 All right, all right, all right. Welcome to Heap's first ever product salon on the European continent. Today we're gonna be covering developing as a product manager with our guest Petra Vile. My name is Sam Casten. I am a senior sales manager here at Heap. Don't be caught off guard by the goofy American accent. I am based out of our London office and I'm thrilled to be a part of the dialogue today. Over my past three plus years at Heap, my absolute favorite part of what I've been able to do has been connecting and meeting with product people, product leaders from companies like IBM, Hewlett, Blumenwild, Crowdcube and so many others and really to invest in them and to learn more about them. Couple of housekeeping items before we totally jump into today's webinar. First things first, all of you are muted. So at this time just hang tight but a recording of the webinar will also be passed along to everyone following the session. So don't feel super stressed about taking notes. We'll make sure you get a copy of everything we covered today. However, we do want this to be about you, to be interactive. So please, please, please take advantage of the questions function within the go-to-webinar control panel. We want to make sure that the questions and the points of this dialogue that are relevant to you are fielded so that we can make sure that Petra gets a chance to address those. One other piece is we wanna make sure that everyone, you know, this doesn't end today. This is about a continual investment in your career. So look out for some follow-up, maybe some homework to make sure that the value doesn't stop with today's webinar. For those of you unfamiliar, I did wanna share a little bit about HEAP. So HEAP is an awesome, awesome disruptor in the product analytics space. We pretty much take and combine, you know, a unique data foundation with proactive insights and now this new view of, you know, tethering together both quantitative and qualitative data in a place where, you know, people can make insight faster. So again, today's dialogue is not about HEAP. It's very much about you. However, if you are interested in learning a little bit more about HEAP, feel free to take a picture of the QR code and we can follow up with that afterwards. But again, as I said, today is very much about you. And that's why we've been so excited to partner with someone like Petra Vile. Petra is passionate about product people, their careers, mentorship and development. So, you know, without kind of further ado, I'd love to introduce Petra Vile. Hello, everybody. So cool to be here. I will share my slides in a second if it works. It should. So hello, lovely product people from all over the world. I'm super glad that he invited me today to talk a bit more on the topic of how you could develop as a product management personality. And I love to start the sessions with some insights. Did you know that only about 25% of product people do report that the company or their line managers support self-progression? This means on the other hand, that 75% of you, of all the PMs out there are not optimally supported when it comes to the topic of personal and professional development. And I think this needs to change. My name is Asad Petra Vile and I'm a product leadership coach and it is my mission to help, yeah, product team leads heads of product directors to become the best product coaches that people ever had and to have product people to take control of their own product journey. And this session today, as I mentioned it in the introduction is about the letter part. So it hopefully will help you to figure out what you need to become better at to become an even better product manager. And to do so in the session, I will share the three main ingredients that you need when it comes to growing as a product person substantially over time. And then I will talk about a framework that could make this journey way easier. And hopefully you could use some of the things we are talking about today in a session with yourself tomorrow, so to say. Let's start with ingredient number one, time. Okay, so that should be obvious. If you don't invest some of your time in your personal development, nothing will change. And you won't get any better. But in fact, I see many, many product people that have not yet understood that lesson and remain rather passive when it comes to their personal development or not tackling it in a structured way. If I ask them, some of my coaches, why they are not making some more time for their personal development, the answers usually are, and maybe you can find yourself in there. Petra, I just don't know where to start or I don't know what to learn. Or it's, I didn't know that it's my job. Actually, my company has a pretty vibrant product community. I wait for them to organize some trainings. I just go there. Or it is, I just don't know how to find my time, the time my best schedules are so busy. And I kind of understand number one and number two and the session today will hopefully help you with that. But three and four, waiting for somebody else to help you grow, that is usually just the waste of time because if your company or your line manager would really care, they would have already started to support you. And even if they do, it is still on you to do the heavy lifting, so to say. Waiting for others and hoping them to change you is just as asking somebody else to exercise on your behalf. And as we know, we don't get the apps from other people's crunches. It's a pity, but that's how it is. So you need to find some time and you need to invest it wisely. And if it's more of a, I'm number four, I can't find the time because my schedules are so busy. Then maybe the good message is you already found your first personal development topic because then it's all about prioritization. You need to prioritize your personal learning and your personal growth. And to make this a bit easier, I have some good reasons for you and some arguments where this should actually matter to you. Investing in yourself is completely portable. You carry it wherever you go. When you invest in yourself, the skills, the experiences, and the