 So I want to start a little bit about my background and kind of, I think it's important. Oftentimes, one of the biggest lessons I'd say in my career has been when you see someone doing something you want to do or you see like a certain opportunity unfolding, oftentimes it's not saying, OK, how can I go do that thing? It's about maybe looking at the three steps back before that led to that opportunity, right? So I'm going to start a few steps back before I became a product manager and I think it's pretty important as a part of my story. So I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. Oregon is the state that's right north of California, OK? And I'm the youngest of six kids and growing up there, every summer I just had some childhood friends where we would just try random stuff for fun. And it really just started from my mom and dad being like, hey, we'll give you like five bucks if you put up Christmas lights, OK? Five bucks back then, a lot of money. I could ride my bike to like a local 7-Eleven, get a candy bar, it's good stuff. And I remember thinking, hey, would it be possible for us to do this for other people? I didn't really know what I was doing, but I liked having money to spend for things, right? And so one of the first businesses I actually started in high school back then was a business putting up Christmas lights. I went around door-to-door, I put on flyers, I knocked on people's doors. And the only way that I remembered that people had like sold stuff was I remember answering the door of my house, someone would come up. Sometimes they'd be selling you like religion and stuff, it doesn't matter what it was. But I remember that, I was like, I can fly your stuff, right? So I did that, moved it around and ended up doing that several years and getting a book of like 50, 60 houses, which was cool. And it turns out people don't like going on ladders, which was interesting. Another thing that I did was a peanut butter and jelly delivery service for our apartment complex, which was a fun, interesting experience delivering food, which I've now done a lot of in my time. It's just kind of fun. I sold strawberries outside of the Costco. I actually, one time, locked my keys out of my car, called someone, realized it's only cost 50 bucks to break into someone's car, like you get a kit to break into someone's car, which is crazy. And this guy told me exactly where to buy the kit and I said, okay, I bought the kit, now I'm going to start doing that for people. Actually, my friend still does that business, he's been doing it for 10 years now, which is pretty cool. Okay, so I've always been kind of tinkering. And I didn't really realize what I was doing, but I was kind of figuring out like, hey, this is something I like doing. All right, when I go to college, what do I kind of end up, wrong way? When I go to college, kind of what do I end up thinking? So I went to University of Oregon, there I studied communication studies, and got a minor in digital arts. And I think for me at the time, it was really like, I tried a bunch of different majors out of everything, but at the time for me, what I really liked about this and what intrigued me was, okay, hey, this was like the place that we were talking about and critically thinking about at the time, you know, Facebook, Twitter, these different things that were coming out and saying, okay, what's the impact that these products are going to have? That was kind of exciting to me. And I think that that really planted like a strong seed for this path that I kind of ended up on. And one of the things I did was right after that, I started a company called WallShops. What WallShops was, if you remember the site StumbleUpon, it next, it takes you to a random website, it's kind of StumbleUpon things. So we built the StumbleUpon for shopping, okay? And the concept was you could next through and see sunglasses from our stores or just random things, look through dresses, look through pants. And I didn't again know what I was doing, but I wrote, you know, a piece of paper that said, this is what it should be like. I worked with a friend to make it. I then put it out there, launched it, asked people about what they thought of it. You know, little things like that along the way. And you know, started understanding like, oh, how can we make this better? Well, what if we looked at the data from, you know, what our website's going through? Didn't really know what I was doing yet. And then had an opportunity where Westfield Labs came to me and my two other co-founders and said, hey, we'd like to work with you. And I realized that we didn't really know what we were doing and it was very hard to describe and to scale that. Hey, how's it going, guys? We didn't really know how to scale that, right? And kind of at the opportunity and thinking it through, we were saying, okay, well maybe I should like take a big step back here and try to like go get educated about what I'm doing and learn about that a little bit. Keep thinking the up arrow would be nice, but it's really not, guys. Okay, so one thing at the time I started thinking about was, okay, who are people doing things that I want to be doing? And how do I see what they were doing before they were doing the thing that I was doing, right? So what I saw, I went to a ton of different CEOs and founders, LinkedIn profiles, because 2018, I guess at the time it wasn't 2018, but we had this thing where you can actually really see what people were doing in their life, right? People talk about it, you go to events like this, they tell you what they were doing, which is fantastic. And you can see like this is the jobs that people were doing. So I kind of did some research, I looked around. What I learned was that like Kevin Cistram, right before that he was, started at Instagram, he was a product manager at a travel website called NextUp. You look at that like the Asana founders, Steve Jobs was a product manager at Atari. Like you look around at all these different things and I said, okay, this is kind of seems, but I didn't know why that was. And so the next thing that I