 Good morning, everyone. My name is Penny Zeta and I'm so excited to be back at ProductCon and to talk to you all today about polymathism in product management. Don't worry, I will be defining what polymathism is throughout the talk, but before I do, so let's just dig in with a little bit about myself right away. I actually began my career in management consulting, which started off really broad. It was really there that I learned how to ramp up on things quickly and draw connections across areas. I had the opportunity to sample lots of different industries working with Fortune 500 companies in tech, retail, and pharma, and all the well-building skills in business strategy. Then I became really curious about the startup space and just the dynamism of the industry. I spent a lot of time with early and growth stage companies and it was there that I worked a lot with founding CEOs who had these really great moonshot visions and it really helped me fall in love with product development overall. Didn't have my first quote unquote proper product management role until I went to American Express and there is where I really honed in and learned about the traditional core product skillset. I worked across a bunch of different areas there as well included mobile, loyalty, mark tech, and digital platforms. Currently I serve as the head of product development at Amazon for Prime Gaming. So I oversee product tech design and the TPM org and it's Prime Gaming basically is this awesome free benefit program that gives away access to games and game content and a monthly Twitch sub for anyone that's actually a prime member. So if we were to look at all of my road titles here, my career path probably feels pretty linear but within and across each of these areas I took a lot of risk, whether it was changing industries, changing functional areas, taking on new leadership responsibilities and not highlighted across all these are some of my endeavors in yoga and art in nonprofits and in psychology because that stuff never really makes it to the core bio slide. And honestly, at one point I was calling it career bingo because it felt like every new role was so different from my last and I was worried I was taking steps back or starting over and there were certain points where I questioned whether or not I wanted to do something that was so different versus kind of progressing in my career. But the issue that I had was I was someone who's very, very curious and I'm a lifelong learner. I didn't have the vocabulary for it historically but what I've actually been doing over the years is cultivating polymathic traits like curiosity and resilience. And I was really integrating learnings from each of these different roles so that new and more doors kept opening up that wouldn't have otherwise been accessible for me. And I honestly wouldn't be as fulfilled and in the position that I've been today. So which leads me to the focus of today's talk. I'm gonna chat through three different things. First, I'm gonna finally define what polymaths are. I'm gonna talk about why PMs should strive to be them. And finally, I'm gonna share a learning model on how to cultivate polymathic traits. So what are polymaths? For those of you who are hearing the word for the first time, you might be thinking it sounds like some terrible school course or a lofty title, but put simply polymaths are individuals who know a lot about multiple things. To better understand them, it's actually helpful to first recognize that there's an idea of generalists versus specialists. So specialists have deep functional, technical and domain mastery in usually one or two areas. They spend years living and breathing that subject matter and are experts in a neural field. Examples of specialists include neurosurgeons, environmental chemists or data scientists where it makes sense for them to hone in and have that more narrow brain focus and very deep skillset. On the other side of the spectrum, we have generalists. They're characterized by broad but shallow knowledge across many areas. And while they're versatile, they've also been criticized as jacks of all trades and masters of none. Examples of generalists might include folks who are project managers, management consultants or human resource managers. And over the years, there's been a lot of debate and fun back and forth in terms of whether it makes more sense to be a specialist or a generalist. For example, in the mid 1800s, we had the Industrial Revolution and with that came a division of labor and factory lines and rise of specialization. Then we had, in the late 20th century, we had generalists seeing a rise because of things like complexity theory that really emphasized how things are interconnected and why it's important to have a more holistic understanding. Just in the last two decades alone, literature has also bounced back and forth between these where we had Malcolm Gladwell talking about in his book, Outliers, how there's this idea of a 10,000 hours of practice goal that's needed to cultivate expertise or specialism. And then on the other side, we have David Epstein's book who came out and basically it was called Range and it talks about why generalists actually triumph in a specialist world. And today my talk isn't really about why one is better than the other, it's actually to focus on an alternate path. And the alternate path is polymaths. So polymaths fall in the middle and they kind of straddle both sides of the spectrum. There's a date around the precise definition but I would define them as individuals who have at least three areas of deep knowledge. So again, they have the deep knowledge but they also have the broadness that's more than what you see in specialists. And polymathism again, leans