connections that you make along the way are all yours to keep. So make the time. And when it comes to preparing for the future, we are often told that we need to invest early on. The context of this usually is that of financial investing, obviously. But I think the same metaphor applies to career development, right? You will benefit from investments you made early on in your career throughout your career. So the time is now. Make some time for your personal development. And last but not least, another good reason why you really should dedicate some time to personal development is that we overestimate what we can achieve in a week. All of us, all the time. You know it from the work with your teams. And we totally underestimate what we can achieve in the years. So consistency really beats intensity. When I talk to my employees, I usually tell them that they should start with a small time budget, maybe 20 minutes a week, and then do something that they enjoy doing. And then be consistent with this 20 minutes a week. Because once you see the positive effects that it has to do this consistent investment in your personal learning, it is way easier to maybe make more room for this or to push it higher on your prioritization. Or in the words of Christina Vodka, and that's maybe another push in the right direction, she says like, learning velocity is the number one competitive advantage in the 21st century. And I really agree with that. To help you get going, I will now share the various things that you need to learn something new. And we will reflect on the things that you're already doing, because I promise that some of your time is already invested in some of these activities and you're doing much more of that already than you actually notice. You learn by consuming books, blog posts, podcasts, attending sessions like this. And you need to improve skills by applying what you've learned in your daily work, either that or in the side project that you're currently having. It's not always possible that you apply what you currently want to learn in your day-to-day jobs. Sometimes you need to find the inside project where you could train a particular skill. Reflection helps you to make sure that you're investing your time wisely and contributing to the product community. And it doesn't matter if it's your small company's product tribe or if it's the global product community, like the world heaps currently creating. That helps you to see how much you have already learned about a certain topic. And if you're explaining what you learned to others, it actually deepens your knowledge, so to say. Now, please take a minute or two. Actually, I think I will grant you two minutes. Draw this little two by two or take your favorite note taking app on your mobile phone. And then just note the things that you do or really like doing in each of these quadrants. So what are you doing to consume things, to gain new knowledge? What are the things? How are you applying what you learned? What is your way of reflecting on things and where are you contributing to either your company's community of practice or another community? I will mute myself for 120 seconds. Use my little time timer and come back in two minutes. Yeah, feel free to take some notes. Coming back to two by two and your notes. Hopefully you found something here and there. No matter how you two by two looks like, I would encourage you to over time find something for each quadrant. Because consuming is good as said, if you want to acquire new know-how. GDPR rules, for example, that's something you could easily acquire by reading a blog post about it. Applying is key if you want to build a new skill. So skills are always something that you need to practice, that you need to train, they need to run through the inspector and the gap cycle. That's actually the applying bit. Reflecting helps you to make sure that you're still on track with your learning goals. So to say, and we will talk about learning goals in a second a bit more. And contribution is what leads to true mastery. I see a lot of people being too shy on the contribution bit, but you could do it really low key if you're attending a conference or watching a webinar like this today. And maybe you can give your colleagues a summary of what you learned and what you liked about it and what have been your main takeaways. That is already a contribution and that helps you to reflect on this webinar and on your learnings. So it could be really low key, but try to find something in each other's body. And if you're finding a balance that is right for you, it is way more likely that you're doing it and you are consistent with your learning. For example, I love listening to podcasts. So that's my way of consuming new knowledge or audiobooks or reading. There are some books behind me, but reading is a bit of a hard thing with a kid at home. So audiobooks work better. Find something that works for you. Okay, now that we have talked about why it is important to find the time, we can move on to ingredient number two. And if you have questions about finding the time S, I mentioned we will have more time for questions later on. Ingredient number two, it is super important to find an ally or allies. You need three kinds of outside perspectives to help you grow substantially over time. And all of this could be something your line manager is capable of. But they often are just too busy to provide you with all three perspectives. And there is a way how you could still get these three perspectives. So there is hope. Let's take a closer look to what you actually need. So first of all, you need people who provide you with feedback regarding your work, your role and your performance to improve exactly that. And that can be something like how a particular meeting went or how you perceive for others when living at home. The second perspective that you need is somebody who knows what a good product person looks like. So what is the good? What should you be striving for? And the person that helps you see your blind spots. And the last perspective that you need is somebody who really helps you to live up to your full potential. So