 Hey everyone, my name is Carlos. I'm the founder and CEO of product school and today I'm here with Jackie Babato Who's the co-author of cracking the PM career? Hey Jackie. Hi, thanks for having me. Thanks for joining the show I know this is not your first book definitely your latest one So why don't you tell us a bit more about kind of your thought process from the original book cracking the PM interview to now Cracking the PM career Yeah, so both this book and my original book have some it's a lot in common so Cracking the PM interview was really inspired by my experience of seeing that When I applied to be a to be a PM. I got rejected my first time applying to Google Made it in a year later, and then I interviewed hundreds of people and while I interviewed them. I realized that Some of the reasons people passed or failed the interview weren't directly related to their skills and how good of a PM They really could be but were more related to how well they had prepared for the interview and how much structure they added to their answers And I thought That if we want to have more great PMS in the world We should really level the playing field and any advice I'd be willing to tell a friend of a friend I should be it willing to tell To tell anybody on the internet or anybody in the world who want to find the book to really make it possible So that everybody has a good chance to become a PM and I really see the new book as and I've got I was gonna show my little This is all in a binder format. It's not printed out yet But I I would say my idea, but now it's sort of the sequel it's saying let's say you've got the job now now how do you succeed as a PM and how do you advance in your career and Just like I saw there were some sort of hidden secrets to the PM interviews I found that there are also some sort of hidden secrets to succeeding as a PM There are some like tips and tricks that if you just understood them a little bit better You could get on the right path. You could build products that that did better in the marketplace and you would able to be able to work better with your manager and with your cross-functional partners and And advance so that you can actually get all the recognition that you deserve So just to give more background on you You've been one of the most influential product leaders that I know out there even before I started pro school I was I was reading your articles the the first book cracking the PM interview was a total best seller He'd see thousands of people read that in order to to get that first product management job And and you mentioned that it's inspired in your own experience as a PM So whether you tell us a little more about your life, you know Before being a PM and then your career as a PM Yeah, so I studied computer science and econ in undergrad And I'm one of those lucky people who got to go straight into product management. So I I became an intern at Microsoft while I was after my sophomore year of college and loved Microsoft decided to go work there full-time and I worked there full-time for about three years and When I was moving to New York, I I Microsoft didn't have any PM jobs there and I love product so much. So I wanted to do that So I applied to Google. That's when I got rejected the first time decided to stay with Microsoft as a Microsoft consultant for a little while and Then switched over a year later to become a PM at Google loved Google stay there for three years and I One day get a message from a friend. I knew from Microsoft saying hey, I'm at this new company Do I have a coffee and learn about it? And I was like, well, what harm would a coffee do and that's how I ended up as the first PM at Asana and Asana was an amazing experience. I started as the first PM and became head of product management and Grew the team to be over 20 people. So during that time I got to become a manager I got to become a manager of managers have all these experiences I got to write my own career ladder is to try to help coach people on my own team to grow and And absolutely loved it and then about a year a little over a year ago I decided it was time for something new and that's when I left and I've been working on the book and Handling the pandemic and a preschooler at that time, too totally well and for for people to know like Asana went public in late 2020 It's one of the most popular tools for product managers. So in a way you also go to build something for people like ourselves. Yes Yeah, it's a great tool. I like to think of it as a project management for people Who don't like to do project management? Love that. I mean a constant bother to explain people that product management is different than project management So in in in your case now as a as a book author It's at the end of the day It's also like a like a baby at least in my experience Writing a book as well. So at the same time you have experienced building detailed product So what are some of those parallels between building something physical and building something digital? Yeah, so I think the thing that they have most in common is that in both cases you should really have a goal and And you have to sort of understand why are you why are you building this product? What's problem is it solving? Why and what will success look like an exact same thing for a book is? Why do you want to write this book? What problem is it solving and? And what will success look like? I'd say that Some of the biggest difference though for me is that as a product manager Everything you do as a product manager you get done through other people You really you work to influence the people around you influence the designers influence the engineers And at the end of the day You're not the person who's sitting there typing the code So with a book you get this difference Which is that you actually have created something tangible with your own hands at the end of the day which can be a nice A nice break from the sometimes thankless job of product management Totally and now that it's out there the thing is you can't really iterate it much Right like you can go back to the code base and make changes So obviously there is probably a lot of thinking process