 Hello everybody. Hope you're all doing well. Thank you for joining me today to talk about why product managers shouldn't be striving for perfection in the workplace. Let's get started. My name is Samantha Nara Harisetti. I'm a product manager at House. For those of you that are unfamiliar with House, we are a home design inspiration platform. We also have a e-commerce marketplace at House that sells home goods and furniture, and this is the team that I'm part of. Here at our marketplace, I specifically focus on repeat purchase behavior and the overall customer lifetime value. If you'd like to connect with me later or ask any questions, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look for me by my full name. A little bit of background about me. I started my career as an iOS developer for a banking client with TCS. Here I was working on building iPhone and iPad applications for this banking client. I left that role to pursue my MBA. I went to business school at the University of Arizona with the hopes of actually moving into tech consulting. While I was in school and throughout my internship, I was introduced to the field of product management and decided to pursue that path instead. Out of school, I landed a product manager position at Overshark.com on their mobile apps team, thanks to my iOS Dev background. At Overshark, I was focused on customer acquisition and conversion on the app, so essentially getting people to download the app and make a purchase on the app. After Overshark, I moved on to Carfax to launch a new product for them from scratch. This is a new web-based product. It's a web-based marketplace, and my focus there was organic traffic growth and user engagement on the platform. Here's the agenda for today. We'll start off by defining who a perfectionist is and how this might translate to your everyday life and work. We'll also talk about how a product manager's role is far from that of a perfectionist, and why you should and need to embrace perfection as a product manager. So, are you a perfectionist? By definition, a perfectionist is someone who has a personality that strives for lawlessness. This often occurs by fixating on imperfections, trying to control situations, working really hard, and or being critical of themselves or others around them. Do you relate to any of these, or at least in some degree? I know these seem a bit extreme, but these behaviors can actually translate to your everyday work and life in a few ways. So, let's ask ourselves a few questions. Do you put off doing something until the time is right or you have it all figured out and you can start doing it and getting it done perfectly? Or, when you think of an idea or a task, you either do it all or you don't do it at all. There's just no in between, like there's no progressive steps. Or, do you get upset when you don't get the results that you wanted, even though you've got some of the results, but not all? And lastly, do you expect yourself to give your best in every situation and nothing short of perfect is acceptable? If you answer yes to any or most of these, then you are a perfectionist to some degree. Not that being a perfectionist is a bad thing, but as a product manager, it is a required skill to be able to work in chaos, in uncertainty and to react and pivot really quickly on the job. Perfection, for us at least, has been glamorized since our childhood and as you progress in your journey as a product manager, you need to learn to embrace and practice in perfection. So let's look at how a perfectionist and a product manager skills are completely opposite. There you go. So as you can see, just as you go down the line, some of the characteristics of a perfectionist are pretty much different from that of a product manager and what they're expected to do on their job every day. And today we'll just kind of go down the list, just one by one and talk a little bit in detail about how you can tackle each of these perfectionist traits. As a product manager, just some big little tips that you can do at work that could help you just kind of combat some of these traits. So the first one we'll talk about is overcoming procrastination. This honestly needs a little bit of rewiring of the brain. So for me, I am someone that I do procrastinate at times and usually when I don't know the right way to do something or I don't have all the details. So one way this translates to my job is in the form of writing product requirement documents or PRDs, I will wait till I knew all the details to get started and not shared with the team until it was all flushed out. So this is not ideal because it might take a while before you know every single thing about that project. So one of the best advices to tackle this and I read this online is to simply get started. So start to document, fill out the headers and all the info that you would need as part of the document what questions you have, what other information you would need, things like that. So basically you want to empty your brain at every point onto the document. This way you're tracking the document in by size pieces versus taking the whole chunk as one. So just starting, just getting started helps in a couple of ways. One, you understand the gaps in your knowledge of the initiative itself. And two, it helps estimate the amount of work that is needed by you to fill out the doc and you will accordingly plan your next steps. Three, it really reduces the anxiety within you to start and finish the document because you're working on it, you're making progress. And four, a lot of the features that you build as a product manager, they require like cross-functional work with other teams. So they can look at this document as you're working on it and start adding their inputs, their questions. And essentially the work can get started a lot quicker because work is continuously happening on the document as you're working on it. Now, another example that I gave you was very specific. It's around a product requirements document, but this could be essentially any task you have. All you have to do is just get started and tackle in by size pieces. The next one is overcoming a all or nothing mindset. As a product manager, you're responsible for launching new and exciting features. Sometimes these products have multiple elements and each of these elements could be adding to the overall effort and the time needed to launch this feature. Now, the problem is as a product manager, these new features that you're looking to build and launch, they're often based on an understanding of your customer, of your product, of the data behind your product. So essentially you're hypothesizing that launching this feature is going to be impactful and beneficial to both your product and your customer. You don't know that for sure most of the time. So what we should be doing is testing our hypothesis in small increments, taking an iterative approach, meaning we should only be creating a MVP version of these products. So if you're not familiar, an MVP or a minimal viable product is basically the most minimum version of your feature that you can build and launch to test your hypothesis. So once your hypothesis