somebody who really believes in you. And if your line manager is not delivering or not helping you with these three perspectives, I think it's worse to form your own growth supporting group or something like that. You could find colleagues that are providing you feedback on a regular basis. And please make sure if they do to give something back and return, otherwise it's a really short feedback cycle. Then you could actively reach out to your line manager and ask for, hey, I would love to hear where you see some blind spots of where I could improve my skills. Or you could go outside of the company or even inside of the company in slightly different roles and go find yourself a mentor. There is a really nice with the thread by Gibson Biddle about how to find a mentor. It's not an easy task, but you could do it. And the mentor is usually the person that provides this perspective of I really believe in you and your skills and in your strengths that I'm happy to help you to get better in what you're currently doing. And another thing it could be do, you could reach out to a group of like-minded people either within the company or without the company, people that want to learn or improve the same skill or the same things. And another idea is go get yourself a coach if you have a learning topic. So coaching only makes sense if there is something that you want to get better at that you really actively want to improve and then get a coach for a limited period of time helping you to grow substantially. So no matter how you are compiling your little support group, make sure you find these people and then make sure to listen to what they have to tell you. You don't have to take all the advice for granted or you don't have to use all of the feedback they provide you. But first of all, you need to listen to what they have. Now we've discussed time is important, finding allies is important, but you still might say, Petra, nice session so far, but where to start? What are the things that I actually need to learn? And that brings me to ingredient number three. It is impossible to progress knowing without knowing what you should be thriving for without the blueprint, without the clear picture of how the best product managers work. Let me share a metaphor that I'm using when explaining this in my coaching sessions. Let's assume you want to become a photographer. Where would you start? With buying camera equipment, with taking a photo class about how to compose the perfect image? Both would be a valid start, but what about reflecting on the type of photographer you want to become? And there's so many options, food, fashion, sports, editorial, landscape, or wildlife. And this decision influences the know-how that you need to acquire, the equipment that you need to buy and the way how you need to use this equipment. And even if when starting something new in a new profession or a new role, some of the development areas are super obvious to everyone. So for example, picture composition and lighting is something you definitely need to wrap your head around when you want to become a photographer. Others are easier to spot once you know which type of photographer you want to become. So in our case, we want to do a wildlife photography so animal behavior comes to mind and it's something we might want to study. And it gets even better if somebody more senior is pointing you in the right direction and is helping you to see the things that you don't know that you should learn, but you need to actually become a really good and these skills are called unknown unknowns. So you don't know that you have to look into these aspects. And what I'm advocating for here is figure out what type of product manager you need to become in your current company and in your current context. This is something that you should discuss with your line manager or if non-existent in small startups, but there's not always a line manager, maybe CEO with no big product background, you could still discuss it with your teams because developers, QA folks, the design people usually have worked with product people before and at least are having expectations. And once you figure out what you need to become, you want to make sure that you are learning the things that you need to do the job well. And to do this, you make the most out of your air life again, right? So you ask them to help you reveal some of your unknown unknowns. And I have created the interview guide that helps you to foster all these conversations. This interview guide, so to say, consists of three different canvases. One I call the role description canvas, then there's something I call the PM wheel and the future self. And I will walk you through all of them briefly and they hopefully really help you to give your whole person the development journey a bit more of a structure. Let's start with the role description canvas because this is what is missing in so many companies. And this is the equivalent to the question of which type of photographer you want to become. When I'm working with a client and they asked me to coach some of their product folks, this is usually a question that I asked early on. So where are your role descriptions? And what I usually get told is, go to the career section. We have some job postings there. And that is actually the role descriptions that we have, not what I'm talking about. If you have a good role description, then you have aligned expectations. So you want to align expectations. Our words with upper management and your line manager, side words with all of your peers and your stakeholders and in words with your team. And it helps a lot to have a role description because if everybody has agreed on what the role is all about, it is much easier to figure out for you what you need to become better at and giving feedback is less personal because what the folks giving feedback to you are mainly pointing out is the gaps between the role description and your current profile. So way easier to provide people feedback. Yeah, now you might say, okay, do we need an aligned role description across the company? And my answer usually is, that's super cool if you