behind the scenes So you notice obviously that there is a need for people to continue growing in their product career After they get that first job and then how do you structure the the course the book? Because I can imagine there are so many different ways you can grow your PM career, right? Yeah Great question. So the way that we've structured the book is that the first chapters are on the product skills And so what I did is I have I talked to lots of product leaders lots of different companies looked at the job ladders And what I found is that the job ladders look very different from company to company every every company groups The skills together differently, but if you if you pull apart those groupings and look at what skills are underneath the groups They're very consistent from company to company. So I group them as product execution strategic and leadership But there are lots of correct ways. There's no one right way to group them So for example is communication a leadership skill or a strategic skill, you know, you can move them around But in all cases, you know, the product skill is data insight is that strategic or product? But the skills were very common. So we go over those break it down into You know many maybe probably more than 30 sub skills here And that's the first chapters of the book we have a whole section on people management and what it takes to move into people management and the new skills you need when you're there and then at the end of the book we have We really talk about career paths and career ladders. So the skills are the are the individual practices and frameworks And responsibilities you need to really succeed at your job. But when you want to translate being good at your job into getting promotions It's not a one-to-one match And it's not a one-to-one match between skills and being good at your job. So what I mean by that is you might have the best possible User insight and data insight But if you can't use those insights to ship great products that help people and solve problems then Then you're not really having the impact that you want to have and then and then that you won't be getting those promotions And you won't be advancing. So in that end of the book, we really talk about what what does the career ladder look like? What differentiates a an APM from a PM one from a senior PM from a PM lead and a director all the way up to head of product And then we've done interviews with a lot of successful PMs and talked about their paths and what they've learned along the way Yeah, then let's dig deeper into that because I always find it fascinating from the outside that some companies like Google would call Almost everyone a product manager. Even if someone will have a lot of experience So it's hard to decode that from from the outside unless you know the internal Ladder Microsoft calls some people product managers instead of product managers You know for for people who are not in those companies, how would you describe like the different career ladders? So so there's really three phases to what I've learned through this research is of three phases to a PM's career To a career and product. So the first phase is the PM phase and that's when you're focused on shipping products The and so this is a lot of like when you think about your PM interviews And what you might be doing for your first five years as being a product manager, it's really all about shipping great products It's all about, you know researching what researching the customers Validating your designs may be running AP tests analyzing them iterating improving and shipping things that are successful And you get better and better and better at that but to get to senior PM There's actually the role the role changes and you don't get to senior PM by just becoming better at shipping products You get to senior PM by getting better at product strategy So that means not just how do we sit take this product and ship it really well, but what products should we be building? What goals should we be going after? What should we set our roadmap? What's our long-term vision? How do you set a long-term plan that will help your company win in the marketplace? And that's that's a new set of skills and a new set of work that you do as a senior PM that as an APM You might not have even realized existed and it's sort of interesting as a new PM when you look at the senior PMs on your team You might you might not you might wonder like oh, what makes them a senior PM? I don't see what they're doing that's so great And that's because a lot of it is behind the scenes a lot of that is going to be the strategic work They're doing the strategy They're creating the times that they go to an executive and they convince them to that we need to hire People who know AI so that can be ready for the moves. We're going to need to make two years from now And so you get better and better at product strategy deciding what your what your company needs to do to win in the marketplace And they say great. I reached the top. There's nothing else to learn But it shifts again, and there's the third phase of product careers, which is organizational excellence So once you move into people management the The the focus now is not on shipping great products or creating Product strategy, but instead on building a high-performing team that can create good strategies and ship good products so now the role really becomes about hiring people and Coaching and developing people setting up processes helping different departments at the company work well together removing obstacles Finding these these huge multipliers on your team success that will help the whole company succeed even though Without you're having your fingers in on every little product decision and what's interesting is some heads of product will still be very very involved in product review and making those small tweaks and and so as an 8 p.m. Let's say when you think of what your head of product does you might think that most of their job is This feedback you're getting in product review that most of the job is the Is the way that they like knew exactly how the design should work or that kind of thing but that's really