into both sides because it leans into the innate multifaceted curiosity we as human beings have that child like wonder. And it also balances it with meaningful depth of expertise. And examples of careers here for polymaths can range quite a bit, but they usually excel in things like leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship and you guessed it, product management. So let's break down some of the key traits that make polymaths so unique and so different. The first one I wanna call out is their worldview. Polymaths tend to have an open and a growth mindset. They also excel in first principles thinking. And first principle thinking is where you kind of see things as deconstructed foundational elements for foundational truths that serves as building blocks for things. So when you can kind of deconstruct something you can also recreate things from those smaller pieces. They have this insatiable curiosity and it's not just in terms of one thing it's actually really, really broad interests and those interests are often they go beyond just adjacent fields. They have the propensity to become experts in the areas that they're interested in. So they can actually dive deep, they can scrutinize things, see if they actually make sense or not and they can reflect on it to actually gain mastery. Or they have this associative and integrative mindset. So they're able to connect the dots across lots of different areas. They recognize that things are relative and they were able to see interdisciplinary patterns. And five, they have this amazing voracious drive. It pushes them to embrace things like self-learning and to continue at things or adapt despite seeing setbacks or challenges. So it's really like, it's arguable in terms of all the skillsets but these are the core things that, usually when we look at polymaths that we see that they actually have. So let's talk a little bit about some well-known polymaths and just get some examples of those. As far as really well-known ones, one of the OGs that come to mind when we think of Renaissance polymaths is Leonardo da Vinci. We know a lot about him from his artwork with the Mona Lisa, but it's also good to recognize that he leveraged his expertise in fields like science, engineering and architecture as well. Second, we have Ben Franklin, again, another well-known polymath. He specialized across multiple areas in politics, philosophy and science. And without him, we wouldn't have things like bifocals or lightning rods or our modern day understanding of electricity overall. Natalie Portman, very well-known actress, but in addition to that, she's a dancer, she's a director, she's a multilingualist and she's also made a lot of contributions to social activism. And finally, we have Elon Musk. Elon is probably arguably one of the most well-known modern day polymaths today. He studied physics and economics. He programmed from the age of 10 and he also helped found a lot of companies across payments, energy, space and more. So I'm showing these examples because, you know, first off, these are all obviously exceptional individuals and the point of sharing this isn't to make polymathism feel unachievable unless you're famous with some like insane amount of talent that's superhuman. It's to illustrate how mastery across areas can actually cultivate holistic excellence and how each of these individuals had more than a singular purpose or mission in life or at least they had different ways of manifesting their calling in life, which leads us nicely into why PM should strive to be polymathic. So let's start off with, just understanding the evolution of product management. As a discipline, it's evolved greatly over the years, but it would kind of first emerge in response to this need for a holistic market-driven and cross-functional approach to product development. We're all probably too familiar with this next graphic with how product managers really need to have deep business and financial acumen. They need to have deep technical knowledge and they need to have user empathy. And on top of that, they need to be able to integrate all of these to actually do their role. So this graphic here clearly illustrates how PM product management as a role is expected to be polymathic by nature. Great. Does this mean that we all get to say we're polymaths added to our LinkedIn profiles and business cards? Not quite. I believe that PMs are well-positioned to become high-value polymaths, but it doesn't mean that every PM is won by default or without working on or exhibiting the traits that I kind of mentioned earlier. In fact, I've actually seen a little bit of erosion in polymathism in product managers over time due to a number of reasons. The first is that there's been a dilution of the practice. A lot of this has come from academicization, which is a word, and generalization. In the past, there wasn't really a playbook on what a PM is. So individuals would have to gain deep expertise across areas and make the connections themselves. With the rise of things like product training, certifications, boot camps and frameworks, we've made the discipline a lot more accessible and standardized, but some folks have taken this at face value and only focused on that like narrow middle piece. So they only focused on understanding agile or user story writing skills, and they've actually lost sight and lost some of the deep expertise across those three core domains. A second trend I've noticed is hyper-specialization within the PM skill set. So PMs are narrowing their expertise to a specific product area, which has been giving rise to multiple quote unquote types of PMs. So you might have a PM that focuses on new ventures and a PM that focuses on growth or a platform PM, and having