did was really thought through and said, okay, how do I learn more about this thing? So I kind of did, I kind of pounded the pavement a bit and started talking to anyone who would talk to me and say, hey, what does a product manager do? Tell me these questions, things like that. And one of the people I met was this guy after a scene of people I reached out to, a guy that's pretty influential in the product management space was a guy named Josh Sheldman, who's a VC. I think actually he's a VP of product at Robin Hood, the trading app right now. And just said, hey, I've done these kind of things. I'm kind of trying to find my way here. I'd love to chat with you about product management. Something very simple. And I think I didn't get a response. Tweeted him, he tweeted me back and said, hey, email me again. We'll figure it out. Didn't get a response. Email again. Three days later. Email again. And then said, hey, head up my assistant. Let's talk together. We're going to find a time. Talked, been very helpful, right? And one of the things that he told me to do was read a book called Venture Deals by Bradfell and Jason Mendelson. And this book was, I asked the question, how do I learn about VCs? How do I learn about companies? How do I learn about being funded? Things like that. One of the things he talked about was this book. I think this is an important thing is that, and this wasn't just the only story like this that I kind of had at this time, but when he recommended this book, what I tried to do is I tried to read it the next two days. And I can say, because he said, hey, read this book and ask me if you have any questions. I think that's a really important piece here because I don't get into why I think that is even more in here a bit, but I read the book, came back with the questions and kept talking with them. I think when someone gives you an opportunity like that it's important to actually jump on it. And I think that actually it's a very important trade for PMs where we want to be very curious. We want to listen to what people are telling us and we want to make the most of those opportunities and keep the conversation going. And learn quickly because I think perspective is everything as a PM. The more data you have or the more information that you have, the better decisions that you can make. And I think that when someone is telling you, hey, this is a path forward. Sometimes it's good to listen to it and interact with it. And that was a way that I was able to build a relationship. One of the advice that he gave me was he said, hey, I said, how do I break into being a PM? He said, you know, a really good place to do this is go to Lyco. And I think it's actually the advice of the product school as well. But it's like, hey, go to a company that has several products that need to be managed. Makes intuitive sense, right? Seeing some head nods, a little bit of smiles, some straight faces out there is good. But I went and he said, hey, you know, gaming companies are a really great place to break into consumer product management in particular because they typically have a portfolio. They're managing multiple live titles. There's things that are constantly being launched, operated and then sunset and then launched again. Games have a smaller shelf life. Some games can be profitable and only be around two years. It's also like a trend of entertainment products, right? A song. We listen to it all the time when it comes out and then we don't listen to it anymore because we get us tired of how entertainment works. And to, hey, go there, go seek out a gaming company. So I kind of went and did that. And I'll talk about my about.me experience a little bit, but at the same time as that was going on, I was working for a company about.me, which is where in place where you can make a personal page review and really got to go through that first experience and seeing what a product manager did, right? And seeing the product manager at about.me creating, doing some analysis, creating a feature, working with engineers. And that was really kind of like a moment for me to solidify and say, hey, this is something that's cool because all roads kind of lead to product, whether it's marketing or engineering or whatever. You get to work with a lot of cross virtual things. So I ended up pounding the pavement and talking to a bunch of gaming companies and getting an opportunity to work at Playdom as an associate product manager. And that was making games. And think of it as that was around the time that like Farmville was a thing. I remember that, getting a bunch of requests from everyone, having a TV show as the name of it, everything and stuff. So, and that was really cool because at that time I was able to, I'm going to get my nose out of here guys, at that time I was able to pick up I think some of the really important skills that you should have as a PM. So number one for me was I picked up really good Excel skills, being able to ingest data, manipulate it and come out with real answers. Another big thing was SQL, right? Ultimately, if we're software PMs, this is something that I really truly believe and an advocate for for my teams and people that work for me is that like as a software PM what is the product that you're often managing? Often, yes there's like some sort of consumer name for it or business name for it or whatever it is, but often it's a set of tables, right? A set of data tables that we are now creating an interface for to allow our consumers to read and write to that, right? Every web product is that way, for the most part. Especially in the consumer world. And SQL is a language that allows you to manipulate that data and understand how users are being presented with it and do a lot of analysis and really understand what is happening when our consumers are going through it. So that was a big one. Another big one was spec writing, right? So it's being able to clearly write out a document that explains hey, this is the opportunity we're going after. Here's the business case behind it. Here's the mock-ups that show the opportunity and here's kind of