 Hello, everyone. Hope you're all doing well. I'm really excited today and honored to be here with you. My name is Chad Ash. I'm a group product manager at booking.com. In this talk, I would like to share some of my experiences on my work journey so far from engineering to product manager to group product manager. I will do my best to highlight the key takeaways and provide practical tips for you. Ready? Let's go. I would like to start with my brief history first. In 2009, years and years ago, I finished my PhD in telecommunications in Turkey. The year after, I moved to the Netherlands as a post-doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Eindhoven. Then I found a job at ASML as a software engineer. In one sentence, ASML manufactures very expensive lithography machines that make the chips you use every day. For example, around 90 percent of the chips in your iPhone are actually created in ASML machines. In 2014, I've been selected for a long-term assignment to work with Intel in their factory in Portland, Oregon, United States, and that was an eye-opener experience for me to see how my software products are actually used in the field. Then I decided to move to product management. After a year in the US, I moved back to the Netherlands and started working as a product manager at ASML. ASML was a great company. I was really comfortable, but it was my first company. I wondered how the world is outside of ASML. Therefore, in 2019, I joined ING Tech to work on their banking technology platform as a product area lead. It was a great experience for me to work on Microsoft Azure Cloud Migration, developer experience, API management Kafka service match. It was a good one. Recently, five months ago, actually, I joined booking.com to help them in their ambitions to build their FinTech platform. Today, I'm working here as a group product manager within FinTech Business Unit. That's enough about me, so let me start with my story today. I would like to again take you back in time. It's the year 2011. I'm working as a software engineer coding in C, those were the days, and working on optimizing algorithms for ASML to scan machines. Quite exciting to work on a problem at the intersection of physics and mathematics, and developing the software to make the hardware perform better. Actually, this was a snapshot of my life from 2011 to 2013. Here is a height map of a vapor. For the ones who do not know, a vapor is a thin slice of semiconductor material in this form used for the fabrication of integrated circuits. Chips. ASML machines measure the height of the vapor in nanometers, and we create this map. Then the same hardware is used to expose light to create the layers of the chips to be manufactured, but it needs to level the vapor in the Z-coordinate, XYZ, so that in the end, the chips will work properly. I'm actually trying to simplify a lot here. It's more complicated than that, but in one sentence, I was working on finding the best possible maneuvers for the hardware to compensate for the differences in the height of the vapor at the nanometer scale. I was quite enthusiastic and amazing problem to solve. As an individual contributor, I'm part of a software team where we have a project manager, a technical team lead, and other members. But as time passes, I notice things. For example, we receive requirements and get the job done, but we are not involved much in the ideation and the requirements space. Also, when we have a successful delivery, we move on to the next problem and have no idea how our delivery is used by the real customers. From time to time, we were briefed on some feedback from the customer, but actually I haven't seen a single customer so far. We're quite tragic. So after a while, I started to feel an itch. Why am I not being involved in some discussions? Who comes up with these ideas? Who sets the requirements? What does the customer do with the product we deliver? Actually, to start with maybe who are the customers? Are they happy with the product? Do they even use it? These questions stuck in my mind and never left. I delivered a couple of other projects and jumped from one project to another, suppressed these questions, but after a while, they came back. The more they circled in my mind, the more I scratched. Finally, today became an itch. So I'm scratching my itch now. I feel clueless. What is the next step? Feeling quite uncomfortable and honestly getting a bit annoyed with all the itch scratching, but then I start talking with peers, with my manager, even with my friends and family. And people are giving you some bits of advice, but you still feel restless. Things are not clear. You don't know what is next, but you have some idea about where to go in your career, or maybe you have multiple options in your mind. Back to me. What did I do next? It was a quite practical approach. I had no idea about product development, but I was curious. So I started searching for all the people in product development at the director level and up, and started sending them messages one by one. Why director level? For me, not much to do with the hierarchy, but mostly about the experience. At that time, my assumption was that a director level and up should have tremendous experience and already figured out things so that one of these people actually can guide me at it. It was the year 2012, and my working environment was at that time a bit hierarchical. I received no responses at all to most of my messages and actually I got a bit upset. Probably, I can only imagine, from the receiver's perspective, I was a developer sending an awkward message like, Hi there. I found your name in the organization chart and wanted to have an introduction and talk about product development. And I'm pretty sure the receiver is like, Who is this guy? I don't know him at all. The lead. Anyway, there were a few who responded and I immediately scheduled introduction sessions and always showed up on time to meet with these people. In these sessions, I did a quick intro and started asking questions to carefully listen and observe. In a session of 20 to 30 minutes, usually you have enough time to understand how someone thinks and makes decisions. So I observed to detail notes and also evaluated how I felt with each people I met during these sessions. In total, there were four people. And with one of them, I had a great click. And that is what matters at the end of the day. I found my mentor. Looking