 So, let's just get started. Let me give the mic to Jesse. Jesse, let's do a quick introduction about yourself. Sure, hi, good afternoon, good evening. It's a pleasure being here tonight. My name is Jesse Owens, the second, no relation to the runner. I'm a product owner at MasterCard and the product that I oversee is a product called MasterPass and you can think of MasterPass as the digital acceptance of the MasterCard brand globally. So essentially what my role responsibility is is to ensure that we ensure we build products and solutions for our merchants as well as our issuing partners and creating seamless checkout experiences. Prior to MasterCard, I was at Imagine Easy Solutions which is an education tech company which focuses around information literacy and research. And so part of my role there was building out institutional tools for our schools and institutions as well as building out the consumer-facing product. Some may know as EasyBid was the online citation and big biography tool. And then prior to that, I spent some time as an engineer at JP Morgan building internal messaging products for our fixed income equities desk for New York, London and Hong Kong trading desk. And part of my role there was building out API services that are internal trading desk within consumer and interface in order to send trade assets out to the street. And then just to round out my history, I was a comp-side major at Norfolk State University. Cool, and Jesse's also teaching the accounting class of their program and course and how many times have you taught before? I've taught earlier this year, early in the spring. Awesome, cool, great. Hey guys, I'm Joel Palothinkel. Just to tell you a little bit about my background, I started out as an engineer. So I kind of had that technical knowledge and after college, I went to my first job in Iowa. It was in the Midwest. It was a company called Rockwell Collins and I worked as an engineer managing the radios that went on to F-18 fighter jets. So I managed that and my role was kind of uniquely different because it was half product, half engineering. And I just realized when I had some of that experience, I really knew that I was passionate about empathizing with the user and also working with sales and working with products that actually touch the client's hands. So after that, I was fortunate to be able to move to New York and work at CBS. So I don't know if anybody remembers the show Survivor, but we built a product where you can text to vote people off the island. So did that. We did a really cool thing with Second Life. I don't know if anybody knows about Second Life. That was like around for like three months and then nobody heard about it. So did that for a little while and then that opened up some doors for me to continue working in media. So I worked at NBC and also Hearst magazines. And while I was at NBC, I did some of their FinTech products. So I did CNBC, really understanding the user's journey on the financial side and that opened up some doors to work at FACCET. And now I'm the head of product on mobile and web technologies at FACCET, so. Awesome. So Joel has also taught at Proud School multiple times and both will be teaching their coming classes who's doing weekend and weeknight. Weekday. Weekdays and weekends. So cool. So I mean, I have few questions prepared just to break the ice, but the idea here is to open the floor as soon as possible and if you have any questions about product management, careers, or anything in between, feel free to fire. So my first question for you guys is, how did you get your, how did you break into product management? Like none of us had this like a traditional career path. So what inspired you or who gave you that first opportunity? How did you make it happen? Yeah, I would say what inspired. I would say what inspired the transition and the product for me was partly because of 2008 being at a financial institution and after having something so catastrophic happening, it just forced you to sort of reevaluate things, reevaluate what are some of your core values in terms of what you wanna start building, what sort of industry you wanna be in and also looking at yourself personally, like what sort of skill sets do I need to be immune to any sort of impacts to the economy. So looking out to, looking to round out my skills and I felt like at the time I was fairly technical but I knew of myself that I didn't quite have the business act in mind or the experience in design. So what I started looking at is going online and figuring out what are some roles that can sort of intersect all those disciplines into one role and so came across product management as that role that can sort of satisfy all my different interests in product development but I knew I didn't have all the skills to make that transition at that point in time so what I started doing is may not recommend it for everyone but I just built my own app. So I decided to solve a problem that I felt that me and my friends were facing just moving to New York, be a new to the city. One of the problems that I felt during the time was around 2009, 2010. There wasn't really many social outlets for me and my friends so I wanted to build something that can catalog all the events that are trending in the city and so that it allows me to share my experience with my friends and my coworkers or anyone that I would wanna hang out with. So built a tool that sort of addresses that need and I treated it as my product that I was looking to bring to market. So actually went to a couple pitch competitions, actually went to a couple meetups, pitched in my idea. Of course there were some limitations with that product given the acquisitions of Instagram and that were addressing some similar needs around photo sharing which ultimately led to a conversation that I had with a co-founder of Imagine These Solutions around the product that I was building. And so I was actually invited to the office and it was actually around the same time I was looking to make a transition but just being constantly told no that told no about not only the product but no you can't be a product manager right now. This kind of inspired me to keep working at the product and keep refining my design and development skills in the end so I can speak about the product not only from a business perspective but also from a user experience as well as from a technical point of view. So leveraging those skills that I learned building my own app I took it to the interview. So