 good afternoon folks how are you doing my name is sparsh and I'm a product manager for Microsoft and I have been working at Microsoft for about a four years before that I was doing my computer engineering at Penn State University right in the East Coast and in my short yet when you some journey you know I have had various different since at different tech companies both as a product manager and a software developer now one of the biggest reasons as I was thinking about what can I share with all of you was that across all this time in my short experience I've learned that as a PM it was incredibly important for me to aggressively learn and learn shamelessly and what does that mean by learning shamelessly is getting rid of the fear that discomfort of asking the questions to the right people at the right time and slowly as I spent more time learning more and more about the problems that I've been working with I got more comfortable doing the same and soon enough I realized that the one line that kept me from not you know the one line that enabled me to have the courage to keep asking the right questions to the right people and keep learning as much as I could to achieve the goal I was working on was what one of my leaders at Microsoft told me when I first joined and while I'll share what that was with you in a in a moment I think the first lesson that I learned there was that in life and in career we may not know the exact right answer in the right moment but I think it is incredibly important for us as PMs to have a set of frameworks that guide us in the right direction in the most precise way when we need to you know be creative take a decision or make progress towards the whatever project that we are working on and so although I call this the power of cliche I truly mean that cliches could very well be very important frameworks the only thing we have to do is get rid of the negative connotation associated with them you know who likes the person who just keeps giving motivational quotes or quoting specific repeated jargons every now and then but I think there is value if we ourselves learn to use them effectively so that being said here are few of my personal favorite frameworks few of my decision-making guide guidelines that help me be a better product manager or when I'm not doing my best motivate me to learn more and figure out how to be better or not just my customers but also my teammates all the engineers and the stakeholders I work with so on to the first most powerful lesson that I learned that still drives me to learn more is this giving up the facade of infallibility what a profound statement for me that I learned probably in the first one month of joining Microsoft now the reason this was incredibly effective for me was in the past I have had people told me you know sparsh whatever you do is not enough you have to make sure that you create a personal brand for yourself which is totally fair right but at the same time your brand and your skill sets should be built on a strong foundation which means till the time you know enough and you can provide enough value to the company and the team just a personal brand alone will not suffice and that resonated with me and I think by far the most effective way of becoming the best first-time product manager for me was this to give up the facade of infallibility which in the most simple sense mean don't shy away from looking like you don't know something so that you could ask the right questions and know them at the perfect right time now at this moment I know I have a whole spectrum of audience who could be watching them I know they will be new product managers and aspiring product managers and to them this lesson would make a lot of sense of course we are learning they're new we are young why don't we just be aggressive in asking these questions and learning new things but I want all the senior PMs all the more experienced audience who are watching this to think about this the two groups that ask the most questions are the young new you know new product managers and the super senior leaders and I think the more we get into the midway the more hesitant we get to ask the right questions from a colleague from our friends from anybody in the industry and I think that's why this is an important reminder for everybody who is in their mid-careers too and I am sure two years down the line when I see this you know life presentation of me speaking to you guys and girls I think this will be a reminder for myself as well to make sure that I asked the right questions and with that let's move on to the next the next framework the next pillar that helps me drive my decisions which is a don't get blinded by science now this is an interesting one because I learned this by experience that while we are looking at various streams of information be it data be it customer interviews be it stakeholder meetings to figure out what is the best thing we could create for our customers and the best ways we could do that we often can forget that the most powerful tool in our product managers toolkit is driving clarity and the way to do is do that is to first understand the big picture problem in the most clear concise and precise way possible and I personally often fall into the trap of getting blinded by science I will talk to a bunch of people bunch of engineers getting into the technical details of how things are working looking at the data looking at trends and numbers in charts and start losing the eagle eye picture so this is one of those key pillars framework I use when I to make important decisions and when I need to ask the right questions to the right customers this pillar tells me to do one simple thing take a step back and look at the whole problem in buckets and I have seen that eventually when you work on enough problems most things will start giving you a pattern that you already used before and while using patterns as a dogma is not the best thing to do because it hinders creativity using these patterns to simplify a new problem and understand it in a more chewable clear lens helps you unearth potential edge cases and gotchas that will be very costly if you find them much later in the process it also helps all your stakeholders understand the why behind what you're doing better and it helps the engineers understand the big picture perspectives of the problem they are helping you solve rather than getting deep into the weeds of typing the semicons so that's my second important pillar cliche that helps me personally and I hope will help you guide your decisions to not get blinded by science let's move on to the next one shall we okay so this has been something I discovered myself when I was working in one of for one of my most challenging projects which was about making sure that engineers aren't checking in secrets in code this is a security specific project because this can happen in various different industries now the reason I say this is because especially post-COVID the way we brainstorm and the way we discuss ideas has changed drastically the more we are getting into the remote work paradigm our meetings are sharing conclusions our meetings are about talking or presenting rather than truly discussing and brainstorming and this means that we are not comfortable with silence now I'll let you in on a quick experiment when you're in your next meeting as you're talking stop for a minute pause and see if people are see if people are comfortable and you will notice that the moment you stop and pause everybody starts to feel a little bit discomfort and that's the problem with remote or virtual brainstorming it is those moments of uncomfortable pauses people take time to think come in with ideas and try to create the best solutions which means that in the remote world we are most likely to select or think more on the impulsive ideas the first solutions that come to your brain right and I think as pms we will be so much more effective if we park those impulsive ideas spend more time truly looking deep into whether