a small part of their job and the larger part of the job is building the team and Coaching the rest of the company on company strategy So for people who let's say enjoy getting their hands dirty and being the front line with engineers designers And they might not want to become a head of product and a built-in for they still want to grow in their career I've seen that there are options. I've seen people call a principal product manager product lead So what is your your take on on that type of career? Yeah, so so What I found is that a lot of a lot of job letters have some level at which it's okay So the two things one is that there's some level which is okay to not continue advancing So so for example, you can't most companies will not let you just hang out at 8 p.m. For 10 years, you know if you've if you're on your 8th year is 8 p.m. And you haven't graduated to be a p.m. One They're gonna say hey, let's you know Great work, but like I'd rather have that headcount spot for someone who's gonna be growing faster It's really meant to be a training job you hire people in and grow them But for most companies senior p.m. Is around the level where if you're a senior p.m. You're a high-performing member of the team you're independent You create you create a lot of value on your own and for example if if work-life balance is more important to you at this point in your career If you have a side project that you're really passionate about you could spend your entire career as a senior p.m. And And the company would be really happy to have you and you don't need to continue to get promoted to stay at a company And really career success can mean such so many different things to different people that that's an entirely valid approach to your career and I think that If you make it that far you should be very proud of what you've done and you shouldn't feel extra pressure to just take on new responsibilities And then there is the principal p.m. Role So the the title between senior p.m. And principal p.m. Can vary from company to company But generally what distinguishes a principal p.m. Is that they are an expert in their industry So they're not just the here's a few things But so they're not just the best in their company at something But actually they're well respected in the industry at having been the being the person the go-to person in the industry to understand the concept Another part about being a principal p.m. Is there generally To become a principal p.m. You need to join a company that has a business need for principal p.m So that means they have a business need for somebody who is so advanced so strategic so excellent at product skills execution skills product strategy and that the the size of the work that They need to be responsible for to create a large impact that justifies their high salary But that can be done with a small enough number of engineers That you don't need to be a people manager So in the product careers a lot of times people become people managers because it's going to take 50 engineers to build your product and 1 p.m. Can't can't leave that many engineers But some places where principal p.m. Are very valued is for example in high-stakes partnerships So for example if if yahoo and microsoft are partnering on something That's the kind of place where you will really want a principal p.m. Because the actual amount of product work is small enough for a few engineers to Handle, but you really can't afford anything going wrong Yeah, and I noticed that trend when when I started pro school there wasn't really that much Definition around this it was like okay. You want to work in product great You are a product manager and the product team is the product manager and now we're seeing this entire Ecosystem of first of all careers for product people, but also different. I would say hybrid roles I've seen a product operations people product design product marketing So how are you thinking about also these kind of Structures that that we are seen as as the product evolves Yeah, I think that that's probably the the the future of product I think is really going to be that there's going to be a lot more product managers and that doesn't mean that Not every come every company especially small ones can't afford to have an extra person who only does product management So I really think that people from many different roles are going to start learning and picking up p.m. Breast practices these these kinds of product best practices like think about your goals before you start the work It's kind of obvious But that's the sort of thing that product managers are really trained in and I think we'll start seeing Lots and lots of roles can benefit from that that mindset. I agree. I think it's a mindset regardless of your title and And I've seen now this these older trend called product led growth or product led businesses How companies are trying to lead with their product and I've seen more companies having a chief product officer Which before it wasn't that obvious I product in some cases used to report to marketing or used to report to technology I've seen a lot of a lot of CEOs that come from a product background So I think all of those trends are pushing in in that direction of elevating the role of the product manager Yeah So what is in the in the career ladder in the p.m. Career? What is the kind of like the ultimate? step I Think I think there's lots of different directions So I think if you were going to go with this a normal straight career ladder I would say probably head of product which becomes not just being responsible for product managers, but also designers and Researchers and depending on the company engineers or they could be separate But that's really just the traditional path. I see a lot of people choose other careers after product management So for example, one really interesting role is general manager So I mentioned head of product might be responsible for the pms And the engineer or sorry the pms the designers maybe the engineers a general manager of a business unit is Responsible for those people within a department, but also the sales and the marketing people all of the all of the different departments