 Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's talk on the art of product management. The reason why I chose this title is because in today's world, as many of you either know from experience or are studying at school, product management often becomes a lot about measurement, about doing quick experiments, about data, about just making sure that every KPI, every metric can be quantified in some way or the other. But I think there's a huge portion of product management that is more than just science, it's art as well. And I think it's the combination of those two things that can actually chart paths to success and have a fruitful career in the field of product management. So today, we're going to be talking about the art of product management and more specifically soft skills. But before that, a little bit about me. So who am I, right? My name is Rohan. I have been in product management for about 12, 13 years now. Currently, I'm a product leader at Amazon. I have worked from the start of my career in the semiconductor industry all the way to most recently in cloud gaming and pretty much everything in between. That has given me exposure to various technologies, various levels of people, various company sizes from startups to giant companies like Amazon. And what it has taught me so far is not just what needs to be valued in product management. As I mentioned earlier, that it needs to be, in my opinion, a blend of technical skills and soft skills. But also it's given me this desire to help others as I was helped on my path to try and enjoy the fruits of this career choice, right? So anyone who's looking to break into product management, I'm happy to speak with them, to coach them and to teach them whatever I've learned along the way. And hopefully I achieve some of that in today's presentation as well. So what is going to be today's agenda? Today's agenda, as I mentioned earlier, is going to be focused on soft skills more specifically within the art of product management. So we're going to be covering questions like, what are soft skills? How do they pertain to the product management life cycle? And for those of you who are not familiar with what the product management life cycle is, I'm going to go ahead and define that as well. And once you understand what those soft skills are and how do they pertain to product management, we'll also dive into why they're important. So not just listing them out, but trying to talk through how they can actually benefit you in your career and your day-to-day jobs. And then how do you go about actually developing these skills, right? Just listing them out is one thing, reading about them or building awareness around them is another thing. But how do you go about actually trying to develop these skills? Are these skills something that you're sort of born with? And if you don't have them, then that's it, you're done. Or is it something that you can actually build through practice, through education and learning in general? And then I'm going to try and frame some of these skills. There's actually a lot of them out there and we have limited time today. But in today's session, I would love to narrow it down to a few case studies that talk about how through the product management life cycle, some of these skills that we're going to highlight today and focus on how do they actually help in the day-to-day, you know, whether it pertains to actually shipping a product all the way from ideation or whether it pertains to managing your own career. Hopefully today's examples will be helpful and then we'll end in conclusion. All right, so let's dig in. I'm going to start with this tweet from Adam Grand, who I'm personally a big fan of. If you haven't heard of Adam Grand, he's an organizational psychologist. He's also a best-selling author. I think he's authored five New York Times best-selling books. One of them, I think, is Originals. It's really a fun read. It's an educational read into how you can actually become a better communicator, a better listener, and how you can actually apply that to your day-to-day work. But outside of that, he is also a podcast host. I think his Ted hosted podcast is one of the top podcasts out there. I think it's called Work Life. And in general, when he says, when he talks about soft skills, I certainly want to stand up and take note and listen. So in his mind and the way he defines it is not only, you know, what it pertains to in terms of leadership and communication and so on, but two other things stand out, right? Like, one, that these are what actually make human beings indispensable. And I think in today's climate, when everyone's talking about the resurgence or the reemergence of AI and chat GPT and even in product management, a lot of people are a little bit concerned that, you know, am I going to be sort of AI'd out of a job? Is the AI going to come in and replace me? I think this line around the behavioral, social, and emotional skills are what make human beings in general indispensable. And even in our field of product management, I truly believe that these are the skills that are going to help product people stand out. Now, to what extent is it, you know, is AI not going to have an impact or, you know, is it going to replace some jobs? But not all that might be the topic of discussion for another day. And I don't want to get into that here. But I think needless to say, in terms of the importance of these skills, I definitely believe that this can give BMs an edge over others who may not have worked on these skills as much or who may not recognize the importance of these skills. The other thing that he mentions here that is very interesting is that these are often the hardest to master. And we're going to dig through this plenty in the rest of the talk