 Hello, and welcome to today's talk. I'm Sagar Randeve, and I am a product manager at Google, working on serverless cloud platform. And today, we are going to talk about how to break into product management. This is an extensive topic, so we will cover the three main takeaways at a very high level. Why product management? What are the challenges for a non-product professional to get into the product space and how to overcome this? And what are the avenues to becoming a product manager? The reason this topic resonates with me is that I myself come from a non-product background. And the transition to becoming a PM was a very fun and eventful journey. Before going into the topic of how to transition into product management, it is important to understand what a product manager does. So a product manager is someone who solves complex real world problems of customers by shipping insightful products that tie into the vision, mission, and strategy of the company. Now, let's break this definition down into its components. Complex. There has to be an inherent complexity associated with a problem that we impose. If a problem is simple one, the company doesn't need to invest in hiring a PM. A real world problem. The problem should exist and should be real, and it should exist today. If you come up with a sophisticated product that doesn't solve a real problem or build a product that solves something for five years down the line, that is not what is expected of a PM. Shipping. This is a term that captures many things. It entails execution, which is the most critical skill of a PM. This requires working closely with the engineering team, marketing, sales team, and making sure that the product requirements are well understood and the process is delivered and landed in a timely manner. Insightful. A PM should be good at product design. This is where a PM is expected to unleash his or her creativity and come up with insightful solutions. Vision, mission, and strategy. These are your not stars. A vision is the end state that your organization wants to get to. You are set on a mission to achieve the vision, meaning the steps that you will take to achieve the vision. And the strategy is nothing but a combination of the trade-offs and resulting decisions that you make as a PM. So why do you want to become a PM? If you love to solve customer problems, do you see yourself seeking for hard problems to solve? Do you love to lead by influence? Does your work carry a weight? Can you influence a team of engineers to build a cool product? Do you love to tell a story? Do you have a cohesive narrative or a story around what problems are we solving and why? Who are we solving it for? How are we solving it? What is the impact? And how will it eventually make people's lives better? Do you love to deliver time constraint results? This is pretty self-explanatory. Do you love to wear multiple hats? Do you understand why is there a race condition in your product? And can you explain that to your leadership as well as customers? Do you know what PII data needs to be collected versus what's not allowed? These are the type of questions that a PM gets on a daily basis, which require you to wear multiple hats from engineering to sales to legal. Do you love to make data-driven bold decisions? If need be, a PM will wrap up a sequel query to identify usage patterns and make decisions accordingly. Do you love to be a people person? Do you love to interact with a lot of people on a daily basis? In short, a PM needs to be the conductor of the orchestra and not play any instrument by themselves. So let's take a look at what are the different types of product managers. There's a B2C PM for consumer products. Like think of iPhone or apps like Zillow or Snapchat or variables like Fitbit. There's a B2B PM for enterprise products. Think of cloud computing or Cisco's networking solution. Then there's a PM for internal tools. These are products that are internally used. Take, for example, a company's project tracking tool or an internal chat tool that a company has. Then there's product manager technical. These PMs are technical counterparts to their product managers. Generally, the products that have technical PMs involve high technical engineering complexity along with being customer-facing. Outbound product managers, this is a fairly new area and they have the same foundational skills as PM but are primarily focused on outbound activities like go-to-market and customer interaction. They also engage on updating the analysts like Gartner or training the field field. There's also an associate PM role that is not a different type of product manager per se but just a junior level PM. For those who have worked closely with PM, you will notice that some of them, not all, are ex-CEO, CTOs, founders or co-founders of startup in their previous role. Alternatively, they go on to start their own company. This will give you a perspective on how a product manager is expected to have a strong ownership of their product and a 30,000-feet view of everything around it. And that's why they say that if a PM was not a PM, he or she would probably be the CEO of their own company. Now that we have understood what a product manager does, let's take a look at what are some of the most common challenges that a non-product professional can encounter should they decide to make a switch into product management. Developing an additional skill. So you love doing everything what a PM does but may not possess all the skills that are required to become a successful PM. Lack of opportunities around you. You may be working on a team, organization or even an industry that doesn't need PM, not enough experience. Say you decide to make the switch but you do not have a prior product management or a similar experience, it will be difficult to get calls from recruiters. There's career timeline regression, meaning imagine you are in an upward career trajectory in a different role, but making the switch might mean a junior position in a short term. Doesn't always happen, but it very well can. And lastly, we have lack of established academic path. There are a very few formal courses or programs or a clear academic path dedicated to guarantee a job in product management. As a result, there are fewer PMs and then straight to network with. And lastly, there is interviewing. This is the last topic in itself, which we will not cover in today's session, but I will link to a few resources in the end that may help you in preparing. So if I were to prioritize these challenges, I'd say that acquiring the right set of skills and showcasing them the right way will get you your first PM break. So let's look at what are the skillsets of an ideal PM candidate. Communication, first and foremost. Imagine me telling you that I will build a home buying app which has six stages, versus I will gamify the home buying experience for millennials. Which one do you think my VP would be more interested in listening to? The latter, right? The solution might be the same, but the way you communicate it makes a huge difference. Leadership. Reiterating a point that I made few slides back. A PM leads the orchestra, but they don't really have direct authority over anyone. Yet, you need to ship complex products that involve a team of at least five to six engineers and engineering leads. A PM is required to display cross-functional leadership. Design skills and creativity. These two go hand in hand. A PM should be able to come up with elegant and sophisticated product design that clearly tie into the user needs. They bring in the culture of innovation and create a space where ideas can be generated that tie into the market requirements. Technical skills. As a PM, you should be able to assist your engineering manager in making technical decisions. If you're not expected to write a code or come up with optimal architecture, but you're certainly expected to have an opinion on how an app layout should look like for the lowest latency, or what should be the algorithm for a new speed. You're also expected to prioritize features based on technical complexities and time to market. Business argument. A PM is expected to have basic to intermediate level of business understanding. For example, can you optimize the cost of goods sold for your product? What are the product iterations that you can improve for your annual, what are the product iterations that you can make to improve your annual recurring revenue or net revenue growth? Are you able to come up with the guardrail metrics that tie into the vision or the goal that you have set? Empathy. A PM should be able to put themselves in the user's shoes whose problem they are solving. And last but not the least, driving and ambiguity. Imagine it's your first day at work as a PM. You open your issue tracker and you have a hundred outstanding items, which seem totally unrelated to each other. You will encounter many similar ambiguous occasions which will require you to prioritize and reprioritize your top at hand effectively. So let's look at how you can develop these skills. You can develop the necessary skills in your current role that can help you make the transition. You can read books like Design of Everyday Things or Creative Confidence that will help you develop product intuition. You can work closely with product managers within your existing organization. There's a lot of audio, video, and text based content available online, like webinars, like this one that product school organizers or podcasts like Stratechery, which will help you get the understanding of the industry, the tech industry. And you can take up side projects that will help you hone PM skills, freelancing sites will let you sign up for interesting projects, which will give you a good PM experience. If somebody is a first graduate, any of their academic projects can also be used to showcase their PM skills. You have formal education. If you do not have prior experience, it would certainly help to do an MBA, although it's not necessary or even a CS degree, especially if you are seeking for a PM role in a big tech company. Lastly, finding a mentor in your existing company, networking through platforms like LinkedIn that will help you find the mentor for one-on-one coaching. Once you have built the required set of skills, showcasing them in the right way is extremely important, and more so when you are shooting for a PM role, because the first product is yourself and your first PRDs are your resumes, co-readers, and online profiles like LinkedIn. Establishing your brand and online presence is very important. Now that you have done all the groundwork of understanding the role and acquiring the necessary skillsets, it's about time you make that switch. These are some of the places that you can look for to make a switch into the PM role. Apply for a transfer internally. You may apply to become a product manager at your current company, or if you do not have an experience, you may even apply for an associate PM position. Work on 20% projects. If your company allows you to try out different roles, you may volunteer to help with the side project as a PM. Apply as an external candidate. This is slightly difficult if you haven't held a PM position in the past, but with the right showcasing of skills as we discussed, it's possible to get an interview call. Startups are an interesting place to work at, and they are in dire need of resources who can help with more than one task. So working at some such startup in a multi-sacred role will potentially qualify you as a PM. And then network, network, network. Attend product conferences, meet new people. You never know who will be impressed by your skillsets. Connect with profiles that are successful PM or work at your dream company, but be sure you build a rapport over time before you ask them for help. Lastly, start your own company. This is by far the toughest way, but a short, short way of assuming the role of a PM. And finally, I'm linking to these resources that I personally found immensely helpful during my preparation. This is by no means an exhaustive list and there are many more great resources on the internet. That said, I conclude my talk here. Thank you and all the best on your transition.