like a little spec for us to build. The other thing was creating mock-ups, right? So even just drawing pictures and being able to explain the vision that you have based off of the analysis you've done. And lastly, kind of this next piece which is presenting hey and aligning people around a particular idea or topic, right? So we align people around with a bit of data and some mock-ups and we say this is the opportunity, this is the thing we need to build and presenting that, right? To a group of people and having everyone come out of that meeting going oh yeah, I agree with that. Or soliciting their feedback and making the idea even better because I think another mark of it really appeared. Cool. So Play Now got bought by Disney and in 2010 which was presenting some other interesting opportunities for me. I got to go PM the first internally developed Star Wars video game that they made which was cool. It was called Star Wars Commander. It was kind of like a Star Wars classic lens if you remember that. Which was awesome. Awesome project. Got to be in like the first five people working on it and built the team up to like 65 people who got to work with a lot of different PMs engineers. Got to go through that cycle of launching something, doing analysis. And that's like what I would say is one of the most valuable parts that you can be in in your career is going to be times where you're launching new things. When you have a hypothesis, you launch something new and you're actually getting the data back, right? I think sometimes, it depends on what type of organization you're in and what type of work you're doing. But as a PM, sometimes people think it's just the getting requirements and building it apart. But really it's that next piece of understanding how did it reform against the goals, right? Because that's what makes it a product. If it doesn't do anything, it's not a product. It's just a, I don't know, piece of content or something, right? We wanted to actively make someone do a different behavior or help someone do something, right? And most of the time when we're building something, we have that in mind, right? Started to work on that. Another thing that happened which was really good timing was Disney bought this other company called Maker Studios which the best way to describe that is it's a infrastructure for like YouTube stars or celebrities or whatever. They helped them monetize their content through these kind of bigger syndicating of their content deals as well as help them kind of grow their program. And I got to lead a project that was taking a lot of the maker's content creation and putting it directly in any direct computer app that Disney has, right? So people would maybe do like a let's play video of our game or instead of that content being viewed on YouTube or if that content could be viewed in-game. It was fun. All good things. Around that time I was kind of in a place in my career where I had been doing some product development. I picked up these PN skills. I kind of put my nose against them, really got good at analytics, right? Really got good at product design and back writing some of the skills we talked about. Really good at going into a room and aligning people using those tools to build things and to be able to honestly say, hey, this was good, this was bad, right? And was kind of at a point, and this is, I think, an important way to view your career at any time, but you ask yourself, okay, well, what am I getting out of this opportunity or what can I give to a company? I think there's like three real things. One, you have your time, right? And I think that you have money that you can give to things and you can invest in things. And I think the other big one is risk tolerance, right? Risk tolerance is something where, if you were to go and talk to someone and say, I want to retire or something like that and go into an office or someone's going to get you financial products, help you retire, first question they're going to ask you is, what's your risk tolerance? And they're going to say, if you have a really risk tolerance, go do really risky stuff. If you have a high risk tolerance, go do risky stuff. If you have low risk tolerance, go do conservative stuff. And I was kind of saying, hey, for me, like at Disney, yes, I have a good like product development thing, but I'm not really using that risk tolerance to go out there. I'm not launching things as fast as I want. If I really want to really get good at being a PM, I know that launching stuff is going to be helpful because that's going to help me, one, refine my execution skills. Number two, it's going to help me learn how customers behave when I give them a certain software experience. Guy that sold Play-Doh came to me and said, hey Patrick, we're starting this company called Green Chef. It's like Blue Apron, but we're going to make it organic. So it's going to be a whole food version of this whole thing. Gave me like a little picture on it and said, hey, we have an opportunity for you to need product there. And I got to work there, build a product team from the ground up, manage the consumer, whole consumer experience, work on a little of the physical product stuff, which is interesting. Peace, because I think that, and this was a big moment, because I think for anyone in their career, and you've probably done this and you've worked in enough places, whenever you get a chance to work in a new industry, even within the same company or a new team, you always gain a lot of perspective. You're getting another data point for yourself. And this was a great opportunity because this is where I felt like I really got to learn, hey, there's not just one, there's not just one way to manage a product. There's not really, like oftentimes we all ask this question, I think this is why a lot of us are here, is either how to handle a product manager, or what are the steps that go to do that. What you learn when you work with a lot of companies is that they might call it a product manager at each company, there's a little bit different flavor. And I think that ultimately that's where