 Hello, my name is Arturi Nahosa and I'm a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. Today, we're going to talk about making the career transition from pre-sales to product management. So, a little bit about myself before we get started and you know why I'm sort of talking on this topic. So, as I mentioned, I'm a PM at AWS and I work on the non-relational databases team. Today, I manage a team of product managers and now I'm a specialist working on our database services, helping them bring to the market, defining the roadmap, those sorts of things. I've been with AWS since about 2016, but not too long ago, before I was a PM at AWS, I actually started off my career as a solution architect and sales engineer. So, they did pretty out of college, helping customers evaluate, deploy and integrate software, working on things such as billing systems and telecommunication software and financial services stuff. You know, looking for money laundering and you know, all sorts of other financial, financial dude, no-no's. It was a lot of fun and I worked as an SC and an SA for about six years, you know, and you know, I got thinking at the question of saying, hey, Arturo, like, how did you sort of go from being an SA and an SC at the PM? Right? And that was what Product School invited me here to talk about today is sort of what that career transition looked like. You know, what was my journey? You know, why I believe and I know that, you know, technical essays and essays make really good product managers, as well as some of the lessons learned that I've picked up along the way and tips that you can use if you're also thinking about making that transition yourself. So, you know, hopefully you find today's presentation helpful. So, you know, my journey from essay, essay to PM was definitely not a straight line. There are lots of different, you know, things are tried along the ways to sort of figure out what I like to do and what was I thought was interesting and you know, where my skills are at. And then each one of those sort of stops I learned something helped me sort of take the next step. So I'll kind of walk you through my journey to give you a sense of like, you know, what sort of pushed me from a long step to step, as well as sort of, you know, what I sort of picked up and the skills I picked up along that helped me sort of ultimately get to where I am today with just like a PM manager and AWS. So, as I mentioned earlier, you know, I really started off my career out of college working as an essay. And I, you know, this year was like a developer and I thought I was going to be like a coder but then I realized you know what, coding is cool I like it it's a lot of fun but what I really like is I like working with customers sort of like being out in the field. I don't just want to be behind the desk so I still like to solve technical problems I like sort of putting things together you know like you know like love Legos as a child right now I like the Legos of technology now as an adult. And you know that's sort of what led me to being an essay right as you get to really be hands on with customers listening to their problems going very deep within the solve help them solve challenging stuff to grow their business. Over time I also learned that I, you know, I like the sales side as far as sort of went from an essay to an SC, because again I really like sort of the, you know, the high pressure situations of trying to win the deal that I really like sort of building something new for customers help them understand the value, you know what the companies that work for offered. And I did that for a while and again it's a lot of fun, but you know sort of along the way, you know, the better of an SC and an essay that I became you know the more I did things like working on, you know, like sales and a bit with them sort of help other essays and essays on my team whenever we launch new products, or I found myself often bringing a lot of feedback back to our product teams and engineering teams of things that I was seeing as they work with customers and I actually found that I really like doing that sort of stuff right, you know, sort of on more of a little more of their strategy side, having more input on the product roadmap I thought was pretty cool. And it sort of led me from being an SC to a role called technical product marketing. You don't have them in every company but basically what tech marketing does is sort of they're like the field side of product management and product marketing. You know, it like continue to sort of let me be hands on with customer because in tech marketing was able to do things like help customers with new product betas and, you know, bringing feedback back to the engineers and then the product manager as well as doing things like giving roadmap presentation for customers kind of wanted to know was coming to coming down the pipe. And that was a lot of fun. Then, you know, I sort of working on this one project and I got exposed to then product marketing and we're traditional product marketing, which I really like right, you know, basically, it was like selling but I'm a strategic you've thought about things like pricing which I never really thought about you know, messaging in a much deeper way. And, you know, I got this opportunity when this product I was working on and, you know, my the purists working with product marketing that is that take a new role I said hey I kind of raised my you know what, you know, I like to try this I can ask if I could, you know, move from tech market and product marketing and, and it was cool because it gave me a really cool opportunity to learn things I just had never thought about before. Being so technical again you're sort of like good sort of, you know, first introduction just really the business world. And