could have that. But if that's not existing, that's too big of a project. That's actually the job of your leadership team. It's a job of maybe HR to have an influence on that. For the time being, if there's nothing like that in your company, you could use the canvas and just create a role description for your current role and you start your own journey. Be a bit selfish here. So don't create one for the whole company. You can download the canvas on the link shown on the slide and like always, like always with canvases, it's not about filling in the blanks. It's about the process and the discussions that you have to have to come up with an agreed upon version. The role description itself is nice and helpful and is super good start, but it does usually not help you to identify development areas in a way that you could tackle them right away. So I created something that helps you assess yourself and it helps you get feedback from others about your current state of product management, so to say. I call this guide a PM wheel and it will understand why I call it a wheel in a second, but let me briefly talk about the dimensions that it comes with. It's eight dimensions and the first five are understanding the problem. So what problems out there are worth solving for us? Where can we provide value to our users while making money for the company? Number two is finding a solution. So what solutions could we think of and which of these solutions is the most promising one, the one that we actually go into build? These two together are often called discovery. Then number three is how are you planning to deliver the solution and that touches topics like road mapping and surfing. Number four is how are you actually delivering the thing, working with the team, creating backlog items, actual shipping processes, then on to figuring out how people are using the features of the software, the product you created and launched, and if you need to iterate on exactly that. And then on the other hand, the other three dimensions are does the PM know anything about teamwork, about team motivation, about alignment, about how to get the teams by in, on to personal growth, that's what we're talking about today. And just but not least, does the PM know the underlying basics of an agile way of work? And I've created a set of questions for each of these buckets as I said, feel free to download it. And usually the questions help you to raise the whole bucket understanding the problem, for example, on one to seven or one to five, that's up to you. And you then can draw a little spider web graphic that I will show you on the next slide. But before we go there, let me add a note. Please customize the PM real. Don't use it off the shelf because with new role description, you know which of the questions might not be relevant in your context. For example, companies that run empowered product teams might need slightly different questions than companies that are still operating feature, taking a feature, taking ordering team, so to say, they just get an idea from management, take it down to the backlog, different framing, different questions. Same applies for tech product folks or other product office people. They don't need to score high on all the things that I have included in this questionnaire. So please customize the PM real to your needs. And that's why it's so important to have the role description first. And if you have access to yourself which would always be step number one and that could be something, Sam said homework, so that could be something for next week, assess yourself with the help of the PM real. You could talk to some of your peers, your team, maybe your line manager and ask them to do the assessment as well. Then you end up with a spider web graphic like this. Or, alternatively, if you're not a big fan of rating one to five or rating on the one to seven scale, you could use what I call the cook levels. I wrote a blog post about it. The link is in here. I will make sure to share the slides later. And that could work as well with rating yourself instead of a number rating. But no matter which version you're using, the assessment, your self-assessment plus feedback of others usually speaks a clear language. And they're one or two dimensions where you rank lower than for the others here. It would be understanding the problem and personal growth. And you could then focus your development time on these two topics. Now you found a headline for your learning journey. So you identify there is understanding the problem is something where you could get better at. Now how to improve it. And I think we could use something like a contract with ourselves. I like to use something I call the future self template. And it originates from a book that is called For Your Improvement. It starts by describing, so you're describing your as is situation. I will show you an example in a second. Then you talk about how should this feel in the future. So how could I tell and how could others tell that I have improved a particular skill? This how could others tell is a really powerful question to find things to improve at. And once you fill out those tunes, you could start to find actions that help you get closer from the as is to the to be. And last but not least, it needs a timeframe. Three to four months are usually a good time for learning something new because it's not your day time. Your day work to personal growth investments. You have super busy schedules, right? So you have 20 minutes a week. So that's why you need the three to four months to really improve significantly over time. And then make sure that you only have one future self that you're working on at a time. So even if you found several things where you could improve in, please pick your battles wisely, focus on one. And then you could in three months from now, in four months from now focus on another topic. Now here's the example as promised, that's prioritization. So the person that filled out this future self and you hopefully write a bit more text. So this is really the short version for a workshop like this, write a bit more text if you're doing it for yourself. But