 Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Hey, I see so many familiar faces here tonight, so I'm glad to be home. This is our headquarters, and that's where I spend most of my time, usually on the backstage, but tonight is my turn to share some of our learnings helping students break into product management. In addition to the classes, we decided to publish a book that encapsulates a lot of the learnings that we've collected from all of these years, and the book has been written by instructors from product school and myself, and we saw in the market that there are so many books out there about how to crack the interview, which don't get me wrong, it's important. But at the end of the day, you can't just get a job by cracking an interview. It's not about hacking your resume. It's also about learning how to do the job right. So this course, this is not the course, but the book is mostly focused on showing you the framework of how product managers work, and what are the tactical steps. All the way from, I have an idea to, I'm pushing this to market and then deciding what to do afterwards. So the content of the presentation tonight is a summary of the book where I try to cover the most relevant topics, but I'm also open to questions. So if there is anything that you need to ask during or after the talk, I'd be happy to answer. The subtitle of the book, the book is called the product book, that's very original. The subtitle is how to become a great product manager, which is what we're going to be covering tonight. So this is my path for the ones that don't know me, I come from software engineering, and that's actually very common for a lot of us. Is there any other software engineer in the room or former software engineer? Okay. So that was me 10 years ago. Who else here is coming from, let's say business? I'm including marketing, sales, consulting. Wow. Majority of you. I was giving a similar talk yesterday in Mountain View at Intuit, and majority of the attendees were software engineers and very few people come from business. So it's interesting to see the diversity and the differences here. Anyway, it is not that easy. It's not like I was an engineer and then I became a product manager and then I became a CEO. My path looks more like this one. I started computer science, and then after starting computer science, I became a software engineer. After working as a software engineer, I tried to start my first company. The good thing of being an engineer or being technical is that you can build something and you don't have to ask for much help at least at the very beginning. Obviously, when the company grows, you need to ask for more help. You need to recruit, you need to hire, you need to fundraise, you need to sell, you need to do many things. So that's how I learned or started learning about product. I considered myself a little bit self-taught, I learned on the go at least at the very beginning. So after that experience building my first company, I decided to learn even more about the business side of things. So I went to business school. Unfortunately, there wasn't anything like product school when I was considering all of these options. But going to business school opened my mind and I realized that there were so many other people like myself that were technical but were thinking business. And funny enough, that's where I found that there was something called product management. And I was like, oh my God, I've been doing this thing all my life and I didn't know how to call it. Which probably feels related to some of you. And after business school, I actually worked as a product manager for a medium-sized, started as a small company, then we got acquired by Oracle. And then after that experience, I became, I started product school because I wish I had something like this when I started. So based on my experience as an engineer and then as a product manager, now we built a platform to teach others how to do the same. And when I started, I used to teach all the classes. Now we have a team of over 15 instructors. As Sam mentioned, all of our instructors come from Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and they keep their full-time jobs so they are not traditional teachers. They are real-world product managers who happen to teach at night. So what's PM? Obviously, there are so many definitions out there with all her people saying that the PM is the mini CEO. Some people love that definition. Some people hate it. I'm not going to take part here. I'm just going to say that that's one possible definition. I prefer to not look at this light. Because it's horrible and that's what you're going to find when you look at the Wikipedia. You type product management or product development cycle. You're going to find something horrible like this. That's not going to teach you product. That's not going to make you a product manager. And that's when people are trying to read what that is. Well, that's just pure definition of, okay, as a product manager, you need to identify the opportunity. Then you have to communicate. Then you have to execute. Okay, blah, blah, blah. That's not enough. So I prefer to create a more visual way. For me, product management is the intersection between business, design, and engineering. And by the way, I'm talking about software products. Okay, I'm not talking about hospitals or 3D printers. There may be some overlap, but when I say product management, I'm talking about software products. So product sits right in between all of these fields. You may come from one of these angles, like in my case, I came from engineering. You may come from business. You may come from design. Common ground here is that you don't need to be great at everything, but you need to be good enough at everything. You know, like you can't expect that a former engineer is going to be an amazing designer or an amazing marketer, but you will definitely need to pick up enough in order to be able to put everybody in the same room and push in the same direction. So pretty much it's not about where you are coming from, but it's more about what else you need to learn in order to be in the middle. And assume that you are going to be kind of a B plus type of student because you don't have the time to master any of those skills. If you're spending too much time on one of those skills, you're probably going to slow in the rest. And that's something very challenging at the very beginning because when we are new to management, we tend to go to the things that we are best at. So I've seen a lot of engineers that get promoted to engineering management or product management. And when there is a technical problem, they tend to go and fix it. That's a very common reaction because, hey, I've done a lot of these things before so I can do it. But it's more about stopping for a second and training someone or asking someone to do it so you can empower others and you can see more in the middle. Sounds easy, but the execution is pretty difficult. Anyway, let's talk about paths to PM. As I mentioned, there was one. This is the five most common paths to PM. And this is based on data from product school. People are trying to look, I can read it for you. There's only five lines. Number one is, and there is no, not like number one, number two or number three, it's more about most common backgrounds are software engineering, entrepreneurship. Is there anyone in this room who tried to start a company or started a company? So great, you should know that there's a lot of product management right there. And it's not like, oh, I need to start a company in order to become a product manager at a company. But it could happen that way. The same way I've seen so many product managers that end up becoming founders or CEOs at their own startups. The mindset is fairly similar. So in addition to engineering or entrepreneurship, I've seen a lot of consultants become product managers. The especially common on the East Coast and our campus in New York, we see a lot of people that come from finance, ops or consulting. They