today. But this is something that while it's hard to master and while it can take time, it can also be incredibly rewarding for the course of your career. So what are some of these skills? Now, this map is great. I wish I could claim credit for making it. The credit for this map goes to Shreyas Doshi. For those of you who haven't heard his name in the field of product management, a hundred and fifty percent recommend that you write it down, search for it and read pretty much everything that he has on the topic because I think a lot of what he says resonates very clearly. He's articulate. He's got the right skill set and experience to actually educate other folks on this topic. But borrowing from Shreyas's framework, what PM's skills overall are there? And my goal with this particular image and slide is not to dive into each and every one of them. There's a lot to cover here. It's one to generate awareness around this general topic. If you haven't heard of these skills before or if you haven't seen product management skills being referred to in this particular way, this is a great place to get started and say, hey, if I'm going to become a successful PM, what skills should I even be looking to master? And then more specifically, when I talk about soft skills for product management, I am focusing on some of the skills that are in the orange and yellow arrows towards the bottom right, which is when you start getting into the influential communication aspect of listening and writing in public speaking. But also persuasion and presence, right? High agency is another one. How do you, without being able to directly manage people, like let's say you're an ICPM and you're not in no one's really reporting to you, but you still need to have that influence, that authority. You can't quite just force and order people around. You still need to be able to work with them, convince them, inspire them and so on and so forth. All these words sound sort of intuitive in the moment and it feels like you're nodding along to it and saying, yeah, yeah, I need to be persuasive. I need to be a good leader. I need to lead by example. I need to be able to influence folks. But what does it actually mean? How do you, you know, what are some of those typical skills, the individual skills that you need to cultivate and how in order to get to those places? So we'll get there today. Hopefully, I think we'll probably just scratch the surface, but it should give you enough of a lead to go and chase and follow and learn more. But the point of this map, again, is if you're not aware, there is a vast sort of array of skills that you can go and acquire, you can learn. And if you're already focusing on the ones that are really popular in interviews, especially like product sense and execution sense and analytics and product vision and strategy, all the stuff that's on the left hand side in the map, that's great and that's absolutely going to be needed. But the communication critical thinking, some of it may even help during product interviews. For example, Amazon's leadership, the sort of leadership principle based interviews or their interviews around behavioral questions. Those, these skills will help with those as well. But in addition to that, just in your day to day job, this is something that's going to be very valuable. So with that, how can they be very valuable, right? As I mentioned, these can have a direct impact on how you're performing, but what kind of a direct impact are we talking about impact with people in terms of, you know, people within your teams, people that are your peers or people you're reporting to or people outside your organization, most importantly, your customers or partners. Or are we talking about actually being able to ship successful products to market and the answer is both, right? So everything starts in my opinion with building relationships, right? Product management is absolutely a team sport and it's interesting because a lot of the work that you do will feel like it's solo work, right? Even though you're in likely a team of PMs, you are pretty much the owner for your own space. And so from a product management perspective, often it'll feel like you're kind of on your own and you're operating solo. But if you dig a little bit deeper and think about it, you can't really get anything done without building relationship, relationships, excuse me, with your teammates, with your leadership or management or with partners and stakeholders. And so soft skills can definitely help you do that. They can definitely help you do it effectively and potentially even stand out to the point where that starts to get recognized as some of your strengths. Understanding customer needs comes from empathy and empathy is not necessarily a technical skill that you would pick up in your college degrees, right? So it's something that definitely is one of those almost intangible human skills. And if you get better at some of the soft skills we discussed today, then you'll be able to understand your customer better, which means you will be able to build hopefully the right products for them. And then leading various cross-functional teams, people often think that leading cross-functional teams comes down to being the smartest person in the room, having the most domain knowledge about a particular topic or being able to solve technically challenging problems, especially if you have a technical product. But the truth is that leading cross-functional teams actually comes down to understanding people, their motivations of what's driving them and ensuring that you have that in mind, you have that interest in mind and you're also able to communicate your interest to them when you are able to successfully collaborate on some sort of a product or a project. And