 Okay, perfect. Hey guys. Hey everyone. Thanks for Joining us today and welcome to another product school talk. I'm Cassandra from product school. Super happy to be here with you guys Thanks for your patience As many of you guys know we teach product management courses coding and data And we just released a best-selling book the product book and you can get a free Free copy if you comment book now So this week's speaker is a Sue Smitha. Is it senior product manager at Oracle? And he's also an alumni from Stanford University. So hi Sue. Welcome Thanks for joining us today. So sure So I know you have a presentation prepared for us I'm gonna give you a couple seconds to get that set up and guys while he's setting it up just as every week We will be taking questions after so you can comment in the Facebook chat and we'll take them Right after his presentation He is set to go All right. All right. Thank you so much And everyone thank you so much for patiently waiting. I know we were supposed to go live a little earlier Technology bugs always creep in at the last minute, but here we are So today we were talking about what are the mindsets? What are the attitudes you as a product manager should have? Many of you already had those traits. Many of you already are Exhibiting the work that a product manager does on a day-to-day basis, but it's a hard nut to crack I say that because there's so much that you as a product manager have to do And and this as this word cloud comes up You would see so many different roles that a product manager has to play That person has to be a CEO of All things because you want to make sure the product you are working on is delivered in time On the budget with the resources that you have to make sure that when it goes out it has the right quality as well and it's not just the Requirements that you write. It's not just the product marketing Documents that you generate and the collateral that you prepare But you have to run the show for everything that has to happen So if something goes wrong if a engineer falls sick and cannot Cannot come up to speed on Getting the product ready You have to find another engineer in time because you have already made your commitments and so and so forth and so There are there is a long list of words a long list of topics that you as a product manager need to be Worried about that you need to be thinking about You could be I could pick up another word from here and talk about let's say go to market You are also the face of the product to the customer if something goes wrong in product You are the ones who are going to take the first bullet You are the first you should be the first line of defense and you should be the last line of The person's taking the credit for it, right? You will have to suck up all those bad Issues the bugs that comes around But at the same time gatekeep all the heat that you get from the customers And and prevent and protect your engineers behind the scenes who are working hard day And they are putting their blood and sweat into developing the product Design thinking is another one. I presume a lot of you have heard of this term design thinking But it is it is very crucial that you have to empathize with the customer You have to really go deep down with the customers to know what is bothering them What is it that they are actually looking to do with the system? They may ask for Something in the first time when you ask them, what are the requirements? But as you dive deeper into that conversation on that one requirement and ask the why questions like five times You'll probably realize what is it that the heart of their need their requirements? And where do you need to focus your energies on? By developing the right product the right functionality that the customers are interested in In today's day and age. It is difficult to go away from innovation You have to be on your toes Thinking of new ways of solving the problem You have to evangelize you have to talk to people about the solution Internally within the team so that many people would buy into your thinking Many people would buy in to your solutions and your products so that you have enough backing When you do the prioritization later on People already know that yes, these are the things that must be practiced up at the top Prioritization should not be a afterthought it should not be a surprise to anybody It should come naturally and when people see that you have prioritized a functionality over the other they know already what the reasons are and that can happen only when you evangelize and Socialize your ideas in the team that you're working with as well as across the breadth And as we talk about the breadth Let me also first take you towards my professional journey of how did I became a product manager and And what was my background like? I was not a Product manager by default by academics by any means My roots are in development writing code doing the web applications and stuff and and after having my bachelor's done My conundrum was I was in a catch 22. I don't have a Work experience and so Companies would not hire me and it sort of goes into that circle and so I Was naive and we've co-founded with a bunch of other friends a company We had about three customers and four projects across those three customers that we worked on for about a year And it gave us amazing amount of knowledge of what it takes to run a business What it takes to build softwares for not just one or two users, but multi users What it takes to sort of provide that's level of services We may I don't I don't claim that we were on top of our game by no means right? We were still no vice. We're still learning and At that point of time we we say well, we have now a year of experience What's next right and that is always playing on my mind and you'll see as it goes along in this slide I decided to sort of take a break or I would say take another route and get a master's in CS get really much more stronger foundations for my Core beliefs and how the software products should be made right getting a master's really got me into a much more Better shape I would say than where I was when I began my career I was able to ideate and think of solutions that would help the customers very soon I was sort of alleviated to be the tech lead and and also a team lead to to take a team of four five seven engineers and Build software for the customers and at this point I was really moving fast because I knew how things are what needs to be done and Where me where we need to go with this product. What is it that the customer will say? Wow, this is a product that I want to use right, but again after a certain point it becomes stagnating for me and I feel what's next I Have to figure out what is that next thing that challenges me It is important for you as a product manager to not stop at what you are Already doing best you know what you're doing best you need to challenge yourself You need to come out of your comfort zone so that you have a much broader vision