This was something very similar to what I was doing at Microsoft within the advertising organization. I was a data scientist and I was going through all of these steps. So, okay, so you're working at DoorDash, you're a data scientist or a software engineer and you're thinking about moving to a product manager role, all right? So step one, let's reflect on whether you have user empathy. So if you were an SD at DoorDash, would you think about who the users are, right? You're coding up a particular feature, you're building sound distributed system within the app, whatever it is, right? Are you thinking about who is actually using this app? Are you thinking about the restaurants who are signing up on the app? Are you thinking about the dashers who are picking up the orders? Do you worry that the feature that you're building is actually not going to be used by these people at all? So this is the basic level of being a product manager and whether you have this trait really matters a lot because if you're not able to think about anybody other than your team and what you're building and you're not able to kind of think like the user, you can't be solving user problems. So are you somebody who has this trait which is user empathy? Second thing is, are you someone who wants to know the bigger picture? So you could be working on say, just one button on the app, you could be working on say the order button, right? Are you somebody who thinks outside of this? Are you trying to understand how many users are there overall on DoorDash? What countries is this app famous in? What cities is it doing well in? What restaurants or what cuisines are popular on the app? Why are Indian restaurants not signing up for DoorDash? Stuff like this. So are you kind of thinking big picture because usually product managers design or at least come up with like product roadmaps and stuff. So you can't be thinking about just one small thing. You should be interested in the bigger picture. You need to think at an org level at a company level, at a market level, what are other apps like Uber Eats, for example, doing in the space that you are working in? So are you someone who wants to know the big picture all the time? You always want to zoom out and see what makes sense and where and why. The third thing is, do you usually find yourself playing detective? So as I said, let's say you're working on the order button, for example, and something is off in say, the data that some other team is providing you. You notice that after 9 p.m. in Seattle, the number of orders through the DoorDash app have dropped significantly. Now, this is not something you're working on, but are you inquisitive about these things and do you end up going and talking to this team? Maybe you want to talk to the product managers who handle this data. Are you interested in finding out why this is happening, even though it's not directly impacting your work because this being nosy is something which product managers should really be good at because they need to dig out things that are going wrong and anticipate things so that they can go and fix it before things get really bad. And at the same time, if you have an intuition or a sense that you can make something better, you have to play detective and go dig by yourself because product managers or the folks are deciding what kind of comes next, of course in association with everyone else in the company. So it's really important to play detective. It's really important to just really be on something before you come to a conclusion which leads me to my next very important trait which you should ideally be showcasing. It is trying to get clarity about something even if it's just for yourself. So how in the previous trait I said, you figured out that there was some data where you saw that DoorDash orders were dropping after 9 p.m. in Seattle. Are you trying everything in your faculty to understand why? You're kind of just digging through making charts, talking to everyone who's responsible for that data. Is it being logged correctly? Are the dashers not picking the order up? Stuff like that. You kind of go and figure out, okay, you reach a point where you're able to understand that situation clearly. So let's say you reach a stage where you realize that dashers are actually not signing up after 9 p.m. in downtown Seattle. Like people don't want to do late night deliveries and this is a problem. So you've reached this stage, you've reached this type of clarity in your mind. So at this point, usually someone who would be a good product manager or who wants to do product management would organically want to fix this. They realize that there is huge potential here, that this 10% drop in orders can actually be beneficial to the app and to making money and to having good engagement on the app. So you're somebody who actually puts a team together. You maybe participate in your company's hackathon. Maybe you do a site project, all of that stuff. And let's say you come up with a solution and you even test it out. Let's say you release something like after 9 p.m. in certain cities, for example, in Seattle, every third order made by a dasher has a higher tip. You're incentivizing the dashers to maybe pick up more after 9 p.m., which is a way for them to basically not drop orders. So this is a solution. You don't know if it's gonna work, but you could try and test it out. So you have put together this team. You are enrolling people onto your idea. You have a level of influence over other people because you're able to clearly communicate, things like that. So at the end of the day, if you are exhibiting any of these five trades or all of them or some of them, you're either interested in being a product manager or you know that moving to this role would be good for you because these are your strengths. And this is of course just scratching the surface. And also