back, it was a great journey for me with my mentor for the next three years. We were meeting every three to four weeks and discussing the topics I brought to the table. And I still don't know how he did that, but he always magically brings a perspective I missed or showed me how stubborn I was being. Sometimes asked the same question I actually asked using a different phrasing. Back to me. Simple trick. It's a really simple trick, but very, very effective. I still vividly remember that before every one of our sessions, I always felt quite enthusiastic. And after every one of these sessions, I always and always felt even more enthusiastic and had more trust in myself. And that is what matters. This is key for any mentor-mentee relationship. So this example, finding a mentor is just one of the things you can do. You can also find a good career coach or even create the support system you need by connecting with your peers. Who has a similar mindset as you have? The value of such a support system over your career is extremely high. It helps you to find and spot your blind spots and grow further. So back to my itch. Looking back, all the itch scratching was a good sign actually. Maybe hard to be aware of when you are going through this period, but from a distance, this is a great step. You will pat yourself on the back after some time. Now, my journey just started and I'm ready to run as fast as I can. So now I'm running like crazy. This is one of those times. All of us, I can imagine, have really challenging but also rewarding experiences in our careers. Now it's the year 2015 for me. I'm a product manager working with multiple development teams to deliver a software product on recipe optimization. In a nutshell, what we were trying to do is to optimize the parameters of the hardware to make the hardware measurements accurate. A lot of research and ideas, trials and errors to get things working properly. There is a deadline, it's a big one. And we keep pushing, running every day, but it doesn't work. The thing about running and rushing is your body is pumping a lot of adrenaline for you to keep up. It feels really good. For some time, it also makes you feel that you are doing great and progressing. At the same time, this might cloud your judgment. I was working really hard, visiting customers around the world, taking detailed notes on how they use our products, what they need, and then coming back to the headquarters, working with the development teams to get our product working. Then I started traveling again. This is pretty much the circle of my life at the time. Not much time to slow down and think properly. Time is running out, the deadline is approaching fast. And then there was a moment. I decided to stop because running and pushing were clearly not working. With all the traveling and alignments with the development teams, I started to notice some patterns. I was getting impatient, for example, with the deadline approaching, sending emails to development teams or my peer PMs, because properly explaining the why, skipping some of the reasonings behind the decisions I am actually making at that time. Then when there's a delay or a change of plans, I was getting upset and probably pushed people a bit with all the stress building up. Also, I noticed some teams were performing exceptionally well and some others struggling. Then I said to myself, I should stop and think. I should put the deadline on all the running aside for a moment. And I did that. I started to think. I talked with several people to understand the reasons behind our challenges. We made a plan together with the people I was working closely with. We got things in a more structured format and also agreed that we will remind each other to make this a reality check. Next time, one of us keeps running for too long. Of course, it depends on the context, but reality checks are needed to remove any bias, taking a step back, asking few questions. For example, are we really progressing? Are we measuring our progress? Do we have a plan in place? Are we following a plan or just trying things coming our way? Did we really understand the problem at hand? In short, I was purely focused on execution to get things done on time and everything else was unimportant to me. I couldn't be more wrong. The year is 2018 now. I have a larger scope and working with five to six development teams and things are getting very more complicated with all the dependencies, team dynamics and organizational structure. My primary focus is still making sure that we deliver the right things to our customers with the right quality and also at the right time. Now, I have observed a few things more than once. For example, people's expectations are very more important than I ever anticipated. Actually, I was feeling quite comfortable with how to set the right expectations with the customer and how to explain things when our clients shift. But when it comes to my development teams or internal stakeholders, I was not bringing my A game. In my mind, I was not positioning the internal stakeholders as my customers. This was a big, big difference. Specifically, when one of the teams was struggling to deliver, I was not spending time to understand what is actually going on. When one of my PMs was a bit delayed in alignment or communication, I was guiding the person to do things better next time but I was not spending the time to understand the reasons behind the situation. Simply, I was not putting the effort needed to understand the problem. Here is what I think. Maybe coming from an engineering background also blocked my perspective here. I had a laser focus when it comes to technical challenges and how to figure things out, but when it comes to people problems, I tend to avoid things. When I figured out there's a lot to learn from me, I started reading a lot and also observing others, solving these complicated problems. For example, I experienced firsthand that from time to time, it is okay that one team is not performing well because that could be many reasons for that. In the end, we build products with people and every person has expectations. People who are building a product form a team and teams have dynamics that make them successful. The starting point is a psychological safety. Everyone in the team must feel comfortable asking questions, admitting mistakes and also contributing their ideas. Team members can count on each other. People