 Hi. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me. Thank you everyone for joining. I'm sure you heard a lot of speeches about product management already, so today I want to focus specifically on you, your career management. So how can you bring your product manager career in the direction that you want to? I'm Fabio Matusi. I've been working in tech for more than 15 years and my experience covers from startups to 4 to 100 companies and a lot in between. So I want to share with you what are the main takeaways that I got through my career and see if anything resonates with you. So on the other hand, I've been an entrepreneur myself and founder of several startups, one of that being faster skills where I coach executives and managers to help them bring their career in the way that they want. And so the merging of these two things is the result of this presentation. I hope you like it and there is my LinkedIn in case you're having so many problems or just if you want to be in touch with me and give me any comments or suggestions or constructive feedback, it's always more than welcome. I'll be happy to be in touch with you. So first of all, I want to make sure that you have the right expectation for this presentation and what it will and will not give you. So on one side, it will not give you a black and white picture of all the possible choices that you have in the market. There are so many different companies and industries and I cannot pretend to be an expert in each and every one of them. What I can do, though, is to give you the idea of what are the different shades and implications between two opposite sides of the equation. So if we talk about startups, what can you expect as compared to a big corp, for example? And I'm not the source of truth for anything in general, so don't think at this as a hard rock truth. He said that startups work this way and big corp work this other way. There's a lot that will change based on what are the companies you're going to be working into. So what I want is to just share my experience and see what resonates with you so you can use it if it's of help at all. I will not be able to tell you what the right choice is for you because you know yourself way better than I do. But I can give you a framework that will hopefully help you in the support of decision making in your career process. So I'm sure that in every product course that you have started to listen to, at some point, they said, you need to understand your user. And so for me, I'm starting from there for this presentation and you are my user. So now that you are a product manager, what are you going to do? What is the career that you're looking for? What are the companies that you can apply for? And there's two different perspectives here that really make a difference in how you're going to approach the problem. And I'm not saying that one is better than the other. When I was at the end of my MBA, for example, had a huge debt and money was tied. So I had to find a job, a job that would pay me right away. And that's what I've done. But then later on, when I had the luxury of actually choosing what was my career course and where I was going, then I switched to a different approach. So if you are on the find a job site, so you need a job right away, you probably want a shotgun approach. You can you can see here, this probably gives away of being in gaming for a while. So the shotgun approach is that you maximize for volume. So I would say you list all the job boards that you can find, link it in indeed and whatnot. And you create profiles on all of them. They have notifications that you can subscribe to and newsletters so that you will receive all the job posts that come out every day. Maybe the most important thing for this approach is that you define a daily routine so that you make sure that every day you review all the new job posts. There are job posts that are from popular companies that get their candidates in a matter of minutes. So if you apply an hour later, there's already 200 300 applications. So you want to be one of the first if at all possible. And I'm saying apply to at least 10 30 positions per day. That's quite an arbitrary number. But that's just to say, don't apply to one or two and hope to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. If you're optimizing for volume, you need to put that volume in there. And then one thing you can do is to write to all of your contacts on LinkedIn or not. And then figure out if there is any opening that you think can match your product management skill in their company. And more often than not, that's a very easy way to get to that first interview and move things from there. On the other hand, if you want to have a more sniper approach, so you optimize for what is the best fit for you? What is your dream job? What is it that you are going to be doing that you really will like in the place that you like with the team that you like? And so on and so forth, then you probably will get the most value from this presentation. And so I'm going to dig into that. So analyzing different sides of your decision making, I'm going to start from size. Size has an impact for you because the difference from a startup and a big corporation, for example, is that there's a very few product managers on one side and there's hundreds of product managers on the other side. And here, the implications for you are at very different levels. So for example, if you like visibility, you like to be reporting to the executive management or the CEO, then you're probably better off on the startup side because the team is going to be way smaller and you're going to be noticed and you're going to be in the position where you can talk to the CEO every day and have a relationship with the other members of the startup. This doesn't mean that you cannot have it on the corporate side, but it depends on where you start and how long it's going to take you to get to the executive management. Responsibility as well is going to be more on the side of the startup because there's less people to do the job, the percentage of impact that you bring is way, way higher than a company that has hundreds of product managers. And therefore, it's very important that you understand that that responsibility is something that people will look at from you. So they are going to be looking at you to take ownership of your part. And that means also sometimes that the workload is going to be quite big because there's just not enough people to cover every single aspect of product management. And so you're going to be in the position where you're going to have an opportunity to develop some skills that are not necessarily just product