I liked, you know, product marketing is really, really fun. I found it that I actually really loved doing things like developing messaging and positioning understanding sort of where you know what are the opportunities for for stuff. But it's still sort of like, you know, I don't want to say it's a support role but it still wasn't the ownership that I want and that's really what pushed me eventually to just doing product matters one. You know, I didn't want to just sort of have influence on what the roadmap looked like I really wanted to drive that I wanted to say hey like you know these are the things that customers really really need. These are the big problems you should be solving. And I want to have sort of more input on how we do these things right and it really let me leverage sort of my diverse work experience. You know, as going back from being an essay and an essay even a developer and technical marketing I sort of was able to sort of bring all these different facets of my career together. Because as a product manager you really do have sort of 360 degree responsibility for the success of your product and you have to be very cross functional and work with all these different teams so having that sort of perspective that these teams sort of did, you know, that has made me pretty successful PM because again I'm able to have empathy with not just my customers, but other stakeholders and other members of the team. And it's really not that unique of a journey. It's pretty common I found for a lot of my pms and a lot of the great pms that are looking to have sort of the technical SC essay engineering background right. And again it's probably one of the, some of the best pms you know have that background especially when you look at things like technology companies or data companies analytics isn't there so such or anything we're selling to a developer right I mean that requires a very deep understanding of your customer and technology, how those things work. And you know pms that was to have that strong technical background really have a bit of an advantage or because you're able to really empathize with your customer. That's really what what makes essays and essays great pms right as a PM you often find yourself working backwards from the customer what does the customer need what is their use case as an essay and essay because you spend so much time in the field. And it helps arm in arm with the, with the customer working things out trying to make things sort of work and trying to try to fill in gaps where there are maybe some shortcomings piece of such deep customer empathy on the realities of of how deploying big software products and cloud services work right, and it's not just that it's deep it's also very practical. And I find sometimes at newer pms they have a challenge understanding like, hey, like you know if I give that if I build that they will come and the customers will love it and they'll let everything would just be amazing. It takes time for you to sort of build up their than just the experience you know that hey, like, you have to migrate something. A lot of times to go what you're using today to go over here or just understand the internal politics of a of an organization like the IT guy probably doesn't have the whole company has to get by and from different stakeholders and you know there's budgets and that sort of stuff. So that real world practical experience just helps you sort of really understand like, if I build it what other stuff do I need to support it. And that's that's a perspective that essays and essays bring to the product management, which is really powerful and differentiated. The other thing that helps is, you know, technical pms are really able to earn trust with their engineers. You know as an engineer, the last thing you want to PM that tells you to go you know build this crazy thing or does, which you don't understand, you know, like the requirements sort of what it will pour to find, you know what the use cases are not really clear. They cause a lot of ambiguity and a lot of churn for engineers which is like, you know, the thing to hit the most right. So if you can go in there and say hey like you know I've got the technical credibility because I've actually deployed things like this before my previous career. I understand how all these things work in the architectures of the customers and what other tools are using and where these integration points are, you know, that buys you a lot of credibility. And on top of that, you're able to provide a lot of context around use case which engineers love. If you're able to kind of say hey like you know these are the SLAs the customers typically want me to either. These are the performance needs to have or these are the other tools that use and how those tools interact with the stuff that you build. All that really rich context helps them build better products and helps build better solutions, and you help build better products. So, you know, those those sort of two things that ability to really empathy with the customer work backwards from the world, and be able to earn, you know, trust through their technical stakeholders really is what gives the essays and essays a leg up when they sort of make that that PM transition. But again, it's not all perfect there are some things where you have to sort of grow as you sort of make the change right. The first is learning to prioritize. You know, as an SC you are like program to solve all the customers problems because again you're trying to win the deal you're trying to help them out so you will look for all these solutions and everything's very critical. But when you kind of get to that to the PM land, you know, it's not that you don't know these things exist, but you have to prioritize because again there are 50 there are 500 