 Thanks for the thanks for the invite and the opportunity. My name is Yanko Pajitavela and today we're going to speak about Transition from engineering to product management The agenda today is we will talk a little bit about my own transition Then I would like to share with you some lessons that I've learned In my experience from moving from engineering to product management share some mistakes that I have made and hopefully to help you deal with Future similar situation better than than I did Then we'll talk a little bit about how can you improve your product management skills coming from engineering background? And of course at the end I would love to to get some questions from you So about my transition Until I started preparing this presentation. I didn't realize that I was actually in product much before than I thought so This is my this is not the actual picture But it's something very close to this is my first product that I built when I was 10 It's a homemade portable a pinball machine. So It really addressed user problems we as kids we wanted to play pinball a lot We we couldn't spend all our money on it But also you wanted to use it for our own convenience So I went ahead got a board and I built this this little machines made few users happy But I don't know what happened afterwards. I didn't know how to scale it. Maybe I didn't have Investment in seed funding. So I just dropped it there so I Went to school in the Think serial and Methodist University in Skopje. That's in, Macedonia. That's where I'm from and that's why I was Born and raised I graduated in 2005 with a degree of computer science And then right after I started working at Seavus, which is International software consultancy and development company they build their own products as well and that's where actually my Engineering career started. So I came fresh out of college. I thought I knew a lot I was lucky to get into a very great team of engineers and those guys were just amazing and then I realized then that there is a so much learning that I Need to have in order to be even close to what they are They were very helpful. They're very smart and they helped me grew within my own role But also grew within within the company. So at Seavus I had a various engineering roles I started as a junior engineer. There's an engineer. There's a tech lead At one point I was head of engineering for our product division. I Was also at one point we had a branch office R&D in Belarus So I was head of that office as well and that's where my actually my transition happened into product management. So Seavus was partnered with Thompson Reuters. You might have heard it's a big financial and news news company and Then they needed we had some developers working there And they also needed someone to substitute for a product manager. So they recommended me and The role sounded interesting and I remember everything went so quick. It was maybe Monday I was in Belarus working there leading the office. I got an interview on Tuesday They said they want you right away on Friday. I went back home in Macedonia to repack Sunday I was in New York Monday. It was my first day as a product manager It was a little bumpy and I will speak more about it later And then this was a temporary engagement. Then I moved to education technology company called Implify. I Had a various product management roles over there. We were focusing on helping Kids mainly K2-3 to learn better. It was based a lot on data and now for the past year and change I'm at Olapec, which is Visual visual marketing company. So through our platform and services. We help global brands discover and Reach and then activate visual content in the channels throughout the whole whole user journey so as I mentioned before my transition was bumpy when I Started being a product manager. I realized even though I was a senior professional. There were a lot of Skills that actually I did not have and much more junior people than we had and then I Realized that I'll have to invest a lot Into into building them. They could speak better with customers that could present better. They could communicate better. So If you're going through this currently or some of you have went and it and it was bumpy for you as well I think that's okay. It's not really a Natural transition and some of us come from engineering to product management. Some come from design business analysis Sales marketing and so forth and Though we know very well as engineers how to build products Knowing that is just one one one One skill from all the skills you need to possess to be successful in your job so I would encourage If you want to do the transition to try first within your own company and that often It's easier. So try to look for opportunities Within your company share your intense with your manager Most of your manager will support you because you will still be doing something in service in your own company And what is very important is your colleagues know you so they know you're competent They know they can trust you and they will be more willing to give you the chance To move into the role rather than applying as an engineer to a completely different place There's a product manager and then this is you know connected to what I mentioned about the skills Don't be concerned about taking more junior role than the role that you currently have in engineering There is a quite a lot that you need to learn to Be a great product manager Me I was at one point head of engineering and then my first product manager role was much much roller lower in seniority than what I had but I Really Was interested in product management. I still love doing it So throughout years, you know, you can get to the point you want to be So I would like to share some lessons that I've learned having product management and engineering head One of the first thing I thought of was There's there can be simple solution To important problems as engineers. We sometimes tend and want to use Cool technology to solve the problems after all we are engineers, right? But as the product managers what is important is What it what is the problem that you are solving? How you're solving the problem doesn't doesn't really matter that much I'll give you an example in my a few years a few years back that amplify we we realized that basically we had a product which was assessments observation assessments for kids and it which was proving to be very efficient, but If the teachers would not