then of course, actually growing your career. This is, I think, something that I have learned the hard way over time. I always wanted to make sure that I have as many product launches under my belt and I had the right metrics to show for it, the right kind of growth in the right areas to make sure that I show an impact on the business directly. And yes, those things are definitely important. I'm not saying that those are not going to help you in your career, but as you start thinking about making that leap into a senior PM role or from a senior PM role into a group PM or a director and above, the further up you go in my experience, these skills are going to matter more and more and more. It's almost like the weightage around these skills starts to go up and that's why it's important to build these as well and building, in my opinion, starts with awareness. So today, hopefully at least the awareness piece is taken care of in this talk. A lot of, when I've talked about this in the past or I've shared this with my mentees or friends and colleagues, one of the first questions that comes to mind is, is this something that I can even work on or either I have it or not? Like, is this something that I'm just born with? And I have seen this in myself. I have seen this in colleagues and friends. Definitely not something that is innate. It's not something that you either have it or not. It's certainly something that you can work on. And I think the philosophy around this in my opinion, the one that resonated with me was, you're going to have a lot of strengths and skills and superpowers, I think is the right word to use over the course of your career. Either you'll be able to identify them yourself or your peers will identify them for you and give you that feedback. In amongst those superpowers, like there's a notion that there's a school of thought that says, hey, you already have superpowers. They're already great. You don't need to work on them. Go work on all your weaknesses. That's one. The other school of thought is, hey, you know, instead of trying to spend all your time developing weaknesses that perhaps were weak for a reason and you may not enjoy doing that. Instead, you should focus on just continuing to build your superpowers because that's differentiating you from others. But in that second school of thought, the advice is not to completely ignore your weaknesses. The advice is to at least bring them to a point where they don't sort of hold you back or drag you down with them. So get them to that good enough point. And I think that's what I have found effective as well. Develop your skills to the point where they're not holding you back that they're at least good enough if you feel like that's something that is not naturally your superpower, right? And I would encourage you to keep that in mind as you think about how to develop your soft skills. And so for example, if you're talking about communication and if you feel like that's something that's never been your strong suit, then think about things like active listening, right? Go look that up. See how active listening can actually be, what it even is to begin with, how can it be developed? And you'll see that it helps you throughout pretty much most aspects of your life. But in particular in product management, that could be something that could really unlock your relationships and your performance as a whole, right? Now, let's talk about the product management lifecycle really quickly. And this is a framework that I will try to bring all examples back to. And hopefully it'll be helpful to track. We know hopefully most of you know this lifecycle, but I'll cover it really quickly. This is not catch all for all PM work out there. There's going to be obviously variations of this, but just for the sake of time and brevity, I have picked an example where you're starting with a brand new idea. Imagine you're going into a new team. You have a brand new idea. You're sort of building the team out and you have to take something from zero to one, which is another very high in demand popular term these days, right? So let's say you started with the idea generation. You have to test out its feasibility. You have to kind of do a market analysis. And a lot of the action at this stage is basically talking and writing and researching, right? You aren't actually building anything yet. From that point, once you feel like you've done enough ideation, you get to the definition phase where you're starting to actually zoom in on what's important and what needs to be done and why and you start to like share that with a lot of your teammates. From there, you go into building and testing the concept as early as possible, hopefully putting as minimum effort as needed so that if you need to make big changes, then you don't have a lot of wasted investment. Then you go on to validate that idea with the market and if you get good feedback or even if whatever feedback you get, you make the changes to the product and then if all your criteria for launch is met, you go ahead, launch it to the right customers via the right channels with the proper strategy in place and eventually after launch, you go ahead and you figure out ways to track the product post launch but also think about growing it in a way that is sustainable for the business. This is something that most of you should already be familiar with. So how does this pertain to the soft skills that I've been talking about so far? Let's take a case study of leadership as an example, right? I'm at Amazon right now. Amazon has 16 leadership principles. So that's a lot of them. There's a lot of ways in which leaders can be defined and leaders by definition don't have to be people with exact titles, right? Director VP and above. Leaders are folks who can