you go and you find out what works for you. And you want to go see, hey, what's that type of work that I wanted to go doing and seeing how I drive with different people. There's PM work that is more about execution based. There's PM work that can be way more analytical. There's PM that can be way more design focused. It really depends on what business you're working on. I think that that's a really important lesson when we are in pursuit of being a product manager is that it's oftentimes we want to optimize our skill set around the business that we're working for, the product that we're managing. So if it's a consumer product that has millions of people on it, we want to be able to talk to customers and pull data and analyze that data in the meaningful insight so we can turn it into features and opportunities. Usually important. If we're working in a more B2B environment, being able to talk to our sales and customer service team and align stakeholders internally under what our customers want, very, very much more valuable than being able to run a lot of SQL queries because you don't have a lot of users. A little bit different. A very early stage company where you don't have any data, being a design focused PM is a way, way more valuable. And I think optimizing understanding what's good for the business is oftentimes going to enhance or give you a clearer picture or a clearer path to being the PM. So at GreenChef, I got to really, I felt like learn that lesson and take this company from a series A business where we had this like weird broccoli slash t-shirt slash chef hat with two fonts logo. That was designed from a designer with like a couple hundred bucks to the GreenChef logo you see today. And then back in March 2018 this year, we were acquired by HelloFresh to further get our product to more people and to provide our offering to HelloFresh customers as well. And that's where I'm at today, guys. All sorts of fun stuff. So that's a little bit about my background. I can tell you kind of some of the things that I've worked on. And I'm really stoked to talk to you about different questions that you might have or different things you're working on or different things you're thinking about and make it a fun discussion. What's your name? Ronnie. So when you started your first PM role, there's obviously a learning curve and you're learning a lot of things. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how you approach that first role and the things that helped you kind of get up to speak to you and we still add value to your team? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a good question. The thing that people often have told me before that I think it's a good analogy and some of you might have heard it's like drinking through a fireplace. It's a lot being thrown at you. And for that first role, I think it was really being willing to really listen to the people around me and ask lots of questions and really take advantage of the resources that you have. So like an example was I was working on a feature and I wrote this back. It was like my first spec. I was like, alright, I wrote the thing. I think that it tells people what to do. I went into a room with an engineer. The designer was kind of explaining it and I saw kind of our engineer taking a lot of notes. I was like, okay. And that designer like taking a lot of notes and I was like, they were asking questions, writing other things down. I was like, how do I make my spec the things that you're writing down right now? Right? And really talking to them in depth and maybe being able to have that deeper conversation and saying, hey, what are the things that are going to help you do that? And bake those in. I think the more that you're willing to go and talk with people and ask them and say, hey, how do you think about this? How do you do this? As opposed to, and then following up on the things that they say for you to do. It's a way that you can get a more focused, you can get more focused out of the energy that you're putting in as opposed to if you're spreading over and over and over. It's another thing that you can take your boss to talk to these people. This is what we're going to do. I'm doing this thing actively for them. And I think that cycle can really help things out. Another really big thing that I think that I got advice from my boss at that time of just being able to make sure, again, you're encouraging feedback from people because that's how we learn. Right? Whenever we're doing something else for the first time, it's good to have a good teacher. But if you're just being thrown in the fire, you need to be getting feedback on what you're doing. And so a big hack for me was after a meeting that I ran or after a meeting that I presented in, I'd just ping a few people and say, hey, how'd that go? How could that be better? And it's not a lot of effort on your part to send that message. But oftentimes, in this area, we work with a lot of thoughtful people that care about their work and have a lot of experience. And I think it's always good to get really good feedback. And at the end of the day, I think we don't look for people to tell us what to do, but we look for people to give us as much information as possible and then make the decision that we think is best so that we can be accountable to it and then get better the next time. So I'd say to just really take the time to, I think, taking the time to talk to people and being curious about the work they're doing and doing these little hacks or just asking for feedback and saying, hey, guys, what did you think of that? And hearing it and then maybe changing it. Like if someone says, hey, I think the spec could have been more efficient here. Next spec, if you do that, that's good, right? I think you'll learn over time what those things are. Another thing I think that was good was just I really kind of put the nose of the grindstone on learning SQL, which was helpful, and that speeds things up. And I would say that whatever the business that you're working for, whatever the way that they collect data to make decisions, not