this person said like, okay, I have constant arguments about the priority of things in my backlog. And it's really draining and frustrating. And people just started recently to complain behind my back to other people that, A, I have no clue how Petra's prioritizing. It's random. I really don't like how she does it. She cannot explain why things are in that particular, right? Not a pleasant position to begin. The to be would be a softest discussions, hopefully a way that I can explain my rationale behind prioritization. And hopefully people will understand why things are in that particular order, even if they don't agree. Because you never get to a state where all stakeholders agree with your prioritization, right? But at least you can explain how you did it and they could follow your arguments here. And hopefully normal complaints behind my back. How to get there? I could reflect on how I'm currently prioritizing. I then need to reflect how others doing it, the inspiration maybe from the internet go to meet up, watch some talks, and then deliberately pick my criteria for prioritizations. What is the Petra way of prioritizing? Then I need to start explaining the process to people and see if that works. And then refine my story and my explanation. Until it actually does and until I reach this to be safe. That is one example. That was too quick. Yeah, so I know this was a lot that I threw at you. The PM wheel, the role description, the future self that you can see as a contract with yourself and an investment in your personal development as a product manager. Before I do a recap, and I will do a recap of all the things that I said, I give you 60 seconds to note your own takeaways and to think about is there one thing out of the things Petra was talking about that I want to try tomorrow or next week, or you could use the time to already pencil something in your calendar, your personal development time, something like that. So 60 seconds on mute, and then I do my recap for you. Okay, I really hope you have something noted down, some bigger and smaller learnings from this session. So here comes my recap for you. Time for your personal growth is always time well spent. And if you want to put your personal and professional development on the agenda, you have to make some time to consume, to apply, to reflect and to contribute. And please don't wait until somebody else is taking care of that because it most likely will never happen. And remember it is in your very own interest to do so. Then find your allies, people that are good in giving feedback, helping you to become a competent product manager, and people that help you to reach your full potential. Then work on your blueprint. How does a competent product manager look like in your competent and in your company and in your context? What are you missing? Or where could you get better? In which of the skills could you get better at? So to become a really strong product person, so to say. And then feel free to use the role description canvas, the PM wheel and the future self template to make this journey a bit more structured, a bit easier. You can download a PDF that is containing all three templates here. Don't even need to enter your email address. And now it's on me to say thank you to Rory and to Heap and to Sam for inviting me to this session and to all of you for listening in and for committing to your own personal growth journey. And I say now, Sam back on stage, it's time for your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Petra. This was very, very enlightening and informative and such a cool opportunity for us to really relate because a lot of what you talked about, I'm sure resonates with many of the people here. Just so everyone knows, we've had quite a few questions come in, but keep them coming so that we can make sure that we address everything that's top of mind for you. Petra, the first question, yeah. The first question I had was about those allies within a team. How do you find who those allies are and decide that this is who I'm gonna work with? Yeah, that is a really tough question. So first of all, there are always these natural allies. That's how I call them. People that are already good in giving feedback. And sometimes it's not that they're providing feedback to you. Sometimes it's just that you're observing that they gave nice feedback to a really nice substantial feedback to a colleague. And then just reach out to them and say, like, hey, could we have a session as well? Could you maybe observe how I'm working in this next session? So be precise in your ask. Where do you need help with? So is it more like task-related feedback? That's if you're more a junior person, maybe task-related. Or is it more behavior-related feedback? It's usually more if you're in a senior role because then you know how to do the basic tasks of product management well. But you still might have some weird behaviors in some sessions. And that's the harder ask, right? Because that is usually rather personal feedback. So go see what people are good in giving feedback and reach out to them. And yeah, so that that's one thing. Observe when they're doing well and giving feedback to others. And then people who believe in you, that could be far more bussed. So that is often the case that a boss in a company where you worked on two years ago really believe in your talent. So maybe you still be an intern at that time or something like that. And then reach out to them again and ask if they could mentor you for a bit longer. So that is two ideas. Yeah, no, that's great. I think feedback is challenging, right? Because not only are you finding the people you trust and figuring out who these allies might be, but then you also have to be ready to take it. And whether it's what you want to hear or not what you want to hear. How do you suggest taking that feedback and quickly implementing it? So that we are adapting and growing quickly. Yeah. So first of all, and I mentioned that in the talk, listening is step number one without any refusal because we often listen to reply. But if you're receiving feedback, that is not the listening mode that you