during the interview I just demoed the app and so the co-founder and the team was impressed enough to offer me a job to be a product manager. Something I wasn't expecting because the meeting was just intended just to have a conversation about the app and just really just hanging out. So it was a Friday and it was a typical Friday afternoon at a startup and everyone was just hanging out just getting ready to wrap up for the weekend and so that was essentially my first break into the product with that interview and never looked back since. So what about, what I'll do again? Yeah so, oh sure thanks. So one thing I'll say about product management in relation to other industries and different roles is that you might see little hints of product management in a certain role right. So in being a business analyst you'll be doing a lot of requirements and documentation that's part of product management but really educating myself on what the full picture is and building my network at work and learning what the product managers do that really helped me to break in because when I started at first I was kind of a hybrid product project manager but then they actually did have six months later they did have an opening in product management so I built some relationships at work and I did some research on my own too as far as what it takes but having those introductions internally really helped me to make that transition. One thing that I'll also add about building your own product, I think that's a huge thing. I built a few apps on my own as well and that just really helped me to understand what product management is because you're just thinking like the user. One thing I'll also say which is like my most exciting thing about the class is at the end of the class everyone is going to be presenting a product that they built so that's a great thing that you can bring with you as a portfolio when you do go to a company and say hey I used to be a business analyst but I went to this class, this amazing program product school and like hey here's a product I built and that way you can kind of do what Jesse did where you can just show what you did instead of really talk about it. Yeah those are really good points. We've seen so many students who broke into product by building their own products and also people that maybe had a job in business analyst or project manager that were close to the product team maybe they had the official title and then after either the class or networking or something else they were able to get help with that final push but there's so many other parts so happy to discuss with you. Now I would like to open the floor for you and let you ask any questions to Jesse or Joel. Yes raise your hand and then I'll point to you. I have a list of questions. First of all you come from an engineer background. Yeah. Do you miss coding? Do you miss like you know I mean you both build your own applications right? So you know as an engineer you know you're always having all these ideas and we're thinking about products all the time but you know when you actually made that transition from coding to managing there's definitely a lot of hours coming up with ideas of coding or will you challenge yourself as an engineer? Yeah. I'm going to rephrase the question just for the people online. First of all the question is as a product manager and former engineer do you miss coding? Yeah so for me I actually don't. I did engineering I did coding when I was in college and I kind of liked it when I was in college but I always just felt myself being more inclined to working on the business side and working with customers working with sales so that's just more natural to me and when I was working at the aviation company one thing that was really missing was the design. So that was what I was talking about right? Like so I did engineering but my role was like a systems engineer so I did requirements development. I work with you know different teams. I work with marketing I work with sales but the one piece that was missing was design and I knew that to be a product manager you need to have all those pieces so. When you say design you mean UX you mean graphic design you mean how would you categorize? Yeah so with app design with mobile apps and websites there's usually two categories it's the UX which is the user experience so that's kind of your information architecture with a bunch of wire frames that really maps out every screen and how you interact and then the UI is a user interface those are like the beautiful colors the buttons that's what makes it really look like an app. So a lot of times you'll see a full stack designer that can do everything but then there's other times where which I do now is I only work with the interaction design people and they give me like these it looks like a skeleton but it clearly shows the navigation of the app and then only after you sign off on that that's when you work with design create visual design as they also call it which you know adds all the colors and layers and I'm sure with Masterpart you guys do a lot of stuff with your branding right? Indeed, I guess from my perspective I guess I would echo the same sentiments from Joel is that I don't miss the actual being behind the keys but I am still very immersed in the actual development of the product and it really depends what type of product you're working on so for me a lot of the work that I do revolves around building services for businesses so going into the APIs, looking at the business logic of these services and having to go into the API contracts some of the business real validations that we perform so it's and if it's consumer facing you know you're talking to, you're talking about the user journey so you're talking about how the users onboard to the product what are some of the key functions that we want to what are we gonna drive traffic towards which is more consumer facing but it really depends on the role but for me I'm still very much immersed in the technical details but without having to be the one responsible of building out the service or the product that we're gonna deliver to the clients and they do have these roles that are called technical product managers so those roles serve that great purpose too for people that do still miss the coding part and do still miss kind of the technology but they're still also building business requirements and I've had a few students in the past that were engineers and they were fortunate to transition into a role