this degree of hyper-specialization has actually come at the cost of versatility and just like a lack of understanding of the entire value chain. If you look at Amazon itself, it actually has four different role titles for PMs. There is product manager, there is product manager MBA, there is product manager tech, and there's product manager tech external services. And these all have different skills, expectations, pay bans, but they all fall within the PM umbrella. And because we've hyper-specialized or forced people to hyper-specialized so soon, we find that people are losing a little bit of that curiosity and only focusing on the area that they think is most important. Lastly, I spent a lot of my time mentoring PMs. And one of the things they often come to me about is, I'm thinking about my next role, trying to figure out what I should take next. And oftentimes it comes between, one, a role that's a promotion, but it's probably within the same domain. It might not be as interesting, may not be as novel, it might not be as challenging, or two, something that's completely different, but would expose them to so many new skill sets, maybe it's a different field, and it has a lot of new challenges that they would have to tackle. I mentioned this earlier, I've been at this crossroads many times in my career. Anecdotally, I have to say that I have found an outsized number of PMs that end up choosing to go for the first option. So they choose to go for the promotion, staying within the same domain, and maybe what might feel like a little bit of a safer bet. I'm not really sure what's causes. Maybe it's because product management itself has become more well-defined as a career with linear progression, a clear trajectory of different titles that we feel we need to pursue, or maybe it's because the industry is just pushing us to specialize sooner, or just a trade-off between curiosity and perceived progress that happens over time. But I find this to be really unfortunate. So I wanna talk a little bit about the benefits of polymathism and some of the advantages, and hopefully convince you all on why embracing it will help us combat this erosion and realize our full potential as PMs. So benefits of being a polymath, one of the biggest things that polymathism helps with is this ability to solve wicked problems. Wicked problems is a concept popularized by Horace Riddle and Melvin Weber, and these were two social scientists from the 1960s. Basically, they argued that traditional problem-solving approaches are great for something called quote-unquote tamed problems. And tamed problems, excuse me, are typically well-defined. They have limited variables. They're within a domain, and solutions for them are easily evaluated for effectiveness. So examples of this might be solving a back problem, fixing a flat tire, or resolving a bug in software. Wicked problems, on the other hand, are a lot more gnarly. They're often, as you can see here, they're often highly complex. They're uncertain and they're changing. They have ethical and social dimensions, and they also have multiple interdependencies. And there's also no definitive one-size-fits-all solution. So examples of this might include designing an effective healthcare system. Another wicked problem could be how do we promote peace in regions of conflict or solve the obesity epidemic? Or how do we combat income inequality? So you can see that in all of these examples, it's not enough to be a deep expert in one field. You actually usually have to be open to ideas from different fields and be able to adapt to changing conditions. And you also have to be really a debt at collaboration across disciplines. And many of these are usually solved with an atypical combination of skills. So thinking about this, it kind of makes sense why polymathic PMs are well-equipped to solve wicked problems. So I wanna talk through next a couple of real-world examples and the polymaths as well as polymathic products that were developed to tackle them. Our first wicked problem that I'm gonna talk a little bit about is the global water crisis. So worldwide, there are 771 million people that lack access to clean water. That's one in 10 people on the planet can take this opportunity to drink a glass. That's super, really quick. But I am super grateful to be able to do that. Also over 800 children under the age of five die every day from diseases linked to unsafe drinking water or poor sanitation. Mikhail Bestregard-Fronston, he's a Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist. And he has a really diverse background that includes running a textile business. He started an aerospace company and he's also advised the Prime Minister of Denmark and acted as an elder for the Lehiya tribe in Kenya. So he drew from his really, really diverse expertise across engineering, material science and public health to work against this wicked problem with clean water. And he helped develop something called Lifesraw. Lifesraw is a product. It's basically a portable water filtration device that's been designed to filter out contaminants, bacteria, parasites so that people can actually drink directly from things like streams, rivers or lakes. And last year alone, over 3.3 million people were able to receive access to clean drinking water because of Lifesraw and its programs. Our second wicked problem is around payment acceptance for small businesses. So small businesses have a close place in my heart after having worked in the credit card industry that's been really, really focused on them. But every business we know of today really started out as a dream that then turned into a small business and then maybe grew from there. Small businesses have really been the backbone of the country and