 Hey everyone, welcome to the webinar hosted by Product School, how to be a 10x Product Manager. Before we start, let me introduce myself. I'm Abhishek. I'm a Product Lead at Square. At Square, I manage standard operation for Square Online's e-commerce product. I moved from engineering into product management in 2016, and all I can say, I've been loving every second of it. I'm extremely passionate about the craft of product management and continue to spend time in investing and learning more about product management. In my free time, I love to coach junior PMs and mentor them, telling them how to be more effective product leaders in their organization. For today's webinar, what we will cover. We'll cover why being a 10x effective PM. Always start with why. Then we'll cover different ways to be 10x effective PM. If you stick to the end, we have a bonus which is how you can grow in your current role. Before we start, a strong disclaimer. Product management is a well-balanced mix of science and art. The reason why this is important, and I always like to start with it is, when you're talking about pure science, you basically, if you have predictable inputs, you would get the same output always. But when you're talking about art or product management, what happens is you have people involved and their emotions involved. Even if you have all the same variables lined up, the incentives for people, your stakeholders, your customers, market dynamics may all change. And then what it basically means is, whatever advice I tell you, or whatever you read on the internet, is actually accurate only 80% of the time. The long tail 20% is determined by a lot of other factors outside your control. So whenever you're trying to implement something, just make sure and use your own judgment, whether this is applicable in your specific scenario, for your specific organization, or if you have to tailor that advice or the framework that you have learned slightly differently so that it works for you. Having done with the disclaimer, let's just go ahead. Now, a question when I talk about this topic to others, they asked me is, why be a 10X effective PM? Why can't I just continue the way I work and just be happy about it? Definitely that's a choice. But if you aim to be a 10X effective PM, it'll help you to be a better product manager every day and your improvement and growth will not be linear and bound by time you spend on it, but by the amount of investment you make on it. You will earn respect from your colleagues and you will be seen as a leader in your organization, bringing in that strategic product leadership thinking, getting work done, and definitely that's very helpful as it opens up various paths for your growth. And finally, the most important thing for me personally is it actually frees up a lot of time to upscale, to pursue your hobbies and other passions. A lot of time people think that in order to be effective, if I'm effective, I'll be able to do a lot more. My thinking is a different, if I'm effective, I'll be able to do the tasks that I want to do and I get a lot of free time to pursue things other than work. That's my personal motivation to be 10X effective PM, you may have totally different one. But let's dive in and see how one can actually be a 10X effective PM. A lot of people again ask me about, hey, can you give me some hacks or shortcuts on how you can navigate certain things? Those hacks and shortcuts are good, but I have seen them work only for a small duration of time. If you want to have sustainable growth, if you wanna have a sustainable learning, you have to build strong foundations. And this is the number one criteria. Anything apart from this won't work. Once we have strong foundations, then you can definitely amplify your learning, incorporate hacks, incorporate shortcuts, incorporate frameworks, but this is a prerequisite before you go ahead. How do you build strong foundations? Number one, you have to master your product. Now, what if I mentor told me one thing, like in order to be a good product manager, it has to become your second nature. If I wake you up from deep sleep and ask you about your product, you should really know how it works. So get that level of comfort with your product. How your product works, what its limitations are, know the numbers of your product really well. What's the activation, adoption rate? What's the PNL for your product? And then finally, dog food your product. You cannot build empathy for your users. You cannot really, really understand your product well, unless you experience it yourself. Make sure you cover some time and see how you can incorporate your product in your own real life. The challenge with not mastering your product is, every time a new opportunity comes, every time a new question comes from your stakeholders or others, I see product managers go back to the product, fiddle around with it, try to understand, try to learn it a little bit better, come back with an answer. And that consumes a lot of time. Imagining building out the next gen strategy for your product or your problem area and not knowing your product in depth, you will definitely have a lot of loose ends in your strategy, which will not make you look professional or good. Secondly, understand your customers really, really well. Know what are the customer's jobs to be done? What jobs are they trying to achieve and why would they need the use of your product? This is the number one prerequisites. But then if you take it one level up, you would find the unsaid needs. These are the needs of the customers that are not directly reflected either to customer service in your qualitative feedback, in your quantitative feedback. These are the hidden intrinsic needs that they want to perform the job for, but they haven't expressed. This