that's kind of still a hybrid that's still a little more technical than a normal product manager but they're not knee-deep in the code writing all that you know committing code like every couple weeks so. Great, yeah so now just to say one last thing it's just important that you distinguish the type of product roles you fill your skill sets best aligned to so kind of what we talked about if the product or the role that you're looking for really focuses around building services quite naturally it's gonna require you to be a bit more technical versus a product role that's more consumer facing so be very mindful of those sort of roles that you're looking at because it's gonna require different skills in order to be successful. Yeah, I have a question for Jesse. My name is Roy. So you talked about we work at NASCAR and you have this product called NASCAR Pass, right? And that's like a two B solution so do you have to work with merchants and work in integration projects? Is that what you like? Right, right so the question is about master pass do you get to work with different integration partners? Yeah so we work with our integration partners via our commercial usage so we have how our organization split up we have product managers who is responsible for going out to the markets that basically the markets that they own and talk to merchants, talk to issuers and come back with some of the feedback from those partners and what my role is we're supposed to deliver solutions that addresses the need of either the merchants or our issuing partners. Oh yeah that's right, yeah. So I'm wondering about for people who aren't technical and they're willing to get into product management what are the biggest challenges you see? Okay so the question is for people who are not technical what are the biggest challenges that you see when it comes to breaking into product management? Take that one. I think the challenges, the level of challenge also varies from what industry you're coming from right? Like if you were a Broadway actor that might be a little more difficult than someone that was a business analyst right? So I think there's kind of a spectrum of the variation but I think with anything sometimes when you're changing industries you have to expect that you're probably not gonna get the same exact salary. You might have to take a little haircut because you're learning and you're taking a new junior role but the great thing about product management and the tech ecosystem especially in New York and San Francisco is that if you get some experience and you work hard and you can prove yourself you can move up and build your experience really fast. Okay so the follow up question is what are the top skill sets that you need to build as a non-technical person trying to break into product management? Yeah I'll just talk a bit about if you're a non-technical person breaking in the product I think what's important is that one that you understand that those are some limitations that you have and you just have to leverage your team in order to get up to speed as far as some of the technical details in regards to the product. So having conversations with your engineers and either buy them lunch or get them a coffee or something that you can spend the hour or two, however much time you need in order to spend with those engineers in order to get up to speed from a technical perspective. Kind of what I've seen in the past is that sometimes if you don't have the technical acumen it's hard for you to really challenge or hard for you to really trade off when it's time to make tough decisions where if you have a launch a week from now and then you still have X amount of features to be completed before the launch and not understanding what are some of the trade-offs and what are the business impacts as a result. So I definitely see that being a challenge but to answer the next question around core skill sets I think we've probably all seen it online. I think it aligns with having a design sense really being having the acumen of working with designers and also from a tech perspective being able to have a facilitate a conversation with the room full of engineers and architects and then also strategy and also a business acumen. So learning how the features that you're building fits into the overall goal of the product and goals of the company. So those are all skill sets that are acquired over time but once you start seeing some of those dynamics start to repeat itself you'll start to recall some of the decisions that you made in the past that will help you to make even faster decisions in the moment. And I think that's where I feel like I at least personally I feel like I've developed over time is developing the quick decision making on the spot versus well give me some time to think about it and then I'll get back to you because sometimes you don't have that much time to making critical decisions but being very immersed in those three disciplines is very important. I've got a few more skill sets that I could add. Oh sure. So I think one of the biggest sentiments with product management is really empathizing with the user. So as you build the product really feel the pain of the user. So to do that you really need to understand the customer's journey, right? So you need to, there's different ways you can understand the customer's journey. You can look at some qualitative feedback and actually talk to customers and ask them hey, what's your top three workflows? When you want to use an app, what's the most important thing to you? Are you a hedge fund manager? As a hedge fund manager that persona what do you need to do to do good in your job, right? So if you're building an app for them you really need to understand the end to end workflow of that. Before you even do that you need to determine if it's even worth doing that project, right? Like why is your boss going to give you funding to be able to do this project, right? So there's a lot of due diligence that you have to do before that to determine if it's even worth it. What type of business impact is this project and this product that I'm building, this app going to impact and how is that going to relate to revenue, right? So being able to be analytical and look at all that data upfront to first decide if you're going to do it. That's important. I mentioned the user journey end to end. Then it's really the execution, right? So how do you, now you know that it's worth doing it. Now you know what you need to build. How are you