broader understanding of what software's what things are required in Getting the right software in the in the hands of our customers To understand that and to get on to the business side of it. I went back to school decided to get an MBA In addition to my work experience NMA really helped me a lot. It gave me the good communication skills that I Required for becoming an evangelist for the product that I'm building and I'm getting built oops Rocky and at that point you want to be this domain expert that knows the domain in and out as I said You want to be somebody who knows of the back of your hand What is in the product and what is the customer going to ask next when they run into an issue and it is that Position which really catapults you into very differently when customers can trust you and they know that if I if a Customer asks a question you not only know the answer to that, but you could predict what their next questions are And that is where you want to be as a domain expert now being a domain expert in one domain While it is great, but for me it is not enough and so I come back to my question. What's next? Where do I go from here? And and I'm on a constant journey of Going between the professional world and working and at the same time getting more certifications getting more Educational pieces taken care of and now here I said I sit with in front of you with these all variety of Educations that I could get around but now I am not only a fast learner a domain expert But I'm an entrepreneur and I'm while I'm working at Oracle There are different projects that I'm working on which allows me to do intrapreneur work Right, so I'm within a bigger organization But Oracle gives me the space to be this intrapreneur if I have an idea and I if I could Elucidate them into a right way put it into a document with a plan and everything They give me this platform and I believe that I am now ready With my experience of being an intrapreneur to go out into the world and be an entrepreneur for myself and Be that next startup that I have always dreamed of I could do that, right? So again, I'm not I'm not sitting tight in my chair With the fact that I'm already an intrapreneur, but I want to challenge more myself as I talked about my journey and You may have noticed that I'm talking about the domain expert But then I'm also trying to get a very different view on it, right? And I want you to sort of Think about yourself. This is sort of a typical hierarchy that you would see in a company and Let's put you in the middle of the hierarchy What is your circle of influence and that defines what is your social circle? Where do you spend most of your time? If you are spending most of your time here with your manager with your peers and your product team You're talking about becoming the domain expert and you have the product depth But that product depth is not Sufficient you need much more for yourself to grow in this hierarchical maze And what can get you out of here is not just the product depth. So let's take a look at what is This product depth giving you It makes you laser focused on the product that you own which is great But then it prevents you from getting any vision outside of your product And so if I were to pull you out of your product and put you into something else Think about what would you do next? What is your next step? If you have not done your socialization across The horizontals then you are within your product depth if only you could find another company doing exactly the same thing You'll find your next opportunity Right, and it is difficult in today's day and age that everybody other companies may be doing exactly the same thing So what's a way out to this and what I call is product breadth Now you're still the same place in the hierarchy But if you can influence the director at your manager level if you are managing up nicely, even if you have More than three tiers of your manager Voting for you and rooting for you and say no, I want Suha's to be in this and that capacity Your manager has no reason to not promote you to not give you more responsibility Not give you more authority a bigger team Whatever you are looking for your manager will have to do that for you and this breath is what gets you places in my view Now that I've talked about the breads and the depth Let me also give you what is the gray matter what I call? What is the mindset that you need? What is the attitude as a product manager that you need? From a mindset perspective, you have to be laser focused when it comes to me On the customer front, you cannot take your eyes off your customers if they are looking for something else and if you blink They'll go somewhere else. You have to be customer focused. You have to be solution driven You cannot give the same solutions for the same problems over and over again You have to be that leader who who plays by the example You you set the example if you have that attitude of setting that example for others to follow You will continuously be that leader you will not have infinite amount of time to learn and and Drive up to any problem to any situation You have to be on your toes and ready to learn fast the faster you learn The faster you can solve a problem I was talking about socializing your ideas and networking Networking is where people will know what you are working on people will know What your strengths are and if they have a need they will pull you and say so has I would like to Get you to work on my project to work on in my company and so forth You'll have to also then constantly play a liaison Between multiple different teams you have to be a cross functional cross departmental player who can talk technology To the engineering folks who could talk business to sales and marketing who could talk strategy to your executives and and still be this one person who can Who can take the product forward and only this collaborative? Attitude or mindset will make you ready for what is coming up next From an attitude perspective, I've gone between the mindset and the attitude But make sure that when you are looking at a functionality a feature requirement. You just don't go emotional Yes, if the customer says that they needed they needed badly look at the data Because sometimes when customers say that they need something's badly. They don't even know what the exactly is that they need Look at the data. Look at and see where things are and what would give them the best Results for what they are looking for And always stay open to challenges because that is where your next frontier is if it is challenging to you That is where you need to grow that is where you need to Look into to see what more can you take on and Showcase yourself when you network with others that you can be that person that people can trust and depend on when they face a challenging situation and And be ready to be the janitor level right you cannot say this is not I that is not my Responsibility if it is your product Anything and everything is your responsibility