requires a little bit of deeper understanding of your customers to understand what they actually want to achieve versus what they are asking for. And finally, if you take one level up, understand how your customers are interacting with the ecosystem. A lot of PMs just restrict the customer knowledge and understanding to how they interact with your own product. But understand customers really don't care about your product. They care about their problems and how they're interacting with the ecosystem of products. Knowing how your customers are interacting with products outside your area within your company would help you understand their overall needs and it will also give you a lot of ideas on how you can really, really expand your products. A lot of innovation happens on the peripheries of your own product and its implications. So understanding the broader need of customers would really help you be more effective. And finally, taking your strategic hat to one level up, knowing your company's goal. What are your company's goal and priorities for that year? And how does your product fit in there? You can call yourself the CEO of your product, but understand the real power of the investment lies with the venture capitalists who are basically your product leadership in the organization. They would determine what the size of your team is, how much investment your product area would get, how much support you would get from other organizations when you go forward with them for a request. Understanding your company's goals and priorities and how your product fit in there will help you better prepare. If there's lesser investment for the area, you can find creative ways on how to do that. Or you can figure out a way how to align your product's mission and goal towards your company's goals and priorities and seek for better investment. As a PM, definitely there's a lot you can do, but you can't do everything. If you're not getting the right level of support from your leadership and cross-vertical stakeholders. Secondly, amplify your impact. In order to be 10x effective PM, one thing that I always stress is you cannot aim for linear growth. You cannot aim for linear impact. You have to be exponential. By doing a lot of things by yourself, you will definitely gain linear benefits, but what you should aim for is exponential benefits. And in order to amplify your impact, there are a few things you can do. Number one is aim for global maximum. And a very easy way to do that is just choose the right problems. A typical product journey looks like you start with problem discovery, then you try to prioritize those problems, and then you do a solution discovery, prioritize those solutions, and go ahead and implement that and do discovery throughout the whole process. Your very first step here is the kind of problems you prioritize. I see a lot of PMs try to figure out, hey, this is a low-hanging fruit for me. This is an easy one to implement. I can do it within a quarter and then probably just talk about it in my preference cycle or my promotion cycle next month. While that may be a good strategy, but it will always help you get just a local maxima. You can do multiple AB testing, but all that will help you is just improve and choose between two different things. Again, local maxima, whereas what you should be aiming for is a global maxima. How can you bring the 10x growth or a bigger impact that others have not even thought about? And to do that, you have to choose the right problems. Of course, I'm not saying that, hey, just totally forget the low-hanging fruits. Your roadmap should be a well-balanced of some good immediate wins that you can talk about and de-risk your long-term bets, but it should always have a few long-term bets that would give you rewards in a year's timeframe, two years' timeframe, working on that that can actually change the trajectory of your product. Second thing is solve for your customers and not your products. A lot of PMs put a blinker zone that, hey, this is my product, this is my limitation, this is the boundary, and here is where I try to innovate and get the answer. They, in fact, try to bring out different use cases on how their product can be adopted by customers, and that's totally a wrong thing. You should always think about your customers and what problems do they want, and then figure out if your product is the right solve for that problem or not. If the problem is meaningful enough, you can always expand the scope of your product or try to introduce a totally new product, but start with customer problems first. And they may both be the same thing, trying to solve for the product which will solve customer needs or thinking about customer needs and then solving through your product, but it's just a mindset shift. The more you grow in your role, the more strategic you become, you would try to overcome again from the limitations and the boundaries different org structures or products put into constraint. Break free from those constraints and think about the end customers and the needs and how you can solve them. And finally, in order to achieve a global maxima or in order to achieve exponential impact, you have to be a rebel. A lot of PMs say, this is what my leadership expects of me. This is what my manager expects of me. This is what my product mandate is. Let me go ahead and do that. And they do really well, really good job at execution, but that's not why organizations have product managers. If you keep doing what you're being asked for, you might get linear results. You might be good at that, but you cannot achieve global maxima. Think about bringing a contrarian thinking into your daily mindset. When you're building out your annual plans or plans for the quarter, think about what are some of the bets that I'm super bullish