 Hey, everyone. Welcome to scaling your product management career as part of product school courses. I am Ramya Ganeshan. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Amazon. I currently manage their customer journey experience for Amazon Pharmacy, but a quick intro about me before we actually get into this course. I'm an insatiable leader who's scaled from an engineer to an Product Manager sprinting from Germany to Singapore to UK and then in India and now I work in US. I've shaped and delivered numerous products managing cross-functional teams and synthesizing complex issues between business, engineering, operations, risk and compliance team. I was also honored to be one among 26 female leaders selected for an elite female leadership program in my previous organization. In terms of my professional experience, I've been a Product Manager for more than a decade and worked on different products across industries. I've worked with products of large banks such as Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, and worked with a few products within Amazon. I started off with Amazon Prime and then moved to Smart Home and currently with Amazon Pharmacy. I own a critical customer experience journey of the Amazon Pharmacy customers. Now, let's start with a quick experimentation. Try coming up with an exciting innovation. Just give yourself a minute and write down what you get. Then once you're done with this, I want you to pick in simple object in your desk and imagine splitting it into two somehow, and then think of idea generation with this new form. What you will notice is between these two attempts at idea generation, you are likely to come up with more exciting results using the second method. That's because as people, we naturally tend to be generative when given a framework in which we can be creative. The takeaway from this that I'm trying to bring is as Product Managers, we will come across a lot of frameworks. And what we call in Amazon terms as a mental model on how you would approach your career. So I hope this can help you build what is needed for the framework, a mental model, and understanding of the responsibilities of each of those product management career roles so that you know how you can progress from one to another, or even if you don't want to progress, you just have a fair understanding of how is a career growth looking for a Product Manager and what is your next role. But that's the intent. I hope this is useful for you. One of the key challenges that I have faced there is a lot of framework. And then sometimes you get confused on how to apply this knowledge and the frameworks. So before we dive into scaling the career, I just want to give you a simple tip. Don't clutter yourself with too much of complexity and information. And here it could be frameworks or any information. Try to simplify them to something that really, really works for you, and then just use it. Even if that means that you use a framework that's old data, that's completely fine as a Product Manager. And if it works for you, that's the best. So that's a simple tip for me for being a Product Manager for more than a decade. Let's move on and understand what does each of these roles look like. Just like in typical product, which has an introductory growth and a maturity phase, I've tried to bring similarity into these roles in terms of in product management career. So in an introductory phase, you're typically in Product Manager with roughly around one to four years of experience. It depends on the organizations of how they call you as a Product Manager as a Senior Product Manager, but this is an industry average. For that, you move to a growth phase, which is like your Senior Product Manager. And then eventually you get into a Product Leader. Usually in orgs like Amazon, you transition from a Senior Product Manager to a Principal Product Manager, a Director of Product Management, and then as MVP. But this is at a high level of how your career scales within product management and the different roles that the organization has. I love this framework and use it when I'm usually in the discovery phase. It's called the Clarity Capability and Motivation, which leads to success. Let's understand this within simple use case of Rubik's Cube Solving. My son loves speed cubing and so this was the best example that I could take. On Clarity, you would want to understand what the goal is to solve the Rubik's Cube. And then on Capability side, it's basically an understanding of the skills that you need to achieve the goal. Here it's the algorithms that you need to be aware and to solve the cube. Finally, for Motivation, are you motivated enough to spend hours of learning the algorithm because there are more than 700 algorithms to Rubik's Cube? This is in framework. How does it relate to what we're trying to do here in terms of scaling your product management career? Why are we talking about this? This is a mental model that I was talking about a mental model framework for scaling your career. And so you need to be clear on what's your target role is and your expectations, which is what I will try to cover for the rest of the slides where you have a high level understanding of what's the expectation of your next role or a role higher. And then you assess the capability for the role so that you know what are the skills, tools, frameworks that you need to reach the goal. And finally, are you motivated enough in terms of reaching out to the next career goal? I categorize these motivations into a couple of things. It's intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. By intrinsic, it means the motivation inside you. Are you motivated enough? To pursue the career. And by extrinsic motivation, it's your environment-based factors. How are the external factors contributing to your motivation? A quick tip is, this is more similar to the unique value proposition that I have brought as a product manager in all of the roles that I've worked until now. It's being able to see the big picture. You may be a product manager who's just in the introductory phase, but if you have the big picture view of what does the role look like, the next few roles look like and what is the expectation of those roles, you are literally having a big picture view of the career itself. And that's something that I would call as my unique value proposition that I bring. A simple tip, if you're able to crystallize the market concept, it's much more important than how well the product functions. This is driving back the thought that if you're able to get the big picture view, you're able to understand the market better, you will be able to design your products better. And so have a strategy for your career and raise the bar by keeping in mind the big picture view of what you want to achieve. Okay, let's move to these roles, each of these roles. And I will talk about a few things. On the left side, what you see is the basic functionalities, if I may call them. And