should actually be in. It's more listen to digest. It's like somebody is handing you a present for your birthday. And then maybe the likelihood of that you are liking this present is 80% of 20% of the gifts are just like maybe a flea market thing. So I think it's exactly the same with feedback. You won't like all the feedback. And that's part of maturing as a product person as well. So which of the feedback that you're given is feedback you want to act on and which not. So first of all, take it. That's the important piece. Take it, note it down. Ideally in quotes because we often, even if it's super critical feedback, we have this, that's so not true. I'm totally not this person you're talking about, but it's not helpful. So really listen, note it down, think about it, digest it, and then think about if you want to put it to the flea market or if you want to act on it. I think this is super important. And if you want to act on it, then as I said, if it's something bigger, close it to your personality core, then that might be worth looking into coaching or a lot of line management folks are braiding coaching their own people. So it's not that you need definitely to find an external coach, if your line manager is a good coach, you could reach out to them and say like, hey, I got this feedback. I struggle to understand what I should actually be doing it. What's my next action helped me to stay clearer. And that is actually something that I would suggest trying to help in what to do next with the feedback. Yeah, absolutely. I think another piece of that is the people were getting that feedback from and something you talked a lot about and something that I know you're passionate about is mentorship. So when I think I know I've found my product mentor or my mentor, how do you suggest approaching that person and beginning that relationship? And then how do I also make sure that that's the right person for me and my personality? Yeah, the last bit is not an easy one, but let me answer that the other bit first. So finding a mentor is really, so it either happens naturally because some of the people I mentoring have volunteers at some of the events I have been speaking to for example, and we talked in the green room or something like that. So that is a natural and then it was super interesting conversation to have and later on they reached out and said, like, hey Petra, I have this one question. Can we talk about that? It's a challenge or something like that. So either it works naturally and to have this natural connection to a mentor you have to leave the building. So to say you have to leave the home office. So you have to attend meetups, you have to be out there, you have to talk to people. Yeah, go to your local product tank or something like that, right? Because there you meet the people that are maybe more senior and sometimes it helps. It does not have to be a product thought leader. It could be somebody who has kind of three more years of experience or something like that. That often is the more helpful mentorship relationship, I'd say. So it either happens naturally or you really need to go find these people deliberately in meetups and things like this. Some people do LinkedIn research and then do cold emails to people and ask for mentoring. I never saw this being successful. So I think it's way better to actually go to meet up, see people, talk to them if you like what they're saying, if they have a similar take on product management than you having, then ask if you could sometimes discuss some ideas with them and think about what you could give back in return. I think this is super important because you're asking for a lot of time, advice, their experience. So think about what you can give back in return and they could be easy things like, hey, I saw you read a lot of blog posts. Could I help you provide feedback to your blog posts before you publish it or whatever it is? But think about what you could give back in return. Yeah, no, that's great. I'm thinking too, looking over your shoulder. There's a lot of books you've mentioned that you're an avid reader. I was curious if there's any specific books that you found that kind of stand out, especially when it comes to nailing a great product process. Unpopular opinion. So to me, it's what I see is a lot of product people don't do books at all. So only despite sized blog posts, if at all. I think it makes sense to read books on product management, especially when you're early on in your career. And it makes sense to read, I would say two to four books and then often come back to these books. So it's not necessary because I'm a professional book reader because of my coaching relationship. But that is not what a product person needs to do, right? So you want to become a good product manager for your team in your current company. You want to create products. You want to ship them. You want to see people use them. So you don't have to read that many books. I think it is good if you find two to four books that you consider to be helpful in your role and then come back to them. So use them as work books. Put a lot of sticky notes in it. Use the text highlighter or if you do it on the Kindle, you still could highlight things and put a lot of bookmarks in it. Work with the books. I think this is more important than reading all of the books out there. Yeah, that's great advice. I think a lot of the questions that have come in have kind of been along the line of, this is catered for product managers furthering their career and growing their career. But a handful of people are hoping to begin their career and product management and transition into the world or start from the top. Yeah, so what advice would you give to someone? Day one, trying to transition or begin a life in product management. Where do I start? I'm learning by doing person. I have to admit, I'm learning by doing person. So I would always start by finding opportunities where I could practice my product management skills and that necessarily needs to be your first product role. It still could be side projects. That still could be community work, volunteering somewhere, all these