You may have to be very well a jack of all trades. You may have to know everything But if you set an example You are also setting an example for others to follow that you could lead other teams and lead other product managers the way and in the direction that you want right and so Constant innovation constant challenging of the status quo constantly Stepping away from your comfort zone will see you grow much more in a much different Person that you are That being said going towards the concluding sort of slides the key key take away There's two is for you to challenge yourself and improve yourself if you feel comfortable Then that is the exact time when you need to think about and say what is next? What's the next frontier? people are talking about IOTs and Artificial intelligence and machine learning take up a course if you don't if you don't know what that is take up a course Of course era or old a be People are talking about going into blockchain. I don't know and I'm looking into blockchain now Just to get myself familiarized because then when you are in that networking Situation you could make a very intelligent sounding Conversation that people would know and and take you seriously Listen listen to your customers listen to a team for God's sake a lot of product managers think Once that I've given you the requirements. I'm out of it. No Teams have their inputs stay open to them get yourself critiqued what works for the team What works for you may be completely different? and you have to be a Key observant of a lot of things. How is your team taking you? Are they happy with you? How is the customer treating you is the customer giving you the right information? What is happening around in the competition in the industry? Is there something that you need to look at and and think about pivoting away into a different area? All of those things are crucial. So keep your eyes and ears open as a product manager, it is difficult to say this but The moment you blink somebody else will take things away. It is hard job. It is not an easy task But you have to be prepared for it. Once you take the dive and events you if you're passionate enough You would love your life as a product manager Yes, there is enough time for your family and your kids and everything else on the socialized social circles But you have to be this passionate to take it With a big heart and say I'm going to run into this challenge and come out winning Show intel is your evangelization if you write blogs if you tweet if you showcase that you know certain things do it Do it more often Set up a vision for people take them and convince them that what they are working on now Has a reason behind it. It's not just because the customers are looking for it but there is a much more bigger vision to achieve right and and and continue to socialize Network with people and and just just enjoy it being a product manager if you can do that You can really succeed as a product manager That's it for me If you have any questions feel free to contact me you have my information up on the screen And now Cassandra, we could open up for questions Silence is golden Yes, so you can start typing in your your questions and we'll take those here This first question comes in how much of coding knowledge is needed to venture into a product management role? I would say Cursory knowledge different companies would expect different things from a product manager An example is Google if you want to be a product manager at Google You need to really know how to code and and come up with some real good solid prototype and other companies who do not need to you could be a designer and if you could put screens together and showcase a Prototype using just simple screens or an HTML code or even draw them up on a piece of paper. That is fine So I would say it is always good to have a little bit of coding knowledge A little bit of HTML so that you could put together some sort of a web page if it is a web application that you're talking about Maybe a little bit of a Java so that you could take no babble with other folks in the team and convince them of The direction that you want to take so I would say at least 25 Good 20 to 25 percent of knowledge would be would be good enough to get started Okay, awesome. We have another question that just came into from Hugo How is a customer success background beneficial for someone wishing to pivot into product management? Oh, that is fantastic I would say if you have been in front of a customer believe me a lot of interviews that you go into they would ask you this have you ever been Working alongside with the customers. What is your experience there? How did you manage the challenges? How did you convince your customers to continue believing in the product that you're trying to sell and and help them fit? All of that is amazing experience Because it's not how you talk to your colleagues at work your friends at home It's a very different frontier and you need to be really patient and that does not come easy If you have already been there done that that comes in really handy and and I would suggest if you have a resume which Needs to be changed. This is one thing that you want to add at the top of it of that list How was your experience with the customer? Right. I definitely agree Our next question comes from Sid Hart. Can Oracle have somebody from different functions like risk management and banking fit into product management? At Oracle and I don't think so. I'm not 100% sure but ideally speaking if I am looking to hire somebody I Would tend to not hire somebody from the same background As I say as being a fast learner if you are that fast learner Then no matter what domain you are thrown into you will be able to come up Very fast in terms of understanding what the customer requirements are and for me Vultitudes of backgrounds help Bring the new perspective into the team. So but but again, that is not generally the case at Oracle Okay Awesome. Our next question is from new par. I have sales experience with tech with a technology background But how do I project myself as a product manager? You should think about what some companies call outbound product marketers and Outbound product managers Oracle have them and what they do is they are the ones who are Constantly in front of the customers bring all of that information and then provide that Knowledge to maybe another inbound product manager or slowly You could say I could start fitting and you are already doing a great job of a outbound product manager That you could start asking for more responsibilities and say, okay I could take on the inbound role as well and as I say having the customer interaction and experience Comes in very handy from a sales perspective I'm sure you get a lot of ideas from the customers only if your product had this You would have purchased it or only if your product did this better You would have you'd have liked it or you would have referred you to somebody else and so forth, right? All of those