there are a million things you could work on. So you have to be much more calculating in, you know, what are the most important things I need to go work on. You know what are the things that have the biggest impact both for my customers as well as for business, and you also have to balance those with the cost of the things right you know yeah maybe you could go spend six years building something amazing, and you should do that that don't get me wrong. So oftentimes hey if I spend like, you know, three months doing something maybe I could unlock a little bit and that's where you get the whole MVP thing so again it's sort of in that making those balancing decisions and sort of thinking about the business side of that sort of stuff is it takes a lot of time and SES or sort of essays are programmed to help as a PM you have to be sort of programmed to prioritize understand why. The other big thing you have to sort of learn is learning the same no. And this is, again, really hard right again going back to essays and I see just want to please the customer. And as you have to say no but when you say no, it's almost like I know because of this other thing that's out of my control like no, I can't help me do that because we don't have that feature, or no I can help you because it's going to take too long and you have a tight deadline or or all these you know all very good reasons why you have to say no but you help the customer with a workaround. When you say no as a product manager, you know, it's a different no it's a no or saying hey I understand what you're trying to say. Yep, it's totally valid but for whatever very probably good reasons. I'm choosing not to prioritize or I'm choosing just not to do it right maybe it's, it's too niche and you know there's an easy workaround or you know this is probably not that or this may not be the direction I want to grow the product or I think strategic. I mean, those sorts of no sting and sting customers a little bit more because it then feels like, you know you're not listening to them so yesterday you'll have to be more careful about saying that no, you know, oftentimes, bringing in an essay help them with a workaround. But it's a, it's a, it's kind of like you know heavy as they had the words the crown of this area like the fact that you were sort of pushing back and challenging customers in a new way. Our program is an essay and it takes a little while to sort of learn that what is the right amount of backbone, you know how do you sort of negotiate those situations. And then also like, who can help you know as an essay essay like you often are sort of like, you know, the last person on the line it's up to you you got to get it done to win the deal or, or get the deployment That's not true as a PM like there are other resources you have to learn to tap you have to delegate you have to leverage your, your, your stakeholders like bringing in an essay or bringing in a pro-serve person or you know doing providing a workaround or alternative. So it's again it's much more strategic it's a little more tactful and takes a while to learn how to develop that muscle. With that, let me talk about some of the lessons learned that I've sort of picked up along my journey here, and hopefully they'll help you, you know, that apply them to your own career. So, you know, when you first want to start off, you know, you have to learn how to ask a lot of why questions, and this is really the key thing that you have to sort of pick up as a PM as like, if I'm going to do so we're going to do something as a company, why are we doing it, why is it important. Why does the customer need this. Why is this a big opportunity. Because again, you could do 50 million things but it's about prioritization. It's about understanding the context behind the things that you do. So you have to start thinking much bigger than you sort of did as an essay because you have to get, you have to go ask an an influence an engineer team to go spend a lot of resources right a lot of cycles, building something or you have to go convince your leadership that hey, I need engineering resources to build this thing because there's a big opportunity here, you have to articulate all of these things and you know these are sort of conversations you typically just don't have as an essay or an essay because again, you're so focused on blocking something, you don't have to not thinking back about like well why am I am blocking it why is this right to go and block what other things that I'm blocking instead or working on instead so again this is really where the developing that strategy muscle takes time and the best way to do that is just practice and asking deep probing questions that sort of you know always challenge our assumptions player and devil's advocate. These are the things that really help you sort of become a much more athletic PM. It's also because at some point you're also going to have to probably do things that where you're leaving sort of your domain expertise you have to just be like a good PM athlete and asking probing questions, no matter the people they're disciplined no matter what the product you're working on, what does make you a better part of the team because you're able to sort of help the team make trade off to make really good decisions. The other thing you have to learn to learn to be relentlessly data driven, and this is something at AWS for you know we take like to the 1 millionth degree right but it's so true that it's so valuable, you have to listen to the data. You can't let things like a single customer experience completely influence your judgment right and I see this lot with your PMs engineers that don't spend a lot of time in the field to have one conversation with a customer a couple conversations. They think they're soulmates, you know they