on, but everyone is not. How can I build a case for that? How can I bring an investment for that? And how can I just get it done? And I agree, this is not easy. This is tough. And a good way to learn that would be look at product leaders and look at product managers who have been there, done that, who have built and scaled zero to one products. How did they go about evangelizing their product or their idea? How did they go about asking for investment? How did they basically align everyone to work on their idea and get it to execution? Again, in your career, you might get a couple of opportunities to do something like this from zero to one. It's not a norm in the industry. It's not a norm everywhere, but if you want to have exponential growth, always look out for these opportunities. And when they strike one, just hold them strongly and go ahead and full blast with them. Secondly, to amplify your impact, you have to leverage your team. I know PMs are busy always and they're trying to do a lot of things. Big respect for that. But understand that you cannot achieve everything on your own. You have to leverage your team. Focus on the highest leverage activities and delicate the risk. If there are certain actions that your engineering manager can take over or your design can lead, delegate them. If there are certain organizational updates that needs to come, delegate to them. You don't always have to be the forefront of communication. You can delegate a part of it, maybe to your program manager or to the other people in your team. Figure out what are the activities that you can delegate and figure out what are the highest leverage activity that the product input is needed and you just do that. A lot of time people think that product manager should be very innovative. They need to bring the big ideas to the table and work for that. As a PM, you are responsible for bringing the vision but bringing innovation is not just your responsibility. Leverage your team for innovation. Engineers are best candidates who understand the real constraints of the product and how to improve that who can tell you about the different challenges. Designers are the other stakeholders that you should involve. So in short, try to do things like brainstorming sessions. As PM, you don't have to be the creator of ideas, I would say, but a good person who can just amalgamate those ideas, who can curate those ideas. So don't be a creator of ideas but be a curator of ideas and leverage your team for innovation and see how you can leverage what others are trying to do. And if something is of great importance, build a good case around it and get it done. And finally, this is a very hot take but my own personal philosophy, rather than doing something wasteful, I would prefer to do nothing. A lot of my PMs feel that, hey, I have some bandwidth left, I have some time left, let me just go ahead and clean up the JIRA or let me just go ahead and do these other work. I would just probably not do that. In the moment when I'm doing nothing, I'm recharging my brain, I'm recharging my thinking, I'm getting a fresh perspective of things and maybe my mind is free enough to strike the new idea or to strike about how I can solve some of the more complex problems. Again, that's personally my hot take. You're free to do otherwise. And finally, evangelizing your impact. With a lot of coaching and networking and observing other successful PMs, a lot of PMs are able to achieve the first two, like thinking about global maxima, taking big bets, prioritizing the right problems, leveraging the team. But personally, in my experience, having talked to so many PMs, I feel the third part is where a lot of PMs lack and struggle, which is evangelizing their own impact. A lot of PMs personally feel that, hey, it's just pumping my own chest for just talking about my own success, et cetera, and they just ethically feel bad about it. Let me tell you, it's not that. Imagine you build out a product for customers out there and you're providing a lot of value, but then you're not charging them money. You're not charging them enough money. You're leaving a lot of value on the table. Can that company sustain or can that company grow? No. Similarly, value creation is important. Number one, I'm not asking you to just go and bulge it around, but definitely create value. But once you create that value, make sure that you are able to talk about it and make sure that value is available to the rest of the organization. Value realization is as important as value creation. And it's not a selfish act. You're not doing it just for yourself. Think about if you're able to evangelize your product well in the org, how it is solving customer needs, the results that you have gotten, it will definitely help you get more funding and more investment for your product area. It will definitely be a moral boost for your teammates to figure out and realize that, hey, they're working on something that's really valuable, that the organization cares about, and their work is being rewarded. So do yourself and your teammates a favor. Make sure the great work that you're doing, the rest of the organization knows about it. The rest of the organization knows about what your product is, what's the future for it, what's the vision for it, what's the roadmap. And this will help not only you and your teammates personally, but help gain a lot of alignment, investment for your product and the future. And finally, in order to be 10x effective, you have to master communication influence. I haven't seen a successful PM who's bad at communicating. In order to be a great PM and have a great influence, you have to master communication. And when you talk about communication and storytelling, these are big topics in themselves. You can read a lot about effective