together So they're really considering The both the profits and the losses and everything it takes to bring a prop up a product to market successfully So that's one of the general manager people also tend to go into various roles in venture consulting I see people move into product coaching some people move into chief of staff roles Although that's a title with an even more ambiguous In the US title than product manager. So there's both very junior and very senior chief of staff roles Yeah, so there's a lot of there's a lot of different things that you can be set up for and then of course CEO role CEO roles and founder roles Maybe that's an idea for your future book the life after the p.m. Career So In your case, I'm also very interested in learning how people learn So the same way you describe how you kind of fell into product How did you learn the skills to truly become a product leader? Yeah, so There's one framework that I was kind of as I was I was reflecting on this for the book that I put together that I really like Which I call like notice assess and improve and What I found is that so I think the best way to improve as a p.m. Is to get feedback And especially feedback from your peers feedback from your managers and also feedback from your managers peers So if you're a larger company for example, the other p.m. Managers are great source of feedback But a lot of the time the feedback that that you'll hear is a p.m. Isn't very actionable or doesn't seem actionable at first So you might hear like you need to be more strategic or you need to be more on top of problems on your team or You need to not let the date slip or whatever it is that you hear When you first hear it, maybe it doesn't resonate with you and you're like that doesn't Like I mean and sometimes you're like you're wrong like no you misunderstood the certain situation Entirely and that feedback is like unfair and invalid But if you split it up into notice assess and improve what you can say is first Notice means find the situations where this feat where this feedback might be applicable Like what are the cases where? The person giving you feedback thinks that you had a problem here What's the pattern and on that very first step when you start to look at the pattern a bunch of you might see a Bunch of different things one of these might be that you You didn't even notice these situations. So maybe somebody says you have a lot of miscommunication And you're like when they're like well in that last meeting and you're like what? So the first step there might just be learning be like, okay Can you please just like give me give me a signal? You know touch your ear every time every time I like have a miscommunication or touch your ear every time I interrupt someone or whatever it is the skill that you're trying to notice So first just gathering of this large bank of examples and training training yourself to notice these situations And then the second step is to assess so one thing that might happen is maybe you were noticing all the time that for example That your project was late or that your dates kept slipping Maybe you're maybe you were very aware of that But they thought that they just slipped because you made a mistake but actually you had made a really intentional decision to move the date in each of these cases and So something went wrong because they they weren't happy with how it went But the problem that they that they named Might be a little bit different than the than the way that you want to frame the problem to work on it So maybe the problem from your point of view isn't that the date slipped the problem is that you didn't Loop in the stakeholders when we're moving the date and you didn't get enough buy-in and you didn't persuade people about the date So there you might say that the problem wasn't your judgment on or your execution skills on getting your team to ship as fast as possible The problem was really the communication skills So when you're able to reframe go back to the person who gave you the feedback double check of that could be true And then you can work on that final step of how do I improve? How do I like? Set up what I want to do set a goal practice it and then go back and check with someone if it improved It's sort of a long way of saying how I think you can kind of make the most out of the feedback We're getting so you can advance as fast as possible and improve your skills as fast Fascinating because feedback is a very overused word and I think that breaking it down into actionable items that are Good for you to deliver but also important for the other person to interpret because sometimes the way that message can land is Very different than the intention that the sender has and I think I tried to learn that there the hard way Sometimes we mean well and create the opposite effect So I think that creating framework is or systems. It's in a way what what is expected from a product leader There's a lot of templates out there But at the end of the day you probably have to customize whatever works for you and your team. Yeah so Now that obviously you you had you are you achieve the ultimate step in In the product career and you had to coach other people. It's very meta because you train the trainers in a way how about Mentorship and help outside an organization Is it the question, you know, how can people do that or yeah, so yeah, it's just valuable Is it something that you personally do? Yeah, yes, so I think that Mentoring is is very important for two reasons One is that if you do have aspirations to be a people manager, then mentoring is a prerequisites Is that being a mentor is is how you demonstrate those skills and build that trust that you'd be a good product leader But even if you have no interest in people management Mentoring is how you can give back to the community And especially because we are we're still in the very early days of product management as a career You're able to have a very very large impact on the world and across companies if you are able to help mentor other people different types of mentorship are One thing I've learned is that people are very are interested in different types of mentorship So