take this assessment that regularly Then the difference of the student outcomes was huge So we we wanted to see like how can we Sort of make some of these teachers in certain districts to take the assessments more regularly than others With the being thought of a super fancy algorithm technology and whatnot and But then later we actually what we decided was To send them a text message at the right time and just to say hey go You have students that you need to assess go do that that was it all the teachers care deeply about their students But they're super busy. They have no time. So they have no Time to think about all these things. I remember we built a solution that was super Super quick there were had so many manual steps. I went to a couple of conferences for teachers I was writing down their mobile phone numbers in a spreadsheet. We run the experiment few times. We got a improvement on over 200 percent so Doesn't matter if you use cool technology and not what matter is the problem that you are solving I Think that even though details are important Focusing on detail. It's more critical for engineering in product management What is more important is to focus on the low long-term goals on the road map on the big picture and Remember that the time that you are spending focusing on Details is time that you don't Spend on focusing on the long-term goals and all the other important things don't focus too much on details and miss the Big picture, right? I just an example. I put some impression this art That the detail itself is only brushstrokes, but when you look at the whole thing, it's pretty pretty beautiful You have to be comfortable That some of the products and features that you are building in especially in early stages might fail completely And this is a sort of a different This is also different when you're in engineering or in product in engineering if you are good engineer and let's say You need to build certain service that will return certain data from a database The likelihood that you will gonna build this and then it will not work at all It's very low. You're confident. You know what you're doing, but as product managers we have sometimes a lot and only assumptions and It's okay. If you have a probably the product or a feature that will fail completely As long as you can learn From that experience and as long as you can limit limit your investments into how much you invest to validate an assumption and Try not to be a touch a touch to it I think that Myself as well when I would build and code and we'll write a code the solutions You're really a touch and proud of the product that you build because you always try to build the best possible engineering solution But in product you're solving problems. You don't build products So if if the product does not solve the solution and it fails just don't be attached. That's it doesn't really matter Focus on outcomes or outputs in you will read this in Every product management book But it's actually in reality can be can be trickier, especially moving from engineering to product, right? as a engineering manager or tech lead you often try to Optimize the output of your team and and you want to be more efficient, right? If you have agile development process You solve important problem in the second day of the spring you're not just going to stop working right? You want to be able to produce as much as possible, but in product Whether you have a hundred percent completion rate of your sprint or not doesn't actually Automatically mean that it's successful or it's a failure if you don't have hundred percent What value you and your team provides to the customers is actually and the stakeholders is what matters the most? I remember in the first years of of being product manager I was really bothered when we would not complete all the stories in the screen I would be like we committed to this like why why are we not completing it? This is important, but then in retrospect when I try to think about it. I really cannot find a correlation of Success in the product versus completion rate. It's everywhere. So Try to focus on the value that you deliver If you don't if your team doesn't complete everything it doesn't really matter That doesn't mean that you know you don't care at all Is a product manager your audience will be much less forgiving than your typical audience as a engineer When you're internal meetings and you talk about some Engineering problems or architecture or you present and you're with your own colleagues is very People will not put you on the spot. They will not put you in a tough position, but When you are product manager, it's a very very different story you have to be very prepared when presenting to customer and you should not assume that you will be only able to stick to your part and You have to be ready to face questions outside of the domain and you have to remember You are the face of the company and the image that the customer will have for your company can be really Influenced by by what what you present and how you present things. So This is something that I have learned through not so great Experience I remember I was pretty new in the company and we were about to meet with the very very known global brand So I prepared my part that I was going to present I Practiced it. I spoke with the account manager. I showed her what I'm presenting. I'm ready. I'm gonna nail it So I go to this meeting and they come in I start presenting my stuff in just two minutes in the meeting The customer says what about this thing that we talked a year ago. I'm like, oh, wow, what is this thing now? So they completely Found me in surprise. I I didn't know I didn't know how to react. I I was putting a really tough spot And I think the they started challenging some of the things that I was presenting the any and that was mostly because they were not happy that they did not see this thing that They talked about last year. I had no idea about it. And I think that The only good thing that I did that meeting was since I was pretty experienced I I did not bend on on on the pressure. I didn't promise everything even though a lot of the things they said made sense, but Even today I tend not to commit On deadlines in meetings unless I'm ready to do that before Before the meeting obviously we came back we regrouped we we plan we came back to the customer They they were really pleased the second time. They they would say what such is amazing. This is great but I the but the lesson that I learned was when you meet with with customers you really really need to Understand all the background don't If they're meeting multiple people from your company see who they are they're meeting if you're the only person From product that they will be meeting What else they might ask you have to be competent to you can obviously answer all the questions But you have to be prepared to give certain answers that will be Satisfactory to them and back to the story. I remember, you know writing my by home I was also upset that I was put in that spot I thought I need to kind of wanted to blame the account manager, but then I realized How many of you when calling? You know yourself or company or cable company and someone responds and they transfer you and they ask you to like Oh, can you please, you know verify your name? What was your problem? You're upset about it. It's like you're one company even though they're 50,000 people and it's about a Service that you pay a hundred bucks per month Imagine if you pay Magnities of that, right? So you have to be really really prepared From time to time and especially if you are more a technical product manager you will have some people call these engineering Initiatives or tech debt or things that you need to do in the infrastructure for the system to work better and What do you need to do? I would I would recommend you to do is to Be ready that not everyone speaks the engineering language and especially the business the business leader and leaders and You really need to Find their language and Try to use some visuals to to be able to convince them for something For example, I remember we had you know on one of our projects We were growing the users, but the solution was not Horizontally scalable Business leaders don't understand necessarily and they don't need to understand what is horizontally scalable and the engineers were a little upset because These guys did not understand the importance and they did not want to invest into this but these Our business guys were saying like why should I invest in something where I quote unquote don't see any value, right? So I said to the team let's try a different approach and I remember Walking into the office of one of the managers and I and I drew something like this And I said, okay, so I'm gonna explain to you what's gonna happen So this is how much users we have now and this is the low time that they experience using our product If we get to the point of number of users where we want to be in a year This is what's gonna happen on their own time of the low time the solution will not work at all With what we are trying to do Regardless of how many users we are adding Not just the low time will won't change, but it's you know ten times faster use language companies use like Internet companies small companies You know when some of them says this is three times faster or five times more reliable. What does that really mean? I don't know if someone knows but it works is something people can relate to you know faster is better more reliable is better alright, so Moving from engineering to product manager How can you improve your product management skills? Everybody knows that right but There is you can't emphasize this enough how important is to Understand your customers problems and needs. They're very very important part of your business Try to talk with them as much as possible get as much as feedback as you can You can learn a lot By looking into data, but the data itself doesn't cannot tell you everything right so for example You might look into data and and and and see that your products is being used Let's say on desktop 99% of the time does that mean that you should be focusing on the desktop experience or Your product is accessed via desktop 99% of the time because your mobile experience suck right So data can tell you something what have happened But it can't always tell you why why that happened so Regardless of all the tools that you have I would highly encourage you to talk with customers and speak as much as possible with them Try to develop Empathy and try to to walk in their shoes so One of the things you will notice when Starting to work with your team being previously an engineer is that you That your relationship is usually much much better than people that have not been technical right you understand each other Well, you can communicate well but I Don't think that's only because you understand them I think that that you understand their language I think that part of it is that you have empathy you have been an engineer You know, you know how it feels you know what kind of problems are facing and That that is helping you build a better relationship with your team So try to walk in customer shoes as much as you can Another important thing is to really really need to communicate clearly and simply Every group and department has their own languages and I would encourage you to try to adopt your language according to the Audience every time you communicate whether that's a verbal Where you write something or you present try to put yourself on the receiver side and Then try to think about it from the point of view of what do I get out of this? I Would encourage you to present and do demos of your products and features whenever you have a chance Trust me. It takes a lot of times and practice To be able to do all these short and great presentations that we have seen In my previous job We had a new product That was we were building it very quickly. We had a short one-week cycles and I decided to record one-minute demos and to Share them with the stakeholders and the management to report on our progress and people I send a couple of them people like them So I continue doing it But even though they were one minute videos Trust me took me much more than one one minute to to record them at the best It would take me five or ten minutes to record them and You will see if you try to do it yourself try to record the video of a minute of the feature you want to present You will start like hey, I would like to show Okay, stop record again. Hi, you know you start and then you get to a point is a user you often struggle with the and then Stop record again. So it takes time and takes practice to be able to Do short Demos I'm sure that and this is something that I sometimes is challenging for me still I'm sure that when I see the recording of this presentation I will find at least a few places where I could have done better job Then then what I'm doing now And I wanted to also share with one interesting quote from bless Pascal French physicist philosopher scientists In one of his long letters well at the end he says I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time You probably have heard this expression Try not to fall between two souls if you are a tech lead and at the same time product manager and Some of us and I've been in that spot I've been put into the situation whether your companies introducing product management Positions and someone needs to take that role or you're the product manager quiets. So you as a tech lead you try to Cover for for him or her Try to drop one of those roles because it's these roles are really Complementary and it would be really hard to be successful in both Deciding what to build and then deciding how you're going to build it and what you're going to commit on and to execute It's it might be smooth because you are one person making all the decision, but It's not going to be the best for the customers and in a retrospect when I think about this and my Situation when I was managing a team and being a product manager. I I don't think I did the best job for the customer so if Some of you might have The the world or title of technical product manager and being known as a technical can Can have its own on on biases you will Likely be by default assigned to more technical products and that's for If you think about it, if you're putting your shoes in your manager not The whole team of product managers will not be technical and even your manager might not be technical and very often You have products that require more technical knowledge. So people will feel more comfortable that you are You are in the troll. So you would need to work harder to To be asked to be given ownership of Non-technical not technical products In my in my own experience. I am I I had the role of technical product manager for some time and I remember I wanted to not I Wanted to own products that are not necessarily just technical and I went to my manager said hey Can we you know just erase this this technical work from my role and he said like you really care about this You're gonna do the same job. Anyways, he's like, I don't care. We can remove it if you want. He said yeah, let's do it So we did that and and suddenly it was so much easier just by that For me to be seen differently and to be given products and more exposure to the customers and You probably from time to time will get on linking these messages. Hey so and so there is this interesting role Are you interested to talk about it? Before when I was technical product manager, maybe eight out of ten would be for a technical product manager spot Then it was the other way around nothing changed in my experience In my resume, but just the perception sometimes can make quite of a difference. So be be just be conscious about it It's a product manager Pretty much every department in the company is your Stakeholder so you really need to to to build good relationships with them and And this is sort of like a like a domino effect right try to understand how what you do can benefit them and make their jobs easier So when doing that, this will create the willingness of them to collaborate more with you which will then lead to For you to be a influencer and being an influencer can make you more successful in your job Technical conferences are always great, but As a product manager, it's also very important for you to attend non technical Or industry-related events and when on those events try to network and learn about With people as much as possible and try to learn about their perspectives and experience Rather than just talking about your your experience. I remember In my first year as in education technology I would attend this South by Southwest EDU. It was maybe the best conference for education and Even though you do your research and everything is available online I would find so much great stuff there. I will meet so many interesting people They would really change my perspective. I will always come back with a lot of enthusiasm and ideas Oh It's a park manager you might have a remote team that will not be sitting next to you and This is this is reality these days I would highly encourage you to to put an effort to go meet and spend time with your team from time to time We at my current company at at all of it We have an engineering hub in core of Argentina So we we periodically go there To work and collaborate with the team. I think that it's You know, there is no the digital tools are getting better and better, but we are humans. I don't think that any digital tool can completely Replace the face-to-face be a storyteller. This is very important. So and why stories are easier to remember and Ability to tell good stories can really help your career and your success as product manager I hope that some of the stories that I shared tonight will stick with you and that will help you deal with situations better than me And there are always online resources, right? So these are I've selected few that I've used myself so to get you started I would recommend to read the lean startup book There is a short course from Steve blank on Udacity about how to build startup And then there are a few blocks including the product school blog that I think it's It's it's a good start and just to close the presentation The reason that I transitioned into product management was I wanted to be closer to the customer and their needs I wanted to be to have more say and decision-making power To be more involved in the product strategy and to have to be part of the whole life cycle of product development so But I realized that you don't You sometimes can you end up being in the role you don't always know that you want to do it, but I would And that's a great opportunity But I would recommend you like don't stay there if you're not interested or if you have not built some interest Stay there if you if you want to do it Because product management, it's not better than engineering nor engineering is better than than product management They're both you can have amazing careers and you can be very happy and engage in both of them Try to make the career shift based on your interest All right, thank you I Don't think I I can say there is an ideal candidate. It really depends on the Role that you are hiring for it also depends on the current structure of the team and what kind of a competency you need sometimes You need more industry knowledge sometimes you don't so it really depends but When I'm interviewing what I want to see is that? That the product managers have a business owner kind of thinking That they really Can't understand customers problems that they know how to prioritize Then that they're passionate about the work that they're doing that they have great analytical skills In the past I've also looked a lot into how strong technical skills they have but I've realized that That's not necessarily that that important so being a business owner Kind of thinking it's much more important than having great technical skills. Yes Well bad examples it's obvious is when people tell you what they want and This also happens when you I would say this is can also be typical when you transition from engineering and product Now you're suddenly closer to the customer and they say this is what I want. You are great I got this and then you switch your mindset. You're an engineer. You know how to solve this great deal But that's I think that's a bad example. I think that you should always Challenge Regardless what they say challenge try to understand what actually they need and what kind of problems you're solving because What I ask you to do Might be very different than what their intent is and why they're asking you to do that and keep in mind There is no there is no formula I've I've Speaking with many park managers and some of them that I've interviewed you say well We have this matrix and we assign weight about this this and that there is no formula There are a lot of factors when prioritizing Some of them can be and first you start with the business value and what kind of problems you're solve Then you look into current commitments and and how this new new new thing fits into your current commitment that you have made then You look into how does This thing fit within the strategy of your company. It might be something that Even though it's important for certain customers. It's not does not really fit within your strategy or the strategy at the moment then other factors even beyond that could be You Can build things or new products if for example if you want to be focused more on growth So you're focusing on your products. You don't care. You can just put more people to service them You don't care about How easy or harder to be used you can also try for example your company might be in a period when They say you know what now. We really want to be profitable. So what we want to do is make sure that We can support a Lot more customers with less effort. So in that case you're looking into How much this improves the whole onboarding process? How much this improves the ability of the support team to respond to this question and whatnot? So it really depends. I will summarize again. It's the business value What how does this fit into the strategy of the company and Whether your company is focused on growth whether your company is focused on efficiency I'm sorry. Can you can you say it again? That's a good question. I in which sense breakthrough. I I would say let me think I would say really the shift of the mindset between Outputs and outcomes was one of the one of the biggest one. I Was puzzled. I was really puzzled how With the very little work or just by talking with a couple of people In the kitchen you can actually Deliver a lot more value than just spending hours and hours in building things. I was puzzling It even bothered me to the point like oh, this is so easy, but it's actually the right focus That helps you so output Understanding how much more the outputs. I'm sorry the outcomes are important than the outputs itself No, no, we are not we are not biased towards hiring more technical I mean product manager with technical experience that's Understanding how the products are built. It's always an advantage But we are really looking more for business owners In my career as I mentioned earlier. I thought having the great engineering background It's a very big Advantage because I myself am an engineer and I went through the path, but I realized that that doesn't make a huge difference maybe if I don't want to say that this is universal of course, but If if the role is super super technical Maybe yes But for the most of the most of the roles that I've seen with most of the people I've I've talked with it Doesn't matter as much Yes So once it transitioned and then being product like do you think you? Like change as a person as well like you know in product You're just like thinking about so much so many more things and maybe you're like talking to more people Do you think over the years like why you did at your job? Is that like how did that influence like I? Don't know how you feel or like how you think what sort of things like would you say you came out the more Around the person or do you think? I I I think that that helped me be more well around the person One of the things it helped me do is learn how to listen Because you will You will be speaking with people that have so many different perspectives and And that's that's where you get the most value from so Knowing how to listen It's it's really really important and that helped me and not just professionally, but also also privately Yeah The product Yeah, so My transition actually was was very very quick and sort of coincidental So I would say that When I made a decision to take this job at Thompson Reuters where I would be a technical product manager in the same time Being an acting engineering manager for all the engineers we had I Don't I don't think that I really thought this through in too much detail. They really happened so quickly I think that from one end I was comfortable that there was part of that role that I've been doing for years For the engineering manager, so that was fine. The other part was was interesting. I think that after that when I went from that position to Implify I Didn't have so much fear, but I had more sort of frustrations because I Soon realize why I had to start from from scratch Because I it was obviously when when I would speak with more senior product people. I did not have those skills but I've always Wanted love to learn and I I often try to get challenged by some problems or Every now and then I want to learn something new so to me that was pretty motivating So there is whole world that I've been part of in the engineering that I don't know about and these guys are great So it was really motivating for me to to learn that and to to catch up Yes Customer Whether I had challenges to get to get yeah I've had that I think that Actually, we were we were at amplify we had a consulting consulting project and then but For us the problem was that that our key contacts were not actually the customers But it was this consulting company that was channeling requirements through through the consultants and We we were raising our concerns all the time because we really did not have Access to the customers neither the users and we were building a lot of stuff in vacuum We used a lot of the Institutional knowledge that we had in the company because we had a lot of educators to try to get as close as possible To the customers. So we had a lot of teachers there. We had a lot of principles But I would say that that was a hack. It wasn't a solution and at the end the project was not that successful and right now, I think this part of manager and very sort of I try to be not not not forceful, but like persistent into getting what I need and But I've been lucky to have To be in a company that really encourages that our questions. Yes I think that The challenges is first I believe in a in every healthy organization both of them are full-time jobs so you're practically trying to do two full-time jobs and What I've learned in my experience is You'll be easier it will be easier for you to do your manager job Then to do your job and your colleague's job at the same time. So in terms of you can be a tech lead Successful tech lead if you not do not complete Everything your full-time minute also, I think that the way those two roles are are so sort of They're built to challenge each other So It's harder, you know to challenge yourself and say oh, this is what I think that we need to build and then oh, yeah This is great idea. Let's do it and then you come up with the solution That's that's hard and I think that our space both in the product space and Engineering space is changing a lot. So to to keep up with all the the greatest and latest technologies That are coming out By spending just part-time on the job It's it's really really difficult, you know, you can be competent and and providing good solutions for engineering But in a year or so unless that's your main focus You cannot you cannot keep up with that So I would say drop if you're in that spot and you like product management try to drop one of the roles And be special as the AI one thing That we have realized in the last company exited Listening to customers is of course But what we have seen in a few cases is talking directly to customers and the journey of them might need you Because they try to Though the features might not be good for them in the long term because when we were pushing for AI They were pushing for a real customer service executive What was happening is that would only increase the cost and reduce the quality of service What are some of the other tools that you have that you can use to gather feedback But Yeah, so that's a great question. So we use a lot of data So you can look into a lot of quantitative data and see That on top of the feedback that you get from the customers what you also and we do this often is when Speaking with customers you you try to to try to understand and not just the part of Like how they use your own product, but you try to really understand how how does their work look like? What are the challenges in what you do? So you try to look beyond your product You also I think especially if you want to be one of the more successful ones You should be looking into some industry trends and and shifts that are happening and sometimes you just have a vision, you know, you want you need to be visionary and you will I would encourage to Have a way and have your organization be open to try to experiment different things In our company we do this a lot. We experiment a lot of things and most of them Most of them Will not succeed, but we always try to learn from that Some of it is just it's not a good idea. The customers did not respond the way you wanted Some of that is it's just not about the right time and we will revise this in the future. I think it's It's it's challenging But as you know most of the for the product managers that the fear I read one serve run survey and most of The main fear of the most of the product manager was that I'm not confident if in what I'm building is the right thing So that will always I think remain like that. So we use We do we do in-person interviews With customers and visit them as much as we can we look into the standard analytics like Google analytics. We also use chart here to build chart here to build to reports You know for whatever we want Sometimes we we also use if you've heard a full story That's an interesting tool that helps you understand. It's it's it's more like a recording of how everyone is I wonder if you have suggestions for things that I can do I Would say be I'm not sure if you have the opportunity currently, but if your company Speak with the existing product managers or account managers. I don't know what the structure is though that are having Meetings or research session or co-op session with customers try to listen in Ask them to include you in those meetings. I think that That's a that's one one. What good thing to do Often in many companies there will be one or for temporary or small projects Where you don't necessarily have a real team and real product management structure Try to partner with some product managers and try to see whether you can be a lead on a small Project, it doesn't have to be big. I would try that Then you know speak get to know them better speak with them tell them that you're interested in it if you work with the product manager as the product manager whether you can whether they can delegate something to you and Try to get some more experience about it as them for advice People value, you know like to be asked for advice. You just If you have any formal groups of product management in your company try to join that and That's that's some of the things that you can do to put you up there, but Share, you know share your intentions tell your manager this I'm really interested in this Tell a good story why you're interested and why you think you can do that Then maybe they will have some creative ideas. How can they? Help you get some skills at the very minimum so they can trust you with with that role