on the right side, what you see is raising the bar within the same function. And I'll give you some tips of how you can do it. In all of these roles, raising the bar is essentially an integral part of scaling your career. Like how do you bring a unique value proposition as a product manager among other product managers who are there? And I hope this is helpful for you. So we are going to take a look at some of the basics for the roles and some raise the bar items for each of these roles. So let's get started. I've organized these ideas in a way that's easier for you to understand, just like a brain, which has a left brain or the logical section, which is essentially the basics of the facts. And then you have the right brain, which is more holistic thinking, raise the bar items, creative thinking. And so we will try to put these skill sets into each of these sides of the brains and that'll help you understand how you can raise the bar in the role. So let's start with, if you're a product manager, your basic responsibility starts within product vision, usually the feature or the small product that you're owning. And then you focus on what you can do for the customers. Then you expand to understand how you can generate an organic growth for your product. Here it is your product metrics. Define them, measure them, try to understand how you measure the performance of the products. These are some tasks that you do as a introductory product manager. Now let's dive into how you can raise the bar as an introductory product manager. If you can expand your product metrics to understand the broader business metrics, how you contribute to making money for your product. That's an right brain or in creative thinking or a raise the bar item, I would say. And then the next element that is integral is you are being able to come up with ideas for scaling the product or a product expansion. Let's move on. And usually I have one of my key impediments in putting these frameworks to application is I struggle to understand how I can bring these frameworks into actually an application. So that's what we're going to do here. I have provided an example where we will take a simple product and then expand these product across these roles. So you will start with an introductory product manager and we'll talk about and feature that this introductory product manager is working on. Slowly expand to what would a senior product manager do in the same company for the same product and then we'll expand to a product leader. I hope this example will help visualize how these roles widen up and the responsibilities widen up. So let's start with the first one which is an introductory product manager. And let's say Jack is a product manager with two years of experience and Jack is working on a product vision to introduce a feature to discover like-minded people in a mobile app to find mentors. So basically he's introducing and feature within a mobile app where you're able to find mentors. We haven't talked about the customer segment here. The customer segment is single parents. So we are trying to enable these single parents to be able to find mentors who can help them with the single parenting topics. As simple as this vision sounds it has a set of functionalities that Jack needs to work on and introduce. Jack needs instead of registered users. Usually I assume this is readily available from other part of the mobile app that he can easily integrate with. Jack needs to develop a new UI to find mentors and Jack will also create Mox as part of this to understand the user experience their happy and sad parts, provide a functionality to change mentors, schedule mentoring sessions, make notes of mentoring sessions. This is typically what Jack would be working on as a product manager with two years of experience owns this feature. Now let's expand and see the other parts of the circle. If you still remember the circle we are going to look into the other parts of the circle and see how he's going to expand and raise the bar. So here are some product metrics that Jack will instrument. Number of customers who visited the page, number of customers who clicked the feature, who pursued finding a mentor, these are all product specific. Now if Jack has to really raise the bar he needs to understand how his product metrics are being able to impact and business metrics. So Jack's feature basically impacts daily active users, the acquisition rate because users may be interested to join the platform just for the feature Jack introduced. Jack is also impacting the retention metric and Jack might also impact the transfer outs of people who are leaving the platform just because the mentoring feature did not work as expected. So essentially, even if Jack is working on a very small feature, he is impacting and moving the needles of the business metric. Finally, we look at product expansion ideas in terms of how can Jack look at expanding the product. Let's assume that Jack is heavily impacting the acquisition and the retention metric which is a happy scenario to be. In terms of product expansion, Jack can look at recommendations for curated list of mentors based on ML models, feedback to mentors, providing rating to mentors, recommending a new user as a mentor or mentor from external platforms, extend online mentoring to live programs and featured events. So this is basically providing that big picture view and then future ahead view of what Jack can do, which is essentially his set of feature lists for the next year, building his roadmap. Coming back to the basics mode and raising the bar more when you can actively engage on the business metrics, you move the needle on and you have product expansion ideas, you are really raising the bar with the big picture view in mind because you understand how is it contributing to the organization. In Amazon terms, we call the product expansion usually as a three year vision, a simple three year plan for each product that we write. This is usually revisited every year because sometimes the path in which the product adoption has been taken by the consumers is different. So we revisit it every year and then haven't, we basically start with an end goal in mind and this has been super useful in my experience. Now, let's move to a senior product manager. We're going to look at the same organization. If you're a senior product manager, your basic responsibility start within product vision. Usually the products that you own, you focus on what you can do for customers and then you expand to understand how you can generate organic growth for your product. Here it's your business mission. Now let's dive into how you can raise the bar. You expand the product and business mission into understanding the strategic growth, which includes understanding the market and then broaden to understanding the industry. As we've talked in the earlier slides, the knowledge of market trend and industry trend raises the bar as a senior product manager. But let's