along with this, you should be interested in talking to people that goes without saying, you should be interested in being very comfortable in an environment where nothing is known to you. You're okay with paving your own path. So if you notice these trades in yourself, in your current role, in any company, I think it's a good thing to think about moving to a p.m. role. And if you're already doing this as a p.m., keep doing more of it because this is what is expected of you, right? So finally, once you reflect, right? And you complete understanding that, okay, this is what is right for me, you can move on to the next step. And if you understand, okay, you know what? I did not know that being a p.m. is actually doing all of this. I just thought it was not coding or it was organizing meetings. These are some of the misconceptions which are there for people. So if that's the case, then yeah, explore other roles which give more meaning to you. So now that you've reflected, the final thing is to actually test the waters. So it's not enough to just have trades, but you also really need to develop skills, right? You need to get all of the p.m. skills in order to be good at your role. You need to understand whether you have the capacity to even develop these skills. It's not enough if you just like playing detective. Can you become better at it? Can you become better at enrolling people in routine? All of that. So the best way is to test the waters, right? So basically you need to be a p.m. for a product, okay? So either do a project with your friends, do a hackathon at work, do a side project at work, whatever it is, okay? Solve a user problem. And as always, let's walk through the steps in doing that and then we'll go into how exactly you can assess yourself, right? So I'm not gonna go very deep into doing this. I'm just gonna explain with an example as always. So let's say that you are someone working at Instacart, okay? And you want to test the waters and be a product manager. So step one, identify a few problems that you as a user or people around you as users face, okay? Let's say for example, you realize that if you wanna make complicated recipes on the app, it's really hard to get individual ingredients, okay? Among other problems, of course. Second step, put together a team, okay? Get some people who are working around you, maybe in your company or friends, whoever it is to give their opinions on this, okay? Because they might have other ideas, maybe you're being biased, you need to rule out all of these things. So discuss and pick one problem to solve. In also doing this, you are understanding the market, you're understanding your competition, you're picking the problem which makes more sense for Instacart to solve right now, okay? So let's say you wanna solve that problem of users who come to the app, find it very hard to prepare complicated recipes because it's really hard to enter 25 ingredients from some other website into the app, right? So now ideate on actually solving this problem, okay? Talk to it, talk about it to a bunch of users, figure out what their journey is like when they open the app till they order something or even after that, right? Understand how your competitors work, do all of that research, okay? Actually ideate on this. Finally, let's say you have a working feature, I'm sorry, a working MVP, you're gonna actually go and tell your team, hey, let's go build this. This is how the UX will look, these are the designs, this is what the backend needs to do. So in doing this, you're forcing yourself to create requirements and understand the end to end flow for this feature that you have ideated along with your teammates. And in this process, you're also aligning people, there will be conflict, you will be resolving that, you'll be the glue that holds this team together and ultimately you build a feature, right? So once your feature is built, test it out, show it to a bunch of people outside your company maybe, or if you can't do that, then do a local test within your company, figure out what the reception is, you will get feedback, it'll be good, it'll be bad, incorporate that constructive feedback and iterate on your feature. Do this over and over again, right? So one iteration of this going from identifying your user problem, going all the way to release of that is one product or feature cycle. So do that a bunch of times, okay? And that is what will give you the information for you to do your self-assessment. So naturally in doing all of this, you have acted as a product manager. You've done a subset of things which a product manager would do in most companies, but you haven't done everything, but that's okay. You probably have not done, go to market, you haven't created KPIs, you haven't really communicated this to maybe your leadership, that's fine. But you've done some of the major things that a product manager is expected to do in a company, okay? You have solved a problem which you identified, solution that you and your team came up with. It's a very good experience and it's a very good exercise to do, okay? So now this is the most important part of this talk. It is doing the self-assessment. You know what a PM does, you know what the traits that you need to exhibit are and after testing it out, now you need to know whether these traits can be converted into skills, okay? So let's look at the skills which I think and also a couple of my managers, et cetera, have told me that are very important for being a PM and whether it really makes sense for you to go down this path or not, right? So first one is clear communication. Can you communicate your ideas to somebody, okay? Second is user empathy. We already discussed this. If you don't think like a user and if you don't care about the user, you cannot be solving problems for them, okay? Third thing is you should be comfortable with ambiguity. Think