they basically continually allow individuals who are inspired to bring innovative ideas to life. However, historically, small businesses have been at a disadvantage, especially when it came to accepting payments, specifically credit card payments due to things like high cost, complex infrastructure, limited access to payment processing services. Also, payments having worked in the industry, it's really, really complex. It's highly regulated. The industry constantly has new technologies that are coming out. There's really, really diverse customer preferences and there's also a lot of complex legal considerations. So all this kind of contributed to the fact that small businesses were struggling to scale and to actually compete. Jack Dorsey, who we're probably all well familiar with is a well-known innovator. His interest in endeavors has spanned across tech, art, sociology, politics and more. Years after he founded Twitter, Dorsey founded Square and Square is an app-based POS that allows individuals and small businesses to reliably and affordably accept card payments anywhere where they basically are using their phone. And it's really revolutionized commerce and it's used by over 2 million merchants today. The interesting thing about Jack Dorsey's story, however, is that when he first sought out funding for Square, he actually distributed a list called 140 Reasons Why Square Will Fail. And he gave this to investors, obviously with some counterpoints. But one of the reasons that he cited was the doubt that he, someone who was a guy who invented a microblogging service for a social media company could take on the financial services industry without any experience in it. And here I wanna demonstrate how, yes, he didn't have that background, but he had interest in the area. He believed that he had the skills and he had the tenacity. So he didn't have the payments expertise, but he had the perseverance and he knew he could learn it and contribute it quickly because he had that diverse foundational background that was interdisciplinary across programming, design, communications and entrepreneurship that made it easier for him. Our last bucket problem has to do with language learning barriers. So historically things like accessibility costs and the way language was traditionally taught in classrooms have been deterrents to education and communication and this has led to downstream impacts in terms of economic inequality. Louis Van Aan is a polymath that grew up in Guatemala. And that's where he saw firsthand how opportunities were really limited to those with English proficiency. He was lucky enough to be able to go to school and learn English and he wanted to be able to do the same for others. His actual first claim to fame was as the inventor of CAPTCHA and re-CAPTCHA. And he drew it from his experience there and prior interests in computer science, in games and in crowdsourcing to create Duolingo. So I speak about Duolingo a lot because it's an app that I love. It basically offers free lessons for over 40 languages. It uses kind of this gamified teaching approach to make learning more engaging and more fun. And it's now the most frequently downloaded education app in the world. And it's really helped with a lot of problems across immigration assistance, travel prep, language preservation and career advancement for millions. So in addition to helping us solve wicked problems, polymathism also helps with future proofing. And by future proofing, I mean future proofing ourselves as PMs. So I know that we've all been inundated with recent advances in AI. So just for fun, I decided to ask chat GBT if AI will likely replace polymaths. I'll just get started here, but spoiler alert, there's no surprise that essentially chat GBT says no, it's not likely because of the very traits that make polymaths so unique. So again, that multidisciplinary nuanced contextual understanding that polymaths had, while AI is able to go really, really deep in terms of its learning, but it doesn't do as good of a job in terms of integrating and cross referencing across areas. And again, if we think about the future more and more industries are becoming less siloed, they're starting to intersect. And at the intersection point is where we're gonna see a lot of growth opportunities in a lot of ways where we can add value as polymaths. So that's one area. The other thing that I wanna also call out though is that polymathism, a big part of it is that resilience despite things like economic downturns with the layoffs that have happening as the PMs that I know that exhibit polymathic traits, they were the ones that were, during the downtime, they were learning new skills. They were figuring out how to pivot and they were the ones that were emerging with roles in completely different industries but also had some tie into what they did historically. So again, just an example of why exhibiting these traits can help us in the future. So the last thing that I wanna mention is that polymathism really can help serve as a contributor to success. So researchers have found that persistent intellectually challenging hobbies like music, art, chess, programming, these are stronger predictors of career success than grades and IQ exams. Other studies have found that Nobel Prize winners which as compared to regular scientists and Nobel Prize winners are again, these esteemed folks who have the highest honors in their domains, they're 25 times more likely to sing, dance, or act, 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be musicians. And if you think about it, you might be like, okay, is this just because talented people are just talented or great at a lot of things? And it might be really easy just to chalk it up to talent but in