management, but it might be a little bit of understanding of more of the UI design or the UX design or what is it that the data analyst team is supposed to bring to you and maybe there is no data team, so you will have to do that analysis yourself. And so that's why I'm putting it here a little bit of in the middle because it also depends on when you join the company. So it might be that it is a big corporation, but maybe that part of the corp is not well structured and developed yet, and therefore you will have to develop those skills anyway. In some other situations, more often than not, there's going to be dedicated teams with tens of people in it that do just UI, just UX, just data. And so you're going to be relying on them for everything that is not strictly product management. And then time to market. I put it in the middle between the two as well because again, it depends on where you're joining. So if you join a startup at the very, very beginning, it might be that it's going to take months, if not at least a year, to have a product that you bring to market. But on the corporate side, it could be the same if you're starting from scratch on a new product. But if they have already a structure in place and maybe they're just already having a product that they are improving over time, maybe the deployment is every three months or six months. And so it really depends on where it is. It's just for you to think that this is something that might affect your decision making. So you might want to ask about it. Culture, this is in the middle because it totally depends on you, on what you like. The startup culture is going to be a lot of excitement, a lot of people that feel that they're building something new. And you might get that excitement as well on the big corporations, but the difference is also what is the risk behind it. So what if this startup doesn't make it and instead on the other side, if you have a big corp, it's already established, it has products on the market, that type of thrill, it's not necessarily always there. And that doesn't mean that it's a good or a bad thing. It just depends on how do you sleep well at night and what excites you to go to work every morning. So think about what is the culture of the company that you want to join. On the development tool side, here is where probably you're going to be finding more on the big corp side because they might have more of programs for development. So they might have already third party tools that allow you to get access to videos or Harvard reviews or anything that is helpful in developing your career. There's also going to be probably trainings that you have to go through in management, in people management, in product management. And so all these tools sometimes are available to you already the moment that you join and you can just use them on a platform in your time at the company. While on the startup side, it's going to be probably more of hands-on learning on the job. And growth opportunity, I'm putting it on the right side mainly because I'm factoring in it the risk. So you know that growth opportunity can be great for a startup in the sense that if you are one of the founders or one of the ones that were in the starting team, then it's going to be great because obviously everything starts from there. And if the company grows, you're going to be already there. But on the other hand, it also means that the company has to grow. And so it will take time for the company to grow. And you know the percentage of success in startups. It's completely different than the probability of a big company to disappear in tomorrow. And so that growth opportunity in a big company is more about moving to a different department or grow inside the team that you are or grow laterally or completely change your function because you decided that you're going to be in product strategy instead of product management because you thought that it's something very interesting for you. And if the culture of the company allows for that, then obviously there's more of opportunities and teams that you can move to. Another thing you definitely want to keep in mind on growth opportunity is also the fact that if you work for one of the big fives in tech, that has a different weight on your resume. If you're looking for another job outside of the company, you want to change say one year or two years from now, having those corporations on your resume will open a lot of doors just because they're there. By opening the door doesn't mean you get the job, but at least they're going to call you for an interview. In my experience, the best spot for me was to work in startups that were recently acquired or that were already part of a bigger holding so that you get the best on both words. Specifically, you get the startup vibe that everybody's so excited and they really want to make the company successful. But on the other hand, you have all the development tools and the growth opportunity of moving around different teams and companies within the holding that you wouldn't have otherwise in a smaller one. Next is scope. By scope, I mean do you want to work in industry? So in specific companies that do one or a few things or do you want to be a consultant? So those two things are mainly different because when you work in the industry, you are completely focused on either one product or one industry at a time. And as long as you stay there, that's what you're going to be working with. If you are a consultant, you might be changing products and even industries depending on what is the strategy of your consulting company and what are the customers doing. And so you're going to be on different projects all the time. The biggest comment that I hear when I talk about this with candidates that I'm helping is that their drive for choosing one or the other is the impact they can get on the product. And that's because when you are in industry, that is your own product. So you feel the ownership of that product from beginning to end. And that's what you think at during all day. That's what you think when you go home, when you come back the next day and you are super, super focused on that specific product, the impact that you're bringing to that and the product choices that you can make and the control that you have over them, it's great because you are very close to it and you are with the management team that actually makes that happen. If you are a consultant, you still have an impact and this depends on how you define impact, but usually you are making recommendations. So the final client might or might not implement what you tell them is the best way to do it. And you have to be okay with that. On the other