are inputs everything that the customer does not like about your product Is an input to make it better and you had that knowledge? Take it to your advantage played play the game to your advantage. I would say, okay Great. Our next question is from Kevin. Um, how how do you prepare or best prepare for your interview process and product management for? Let's say startups or or even like a big corporation like Google or Facebook Any advice that you can add to that Google Google and Facebook are very different in their interview process They ask open-ended questions and they they judge you on how you how you approach the problem that they are giving you It's not technical most of the cases initially But once you get to the second round the third round, yes They will want to to gauge your technical abilities and stuff But to break into the first round you want to have Understanding and and somebody would think on their toes Because they're going to throw you into an area which you have not imagined Even if you go through googling about what are the questions people ask they have a long list of sort of very Open-ended questions that they can ask you and so keep keep your eyes and ears open understand what they are trying to get to and think about Them as your customer again. What is it that they are looking for? they're looking for Whether this person thinks or has a problem solving skills whether this person is innovative and can think of different solutions Given the same problem Or given the same props right and things of that nature When you come to oracle kind of places, I would say Things like design thinking people want to know whether you understand what design thinking is because After the iphone Release they have changed The user experience expectations in people and you better think about the design of your user experience and understand how to sort of empathize with the customer and build prototypes and and I trade over again and so forth that entire cycle of design thinking needs to be clear as well and there are people who now Ask a lot of these questions whether you have that design thinking attitude in your as well or not Yeah, absolutely And we had quite a few more questions coming we have time for maybe one or two more So i'm going to go through and pick out a couple out of the few that just came in um as well so um our next question is from I'll take this one from ral. Um, how can you get into product management into a product management role without having previous experience of product management What advice you have? That is uh slightly a tricky proposition One of the things that you need to have is that customer focused mindset That whatever you build as an engineer What is it going to give the customer? How will customers? Life be different especially improved With that additional piece if you start thinking from a customer perspective and not From a technicality perspective or because technology allows me to do this x. I will do it But what does that x give the customer if if the answer to that question? Is nothing much then don't do it and then Right, I would say documentation because as a product manager This is a very different Game that you have to play and I have played that game. I was an engineer Who would hate writing documentation? You know, I would love to write code and and come up with new solutions But then at the end on the side of a product manager You need to write you need to be able to write user requirements You need to be able to evangelize and convey your thoughts Ideas and solutions to people whether it be writing blogs or technical stuff You need to be doing that as well. And so Working on that would be a big big help towards becoming a product manager And as part of the product school, let me plug this in Think about taking taking the class with us We go to a rigor on how to think about a product manager. What are the things that A individual in that shoe has to do on a daily basis Open this program for eight weeks. I would say eight or ten weeks depending on which Class you take but it would be a great place for you to learn more about the product manager and what their life looks like Right. It's definitely about adopting a product manager mindset As well um, great, um, we'll have time to take just one more. Um, this is from the team Cooper when deciding between going into a product management role in a larger company versus Versus like an early startup. What consideration would you take into account? I would take into account What is it that you can impress to the customer again customer focus is key for me Um, would you have a opportunity to impress a customer at a big company? Or at the small company Also, as I said as a product manager, you have to play every role possible There is possible in a company you have to be the ceo For the lack of better word, right? and and I would for for my sake I would want to go and work at a smaller company either you work for a smaller company or you start on your own Right. I'm using all my experience to start something off my own and and use that platform to grow your sales Your sales skills your marketing skills your Oratory skills and evangelizing skills. Maybe even look at what is new in the technology blockchains artificial intelligence machine learning AR VR, I mean there are there are a ton of things that are happening in the market Pick something and see how that could be Plugged into your product and how could you make your product unique that nobody else can be And your competition will have to follow once you get into that in that mindset I think you are ready. You are already a product manager Whether you're a senior with your principal with your director. It doesn't matter I would love to stay at senior because I'd love to get to work on so many different aspects of it Once if I decide to grow up And become a manager then I have to take care of a lot of people management, but that startup Company would get you much more product management to work that you have to sort of build yourself and and Round yourself up with every skills there is to be had Awesome. Well, I just want to thank you again. That's all the time we have for questions now um, thank you again for joining us today and um, and for taking the time to To put together the presentation for everyone as well. I appreciate that So thanks again Awesome, and um before we go if you could just leave everyone with one final piece of advice for aspiring product managers Um customer focus, uh, that is one piece of advice. I can say and I cannot say it less If you stay focused put yourself in the customer shoe And see whether you would you use the product that you're building if you think you would It may be the customer who would be building to use that product as well Awesome. Thank you again And thanks again everyone for your patience and for joining us today. Um, as you guys know, we host these every week So we'll see you next thursday. Um, have a great rest of your week. Bye. Bye. Bye