 Hey, welcome everyone. My name is Carlos and I'm the founder and CEO of Product School. Thank you for joining us for this webinar today. I'm very excited to do it because we are going to be covering topics such as how to become a great product manager and also how to break into product management. So I encourage you to ask any questions on the comments of this video because then we'll have some time for Q&A. The format of this presentation is going to be around 15-20 minutes for the presentation and then another 5-10 minutes for the Q&A. So I'm going to share my screen because I prepared the presentation and I'll be also looking at the comments in case you need something to add. I hope you can see it right now. Okay, so let's go. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, I am the founder and the CEO of Product School. What we do at Product School is to teach product management. We have a total of 14 campuses across the US and also in Canada and the UK. And in all of those campuses, we organize classes and events outside of business hours because in order to become a manager, we believe you need to have some experience on the ground. So students who take our programs usually have full-time jobs and join us after work or during weekends. And that's the same for our instructors. They are all senior level product managers at top companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, all of them keep their full-time jobs as product leaders. And they also teach on the side. So I also wanted to kind of show you a little bit of us by the numbers we've graduated over 4,000 alumni across the world in all of our 14 campuses. So we have a big presence in California with campuses in San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles area. We also have campuses in Seattle, Austin, Denver. We also have campuses in New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and London. As I mentioned, this is the main course that we offer, which is called product management. It's mostly for people who are trying to break into product. And what we cover here is not just to teach you how to build products, but also how to get a job in product. I will try to explain some of those key topics also during this event. And in addition to product school, we also built our first physical product. And it's funny, we always teach people how to build digital products. And we also built a physical product, which was this product book that became a best-selling Amazon a few months ago. And the reason why we did this book is because we realized that there are so many, you know, articles and content and videos out there online about product management, but they are not validated and they are not like put it in the right sequence. So it's really hard to find the right materials that you can trust if you want to learn more about this topic. So we extracted some of our highlights from the courses that we teach here. And a lot of instructors from these top companies contributed to the book as well. So this is something that you can find online on Amazon. And you have the Kindle Substitution membership, you can get the book for free. Otherwise, I believe it's 2.99 Kindle version of the book. Anyway, so the big of this webinar is about how to become a great product manager. And I would like to start by showing you a little bit of my path, how I did it. So traditionally, I started software engineering. And from there, I became a product manager. And then from there, I became a CEO. This is a very typical path in Silicon Valley. But in reality, it is not that easy. This is my real path. So I was a student, I started computer science, and then I worked as a software engineer. Both the students as a professional, I realized that even though I was good enough at coding, that wasn't really my passion. I realized that I wasn't going to be the very best in the world at that. And I was always very curious about how to connect the technical components of the business with actually the business. I was always thinking about why do we have to code this instead of that? Or how are we going to make money? Like how does this work? How are the designers or the sales people going to connect with this product? So at that time, I didn't even know what product management was. I was doing it without knowing how to define it. So after my experience working as an engineer, I decided to start my first company. And then is when I realized that this is exactly what I loved. And I wasn't alone. There are so many people, not just engineers, who really want to leverage their expertise and move to our middle and become more of a translator in between different groups than a specialist in one specific area. We'll talk more about that. But after my first entrepreneurial experience, I realized that I needed to learn more about business. So I took the opposite extreme of computer science, which is probably going to business school. So I realized that, yes, that was a good experience because I was learning more about business. In reality, it was probably too high level. There were no classes about technology or about product management or about even digital marketing. So I felt like there had to be something in between because computer science was probably too low level and nobody taught me anything about business. Business school was probably too high level. Nobody taught us anything about how things actually work. So that's why I built product school as a platform to teach others how to become product managers in software. This presentation is going to be focused on software product management. So mostly websites and mobile apps. Of course, there are always these new formats, right? Like smart watches, smart tablets, but mostly I mean software. I'm not talking about how to build a hardware product such as a 3D printer or an IoT device or even how to build a hospital. Just keep that in mind for the record. So let's start from the beginning. What's PM in software? How do we define product? So this is a definition that I hate that you can find on the Wikipedia because it's the very old school approach on how you do product management, right? Like you gather requirements, then you have to create a plan and you have to explain people what to do. Then you have to keep track of the process and then you have to launch the product, analyze what happens and do it again. Yes, but I believe there is a better way to explain this, especially in a context where things