kind of things. I've had a lot of coaches. I'm no longer working with product manager on the AC level. I'm only working with product leadership folks the last few years. But while I was still coaching the AC level, I saw a lot of them coming from UX roles, for example. And then slowly over books and attending a conference here and there, picking up the lingo a bit and with some of the lingo being able to land the first job. Because I think this is the hardest thing is to land your first job. If you're coming from another profession and then I would suggest like, go read some of the books, attend some of the meetups. Even if you're not there, the product community is such a friendly community. You can just, even if you're in a totally different profession, a profession, psychology, and you want to break into a product, then you can attend these meetups and you can talk to the people. And once you learn some of the lingo, it will be way easier to land your first associate job. Maybe it's an internship where you start to look into how to manage a product. And then it's learning by doing. It definitely helps to acquire the lingo. You need to read the two to three books, I'd say. For me, it's always hard to recommend some. Yeah, because it really, really depends where you end up if you're already in a company situation. So good books to start with. I think Madela May's book, Product Management and Practice is a good start at Theresa, no, not Theresa. Theresa did a bit more advanced if you want to look into discovery. Melissa Perry's book, Escaping the Build Trap, might be a nice book to start with and then because everybody is reading it inspired by Marty Kagan is one that you want to add to your menu, especially when we're talking about lingo because everybody is quoting these people, everybody is using the words they're using. So you want to understand their concepts. And for example, if you read Matt's book and Marty's book, you can see some different flavors already and I think this is a nice start. Yeah, that's great. We definitely love Marty over at Heath and a lot of people follow his podcasts. A couple of questions have come in regarding, understanding, hey, is there, do you view coaching and mentorship separate? And how do you distinguish, hey, this person is going to be a coach for me but not a mentor or a mentor for me, but not a coach? Yeah, so the thing is the coaching is, it really depends on your definition of coaching and the American world has a slightly different definition of coaching than people I figured out over the last few years. So in Europe, we see coaching as somebody who actually is not giving too much advice, somebody who's asking the right question at the right time. So they help you think about certain topics and they give you the safe space and the room to do so. Whereas in the American culture, the coach is more like a football coach, somebody who is really providing you with feedback, telling you what to do next, helping you with the next steps. So that when you look into coaching, ask the coach what, which team they're playing at, if they are forgiving advice, if they are forgiving feedback, if they are for pointing you in the right direction sometimes or if they're more on I'm only here to ask you the right question at the right time, because there is a nice and effective way of coaching but it can be sometimes frustrating, especially if you're early on and you're there. And mentorship is unpaid. That somebody who just likes you and likes where you are and sees some potential in you. And sometimes there is interest like, okay, maybe they want to hire you in five years from now or something like that. It's not that there's no reward, but usually mentorship is unpaid. It's more like a friendly relationship to somebody else. Yeah, I think that's great. So there's also been a handful of questions regarding the transition of the product landscape as a whole and how that's impacting people at work. So, you know, where historically people were shipping a lot of features in the world of product management, we've now seen a big shift to PLG, product led growth. Maybe some companies are doing less feature launches and the product teams are operating at a much slimmer level, which means the product organizations just aren't as big at some companies. How would you advise seeking out the right people and mentors and allies when your organization is quite small? Yeah, go find a local community. So people that you can meet for most of us working in the bigger cities that is easy because there's so other companies, same struggles. And we often think like the struggles are so individual to our company context. I can tell you they're not. Most of us are having the same issues, the same problems, the same learning goals and all these kind of things. So leave the building, go find a group of lovely, and there's so many of these communities, right? So there's women in product, for example, there are events like this where you gather people for webinars. And maybe people are tweeting about this session and if you see another attendee tweeting why not reaching out to them and say, like, hey, what did you like about this session? I'm looking for people who I could actually exchange my learning results with or something like that. So really think out of the box here and go find those people. Yeah, and you could even sometimes design communities or nice agile communities. Now, whatever meetup is hosted in your town, village or city, go there and talk to people. And then maybe they're just like connected with others that they know, that they have the same struggle. So it's all about the networking, I'd say. And the smaller the community is the more effective. So if it's an 80 people product time, yay, cool, yeah. I've been so blown away, obviously I said, I'm based in London, but the willingness of people to get together virtually or in person to idea share, I think it's great. A lot of the dialogue we've had today has been about the desire to rise, right? Getting mentorship, growing their career. Something that was really interesting to me of one of the questions, I think comes from