usually make great product managers. I see people smiling. Are you guys consultants? Okay, are you from New York? Okay. This is, they usually make great product managers because as a consultant, you are trained to learn fast and move fast. And this is skill set that can be applicable to software. Obviously there are other parts that you will need to pick up, but it's definitely a good path. Not just about consulting, but product, no, sorry, project management or program management. Those are stepping stones to our product. Depending on how the company defines this role, this could be considered either product management per se or at least part of the product team. So keep in mind that it's not just about all the engineers can become PMs. There are so many options and those are the most common ones that we've seen across the board. But what if you are thinking, hey, I'm not one of these. Am I done or what? Well, it's actually alternative ways to break into product. And we've seen some of those cases as well. If you are an engineer, but not a software engineer, let's say hardware engineer, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, even chemical engineer, well, you can make it. At the end of the day, being an engineer and I'm speaking from experience, it's about being excited about fixing problems. You know that you're not going to give up. And that type of mentality will make you very resilient and you will need to kind of focus your attention to other types of problems, but in general, engineers can make good product managers. Finance slash ops. There's some people that enjoy getting S done. Well, that is another big part of product. Obviously it's not just about checking boxes, but you are going to require some of that at some point. So I'm just trying to create other ways for you to see, to look at product. Before product school and probably five, 10 years ago, product management was this black box where only few would be working at that and they would look like geniuses. Well, I mean, some of them are geniuses, but the reality is that this is not rocket science. You obviously need to put time and the work, but it's doable. So look at people that come from support or QA. They can also become PMs. In general, when you work in support or QA, you're mostly focused on fixing problems that they come to you. Someone has a problem, they come to you and you go and fix it. As a product manager, there is a component of that plus you also need to pick the problems you are going to tackle. In customer support, unfortunately, you don't get to pick much. You just get the list and you just fix it. But if you have the capacity to not just fix the back, but also think about, okay, how can we implement a process or something? So next time that this happens, we can be better prepared. I just want you to start thinking about product kind of, do not expect for someone to give you the title. You can see a little bit of product pretty much in any title or responsibility and even sales or design. Okay, well, let's talk about other PM roles. Because yeah, when I say PM, I mostly mean product management, but this is not just about product management. Depending on the size of the company, there may be other people involved in the product team. If you are in a startup, let's say less than 20 people, there may not be even a single product manager. It is usually the CEO or one of the founders who's acting as that product person. And that's how I did it and that's how most of the startups operate. It makes sense because product is so close to the founders that it's really hard to give up, at least at the very beginning. It's only when your product starts growing and you need to do so many things that you are at this point like either higher or I'm going to heart attack that you probably make that first higher. And it could come from an internal promotion but it could also come from the outside. So just look at this graph for a second. My initial graph only had the three circles where it was business, engineering, and design. And right in the middle, we had product. But if the company grows, there's going to be more than just one product person in the middle. If you look at the intersection between product management and engineering, there is something called project management or technical program management. There is a good step in stone if you come from a technical background. The same way if you think of the intersection between design and product, there's something called product design. So if you come from a design background, this could be a good stepping stone. Again, I'm not just kind of telling you what to do and trying to show you options because this is fairly common in bigger organizations. Same case applies to business. You've probably heard this term of product marketing manager that's usually in the middle in between business and product. So if you come from a business background, it is going to be almost impossible that you become a product designer before you become a product manager. You can become a product marketing manager before you become a product manager. But those intermediate roles are eligible for people that come from those specific areas of expertise. So if you look at this graph now, you will see that there is something called project manager or program manager. There's something called product designer, product marketing manager, business analyst that usually is closer, that's closer to project management or program management. And the last category, I call it product X because now everything is product. I've seen people call themselves product engineers, product operations, product everything. So my point here is if you are looking for a job or thinking about applying to product positions, do not stop at the headline of the job description. Take a look at them at the details because the title may be completely different for different companies. Like Microsoft would call program management to what we usually call product management. Just an example, companies that are looking for product marketing managers may be a good fit for you while other companies hiding for product marketing managers may be looking at skills that are completely different from what you bring to the table. So not to make life more complicated, but just to tell you that we're still learning about how to define all of those concepts. So this is still early enough for you to jump in and help the company shape what product means. Every time I have questions, I try to go back to this diagram because at least I can see that this is in between business, design and engineering. I like this more than just saying mini CEO. By the way, I'll be sharing these slides afterwards. So if you check in, we'll make sure to follow up with a link to these slides. And also we are recording a live streaming on Facebook so you will have me everywhere. Let's talk about the PM career path because we always talk about how to break into product, which is great, but then what? I look at this as an open table dollars where usually the first step in the ladder is what we call APM or associate product manager. And this is a term that was coined by Marissa Mayer when she was at Google. And the original concept was, hey, there's no many places where we can train product managers, so why don't we create an internal program where we take some smart engineers that are thinking business and we make them product managers. That became so successful that other big companies started doing the same. So companies like Facebook, Intuit, LinkedIn, Yelp, Google and more have those APM programs. Some of them call it APM, some of them call it rotational programs. Amazon has another rotational program. So in general, what they do is try to hire fresh grads or people with less than three years of experience traditionally with technical backgrounds. They're very, very selective. They put these people through a six to 12 month program. They rotate them through different products and then at the end of that, they decided they extend them