 Hi, everyone, and welcome to my webinar where I'll be sharing insights and experience on how to choose your product management adventure. Before we dive in, I'll do a quick intro. I am Aishwarya Agarwal, a product manager on YouTube. Our team recently launched some amazing NFL features, including MultiView, where you can watch up to four live streams at once. I got to work on some truly groundbreaking features, but it was a long path for me to get here. In my career at YouTube, and I dropped it, I have worn many PM hats, including growth PM with the focus on retention, platform PM with the focus on data platforms, traditional PM or what you might also know as core or feature PM. And having worked at a startup called Replit, I was almost an everything PM and there were no set boundaries. I got exposed to a breadth of PM specialties early on in my career, and it gave me a perspective on what skills were required for each and what I enjoyed most. So today, I'm going to share that perspective with you. We will look at the various product management specializations in today's technical environment. We'll go through a framework of how to identify your specialties, and talk about the various ways of approaching your career progression. So let's dive into it. When I first started my career as an engineer, I knew there were back end, front end, network, security test, and many other types of engineering. Then when I briefly moved into sales and later on in marketing, I saw specializations there as well. You would have heard of inbound and outbound sales, brand marketing, growth marketing, SEO marketing, and maybe more. But if you look at product management roles, at least until very recently, most of them simply said product management and did not put a specialization suffix. The lack of specialization makes people think that all PM roles are created equal. And the best PMs are those who know everything across all stages of a product or company. But this is not what happens in practice. It's only lately that I have started to see AI product management and growth product management emerge. There are also mentions of payments product manager and if zero to one product manager has come up in certain job descriptions. This is headed in the right direction, but there's still not a lot of understanding of what these PM roles mean, and how each of them is unique, and how each specialization can help at different stages of the company. So overall, in today's tech world, design, engineering, marketing, and sales have specialties, but what about product management? It's like the hammer and nail problem. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this is a fundamental issue with treating all product management the same. Your toolkit does not transfer for the problem at hand and you fail to produce results or have impact. This problem can be broken down into five parts. First, your strategies and tools don't adapt. Presuming all PM positions to be uniform often results in the application of the same techniques across different scenarios. This approach can hinder career advancement by failing to acknowledge the need for a variety of skill sets and tactics. For example, a PM who is skilled in payment infrastructure struggles when faced with a novel product domain. They disregard the crucial aspects like market research and user engagement. And they think that the product need is not very different from their domain of expertise. They may just naturally gravitate towards doing what they know is best, that is scaling payments. Whereas what was really needed from this PM at a startup or at an innovative stage of the company was to do market research, user attraction studies and find a product market fit. The second problem is performance decline. An extension to the above point is how a mismatch of strategies can affect the PM's performance. They will struggle to deliver results and they will ultimately begin to doubt themselves. In the scenario above, a payments PM might feel out of depth when they're asked to do market research and find the total addressable market and come up with a product that fits the market. Third, unclear focus. Imagine you're a growth PM who is brought on as a PM for a fast-going product and you are responsible for the product platform so that your partner teams can integrate within it. Now, you don't know what should you focus on. Should you do experimentation and grow the product? Should you scale product delivery and think about how to best support your partner teams? Or should you focus on launching features on your own? You know what your skills are, but you don't know what's the actual and immediate requirement for this role. Fourth, poor hiring. Hiring product managers without considering the specific proficiencies can result in poor role fits. Organizations may grapple with understanding why a highly recommended PM is not thriving in their new position. If you hire a growth PM who is skilled at running quick experiments and you ask them to scale product delivery, chances are that they may struggle to be successful in the role. Fifth, unfair comparison. All companies compare their employees to determine promotions and bonuses. This is where recognizing each PM specialty is critical because of the vastly different skill sets, outcomes, and even the time scale of delivery. For instance, a growth PM can deliver a large amount of volume, but a platform or a partnerships PM would take much longer to scale product delivery or to close a partnerships deal. Holding different PMs accountable for the same metrics will result in employee dissatisfaction and it will ultimately sabotage the PM's confidence and professional growth. So now we know the problems that can arise when you treat all PMs the same. But let's also quickly consider what are the similarities across all these PMs? There are five major skills that are needed across all PMs and it is important for all of you out there to continuously work on these skills to improve your product management jobs. The first one is problem solving. You should be able to break down a complex problem into manageable chunks so that you can reason about them and iterate on them to find an appropriate solution. Second, user empathy. According to me, this is one of the top skills for a PM. You need to be able to understand the user and be the voice of the user in the development of your product. You should understand their pain