being able to have to rely on other people to get that data can drastically speed up your ability to learn. And I think thinking of it, again, as a function of how can I learn fastest, right? Is how can I go through and we can, we know how learning works. Learning works as we look at a problem, we set a set of goals, we say a hypothesis of what we think might happen, and then we go take something to market, we then see and we look back and say, did it accomplish the thing? How close was I from hypothesis? The more that you can do that, even in your own work and kind of run yourself kind of like a product, the better I think you're going to, or the faster that you're going to move, right? So whether your company gets a lot of decision-making data from finance or if it comes from, you know, and looking at different Excel models, get good at Excel modeling, right? If it's pulling SQL queries to do your own analysis, get good at that. If it's talking to customers, go talk to customers, because ultimately there's going to be some sort of KPI or metric or customer that you're responsible for, and you're going to want to bring the best data to that to make decisions. And if you're constantly having to like, go ask someone and then wait on them, that's fine and we want to be respectful of, you know, our limitations, but I would encourage you to double down and learn those skills. That'll speed you up. Yeah, that was great. Great, okay, cool. I'm sorry, I missed the... Yeah, go for it, please. I missed the, you know, I think the first couple of minutes of presentation. Sure. So what was your background before you decided that you wanted to switch to PM? And when you were applying to PM, how did you set yourself? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't have any kind of background. So briefly, I really started from, I started several little tiny little projects, and companies. And I was working on a company at the time and kind of became a little bit like, oh, wow, I don't really know how to scalably manage a product like this. I didn't really know what I was doing. The way I kind of thought it was I looked at different people that had started companies and said, what do these people do? How did they learn how to do this? They only learned how to do it by being a product manager for several years going through the cycle of learning, right? So how did I sell myself as a product manager as a really good question? You know, I think that your story is always very important. That's why I always say, don't look at the thing that you want. You need to set up the context for that moment. Oftentimes it's a much more efficient approach. That's why, and one of the things I said earlier is look at the people doing the thing you want to do and then look at what they did the last three years before that. So that's the thing that I would encourage is as you go talk to other PMs or talk to PMs of your company, ask them what they were doing before that. That's a good question. So I did that. And I think the real way that I sold myself was saying, hey guys, here's what I've done, right? I've been working on these different projects. I've been doing these different things in my company that have been very cross-functional, been very focused on this. I'm in pursuit of opportunity where I can continue to grow on this. And I'm looking for someone that can help me do that. And I think that that's an important way to, for me at least, was to frame it. It's not like I have a lot of value. I have a lot of energy that I'm going to bring. And I'm looking for the best place to do this. And I think that you might be the best place to do this. And that's what I think for me, like the playdom, when I remember talking to the guy, also super random, sorry, this is also a real total taking a step back here. Tell people what you want in life. But once you figure out what you want, like what you want to do, like you all want to be product managers, tell people you want to be a product manager. Because I think oftentimes, if we tell people what we want, now we know, other people know what we're looking for and can help us. And back at that time, this is really crazy. I went to a hackathon. So I thought that was like a fun thing to do. And it is. It's a cool place to like go, pitch an idea, and like kind of work with some people to make stuff. Made a big proponent of it. I did that. And I met a guy that was going to be like, was way younger than me, was attending Stanford was like this, I don't know if anyone's met these people that are out here, but like they're like 17 years old and they like can build an app like in a second. And it's like poof. And they're like going to like some really smart school and all that stuff. And at this guy, that was like that. And I remember we went to like a movie or something. There's like, okay, this is fine. We like hung out. Let's go to a movie or something. He invited someone. And I just told people like, hey, like I'm looking for product management work. Like if you know someone, like I'd love to like get lunch with anyone that you know, that's a product manager. And he was like, yeah. So he was like an intern at like some company played up, his intern play. And he ended up introducing me to the VP of product through an email. And the guy was like, I'll get lunch with you. Got lunch with him. Said hey. Yeah. I was like, hey, I'm this guy. I've done these things. I'm looking for a place. This person told me gaming companies is the best place to learn PM. That's why I'm here. Wait, what do you want from me? Right. I think that it's about how do you build that story for yourself and saying like, we all have reasons why we want to do it. It's about just, I think, articulating it very clearly. So I was like myself. And I think the key thing is that every single person is a different cell. Right. Every single person you talk to, you should take the effort to learn about, hey, what are the ways that we might be able to talk or what are stories that they might have, right? Which I think is good. And if you have people that you want to talk to, you're