going to do it? That's really what Jesse was saying, right? Like first you need to design it, right? Like it's what does it look like? How do you interact with it? Are you going to tap it? Are you going to pull down a refresh? All those things you need to hash out with design. Then you're going to work with engineering to turn it into something that's real and living. And then how are you going to launch it, right? Like what, how do you, how do people know that you even launched that, right? So that's where you work with product management. You work with sales so that you can promote sales enablement, right? So sales can go out and sell the product and bring in revenue for the company. So, you know, we'll drill into like a lot of the granular details in class, but really those skill sets of like just owning a product from maybe an idea or a concept to really seeing it into an app is like that whole journey that you're going through. So I hope that was helpful. Yeah, I'll just also just quickly, I'll just add organization is going to be extremely important when you, I know it sounds, sounds cliche, but you'll be amazed on how many different priorities gets thrown your way and having to organize it in a succinct manner to where you're still able to deliver, but able to maintain and re-establish relationships that you have within the organization. Because a lot of your role is you're going to be a relationship manager. And sometimes you're not going to be able to get everything done that you would like for your stakeholders and learning how to communicate to them when things aren't going to be delivered when they expect it. So, yeah, just wanted to reiterate that. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the role of product manager kind of differs depending on the size of the company, whether you're like a small, high-tech startup or like a big media corporation and depending on the industry whether it's fintech or something else. Why does it say it's kind of the difference in the experiences as a part of the management and whether the company's small or large or depending on the industry? Okay, so the question is what are the main differences as a product manager depending on the company's size, but also depending on the company's industry? Yeah, so the biggest thing I would say is just the multiple hats that you have to wear, right? So if you're at a startup, you might be running growth too. You might be doing Twitter posts and promoting the company. You might also be doing the design too. So I currently advise a couple startups now and I get my wrist lops sometimes because I just go ahead and do the design. The designer gets a little mad, but the startup, like somebody, you need like extra hands to do it. So you'll be finding yourself learning things very quickly. And the biggest difference with the startup and a big company is if you mess up, oops, like the company can go under. If it's a big company, oops, it's okay. Just get it right like next quarter, and it's all right, nobody cares. But that's, and also like big companies, if you wanna make a change to design, you have to go to the design department, make a request for design, and there's a lot more layers of bureaucracy and processes in place. It can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, so, but there's more stability at a bigger company usually. Smaller companies, you're just kind of running around with your head chopped off and hoping everything works out, so. In light of like big and small companies and like the stakes between success and failure between startups and large companies, what comes to like breaking in for those of you who are, do not come from like products. Sure. Which one's easier for you? So the question is, I am afraid of him in rephrasing this question. Let me change it a little bit. What takes to breaking to product management in a small company, and also what takes to breaking to product management at a larger company? I would say at a smaller company, they're looking for not just, they're looking for skill, a multitude of skills, whereas in bigger companies, they're looking for specialization. So if you specialize in consumer or you specialize in marketing, then they hire for that role versus at a startup where you need someone who can wear many hats and do many things, you probably would want to look for someone that can do a multitude of things or that can assist on different aspects of the company, because you don't necessarily have the budget to hire for each every single specialty. So it's probably who's a company to find someone that has multiple skill sets and not just someone who's just, they're only no APIs. They not only know APIs, but they also know how to build wireframes and they know how to build prototypes. So those are things to be mindful of if you were to look for a product role at a startup versus at a larger company. And my answer would be definitely a startup. I think also with the startup, there's flexibility, there isn't as much formality. So if you're willing to even just join for free, just to kind of get the experience and kind of get your foot in the door and maybe offer to do it part-time and then you prove yourself, maybe when the startup raises the next round of funding, they'll say, hey, you've already been with us for like six months and you already know our process. So it makes sense to just make you a product manager. And I know somebody that was in operations at a startup, one of my students and she was pretty much doing product stuff and she went to product school and they made her like the director of product, which is awesome. So I think there's a lot more flexibility and less like red tape if you want to just do something innovative and learn and just kind of wear multiple hats, as Jesse said. So okay. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Okay, so the question is, what are some of the biggest mobile trends within the fintech industry? I mean, I just think that the mobile usage in general is growing exponentially. As soon as we hit the iPhone 6 Plus, there was a massive jump in growth because that was kind of the intersection between the tablet and the phablet and then like a big phone. So a lot of the people that wanted tablets, they were really happy with the 6 Plus and we just saw a surge of usage. So I think another big trend is tablet isn't really changing that much. Tablet is in parity with desktop and web because tablet, if you think about it, and we've done a lot of user experience research on this, users want what's similar on the desktop on tablet because there's more real estate, but it still needs to be optimized for tablet. So the buttons need to be big enough to tap opposed to a desktop where you're gonna be clicking and hovering. So those kind of like from a usability standpoint, those are some high level trends and then I see phones still growing and as you know, like Moore's law was kind of something that people have talked about a few years ago, it's not completely true now, like just the computing power doubling, but the phones are gonna continue to get more powerful and people are gonna take the phones and hook it into a docking station that's actually gonna turn it into their computer and Microsoft's already done a few things like that already. I think they call it a clamshell device where it's a dock dropping the phone and the phone is really your PC. So users in the fintech space and probably in any other enterprise space, their work never stops and they wanna still be able to check and be up to date no matter where they go. So that's their user journey as your product manager. You really need to kind of understand that use case. And like I said before, I'll really stress this. I mean, really empathize with the user, right? They're on their train home from work. What are they gonna be doing? They're probably gonna be checking their phone. They may wanna save some stuff offline to their tablet because they're a portfolio manager and they wanna read stuff about the markets. So just understanding those things, I think is a lot of the due diligence you'll do as you do the upfront analysis of the product. So hope that was helpful. So what's the difference between bidding and internal application for a large organization or such a shipping of product that can be... Okay, that's a great question. So what's the difference between building an internal product in a company and building an external product for thousands or hundreds of thousands of users? Yeah, I guess it just really depends on what's the problem that you're attending on solving. Sometimes it probably makes sense to build an internal tool versus building something off the shelf because it doesn't really support the level of customization that you need. And so the thought process around that is the amount of time that you exude customizing this off the shelf product, you could have just built your own and it's really custom for the company. So think of something like content management. So think about if you build out content for your blog or your website, you wanna build your own internal CMS that handles all your assets and is able to be performing as you would like versus using something else that's off the shelf. So that's not something you actually wanna ship to customers, but it's something that improves the operational efficiencies of your company versus something that you actually want consumers to use for intent of growing the business. So there's things operationally that you have to do along the way in order to, as you start to scale, but then there's also things that you wanna actually ship out for customers to use. Yeah, and I've done both, right? So I've been at NBC and CVS and those are consumer apps. So to really move the needle, you're looking at millions of users, especially if you're trying to make money off of ads. When you're doing a B2B play, like a company like Bloomberg or FACSET or Salesforce, you may not have millions and millions of users, you may have thousands of users, but those users spend 50 grand. So it's one big sale. The sales cycle is a lot longer too, right? So to get somebody to use your application, there's a big process, especially in the financial space when you're working with institutional investors, there's just that whole process there. So if you lose one of those clients, it's a big deal. If you lose one user from your pool of millions of users, just serve up a couple more ads and optimize your ads and you may be able to make up for that segment. So I think the user acquisition is different. You can also get different data, right? So you can get a lot of qualitative data and you can build relationships with your customers and get real time feedback that's real tangible from the enterprise space. When you deal with a consumer app like NBC or if you work at Uber, you really just have the data, you know? I mean, you could probably do some UX research and invite some people to do some user research, which they do, but it's a little, it's kind of secondary because you're kind of inviting them in you're not really working directly with someone that kind of touched the product. So I think those are kind of the differences. And it depends on what your goal is for the product because the goals are gonna be different too, so. What are some tips or pitfalls for when like your interview with a client trying to find their problems? Okay, so question is, what are some of the tips or pitfalls that you have seen when you're trying to do some user research with users of your product? Yeah, I would say when, I would definitely say when you try to lead with features versus trying to understand their problem. I think that's where you kind of get stuck where you're kind of left without a problem to truly solve it, versus you trying to force a feature on a potential client that wasn't even solving their problem. So I think is what Joel said earlier is just really empathizing with what that problem is and really understanding some of their behaviors and some of their challenges with either existing products that they're currently using. And then using that as insights as far as based off of these suite of products that our clients use, here's our opportunity for this new product that we're going to build. Yeah, I would definitely stay away from solutioning. So as Jesse said, right, like I mean you don't wanna go in and meet the client and say hey, are you saying you want a button that you tap on? When you tap on it, there's a green light that shows up. So you're just kind of telling them what you want to do because you think it's a cool feature when you really should just be, not even talking about any features, just ask them to just completely do all the talking in. Tell them what they do in the morning till the end of day, what's their workflow? That's really important. A lot of times like our technology when we tried to do UX research, it worked great in all our dry runs and then when we meet the client, like