really, they think this is the, you know, the true north star of all their decision making, but it's just one or two conversations. You have to really develop a mechanism to get an analyze trends across lots of customers right is that you know is the right that one conversation even the right customer or they just not in your target customer segment because you're trying to false because you think the opportunity is over here. So you have to really understand like how am I going to, you know, talk to 10s dozen hundreds of customers, without actually talking to them and whether that's leveraging your field teams, you know setting up feedback sessions you know developing mechanisms to people for people that like record feature requests and the context on this feature request, but you really want to be able to say hey it's not that I talked to one customer to customers I talked to a dozen 2015 you know whatever makes sense given the problem trying to solve, but I have a lot of data of diverse opinions that help me help me inform right and I can challenge my assumptions I can challenge the decisions, because I have data that proves to me and I can use to book others. I have to be able to write things to go do so the area that's to be real let me see data driven. And if we'll use that data, even past the decision you have to use that data to then also validate that was that the right thing because that can influence future decisions again you have to really be used to learn to measure your performance like, are you, are you measuring adoption are you measuring the revenue are you measuring something like a customer satisfaction score, you want to start developing and use these north star metric stuff you say hey like, you know, we think that the right thing to do is this and the validate that we're going to measure this and then we're going to track that that measurement over time to see whether we're, you know, we're doing the right thing. So make sure you're grading that performance against your expectations. You know one of the biggest learning moments for me is you know we're sitting in this presentation to our executives and this other team was talking about the thing they just built and launch and then you know they're super excited about it and you know you're rattling off all the stats and you know, one of the guys that or the other guys is like, you know, and we've got you know like hundreds of big customers in this thing already. And then the senior executive sort of look at them with a kind of a quasi blank there and so the guy was expecting this is like clapping and cheering but the executives kind of status like, I don't know what that means is, were you expecting 10s of customers at this point, or thousands of big customers at this point because your you tell me if hundreds of customers at this point right either you're massively overperforming or you're underperforming so being able to sort of develop these models and develop expectations, which then you can measure against your own metrics. It's just that this is sort of what makes a fantastic PM that can really sort of been influence influence and share metrics up and sort of say this is how we're doing. You know, things are going to well I know they're going to well they're better than we expect it's we're on the right strategy or hey, things aren't going as we're expected and we have to pivot we have to make a change with reevaluate something. So you know having this sort of data metrics is really important and again, these are things that you never really had to do as an essay before it's sort of like when the deal yeah awesome high fives right, but now you have to sort of say like that I wouldn't the right deal that I wouldn't deal enough it's it's a whole different mentality it takes a little bit of a time to learn just learning how to measure stuff as one of the things will help you quickly become a much better PM. So you know what are some tips tips you can use to sort of pick up these skills. Well one is you have to sort of really capitalize on the overlap between the essay and PM roles you know and I sort of purposely peppered some of these examples earlier as I was going through my career career story and sort of stuff but again. You know there's lots of places where the PM job and the essay job intersect, and this is going to give you sort of a foot in the door if you are interested about making that change to go you know validate for yourself that hey this is the stuff I really want to go do. And it also is a good way to sort of network with the PM team if you do just want to make the change right as often how we source essay essays and dark PM team. So one you know you don't want to set up and drive technical. This is probably like the easiest thing you can do as an essay, if you want to get more strategic right because it gives you exposure to the strategy site. You know the PMs and the PMMs that are working on these decks with you and, and in making sure that you have the right messaging and positioning and there's the competitive analysis, all that stuff that goes in a technical and a woman. If you if you like doing that sort of stuff that is a good sign maybe it's in product management long term is this is probably the most PM is part of the essay role right. The other thing you can do is do things like support new product launches. You know and I was in tech marketing, this is for to believe my first like it for into the into the roadmap side of stuff as you work on these beta programs you work on previews. You're out there with the customers are capturing feedback and bringing that back to the product team, you're iterating they asked more questions you go back, you start to sort of learn what are the right sort of discovery questions not just for winning a deal for building a