points, you should design to solve those pain points and you should consistently be in touch with your user. Third, communication and collaboration. As a PM, you should be able to lead and inspire your team towards a vision while also getting alignment from cross-functional stakeholders. This is a hard-learned skill in my opinion and if you don't have the personality for it, it can be tough, but not impossible to cultivate. Fourth is strategic thinking. When you're building your product, you should orient yourself around the larger goals of the company. You're building for your users, yes, but you are still running a business at the end of the day and your product should not lose stock of that larger organizational goal. And fifth is technical knowledge. While you don't need to know how to code, you should know how to talk intelligently with your engineers, discuss technical trade-offs with them and also be able to pull data when needed. So keep these five things in mind as you move forward towards the differences in PM because these five skills are the foundation and these are skills that you should always be working on. Now, let's talk about the different types of PM work and how they map to PM specializations. So there are roughly four types of product work. First one is feature work. This is typically the most well-known, also known as like traditional PMing, and this is where you're solving customer pain points and delivering value to your customer by extending your product toolkit through new features that your customers can use. This can be a very attractive PM specialization because you can directly see the impact in your product in the form of pixels. You can get user feedback directly and indirectly through multiple channels. Second is growth work. This is where I started my career and this can be very exciting for someone who likes numbers and a fast-paced environment. In this type of work, you are solving for business metrics through data insights and hyper-optimizations of your existing product suite. Third is scaling work. This is somewhat what I'm doing right now. This type of work can be less tangible in the form of actually seeing the product depending on what you're scaling, of course, but it is no less impactful. Depending on the type and stage of the company, this work is critical to actually de-next the growth of your product. When I was working at Replet, scaling work was critical. Because Replet is essentially a platform that lets developers build on top of it, it was crucial to think about the scalability of the platform in everything that we did. Fourth is product market fit work or zero to one PM work, or I think it's also called innovative PM work. This is where you are in very early stages of the product or of the company, and you're trying to identify whether your product solves the real user need, and can you do so while also making profit over time? This can be equally exhausting and exhilarating work. It takes a lot of market and user research to get this right. You may even have to pivot a few times, but when you do get it right, the feeling is exhilarating. You might have already connected the dots, but these four types of product work match to these four PM types. So the first one, the feature or core PM, the second one is growth PM, the third is what you've got platform PM. When I was in this role, we called it data PM, and the fourth one is innovation PM, which can also be zero to one product management. Now, let's say you're an aspiring PM or already a PM considering a specialization switch. How should you think about each specialization and a skills fit? There are three things you should consider to find the right product manager fit. What are the skills required? Who will be your key collaborators? And whether your current role might be a good skills fit for the next PM job. We already discussed the focus of each type of PM, that is your solving customer pain points through feature work, your solving for business metrics by hyper optimization as a growth PM, your scaling product delivery as a platform PM, and your finding a product market fit as an innovation PM. Now let's talk about the other two, the skills needed, the key collaborators, and also the third one, whether your current role might be a good skills fit. So as a feature or core PM, you need to be very user centered, empathetic, and you should have some design and creative bent of mind. In this role, your key collaborators are designers, UXRs, of course, engineers, and sometimes marketing and support, depending on how big of a feature launch it is. You'll be a good fit for this role if you are in user research, design, marketing, partnerships, consultation, VC, because these roles can be very user centric. The second, as a growth PM, you need to be data savvy. You should be able to write scripts, build dashboards, and reason about metrics. You might even need to create new metrics to really anchor your organization around how to measure core user acquisition and retention, and you need to be comfortable with quick experimentation and a lot of failure and learnings. Here, your primary collaborators are marketing, data science, and sometimes even finance teams. Third, as a platform PM, you need to be able to understand the core technologies and infrastructure. This role can be technical, so it helps if you have a technical degree or are proficient in software otherwise. Your team here typically includes engineers and data science. Lastly, as a zero to one PM, you should thrive in ambiguity and be very comfortable with market research, visionary thinking, and storytelling. In this role, chances are that you will largely be working with the executive team, researchers, and with users. In addition to the skill set, there is another dimension to consider when you're finding your product manager fit, and that is the stage of the company. So when you are at an early stage company, let's say, Preceed or Series A, this is when it helps to be a highly generalist PM. What this means is that you may have some PM experience and even limited PM experience, but you should be able to dip into the different PM specialties. You cannot just shackle yourself into a lane. You might be asked to switch lanes, and often you will have to switch lanes. You should be able to do product market fit expansion work. You should be able to do growth work, scaling work, and a lot of zero to one work. The