 Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me today, and thanks to Product School for setting up this webinar. We are going to talk about my experience and share what I believe are good tips to break into product management. My name is Pavneet Alwalia. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Azure. Thanks everyone for joining. So let me start by giving a quick introduction of myself. Like I said, I'm Pavneet Singh Alwalia. I'm from India, New Delhi. Originally, I live here today in Seattle. I work at Microsoft as a senior PM for Azure Kubernetes Service, which is Azure's managed Kubernetes service, one of the largest services in Azure today. I have roughly three years of cloud product management experience. Prior to Microsoft, I worked at AWS for two years in containers, spaced with products like ECS and Fargate. Prior to that, I did my MBA from Michigan School of Business, Ross School of Business at Michigan University. By education, I'm a chemical engineer. Actually, that's what my undergrad was in. Then I did data science for a couple of years in a startup based out of India, followed that by working at Google and as a digital marketing product specialist with the sales orgs, post which I decided to pursue my MBA, which allowed me to transition into product management. That's my LinkedIn profile QR code. Feel free to scan it. Feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn if you want to follow up with anything post this webinar. So what do we expect from this session today? I like tackling problems and I like tackling big things into breaking it up into questions. So let's try to solve and find answers to these five questions through the session today. What is product management? What do they do? What does the life for product manager look like? Second, I want to get into some myth busting like, Hey, do I need a computer science degree to do product management in tech? Or do I need an MBA? Stuff like that common misconceptions that I want to dive deep into and answer those questions. Third, how do how to get product management interviews? Hey, I work in a very unrelated field or a very unrelated role. How do I even begin to get interviews so that I can crack product management? Right? That's the first step. That's probably the biggest hurdle. Next is how now that I have interviews, how do I prepare for them? What can I do to make sure that I'm putting my best foot forward and give myself the best chance of getting selected into a product role in any of the big tech companies? And then finally, hey, I've got multiple offers. Which one should I pick? Which product should I go for? Which team should I go for? We'll talk about a little bit about that and how I made those decisions in the past. So let's dive into it. First up, I think the biggest question some of you might have or probably already answered for yourself is what do product managers do? I like this comic that I found yesterday while making this presentation. Product managers spend a lot of time trying to figure out, hey, what to build? How do I build? What's the priority? And then somebody comes in tells us, somebody up top comes and tells us, we need to build that because XYZ customer said so. I think that happens sometimes, but that's not a true representation. So I want to clarify some of that here. I think somebody once said to me that product managers are CEOs without any authority. And I think that's a very good representation of the role. Why? Because everything that is wrong with the product, every problem, whether that's pricing, whether that's go to market strategy, whether that's hey, customers don't like the experience or engineering is struggling to figure out what to build next. All of those are your problems, just like a CEO would for a company. But you don't have the organizational authority to go tell sales to do this or go tell marketing to go do that. They look towards you for guidance. They look towards you to set the path, but you don't really have any direct organizational authority over them. So I think that's a good quote that sums it up. The way I think about it, about what my role as product manager is, I'll break it into these five steps, right? You're the customer advocate in all internal meetings. When the engineers are trying to decide, how do I build this feature? What does the UX look like? What does the backend design look like? It's your job to be the customer representative and fight for what's right for the customer. You're the product evangelist in the customer meetings. It's your job to sell it. If you're in a B2B product management role like me in the cloud space, you get on calls with a lot of customers, some of them large organizations, and it's your job to sell the product to them to help them understand how does this product solve their problems. You're the business leader in engineering meetings. It's your job to prioritize features. It's your job to help engineers understand why are we building this? How will this help the product? How will this help the customer? You're the engineering leader in business meetings, which means when the VP of your organization says, hey, we need to build this because XYZ customer told us to. It's your job to represent the engineers and set the pros and cons and set the trade offs in front of the leaders so that they can help you make the right decisions. It's your job to set the product strategy, the roadmap, the product positioning, the pricing. Pricing is not always a PM role, but in some companies it is, and the GTM and technical support. That's all everything that I do on a day-to-day basis, both in my previous role at AWS and now today at Microsoft Azure. If I had to sum it up at the end of the day, your job is to make a lot of decisions. And as you move up the chain, as you grow in, you know, as you get promoted and move up, you will have to make less and less decisions, but you'll have to make sure that they're of higher and higher quality. This is an oblique quote reference