truth, learning these other areas takes a lot of a lot of dedication, a lot of knowing how to learn. So it isn't just raw talent itself, which leads us to how do we cultivate polymathism? Say we don't necessarily have some of this today is are there certain tactics that we can employ to make us better at it? Hopefully at this point I've convinced you all on the advantages of being polymathic and I'll focus a little bit more on a practical learning model that you can use to apply. So let's first ground ourselves with this idea with the intention of our learning. Most of you are familiar with the Peruto principle or the 80-20 rule. As a reminder, it's an efficiency theory that believes most things in life are not distributed evenly and that about 80% of the outputs are the result of 20% of the inputs. So 80% of a company's profits comes from about 20% of its customers, 20% of players score 80% of the points in a game and so on. Jake Chapman is an investor who took this principle further and he posits that if we believe that the 80-20 rule is divisible, we're actually gonna start seeing and get even more lopsided as it progresses. So let's say 20% of the inputs is 4% and that generates 80% of 80% of the outputs are 64%. So put simply, 20% generates 80%, 4% generates 64%. And as you kind of continue doing this math down, it actually leads to some pretty astonishing force multiplication. He takes this further and applies it to kind of five stages of learning. And in these stages, there's varying degrees of proficiency from layman to master. And he kind of assumes that it takes about 20 years to achieve mastery. So just to bring this to life in terms of how we should think about this, let's imagine that we have 100 points worth of learning that we can spend. We can decide to spend all of 100 points in one area to get to about 99% output or mastery in one domain. Alternatively, we can say we'll spend 20% of our points or 20 points in one area and get 80% out. So as a journeyman, and we could do this five times. So we can do, we can be a journeyman for five different domains versus just a master for just one domain. Intuitively, this sounds probably about right as you think about it. Just for example, two months coding class, those boot camps, they probably teach beginners the basics before they move on to roles as entry level apprentices. So now this is obviously isn't 100% accurate representation of the world, but the point here is that the distribution shows the efficiency value of diversifying our learning. And it's also helpful to go into your learning with somewhat of an idea of what your objectives are upfront in regards to the degree of mastery you're trying to achieve, as well as how much time you're willing to invest. So we can actually dig into the learning model now. So polymorphic learning is often self-guided. It stems from this innate curiosity or motivation to obtain knowledge. And it's helpful to structure these into three stages as, again, as a guide with different types of learning questions and learning activities within each. I've seen a lot of different learning agendas that will break things down into more granular pieces. But at the end of the day, it's really around what you're trying to figure out, what you wanna know and what you're gonna do to be able to actually learn it and apply it. And I really think that learning questions are really important because that's really what's gonna help guide your studies across each of these different areas. So this looks a little bit like an hour class. And the first phase goes pretty wide. So it's called going broad. And this is a phase where when you're starting out, you're asking broader questions. You're gonna be trying to understand things that are more foundational in nature, or you're gonna try to clarify some concepts or basics of your subject. And you're also probably gonna be, from an action perspective, you're gonna be seeking more guidance and input from professionals. And a lot of the content that you're gonna consume is probably gonna be more expert generated, more authoritative. So it can include things like textbooks or intro classes. And as you move from this, you go a little bit narrower. And basically I call this dive deep, but it's kind of like dive deep slash play. And this is where you, after you have more of a baseline area of knowledge, you might break things down into modules and within your topic and kind of go deeper into those different areas. And here I find that it's really like, you end up going deeper and you come out again, you go deeper again and come out again. And the types of questions and hypotheses that you have here are gonna be a little bit more complex. You're also gonna start drawing from a broader set of resources. So it's not just gonna be expert generated. You might look at user generated content as well. And you're also gonna be starting to apply more of what you're learning through engaging with peers or intellectual debate. The final phase is kind of where you go back wide again. And this is the integration phase. And here it's where you're kind of integrating what you've learned with other areas of domain of expertise that you already have. So here your questions are gonna be more associative in nature as you try to find relationships between what you've learned and what you know. And you'll also know enough to start generating some original thoughts and perspectives and be able to teach others. So there's two things that I wanna call out here. The first is that as you move from just like novice to master year go from top to bottom, your learning actually will become a lot more self-directed. You're gonna be figuring out what interests that you have and then zoom into that a little bit