product right you know if I did this what would you do or how would you like this to work. The different questions you asked and during the discovery we're trying to qualify as a customer. When you sort of start asking these beta preview questions you're really building a rapport with the customer to understand how the product should work and what are the trade off the customers willing to make. And these are the whole different new set of questions, and also expose you to working on cross functional team, you know, and then see how roadmap is above. You know it was really cool and I was working on beta programs you sort of, you know, work with the PMM is to build the debt for that does, you know to educate a customer on what the beta does and why they should try. You know with the PM on on sort of stuff you might work with marketing to set up, like, you know, the email mechanism to sort of capture feedback so everybody's that sort of thing. So it really gives you opportunity to work with those teams that work on the product and strategy side and go to market side, a lot more than you would have as an essay. And then finally, you know, do you want to get yourself involved interjecting to the roadmap planning process and every company has its own sort of way that it does this. And actually, you know, every PM once can put on what they should be building next, you know, what are the challenges customers have with the product today. So if you can provide that input, you know, do with one on one meetings with your PM, or your joining the PM meeting or even better yet aggregating feedback from across the fuel teams to share with the PMs. That's a great, great way to sort of get yourself interjecting to the roadmap planning process are getting a lot more strategic. The second tip I'll offer is what a leverage your network. And, you know, by leverage your network, you know, that sort of means like looking for internal openings on familiar product right like today if you work on on a on some product or service and the PM team is deciding to grow and they're looking from you PM, that'll be your best new best first PM job, because you will deliver your technical expertise about the product to sort of, you know, help you sort of fill the gap on stuff you can work on, as you ramp up on the other core PM skills that way you're not sort of walking and like, totally like what do I do, but at least hey I can contribute by, you know, doing some some field work or working on a new feature in this capturing feedback, like this just gives you something that where you can sort of feel like you're adding value and until you learn how to do things like pricing which is like totally left field right or something you might that might be new to you. So at this point I make sure you're setting yourself up for success by looking for teams with PM leaders either have a similar background, or they have a successful track of training SES and SA right because again, it's one of those things where you're going to need a little bit of mentorship to make the change, like anything practice makes perfect something you've never done before. So you want to make sure you're working with that with a manager or the team that is sort of on board with helping you make the transition to make the change. You know, it's, it's, I find some folks on the PM side, especially if they come more traditional PM back up like the MBA and the fans of school, they want to build a lot of frameworks. Those, those often might not be the best first time PM managers unless they're really innovative, developing technical talent right it's just something where you want to make sure that there's someone that's going to help you out have your back as you're making the change. And other thing to think about is you want to look for your network connections and for opportunities working on really highly technical product is again, this is the best place to sort of get started because if you're working on product and data analytics or something that's working for developers. We, those customers, those companies want really technical PMs they want folks that can, you know, talk with engineers because those are and developers who are customers data scientists and the role of their sleeves and get deep with them. So if you can sort of bring that technical back on it, the leg up right and oftentimes and I know what we have is these types of roles and more than willing to help someone develop their messaging if they can at least go out there and like get deep with a customer on the technology side understand use cases and challenges, because you know that that that that background takes a long time to build up. So, I'll leave you sort of like a, you know, one final tip right so you know you also want to be accepting and do something about your blind spots. Doing new things is hard, and it's uncomfortable at first because it's something you've never done before. But you have to keep at it and you have to sort of, you know, be willing to learn and to be taught to get good at something new right. Most of your areas for growth, if you're sort of making that change from the PM, I've started from the SASE side to PM, we're going to be on the business side. Odds are you've never developed pricing before as an SA or an SE. That's hard. It's not trivial. It takes skill. It takes practice. You know, you have to understand what are the decisions points that come into that. How much should you frame, you know, like a value in cards and the market segment and so other stuff, all the things fit together. It takes, it takes practice a lot of time learn to do that stuff right. Being able to do things like size and opportunity. You know, the worst feeling you have someone and executive asset like, Well, how, you know, how big is that market segment or