and offer as a product manager or not. Now, other companies may be hiding associate product managers, so it's not just for fresh grads, but again, try to take a look at the definition and see what they're actually looking for. They're also the companies that will hire straight for product management positions. I haven't seen any companies that create a title called Junior Product Manager. That doesn't sound very good. So they usually call it product manager. And the difference, I don't think the salary that you would make as a product manager or first time product manager is going to kind of change your life. I think it's more about deciding where you want to take your career. And this was a huge decision that I had to make when I was an engineer because when you are a specialist and in my case is engineering, you know that you are going to spend at least 80% of your time executing and the other 20% of your time doing something else. Could be participating in meetings, could be doing some research, whatever. I like these 80, 20 rules for a lot of things in life. As a manager, you flip the coin and you spend around 80% of your time managing and communicating and only 20% of your time executing. Well, I know it's not always right. Sometimes you spend 80% of the time communicating and 80% of your time executing. But you get the point. Being a specialist is very different from being a people manager. And it's not like one is good or wrong, but you have to make that decision for yourself. Because the earlier you start thinking about all of this, the easier it will be for you to make the switch. I'm not saying that it's going to be impossible to make a switch when you are later in your career. But it's probably going to be harder for many reasons. Your hazard expectations will probably be higher. Your level of seniority will be higher. So it'll be harder for a company to believe that now you want to take such a high pay cut and kind of demotion in terms of the ranking just to start as a product manager. I've seen that happening. But in general, if you are pretty decided to start thinking about managing and not just pure execution, I think that'll give you some advantage. Well, let's say that you keep growing in your career and you are a product manager. After two, three years, depending on the company, you may become a senior product manager. The difference between a product manager and a senior product manager is mostly the experience. You're still going to be working directly with engineers, designers, and business people. I mean, if you're in startup, everybody's a vice president, right? But this is mostly assuming that you are in a larger organization. So as a PM or SPM, pretty much going to be doing the same. Or maybe they give you other types of products that are more relevant for the company. But at the end of the day, you're still going to be pretty close to engineering, design, and business. Biggest jump happens after that when you become a group product manager or director of product. At this point, at that point, you are going to be working with product managers that will work with engineers, designers, and business. You become more of a manager of product managers than a product manager. And depending on how big the company is, then we have VP's of product, chief product officer, and ultimately I put the CEO because CEOs are still influencing product big time. And it's hard to give up. Anyway, I put $4 on the CEO level because you could be making a lot of money, but also if you're a founder, maybe you're not making that much money, but you're still doing a lot of product. So just keep that in mind. If you want to look at more accurate data, I recommend you to go to Glassdoor.com. LinkedIn also publish something called LinkedIn salaries where people submit their income, their income, and then they show you stats about what's the average, depending on location, seniority type of company, and so on. Okay, by the way, I extended on all of these topics more in the book, but I'm just trying to cover each chapter. Types of PMs, there's another important point that I've seen very often because product management sounds great. And especially when we are in the area, we think that everybody wants to be a product manager and we think that product management is this amazing person that sees in between and decides this strategy and whatever, but you also have to think a little bit deeper and see what types of products are you be working with. Just take a look at this slide for a second. I just tried to mention a couple of categories. There are more, of course, but some of these are very common, B2D versus B2C. Types of product management you're going to apply to a B2D company than a B2C company is fairly different, but that could also apply to web product versus mobile products, or marketplaces versus SaaS products. So what I'm trying to explain here is if you come from, let's say, all your experiences in large organizations, and you are a product manager at a large organization, and you are thinking about switching to another product management role. It is going to be very, very difficult for you to go from big organization, if you spend 10 years of your life doing big organizations, to join a three people scrappy startup in a garage. I'm not saying it's impossible, but your area of expertise is very, very different when we are working in large organizations, not just as product managers, but in general we are optimizing things that already work. That's why there are so many people. Why the smaller company is more about moving fast and breaking things. So it's not like one thing is good or wrong, that you need to keep in mind that it is not as straightforward to go from fintech into healthcare, especially if you are trying to switch roles at the same time. So let me give you another example. Let's say you work as a business analyst at a fintech company, and you are thinking about breaking into product management, and you see this cool opportunity to become a product manager at a healthcare company, but your experience in fintech. If you try to switch roles and industries at the same time, it is going to be almost impossible. You have to decide if you want to switch industries and then roles, or roles and then industries. So for example, it would be easier for you to become a business analyst at a healthcare company and then from there try to become a product manager or try to become a product manager at a fintech company and then from there switch to healthcare. Think about it as a multi-step process because that will make your life easier. And by the way, these are not all the categories in the world. I just mentioned some. And you may qualify for more than just one because let's say you're working at a company like Airbnb. We tend to think of Airbnb as a B2C marketplace, but they have web apps and mobile apps. So maybe you are a software engineer in the iOS team. Well, you could qualify for mobile products, but at the same time you could qualify for marketplace type of products and at the same time you could qualify for B2C type of products. So depending on the company that you are targeting, you'll also have to think what it is that you had before that you can leverage. It takes time because unfortunately we can't just create a template that says we're hiring manager, boom. Here's my life, you should hire me. It's more about being a sniper and thinking well about what it is that I have that the other person cares, especially if I don't have that title yet. If you have the title, it is easier to get a second PM job than a first PM job. So you can probably have more flexibility in terms of industries and whatnot. Cool, but what is the perfect PM? I'm just going to show data because each company will have a different definition of what they're looking for. Our definition is what we've seen in students that ended up getting jobs as product managers. And we've seen a commonality there, which is the following. Technical background, industry expertise and communication skills. I'm