more and your resources are gonna be more curated. You're gonna go from like more expert generated stuff again to stuff that really suits your specific needs. You're gonna become a lot more discerning in terms of the credibility and relevance of what you're using to learn. The second thing that I wanna call out is that these phases might feel distinct as you move through them from kind of the top where you're more consuming knowledge to the bottom where you're contributing back, but you should be implementing your learning throughout each of these phases. And I really think it's important to mention that you do not want to let your knowledge outpace application. So I'm gonna repeat that again. Do not let knowledge outpace application. And that's really important because, yes, it's great to learn things, but in order to really synthesize it, you actually have to apply it. So now that we've routed ourselves with this learning model, I'm gonna take you through just a quick example about just to bring it to life using examples from my own life. A lot of folks sometimes will ask me, how did you go from pharma to retail or from retail to financial services and from financial services to gaming? So let's kind of double click on that last one. So aside from playing games and interning in media and entertainment, I was otherwise like pretty much a nuke when it came to the games industry. I mean, I was really enthusiastic about the space, though, and I was really, really motivated to build expertise. So in terms of how I got started, I started really broad and a lot of the questions I had were basic. It was things like, how big is the games industry? What's the difference between a developer and a publisher? What are the player personas and the key trends that are impacting the space today? And from an actions perspective, I knew that I wanted something that was a little bit more guided, that had an outline and a holistic view of where I should be digging in. So I took an IEP training course and it covered things like the history, genres, principles. It basically gave me this awesome bird's-eye view of every single thing. And I also purchased textbooks that I used as reference guides. I didn't read them from the front to the back, but I used them as reference guides as I was learning new concepts. And I also used expert games resources like Game Pass and New Zoo to really better understand the market. As I dove deeper, I started getting into topics that resonated more with me, which included things like gamification and monetization models. And as I was defining these sub modules, my learning felt like it was oscillating a little bit. I was going deep and coming back out and going deep again on a lot of different topics within the game and space. And the questions I asked became a lot more complex. And from an actions perspective, this is really where I completely inundated myself and embraced a variety of different ways to learn. So again, I spent a lot of time playing games. It's hard to get into the games industry if you don't actually play games. So there are games that I already played, so I tried different genres. And if I couldn't get past a certain level, I just watched people who were way better than me play games. I read a lot of books. I'm a big reader, so I love reading books about gamification in different ways, again, different ways to monetize or interactive storytelling. I went in intended eSports events. So eSports events are an awesome way to see gameplay live. I also watched a ton of YouTube videos. Again, some more of that user-generated content. And I got a chance to understand some more unique perspectives. I also attended games conferences like GDC. And there I sat in undeveloper meetings with my business development team. And I really, I interacted a lot with folks on Twitch as well as at Meetups. And I was able to find a lot of awesome communities that were not only willing to teach, but they also wanted to debate certain things. And above all this, I was fortunate enough to actually work in games starting this time. So I was applying what I was learning every single day to my role. And I worked with a lot of folks who had more tenure and expertise in this space. And it was great because I was doing a lot of learning through us, Moses. So a lot of this might sound like a lot and extremely time-consuming. And it was, I was living and breathing games and I still am. But that's kind of what building proficiency entails. It's the ongoing curiosity that makes you ping-pong from being like, ah, I get it all. I'm a genius. Like I know everything to like, I know nothing. I'm an idiot. This is so confusing. And it's really that perseverance to kind of continue past that. So the last phase is the integration phase. And this is where I really doubled down on applying what I was learning. So questions here were around what patterns or trends do I see in games that are related to other fields that I've worked in. I knew enough at this point to form opinions and assess what I believe was going great in the games industry versus what I felt like needed a little bit more innovation or change. And a couple of examples of actions that I actually took. The first was product con last year. I combined a few things. I combined my passion for mentorship with the games experience that I was able to have at that point with my deep product knowledge to create a talk on how to gamify your product career. The next one is from a women impact tech panel. And there's where I combined my background passion in tech, passion for gender equality. And I spoke with peers from different games companies about biases in the games industry and how we can actually work to combat them. And each of these were