to something that Jeff Bezos said, but his job is, which is to make a lot of high quality decisions. So that brings me back to the fact that I would say a CEO, a product manager is a CEO of the product without any of the organizational authority. So let's get into the myth busting that I talked about earlier, right? Do I need to have a computer science engineering undergrad or post-grad degree to be a product manager in tech? The answer is no. I'm a life proof of that. I'm a chemical engineer by education and I've never been a software engineer in my whole life, but I was able to break into product management and I feel I do a pretty good job at it. So no, you don't need to be a computer science degree holder. It will help. It will certainly help if you get into some of the more technical products on the cloud side or on AI ML, but it's not a prerequisite. Do you need to have an MBA to be a product manager? Again, the answer is no. I chose that path because I was from India. I wanted to move to US and I wanted to work for the big tech companies and there was a glass ceiling that I needed to break through, which an MBA helped me with, but that's not the only way to go about it. Proof of that is several companies like Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Google have APM, which is associate product manager or entry level PM roles, which allow you to become PM early in your careers and then learn the basic skills on the job. Right. But I would say that if you're looking for something like growth PM role, where your job is to drive adoption or to drive GTM and marketing initiatives, an MBA will help. A formal education in those fields will help. Do I need to have a prior project management or program management experience? Again, no, but the ability to juggle multiple balls that are up in the air is a prerequisite, I think. So if you can show that they I'm good at, you know, executing, I'm good at holding two deadlines, I'm good at organizing multiple people and multiple initiatives together. That's what you need to show rather than on your resume, have project project management there. So what do you need to get into product management? I think it's important to focus on the skills rather than titles. I think these six plus one skills fairly represent what I do day to day in my job and what I've seen others do, depending on the company, depending on the role you might over index on one over the other, but broadly speaking, these are skills that are pretty ubiquitous across all product management roles in tech. First up is problem solving. PMs are at the end of the day problem solvers. The job is to understand customer problems and then find the best way to solve them. You need to define the problems crisply so that all your other teams understand what it is. You need to structure it because sometimes it's not one feature, but 10 different features that meet that can solve a customer problem, right? Sometimes it's not even a feature. Sometimes it's the right documentation, right? So you need to be able to structure and define it very crisply and then research and investigation, whether that is researching different ways to solve it, whether that is research and customer through customer research, through interviews, through UX, bug bashes, you need to be able to dive deep into the problem and structure it so that others can understand it and help you solve it. Second big skill is data skills. I put SQL and Python there. They're not precise. I think SQL is pretty much prerequisite. I think in any tech role, I think today you need to know SQL. Python is a big plus. You can learn it on the job. It's not too difficult. I still struggle with it sometimes to be honest, but it's great if you know it, right? You need to know basic steps. You need to know the difference between need and median and standard deviations and person tiles so that when data is presented to you, you can understand it because how else are you to understand the market and customer trends? How do you understand the product performance, feature adoption, customer behavior? You need those data skills to marry with the qualitative research that you will be doing and it's key to your decision-making skill, which is, I think, central to everything you do as a product manager. Third, I would say, is ability to learn quickly. Like I said, I came from a non-computer science, non-technical background, right? But I was able to learn everything I need to know to be in a very technical cloud product on the job. Yes, I struggled for the first six months because I felt, hey, I didn't know enough. I had imposter syndrome, but if you have that ability to learn quickly, you can overcome any deficiency that you might have coming into the role, right? For example, how do APIs work? How, what is load balancer? What are the basic principles of front end UI design? How do I price a product? All those things you may not know going in, but if you have the ability to learn quickly on the job and to be comfortable with not knowing, those are important skills to have, right? Customer empathy, I think enough people have talked about this over the last years. Amazon is a pioneer in customer empathy, so is Microsoft, so is Google when it comes to consumer tech. If you can't understand the customer by putting yourself in their shoes, then how can you solve their unmet needs, whether they know it about it or not? I think Apple is a great example for it. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, it's your job to solve the problems that customers don't even know that they have, and if you don't have customer empathy, you won't, you won't succeed at that. I think next on the list is influence without authority. Like I said, you don't actually have any organizational authority as a product manager. Engineers report to engineering manager, finance reports to somebody else, marketing reports to somebody else, sales is its own org, so you need to be able to convince them of the strategy that you want the product to go in of the right prioritizing decisions. You need to have empathy to understand why are they pushing back when they push back and not become a bully in the org. Nobody likes that. I think, especially in tech companies, that culture is corrosive, right? And then you need to be able to adapt to working with different people, with different skill set, different mindsets, and different goals, and be able to adapt your message so that they align behind it, and also learn from them as part of the consensus building and influencing part. I think that is a core skill that any product manager needs to have. That is going to be, again, ubiquitous across any PM role that you come across. Last but not least is business strategy. I worked on a product in AWS, which was a market leader for many years, but then got disrupted by open-source technology. How do you respond to that? How do you pivot your product strategy? How do you find a niche, or how do you change your product strategy to be able to still grow in over against overwhelming market odds, right? Or do you actually say, no, this is a waste of resource. Let's kill this product and go do something else. You need to have a good sense of business strategy, product strategy, understanding the competitive landscape, and monetizing. At the end of the day, the goal is to make money, right? So, as you grow as a product manager, more and more responsibility of the product strategy lands on you, and that's a core skill that you need to have to succeed as a product manager. Finally, I would say decision-making is pervasive through everything. You will need to make a lot of decisions on a day-to-day basis. You need to be comfortable with making high pressure, high impact decisions, sometimes without the right amount of data. So, you need to be comfortable with ambiguity. And you need to build your resume by highlighting all these skills, right? No matter what you do, if you work in any sort of corporate role, you end up doing some, you know, parts of this in your day-to-day job. Highlight those things. Show experiences where you might have influenced somebody, even if it was not product-related. Where you should come customer empathy, where you showed your data skills. If your resume represents these six skills throughout, you know, the many bullets that you're going to put there, you have a good chance of being noticed, if you, you know, and that's what you should be focusing on rather than titles. So, next up, how do you get product management interviews? So, somewhere, sometime during my MBA, I built this mental model, which I can try to put in, in graphics here, which I believe has never failed me and I don't think will ever fail you if you diligently follow it. Now, what is this model? I call it the seven habits of highly successful job hunters. Think of it as a marketing fund. At the top of it is, is awareness, right, where it's your job to reach out to as many people in the relevant companies and the relevant roles. And, and even if it's a cold email, even if it's a LinkedIn email, reach out to them, tell your story, show your passion for why you want to do product management or why do you want to work on those companies. And some of them will respond, some of them will not respond. That's okay. You only need one solid lead, right, but you have to reach broadly to be able to get what that one solid lead, that one person who's your advocate and who will vouch for you and who will fight for you, right. So top of the funnel is I think LinkedIn, cold emails, cold reaching out and just being persistent at it. Next up is, is coffee chats or informational interviews, as most MBA calls it, call it. That's about building relationships. You can get a cold referral by saying hey, hey, I want to apply to your team. I want to apply to this role as much as you may. Can you give me a referral? Most people will because they get referral bonus. They lose nothing by giving you a referral, but that's not enough. They're going to do it for hundreds of people, right. So you want to build relationships. You want to build advocates in those companies who like you, who believe in you, who see your passion and commitment and will then fight for you internally to get you hired. And the way to go about it is, when you've reached out on LinkedIn and somebody's responded, you ask for 20 minutes call. You ask for a coffee chat if you can meet in person or do a video call and tell your story, understand their experience, learn from them what, you know, that role looks like in a company and then tailor your resume and tailor your story so that you have the maximum chance of convincing that person to fight for you. And then yes, at the end of the day it comes down to referrals, but warm referrals, not cold referrals. You can follow seven steps to execute this, this framework. Make a list of companies that you want to apply to. I built, I built Excel trackers both during my MBA job recruiting and then later when I was thinking of leaving Amazon. And they helped. Here are the two 10 companies I want to apply to. Here are the 30 people I've reached out to in them. These are the people who responded. This is what the conversation was about. What is the next step? Do I need to follow up? Do I need to send them anything? Be ruthless about that tracking and staying on top of your networking, right? And Excel is a great tool for that. Reach out to PMs and adjacent roles in those companies via LinkedIn or your personal network. Once you know which companies you want to apply to, find people who are your second degree connections or third degree connections on LinkedIn and reach out to them, tell them your story, share them why you want to apply and then ask for their time. Ask for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes to have a genuine interaction with them which is non-transactional. Do coffee chats, do informational interviews to understand the role the company and the teams that you are applying to. You can