some people really like one-on-one mentoring with someone some people like to get groups together some people like to do likes put together a big presentation of what they've learned and take it on the conference circuit some people like to tweet some people write to like blog articles and So if you're looking for a way to give back to the community and to mentor people What I would say is that you you don't need to fight your personality It's okay to pick the approach that that really calls to you the one that feels like less work to you the one that That you enjoy doing the most And use that to go forward And if you are doing writing the thing that I think that the community needs a lot more of is Is stories about real product management? So if anybody out there is listening and wants to wants to contribute I think that there's so much valuable that even a fairly new p.m Can have if you just tell the story about a product decision you made and how you thought about the choices the interesting things You learned and how it turned out and maybe what you learned after that and how you've done it differently I think that Each of those stories is valuable And so there's no there's no chance of the world being too filled with that stories everybody will love to learn those specific ones and it's and you really are the expert on your story And you can kind of work with your company to make sure that you're keeping it as You're not going to any secrets that they don't want you to I like your point on Picking the right format for both the the the teacher and the student because at the end of the day I think part of lifelong learning is that you have options you can try you can do this You don't have to over commit you can do this on the side You can change if something stops working for you and and I think we went from there's nothing out there Or very little to oh my god It's probably too much information now It's important to also curate and filter those those sources because there's good product management And definitely your book is a really good source, but I've also seen very contradictory advice that can create a lot of confusion in the industry Yeah, yeah, sometimes there's things that apply in one case, but not another Yeah, and part of it. I think it's because there wasn't really a playbook So a lot of us are trying to create that playbook by also Thinking back in on other that have experienced in different industries And and I think it's beautiful that we are co-creating these new industries and and good practices for the rest of the world Taking a product mindset knowing that some of the things that we were saying many years ago might be different And that's okay. And at the same time we cannot do this alone I don't think one person has the single truth on and here is how you do product. Yeah So what is what is next for like what is the goal with with the book? Obviously, you are about to launch and I appreciate your time You've been giving back to the community since the very beginning I think the first time you participated at one of our events was 2018 and your author Gail Participating 2015 so I'm very appreciative for for everything that you do for for us and for the community And what is your own goal with with this book? Yeah, so yeah, so the book cracking the PM career is coming out next week And it's it's a you can pre-order on Amazon now if you'd like and we are working on the layout for the Kindle version So that will be not too far after And in terms of the goal for the book There's a few different goals we have but one of the ones That I really like is so high level my goal for the book is to create more great product managers in the world because I want there to be more good products in the world and Every time I see a product that has a terrible UI, you know, I feel I'm like oh I wish they had a better product manager there Um, but also there are these products where the entire product and the thousands of hours people put into it fails You know as steam a quippy recently and so many people put so many so much effort and so much energy and so much love into that product Um, but it was it was sort of some of the premise was flawed from the start and better product management I think could have could have Prevented that waste of energy so So I'm really hoping that through the book that that more people improve their pm skills that we create better products and And again, I'm really hoping to level the playing field so that the people who are really skilled into the people that are the best at their careers Are able to get a fair shot at at Expanding their scope and their impact and getting the promotions they want so that they're able to have as much influence as they deserve I agree and and I think one of the beautiful things about Having this content very affordable for the rest of the world is that it's not a secret in silicon valley anymore I remember come as an outsider I used to think that oh my god I need to be in silicon valley need to meet someone from google in order to learn and now they can come to your house yeah So all that democratization of education I think ultimately benefits the work to make better products and um Now I think for us we have a big responsibility to continue Updating some of those mental models that maybe were useful at some point and now They are changing like for me personally. I just don't understand why We keep talking about agile so much when this is something that was invented 20 years ago Yeah, I think is the kind of the the future. How is this product management? Discipline going to evolve going to evolve. Yeah Yeah, and just to uh to touch on agile for a second And we we had talked about you and I had talked about this a little bit before the concept of like What world is project management happen in product management? And I think what I found is that product managers spend so long being like i'm a product manager not a Project manager that then when it comes time to do some project management at your team. You're like, no, I can't do it It's not my job um But but but to have your team be successful in the ownership products. You do need to do some um some