storytelling, effective communication online, and there are many good courses and many good resources and books out there. But if I break down and condense everything to just one point, that would be bring extreme clarity. PMs are the only one who know the end, full picture end to end. You would know the technical constraint from your engineers or you can bring them to the table. You would know the design constraints. You would know the constraint from legal implications, compliance, you would know what the sales want. Sitting at the intersection of everything, PMs understand what every stakeholder wants, what the constraints are and how you have to operate and navigate with them. So as a PM, your number one job should be to bring extreme clarity. Why are we doing this? Who are we targeting? What are we trying to build? Be very clear and crisp in your communication with everyone. Quick, meaningful alignment is an underrated skill. A lot of people just think that, hey, PMs only do meetings. They just chat and they just talk. But as the organization grows big in size, it becomes more and more important. Different organizations within your company would have different incentives, different KPIs and different metrics. Bring them all together on a table, aligning them for a single solution, aligning them or focusing on one problem is definitely is a big task. And as a PM, in order to be successful, you have to do that. Bring extreme clarity to the table. And finally, influence. You might have heard that nobody reports to PMs and SPMs, you work with engineers, but they don't report to you. You work with designers, they don't report to you and you have to influence them. Not only your own team, you always also have to influence your stakeholders on why they should try to ask your ask, why they should just drop everything they're doing and do what you are requesting them. Influence by itself is a bigger topic, but if you condense again influence, it basically aligns to one thing, understand your stakeholders, KPIs and needs. If you're going forward with an ask to someone, understand why is this asked important to you and the company, but how it would benefit that team, like how it aligns to the work that they are doing, how it aligns to the incentive they are doing. And finally, why is your ask important? Maybe that team or that platform team or stakeholder team is getting thousands of requests every quarter, every year, why they should prioritize your stuff. What would be the benefit of the company, to the customers, to their own organization when we're trying to do it? So influence is not just about good effective communication. It is definitely a part of it, but it's also doing your groundwork and doing your research to understand what the person ahead of you you're talking to wants and how you can basically answer your questions. Never go to such meetings unprepared. Never try to influence someone without understanding them, what they are doing, what they are thinking, how they think, et cetera. So make sure you do your groundwork and then you go ahead and influence that. Influence is a very important skill. At the end of the day, as a PM, you will be responsible and ask for the impact you bring to the table. And often to bring that impact, you would have to take a lot of big bets. You would have to work cross vertically with different stakeholders and the ability to influence them would really help you meet your goals much, much faster. And that's a key difference between LOXA PMs and average PMs. The LOXA PMs are able to bring extreme clarity to the table. They are able to influence people around there and they're able to get the job done. And finally, learn how to navigate your organization. Understand how your organization is structured. Who are the key decision makers? How is the other organization structured? What do they care about? Be crisp and cut the fluff. When you're talking to leaders, when you're talking to people out there, they have very limited time. They have limited attention span and limited memory. You have to really cut the fluff, cut to the chase and just talk about in very crisp and clear bullet points. Often, ICPMs just get entangled into the web of organizational structure, going from team A to team B to team C or for trying to request something from someone or not even the decision makers. And you may spend hours influencing them, but at the end of the day, it's not their call and all your efforts are futile and wasteful. So in order to not have that kind of situation, understand your organization structure. Who is the decision makers? How is it structured? What do they care about? And make sure that you contact the right people to get the right stuff done. And finally, a bonus tip. Thank you for staying towards the end. This bonus tip is about growing in your role. This is not talking about specifically promotion, but how can you grow as a team better and seen and respected as a leader in the organization? And of course, this is a precursor to promotion and this will help you grow ahead in your role. But understand that, you know, promotions are dependent on a lot more variables than just your own performance. There are several dynamics at play, which is a topic in this. But let's talk about how you can grow as a PM in your role. The number one thing I would say is, always do what you commit. Always, always. If you say I'm gonna do something, if you say I'm gonna get back, always do that within the timeframe that you have specified. It will help you gain trust from your peers and the leaders from your org. As a leader, I would care about if I'm giving this job to Abhishek, will he get it done? Will he do it? And it's a predictable pattern. If I approved myself like five, six times, they would definitely trust me. And slowly, the