take the example and we look into the specifics of how a senior product manager of the same organization will be working. Okay, this is expansion of the similar product we saw. So you can now see that how the app feature translates into products handled by a senior product manager. Let's start with the product vision. The product vision for the senior product manager is to deliver products that can enable customers of the app, form a community with a group of users, communicate with the community, enrich and share experience, enable and learning environment for single parents. The functionalities include enable users to organize meetups, enable users to message to a group, form a community, a forum to ask and answer any questions and many more. You may have noticed here that the product scope is expanding beyond just providing the mentor feature. The feature needed falls in line with the organic growth of the business to expand the community setup. Mentoring is part of it, but holistically the senior product manager is looking at community setup, establishing mentoring capabilities, knowledge sharing and information support. So basically the scope is expanding and so it's like in product set that the senior product manager will be working on. If I have to raise the bar as a senior product manager, understanding the market trend is really, really important. So here I have pulled a list of other competitors who are trending towards creating the same value for customers in the same segment. Broadly, the offerings are in three buckets, as you can see. Community building is one of the buckets in which their offerings are there. Dating is another offering and information support is another offering. So if we go back to the product vision that the senior product manager was working on, most of it lied in the community building and the information support area we haven't yet dove into the dating support. But let's look at the industry trend. We are switching gears, moving to industry trend. Majority of the industry players are offering community building features and information sharing, which was exactly the senior product manager's vision. With this knowledge of this market trend, which includes competitors and industry, now you can design your unique value proposition, which is basically enabling the app users to find mentors because mentoring is something that we do not see that the competitors was offering. It's more interactive than just in set up where you ask questions and someone answers. This is more personalized. Scheduling, mentoring sessions, review and feedback to mentors and also providing and personalized learning material based on which phase of learning these single parents are. These are some unique value propositions that has ideated out of the market and industry trend knowledge. I am moving to product leaders. As the framework goes, and now that you are comfortable with this framework, the left part of the circle are basically the must-have skills which includes defining a really good product strategy as a product leader, tying it back to the organization strategy. So that the product growth and the organization growth goes hand-in-hand and creates and flywheel effect across the ops because you want both these strategies to be hand-in-hand. Unless your product is trying to impact the needle of an organization goal that you're working on, you cannot create these flywheel effects. The raising the bar parameters includes a deep understanding of the micro environment or the ecosystem players here, which I may call foreign potential, vertical or horizontal integration of the products. So you can increase the core value proposition that you provide by the ecosystem of products to your consumers. So understanding of other ecosystem players, micro environment factors, so that you look at potential options, opportunities for integration in the future. And finally and deeper understanding of the macro environment is definitely necessary to make these integrations decisions. How is the industry trending? What is the macro environment factor that I should consider when I am looking at integrating within horizontal or vertical partner? Let's dive into the same example and let's look at what Alison as a product leader in the same company is doing. From a product strategy perspective, Alison has a clearly defined strategy to connect, support and empower single parents. Now, as you can see, the scope has basically expanded and widened and we are abstracting it at multiple layers. So if you are an introductory product manager and you have an understanding of the product strategy of how the scope is expanding, it gives a lot of ideas into towards how will you look at the future features of your products? So I rely completely on the big picture view. Let's talk about the modes. So Alison is also looking at different modes in which this apps can be used by the single parents, a community mode where single parents are just looking out for an community, a dating mode where someone who's serious about dating can use a dating mode. Learning mode, I just need information. I use a learning mode. I want an advisor, a legal advisor, a financial advisor. Then I go for an seek advisor mode. And then finally, there are some services mode that I can use where, and that's where the integration elements come where you're able to provide services on your app as a platform. In the organization strategy, Alison defines how a product contributes to the monetization by introducing these models. Now, it's Alison's job to basically draft how is the monetization of the product happening. So there's an organization strategy of introducing these few models in which we can monetize the product. The first one is the premium model, which is mostly the community and the learning mode where people are able to onboard onto your platform, understand if the resources provided by the community and the learning mode are really useful for them. So then they can think of seriously transitioning themselves to the premium mode or in commission mode. Now, when in premium model, we're looking at people who are very serious about dating and then anyone who needs specific advisory service, here it could be in legal or in financial advisory service. And finally, in commission model where you're looking at actually availing in service and move from the advisory phase to basically hiring an advocate for your divorce case as an example, or looking at immigration services help where you need a lawyer for your immigration services. So the last mode of monetization is basically in commissioning model where we are able to provide a platform for people who provides its services and for people who needs its services. Alison is also trying to understand the micro and macro environment factors. The total addressable market here is 25.5 million or in other words, there are 25.5 million single parents at this moment. I hope this data is about a couple of years old