change so fast. So I'm more of a visual person and I like to define product management as the intersection between these three groups. Business, engineering and design. Because I said that this is about software product management. When I say engineering, I mean software engineering. When I say design, I mostly mean UX design. And when I say business, I mostly mean digital marketing. So as a product manager, you are really a generalist where you need to know enough about each of these three concepts. And it's not expected that you are an expert at all of them. But obviously, if your background is engineering, you will have more expertise on that technical part, but you will have to learn about the other two. And if you come from business, you will have to learn a bit more about engineering, although your expertise would probably more on the business, marketing or sales side. So let's talk about different paths to PM. At the very beginning, I showed you my path, which is fairly common, especially in the Silicon Valley, but it's not the only path. So here I showed the top five backgrounds that we've seen in our school for people who are successful at breaking into product management. So obviously, software engineering is huge, but that's not the only one. I also like to mention entrepreneurship. And let me clarify this one. When I say entrepreneurship, I'm not talking about being a very successful founder of your company, selling it and then becoming a product manager for another company. I'm talking about being curious enough to build something and prove that you can do it. This could be something as simple as your own personal website that you just created to link to other social media channels or to host your own blog articles. It could also be something more complex, like a site project that you built with a couple of friends and maybe it's a mobile app that you published on the App Store. But something like that is good enough. It just sets you apart from a lot of other people that are complaining about how hard it is to break into product, but I'm not really doing anything about it. So of course, if you were also successful and build something full-time and it worked, that's huge bonus point. But entrepreneurship for me in this context means having the curiosity and being able to prove that you are more than your current job and that if you need to build something, you will try to figure it out. Another very popular background it's consulting. This is especially very common in the east coast of the US. We've seen a lot of management consultants, strategy consultants from top firms that are trying to break into tech. And their background makes them really good product management candidates because in consulting, you have to learn things really fast and switch from different industries and clients and make a lot of data-driven decisions and feel comfortable communicating with different stakeholders. There's a huge overlap with what you will have to do as a product manager. The biggest area of opportunity here for someone who comes from a traditional business background is to understand more about how to work with engineers and learn a little bit of code and learn more about software architecture and how engineers work and think, because it is otherwise going to be very hard for engineers to earn the respect of someone who is not an engineer and has never been an engineer before. And of course, we talk more about specific tactics that you can use for that. I also mentioned project and program management. I could also mention business analysts or even scrum master. Those are all intermediate roles in between product and engineering and those are stepping stones. And actually in many companies, depending on how big the company is or how they define this role, that could be a lot of product management. So if you are already one of those intermediate roles, you know that you are almost there. And product management is definitely a natural next step for you. And of course, marketing. Most of people who are probably watching this webinar today will probably feel identified with any of those five buckets and probably more than one. But if you are thinking that, you know, I don't really fit into this profile, can I really do it? My answer is yes. And before I show you other options, yes, let me give you an example of one of our students who was a lawyer. And he actually took our product management course and also coding course because he really wanted to leverage his legal background and apply it to a legal tech firm. He ended up getting a product management job at a company called Rocket Lawyer. And that makes total sense because how many other lawyers out there, you know, that understand legal and product and technology that well. So that's a really good example. Obviously, that's not the most common background for our students. But here I also want to show you other options. We get a lot of people that come from other types of engineering such as hardware engineering or mechanical engineering. That's also a good way to break into product. My piece of advice for folks like that is to also try to identify companies or industries that are hybrid in between software and hardware such as Internet of Things, wearable devices, voice recognition products. So companies that have a hardware and a software component because it is really hard to find profiles that understand both. And if you come from hardware, it's always going to be easier for a hardware person to understand software than for a software person to try to understand hardware. And I also mentioned finance operations kind of similar to what I said before about consulting and sales. It's important because just think about it when you work in a sales role, you're always in touch with the customer. And I'm sure you have a lot of ideas and recommendations for the engineering team because at the end of the day, your customers are asking for certain things and you need those things in order to close certain things. So if you are able to step up your game and not only ask someone to do something but really understand what are the implications and how you can better prepare that request from like a technical perspective. And these people and we've seen a lot of people that come from marketing sales backgrounds make good product managers. Again, I'm not trying to say that this is simple or easy. This takes a lot of work, but I'm trying to show you that there is not just