must complete their work well and on time. If that's not going to happen, then they must clearly communicate timely and also explain the new plan. Another one, team members must understand the shared goal between them and how their work contributes to the company objectives and their role in them. Fourth one, team members should find something that is personally important for them in their work because that is how people get motivated. Last but not the least, they believe in working on the work that matters. They feel like they are making a difference and an impact. So if you look at this, this is not an easy list of things to achieve, but when you at least one time work with a very successful team, you will recognize it immediately. This was a big learning for me, an in perspective. So I felt like I rewired myself because the key learning was sometimes the problem could be a people problem as well. And that requires a completely different approach than product management or engineering skillset. And unfortunately, it's not possible to solve all people problems as if you are managing a product. Therefore, it might require some rewiring for people like me. Okay, now we are in the last chapter of my story. So I'm managing several product managers now, no longer an individual contributor. So I'll be honest here, at the beginning of this transition from individual contributor to a managerial role, I struggled quite a lot. So the biggest struggle for me was, I noticed that I was very used to be in the spotlight, traveling to customers, getting good engagement with the team and then coming back to the headquarters and delivering product updates to my stakeholders, running after new ideas, launching new features. It felt really, really good. There was a lot of attention on the work I was doing and I was feeling the impact being created pretty much every day. Now, the spotlight is not on me anymore, but on the product managers in my unit. The rewiring of myself was also about this feeling. It took a while, but finally, I came to the realization that there's much more I can learn and create an impact by serving others, enabling others, learning how to understand their expectations, supporting them in difficult situations, experiencing that they deliver fantastic results and helping them grow in their career. When I look back at it, the satisfaction I got from all of these was far greater than the adrenaline pump and the joy I got when I was an individual contributor. Actually, maybe one of the most important bits I got on this topic was, you don't need to be a manager to do all of these things. If you want, you can already practice when you're an IC, but nobody's actually stopping you. When you became a manager, your scope gets quite extended. So you are no longer an expert in one area, but you're expected to have an understanding of multiple areas. In some of these areas, you might know a lot more and in some others, not that much. How are you going to focus on such an extended scope? There are a few key things that I learned that can help you focus in today's noisy world. As a manager, first of all, you need to build a great relationship with your team members. This is key. Without fully functioning team, you will find yourself trying to fill some gaps and also losing your focus on the bigger picture. And this is a continuous process. You keep spending time with everyone in your team to make sure your team functions as well as possible. Next, you need to look ahead and prepare things for your team, meaning you need to be prepared most of the time. You need to be the one thinking about the structural things, getting your stakeholders input and building long-term strategy and planning on your group of products scope now. At the same time, while keeping the product management scope, you need to build the strategy and plan on your team, their competence, their growth, possible expansion of your area and how it will look organizationally. Now there are many more dimensions to take into account when defining a strategy or making a plan. When you have a plan, don't forget to communicate your plan clearly to your stakeholders again and again because people might not get fully what you are planning to do in just one session. To achieve success in this extended scope and your new multidimensional universe, you need to form your habits and be very structural. At least this is my advice worked very well for me so far. Within these habits, one thing that is exceptionally important for me is writing things down. Maybe it is because I don't have a good recall, but it always worked for me to look back on the notes I took and reread them before thinking about how to approach things. It's a noisy world and we need to nurture our team, learn how to focus and then communicate our thinking clearly. It's a noisy world and we need to form our habits to live in an effective way. I would like to close my talk by talking about a well-known concept called the learning picture. There are and will be many of these learning kids in your career. So the key message here is you need to put in the hard work. There's not a way. Every time without an exception, you need to go through the phase of, I don't understand this, making you really uncomfortable to stop. Then it gets quite difficult. And eventually there will be a moment where you really want to throw in the towel. Okay, we are done here. But actually that is probably where things start to get a bit better because you hit the bottom of the pit, then you start climbing out of the pit and eventually reach the other end without of learning along the way. And you go on till the next bit. All in all, the summary of my journey from engineering to PM to GPM started scratching my itch, then creating my support system to find my way. When I became a PM, I started running full speed. Running was fun, but I learned to go slow to be able to go fast again. There was a moment I focused on understanding the problem in a broader sense. This led me to rewire myself as I couldn't apply my PM skills to people problems. Then when I became a manager, I learned how to serve my team and enable my team members. To be able to do that effectively, I taught a lot about how I can lead in a noisy world, communicate my thinking and let my team members be focused. I still try to learn like a kid and I would like to keep doing that following my curiosity and interests. Thank you.