 Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone who are here. Thank you for taking the time to join this session. I would love to know where you're joining from and what your current role is. If you don't mind, please let us know in the comments. All right. The topic we're going to discuss today is soft skills needed to succeed as a product manager. I'm Deepti Jayarajan and I'm a Senior Product Manager at Zoom. I've been with Zoom for over four years now. Before Zoom, I was at Cisco where I worked as an engineer and a team lead before I transitioned fully into product management around six years back. I was also a student of product school when it had just started and I'm very honored to have the opportunity today to be on the other side and share my experience as a product manager to aspiring PMs like you. I'm also going to be teaching in product school in August. So if any of you are interested, please check out the product school website and sign up. I've personally benefited from product school as I was navigating my career into product management. So the agenda for today is to go through what soft skills are, why they're important for product managers, and how you can develop these skills to succeed as a product manager and a product leader. So let's dive in. What are soft skills? This is the definition of soft skills from the Cambridge dictionary. Soft skills are people's abilities to communicate with each other and work well together. Sounds simple, right? Some examples of soft skills are communication, collaboration, creativity, leadership and adaptability. Even though they're called soft skills, there is nothing really soft about them. They're basically human skills and human skills are what makes us better human beings and better leaders. In the new world where artificial intelligence is emerging strong, these human skills would be the most indispensable skills you could have. Now let's see how this applies in product management. This is an image from Ken Norton who is a product leader and the author of the blog, Bring the Donuts. He shares his wisdom on product management and how we can become great product leaders in his blog. If you haven't come across this blog, I highly recommend everyone to check it out. So he talks about the art of product management that is depicted in this picture. He highlights six skills, communication, the ability to connect and share with other people. That's what communication is all about. As a PM, we often feel that all we do is talk to people and say the same things over and over again. When do we do the real work, right? Communication is the work. The second skill is collaboration. Collaboration is the ability to work with other people and support their ability to work with each other. Team building and giving and receiving feedback, dealing with difficult people and situations are all part of effective collaboration. Third is creativity. Creativity will help you solve customer problems and it will help you figure out the right solution, which often is not the fastest or the least complex, and this requires creative thinking. Fourth is critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to analyze facts, synthesize it, draw inferences and solve problems. It's very important for a product manager. Fifth is curiosity. The ability to form a strong desire to know what is unknown, that's what curiosity is all about. It motivates us to keep digging in and getting to the why. Knowing the why to a problem is very important to build the optimal solution. The sixth one is consciousness, which is not often talked about. Consciousness is the ability to develop the inner strength to navigate, cope and grow. This is so important. Product management is not easy and to avoid burnout, you need to understand your values and have a sense of purpose in what you're doing. The day-to-day life of a PM can be very exhausting and you have to balance your mental health and wellness to do your best work. There are a lot of skills within each of these circles that we can learn and practice and I'll cover three of the most important ones that I think are very crucial for PMs. There's a famous Steve Jobs quote where he said, Technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with liberal arts, married with humanities that heals us the result that make a hard thing. His quote encompasses how important the art is when you're developing products that customers love. So one of the most important things that you can do early in your career is to grow these skills. Tactics and techniques are essential, but the craft of product management depends more on the art over the long term. So before we dig into some of the human skills that are essential for product managers to be successful, let's understand why these skills are important. Number one, these skills help us build products that customers love. Apple is a great example where Steve Jobs mastered the art to make the most beautiful products. Number two and three, they help us build high performing teams and build meaningful relationships. Beyond customers, your colleagues, your partners and teammates play a very crucial role in your career. Teamwork is what makes the dream work, right? And product management is the team sport. Without the human skills like effective communication and collaboration, there is no team and there's no product. Number four, they will help you transition from a good PM to a great PM. And we all want to be great at what we do. Going back to the first point, building products that customers love, you need to be great at what you do. So let's dive into some of the most important skills that I think are very crucial to be a successful product manager. The first one is empathy. This is a quote from Jeff Bezos where he talks about customer obsession and it's all about empathy. Let me share a few examples and lessons that I've learned in my career that's helped develop empathy towards our customers, our users and my colleagues. The first one, listen. Listen to your customers to really understand their pain points. For example, we might have some cool technology that we want to use to build products and to