second stage of the company, which is Series B to C, this is where you're kind of stuck in the middle. You may have to be a generalist PM, depending on how many PMs there are in your team, or you could also be a specialized PM team. This is where I found myself when I was working at Replet, which was a Series B company at the time. I was hired to be a growth PM. I did some growth work at the start, but when we found that launching a learning platform is what would bring us a lot of new users and growth, that is what I did. I launched a learning platform, which was almost like a zero to one thing for the company, and it wasn't literally growth work in its traditional sense. The third one is a Series D company, or perhaps even a large company, where you have the luxury of a very specialized PM team. You will rarely be asked to switch PM lanes here. You will have specialized product managers, and at a very big company, you might even have multiple product managers for the same product cut across different services of the product. So depending on what your natural bent of mind is, what you're passionate about, what your skills are, you may want to choose which stage of the company you want to go in, because regardless of the role, you may or may not get an opportunity to dip into other product management specializations. Now, let's say you're thinking about your career. When I was thinking about my career progression, the left side is how I thought it would go, but it really did not go that way. In reality, it was a lot messier. I jumped around a lot so that I could get a breath first experience before going depth first, but that is not the traditional advice that you would get. So let's think about how you should actually approach your career progression. There are three things you should consider when thinking about how to progress in your PM career. The first is the product work spectrum, which we spoke at length about, right? Recognizing the diverse landscape of product roles and responsibilities and avoiding any over reliance on tools that you're familiar with and really using the right toolkit for the right problem. The second is create your path. You should develop a strategic path for your career advancement. Again, I'm guilty of it, I did not do it. I was very curious and I was eager to see what different types of PMs were out there before I could pick a specialization to go deep into. You can pick and choose, but the typical advice you would get is really intentionally think about where you want your career to go. And here it also helps to not be very focused on personal achievements, but really to holistically think about scaled product initiatives. The third one is just charting your career progression. Think about the right timing and think about what balance you wanna strike between breath and depth. Again, when I joined the startup, I did so during a highly economic turmoil time and it wasn't a good decision to do that. I came out of it safe, but consider those facts when you're thinking about where your career is going. Avoid the common mistake of seeking breath first very early in your career, because when you go depth first, you can really build a lot of credibility, which will also then allow you to go breath first very easily. Okay, so let's say you're already a product manager and you're thinking about whether or not you should make a career switch. How should you think about it? There are three tips that I would give you. First is think about your innate talents, right? What you're passionate about is very, very important and what your natural skill sets are also very important. Take stock of those. Don't just jump into the first thing that comes your way and think about what skill sets you have and what skills gap can you close that would allow you to succeed in the role, but that would also make the role challenging in a very fulfilling way. Secondly, broaden your skill sets after you have specialized in something. Transitioning to a new focus should come only after you've achieved a sense of mastery, otherwise you'll just keep thrashing around. And the third is you could always boost your career by specializing in emerging fields and think about like where is the high demand and probably limited supply because that's where you can maximize your chances of success quite a bit. So this is when it might make sense to make the switch. When does it not make sense to make the switch? You shouldn't really think about not jumping to the first thing that catches your eye, right? Beware that dazzling distraction. Avoid pursuing some things solely because they seemed prominent or appealing and really assess like all aspects of your career advancement. This is where it helps to have a plan. Second, don't be afraid of embracing complexity, right? A lot of us would think that, okay, if the role starts to get challenging or complex, you might think, I'm better than this. I know I can succeed if I just jump ship and move on to something else. It's very tempting, you will succeed, but really resist the urge to do so because when the going gets tough, that's when you can lean in. That also helps you really sharpen your own product management skills. You should be able to handle conflict and work through difficult situations. Those are also very valuable PM skills. And think about sticking around and embracing that complexity whenever that arises instead of just jumping on to a new thing. And lastly, I would say build really good relationships. This is something that I constantly did in my career. I changed a bunch of roles. I was in engineering, sales, marketing, strategy and operations before moving into product manager. And the one thing that helped me constantly besides hard work and delivering good results is building relationships. Your colleagues are not just your colleagues. They will take you forward. They will remember if you did good work, they will remember your personality and they will be there standing in your corner cheering you on or even writing those letters of recommendation or interviewing you for your next big job. So keep that in mind, always build good relationships. Understand where your skill sets are, where you want your career to go and then find your own product manager fit. Thank you. I'm always open to speaking at events and connecting with people. So if you need me for anything, you can reach me at my email, ashwarya105 at gmail.com. Bye.