the screen share for some reason doesn't work. So just making sure you dry run it and make sure the technology, if you're gonna be recording users, just make sure you have a good process in place to do it and your operations of that are really smooth because that's ruined a lot of our data just not being able to access the logistics of it. Okay, so the question is, what type of challenges do you enjoy solving and where do you see yourself in five years? It seems like you are recruiting here. I think she's a life coach actually. I would say for me, just given my background, I really enjoy some of the technical challenges like just around infrastructure and how we're going to support new consumer-facing features with our current back-end technologies or what sort of layers do we need to build in to our product in order to, even to have our product more performant or to, okay. So I'm really intrigued on the architecture of the product behind the scenes. And so really looking at how different things are hooked together and looking at how we can create opportunities for the product as we scale. So really my interest goes into like, all right, it's cool that we've watched the product, we got a couple of users using it, but what if we got 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 users? What is that technology on the back and what does that look like and what sort of technology is gonna be running behind the scenes and going from microservices to data centers, those are things that I'm really keen on. But it was just something that I've developed over time but I also enjoy the work that's put in on the back end, how it results on the front end as well. Yeah, and we'll talk about our five year, we'll talk about our five year goals. Sure. Yeah, so for me, it would be a little less on the infrastructure. I think I'm a little less passionate about that but I've always been really passionate about design so making sure the app just looks really clean and beautiful and easy to use. A lot of times it's not, right? Like you, you know, for a user to do something, again, right, the user journey, you take some like five taps when it really should just be one button. Like if you think of Uber, right? You just tap one button and it really just tells you where the cap is. You don't have to go through like five hidden menus to try to request a car. And that would directly impact their sales, right? So I think for me, tying the design to scaling and growing users, I think is a huge thing. So I get really excited when I add, like I added this button on the home screen that helped the user achieve their workflow really quickly and I saw that directly increase the usage. So I think just playing around and doing a lot of testing to see a lot of engagement in the app that just kind of keeps me excited. Okay, and you were five years back. Five years. So I think, you know, within my career, I've seen my role just sometimes stay the same but just get, expand a little more. So, you know, if I stay at fact set, it'll hopefully be that I'm just expanding and just taking on more products. So what I've seen is that people become product managers and then later maybe they become a director of product. They have product managers report to them. But then later that gets larger to a macro level where you own the platform. And the platform has multiple products and it's a portfolio of products. So I think just continuing to learn more and just expand my leadership I think would be a good thing to shoot for, yeah. Yeah, I would echo those same sentiments. Yeah, just continue to grow in the role, continuing to teach, continuing to learn about my skill sets and working on skills that I feel that I'm weaker in. So just so I could just round out my institutional knowledge, not only of the product but even of my own skill sets and just constantly being self-reflective of those opportunities, not only for me but also for products that I will want to manage in the future. As a software architect slash digital strategist I've had a really good career for many years. I actually work for CMEs right now. But it seems to be that as a product manager you have to be an employee. There's not so many consultants opportunities or I don't know about that. Oh well, so the question is about product consultants, it seems like most of the product managers are employees but what about product consulting? Do you know any of those opportunities? Yeah, there's a group called the Taliner group they're in New York, I reached out to them when I was job hunting like a few years ago and they're in New York. So there's a bunch of agencies that I think do higher contract work. So if that's something that you're looking for that may be a good way to kind of get in as well. Like if it's kind of like an entry level contract product manager, you used to be a project manager but you're able to kind of say how you can really fill in those gaps. That's something that is transitioned. So I think a lot of there are some recruiters. I mean it may not be as much as the full-time permanent. And I think it also depends on the economy, right? The markets are doing pretty good now. So there is a lot of full-time work when the economy doesn't do as well. A lot of that does change to contract work. I think a company that comes to mind that is huge and they're based out in Brooklyn, it's an agency. So the work in nature is agency work. So they'll work with different brands on different problems that they have with their product. So you'll be tasked to solve those usability problems, the experience problems. So maybe you could still be an employee but the work in itself is you're a consultant. I'm a consultant, that's why I found that. I also know a website called Geekster, G-I-G-S-T-E-R. They also offer those type of services. It's kind of like a higher level version of Upwork or freelancer.net where clients can hire a product manager who will be the point of contact between the client and the engineering team. So that's another interesting web to check out. Do you spell that again? G-I-G-S-T-E-R.com. Things of such. What can we do today such that the transition in six months or two years is better? Okay, so the question is, as a business analyst who's trying to make a transition into product management within six months, what are some of the tactical steps that I can take now to try to increase my chances to get a job in product? Yeah, so I would say definitely what you can start doing now is subscribing to, so