kind of opportunities I'll be getting will grow in size. Like you will get from one opportunity to the bigger opportunity. But in order to gain that bigger opportunity, you have to prove yourself starting from the down. The next thing is attention to details. I love PMs. I love PMs who just go deep into the craft. If you are talking about something, if you're proposing something, the amount of details you give, the amount of attention you give to them is really a determining factor between a very well-polished PM versus someone who is very strong. Earlier in your career, try to go as deep as you can. As you grow in your product role, as your sphere of influence increases, you would also have to go broad and probably might have to adopt an eagle eye view where you fly above and see the entire landscape from birds eye view. But your capability and your skills that you've learned to go deep will also help you dive down like an eagle and catch your prey. So start by getting a depth, giving attention to details and as you grow, start giving a breadth perspective to what you're doing. And finally, ask for more and do that well too. Once you have proved yourself that you can do a certain things, ask for more. And this can be through innovative ideas that you're proposing and trying to gain investment for that or asking for a broader role or broader opportunities. This is how a good linear growth and exponential growth in the future can be like. Do what you commit, gain trust, show yourself that you're a very well articulated PM who go in depth and then finally expand your sphere of influence by asking for more from your leadership. And once you have established yourself, this would not be very tough. A lot of things about success is doing the same consistent, boring things over and over again, over and over again. A lot of people just give midway. They say, like, yeah, I've done this multiple times and they just try to slack around the cut corners. And in order to establish a great trust and do well in your career, I would advise just be very perfect with what you're trying to do. Raise the bar high for yourself and for the people around you. Finally, observe PM leaders around you. A lot of things I talked about earlier in the webinar, you know, a very few of that you can actually learn from books in here and there. A lot of actual learning comes from observing people who have been there and done that. Try to find out PM leaders in your organization or even in different companies around you who you respect and admire. Notice how they solve complex problems. Notice how they resolve conflicts, how they give presentations, how they talk, how they're able to align themselves, how they basically master storytelling. Product management is a craft that you learn a lot by doing. So you have to be around smart PMs, you have to learn and you have to observe how they're doing. Another good way would be read the PRDs that they have written, read the docs they have written. Try to see how they bring clarity to the table, how they respond to comments, how they align everyone together. This will definitely amplify your learning. You can learn all of this by yourself. You can make mistakes on the way and then learn from your mistakes. But the problem is this whole path of learning by yourself making mistakes is effective, but it takes a lot of time. While you can accelerate your learning by learning from others mistakes, observing these PMs, learning how they do, understanding where they failed and how they rectified that would definitely accelerate your learning. And finally, network and build relationships. Network with other PMs and leads in your organization and even outside your organization. People love to work with people they love and they like and that's true for bigger organizations, companies, startups, looking for your co-founders, et cetera. Understand that growth is a lot linear. A lot of PM things that, hey, this is my org chart and org structure. I'm starting with an APM, my next step would be to be a PM at a senior PM, group PM and grow in this organization or change companies or be in this line of work. Growth actually is like a jungle gym. There are multiple, multiple open paths and always keep your eyes open for that path. Maybe you realize that, you know, like growing from a PM, you might want to transition into a general management role or a different kind of role or you want to try to go into an industry which is totally different from what you're working on. Maybe you are a mobile PM but want to explore artificial intelligence or platform PM. Keep all the options open for you. Understand that growth is not real. And the way to gain this divergent perspective is to network really well within your organization, talking to PMs who are doing different things from you and building good value for them. Networking again is a bigger concept but if I can't enter into one small thing is people offer network and they think about networking as, hey, talking to them, introducing yourself and just connecting on a fewer topics. I would focus on building deeper relationships and broader relationships. Like network with few people but network really, really well. Don't just think about what value they can bring to you but figure out what value you can bring to them. How is something you can help them? And that basically is the foundation of a longer lasting relationship. Catching knowing someone may only bring you shallow opportunities but deeper opportunities only come with people who know you really well who admire and respect you. Thank you for sticking around. Just in short, what a good Chris old age knowledge about how to be a tennis effective PM and how you can grow in your role, in your organization. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.