proves right, you can go on adding other bells and whistles to your feature and keep optimizing it to where you want it to the ideal state. This is also the most cost efficient approach to building a product because imagine the opposite. Imagine you went all in on this new feature that took several weeks or months to build and it didn't create the impact that you thought it would or it is actually dragging down the metrics in a negative way, we don't want that. So what you wanna do is take these small steps while building your product. So again, taking an iterative approach. The third one is overcoming being heavily disoriented. Yes, of course, as a PM, you show impact by through the results you're gaining, but like we talked about in the previous slide, our ideation of what we're going to build next or the next feature is typically based on a hypothesis. Again, around our understanding of our customer, of our product and how our product performs. Seldom, we would know for sure that this product or feature is going to launch and drive up the metrics. So with the information that we have, we launch a product, sometimes it might not do well and that's okay because being a product manager is all about experimentation. If you don't get the results that you wanted, it is our responsibility as a product manager to pause, go back and understand why we didn't get the results that we wanted, what could have gone wrong, is the feature not working as expected, is some things that are friction in the flow or in the user experience. So learn from that and pivot your strategy based on what you just learned rather than following the plan that you already had before. So make a plan for the follow-up builds and test again, again, being a product manager is all about experimentation. So most of the time we will not be going from zero to hero, it's not a zero to one approach, it's always about making progress as we build the feature out. The next one, let's talk about learning to not be self-critical and appreciate yourself. Like the example in the last slide, when a feature or its results don't go as planned, remember, just be kind to yourself. Even if the feature doesn't win, take it as a learning opportunity and celebrate it. You should focus on the process from that launch, learn from it and move forward. Remember that the destination is always not easy to reach, especially for a product manager, but when you enjoy the journey, the destination just becomes that much sweeter. And don't forget to tell yourself that you did a good job and just focus on learning forward. And I want to emphasize on this because as a product manager, this will happen to you so many times in your career, possibly potentially on a daily basis, given just you're working on multiple features at a time, or things can go wrong, due to factors that are external to you and your company, so you just have to take it with us, right? The fifth one is overcoming imposter syndrome. Just have you ever felt like you didn't belong in a job or you didn't deserve a job? It just felt really guilty about it. So this is called imposter syndrome and it is loosely defined as doubting your abilities to do a certain job and basically feeling like a fraud. As a product manager, it is very common to feel this way, mostly because our job is very chaotic, it's very vague, and it's hardly defined with the structure. You have ownership over a lot of different aspects of your product and it changes day to day, minute to minute, feature to feature. So the lack of that structure sometimes makes you feel like you don't know what you're doing. One day you know everything, another day you know nothing about your job. And you need to remember that you're not alone, this happens to all product managers, this happens to everybody, no matter who they are, what job they're in, everybody's learning on the job. And secondly, recognize when you feel guilt and manage it. Tell yourself again that you're deserving of this job because which is why I had that in the first place. So just be kind to yourself. And the next one is how to overcome overcorrection. So everybody, no matter who they are, they receive feedback in their job or as part of their performance review, from time to time they do receive feedback. But for a product manager, it's a little bit different because we receive feedback almost every day, whether it is from our customers not making our feature or another team not being able to prioritize our info, seeming brighter than the features or not having all the info for our stakeholders not feeling aligned with their roadmap. Feedbacks comes to us in all different shapes and forms. It can get overwhelming but it's important again to remember just not to react immediately, not react emotionally or over correct immediately after getting the feedback. Understand what the feedback is and where it's coming from. And just take the feedback constructively, listen to what is being said and apply it in a way that makes sense for what you're doing for your product. Don't just blindly apply the feedback for you at work. You need to take a step back, reflect on the feedback and then react accordingly. And the last one to overcome is expecting perfection from others. If anything, this is the most important trait to have as a product manager is not expecting perfection from everybody else because 100% of your tasks are cross functional. So you work with many, many different teams, many different people. You will rarely work on something by yourself, just by yourself. So when we work with so many different people and different teams, each team and each person, they have their own processes, they have their own working styles. So some ways to manage expectations for yourself and for everybody else is when working with different teams or people, be clear in what you're asking for. So what do you need from them? Why do you need it? When do you need it by? Is there a specific format or template to watch you're asking? Et cetera, things like that. Two, if it is a long task that is going to take several days or weeks, have intermittent touch points with the folks on the team to see the progress of the task. So in case it's not going the right direction, you can always stop and pivot the team in the right direction. This is better than waiting till the end and realizing that it hasn't gone the way that you wanted it. Three, and you need to manage your own expectations. Again, like I said, not everybody works like you or in the same pace as you, some people are pastors, some people slower than the way they work. So accepted things will be a bit different and you need to communicate with your team to work in harmony with them. And lastly, be patient while you're going to work with your team because as you're learning, they're also learning to work with you. So that is the end. Thank you all for your time today. I'd encourage each and every one of you to think about what perfectionist traits you have even if it's a fraction of it and think about how that affects your everyday life and work. Should we have a message on LinkedIn if you have any questions that you'd like to chat? Thank you, everybody.