 Hi, my name is Brenda and I'll be talking about how to set yourself up for success. One important step in setting yourself up for success is picking the right company specifically for you. I'm currently a senior product manager at Slack, but I've been a product manager of a few other companies before. Over the past nine years, I've worked at six different companies. I started my career at General Mills, then went to Glassdoor as an analyst, then Dropbox as a product manager, and I've been a product manager since at Lumosity, Alto, and Slack. So why am I talking about this topic? I would love to help others have a better time than I did. Being at many different companies, I've gotten many data points. Through the different industries, company sizes, stages, products, I've gotten through a lot of experiences such as layoffs, roadmap thrash, and organizational chaos. I think many of my unpleasant experiences could have been either preventable or better mitigated if I were aware or prepared. I also think conditions now are tougher than ever. There are more and more frequent large-scale layoffs, difficult economic conditions, a competitive job market, ultimately coming to even harder conditions for newer New York P.M.s. So the goal of today's talk is to help find a match fit specifically for you. I'll go through how to evaluate a company's level of volatility through their business strategy and organizational structure, as well as helping you understand your tolerance for volatility. I won't be talking about other dimensions that are important, such as culture, values, mission, compensation. I think those are widely discussed and have many other great resources. The things that I talk about will be general guidelines, not rules, to help you understand your own trade-offs. There are many more ways to understand volatility. This will cover some of the biggest signal so that you can make quicker decisions. So why volatility? Volatility is a trade-off cost to evaluating match fit. It's a critical factor that leads to burnout, stress, or could slow down learnings and career progressions if unprepared or unaware. You can see different things that volatility indicates, such as changing roadmaps, attrition, and under-delivered promises. However, you can gauge volatility by following the money and the leaders. When looking at business strategy, short-term strategies lead to more volatility. The less money a company has on hand, the more likelihood there will be company volatility. From product leadership and their organizational structure, the less maturity of a leadership organization, the more volatility. The lower index the company has towards product-led strategy, the more product level volatility there will be. Now I'll go deeper into these dimensions. So a key indicator of short-term strategies is poor cash flow or low-free cash flow. They're nuanced, but I'll be using them interchangeably to essentially mean the money a company, the amount of money that a company has on hand. This is an indicator of a company's agility and ability to react to big changes and think of it kind of like your personal emergency fund. The less money a company has on hand means the less room they have to react to a market downturn or lower earnings. Surprise costs, such as regulatory changes or supply chain disruptions. This is typical to companies who have a growth at all cost strategy. Another key indicator is large funding rounds at a high valuation. This becomes an indicator of a company's obligation and timeline to deliver on those obligations. Bigger obligations mean the company's focus, not necessarily only on the customers or the product, but is more on what the investors want. With the expectations are not met, there could be more severe consequences, as well as fewer options for where the company can go after this valuation. So when a company has poor cash flow, you'll see what we're seeing now with the market downturn. Companies who don't have cash on hand are more likely to have layoffs or more likely to have larger layoffs. Companies who have good cash flow are ones like Apple, Microsoft, Duolingo, who typically are good signals or things like recurring revenue or a long-term profitability strategy. Companies with poor free cash flow are ones with very high operating cost, high expenditures, acquisitions, and low margins. Some companies that had poor cash flow or Uber before this year, Meta recently has lowered their free cash flow by 90% and other companies like Peloton. So when a company has large fundraising rounds at high valuation, the company tends to expand insides and quickly needs to drive growth. This means the strategy and organization can become inefficient where leadership wants to do many things at once and everyone is thrown into many different priorities, potentially conflicting priorities as well. Large funding does not necessarily mean long runway. Not all the money is directly going to the business or supplying cash on hand. There are companies where this goes into other costs like acquisitions such as Hoppin where they had a large round at a very large valuation. If a company does not deliver quickly, there could be quick loss cutting-edge response or eventually a downturn like Clarnasaw. Investors are not necessarily investing because of a long-term payout. So large investment does not necessarily mean long-term stability. Investors have different goals and employees and they could be looking for a short-term return. So another point of volatility is on the organizational level. A product org's maturity will have a big impact on the volatility on your day-to-day as a product manager. How long has the product team been around? A product org that is just new to the organization maybe one years old compared to the organization's four years will have a long learning curve in learning how to work with product. How much experience leading does the product leadership team have? The skills that make a great IC do not necessarily mean the greatest skills for people managing or senior leadership. Having a lot of experience in that does mean more stability for product managers. How much industry experience leading at a high level through the strategy, keeping the business stable does take more experience and even better our experiences within the industry. Does the product leadership team have value or strategic thinking that aligns with yours? This is about match fit. Does the leadership team style specifically for product match your style as a product leader? Another component is who makes strategic decisions. So leadership teams and different functions all work together to make strategic decisions, but companies do index more heavily towards a certain function. It's intuitively better for product managers that it is a product-led organization. However, there are other organizations such as Airbnb that are more heavy on the design side but also have great collaboration with product management. So how well do other functions work with product that will impact your day-to-day volatility? And then on the executive team side, team level changes are frequent. Your manager and your coworkers will make a big difference in your happiness. However, those things do change frequently. Executive leadership, however, should be lower frequency and change. So understanding your own tolerance for volatility helps make a better match fit decisions. Sometimes the trade-off could be worth it. There are many opportunities that provide learning growth and great experiences. So having the right match fit is not just understanding the trade-off and being willing to make that kind of trade-off, but also intentionally planning for it, understanding what it comes with, and maybe positioning yourself better. So your tolerance for volatility might be higher if you have genuine and natural interests in the challenges that come with any job. There's industry excitement, product excitement, strategy and customer problems that could be very interesting for you and that makes the volatility either more bearable or you're able to cut through the noise. Specific clarity to what you want out of the job ties into this interest. What do you need out of this stage in your career? What kind of learnings, what kind of guidance, what kind of team collaboration? More clear on what you need, the more you can understand if the trade-offs conflict with that or they're a natural byproduct of any imperfect job. And finally, you hear many people say that the best part of their job, big part of their satisfaction with their role are the people that they work with. And similarly, your own tolerance for volatility will probably be higher if you have a strong support system with you in the job. And you might be wondering how to find more information to make your decisions. Researching information about your company's business model, major financial decisions, strategic direction, industry trends can be found online. Reading all the articles or information, not just the positive press, will help give a more full picture of what's going on. Look for specific details in these articles like major financial decisions, numbers, strategic decisions. And there are many resources out there like Glassdoor, Blind, TechCrunch, Huckabees. Some people also can tactfully reach out to employees who've recently left their company or reach out to current employees to ask questions and understand what's going on. In interviews, you could also ask to interview with the skip level to pick their brain on more strategy and organizational context. And most importantly, feel free to ask in general, whether it's to the recruiter or other interview panels, fill in the gaps in your understanding by asking directly things you would like to know to make a better decision. Thank you for listening to my talk. Good luck to all of the people job hunting out there. And feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.