one path. It's not like, oh, you need to be a software engineer in order to become a product manager. Well, let's talk about other PM roles because when I say PM, I mean product manager. The great thing is that as your company grows, you, yes, you are going to have more people in the product team. And then actually when the company is small, let's say five, 10 people. Most of the cases don't really need a product manager. It's one of the, usually one of the founders or the CEO who's going to be acting as that product manager. You get to a point where your company is grown to a point of, let's say, five to seven software engineers and then the person who's acting as the product manager can't really do product management full time and other functions such as fundraising, recruiting, operations or whatever it is. So usually at that point when you need to bring your first full time product manager. Most of the tech companies that I've seen at that stage usually hire that get that first product manager from inside. It's usually an internal promotion or maybe someone who works in support or engineering or marketing who is curious enough, who is quickers a lot about the product and you can give this person the chance. But obviously as the company keeps growing and growing, you need to bring some talent from the outside. And there are so many options, not just for product management. These are some of the titles of people who work in the product team who could be a good option for you. So I mentioned before business analyst or project manager or program manager. Those are roles that are right in between product and engineering. They're project manager, although I could also say program manager or business analyst or even scrum master. Those opportunities are really good for people who come from an engineering background. Like if you come from a design or business background, I wouldn't try to become a project manager because those positions usually require a technical background. Just to give you an idea of the difference between project manager and product manager is that first of all, there are companies that don't have the luxury of having a project manager. So the product manager is acting as both the project and the product manager. But if you're in a situation where there's a project person and a product person, the project person is usually more focused on the tactics and the actual execution on a daily basis. This is the person who's going to run the daily stand-ups with their engineers. This is the person who's going to be creating the product specifications and breaking it down into different user stories and you know, being in the engineering room, working with your engineers and trying to figure out every single little detail that's going on. Well, the product manager will have a higher perspective of the product, will be more in touch with business teams, design teams, will also own the roadmap and the overall strategy for the next month. So that's in case you have two people. But sometimes, especially when you're starting, the product manager is also only project manager. The same case applies to other areas such as business. So I've seen a lot of folks that come from business and start as product marketing managers before they become product managers, which is a really good option. And the same case applies to folks that come from design. It's a role called product design that is a good step in stone towards product management. So again, this is your call. You have to decide if you are trying to optimize for title and what you care is title product manager. But I've seen all the, I've seen people considering getting an intermediate role in a company or industry that they love. And then once they prove themselves, then they can take the next step and try to become product managers. But let's talk about the PM career path because talk a lot about how to break into product, but I think we don't talk enough about what happens afterwards. And I see two main paths. One is the entrepreneurial route. Let's say you want to build a product for yourself. And at the end of the day, it's a very senior framework as if you are building a product for somebody else. And obviously, if you're in a small team, you will have to take some shortcuts because you need to get things done faster. While if you're in a larger organization, you may need to add some layers of politics because at the end of the day, you need to get the buying from so many different stakeholders. But I've seen the other way around. I've seen also founders who joined bigger companies as product managers. And I've seen people who are product managers are certain companies that lead those companies to become the CEOs of startups. So that's very common. The other path is the one that I'm showing right now, which is the corporate path. Let's say you're in an organization and you start as a product manager and then you work your way up towards VP of product or head of product or chief product officer. So I also mentioned APM because there are some companies that offer that position. It stands for associate product manager. And that's a term that was coined by Madison Ayer, where she was the VP of product at Google. Then she became the CEO of Yahoo. And the reason why they did that is because 10 years ago or so, product management wasn't that cool and product school didn't exist. So they actually had to find people to do product and it wasn't that easy to find them because they weren't in schools teaching that. So they decided to create an internal training program to pick some of their engineers and make them product managers. So if you're interested, you can find a lot of documentation about that online. But that's a term that became very popular and other big companies in tech like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yelp, LinkedIn, Intuit. They also offer similar training programs, mostly for recent brands. You can also start your career as a product manager. And honestly, the difference between a product manager and a senior product manager is not that much. It's probably the amount of years of experience. Biggest leap happens afterwards between senior product manager and director of product. Other companies will call this group product manager because as a senior or product manager, you're going to be working directly with engineers, designers and marketers. While as a director of product, you're going to be working with product managers