how big is the opportunity there. You have to be able to have a number. And that's your job as the PM, right. You have to understand because you get, he's that executive saw her here. She's making the trade off. You know, like, do we fund this project or that project is which has the biggest opportunity for us, which can we service more things like addressable market serviceable markets all these sort of, you know, the business school stuff. You just want to have a basic understanding what they mean and how to use and quantify them and explain them, especially as you're talking to your business. And also being able to do things like opportunity segmentation right. I had an old boss used to speed up was that really messy mutually exclusive and I forgot the rest of the afternoon but it's not a wrong question like you know when you sort of are thinking about the opportunity. We're going to break it down into pieces. Let's you then that's already said well should we focus on on this piece first of that piece first if we want when we know about the whole pie but know which piece we should sort of bite off first right. Hang on these are new skills on the really having as an essay essay. You may have seen it you may be the consumer of the information during the enablement session stuff I get but developing it doing the math understanding what resources to use, how to do estimation analysis, bottom up analysis, all these things are new, and that's okay you know that's the part where we grow we learn, but you have to keep an open mind you can't go in there and say I know how this thing works and there's this stuff doesn't matter you have to really be willing to be taught and do that. Find a mentor, you know, there are lots of folks out there in tech and then working in companies that again have that essay essay background or an engineering background, or just a technical background or didn't go to business school or maybe you know whatever. And those folks make great mentors they understand sort of the practical challenges you're going through. They're sympathetic and they, you know, everyone likes to see people like them succeed right I mean like, you know, anytime I you know I find other src that wants me to help you I will spend an hour with you, Griffin, you know what why you like what do you want to do what you know, do you really want to be a product manager do you really want to be a product marketing manager do you want to be a tech marketing manager like, do you want to do something like marketing, you know, helping you sort of work through all that stuff right, finding a mentor, you know they can someone you can sort of, you know, tap and every other question that also give you honest feedback right for working on messaging for new product. Hey, like, can you kind of give me your thoughts on this, how did this look for the stuff I was working a year ago my learning stuff, and all those things you know just to help right getting that sort of feedback. I just want to take advantage of educational resource like watching these sets of sessions product school. There's also tons of books on business strategy and product management and case studies from this and that we read read as much as you can right you know the you want to make sure that you're not stuck in the position where you only learn a lesson when you go through it that is a very expensive way to learn stuff, you can stand on the shoulders of giants, learn, you know what others have done, learn techniques for messaging. You know how that works, learning different pricing scenarios and all that stuff like all that stuff's been written books of ad nauseam so read the books. You know I'm sure there's book lists out there read the, you know, the all the BC books right like all those do pretty good job of talking about product management challenges going to company growing a business growing an opportunity. You know, because again reading is a really fast way to learn because you're able to sort of digest a lot of other really good experience very quickly and apply it right. So in summary. Again, you know, essays and essays make great pms because they have a technical background and the deep customer empathy. It's a great transition for anyone that wants to sort of be more strategic in their career, have ownership have more sort of insight or you know have more influence on, you know the product direction and strategy and sort of nature. It's a lot of fun. There isn't a learning curve but it's manageable, like I said you set to be willing to learn, and it will only go do the work to sort of ramp up on the skill that you're going to fill in the gap for. But there's lots of opportunities to do that right again you can start off by just overdoing some more strategic stuff in your current role. See if there's you know, you can resources online and books but you know there's lots of ways to learn that stuff so that's pretty much it for my presentation today, you know, it would be remiss on me not to mention that that I am hiring for product managers to work on Amazon key spaces which is one of our non relational database services. It's a really cool role. You know you can get to find the business strategy for your ownership, drive road map from features, help grow the business key spaces the really cool product service. You know it helps some of the customers run some of their, their biggest and most mission critical workloads. If you want to learn more about sort of no SQL and the opening, please check out the job posting I've got you on the link. You know, LinkedIn or on Twitter, you know, that always we're always looking for product managers that at AWS, not just in my team but across all of our database services team so you know thank you very much for your time today and I hope you enjoy the presentation.