learn a lot. Half your interview prep can be done right here if you do this right. Builders you may that marries your experience to the research and feedback that those people have told you. For example, Google puts a lot of emphasis on working with people on being entrepreneurial and being impact-driven. I like those things right whereas Amazon is more driven towards the 14 leadership principles like bias for action and other things. I like that if that's where you're applying. Build relationships, follow up, find out how you can help them. For example, you applied somewhere you didn't get through but now your friend is looking for a role in the same company. Therefore that person to your connections. Build a long-term relationship with those people you never know when and how that might help you. I did an internship in Amazon when I was in MBA and my manager became my mentor and then stayed my mentor for many years and even today if I need to make a big career decision I go back to that person. So don't treat these conversations as transactional. Cultivate advocates if you don't have relevant experience impress them through the right attitude and commitment and your passion for the product roles and product management and their company. And finally, yes, please get warm referrals. Don't do portal resume dumps. So now you've got multiple interviews. If you did the previous seven steps right I can guarantee you you will get multiple interviews. Now how do you prepare for them? I'm not going to cover frameworks and specific questions because I think there are a lot of good resources and books out there who talk to it and I collated that into a LinkedIn post a few months ago and the link to that is on the slide. Feel free to refer to that link look through all those resources. I think it's pretty exhaustive list there. But I want to broadly speak about what are the big buckets of things that you can expect in an interview in a product management interview. First up is product questions. What do they look like? They look like product design questions. For example, design a disaster recovery app for the government of the United States. They could be product strategy questions which is hey I'm thinking of launching Amazon Fresh in China. Should we or should we not? Last are technical interviews which could be something as simple as what happens when you type www.linkedin.com in your browser to super complex design questions or system design questions depending on the role that you're applying to. My tip here is have frameworks for each of them. There are books that give you brilliant frameworks strive to build your own because I think interviewers kind of already know what frames are frameworks are out there so if you can come with some come with something in genuine that's bonus points but you must have frameworks to tackle these type of problems so that you can structure your answers and you can cover all the main key points that you should be covering. Next up is behavioral stories. These are the kind of questions like tell me about about the time where you did X, Y, Z. These are very common in companies like Microsoft in Amazon and some of the startups as well you'll see these kind of questions a lot. My tip here is think and prepare in advance. Think about the 1012 most high probability questions that you're likely to get like examples of where you work with engineering where you dealt with ambiguity where you were building something from scratch right and write down your stories beforehand so that you're not forced to think on the spot last minute that's not the way to go about it don't take behavioral lightly they are probably as important if not more as the technical portion of your interviews. A good format that I use for behavioral stories is edge cars sorry it's not catchy but it's a good framework edge stands for headline start with the headline here I'm going to tell you about a time where I did this C is for context set the business context set the challenge what was the challenge that you face right give them the context they need to empathize with your story third is action what did you do why did you do it right result what was the outcome and then S stands for so what which is what did you learn right what was the insight that you gained from this experience that you will bring to our company don't forget that part now the last is understanding the company culture and research I think this is understated people don't spend enough time doing this because they feel hey it's a tech company it's a product question it's all I'm going to be saying I don't think so it's very important to understand what does the company mission stand for what does the CEO's personal work ethic is what does the product role specifically in that company look like how does product manager work with engineers how do product manager work with other teams is it a more collaboration defined company or is it more you know top-down goal defined company is it entrepreneurial or is it more strict you know strict rules and and path given company you by the time you actually reached the interview you should know enough about the company as the person interviewing you you need to immerse yourself in the company culture to be able to feel comfortable enough and ensure your passion and show the why you want to join this company right now how do you go about it some tips is study their career pages most companies give away the answers to most questions on their career pages like the amazon leadership principle and the amazon flywheel if you don't understand it don't go for an interview with amazon googliness you've probably heard this now if you don't understand that go don't go for an interview with google you're missing out on the key culture read their 10 case which is their annual reports and then the commentary that goes with it they most companies will tell their business strategy the risks and their threats in that commentary that goes with the annual reports please read