going to elaborate on each of them a little bit more because there's a lot of confusion out there. When you say something like technical background, what does that mean? Do I have to be an engineer? Do I need to know how to code? Well, if you come from software engineering, great. If you know how to code, great. But I'm thinking beyond that. Let's take a deeper look at what I mean by having a technical background. You don't need to have a serious degree in order to consider yourself technical. You don't need to know how to code like a coder. But it's true that you need to know to speak tech and you need to know enough code to be able to communicate with other software engineers and earn their respect. Now, depending on the product, if we are talking about a very technical product, their bar may be very, very high. And it's true that some companies will be like, hey, we only hire former engineers because we are building an AI chatbot. And if you don't come from like a pure PhD in CS, you don't get it. Okay, fine. But in any company, they will expect a minimum level of technical acumen. And there are different options for you to acquire that. So in each of the blogs, I first kind of show what I mean. Then I show you how you can get it. And then I show you how you can prove it. I like to do these presentations as tactical as possible. So this is not just a keynote speech about the future of product management. It's more about how you can get something valuable out of this hour. So, especially for folks that don't come from a CS background or they don't consider themselves very, very technical. Here's how you can do it. There are so many online options out there. And just to mention a few, you have Udacity, you have Udemy, you have Code Academy, you have Code School, you have iTunes University and more. You can just Google how to build a website with HTML and you can find so many online free tutorials. I don't think the value here is the content. I think the value here is for you to have the willingness to not give up. If you can power through, good for you. In general, I've seen a lot of people giving up and I don't blame them because learning how to code is really, really tough. And they may need some offline component there. So I'm going to show you some offline options as well. Obviously these ones are more expensive but more effective in my opinion. You can go all the way, you can do coding boot camps but in general, my suggestion here is that if you know that you want to be a product manager, don't think you need to take a boot camp to become a software engineer and then try to become a product manager. I've seen companies like Codepad, Hack Reactor, App Academy, they are very, very focused on making software engineers. But there are other companies like Block.io, Thinkful, Code Mentor, Springboard. These companies offer a lot of content out there. But they also have offline touches. They do live Skype meetings once a week with a mentor. So it's a nice way to keep yourself accountable. Not bad, better than just pure online video. Now you have obviously the offline classes and that's why we built this course called Coding for Managers because we saw that there wasn't nothing in the market that was just enough for someone that wants to learn how to code that doesn't want to be a coder. We saw that there were full on coding boot camps and a lot of online videos. So we built this in between, things to consider and then you also have the option of do it yourself. Good luck with that. Actually, hi, I hired a software engineer, I hired a programmer from Cuba who taught himself how to code and he was extraordinary. Now I've only met one person like this in my life. He was one of those, hey you're not going to have problems but I always compare learning how to code this way with like, hey you can always watch an aerobic video from home and try to do the exercises or you can go to the gym with a personal trainer. If you want to make it happen, you are going to do it. Now, you are going to kind of speed up the process if you invest a lot of time and money, that's how it is. How you can prove it? Because I love asking this question, not just in interviews, but also when we have candidates applying to college school. Say, hey, what's your technical background? And then some people would say, well I took this core academy course and I have a badge or 10 years ago I graduated from CS degree. And my follow up question is, but do you have any project that I can see? No, well it's not probably, well, well, it is way better to show something even if it's not perfect than telling me that you got an online badge out there and there is no content. So there's no excuses today to build a website. Of course you have the easy option which is using a content management system like WordPress or Weebly, Wix.com, Squarespace, you name it. I wouldn't consider someone technical just because you build a website using blogs. Hey, but that's better than nothing. If you want to take the next step, you can code something fairly basic with HTML and CSS. It's static and use it as your own personal website with a link to your LinkedIn profile and to your resume. And that is better than nothing. I encourage our students to do that to kind of take one step further and prove that even though they don't consider engineers by any means, they are setting themselves apart from the rest of people that just come from, in this case, design or business, and I'm not doing anything about proving that they really want to be a little more technical. So just keep that in mind. Could be a good option. If you have the luxury of getting along with your own software engineers, you can ask them. Sometimes they will love to explain you more about what they do. One of our students gave us this idea. He went out there and said, hey, I'm not a coder, but do you mind showing me how you throw queries? What's your SQL editor and how do you fix bugs? Show me the tools that you use. And obviously, he's not an engineer, but he was able to get addicted into that and then from there learning more. There's no excuse at these days. Now keep that in mind next time somebody asked you, what's your technical background? Let's talk about domain expertise and technical acumen. Sorry, business acumen. This is my second most popular question at pro school. Do I need an MBA in order to be a product manager? Before I answer that, how many of you have been to business school or have an MBA? Okay, wow, a lot of people. Good for you. And I think that's good. The same way, I don't believe you need a CS degree in order to prove your technical acumen. You don't need an MBA in order to prove your business acumen, but if you have it, that's a good bonus point. That helps. Now, that's not enough and you need to take one step further. So again, you don't need an MBA. I don't think you need to be a top performance salesperson. But here's the thing, you need to know your product really, really, really well. And by product, I mean your market, your competitors, your users, the process of how it works, pretty much you need to be obsessed with the product. You need to be leaving it so much. And I know it's hard when you're working at B2B Enterprise Company, doing health insurance, for example. But as a product manager, you are pretty much the advocate for your users. And if you don't believe enough in your product, that's not going to work. I could hire someone to do something even though this person doesn't believe in the product, but not a product manager. So if you feel like you are not connected with the product enough, there are so many other companies out there that I don't think you should compromise this part. Because it's very obvious. Maybe you even get the job in something in a company that you don't love and what's going to happen is that in a few months, you are going to decide to leave. And that doesn't look good on your resume, especially as a product manager. It's such a critical hire. You are the gatekeeper for so many other functions that you really need