not sure how you should talk to them. Talk to me. I'm all talk to them. Talk to you then. Cool. Question. So it's kind of related to them. Mine is a little more specific to the projects. Love specific. Yeah. So I'm just trying to work as going down to management now and putting on project work on the side. So I have this guy working on his own project, just like a VR language learning program. So it's like a puzzle game. You put on a gobble. It's Chinese learning because his wife is Chinese. And then you just put on a couple of the characters like you pick and choose. So the best way of learning language is that between the situation you just directly learn the language instead of translating. So that's a really good model. And then it's like a new product coming up and he's still doing that, testing later age. So I volunteer. Like if I can help, I'm learning this project. What can I do? So for this new, like it's fresh, like even fresh to me. Love it. What can I do? I'm just like, oh, I don't know any of the VR. He's like a PhD doing like a data analysis. Yes. Like all the way up. I know he's very, very, very young. No staying. Okay. How can you add value? How do I do it? Yes. Good question. How can I help on the marketing and all of that? Got it. Yeah. What's your name? My name is Karen. Karen. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Patrick. Yes, I'm Patrick. Karen. Okay, yes. So it sounds like there's someone that's very technical that has an interesting product. You're helping them and they have a focus or kind of engineering design. Yes. It's like, how do you prioritize your time? Right? And I have the most value. One thought here or a couple of thoughts. Number one, I think if you really boil down to, so a lot of people ask the question, like what does the product manager do? And they give lots of long blog post answers, you know, about them. And then you're like still left being like, I don't know if this thing does. If I had to boil it down to like one thing and like one word, I would say what PMs do is they prioritize. Period. I think every skill that I told you that I think is important for a PM to have in your tool belt is it allows you to make better decisions or make better decisions for your product, right? Being able to visualize with a mock-up, being able to visualize with a mock-up helps us see is this a good opportunity. Being able to go talk to customers helps us validate our hypothesis pre-launch of a product, right? Being able to pull data helps us run a business case and maybe market size things, right? So, off the top of my head, if I had to prioritize one of those in the funnel based off what I know about the situation is oftentimes it's developing a hypothesis and saying okay, what, right? What is, so we're building this product for a person that we think exists, right? So I would go try to talk to those people and I would say I want to go find 10, 20 of those people, right? And go talk to them and ask them a set of questions where I can learn how are they currently solving this problem? The important thing I think when you're calling customers or calling people is that, or you're talking to people, is you're rooting the discussion in what they did or what they have done rather than what they think they want to do or what they would do. And the reason that is is because we want to be data-driven and data is inherently something that has happened. It's something that we forecast out of the future necessarily and so I would ask these people a set of questions. You're probably something like tell me about the last time you tried to learn a language or whatever, or whatever the main goal of this application. Tell me the last time you tried to learn a language. Hear the story, listen to what they say. Any time they say they hate something or they love something, that's like you should write that down. That's typically telling you something that they want the experience to be one way or they want the experience to be another way. The next question that after they tell you all about that, I would ask them what's the hardest part about that? What's the hardest part about doing that? Or yeah. And I would say how do you currently solve the problem that's the hardest thing? In this hypothetical application that I'm kind of running live right now, I would say something like hey, how do you currently solve this problem? They're like, oh, I go to school. Tell me about school. The teacher comes in and they talk to me, it's actually like this. I don't always have notes feature idea. What's the hardest part about this? Well, it's really hard to take notes and listen at the same time. How do you currently solve that? I currently solve that problem by writing things down and I don't always check. Well, maybe like this, maybe now you can infer and come up with an opinion on how to solve that. That's a thing that you can bring to the table now and talk to your partner. So I would definitely say talking to customers and defining who we're going after is number one. Number two, I would really define a set of what are the product KPIs? KPIs are for key performance indicators. If you've worked in a corporate environment you probably know the KPIs. If you haven't, it's called something else but I would try to really understand what it is we think our product does. So is it like, what are those key metrics? We want someone to go through this session or complete a course or we want someone to do XYZ and understand all of those metrics because when you do create a feature you want to know is this feature helping us do this? It's a good way to help prioritize it, right? So I think pre-launch I would talk to a lot of customers to find who that is and I would just find a set of product KPIs to do that. I think those are really strong ways. So KPIs in this case could be on which time you would take otherwise and what this product should be. Yeah, so I think you start with what you've got. So it depends on how, if you have strong lockups that are currently being worked on, you can kind of come up and you can see what does this product