them understand them watch youtube videos of the CEOs if you're applying to microsoft watch satya nadella talk about microsoft and azure and the company strategy and what he believes in and leading with empathy he's giving you the answers to most interview questions right there look at their conferences right try to attend them if you can if you have that much time one last thing that i would leave you with couple of things i would leave you with on this slide is do some mental exercises throughout your interview prep if you're applying to a company pick a product think through hey why is this product built this way what is its monetizing strategy what are its biggest threats what would you change about this product from marketing or from a feature perspective and lastly read read read read tech crunch read verge articles about the companies that you're applying to a lot of these articles do very good critical commentary on the companies think about it think about do you agree do you not agree and that will give you the confidence and the know-how about the company to go and interview with with confidence so the most important thing though about interview prep is mock interviews practice practice practice record yourself in your mock interviews go watch those recordings because nobody knows you better than you so when you watch your behavioral answers which are recorded you will definitely find problems you will find better ways to represent your stories once you see yourself deliver them that's hard to do unless you record and see yourself because you can't answer and have mental awareness of what you're answering at the same time that becomes too tricky so please do mock interviews record them watch them and learn from them lastly you got a few interviews you got a few offers you are feeling happy now you have the big decision of where to go there's a good video on youtube called price of admission which I really like you should check it out it's not geared towards career advice but I think that advice that that video is giving is pretty valid for career as well it's called price of admission please check it out now I've categorized some big questions that you need to answer to be able to pick which product you want to join first up is consumer versus B2B tech think about your natural skill sets are you good at UX design then maybe you should do consumer tech are you good at driving marketing and product adoption then maybe growth PM roles are better fit for you are you passionate about solving deep technical problems and enabling enterprises then maybe cloud PM is a good role for you so think about your skill set and how that applies to the role options that you've got next up is how important is the product to the company's success I think that is very important you want to be in the high growth part of the company where it's called leadership focus that will make it easier for you to win internal prioritization battles when you know it's the same engineering team that needs to either work for your product or somebody else's product if we know that the CEO's top down mandate is to grow your product it's going to be easier and it'll also accelerate your growth the first rule of battle is pick where you fight this talks to that how is the leadership of the org what is the culture like what is the VP believe in how is the manager do they incentivize try and error do they how do they make promotion decisions right those are important questions because a good manager will make or break your career and that's probably true for VPs as well right you can use blind as a common tool where people look at feedback but I think it's a little bias towards the negative so I would say go back to the people you spoke to during your informational interviews and coffee chats tell them here I got an offer in this team what do you suggest do you know anybody in that team what is your opinion either from the inside or the outside share your options with them get their feedback use that to make this decision as well how do you fit the company's mission and culture I think this is pretty self-evident by the question itself one example I can give you is I will never work for Meta or Facebook because I disagree with the company's values and don't have a passion for it so find what are you passionate about find what are you or your values that'll help you rule out some companies straight away what skills do you want to build I again give an example from my story which is when I was at when I was at MBA and I had multiple options between product roles I picked AWS because it was going to be a highly technical role it was going to be very challenging and I didn't have the technical skills so I struggled for six months for sure but two years down the road now I feel I have the technical principles and the foundation built to go do any product role in any field going forward so it was a little bit of pain for the first year or so but because I knew that was my weakness and it was something that was going to become a hindrance in my long-term career I went and tackled that hit up then lastly large organization versus startups well as you move from large companies like Google Microsoft to start-ups the level of ambiguity increases and your scope of work also increases so figure out what you want to do do you want to start or do you want to do a highly ambiguity high ambiguity role where you won't have mandates from top down where you won't have a narrow or well-defined scope of work then yeah maybe startups have a good place to go right so that's everything I wanted to talk about feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn if you have any follow-up questions I think product management is a great place to be I personally have loved the transition into product management having done various roles before that Microsoft is hiring so if you're looking for jobs once again hit me up on LinkedIn thank you and thanks product school for setting up this webinar I appreciate it