sell those products. But is that really going to solve a customer pain point? This is a question that we have to ask. So we have to always start with customer experience and then work backwards to technology. If we start with technology and try to see where it fits in without really understanding what the customer pain point we are solving for, that's not going to work. So to start with customer experience, we need to listen to our customers, empathize with them and then innovate. The second one, understanding just the problem is not enough. We have to also understand how the problem makes them feel. Understanding how the problem makes them feel is important to build delightful experiences. We see many products that has a feature that does the job well, but does that feature make you cringe or happy? That's where the difference comes in between a functionality or a feature and a delightful experience. I think Zoom understood the customer pain point around video conferencing really well. And Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO, his empathy towards the customers is what made him build a delightful Zoom meeting experience for our users. Zoom had the technology, but it was married with the arts which made it successful. Putting yourself in place of your customer and seeing the world through their eyes will allow you to build better products and create a more inclusive and happier environment. Third point, empathy is not just for customers. It's also important to show empathy towards your colleagues. So it's important to connect with your peers and share your ideas, vision and product roadmap to bring them along the journey and also take their feedback, their point of view and perspective to drive success. So in essence, to achieve product excellence, it is important to empathize with people who build, sell, support and use your product. The second human skill that I think is very important for a PM to master is problem solving. Albert Einstein said, if I had an hour, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solutions. What does this mean for product managers? This means that understanding the problem very well is what leads to building the product that customers will use. So it's very important to listen to customer problems and not the solutions that they're offering. Finding a solution is your job as a PM. Only if you understand the problem well, you can build delightful products instead of building a feature that might solve some part of the problem. Now in order to understand the problem, we have to start with why. The five wise framework is the great tool to use here. You basically keep asking why till you get to the root of the problem. One of the framework that we use at Zoom is the problem root cause solution framework. The root cause will unravel the fundamental reason for the problem, which then helps us in finding the most optimal solution, and it works great. Once you develop the skill of problem solving, you can then start to prevent the problems from happening in the first place and then keep improving the products you built and become an innovator. The last human skill I want to highlight today is leadership, which is important from day one of your PM career. And this is what will make you a great product leader. Every PM is a leader from day one. When you start, you might be working on building specific set of features, right? And you are the person who will be leading that effort. You would need to lead a team of designers, engineers, marketers, et cetera, to build a successful product. And as a PM, you have to lead with no authority. And for building leadership skill, developing a growth mindset is super important. This means that you have to be open minded and get comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. Leadership is a continuous learning process and you cannot learn without having a growth mindset. So keep building the growth mindset as you navigate your PM career. And last, getting stuff done. And I think this is what matters more than anything for a PM. We can keep thinking about the vision and the strategy, but that will not help customers if you don't get stuff done to shift great products. A true leader is who can get stuff done without telling people what to do. So how can you do that? This is a picture from the book Radical Candle. I highly recommend this book for any managers and leaders. First, you have to listen to the ideas that people on your team have and create a culture in which they listen to each other. That's how you can be collaborative. Next, you have to create a space where ideas are sharpened and clarified before they get crushed because people don't understand it. Just because an idea is easy to understand, that doesn't mean it's a good one. So you have to debate the ideas and test them. Then you need to decide quickly, not too quickly. Everyone might not be involved in this part of the collaboration. So the next step is to bring the broader team along. Then persuade those who weren't involved in a decision that it was a good decision. And that way, everyone can execute effectively. Having executed, you have to learn from the results to understand whether or not you did the right thing and start the whole process again. This is a great framework to use to get stuff done as a product manager. So let's recap and look at the key takeaways. Number one, in product management, there is both art and science. Soft skills is the art that enhances your technical expertise to be successful. Number two, approaching customers and your users with empathy and really understanding how the problem makes them feel is critical to drive success of your customers, your business and your career. Number three, product management is a team sport. Building and supporting an environment that values and encourages teamwork through communication and leadership is what collaboration is about. I hope this was helpful. Please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn with your feedback. And if you have any questions related to this topic or product management in general, I would love to hear from you. Thank you everyone and have a great day.