essentially lead in any situation. You could be thrown into a room of people that you've never met before and you can recognize what the room needs, what the problems are, why they're dead together or perhaps even facilitate that conversation and you could naturally take on a leadership role. And so one of the favorites of mine in that list of 16 is Earn Trust. You know, I won't go too deep into sort of explaining and defining it. It's a little bit self-explanatory, but in the interest of Earn Trust, how does one build the skills, what soft skills are even needed? First, let's say earning trust and how does that pertain to the product development lifecycle that I had just talked about? So first of all, think about things like putting others' interests before yours, right? How do you earn trust with someone? You don't go in into a conversation or into a group setting with a very prefixed agenda, right? You try to put in the work to get to know who the people are that you're with. You get to learn their interests. You lead by example, right? Instead of just talking a big game, you go ahead and you actually do the things that you claim to do. You don't just try to take all the credits and the plots and paint yourself as the most positive successful person ever. You actually go ahead and own both your successes and failures, right? And then be consistent. You repeatedly do what you actually say, put in the work, right? Don't just show up saying, hey, I'm the product manager. You're the marketing person. You're the legal person. Go ahead and do the things that you're supposed to do and just tell me what the result is. Take a little bit of interest. Do some research in their areas as well and understand where your partners are coming from and just keep doing it over time. It's a little bit of a grind, but it's the work that will earn you the trust that you need to be both a good teammate but also a leader that your teammates are looking to follow. And how does this fit in into the actual product development lifecycle? Especially in the early phases, when you're coming up with ideas, when you're ideating and you're brainstorming and you're looking to define where the product is going and you expect others to follow you, it's not just the strength of the idea, how innovative that is and how impactful that might be to the business that would get the kind of attention you need from your teammates. It's also your track record as a leader, which is why often if you're brought in brand new into a team, into a space, this can take time, right? No matter how successful you are, no matter what your track record is in the past, if you're put it into a brand new situation, give yourself time to establish yourself as a leader on that trust so that then the team can truly gel and deliver innovation at the rate that you're looking to deliver. Another one, another pillar. And as I said earlier, we're just going to cover four case studies today. There are many, many soft skill areas that I think are important in the art of product management, but for the sake of time, I've sort of nattered down to these four. So after leadership, the next case study I'd like to focus on is teamwork as a soft skill. How do you become better at teamwork? You know, there's a communication piece to it. You should ideally over communicate, right? When there's a need to actually share what is it that you're up to, whether it's in terms of product vision or strategy or whether it's in the form of status updates for where the project or product development life cycle is, make sure that you are going overboard in communicating because silence is worse than getting too many pings on the status of something. Make sure you have empathy for where your teammates are coming from. Don't just go in and have a my way or highway attitude. Resolve conflicts quickly. This is a huge one. I can't stress enough how many times in my career so far, I have been in situations where inevitably either me directly or others on my team have gotten into conflicts because of some reason or the other. It could be a time pressure. It could be a difference in opinion on going in a certain direction. It could be people stepping on each other's toes. How do you get around that, right? Do you have what it takes to actually recognize that first of all, right? You could be passive about it. You could just be kind of having an attitude of this is not really my problem and those two people are fighting about some topic and they'll figure it out. Instead of that, try to actively get on it, offer your help, see if you can actually help resolve the conflict by either finding common ground and figuring out that there must be something that the two people are agreeing on, if nothing else at the very least, that they're trying to go towards the same goals that you would help define earlier and then from there, understand each of the side's motivations and grievances and make sure that everyone feels heard, right? So get in there, resolve those conflicts quickly, recognize them and act on them, actively participate. You are the heartbeat of the team and you have to make sure that everyone feels involved. Again, it feels obvious to say and it feels like these are just things that should happen organically but they often don't. So make sure that you actively do that and of course, respect your teammates. No matter how smart you are, no matter what you have achieved in your career, everyone's on a journey of their own and everyone has earned the right to be in the room same as you. So make sure you are aware of that as well. Everyone should feel psychologically safe to be their most productive in the area, right? In the area that they're in and what they're building along with you and this in my experience has been