side, you don't have that control, but you can also have the sense of accomplishment that you worked on very different products. And that is why I'm putting this in the middle, because it really depends on you. So for me, for example, when I was working as a consultant, I didn't miss at all that sense of belonging. On one side, I was working for three weeks to three months on any project. And I was happy with that because I liked the variety, I liked to do different things. And the belonging was coming from the consulting company. This was more than 10 years ago, and I still have in my closet the t-shirt that I got that year because we were one of the best companies within that holding for the place to work. I probably moved more than 20 different houses and apartments, and that t-shirt is still with me. So I'm not saying one place is better than the other consulting versus industry, but you need to figure out where do you want to belong and how close do you want to get to the decision making for that product. So on the consulting side, obviously the other thing is the industry diversity. So if you work with the consulting company that helps different industries, even within tech, for example, you can get exposed to so many different things. And this is also something that you might want to factor in where you are in your career. So if you want to explore, maybe because you are at the beginning of your career, and you want to get a feeling for you're not quite sure what you will like the most, but then you can focus later on versus you're already clear on what you want, and then you just want to go to that industry because you really like it. So that's up to you. Next is user. Is the user internal to the company or is it external? What I mean by that is, are you developing a product that is using internally for the company, or is it something that is customer facing that all of your friends and family can purchase at any point in time? So those two things are completely different. And one of the main things that I want to focus on is the data availability. You probably heard a lot, as I was saying before, that you need to think as your user, you need to understand your user. While in real life, that means that you have to have a way to get that information from your user. And of course, if you're sitting close to them because you're working with these people and you're developing tools for them, that's going to be way easier to get that data and that qualitative input as compared to having to run a specific research. So you can still get that. So you can still get the quantitative and qualitative feedback, even if the product is external. And obviously you will. The difference is in the timing. So and the friction that you will have to get that data as compared to just talk about that product in your coffee break. On the other hand, the market visibility of a product that is external, it's obviously bigger because it's not just for the people in the company, but it's for everybody. So there's people that I've been coaching in the past that had their main drive was, this is what I want to be doing because when I go home and I talk to my friends and we're in front of the TV and they open that app, I can say, I made that. I did that part. I did that screen. This is why I did this. This is why I did that. And they were taking a great proud into working on these products because they could show off with their friends and family, which is great. And they were really excited about it. And so obviously that's not something that you're going to necessarily get if you're working on an internal product. You might have that same popularity or not, depending on the product that you get with your co-worker. So it's really up to you, which ones you want to prioritize on that. Also on the external side, you have the whole part of the competitor analysis. If you like to do that, that's a very interesting exercise. What are the competitors doing? If you are developing an internal product, you will see less of that. Business model. Is it business to business or business to customer? The main implication here is that if you are on the business to business side, you have fewer business clients. This is not always true, obviously. You might work with a company that has hundreds of clients in the B2B, but also this compares to millions of clients per comparison on the B2C. So what I'm trying to say here is that there's orders of magnitude, of difference, and those have the following implications. So for the requirement gathering, for example, if you are in B2B or way closer to your client, that's just either a call away or if you have sales people, they're going to be telling you everything they hear on the calls, they want their customers to be happy. And so they're going to come back with all the feedback that you need for the specific product that you're building to make sure that it fits their needs. And so that part is going to be way easier than asking 3 million users what they think about your product and organize all that information. Now, that is also true for qualitative feedback, more than quantitative feedback, because it's way easier to have a call with one of your business clients as compared to having a full-fledged research that brings a lot of the B2C users in the room, because you need to sample them, you need to figure out which segments they are part of so that their research actually makes sense. And so that also plays into another side, which makes it, at least for me, a little bit more fun on the B2C side, and it's the prioritization autonomy. What I mean by that is that you have more of a chance to say these are the 15 features that we want to prioritize. Looking at the data, we believe that these are the top two that we should focus on. If you are on the B2B side, those two are probably the ones that the client was yelling the most about in the last meeting. Not saying that that's not fun as well, but just for my business analyst attitude, that's more fun to work with, as well as defining goals and the KPIs. There's a big difference in building something that has to have a long session duration as compared to something that is optimized for frequency of use or user acquisition, for example. And so those things are something that you can engineer with your team or with your management. If you are on the B2C side, sometimes you can do that on the B2B as well, but I think it's going to be more probable that you find it on this way. And then there's market segmentation. If you like to have a role that works a lot with marketing and what is the landscape of users looking for, this is definitely the part where you can find a lot