about it. You are solving problems which nobody knows about yet. You are finding solutions for something which nobody has worked on, okay? So you need to be comfortable paving a path for yourself and constantly being in situations where you don't have the answers. Fourth, you should be comfortable playing detective. What does this mean? Good data analysis skills. Good visualization skills and intuition or a sense of where all this information is finally leading you to. If you're not okay with trying to come to a cohesive solution with a large amount of data, it's got to be really hard being a PM. Next point is enrolling people onto an idea. Your entire job is to get a whole bunch of people who are not gonna be working together at all to work on something. They will have different priorities. They will have different things to do. They will not be interested in working on your problem. It's all a day-to-day thing, but you need to get all of these people aligned and working on something. So if that seems exhausting to you, you shouldn't be thinking about becoming a PM, okay? And finally, driving clarity, right? So once you get all of these people together, there's gonna be noise, there's gonna be chaos. Your project trajectory is gonna go off the charts sometimes you need to always keep drilling down sense into people and keep asking the right questions to get people kind of going on the same, the track that needs to be taken. So if you're not interested in doing that, you shouldn't be thinking about being a product manager. So you not only need to know whether you're rating yourself well out of say five or 10 points on each of this, you also need to know whether you have an interest in doing each of these things. So which is kind of what I have shown. And if you have ratings where you're interested in something but you don't have a good self rating, like you don't have that skill, it means that you have room for improvement. So you don't mind kind of grinding and becoming better at something. But you might also see that you're good at thinking about users, you have good communication, you like driving clarity, but you couldn't be bothered about playing detective or enrolling people into an idea. That's okay. It just means that maybe you really like being, say, a researcher, you're interested in being an engineer, maybe a UX engineer. You could be interested in marketing. A product management may not be for you because being comfortable with ambiguity and all of that, that just is not your cup of tea and that's okay. So there could be different combinations that you are good at, that you're interested in. So the more number of times you do this exercise, the more patterns you see within yourself and you figure out whether this PM role is good for you or whether there are other roles that are good for you. And if you're already a product manager, doing this is of course, you're already doing this as part of your job, you're just probably not rating yourself or understanding whether you're interested in something. So the more you reflect, the more you assess yourself, you get a better idea about what you need to improve upon. And if you're someone who's interviewing, you probably know if you're doing well in certain parts of the interview, you know why. Maybe because you're not interested in thinking about certain kinds of questions, maybe you're not interested in doing analysis type questions or estimation questions. And if that's a deal breaker, maybe you should rethink or if you're interested, but if you're not doing well, maybe you can drill down and get better at just such kind of questions in the future. So there's a lot of value, I think, if you already exhibit these traits naturally because then you don't have to really force yourself to work on it. And I think some of those traits are user empathy, being comfortable and calm in ambiguous situations and being open to enrolling people and bringing people together. So these are things which are hard to learn. They are traits which eventually get developed into skills. Imagine trying to force yourself to think about a user. If you don't like the idea of it, it's very difficult to do that. So the job, the product manager job is complicated. As I said, all of these things are not things that you learn in school. For example, no one says, hey, this is the track that you need to take. Of course, there are a lot of different sources out there and product school has a really good set of courses to understand your blind spots and actually take courses for each of these skills and develop them, which is a great idea to do. But if you don't have that opportunity, then the self-assessment would be really, really helpful. Yeah, and at the end of the day, it really gives you more clarity on whether you're being a good product manager, whether you should be a product manager at all. And I'm gonna link this self-assessment plan in the description for this talk and also in this presentation. So feel free to download it, feel free to rate yourself, see how the trends are looking for the next three, four months, see whether you are improving in certain areas, whether you're just not able to like certain things. And at the end of those three, four months, you will understand how to get better and whether this path really makes sense for you. And this is exactly what I did for the last year of being an ML engineer or data scientist at Microsoft. I rated myself constantly after taking on a lot of side projects at work. And yeah, I'm doing, I think, a good job right now and I really like being a product manager. So if you are having double, you know, second thoughts on this whole process, feel free to reach out to me. Yeah, all the very best, you got this. And thank you so much to Product School for giving me this time. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening to this talk.