who work with engineers, designers and marketers. So you become more of a manager of managers than just a product manager. And at that point, you will have to focus more on recruiting, setting up the vision, defining the culture, defining certain processes and so on. And then of course, depending on your level of seniority and the size of the company, then next steps are VP of product or even CPU. That stands for Chief Product Officer. I also mentioned CEO because especially in tech, it's very true that most of the CEOs are product focused and their backgrounds are as in product managers. So they still don't want to give that up and I'm sure you'll see companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Google where all those CEOs are product people and they still participate in a lot of product meetings and want to have an opinion on what we're shooting. Okay, let's talk about types of product managers in software because software is also a very broad term and there are so many ways you can look at a product. You can see if this product is in the B2B space or B2C, B2C is business to consumer, B2B is business to business. So are you setting to direct consumers or are you setting to other companies? You could also categorize your product by are you working at startup or small company or are you working at large company? And those are all valid points because when you're trying to break into product, first of all, that's hard. So you need to try to identify companies that might be a good fit for you. And if you have a lot of experience in, let's say, large organizations, it will be easier for you to switch to product at another large organization. Because if you spend your whole life working at a large organization, let's say in marketing, it's going to be very complicated to break into product management at a startup. For two reasons because you are trying to switch roles from marketing to product and you are also trying to switch kind of companies from large to small. So it's easier to do it once at a time. There are other ways to look at product, especially if you come from a very strong technical background. There are companies that still only hire product managers who come from engineering, while there are other companies that prefer people that have stronger design or business backgrounds. You know, there are mobile products, web products, there are SaaS products, marketplaces. It's very important to do your research and work on identifying companies that are good fit for you based on some of these criteria, but also there may be other criteria that are important to you such as locations, salary expectations, other types of perks and so on. So keep this in mind because even though we always say product, product, product, it's more to it. But in any case, there is something very standard across the board, which is like some of the skillsets that you need to learn in order to become a great product manager. And again, this is based on data. This is based on understanding the pattern of students that went to flu college school and ended up getting jobs in product management. So we realized that there were three common characteristics across the board. One was technical background. Second one is domain expertise. And the third one is communication skills. So let me explain one by one. First one is computer science versus technical background. And here I don't say that you need to have a computer science degree or that you need to be able to code like a professional. No, it is true that you need to understand the product at every level and have the ability to learn and respect and earn the respect of your engineering team. So depending on the company, of course, there are companies that are still very, very engineering driven and for them having a basic technical background means having a PhD in physics. But there are many other companies that will still just want you to prove that you understand the difference between front end and back end. You know what's technical debt, you know how to, what's the release cycle that your engineers follow, what are the tools that they use. Hopefully you can understand code a little bit. So when you start, when you work on meetings with them, you can identify certain trade-offs you have to make or how to estimate the effort that certain tasks are going to take. So that's what I mean by technical background. There are multiple ways you can prove it. The best way is to build something by yourself. It doesn't need to be pretty, but it has to be yours. I'm not talking about getting a batch because you got an online course on Code Academy or similar website. I'm talking about literally writing a couple of lines of code by yourself and going through some of the struggle of understanding how engineers work on a daily basis. Obviously, you don't have to do it by yourself alone. You can also join a team, collaborate with a friend. You can hire a freelancer through one of these websites like Upwork, but at the end of the day you need to show something. And by the way, being technical is not just about writing code. Being technical is also about understanding data and being able to extract some data using CQL or other web analytics tools out there. Because even though it's not required that as a product manager you're going to be writing code or running CQL queries, the more self-sufficient you are, the better. Point number two is domain expertise. And we've really touched upon that before when I was saying that you definitely need to see what you have right now and see what other companies will care about that. You don't need an MBA, although if you have an MBA that's okay. It's a bonus point. You don't need to be a professional safe person. What's true is that you need to know everything about your industry, your product, your competitors. You need to be obsessed with your product and be that go-to person, that person who is resourceful. And it's always there to prove that you are a good connector in between all of these different groups. So how can you prove it? Well, there's so many events both online and offline out there that can help you. And the fact that you guys are joining these webinar groups that you are already on your way to becoming a product manager. You can obviously read books, like not only the one that we publish, but there are so many other books online that are good. You can find a lot of communities on Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn. There's