to be careful here. So keep that in mind now. How can I get this business acumen? I'm very passionate about Airbnb. But how can I prove that I could do a good job there? Well, let's take a look at some of these examples. There's so many industry-related products. So if you are saying Airbnb, you should definitely use Airbnb, right? That you should have a profile, at least as a guest. Hopefully, as a host. And if you look at the application process for Airbnb, for example, they asked you to sign in with your Airbnb account. I think it's great. Dropbox will ask you to submit your resume using the Dropbox API. Makes total sense. I mean, especially easier to understand when you are applying for B2C products. If you're applying for a B2B product, why not expect you to be the customer? But you should find a way to relate to that. So following up on the example of Airbnb, you should also know about Hotel Tonight. You should also know about other hotels and other marketplaces and other web experiences and mobile experiences. I really want to see that you care a lot. I want to believe that I'm not just one out of 50 resumes that you are sending out there. But not just using products will give you enough business acumen. That would be too easy. There are definitely things that you need to read and study. And there's a lot of content out there. Obviously, taking a structure course is one option. But you can also try to do it yourself. You can find a mentor. You can grab coffee with people. You have to do something. You tell me what you want to do. But it's not just about reading the Wikipedia or blogs about how cool Airbnb is. There are so many events out there about pretty much anything. We're in San Francisco. There are events every week. There are meetups every day. And this is a good sign that you care about product that you are here. A lot of our students, they leverage the fact that they got certified as product managers. And that speaks a lot. I mean, if you are able to spend some time outside of work to learn something new, the same way you could spend the time going to the gym, watching Netflix or doing something else, that means a lot. We've had students that flew from Brazil, Dubai, Kenya, just to take this class. If I was the hiring manager and someone tells me this story, I would definitely want to listen because that's not like the average candidate for sure. And then there's so many options online. LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, lag groups, Twitter influencers, medium influencers, niche forums, you and me. There's no excuse these days not to know more about where your people is and try to learn more from them. And then how can you prove it? Let's say you get an interview with a, let's continue with the example of Airbnb and I'm asking you about why Airbnb? What's your expertise in this type of products? Well, hopefully you have a real experience working at a competitor or at the same industry. That's number one. That's the best way to prove that you have the main expertise. But if you don't have proper experience, maybe you have some experience using those similar products. Or maybe you build a side project or maybe you participate in a hackathon. Maybe you did something that shows me that you truly care about this thing. There's no excuse these days to not try to give me that extra bonus point that I'm looking for. Just think about it. How many spying and existing product managers are going to be competing for the same position that you are? I hope this presentation makes you think about a smart way to prove your technical background, your business acumen and passion about that product. And then the third thing is the communication skills. Communication skills is very, very broad term. When I was in engineering school, I had zero classes about public speaking. Nobody, I was discouraged from speaking in public. And that is very complicated. I see people are smiling. The only way to learn how to speak in public, you have to do it. Now, you don't need to be a public speaker or a book author in order to become a product manager. Those are obviously bonus points, but it's more about feeling comfortable interacting with people. On the stage via email, via phone, whatever. At the very beginning of this presentation, I mentioned that as a manager, you are going to spend around 80% of your time communicating and 20% of your time executing. It's a huge amount of time. So, as a hiring manager, I want to see how comfortable you feel connecting with people. Okay, and I'm not expecting you to be a visionary leader that is motivating people. Oh, hopefully that, but at least I want you to make sure, I want to make sure that you can break down complex concepts into something that is easy to understand and that if you are talking with designers, you're going to use a different vocabulary and motivation than if you're trying to sell the same idea to your engineers or to your business people. Now, let's try to see some external examples about how this works. Well, how can you get this communications case if you are not a natural communicator? Well, you can think about how you are communicating right now or at your work. Try to read your emails twice before you click send. It takes 30 seconds or one minute, but next time you are going to send an email, especially if it's a long email, try to read it before you click send. Maybe you decide to edit something, maybe you even decide not to send the email. Or think about if you could replace some of those emails for a phone conversation or an in person meeting. I know it's an investment, but sometimes it's required. Sometimes you can't win or you can't connect with someone at a deeper level over email. And I know that the easy solution is to send that email. But none of us are getting paid for sending emails. So those two actionable tricks can be applied today, tomorrow, if you want. More things, well, try to document. You are going to be interacting with people all day, even if you are not a product manager yet. Try to take notes about the meetings that you have. Try to create tasks on your to-do list. Do not rely on your brain. Try to be that organized person that is going to help. It's not just going to be one more person in the room who is there because someone sends you a calendar invite. Do it for yourself first because that will make you more productive. But also try to use it to help others be more organized. This is incredible and you don't need a title in order to implement any of these. And yeah, you want to take this to the next level and you want to build up your online presence, you can start by signing up on quota, medium, maybe there are some specific forums that you care and it's not about just writing, writing, writing. Maybe you can start by observing and then deciding if you want to start writing something. If you are going to start contributing to a conversation, make sure you do it consistently. So I've seen people creating a blog because someone like me told them, hey, you need to create a personal website because it's going to look good when you interview. And then you go create a blog and just write one article. You're going to do that. You don't need to create a blog. You can answer a couple of questions on quota or you can tweet a couple of things. If you are going to do it, do it right. Or maybe you can create a personal website that is static so it's not required for you to write articles on a weekly basis with a link to your LinkedIn profile and a link to your resume. Good enough. And then we can see where we take it from there. Use technology. I love this question during interviews. When I ask someone, how do you organize your life? Can I see your Google Calendar? Or what tool do you use to keep track of your tasks or projects? Well, take it or whatever. Let me see your Trello. Let me see your Notepad. Whatever do you use? I don't care about what tool you pick even if it is a Notepad. But I want to see if you truly document or try to keep this on track or you just move fast and break things. And if you also have some experience outside of work participating in a nonprofit or doing group sports or participating in hackathons or volunteering at events, how do you like that? Speak, it's really powerful when I see that someone is doing more than just complaining or applying to jobs. That, especially the first time you break into product, I'm going to be looking for excuses to give you that opportunity. Because the second time you try to become a PM, you already have a product management title in your resume. So that's easier for me to believe that you've done product. But the first time, it's all about proving that you can do it even though you don't have the title yet. OK, now I start talking about what's the job process. Let's say that we already did our research and we understand the type of companies that we're going to apply. We feel comfortable with our technical skills, business acumen, and communications skills. And it's time to go out there and start applying for jobs. Well, first thing I say is that applying for a job is a job itself. And if you are going to do it, do it right. And I'm not saying quit your job and look for a job. But I'm saying, if you're serious about this, you should invest enough time. Because, again, this is mostly focused on people who are trying to break into product. And this is data that we collected from our students at Broad School. This is a pyramid where we start at the very beginning on top of the funnel where we all prepare our resumes. And then we try to work our way all the way through receiving a job offer. If you look at the first number that I put out there, I'm saying that you need to identify anywhere between 30 to 50 companies in order to get one to two job offers. That is crazy. If you are a software engineer and are trying to get another software engineer job, it's a totally different story. But if you are trying to break into product, this is pretty realistic. And this is based on what we've seen. So what I mean by identifying 30 to 50 companies is not, oh, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber. No, we also need to be realistic where our expectations. And I would definitely identify companies based on our categories. So, hey, I'm looking for companies in this location that are B2B enterprise, SAS, that they have jobs opening, that I have a contact inside. So I would definitely do my research and identify at least 30 companies that you think that fit your criteria. And you need to be honest with yourself. Now, if you are not going to do that, if you prefer to apply to a few companies here and there, forget about this. Just keep going to Indeed.com or LinkedIn.com and clicking on Apply Now. This is if you really want to build a process and treat this as your job, at least until you get the job. So I will start with that. And the first step is to optimize your resume or your LinkedIn profile. That is never going to get you a job. That's going to get you, hopefully, an interview. So there's obviously so many things that we discuss in class about how you can highlight some of your previous experience. Even this is very, very common. Maybe it comes up during the Q&A part. Hey, I'm not a PM yet. I work as a project manager or software engineer. And I've done a lot of product management stuff. I feel like I've done at least 50% of the official title. But I don't have the title. How can I highlight that? Well, we work on that because the person who's going to be screening your resume may not be a product manager. It's a recruiter. And their recruiter is going to be looking for specific keywords and other criteria in order to decide if they call you or not. So you have to play this game or do an SEO for your own resume and LinkedIn. And that's something that you can learn. Well, let's say we passed that first phase. And now we are getting enough phone calls. That first phone call is usually going to be, again, by a recruiter. I don't think the product manager will take that first phone call. So what I've seen is that if you feel like you are not getting enough phone calls, your bottleneck is on the resume. So you should optimize that. If you feel like you are getting enough for a decent number of phone calls, then instead of over-optimizing my resume, I would start thinking more about over-optimizing the type of answers to the questions that I'm getting. And you will see that once you get two, three, four phone interviews, at least 50% of the questions are the same. So it's not about just hacking your career. But it's definitely being smart about how to sell yourself. This is something that is becoming more and more popular among product management interviews. Traditionally, when designers would apply for jobs, they would need to present a portfolio. And engineers also have some projects that they can show or technical challenges that they can do. Now it's happening that product managers also need to have a portfolio or something to prove that they understand product. And this is not just about blah, blah. This is about, hey, look at my wireframes. Look at my roadmap. Look at this site project that I did with my friend. Look at this hackathon product that I did. Look at this, whatever, for two reasons. One is because they probably want to see some signs before they move you to the next step. And then assuming that you get to the stage where they ask you to do something, it's going to be fairly similar to what you did before. A lot of companies will ask you something like, why don't you build this new, why don't you create a proposal for this new feature and come on site and then present it to us? There is no perfect answer for that. They just want to see that you have a framework and you have an elaborate way to think about how to present an idea. And this is not just a brainstorming session about how I would improve your product. Anyone can do that. Hopefully the second round of interviews involves product managers and maybe other members of the engineering or design team because people will want to see that you get along with different stakeholders. And then after that, hopefully you will get a job offer. So I put the numbers here just to kind of give you an idea of where the dropout rates are and how many companies you need to put on top of the funnel in order to get enough volume at the very end. Whoop, this is, I know it's hard, but it's doable and we've seen it. We see it every, every day. Now there is no shortcut to this. The only solution is you have to put the work in smart way. So it's not just about, I'm going to make it happen and apply it to 50 companies every day. Well, you can do that and get some training, get some mentorships, read something, attend to events, meet some people, you name it. You can't do everything, especially if you have a full-time job. But it's more than just admitting resumes. Well, I'm going to stop here for a second. I'm going to take some questions. You mentioned coding, right? Like people all over the world say like, I get a coding, I'm a mechanical engineer. So, there's a lot of language out there, like Python, Ruby, Java, so HTML. How do you know which ones you kind of like know in order to kind of take that next step of having at least a basic knowledge? Wonder so many of them. That's a really good question. Let's say I'm not technical and I'm trying to leverage my technical. I want to learn some coding. What problem in language should I start with? Great question. My answer is the following. I wouldn't stick to just one specific programming language because technologies will change so fast that who knows what's going to be trending three years from now. Now, the grammar is fairly similar, at least from the manager's perspective. As a product manager, it's not expected that you are going to be coding on a daily basis. What's expected is that you understand the full release cycle and you know what frontend is, what backend is, what GitHub, how you can push code, pull code, what's a release, you know? Like it's more about understanding the process than really saying I'm going to master Ruby and Raze because my CTO told me that this is cool. Now, in our course, we obviously had to pick some technologies because you can't just learn how to code by like showing presentations. Oh, backend is this, frontend is this. I want to give my spirit in an interview. No, especially for the frontend technologies, the most basic ones are HTML and CSS. So with that, that would give you an idea of how a website is built, at least from behind the scenes. Then we covered a little bit of JavaScript, at least the frontend part of it to show some interactions. But what you'll realize is that as you try to make your websites or mobile apps more complicated, you also need to connect with databases. Just imagine that you want to offer a sign up and login functionality. So when someone's trying to log in on any app, they put an email and a password, and then they click login. So somehow you need to send that sign to a database to double check if email and password are correct, hence show one screen or show an error screen. So all of those interactions happen on the backend. And for that, we use other technologies. In our case, we picked Ruby and Raze because it's right now the most popular one. And also, it's abstract enough so as a manager, you can build a lot without really having to understand how every single thing works. Think of an iPhone. You can download an app and you can get some extra functionality, even though you don't know exactly who coded that. So Ruby and Raze works kind of that way. And then if for whatever reason, your company or your future company uses Python, well, it's okay, you'll be fine. The engineer is the one who really needs to catch up with whatever is new. But you need to at least understand the basics of it. Yes. Yeah, it's you. What is the typical day of a product manager? I love it, but not everybody will love it. So the typical day of a product manager, obviously, and I hate this answer, it depends. Well, what does that mean? In general, you're going to be, having a lot of interactions with so many different people. Well, remember, think of this 80-20 rule. You're going to be communicating all the time. So you may have a daily scrum meeting with your engineers, but you may also need to have some one-on-ones when you detect that there is specific conflict. You may also need to talk with your designers. You may also need to interact with other business stakeholders, or maybe you may need to prepare a presentation to get the buying from C-level executives of your company. It's a lot of interactions. And you live in your calendar and you have your kind of like back-to-back meetings and so on. You also need to block some time for you to actually do some work. But in general, it's a lot of communication via in-person meetings, phone, and emails, obviously. And then a lot of the work is not just, it's not about designing, coding, or selling. It's more about enabling those things to do so. So a lot of presentations, a lot of wireframing, a lot of defining metrics, and you know, it's more about being on the first steps of the process and then making sure the specialists get you so they can take it from there. The cool thing about it is that every day or every week is fairly different. In a sense that there's so many fires out there that you are the one putting them out or at least picking which ones you are going to put out first. That if it helps out, like standing and do all this? Obviously it takes time. And what I would say is that before you start applying like this, I would probably look at what we discussed before, which is is there any gap in my resume that I think I need to learn more in terms of technical background or communication skills or just learning more about the specific industry that I'm very passionate about and see how you can start learning that. I would start, I wouldn't key myself. I mean like, wow, I'm going to block three hours a day every day and I'm going to read this book or I'm going to go to all of this event on mirab.com. Maybe you can start doing a little bit of everything twice a week. You know, like, hey, I'm going to pick one event. I'm going to pick one book and I'm going to try to have a coffee meeting with my friend. And then I will take it from there. I mean, obviously our classes is another option. I would think it's probably the next step. It's more commitment, it's twice a week, two and a half hours per day or Saturdays. Whatever works with your schedule. But my point is, do not go too crazy because otherwise you're going to burn out. You may apply to 10, 15 companies and be like, oh, I'm not getting results. Done. I'm not good for this. That's not true. That's a great question. How can you source your pipeline and identify good companies? Let's say those 30 to 50 companies. There are so many tools that you can use out there. Especially if you ask about startups, Angel List is a good source. Think of Angel List as LinkedIn for startups. So what I like about Angel List is not just that they have these jobs out there, is that you can also see the founders and you can try to reach out to them. In general, the good thing about startups is that they are not that big. So you can find your way to connect directly with the hiring manager or a C-level person. It's not like you need to go to company.com slash jobs and hope for the best. So I like that approach. Maybe you combine Angel List with LinkedIn to look at the founder or whoever is hiring and then try to connect from there. LinkedIn is great, Angel List is great. There are other approaches like Mattermark. I know there are companies, for example, Mattermark. Mattermark is not a website to find jobs. It's actually a website that a lot of investors will use to find this low. But not just that. Other companies may use that to find clients. But if you treat yourself as a product, you could also use that tool to segment your search and say, I'm looking for companies in this location that are in this funding stage that are in this type of industries. And then from there, you can identify the decision makers or some of those employees and then go to your LinkedIn or Angel List and reach out to them. If you know your specific industry, let's say you are very passionate about fintech. I'm sure there are going to be forums about fintech where you can also see who the influencers are and what's going on. We actually have a community on Facebook with over 2,000, 12,000 people where there are so many companies constantly publishing job offers for product. We also have our community on Slack. You all got an invite. We have over 13,000 people there. There's a specific channel called Hiding where a lot of companies are publishing jobs. And the person who's publishing the job, you can get the contact information. So it's not just a random job posting out there. I mean, it's people that you either have their Facebook profile or their Slack username or LinkedIn. And from there, you can DM there. I think that's a good start. The community on Facebook is called Product Managers. So you can join. We also have a community on LinkedIn called Product Managers Community, very original. And then the Slack group. Those are good sources for software product management positions. And I hope that's a good starting point. The PM should look at the business model. My obviously, you're building a software product. But looking at the revenue, the cost, and all that stuff that comes with it as a PM. Yeah, that's a good question. So the question is, as a PM, how should you look at the business model of the company or monetization and other areas of the business related to more about making money? There are actually some PM roles focused solely on monetization. So LinkedIn, for example, has a PM for monetization who's in charge of looking at the subscription pricing and the pricing page and how they can optimize that. And the turnover rate for people that subscribe and so on. In general, those type of PM roles are a better fit for people that come from a business background, like consulting or MBAs, because they already have that. The same way, there are other companies that are looking for technical product managers. And if you come from an engineering background, you may have a leg up. But it's definitely important. What we're going to learn about, you know, we should gain skills, technical skills, business acumen, and communication skills. But what about the product management process itself? Is there any framework out there? When people ask you, what's the process like? How do you know about that? So again, the question is about, so other than technical skills, communications skills, and business skills, how can I learn the actual product management process? And I was smiling because I actually wrote a 300-page book about that. And you can also find it on Amazon if you don't win the raffle. I mean, it's just, I think, $17. That's a good start. Obviously, you can't expect to learn absolutely everything by just reading a book. But I tried to make this book as tactical as possible, to really go step by step and even suggesting some of the tools that, as PMs, we use to hopefully kind of illustrate some case studies as well. Something that I hated when I would go online about trying to find information is that there was so many answers that it was hard for me to curate the good ones. And also, some of those answers were so high level that it was hard for me to really know, OK, good, but how can I do it? So hopefully, this book can help. Obviously, that's all we do as well as our own bread and butter. Our courses are just teaching people how to build products. And there's a lot of group exercises. And we also make you build a product as part of your course, where there is no way out. You are going to be getting your hands dirty. You've seen wire framing tools, analytics tools, road mapping tools, and so on. And you can also ask, maybe it's a friend that is a PM and try to bring them down to really ask, what tool do you use? Can you show it to me? Can I see an example of a PRD or a roadmap? Do not stop in the first phase of, and here is how you are a great PM, like what you asked. Try to read a book or ask someone that does this on a daily basis so they can give you more details. I should go and be the founder of a company and be the product manager that way or try and identify an industry where I could find that role that fits for me. Not be specifically, but will be. Your friend. OK. So that's a good point. Let's say you want to be a product and you are trying to figure out if you should do it for yourself or for somebody else. That's a very legit question. And the mindset and the framework is pretty similar. Obviously, if you're in a smaller organization, either as a founder or as an early employee, you may need to take some shortcuts because you need to get things done and there is no time for so many meetings. If you're in a larger organization, you may need to add some layers of politics because it's what it is. There are more people you need to get the buy-in from all of them. But the framework is pretty much the same to your question before. And there is no right or wrong answer. What I would say here is that if you know that you want to work as a product manager, you can try to build something on the site. And maybe the goal of that site project is not to make it into a full-on startup. Maybe it's just to learn. And that's totally fine. And maybe you love it so much that you do this and it's working so well that you decide to do it full-time. But maybe it's just a nice experiment for you to get your hands dirty and then see, like, you know what? I would love to apply this to a bigger organization. That's totally fine. That's why I've seen so many PMs become founders and so many founders become PMs. It's a strong correlation there. Are you talking about when you are trying to break into product or when you are an existing PM? I would do both. I would do both. The question is, let's say I come from a UX background and I'm trying to build a holistic product and I don't have a technical expertise. Should I spend time learning that technical part and then executing or should I try to define the scope and then see what I really need to learn? I would try to do both. Obviously, if you already have a job and you have the opportunity to learn on the go, that's best, right? Because the company's not going to stop. You are going to build something and work with engineers, marketers, and learn something from them. If you don't have that opportunity at work but you have some time outside of work to properly learn some of those keys, that's also good. So depending on where you are, I think at some point both will catch up with you. Okay, well, I'll take this last one question. Okay, so the question is about NDAs and let's say you need to build like a product for a site project for a company. And should I sign on NDA? My answer is no. And I don't think, especially if you are trying just to build a site project to prove that you can build products, I'm not going to focus that much on the specifics. I really want to know that you can build something. Obviously, you need to be realistic with your expectations, right? In terms of the metrics that you're going to look at and numbers and so on. But you don't need to get an NDA in order to start working on a site project. Like for example, a lot of our students we encourage our students to pick a new feature for an existing product. Let's say Snapchat. I'll get to your follow up question when I answer the first one. So one thing they did was they, one of our students actually built a group snap feature for Snapchat. Even before Snapchat released that. And they didn't ask for permission. He just came up with a hypothesis based on some public information and he said assuming that that was the PM it is my reasoning so why we should build this feature. And then he created a roadmap and then he created some wireframes and he actually did some user testing with Snapchat users. Some of the classmates were using Snapchat or he also got some other users using user testing.com for example. And then from there, he explains the whole process that he followed and he created a LinkedIn article explaining that. And then he mentioned a product manager at Snapchat to say hey look at this feature that I built. Obviously he wasn't expecting Snapchat to be like wow this is great let's do it ourselves. But it proved a lot in so many different ways. And actually one of our instructors works for Snapchat. So he was able to line up and interview that way. So that's one way to look at it. Now I'm not saying you all go out there and start building features and ping in the CEO of the companies. But that worked for him. Okay well the question is you've built many. The question is I've built many projects as part of your portfolio for different clients right. Well if you have done a project for real that's a different question for the company about how much of that you can disclose out there. But my point is as a hiring manager or as a recruiter I would want to see what you've done as a product person even if you don't have the title. And I'm not going to care that much about the specific number. So maybe you can put mock data out there. But I definitely want to see something you know and sorry I can't give you a more specific answer because I don't know this case and I know depending on the industry they're trying to be very very restrictive about the information they can disclose. But in general I would focus more on building something and following a framework and putting it out there. Either via your website or a LinkedIn article, medium article. If you are more design driven you can even create your portfolio on Dribble. If you are more engineering driven you may create your portfolio on GitHub. So that's another way to prove that you are in the market. Anyway we can take more questions offline because I know that a lot of you are going to hang out for like 15, 30 minutes during the networking part. But I'll leave it up to Sam. Thank you.