but it's still useful to drive in the concept. And then the serviceable addressable market is around 17 million. Now, with these information, obviously any product cannot target for the entire serviceable addressable market. So you definitely have a target market which for Alison is around 9 million. Now, these are understanding of data around the micro environment. And so you're able to understand how big is your market. And if you're looking at your product growth, you have a clear understanding of if you have acquired 1 million customers out of your target 9 million customers. You're doing fairly good if you're in the introductory phase, but if you're in the growth phase, you typically want to see a number that's more than 30% or 40% of your target market. And finally, with all of these factors come an average spend rate of single parents, you have to keep that factor in mind and design your products. Now, with these micro environment factors and on the macro factors, so one of the example of macro factors is the average spend rate of single parents but also the other one that I can think of here is the rise in the number of single parents that we see. There isn't forecasted growth in all of the public data forums that you can see that the number of single parents is actually expanding at a rate that's been higher than in the past few years. Now, understanding of this macro and micro environment factors will help Alison as a product leader to analyze the forecasted growth of single parent needs holistically. So Alison is not just looking at the product strategy and organization strategy, we just lies within her organization, but then with the knowledge of this micro and macro environment factors, she can design products for single parents more holistically. And with that, I just want to give a simple idea that I was thinking when I drafted this, if I was Alison and I'm looking at a unique value proposition as a product leader in the segment, many of the competitors, now that we have understanding of the competitors as well, many of the competitors here have been looking at NB2C segment for the products in terms of creating the app, creating this users. But if we can bring these commission mode and the premium model as an B2B model, introduce incorporate partnership model for single parents where you tie up with EHRs of each of those organizations. As part of B&I, there are a lot of initiatives that are happening in multiple organizations. And if we can, Alison can actually think of NB2B model and introduce some of these services for single parents with incorporate partnership. That's something that no one has worked until now. And so that's definitely going to help Alison in a couple of things. One, this product can establish time compression this economies with competitors because B2B partnership model where providing corporate offerings for single parents including legal health, financial planning, grooming can be an unique value proposition. Establishing as a first entrant and making use of the first mover advantage, that's something that Alison will win over. With all of these, we have established the rise about elements set across these three roles as we discuss. I know it will take a few tries for you to understand this because I've tried to crunch this into a smaller timeframe but do visit each of those roles and try to understand the left side or the left brain which is more facts, logical pieces of it which is more towards what the role expectations are and then the right side of it are rise about elements which basically gives you an view of pricing the bar more creative thinking and being as in, it's your unique value proposition as a product manager, let me put it that way. Now, across these three examples of the company that we were looking at and the roles you could see that how small feature of mentoring which has been managed by an introductory product manager expanded to a large set of offerings or features and the product line offered by the company. Finally, while this is a known path to scale I always think everybody has different views of how they can scale. For me, having an understanding of the big picture view and having an understanding of elements that can raise the bar has helped me but I'm sure you will have to evaluate if it's right for you and then I have a framework which is exactly going to help you with that. So it's called an RWW model. It's established by George S. Day and published in Harvard Business Review. This model can be used to understand if the role is right for you and if you can win. The framework is very simple but essentially the idea of framework is it forces you to ask these questions and answer these questions which you don't take time to do and so I appreciate if you can do this. This framework is mainly used for products but here I'm using it for the career in terms of scaling your career. So in this case, we are looking at is it real? How relevant is your personal brand to the intended role in terms of your need or desire and here simple example is your need and desire if you're an introductory product manager is your need and desire and your personal brand in line with moving yourself to and senior product manager. So that's how you will use this. Can you win is basically what capabilities do you have? Do you know what expectations of the role are and are you clear if you can provide clear advantages be competitive and if you're able to provide a unique value proposition. And finally is it worth doing is just to see if it fits your personal growth strategy. But as I said, the frameworks work differently for people and so I hope it works for you and or just tweak it to use the way you would need. I just want to end with a small note. Many people view gains egocentrically that is they focus on their own position. The primary insight of game theory is the importance of focusing on others namely allocentrism. So you move from inside to outside to look forward and to reason backward you have to put yourself in the shoes even in the heads of other players. To assess your added value you have to ask not what other players can bring to you but what you can bring to other players. Now, why am I telling this? This is very important from an product manager career perspective that you established in mental model or in framework in which you are able to bring an unique value proposition to the role. I've given some examples that has worked for me over these decades but I'm sure you will have different unique value propositions that you can also bring but the idea that I try to bring back here is just like the game theory you need to understand what you can bring on the table as a product manager. I've tried my best to provide you insights to what these roles are and I've also provided an example so that you are able to visualize it and how you can raise a bar in each of these roles. I hope this was useful for you and thank you, you can always connect me on LinkedIn.