these different solutions that are coming to us are the right solutions for our customers and use a more traditional way of solving these problems to to create whatever we are trying to achieve so I think I'll leave you with a simple you know philosophy here we must remind ourselves to go beyond the path of least friction not just for creating solutions but even on simpler tasks that we achieve on a day-to-day basis sometimes we can surprise ourselves by the quality of answers we derive when we just look a little deeper on to the next one okay so this one's very interesting for me personally I I think this has been such a common thing if for us to get affected by recency bias and I don't think this is a particularly product management only issue biases are all over the place these happen in the industry these biases happen when people are reviewing resumes when people are looking at LinkedIn profiles when people are interviewing other people it's all over the place and I think the most powerful solution to that is to be aware of the kind of biases different people may have including you and me and I have found that recency bias can come to you in various different forms now what is recency bias in the most simplest terms it means that your thoughts today are affected by recent events or incidents you saw now that may be a good thing in some situations but in many other situations recency bias can put undue weight to some situations in your mind which will probably make you make decisions that are not balanced so simple lesson is whenever you're talking to a colleague when you're working in a team don't let any recent incidents news immediately decide how you proceed with your new conversations and I think rest is pretty self-explanatory right recent events can cause you to take wrong decisions and as a PM it's our job to take the most balanced decisions and our job is to have most of the opinions of most of the stakeholders come together in a way that creates a great net product for them let's see what's next on this slide you know folks this is I'm not going to spend too long for the sake of time on this one but product is all about data right like we have to make sure that when we are working especially at scale when you have products that are used by millions of customers tens of thousands of different categories of people across the world using them data is important because it drives how you decide what next to build how to build it what are the priority of different features that you'll be building but there is true value in your own personal insights about products you know there is there's a reason you are working in a product position there is a reason your own experience your own expertise and creativity has brought you to where you are in your position and you want to value that and you want to have that you know that expertise that you have built over time to reflect in the work you do and so data driven is important but we need to use it in a balanced way with your own personal experience and with the experience and expertise of the people you work with and that's where I personally think it's important to be data informed and then make an informed call about the work you do the work you do or we're purely looking at the data and then dogmatically finding a solution out of it I think this lesson is sort of similar to you know when we do customer interviews I remember one of the first things I learned about product management was that if we simply asked people what they would want they would say faster horses and we wouldn't be you know using these past cars so somebody somewhere used the information they got from their customers used their own personal ideas and converted that into a car and not just faster horses right so thanks to that we have a better vehicle rather than just horses so I think this is where we stand here is being data informed over data driven and we are almost at the end of the presentation and for those of you who are still watching thank you so much my goal folks here is that you could have some pillars that you could put your PM careers on in a way that could drive it forward in a faster more efficient way because it has helped me I wanted to share this with you now context versus conclusions now this is an interesting one and you know I mentioned before in the post COVID world because of the nature of our interactions we tend to lose context in our conversations because we want to share conclusions and share solutions so I think it is important task of product managers to decide what level of context is important to be shared with our customers and our stakeholders to truly understand the conclusions that we receive from the data and the research that we have done and to truly help them understand the why behind what we are doing now I read this somewhere in a book and you know I like to present this with a story there was a person working in a ship really hard-working person the best employee you know this ship owner could have one day one day he had a really tragic incident back home he learned about a very bad news and he went ahead and drank a lot on the job extremely unfortunate incident and his boss saw it but and you know he the person apologized but his boss was extremely angry and what they did was he but he did was he wrote in a log bar log book that David got drunk today now David he was very sad he was devastated and he really requested his boss to please let him go once this will never happen again you know his he received extremely tragic news but but his boss was like well David it is what it is you find something you want to write in the log book you could you could write it now funny thing is next day in the evening David was feeling better all he did was went to the log book and wrote John was sober today it is it was a fact but that's where the power of context comes in everybody is going to be reading that would probably read hmm John was sober today and probably understood you know in their mind they will think that John was not sober the rest of the day so I guess a little quick funny story to to explain the importance of context and whether we are communicating through our emails whether we are writing uh you know public announcements uh we are writing uh you know knowledge bases the keys uh for our customers or even our internal engineers I think it is an incredibly important aspect of decision-making to figure out what level of context we need to add in our presentation well that brings me to my final final pillar of product management which is healthy disregard for the impossible this is a phrase that I learned way back way back in college when I was attending a leadership workshop and later on I casually was I stumbled upon a video I think it was a graduation ceremony in University of Michigan where Larry Page was giving a speech and somehow he used the exact same quote healthy disregard for the impossible and which means that for us to be moving the rock moving the milestones for us to make our products and projects better and better we we need to be a little crazy just a little bit of ambition to challenge the paradigms just a little bit you know one of my favorite posters uh that I saw and I own is the most dangerous lines ever said was we do it this way because it has always been done this way and I think as pms to drive creativity and to try better products and services for our customers we all need to have a little bit of healthy disregard for the impossible so next time you are looking for something new building something absolutely new I think it's it's great to be a little crazy and have healthy disregard for the impossible and with that folks those were my few pillars few cliches I hope you could take home some of them and use them small statements to remind yourself of the right pathway as you make various different decisions for your own career and your work thank you so much uh it was pleasure having this conversation with you and have a great rest of your day folks thank you