a product leader. And I thought it was interesting that they said, hey, should we, as we, you know, hire new people and start fostering career growth and development within our organization, maybe take that product growth career framework into our organization and help, you know, people say, hey, you wanna begin your product career here, we're gonna build an environment to help you rise. How should leaders be thinking about that product career growth framework and helping their young, our new talent get to where they need to be? Oh, what a great question. Yeah, so definitely, yes. I think what leaders need to do first, either for the company, but as this is often really complex for themselves, is having a compass. So what do they think a great and strong product person looks like? And they need to make it explicit. So they need to be able to talk about it. What are the six personality traits they want to see in the product people they hire? What are the skills, the competencies to know how? And once they made it explicit and they can talk about it and they definitely could use the PM wheel and build on that, that is a massive shortcut for most of the clients I'm working with, but please customize it. Then they could use this in fostering one-on-one conversations and it makes one-on-one conversations way easier because you could use one of the dimensions in a one-on-one and you already have eight one-on-one sessions covered. So it is really helpful to have such a framework. What I was not doing is I'm not talking about the career ladder in my framework because this is a totally different piece to come up with the career ladder. If you're working on a career ladder, you're actually creating a game and everybody starts to play the game once you've rolled up the career ladder, right? Everybody wants to be leveled up. Everybody wants to have to raise. So that is a bigger project and you need to make sure that this is fair before you actually roll it out and see better, make sure that you covered all the edge cases because people will find them. So that is not something the framework is helpful with but all of that is important topic. So what is your definition of good? Can you talk about it? Is it in written documentation? Then use it in your one-on-one conversations. Use it to help people find their blind spots and usually people need help with filling out this future self canvas and finding good activities and good things that they could do and give them some budget because sometimes it's often that the people I was working with have to the question of are you allowed to read books in your working hours? People were often like, I have no clue. So tell them that they're allowed to read books and watch seminars in their working hours because you as a company have an interest of them getting better at what they do, right? And grant them a small budget for buying some books and all these kind of things. I think that makes a tremendous difference if you as a product are doing things like that. Yeah, absolutely. So kind of reflecting on your career, right? In your time in product, what's a challenge that you think is coming? Maybe something that we don't hasn't historically been the day-to-day challenges of a PM but it's something that you envision becoming the challenge of the future for product managers. That is a super inspiring question. Yeah, so currently we're all struggling or yeah, all struggling to focus on profitability, I think that's at least for most of the companies I'm working with. Growth has been long, the predominant thing. Everybody was growth hacking and new leads have been the number one. I think everybody was optimizing for it, that has changed. So teams are stretching because people are not going to be replaced when they're leaving the companies. So that is a challenge currently. So we need to run our teams more effective currently and we need to focus a bit more on profitability than we have been in the past. I think that's when talking about what is currently going on. And then in the future, and that is more a hope than an observation is we hopefully might even more look into things like what are the futures that we creating as product people because often our decisions while building software have massive impact on how society is actually behaving in the future. So I would hope that this is a topic that we all as a product discussing more often. So the moral, the ethical backgrounds of what we actually do. And I think we could all do a bit more of what I call life centered product management. So not only use a centered product management and really think about the impact that the things that we do are having on the environment on societies and all these things. Yeah, I think that's great. We have time for one last question. And that is immediately following this webinar, what should we do to make sure that we continue growing and going in the right path forward to further our product management careers? Yeah, so number one is if you don't you have no time slot in your calendar to read something or try something new then please make sure to put this blocker in your calendar right after this webinar. If you struggle to picture what you could be learning next then I think you should go and download the PM wheel because that will be your inspiration of what you could get better at, I'd say. And if you don't have some allies helping you with your personal growth and make a list, I think that is step one. Don't reach out to them yet. Make a list of people that will be candidates for providing these three perspectives. That's fabulous. Well, again, we are at time. I do wanna thank everyone again for joining us today. It's been an absolute treat for Heap to host this product salon with Petra. I definitely feel like I got a lot out of the session and I'm also just thrilled to have you as a friend. So I think with that we're gonna wrap but everyone please be on the lookout for that follow-up from us, the recording, the slides and everything you'll need to make sure that today was as impactful as possible. Thank you all again so much for your time and have a great week. Thank you.