so many discussion forums like Water where you can find information. But the reality is that it's probably too much. And at some point you have to go from quantity to quality and try to identify what are those two, three things that work for you. And instead of trying to go for everything, maybe just carve some time to stick to something that works for you and then take it from there. Something that works really well is trying to leverage your professional network. So I'm sure you have a LinkedIn profile. And if you are interested in a specific company or industry, I'm sure you have one friend who works there. And you can ping that person and have coffee and learn more about this. And from there, you never know. Maybe this person connects you with another person or maybe you called email someone that even though you don't know directly could help. So you have to be creative. But my point here is that at the end of the day, this is not magic. I am very big fan of putting things on the calendar and allocating some time of the week for learning. Otherwise, life gets busy and you tend to forget. And the last one is communication skills. So what I mean by this is that you don't need to be a public speaker or a book author. But you definitely need to be a good communicator over every single channel, not just email. You need to feel comfortable speaking in public, speaking in private. You need to feel comfortable having a phone conversation. And that's something that takes time. People that come from business backgrounds or consulting that are more used to working with all the stakeholders will understand this really well. The same way they probably struggle a little bit more with the technical background while engineers would usually, you know, feel very comfortable with the technical aspects of the product, but we'll have to work more on the communication skills. So how can you prove it? Well, best way to prove it is by show it. So there's no excuse these days not to create an article on a blog post or even on your own LinkedIn account or answer a question on Quora or participate on a discussion forum. So for me these days, it's actually more important to see your social, your online presence than your resume. So I definitely Google names to see not just what your LinkedIn profile about, but also if you are active on any other channels and it's not just about getting a job, but it's also about learning more about how to develop certain skills that you want to develop. And if you want to learn more of that at work, the very best piece of advice that I could give you is see when you can replace sending an email for having a conversation. Sometimes I know it is easier to send an email and copy a lot of people, but if you could try to avoid that sometimes and just briefly stick on the phone and then you can send an email with summary of what we discussed. I'm sure that would also save you in making the future and also make you a better communicator and manager after all. So these are the main topics that I wanted to review with all of you for the webinar today. And now I'd be happy to take some questions. Awesome. Thank you, Carlos. So we had a couple questions coming through. The first one is from Janelle for an 18 year old freshman in college, what undergraduate major and or minor would you recommend if you're interested in product management, specifically in the gaming industry. That's a really good question. Well, I mean, there is no undergraduate in product management. So I would say something that helped me a lot is to take computer science because learning how things work at a low level, then help me take one step further and try to think bigger. But having that technical background was always fundamental for many things. So that would be at least something that worked for me. And I'm sure there will be other options as well. Great. Thanks. And our next question is from Jennifer. Can you please cover the difference between project management and product management? Yeah, I think I covered that before, but just to summarize that. So most of the some companies where the product manager is also doing the project management, but when you get to a certain size and you need to divide responsibilities, the project manager is more tactical. It's the person who's going to be working on the timeline directly with engineers and correcting deviations on a daily basis, you know, understanding every single little detail that happens in the engineering room every day. And then the product manager is going to have a little zoom out a little bit more and have a bigger impact connecting engineering with design with business and owning the roadmap. Okay. And our last question, because we're running out of time here came from Slack. Actually, what is your advice for getting a job at a larger company, for example, Google, LinkedIn or Spotify? And how is that compared to getting a job at a smaller company like a startup, for example? So, similar to what I discussed before, it all depends on your background. Like if you have a lot of experience working in startups, it will be easier for you to justify why you want to join another startup. And it will be harder for you to justify why you want to join a large organization if you've never been there. The same time if you have a lot of experience in a large organization, it'll be easier to explain why you want to join a larger organization. I'm not saying it's impossible to switch, but it will be definitely if your priorities to switch like company sizes, I will probably try to go for a horizontal move and try to do it in the same role and then try a different role because if you try to switch roles and company sizes at the same time, it's going to be almost impossible. So I will do it one step at a time. Awesome. Thank you, Carlos. Before we close out, can you share your final advice for aspiring product managers? Sure. I'm a big fan of building. So if you can start by building something that will teach you a lot and then from there you will probably get addicted and you will want to build more and more and more. So at some point you will realize that you want to learn more and some people are totally fine learning on the go or getting mentors, other people prefer to get some structure training, whatever that is, but I will definitely start by building something. Awesome. Thank you again, Carlos, for joining us today. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye.