 All right, hello everyone and welcome to this week's product school webinar. Thanks so much for joining us today. So just in case you didn't know, Product School offers product management certificates online and at our 20 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars such as this one, live streams and Ask Me Anything sessions. So head on over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. So today we have an awesome guest presenting with us today. I'd like to introduce you to Ren Lidlow. When is a principal product manager at Oracle who is passionate about building intelligent and game changing products. He brings years of extensive experience to his position, specializing in marketing cloud data visualization and B2B to be cloud solutions. During his lucrative career, Ren has held product managerial positions across the domains of I.T. and services and commuter software. As an operation specialist and subsequently a product program manager for Adobe Experience Cloud, he has managed marketing operations, including research, scheduling, agency relations and workflow management. Today at Oracle, his responsibilities include content creation, the email send engine personalization features along with preparing marketers for future B2B marketing. His expertise lies at the intersection of product management, product marketing, software development and go to marketing. So feel free to leave any questions that you have for Ren in the comments and towards the end, we'll definitely address as many as we can. So without further ado, let's welcome Ren. Thanks so much for joining us today, Ren. Cool problem. Thanks for having me. And thanks for such a great introduction. Can you see the screen OK? Yeah. OK, excellent. Well, everyone, thank you for joining today, whether it's morning, afternoon or evening. So today we're going to talk about how to be a 1% product manager being the top 1%. And I'm not saying that I'm part of that group. I'm not. But it's certainly something that we all are striving to be so we can deliver extraordinary products and extraordinary value to our respective organizations. So here's what we're going to do. I'll do a little intro about myself a little bit more than was already discussed. Then we'll talk about several principles of how to be a 1% PM. Now, these will have to be applied by you in your specific circumstances for the product that you are supporting for the organization that you operate within. But hopefully the principles give you a starting point to think differently and to try to go learn some new things after today. And then, of course, we'll be doing question and answer at the end. So please feel free to submit those as we talk. So some great background. I'm actually based out of Washington DC area in Northern Virginia. I'm originally from Texas, lived there most of my life. And then I went to school out of Utah. So I've traveled a little bit, relocated several times for my career, but I've always been really passionate about tech and about technology, specifically in marketing. The little copy mug there represents that I really love connecting with people. I like networking. And I just like communicating in general. So after the session, go for it at AdGone LinkedIn or to connect in the future, especially when it comes to mentoring up-and-coming product managers, those are conversations that I always enjoy having. And then the book that represents one of my personal interests is book collecting. I currently have about 1,000 books in my library. I'm hoping to have that to about 10,000 by the time I retire. So we'll see how that goes. So this was hinted at a little bit in terms of my background, but I started out when I moved into tech as an intern at Domo. Domo was a data visualization startup that's now currently public. It was kind of a tableau competitor at the time. That gives you a sense of space to operate in. Then I transitioned to Adobe, where I did operations for marketing, as well as program management for marketing. From there, I had my first foray into product management. I moved to Texas, and I worked for Saber, which is a travel technology company. Then from Saber, I transitioned to Oracle, where I now do product management for our marketing cloud technology. So talking about being a 1% PM, what does that mean? So here's a story of two PMs for you. We have what we call the good PM, and we have the 1% PM. Now on paper, these PMs probably look similar. And even having a five-minute conversation with them, they probably even sound similar. But when you look deeper, they are worlds apart in how they approach things and in the value that they're able to drive to their organization. One is kind of in stasis. They do good things. They do enough. They do things iteratively, but they're not adding transformational value to the organization. The 1% PM is very different. They might be given the same amount of responsibility, but then they master that. They expand their vision and their scope, and then they deliver things in much more effective, deliberate, and extraordinary ways, creating bigger impacts as well as better customer value. So let's break that down into five key principles of how do you separate yourself from being just a good PM to being that 1% PM going forward, as well as hopefully the rest of your career. So the first one I lovingly call get shit done. I bleeped it out there for you, but you get the idea. 1% PMs are consistently delivering extraordinary value, no matter the constraints they operate in or any other roadblocks that come into their way. And that's because they control their own destiny. So this is a great Steve Jobs quote that I've always really appreciated. He said, real artists ship. The implication being real artists get things done and out the door. And at Apple, they had this balance early on about this kind of maniacal focus on quality, but then also trying to meet deadlines. Now, sometimes those did slip, but the sentiment there by Steve Jobs is true. And when you flip it for product managers, you could say good PMs ship, they get things across the finish line, but when you take it to a 1% PM, they ship extraordinary products. And it's not just the fact that they get extraordinary product across the finish line. It's how they go about doing it, the way they interact with people, the way they're able to pull things together, the things that they're able to package. It's something that's completely different. And you think about the quality of the Apple and views and everything that they put out there, that is essentially where the 1% PM separates themselves, whether it's hardware or whether it's software, you're able to do things in a way that separates yourself. Now, this doesn't mean you're shipping the end state every single time. There's something to be said of your shipping value and quality and maybe a small molecule. And then you build on that over time. And the exceptional PMs kind of know the difference in how to ship quicker value, but then to build on that very quickly with good momentum. So here's a quote that I really appreciate. And again, we're gonna flip this to talk about what this applies to for product managers. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they are gonna screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and make it better. Now, how does the supply to a PM? Well, if you give a good idea to a just good PM or an average PM, maybe they'll screw it up, probably they'll screw it up. We'll be a little more optimistic here. But if you give a mediocre idea to a 1% PM, they will fix it or they will completely throw it away and make it far better than it was originally. And you can start to feel that difference. And as I talk about this, you might picture colleagues or mentors or people you know that maybe embody this versus those that the opposite is kind of true. So how do you get things done? How do you push the boundaries and say, I'm not just settling for good. I want to actually deliver a lot more value. I want to give value to my customers. Because when you think about it at the end of the day, why do product managers exist? It's to ship value, it's to build amazing product. So first is to manage dependencies. This is something that really is vexing for a lot of organizations and a lot of people. Projects are very complex. Building products is very complex as well. You need to be intimately aware of where things can go wrong and who you are dependent on. And they need to manage those and contingencies to overcome those no matter what happens. Not getting something done is not an excuse. You have to think about, okay, well, there's limitations here. What is the thing I can do? Or how do we go about this? Being able to do that cultivates trust and really separates you apart from those who are average and say, oh, whoops, gotta push it three more quarters. Can't do it now. Second, excuse me, being maniacal about scope. Scope creep is also something that is very common. Now scope can evolve, but you have to be very deliberate about what you're building, what you're not building and the way you're going about it. And you as a PM need to have a good internal view of what that should be and hold your development teams to it, program management, all the other organizations. Even when it comes to leadership and the other groups that you're negotiating in between. Having that mastery of scope allows you to get things across the finish line with a higher quality. Otherwise, people will prioritize things for you or there's going to be momentum that prioritizes things for you that maybe you don't want to have happen. Prioritize like crazy. This is pretty much related to number two, but you have to be able to say what is more important, what is less important and what timing you need to have to be able to create your first version of the product that's viable, the subsequent versions, as well as building to that vision of that extraordinary product at the end of the day. And this is applied to if you're enhancing an existing product, if you're building new features, improving existing features or building a net new product or solution. Be flexible. Things never go according to plan, at least for me. So being able to say, okay, this is what's changed. This is what I still want to do. How do we go about doing it? What are things I can bring in? What are things that I can evolve with? Is there new value that I can bring here? That flexibility lets you accomplish things and still deliver value even though it doesn't fit your original spec sheet or the original things that were scoped and spiked. Be open-minded as well. Be open-minded about the people that you'll be working with. Be open-minded about being able to pivot on exactly again what you're going to deliver. Also be open-minded about the process in which you're doing things. Being that flexible and that open-minded, again, will let you deliver things which is the value you want to get at the end of the day. And then of course, be passionate. And this is I think one of the biggest differentiators between a 1% PM and just your good PM. The good PM is taking space and they are doing things. Maybe they're going through the motions, whatever. But you can tell if someone's not passionate about the product of what they're doing or they're not passionate about even being a product manager and being in that role. Being passionate gives you some level of gravity where you can almost will things to happen and to play out as you want them to. You find a way to get it done. Second is thinking big. 1% PMs think differently. They are disruptive. They don't just settle for the norm. They don't just simply iterate one tiny step beyond what exists today. So I like this quote a lot by Seth Godin. You're either remarkable or invisible. For you and your career, this is probably applicable. You either are pushing boundaries and standing out or you're just kind of falling behind the scenes. And the same goes for your product as well. You can be shipping a remarkable product or if it's mediocre average, it's going to be more or less invisible, less visible value, less compelling value versus. If it is remarkable, you will be seen as a differentiator as an innovator and by customers they will appreciate the good things you do for them. So this is a concept that comes up in science. It's mentioned in different business books. It's called the adjacent possible. So here in the very middle is what we're comfortable with. It's called the known space. These are things that are well known or well established or have been proven. Outside of what is known is what we call the adjacent possible. You think about the next industry or the next wave of innovation or the next thing that you could possibly accomplish. That's the uncomfortable zone where we think we know something or there's something to be discovered but has yet to be proven, has yet to be accomplished. Now it's like the adjacent possible is going to be something that's way too farfetched. We don't want to go there but the adjacent possible is what we want to do when we think about going big, when we think about being disruptive. So a lot of good PMs today live in this known world. They know their feature, they know their product. Maybe they even know their industry but that's about where it stops a lot of times. What's good about that is, I guess they have that good knowledge but what's bad about that is that's not good for disruption or innovation. Innovation draws from cross disciplines or things that don't live in what you do know or what you are comfortable with. So what we like to see for 1% PMs is that you go beyond what is known and venture into the adjacent possible. If you do research, there's kind of mental models and there's steps on how to do that, how to go about that. One example is you say, okay, this is what I'm doing, this is the value that I want to deliver. Where can I drive innovation or inspiration beyond what I know? Maybe it's a different industry or a completely different type of product. Maybe talk to someone that operates out of your initial realm of expertise. You can drive innovation and I guess inspirations, the better word to say, okay, now I better understand my world from this external source. That's the adjacent possible. That's the next step of things being waiting there for you to discover. So I don't know if you've seen the film Free Solo but it was a documentary about Alex who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite without any safety equipment whatsoever. He was free climbing. Here's a great quote which I appreciate and this plays into how you can think big. He said, I don't need to reduce my fear. I just need to expand my comfort zone. So as you push boundaries as a product manager with your product, as you try to push boundaries in your career and in your organization, it is going to feel uncomfortable. There's probably gonna be a fear element. We all have our different talents and abilities. How do you play to those and how do you move beyond that to push the envelope? So this quote I think is applicable to you in that sense. It's okay to have fear and there's discomfort but you really focus on expanding that comfort zone and operating and thinking big despite of those apprehensions and those fears. So a couple of thoughts on how to think big. The art of the impossible. This is kind of a fun phrase. I've heard of the art of the impossible or the art of that possible. Things that are impossible or improbable for you are a lot of times rich grounds for driving disruption. For your product as well as for yourself as a PM in your career. Embrace it, think about it while still managing your day job and the initial scope that's given to you. You can do both. And that is gonna pay massive dividends for your customers as well as for you as you progress through your career. Moving to the adjacent possible as much as possible. Be very aware of it and also think about it as you're trying to drive value for your customers as you're considering which features you're bringing in or how you can improve your product. It's one thing to say, okay, these are things that I like and dislike. I'm gonna make X, Y and Z minimal changes. That's a good PM thinking. A 1% PM says, okay, I can do these good average things but what is the end game? What can drive the most transformational value for my users based on how I know them? And that'll be something a lot of times that's very different. Three, cultivate that personal confidence. If you can exude that confidence, that gives you the ability to better tackle the adjacent possible to better move into that zone as well as to motivate and compel parts of the organization to follow you in that vision. In the industry today across different disciplines, many different product types, it's very comfortable to say where you are. That's the innovator's dilemma. We need to push past that because that is where we deliver more value for our customers, especially today with the proliferation of AI technology. So many things are available that fit into what we consider to be the adjacent possible. And lastly, their experiment failed fast, which is a great principle in Scrum. We talk about it a lot, but we don't see it practically applied a lot except for maybe in startups. No matter what size organization you are in, you personally as a PM can adopt this philosophy and that puts you into 1% territory where you feel comfortable enough to experiment and to fail either in the prototyping phases or depending how long your development cycle is and later phases midway through the product life cycle. Having that ability to be flexible and experiment lets you test out the adjacent possible and pick which thing you can latch on to. Thirdly, communication. And this maybe sounds obvious. There's a lot of implications here. They're actually really difficult to unpack. You as a 1% PM, you need to be able to motivate, inspire, influence, and articulate value. So clearly that people will come on board with you, give you the resources, customers will buy the product, they'll want to renew because of your effective communication. This is a good quote by Kerry Patterson. He wrote crucial conversations, which is a very seminal business book. At the end of the day, what qualifies people to be called leaders is their capacity to influence others, to change their behavior in order to achieve important results. You can input PM there and that is still going to be very applicable. As a PM in your capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results, those results being shipping extraordinary product and being able to drive extraordinary value to your users beyond what is normal, what's average, what's the mediocre state of things today. So as product managers, we communicate with massive amounts of people and they all have different motivations, different skill sets and different needs. How do we communicate with them effectively to move forward our projects? There's a science and an art to it, mostly an art. So you think about engineering, very technical, very practical. Maybe they want to over engineer things. Maybe they want to build everything upfront. You get to communicate with them and help manage that. And there's skills and knowledge you need to bring to the table there. Your fellow product managers and product leadership being able to effectively work with them, especially if there's cross team dependencies. Customer success organization, your customers are important and you need to be there to help support everyone that supports the customer ecosystem. Leadership, engineering leadership, PM leadership, leadership beyond those levels, especially if you're a smaller organization, you might be working with C-suite leadership. Product marketing, if you can't articulate value for your product or help others articulate value, it doesn't matter how amazing your product is, people won't buy it. People won't be convinced. Support, sales, support. We, depending on what product you interact with, you want to be there for your support organization. It goes on and on and on. And you kind of get the idea here where the 1% product manager can effectively communicate with all groups indiscriminately and adapt their communication style and really understand intimately the needs of each group. The good PM or the average PM, maybe they sound good when they speak, but they don't adjust themselves very effectively. They don't have compelling ways of communicating with these different groups. So a concept I really like from Harvard Business Review is what we call emotional intelligence. Made a couple of categories here. The 1% of product managers master emotional intelligence. They have a certain level of empathy and understanding that helps them influence and motivate people and by virtue of that, properly communicate value of what they're trying to build. So there's self-awareness of what am I about? What am I feeling? What makes me tick? Self-management. And we've got some principles there. I like the positive outlook a lot. You don't like working with product managers who are negative and they typically don't accomplish very much as well if they are hopefully negative. The adaptability, self-control, being able to achieve things. Social awareness though is where we really start working with others. Empathy, we want radical empathy to understand where other people are coming from. That way we can properly approach them or present to them the appropriate aspects of the value we're trying to communicate. Organizational awareness is very crucial because you have such a cross-disciplinary role as a product manager. Then we get into relationship management. The quote earlier talked about influence. Being able to coach and mentor people is rewarding in and of itself and helps you establish relationships. Conflict management. Now I know for you, you never have conflicts in your organization. It's all PhD, everyone gets along. But for me, when I'm trying to work with people and sometimes there's tension or sometimes there's disagreement about roadmap or whatever it is, you want to be able to effectively communicate, act with empathy and be able to work with people in all circumstances. Teamwork. You're not gonna build a product by yourself. If no one likes you or wants to work with you or if you're not being effective there, things will not get done. Then inspirational leadership. We want to be leaders in our own right. So sometimes for communication, you need to be able to write clearly and succinctly. Doesn't matter if it's on Slack or if it's on email or any other medium that you're using to communicate. When you commit things into words on a page, it needs to be very clear and concise. Product managers need to have that skill set. Today, you can't get around it if you want to be a 1% PM. Good PMs, maybe they stumble across the point but they aren't succinct and they're not very clear. Protecting with others is so crucial. You're not an island. Unto yourself, you need to rely on others in the organization. Be a positive influence. You need to be able to be seen as a leader as someone people can trust and come to solve problems. Be able to make good presentations. You want to keep it simple but also make it compelling. And then be able to be confident when you speak to an audience, when you're working with others and you're working in the room, you're presenting different ideas. It could be a small intimate setting. It could be a large conference type setting. If you can't vocalize or present your ideas effectively, again, you're going to be pigeonholing. You're not going to be effective. And then stay cool headed in a crisis. You don't want to be the person that freaks out either when there's disagreements or when things go wrong. Which again, I'm sure things never go wrong for your products. There's never buyers. There's never escalations. And then always be able to communicate clear value. If you can do that at the end of the day, that is going to give you so much benefit to accomplishing your goals as a product manager. Embrace simplicity. This is something that we see a lot of good PMs struggling with. And this really separates the 1% PMs. The 1% PM does less, but they do less better than anyone else. And they do it better than what they would otherwise. Another Steve Jobs quote, simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean and simple. But it's worth it in the end because you get there. If you, once you get there, you can move mountains. And in our case as product managers, moving mountains means delivering exceptional products in exceptional ways beyond what we normally would be able to do. So the R of the Essential is a great book. And I like this concept of essentialism where I do less and I do it better. I'm able to say this is what's most important. And I'm going to focus on that. And I'm almost going to aggressively minimize and minimize my focus until I am focusing on what is most essential. Everything else gets cast aside or reprioritized for down the road. As product managers, we say that we wanna do this but it's easy to just fall into the old trap of we're gonna deal with everything now and I'm just gonna spread myself then or I'm going to be less effective if it's still trying to do everything. Richard Feynman is a really famous scientist and he's famous for his lectures. Very smart guy, worked on the Manhattan Project to create the first nuclear bomb basically. He has this technique where you know something so well that you can articulate it very simply even if it's a crazy complex concept. So you can apply this in your product management where you choose a concept, you are able to explain it simply. If you can't explain it simply, you have a knowledge gap and you go back and fill that. And then you can create analogies or other ways to very simply abstract that concept that's complex. So some ways to embrace simplicity. You give yourself permission to not do everything, to do things more simply to reduce what you're putting into your product at each phase along the way and what you're doing in your day-to-day job. You have to be able to capture the essence of the most important value very quickly whether it's a new role, a new project or within an existing project. Without that, you can't reduce it to what's most important and what's most simple. Know when to say no and actually say no when you should be saying no. Don't go for the petitions of others saying, oh, please fit the sand, oh, please. You have to be that kind of guiding post for the product. You should control the options. Don't have every option because there's the paradox of choice. Always choose what matters the most. And be a master of your subject area. And when you're building your product, simplify and simplify it again and then simplify it again. That's probably the place where you wanna be when you're focusing on value. Last category here, and then we can move into some questions. Be product fluent. This fits two categories. Design, fluency, as well as technical fluency, communicating with development teams and technical teams. Design is so simple. That's why it's complicated. All around is a famous graphic designer. Noah Weiss, this was a great article I found on media.com. Even though you don't have a CS degree, PMs are effective collaborators and sounding boards for their engineering partners. They can help weigh complex technical trade-offs and design decisions. That's where you need as a 1% PM to weigh in on those technical trade-offs and those design decisions. The good PM kind of wanders into whatever is closest or maybe most convenient. The 1% can look clearly at different options that are available and through intuition and experience, say that's what we're gonna do and this is why and be able to articulate exactly why. So some tips for design fluency. You need to be able to recognize and articulate exceptional design. You need to have the principles of design known to you. You need to have radical user empathy and be able to internalize it yourself and be able to draw upon that every day in your career. You need to practice, practice, practice design. For most of us, it doesn't come naturally. So you have to be able to try to generate good design and recognize good design over time. And that gives you an internal sense for what it is. And then embrace simplicity. Good design is not complex. Some tips for technical fluency. You need to be able to comfortably size projects with your gut before you take them to engineering. You need to have enough knowledge of technical processes and how your product is built. That way, you're not completely ignorant. Good product managers, they maybe can guess but they aren't always accurate. 1% PMs have very intimate knowledge and can guess pretty darn well. You need to have detailed knowledge of how different systems fit together for your product, your area. You need to know the development process of software or whatever development process exists for your product, your industry. You'd have the pros and cons of different development systems and different development approaches. Be aware of things that are changing, new technology, new trends, whatever is applicable to your users and your product. Be able to decide trade-offs. Deciding trade-offs for multiple things is always essential for becoming a 1% PM. And then understand, again, technology trends and what changes in the industry. And that will inform how you make things disruptive or how you move into the adjacent possible. Without that knowledge, you are stuck, basically. So that was our content. This is my LinkedIn, feel free to add me but I think we wanna leave some time for questions. All right, thanks so much, Ren, for that great presentation. So yeah, we have a couple of questions. So I have a question from Jared. And Jared is an actively interviewing product manager candidate with a strong leadership and startup and scale of experiences who's looking to pivot into Fortune 500 PM roles. And he often gets asked in interviews, how do you prioritize your roadmap? And so he wants to know, how does a PM in a huge company like Oracle prioritize backlog and roadmap items? That's a really great question. And there's no perfect way to do it. Corporate world Fortune 500 is very matrix but what you wanna do is understand the main priorities at play. You have executive mandates and what the higher level goals are for the organization. You have your personal goals for your product and your roadmap. Then you maybe have competing goals on the roadmap of your fellow product managers, your fellow scrum teams. Find overlapping elements there and help prioritize those. And then be able to say, again, what is the value I'm trying to deliver and which things make the most sense there and try to articulate that value. Sometimes you really have to fight for your stuff to be prioritized. And that takes practice in a corporate environment as well because there's almost an arc to say what has a chance of being supported or being funded and what's something that maybe I think really should happen but it has no chance of being resourced. Good luck by the way in your interviews, Jared. Hopefully you find what you're looking for. All right, thank you so much. I have one last question before we go. Do you have any final advice for aspiring product managers? Yes, that's a good question. The advice would be, know so much about product management that if you do get to an interview, you sound the part. My first interview before I had any PM experience, I spent the whole time justifying why I could be successful as a product manager. Once you have PM on your resume, the game changes and the conversation completely flips and you get to say why you're an exceptional product manager. You want to justify yourself as much. So being able to sound the part is gonna be something you have control over and that you work on. And then from there, trying to pivot and get as much relevant experience as possible. That could be doing your internships. That could be doing a startup. That could be getting an MBA and getting into a PM internship post MBA. There's a variety of ways to get into it. It depends on the industry and the companies that you're targeting. Feel free to reach out to me directly and we can talk about some other strategies. All right, awesome. Well, thank you so much for that incredible presentation. And thank you for presenting, Ren. And thanks to everyone who joined us today. So before we leave, remember that we do offer weekly, online and on-site events in more than 100 cities. And you can also find us on social media at product school on all platforms. And be sure to keep up with the latest product manager content on our blog, which is at productschool.com slash blog. Thank you so much for joining us today and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day. And I hope to see you next week. Thank you so much, Ren. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks. Have a good one.