do? It's like, okay, it gives me a lesson. You want people to next through the lesson or complete a quiz or something like that. Eventually they end it, whatever it is. I don't know, I'm just making up this interface in my head. If you are at that stage with a product and there's something you can visualize and there's a real here's what we want people to do. Boiling that down into saying these are the clear ways that we are going to measure success. We're going to measure success. This is a successful product when this person can go through this flow and they complete these things and we're going to want them to come back regularly and can complete that. So I'll give you an example from my career of how this was helpful pre-launching. So Star Wars Commander. Star Wars Commander was this big classic lens style game and a big question in our mind was how much content should we launch with? So in this type of a game you get a headquarters and all your content is blocked. If you get your headquarters level 2 you can get level 2 buildings and units. You upgrade them. You get level 3, level 3 stuff, level 4. You unlock stuff. So if you want if we launch should we do all the way to level 5, all the way to level 10? What's the right amount of content? And at that time we said hey, how are we, why is that important to us? We can evaluate that. And we just went through a simple thought exercise which was like oh, if we believe, if the only way that people can pay us money which is valuable to us obviously is going through these flows like if we just have one of these levels and people can blow through these in a week and we can't do an app update for another 3, 4 weeks or something like that well then that's going to be 3 weeks hypothetically that people aren't going to be able to spend money. Like our best customers have spent all our money and paid all the way through aren't going to be able to spend this money, right? So we timed it and said okay we think right now that 5 levels will take people about 10 weeks and we think we'll have our next app update by around 8 weeks. So that gives people a chance to never feel like they're blocked and constantly be spending. We didn't need data for that but we were able to walk through and create the model that says okay where are the most valuable metrics coming from and is there a way that we can prioritize and make these decisions. If you want to talk more about the product and talk about those projects you guys I'm willing to talk to that. Fun stuff. Revening stuff at 7.10 in Santa Clara, right? Cool. Other thoughts? Questions? Stories? Regarding her question before she was asking what's your background so I guess it's like what kind of major were you studying at because I'm an engineer background so I'm not sure how to transfer from an engineer to a product manager because right now I haven't got an MBA degree. Sure. I don't have an MBA either. So what were you doing? Is it also an engineer or a business or marketing background? The best way to describe it is probably business operations and different business operations and marketing and probably a little bit of data science but to answer your question specifically about engineering manager how do you make that switch exercise that and this is something that's come up the last couple of times I've talked I had some people in my class that were doing something similar I think the way we approach it is saying okay well what first of all I think it's always going to say what opportunities do we want can we go find certain product management jobs maybe it's internally at your company but can we find and say what's a job that we think that would be fun to have that can get anywhere we do those search and we give ourselves a target it's important to have targets because if we don't have a target where are we going? One of the big things for me that I spent a lot of time is that if you look at product manager job descriptions and what I did is I spent time looking at that and said okay the skills that you need to be a PM are you need to be able to pull data you need to be able to wherever that is whether it's through SQL whether it's through talking to people whether it's through whatever pipeline it is that you have at that business you need to be able to visualize your ideas you need to be able to write specs you need to be able to present on data and present on specs to align people and you need to be able to go through that what people call a product cycle which is you an idea comes from anywhere you analyze it, put a business in a case around it you prioritize it saying it's the most important thing you create a spec you create a sheet that you align people you align a product, a designer an engineer, whoever you need to build it we then work through some sort of project management system or whatever that is to build this stuff we design we get engineers to work on things we then come up with a go to market strategy we launch we then look and we analyze it against the goals of the reason why whatever our business case was we analyze it and we say did this do the thing did not do the thing a lot so I would then ask you to say what are the pieces that I know about what are the pieces that I don't know about do you probably know a lot about the cycle of working with design and working with product engineering to build something like managing development is probably something that you're like I know about that right and I would then ask you to probably do an assessment of some of those other parts of that product cycle and say well do I know business cases right or do I know how to pull data and I would try to prioritize what are those areas that you feel like you would need to improve and I would start on this I think we have to have a target come up with a list of things that we need to do and then start knocking them out and I think that that's a really strong approach because I think that if someone was coming from more of a business development background they probably would know a little bit more about business cases wouldn't know anything about managing