of that. I had a lot of fun working with the teams that were making these researches. You can have a lot of input into what are the questions that are going to ask the user, and you might be even in the room when you do the interviews with the user. It's really a lot of fun to engineer the whole study behind it. So up till now, we have looked into many different parameters for your decision-making, more than 20. So if you look at every one of them and how it interacts with all the other ones, that might make things really complex to make an actual decision. So how do you organize that 20-dimensional space in a way that you can actually navigate it to create an action plan for what you really want to do? Well, again, here it depends on how you think. Are you a left brainer or a right brainer? So are you more intuitive or are you more analytical? And if you cannot choose, just use both and you're going to be fine. If you're more intuitive, you're going to be probably leveraging your gut feeling, and so just leverage that. So to do that, one thing you can do is to write down your top two or three choices and then explore them emotionally. By emotionally, I mean that you actually think about how is your day going to be looking like? You're going to wake up, you're going to go to that office, how is the office going to look like? Are you going to say hi to a couple of friends in the company or are you going to be entering a cafeteria with hundreds of people? How does that make you feel? And then you can share those feelings with someone close that hopefully likes you enough to give you some interesting feedback. And more often than not, it's very easy for somebody who knows you to get an understanding of what really excites you. When you talk about it, you're probably smiling a lot and you are very excited about one of the choices more than the others, even though you don't really realize that consciously. But this is a great exercise. I do that all the time and well, maybe I abuse a little bit of my friends and family for this, but I really get good value out of it every time I do. If you're more on the analytical side, then you're going to be likely more data driven. So in this case, the data, you have to fabricate the data. And let's see how we can do that and how you can put it in a framework that will help you make a decision. So if you look back at the four slides that we had before, each one of them had all the parameters listed. So you can grab those parameters and put them all in one long line. So you see visibility, workload, and that's going to be the first line of your matrix. Then you will add the weights. The weights are basically saying, how important is this thing for me? So say you use a scale from zero to five, where zero is, I don't really care. And five is, this is really important to me. And you score visibility at five. It means that you really value the visibility of your job, meaning that you really want to be close to the management team. You want to be either reporting to the CEO or some of the very close execs that make the decisions. And instead, the workload, if you score that as two, it means you really don't care if you're staying up late or working weekends, because that's not a big deal for you. Then you can list all the different jobs and roles. So say, for example, this could be different companies or different roles at the same company. And then you score what those visibility and workload and everything else that you've put there, what is good for you? So if you say visibility five, it means that in that role, you're probably either reporting to the CEO or you are very close to the management team. The workload of three, it means that, well, maybe it's a little bit more than what you liked, but it's still tolerable. So you're still okay with that. While for role two, for example, you're not going to be as close to the management team because you score that as a three. But in this case, the workload is going to be just fine. You're going to have a great life work balance because the team is well-stuffed. And so the workload is going to be fine. And then you keep doing this for all of the parameters for all the different roles. At the end, what you do is you calculate a fit score. A fit score, it's simply a weighted sum that multiplies the weights by the scores that you've put in there. So for example, for role one, you do visibility, your weight is five. And so you multiply that by five and then you sum workload weight, which is two, you multiply that by three, you sum all that up and you get that score. You do the same for all of these. And basically what you get on the fit score column is a score that says, how good is this job for me? How likely am I to be happy in this role? And then at the end, all you need to do is to just sort the jobs by the fit score and take the first one. That's it. That's the one that fits the most. And then probably want to do the intuitive exercise with at least the first one or two to make sure that you're right on track with that. So summarizing, do your own research before you apply to the company. Try to understand how those parameters that we talked about before may affect how happy you're going to be there. During the interview process, ask the questions if you're not sure about what the culture is like and how is the team going to be structured? Are there supporting teams that are going to be helping you doing the job? Or are you going to be doing all the different things by yourself? And then connect with the current employees. If you have a chance, that's the best way to get a feeling for how it is to work in that place, in that role. Be clear on what you want. This is something that only you can do. I offered some ideas here during this presentation. You saw the different parameters. You can go back and look at them, but also feel free to add something that maybe I didn't think or I didn't talk about and add it to the framework so that it can be helpful for your decision-making. Then you prioritize them. As we've seen, you score all the options in the matrix and you have your favorites. At this point, take your time to decide. If you have a chance, consider all the final options before you make a call. Don't rush it and play the different scenarios. Think about what are all the other implications on your career and not only on what you're doing today for this specific role, but how is that role going to be helping you get into your next thing two, three years from now? And then you can make the final call. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the time with you and I hope that this helps you find your way. I'm sure you'll do great. Good luck.