 Hello, everyone. It is so good to be here. I want to thank NewMe and the Product School for this great opportunity. A little bit about myself. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, and I'm responsible for the desktop and mobile apps for the advertisers. Prior to this, I led the mid-market at CM offering at ADP, and had the opportunity to envision, conceptualize, build, and launch many products. In the next 20 minutes that we have together, you will hear about my own journey from a mainframe developer to a product leader. We will also talk about my perspective on building a strong PM skillset, and finally, we will dive into some PM growth techniques that you can apply at various stages of your own career. Let's get started. I started in the tech industry back in 2007 as a mainframe developer. I was fresh out of college and practically had no idea about how technology enabled the scale and the user experience. My first job was to enhance an auto insurance calculation engine. If you use a State Farm, there is still a pretty good chance that my code calculated your insurance. Now you know who to blame for that higher insurance rate. This is the place where I got introduced to the role of Product Manager. The story goes like this. I was testing a screen that had a car outline and it was used to mark the damages and the scratches while doing that rate calculation, and interestingly, the same screen also showed up for motorcycle insurance. I asked around, I said, why it is not a motorcycle screen, why it's a car screen showing for motorcycle, and somebody pointed me to this product manager sitting in Bloomington, Illinois to ask that question. That product manager explained me the reasoning, and that's how I got introduced to the role, and I found that pretty cool. This person knows everything, he knows what and why of the product, and that day I told myself that that's what I wanted to do in the long term. So as the luck would have it, when I joined ADP in 2009, my hiring manager during the interview asked what I wanted to do long term, and I said I wanted to be a Product Manager. They were setting up the PM practice at that time, and I got the opportunity to be one of the first PMs on the team, and in 2014, I moved to the state side as a Product Manager for the reporting and analytics product. In my last role at ADP, I was leading a team of PMs responsible for North American payroll, tax and accounting products, and it has been a fun ride to say the least. Okay, that's enough about me. Let's talk about being a PM. How do I get started? What's the scope of the role? What does a PM do? And from my perspective, a PM is someone who uses pretentious notepads? Wait a second. No, that's not what I meant. Let me get to the right slide. There we go. I'm sure you've seen this Venn diagram on the right, where the Product Manager sits at the intersection of UX, tech and business. He or she is the glue among various practices that design, build and run a product and the business. There is nothing wrong in this way of looking at the Product Manager unless you're trying to break into the profession and find it extremely hard to relate to that perfect PM sitting in the middle. Most of us have started from either being an engineer, a designer or a business stakeholder. So let's look at this Venn diagram a little differently. I call this a PM triangle. At the beginning of the career, most of us started from one of its vertices and over the period of time, built expertise in that area before moving to the PM role. Talking about myself, I started as a developer. So I moved from the tech vertices and still trying to move to the center. A great PM is a good blend of these three disciplines, UX, tech and business. So in terms of this triangle, the perfect PM sits at the center. The journey to being a great PM starts from one vertex to the center and it may look very different for different people depending on the discipline they come from. The key is to leverage your strengths while building expertise in other areas towards that perfect blend at the center. So if you started as an engineer, you are going to be really good at problem solving, solution finding, but you may have to build expertise on design thinking, business metrics and customer communication. Knowing the areas where you need to learn and grow can help you find opportunities where you can acquire those skills. Let's take an example. As an engineer, your key focus is to build a functionality to the spec with the right design pattern meeting all the performance requirements. But as a PM, you will need to talk about what's in it for the customer and the business. What customer pain point are you solving? What market differentiator you're creating? So there you have it. You already have an excellently working feature. You spend some time in thinking about how it solves customer pain points, how it creates differentiation in the market and how it benefits customers and the business. Even better, if you find an opportunity to talk about those in your internal demos. You, my friend, have just taken the first step towards the center. And this is not very hard. You are already working on that product and feature. You know in and outs of how that product works. It's all about taking some time and thinking outside in about how it impacts the customer and the end user and how it impacts the business. And once you have that together, you are already thinking like a PM. And you can apply this approach regardless of your current discipline or strength. As a designer, you're strong at visual and interaction design. You are good at thinking with customer in mind, putting yourself in customer shoes because you have to design a product that they have to use. In order to build PM expertise, how about articulating the positive impact that your design is expected to drive? How about understanding the trade-offs between the perfect design and the practical one? So these are some areas of strength that you can gain and grow by knowing the technical know-how of the product, knowing the constraints that engineers have to deal with in bringing the product to life, understanding the business metrics that are going to be used to measure the success of the product and how the end-to-end execution of the product happens all the way from conceptualization to requirements to design to build, launch and measurement. And so you already have a good strength in terms of thinking like a customer, building and designing the solutions that they're gonna like. Now it's about building the expertise about the technical know-how of the product, the business metrics, the launch and once you have the experience in those areas or once you are able to get comfortable in those areas, you are very well on the path of being a great PM. Let's also look at it from a different angle. Let's look at it from our perspective of someone who is in the business. And I've taken a representative title of business program manager, but it could really be anyone who is in a business function, a customer success engineer, customer support analyst, a salesperson, a sales leader, a business program manager who is driving projects and change management and you know, org initiatives. Any of those roles can be in this category. So I've taken this representative example, let's go with business program manager. Let's say this person has the skills about understanding the business metrics, executing the change management, customer communication because they talk to customers and how can they leverage those strengths towards their PM journey? So let's say as a business program manager, you are already talking to customers. How about using that to understand and identify some unmet needs that they may have? Defining those needs, defining what can be done to solve those things. Working with PMs and engineering team and designers, really getting them together and getting them to rally behind your idea of how to solve that customer problem. Creating a cross-functional team, a V team that runs that as a project and solves that customer problem. So you used your skill of being really good at customer communication to identify some unmet customer needs. You worked with the cross-functional teams to rally them behind your idea of how to solve that. You got PMs to work with you to understand the value of why that should be solved and you really worked with all these functions together to drive a change, drive a solution or feature. And that essentially is a role of a PM. So even if you're not a PM, if you wanna get there, you can reduce your customer communication, understanding customer strengths towards building that PM skill set of getting everyone together and solving the customer problems. And as you see, the key here is to know your areas of strength and find the opportunities to grow in other areas and repeatedly doing that will make you a well-rounded PM. So so far we talked about how you can craft your journey from your current discipline to the PM or if you are an early stage PM, how do you build the strength in the adjacent areas where you see the growth opportunity. Now let's also talk about a few things that you can do in the role and these are not really the hard skills so to speak, you saw them on the previous slides but these are really the techniques and really some tactics that you can use at work and outside of work to be a well-rounded PM. So I have divided this into three separate stages, crawl, walk, run, which is kind of a standard for saying how you wanna grow or how you wanna mature in an area. In this case it is growing as a PM. And then you can look at the activities in terms of what you can do at work and what you can do outside of work to really build that career, build that well-rounded PM skill set. I also wanna say that in no way this is exhaustive or like this is the holy grail of any sorts but it's really a reflection of my own experience of things that I have done, things that I've liked doing at work and outside of work that helped me grow, that helped me sort of in some cases cope up with the pressure of being a PM. As you know, it's not a role where people are reporting into you. It's a role of influence. It's a role where you drive a team, a change, a product. You've got people to rally behind you by your sheer knowledge, passion and reasoning as to why something should be done. So it's very different. I'm sure you've heard about that all the time that nobody reports into a PM, even if PM is called the CEO of the product. But at the same time, there are things that you can do to get more influence on the team, on the product, get more thoughtfulness into why you should be building something or what you should be doing. You can also use these to really be finding things that actually interest you outside of the work. So let's get started. Let's look at this list. So let's start with the first stage, which is crawl. And this would apply to junior PMs, associate PMs, aspiring PMs who are just getting started. And this is very early stage of your PM career. One thing to keep in mind is like everyone has imposter syndrome. Use that as a fuel towards your learning and growth and be confident, learn it all, figure out what motivates you. And it's really important to know what motivates you and what does not motivate you. As a PM, you have to work with different disciplines, different types of people, technical, non-technical, business, artists, you name it. And it's very important to know what types of interactions, what types of work motivates you. Make sure that you are factoring that, you're doing that quite often to keep you energized while you also know what drains your energy, what does not motivate you. And always use that as a challenge to work towards and get comfortable with. For me, when I started, I really did not have much idea about writing a business case. I did not know how to start and how to pitch something. So I was good at solutioning, but I wanted to get better at starting from the problem space and then get into the solution space. So that was my way of looking at what I could do better and what I could learn more. Outside of work, also find a hobby. It's extremely important to have a hobby. This could be cooking, this could be dance, music, reading. I would not suggest binging Netflix as a healthy hobby, but it's up to you. But really have something that transforms you outside of the work. It's a job that requires a lot of passion and pressure. And so when you are somewhere where you have a lot of passion and pressure, it generally, in some ways, you need something to balance your mental health, balance your lifestyle, and a hobby helps like anything. For me personally, it is cooking. I love cooking. For me, it's like product management where you envision something. You get the ingredients together. You cook it, you taste it multiple times, which is very much like testing something in the market and then you launch it for your family and friends. So for me personally, I love cooking, but it's up to you. It's really finding that hobby that transforms you out of the work so that you can relax and rejuvenate. And also find the most effective learning mechanism for you. It could be, again, reading, watching videos on YouTube or other platforms. It could be doing something and then learning. So really trying to learn by doing something. And it's important to know that at the beginning because it's gonna be a long journey and you have to keep learning, keep motivating, keep updating yourself. And if you know the way you learn the most in the most effective way, that saves a lot of time and that's very effective in terms of building that skill set in future. The second stage, which is walk, I would say this generally applies to the PMs who are now in the sort of mid-career stage or early mid-career stage. They do not require a lot of support. They can walk by themselves. And this is an area where I would say you wanna be a specialist first before you become a journalist. And you can be a specialist in terms of core PMs skillset that could be business metrics, that could be solutioning, that could be talking to customers and identifying problems and prioritizing problems that you wanna solve. Or it could also be something very niche in terms of how you effectively write a copy for marketing, right? I'm not saying that you have to be marketing but find the area where you can build expertise. It could also be expertise in domain and it is important because you can be generalist at more senior stages where you have a team of people working for you and you are being responsible for a bigger portfolio. But at this stage of walk, it's important to have strong skill sets in certain areas that you can use towards your own personal growth. Be comfortable with ambiguity and customer interactions. When you're starting with a new problem space, you're not gonna have all the answers. Nobody's gonna be able to find those answers. Your job is to find answers and find unknowns. And for that, you have to be very comfortable with ambiguity. You have to be also comfortable with customer interactions because these are the people who are paying your company, they're paying your product and they expect the product to perform the way they want. That always does not align with your company's strategy or your product strategy. So it's very important to listen, understand your customer, understand where they're coming from, be articulate in terms of how it aligns with your own direction or where it does not align and there are ways to communicate so be super comfortable and learn how to communicate with customers. Outside of the work, create a product and creating a product gives you a much bigger degree of freedom in terms of envisioning, launching and promoting the product. And let me be clear about what I mean by product. It does not have to be the next biggest social media platform or the next biggest video streaming platform. It could really be a recipe book, really. It could really be a video, a blog and article, a low-code app that you've been thinking about because that's a problem that you wanna solve, that's something that is bothering you in your day-to-day life. There are lots of platforms that let you do that today without writing a single line of code. The idea here is to understand all the stages of product lifecycle from the problem space, defining the problem all the way to launching something and promoting something and getting users. And that gives you a perspective of what you need to do even in your work life when you're building on a new product or building something from scratch. Read and learn more. Product Twitter is the best resource that I've seen in terms of getting the practical product knowledge. So follow product leaders on Twitter. That's a great way to learn about what's happening in the industry. And finally, at the run state where you are good at what you do, now it's time to give back to others. So contribute to organization success by your ideas, your expertise, not just your own product, but really thinking about the bigger, bigger picture. And mentor others at work, hire people that you can motivate and grow as product manager if you can, if you have that ability. And then outside of work, just unwind and have the hobby, passion projects, things that basically again transform you from work and have that balance between your work and your life. And those things coming together are gonna make you a very comfortable, rounded, great peer. While doing all this, always keep in mind, be a cheerleader for your team, be a cheerleader for your product and network. I cannot tell you how helpful it has been for me personally to network with people at the work, outside of work. I have friends that I started as co-worker. I have really good connections and that just helps you a lot in your good days, bad days, bouncing around ideas, connecting and discussing what's happening in the industry and it's an extremely good resource in terms of your career growth. So to wrap up, the whole talk is about identifying your strengths towards your journey of PM and identifying the areas where you need to grow more and then identifying opportunities where you can do that and learn. Find your passion, both at work and outside and it helps on good days and rough days and super important and then give back to PM community. Mentor, teach, connect with people higher if you can, grow the people and that is the most satisfying feeling that I personally get when I do these kind of talks, when I talk to people who are aspiring and want to get into product management, when I mentor people, it's extremely satisfying and while doing all this, don't forget to enjoy the ride. Thank you.