development and I think that whatever that thing is that you already know a lot about in terms of the process right like feel good about that I know about this, don't like undersell yourself and say I have no experience, no you have a lot of experience you have a lot of relevant experience from a really important part of this thing and I would start there and then I would look for opportunities that are looking for people that know a lot about that particular topic um I think that's where I would start I think there are other interesting things that you could look at and say what industry expertise do I know part of the reason that I started a consumer was because as at the point of my career that I was at I really didn't have any B2B experience whatsoever I didn't know how a sales cycle worked by selling some sort of like cloud software to someone and I did have insight into that but I did have insight into playing games I did have insight into using social networks I did have insight into using different consumer products um and I spent time like analyzing them also right like back to your question about how I kind of sold myself another thing that I've done is that I would encourage you to do is like come up with feature ideas for places you want to work right, it's always an interesting thing there's a table, like do the there's nothing stopping you from doing PM work right now right, picking an app that you like saying or something wrong with it asking people about it, coming up with a hypothesis making a spec drawing a picture and saying this is what it could be that's pretty cool and any time that I've ever in my career had someone come to like a PM that's trying to get onto my team come to me and show me that either one I've been able to say like you're on the right track and here's how I can help you but I know that it's worth it because they're putting in the effort and so I think that again starting with a target doing an assessment of where we're at prioritizing with the thing we want to learn go do it actually I have a second question so as a PM how broad is your job market so like if you are currently in a consumer industry or how about you switch to a software or like hardware company so how is it possible to switch in between like if you are working in a hardware company where you can only work in this kind of company afterwards or you can easily switch to a software company you know I would probably say that it only feels a bit more rigid than this life this world experiences for all of us and I think that at the end of the day any there's no like now you can't do this there's no like person at a company that's saying like this is not it's not like an automatic no or anything like that I think it's about again building that case for yourself first of all to convince anyone of anything you have to convince yourself first and I think the way you do that is by systematically like another thing that I kind of tell my PMs often that's a math problem how do you make this a finite thing where you say if I do this I expect XYZ results at the other side of it so I think that if you were to be making the transition from like a hardware company to like a software company for example you have to say like okay well like which parts of this job is the same right and which parts of it are different and how do I learn the things that I need to know that are different does that for me to learn the things that I need to know is different how long does it take and does that align with my goals it's a very simple way of looking at it right so I think that oftentimes if you have this strong set of skills as a PM right of being able to analytically look at a problem pull your own data turn that into an opportunity prioritize it against a set of other opportunities right draw a picture to align people or make a spec manage development do those things that is translatable to other places right um so I think that that's one approach right I have these skill sets that are similar so it's like I could probably go step in and be a B2B product manager right now just by applying those skills because I can learn in that cycle that said it is helpful if you have like certain like a category experience vice versa that's also true so if you have category experience like a particular vertical that's really valuable I can teach you the PM skills but I can't necessarily like teach you those category things as fast um and really how that translates often and another thing that I would say to do is like one of the most valuable things that you can do while you're at the company you are is learn what are the results of the projects that you're working on like that's something that I think makes like I've always pay attention and always helped me is like I can tell you what I think what are push notification rates in a consumer app I can tell you what like transaction email rates are because I've done that several times and I think most of your companies probably is producing some sort of interesting data or test and I think asking those and learning those is always a good place to start as well um so yes I think it's possible right um and I think it's about just breaking it down and saying very clearly what are the things that I am missing and then going after those because at the end of the day every single person, no one ever had all the experience ever before they started doing something no one, right if you read like I'm like really into listening to the podcast where it's like about someone starting something like how I built this NPR podcast really fun um and what you learn from someone that started anything is it started because they had one piece of it that they like latched on to and everything else they had to figure out right um so I don't think I think that there's a certain element to any of this where it's about just being self aware convincing yourself here's the path I need to take putting yourself on that path checking in making sure you're still going there finding good people to talk to give you feedback and I think you know not there okay thank you