there's some good resources online that you can start consuming yourself with because as a product manager, I think one of the skills that we didn't mention is being a constant learner. And so I think a part of that is reading a ton. I just find myself, that's just part of my daily habits is waking up, reading articles, and then maybe during my lunch break read more articles just around, either around the payment space or just around just consumers and just looking at different, how experts have defined what this consumer research would look like. So there's index at General Assembly is really good. The black box of product management on Medium. There's actually a great podcast called Expoded by Ben Thompson. And there's a designbetter.co is another podcast I would highly recommend just to learn and just really be immersed on how experts are viewing product development and just really just absorbing a lot of information as you start to refine what your role is gonna look like in the future. So you mentioned that you're a BA. A lot of what you do is an aspect of product management because you have to define very clear requirements for your engineering team to now go and execute and deliver. So you can start framing your resume in a way that it looks like you've done product work because in essence you have. So you can start doing that and start collecting feedback around what else needs to be packaged up to be even looked at as a product manager. So I would just say just reevaluating your resume and just how do you wanna and compare to whatever resumes that you see online and just make sure that you're addressing some of the key indicators that you are at PM or you have the skills to become one. Yeah and I say you could know all of the knowledge about product management. You can know the whole workflow. You can say all the buzzwords we're saying but at the end of the day, right? Like if you don't have that in your resume then it's just gonna fall to the bottom of the stack. So I mean I think the two biggest things, I mean there are people that get the job that didn't have all that knowledge but they were able to jump in, go to a startup and just learn it really quickly on the fly. One of my favorite sayings by Richard Branson is if you have a challenge and you don't know how to do it just say yes and figure it out as you go. I mean don't do anything too reckless but I would say be hungry, be open to taking on new challenges and try to jump in and learn something. I think one thing that's made me successful is just being able to just handle change like moving from aviation to media to finance. So I think once you do get a job if you're fortunate to do that really just build strong relationships early on. Like spend some time with the engineers. I mean if you wanna move internally really spend some close time with your product managers and learn what they do on a day to day basis so that that way you can start maybe seeing if they can use some help and like maybe you can do a few projects with them and wear a hat, maybe a big company is willing to do that. I know a few of my students in the past that were kind of like a business research analytics person but they were able to actually build some relationships with the product group and do a few projects. But I would definitely do all the studies, read the research but at the end of the day to get the job, the person that gets a job maybe they don't know how to do the job that well but they interviewed really well. That's what really it's a sale at the end of the day. So can you convince somebody that you know how to do the job and that you'll do well and do you know how it should be done? I think that's the end of the day the strongest people that have the and you'll see it when you start recruiting and applying. It's like you'll see a slew of first round calls with the HR group. If you're getting those calls that means that you have a strong resume because you're getting people's attention but then if you have all these phone interviews and then for some reason you're just not getting the job you know that something needs to be worked on with your interview. So that's something that you need to work on and I work closely with a lot of my students like that's the biggest thing that they have trouble with I think in my class really just getting the job. So I like to try to have the students give me the job description and then I look at the resume and just make sure that the resume actually calls out. You don't wanna lie. You wanna be honest about your experience but you wanna make sure that you're highlighting your talents the best way possible. Like for BA right? I mean being able to write really good requirements understanding the workflows. Those are BA skill sets but that's really important in product management and there could be a company or a job that really really focuses on that and they don't do much design. So I think really figuring out the right fit is another thing too because you wanna make sure you stick around for a while as well. I always say that trying to get a job especially in a competitive space like New York product management it's a job itself. It's not about quitting your job and looking for a job but allocating some time for that could be on weekends, could be after work or before work or during lunch but you need to kind of block that time for yourself and part of what we teach in product school is not just about how to do your job which is actually the biggest part but it's also how to get a job because to Joel's point we've seen many good people that we know that could do an excellent job but maybe they don't know how to sell themselves and we've also seen the opposite case. People that are really good at selling themselves but maybe they can't deliver. So you have to find that right balance and it's true that at some point you will need to tweak your resume in a way that you can call the attention of a recruiter. You will also have to practice your interview so you can convince someone that you know how to do your job but at the end of the day you also need to be able to deliver, right? So it's a combination of both. Just to put it in a boat I think storytelling is gonna be extremely important so maybe taking a storytelling class there's Toastmasters, yes. So I would invest into that and just being very confident telling your story and just figuring out what story works best for you. You know, we all have our personalities and we all have our ways of delivering