most apparent during prototyping and validation because this is often where teams are under most pressure. People think that the most pressure comes from launches or post launch and of course it has its own pressure but when you're building something new and there is anticipation around it, especially when you're in that prototyping and validation phase there is a lot of uncertainty around whether we're going in the right direction or not. We don't really have a lot of signal. A lot of resources are being poured into XYZ project. That is the time when your teamwork especially needs to be really stellar. Communication is a golden one. You can imagine at all phases this is important but especially when you're coming close to launching and growing at the product you can imagine that others within your group or across your group teams within the company or your leadership would want clear and crisp communication around what's going on. We spoke about active listening a little bit earlier. Make sure that as a PM your spoken and written communication is top notch and this could be each email. It doesn't have to be a six-pager or a memo that is two pages that you're working on. Every email that you send, work on it, work on techniques that help you become better at writing these. There's a lot of frameworks out there. Go look them up. Internal and external communication is important. Recognize when you're sending an email to a vendor or a customer versus your colleague or your leadership. Know the difference between what it means to send an internal versus external communication. Learn that same for technical versus non-technical verbiage just because you know something in and out very well does not mean that everyone needs to understand every aspect of the technical architecture of your product as an example. And the same for individual contributors and executives. Your software development manager partner or your engineering manager partner may need to have a great level of detail around, let's say, bugs that are impacting your product. But in your executive product reviews, your VP of product may not really care for that level of detail unless asked. So there's a lot of detail here. This could be a whole different topic in itself, but another timeless piece to pay attention to. And then time management, speaking of time, I think I want to stress that for those of you who are thinking of developing your soft skills, time management is perhaps on the edge, right, of soft and hard skills. It's something you can actually kind of measure the impact of very easily, relatively easily. But if you're in that mindset of like, hey, I'll just get every single thing done on your plate. That is not a sustainable approach. Actively think about how will you manage your day? You may sprint for a week or two or a month or a year, but inevitably no matter who you are, you are going to burn out and that is not good for a long and healthy career. So I would highly encourage you to manage your time and to think actively about it. And how do you do that? Well, you learn to delegate. If you want to scale, if you want to climb the managerial ladder or just grow in your career, you have to be able to delegate. You have to be able to trust others. But don't just offload busy work, right? Think through how you're doing this in a manner that's actually also helpful for the people who are helping you prioritize ruthlessly. Anytime, no matter how small the task comes to you, if someone comes in with a request, it almost feels too easy to be like, yeah, I'll take care of it and just say, yeah, I'll get it done. But the truth is you have to be able to prioritize. You have to be able to make sure that you are very intentional about every day or every week and the way you spend it. So build in some time to actually think about prioritization. Use a framework like the LNO one from Shreyas Toshi I mentioned earlier. I won't dig into it or dive into it here, but please do look it up. It's an effective framework and also learn to say no, right? Say no often. You should be saying no more times than yes, especially once you get established because you're going to get requests for doing way more things than you have the bandwidth for. But of course, when you do say no, try to be polite, try to give a reasoning, and then once you respect your boundaries, I think others will start respecting them as well. And over time, you'll hopefully feel like your work-life balance is also being maintained. So that was a lot. I felt like it went by way faster than I expected. But to recap, in my opinion, don't ignore soft skills. Hopefully, this gives you a little bit of a glimpse into what soft skills are. Technical skills are definitely important if you're going into technical product management or just direct product management technical skills for any PM role. But soft skills, in my opinion, are vital and you'll especially reach that tipping point in your career pretty soon when you realize that these soft skills are the ones that are actually getting you further forward in your career. Practice them. That's definitely the only way whether you think you're good at them or not. Practice them. Make sure you pick the areas that you want to develop. And then there's a lot of material out there to actually help you get ahead. And then finally, balance them both, right? Of course, soft skills are important and I've reached that for the last half an hour. But make sure you find that right balance of technical and soft skills and that'll help you in your career and it'll also help your customers who you're building the products for. Thank you so much for your time. Hope you had a productive session and hope you can take away something from this that helps you in your PM journey. Thanks.