 Hello everybody, thank you so much for joining me today. Today we're gonna be talking about, hey, I have no BM skills, can I be a BM? That is the question I get asked most of the times from early in career professionals, students, graduate students who are looking into breaking into product management. So today I'm gonna try and navigate that answer for you all with the help of my own story and some takeaways and real life examples of how you can navigate that decision for yourself. I am Seema Bansal. I'm an engineer, come designer, come marketing professional. I am sometimes a user researcher myself, an artist, a plant mom. Essentially, right now I am a product manager. I am managing Microsoft Teams as the product which is serving 217 million users every month. And let's see how I actually navigated myself this own path. So, academically I started my education with computer science engineering and throughout my career I have had education in human centric design. It was more like a design research academic course and then I started marketing a little bit at Harvard during a summer school and then I started product management at Carnegie Mellon. So you kind of can see how I was also struggling my way into product role, if I were to call it, not like a struggle but I see myself today as a combination of all instead of it being a bit of a struggle. I am a person with comes with a great vision and multifaceted skillset and therefore I see myself be able to translate all of those skills I have been able to develop during the course of time and become that fantastic product manager for consumer products, enterprise products, digital services and so forth. I can understand how someone like a lean career or in a non-product role might actually think about breaking into product management coming across this question. Who really am I? I am an engineer or you are programmer or you see yourself as a PhD student or a security researcher or you may actually be already via PM for a startup thinking about breaking into a bigger tech corporation or you are a UXR or a product designer or a data scientist at a wizard and then thinking about which shoe does belong to me. Essentially, none of those. As long as you care about fitting one shoe which is customer shoes, you can be a fantastic PM. You are gonna be empathetic to the people you are serving and that is the greatest skill of being a PM that can help anyone fitting in any of those shoes to be thinking about how do I translate into becoming a better product manager. So the secret here is how you tell your story. That's it. The secret of landing into a product manager interview is how your one pager, your resume is able to translate and have the person reading that resume walk through and unpack what those skills that you had listed be translated into a PM skill. So let's walk through some of those examples of these different roles and unpack how could those different shoes that we talked about be actually be translated into a product role. So as you write your resumes, as you collect all of those archeological events in your career and put yourself up for the next career pivot which could be a product manager role, think about bring on the table. Not something that you have done in the past but what you can bring to the table. So enough talking, let's really come down to the examples and see if that is something that you're already doing or you can improve on. So let's start with one example. So you're a data scientist and you come and think about how can I switch to a product manager role? That's something is not that hard to think about because data is such an integral part of succeeding as a product manager. What you need to focus on in your storytelling is A, are you able to tell that you are able to interpret data and have the potential to provide those meaningful recommendations for your product team in order for the product to be a successful product? Are you able to show that you can actually introduce new features and make the difference in the KPI for that product because you can understand how the quantitative and the qualitative KPIs integrate and transcend into each other and ensuring that the right telemetry is being collected. Oftentimes, that's one thing that PMS missed out on that you can actually bridge the gap. When a product fails, if you don't really know where it actually failed, you have essentially failed as launching a good product. So as a data scientist, as a data person, you can ensure that the right telemetry is being collected for especially for the cloud services. It's such an important thing to do. So when you tell your story in your resume and when you are meeting with your potential hiring manager, come across as the math wizard, come across that, hey, I would have access to data and I would command product metrics like none other on the team and I will make sure that the right decisions are being made for our product. So therefore hire me. Now let's transition into another role, which is someone who's a UXR and user researcher and now thinking about switching into a PM role. I love that because I myself transition into someone who's a user researcher. So understanding your customer, understanding that the feedback you've been getting and the research from the market itself, that is such an important essential piece of creating new features or maybe launching a new product in the industry itself. So in your story, when you're writing, you're drafting your resume, make sure that you focus on the skills as follows. First, that you are the one who can represent customers and speak on their behalf. You are the one who can create all of these multi-faceted customer personas and you are the one who can create insights into how a customer is actually currently using the product itself. A lot of PMs actually miss out on that thing and they actually are thinking about, okay, what is the next thing that we want to go build? So when you meet with a potential hiring manager, you got to talk about every business today irrespective of enterprise consumer or a cloud service is aiming to create a customer first culture. And as a user researcher, I will be the one bringing that customer insights to help accomplish that goal, the business objective, so therefore hire me. With me so far, let's move on to the next one. So here I'm going to switch some gears, not a technical role, but someone who is a consultant, someone who is a strategist who's thinking about switching into a product manager role. It's not that tricky if you think about it because every day a PM has to make decisions about products and what they're working on in a strategy thinking manner. You kind of already are doing that as a strategist, as a consultant yourself. What you need to do when you tell your story in your resume is to focus on that you are the person who has the strong muscle of envisioning the long-lasting product vision. What is the value of doing X over Y? Today, six months from now, one year from now and a half that five year strategy got written down very well because you are a strategist, you are a consultant and being doing that. You are the one who can actually develop those realistic plans and timelines to meet those business goals and objectives for the product. Since you are a consultant as well, a major chunk of a product manager role is communicating with all of the other stakeholders and therefore you can efficiently communicate, ask the right questions and identify the new opportunity emerging trends in the industry and therefore when you talk to your hiring manager, talk to them about every product needs a roadmap. And as a strategist, I will keep that in the top notch shape, so therefore hire me. You see how a non-tech role now can be transitioned into a product manager role, potentially for a tech product, simply by the virtue of how you're able to present yourself and tell your story from the perspective of not what you all have done, but instead what all you can bring onto the table that can be fused together for a product manager role. Let's take one more. Let's talk about a marketing role and then think about, all right, how can I switch from being a marketing professional to a product manager role? It's not that hard either, so you need to think from the muscle that you have as a marketing professional. You understand for a product, that product positioning in the market, where each and every new feature could bring new value, value add for the consumers, and therefore ensuring that it's been meeting the target goals and the business objectives that your product team has. So in your story, focus on the following skills that you have and you can bring on the table. That you are the person who can streamline the process of the releasing the product feature with your development team. You can also be the person who would be, who has been trained into prioritizing which challenge to solve first. And it's not the most favorite part of being a BM, but a muscle that almost every product manager has to develop on is prioritization. How do you pick which needs to go first and why? So when someone is already in that trajectory of releasing into the market, they have to always make tradeoff into which one needs to go first, which one needs to cut off, which one is half baked or is already ready, which can be coming to the public roadmap. So you kind of are already doing that. Make sure that you bring that on your resume when you talk to your hiring team. And often not appreciated much, but negotiation is an underappreciated skill that almost every product manager often has to develop because as PMs, you're constantly having to negotiate with your engineering counterpart teams to prioritize A over B. So we need to tell your story to your potential hiring manager. One thing that you definitely want to nail down on is, hey, I can mark a product feature, not just as done, unless it reaches the customer, right? With the right messages. So as a marketing professional, I will bring my A game to communicate that message for any new service, any new product, any new enterprise strategy, business goal that you're thinking about bringing up to the table. So therefore hire me. All right, we're talking about a lot of different roles and there are many more that are not in this list, but you kind of get the gist of what we've been thinking about and talking about over the past of these examples. So irrespective of that role, you would continuously be able to evolve and learn. Forget about what you have been doing in terms of your title, but focus on telling your story of what you can evolve into. All right, with that, I'm gonna pause and thank you so much for listening and tuning in. Thank you so much. If you have questions and messages, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and drop me why you think you are not able to translate into a PM role or what role you're looking into translate from into a PM role and if this was helpful, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much.