or telling the story to our friends, family, loved ones. Figuring out what works best for you and just putting it in the context of your career and just really refine that into a point where you're ready to go out and sell yourself. And I have probably around maybe four stories off hand and that story is the end-to-end story of how that product was built and the reason why I have four to five is because the interviewer may just throw some random question out and like just having one canned story that you already talked about may not work. They may ask you, hey, tell me a difficult time as a, that's a common one because they wanna know how you handle chaos and crisis, right? So tell me a time that you dealt with a difficult scenario in product management and how you handle it, right? So I already kind of talked about the end-to-end for like one product that can't really use that same product again so it's good to just have a few different products you worked on even if you didn't become the product manager, I'm sure as a VA there is some contribution to a product so if you can highlight those parts of that, I think that could really help you out. Okay, so we have time for two more questions. So can you contrast project management and product management, project management there? Sounds similar, but maybe there's a nuance that I might not be passionate about. Okay, so what is the difference between project management and product management? Right, yeah, so which is very similar and kind of what we talked about VA, there's a lot of similarities to, or there's elements of project management to product, but I would just say that project management is just around execution. Like you have a project that starts and ends, we need to make sure we have our list of tasks that needs to be done in a certain timeframe or we miss our date. Those things are very similar in product management because if you have a campaign that's supposed to start this weekend, we have to make sure that we have the product done by tomorrow, we can't miss those deadlines. So you have to make sure that you're on task and making sure that people are held accountable that said that we're gonna do certain things by a certain date. So I would say project is about execution and then product is more about you're looking at the product holistically and tying it to actual business value, not only to the company, but also to your users and being, taking a very iterative approach and how you approach it. And so it's not just, you're not gonna just walk away from the product after this weekend. There's some learnings after the weekend, after the launch, and you learn more about your consumers. So that will feed into the next iteration of the product. Yeah, the best analogy I would say is, a project manager usually is the timekeeper, but sometimes they do in the media space, I know the media space, sometimes you do have a little bit of a hybrid role where you do work with design, you have to come up with revisions to creative and you might have some ideas and ideate, but then it's launched and then that's it. Product management, the closest alignment I'd say is being Steve Jobs, because you have to think of where the product is going. And one of his favorite quotes that I always think about is, you have to think about where the product is gonna be five years from now. Like not, think about the iPad when you only have a CD player. So today, what do we have now and where is it going like five, because you may have to maintain that product and you may have to evolve that product and that may be your only baby that you managed for two to three years. So how are you gonna innovate on that? How are you gonna get revenue? Because if you don't have revenue and the product isn't getting any values, a lot of times the product might have to get sunsetted. But the project manager would be kind of, a lot of times we have a project management team, they kind of align with us and just make sure that we track all of our projects and how many projects we have and which ones are done and what's the status. But that's kind of where it ends. However, there are some industries and there are different roles where you are a product manager but just the company just titled you as a project manager or a BA slash project manager but you're doing product management. So different companies have different titles for what you do and sometimes it's aligned with like a certain code that they have for the role of an HR. So just keep that in mind too. Wow. Okay, so the question is, and that's a really good one. We call sometimes these super power. So what's your superpower when you join a company as a product manager? Yeah, I think having to work with a lot of high-end beauty brands, that's kind of out of fear, that's kind of forced me to be really critical of design. So when I worked at Hearst magazines, some of my clients were like Christian Dior. So like if the logo was off by a pixel or if it was like a little stretched out, it was like a huge deal, because the brand is such a big thing. So because of that, I've always been very critical and very just very close to how the product should look. So I think as far as the design, I think I have a strong skill set. And I think a big thing with me is really, I think I can jump into different industries and different projects and try to pick things up really quickly. And I think that is really helpful, especially if you want to change industries. Yeah, I would say that I superpowers that I'm bilingual and bilingual in a sense that I can jump into a design conversation and have a very, not a productive conversation with designers about how the experience should flow and how it should work, but also I'm able to jump in a conversation with our lead engineers and architects on how should this be architected and what are our data models gonna look like in the future to support these new features. So I think I've been very comfortable in both spaces. And I think that's led to ultimately like me being successful and also being able to connect some of the two disciplines when they're sometimes they may be at odds with each other. Like the design doesn't work well with architecture. Architecture doesn't work well with the design. And so kind of being the middleman and help facilitating that conversation so that we can continue to move forward. And everyone can operate and flow is something that I truly hone in on. Great, well, thank you so much, Joel and Jesse. This was great.