super, super rewarding because it was a way for me to actually contribute back to this field that I had spent so much time consuming information about. And it really allowed me to synthesize my learnings with the new knowledge with my existing areas of expertise and it really just solidified so much of my learning. So again, I'm going to zoom out a little bit and share more about how this all can fit together. Again, using samples from my own experience. So here are six domains that I feel I have some degree of expertise in, either through work or just recreationally. So I want to walk through kind of my knowledge, how my knowledge in one of these areas actually helped me accelerate my learning or create atypical perspectives in another. So let's start with visual art. I've always loved making art ever since I was a kid, whether it was sketching, painting or digital. I spent a lot of time creating it myself and I learned about things like composition, color theory and design patterns. And one of my consulting roles was for a clothing retailer that was looking to explain globally and at the time, global expansions were my jam. So I was working with them and one of the early meetings that we had, there was just a side debate that they were having about this ad image and looking at it, I called out a few things that I noticed. I was like, well, there's oversaturation, the visual hierarchy is off and the colors that you guys chose were not evoking the right mood for the campaign. I added a few other tidbits that sounded smart and they really impressed them and it worked. And basically they were like, okay, you actually know what you're talking about when it comes to the art space. Do you want to be included in more meetings? So they did, they started folding me more into like some fashion designing graded meetings and it allowed me to earn trust with that team. And one of the things that's really cool was it actually surfaced up a new opportunity. After this project finished, they were starting another project about how to launch their e-commerce experience. And that's when they taught me and said, we trust your strategy charts but we also trust your design and aesthetic understanding and I think you can combine both of them to do this role. So that was pretty awesome. The next comes from my example working in the tech space. And that's where I learned I spent a lot of time helping companies move from waterfall to agile and getting deeper in terms of agile methodology. Around this time is also where I developed a really strong interest in yoga. I will say though, the first class I went to was with a friend. I had a number of variables working against me. It was after a night out. So I was extremely dehydrated. It was big room yoga. So the room was like 105 degrees and it was an advanced class. So folks were doing things like headstands and king pigeon pose and eight angle pose, I think. And at first I was like, this is not for me, you know, a bit much, it's okay. I don't have to be a yogi. Maybe I'll do soul cycle or something like that instead. So that felt a little bit less complex. But afterwards I met up with one of the instructors and he basically explained to me how yoga is really a series of poses that builds off each other. And that's how you kind of can learn to do the more complex ones. And I realized that I actually could apply a lot of what I knew about agile methodology to learning yoga. A lot of it was embracing an iterative approach breaking down these advanced poses into more basic ones that I can master in increments and can build off each other so that I could still feel like I was progressing. And I also experimented with different poses, whether it was more standing poses, more poses that were on the floor. And I recognized that, you know, some of them didn't serve me as well. So if that was the case, I could easily pivot and use some of that learning to be applied somewhere else. I also spent a lot of my time on a weekly basis doing like mini rituals and reflection moments with myself and help having me, you know, figure out what went well, what did it well and kind of adjusting my practice based off of that. My last example brings me to today's world. So I mentioned this earlier, but I spent a chunk of my time working in Fintech for American Express. AmEx has one of the best world-class membership rewards programs. So basically the more that you spend on your credit card, you earn membership rewards points that can be redeemed for other things. And really at AmEx, it's where I learned how to do things like how do you balance rewards diversity based off of different target audiences? What's the value of exclusive benefits? How do you evaluate things like earning potential? And I was able to use a lot of this in my current role because currently I manage a games benefit program. And this program has historically been a little bit more transactional focused, but I took a lot of my learnings from American Express and by looking at the credit cards industry and a payments industry where they have some of the most well-known and most used rewards programs and said, how can we apply it to the game space? How can we start thinking of our customers again, just not just transactional, but also as members so that we can actually retain them? So another area where, since that has helped me a lot with games. And I know I walked through a few of these examples, but realistically each of these kind of feeds, it's not just a one-to-one feed, each of them actually feeds into each other and this actually continually expands as you add more and more domains and you make more connections across them. So I wanna leave you with some closing dots and key takeaways. The first is that again, polymaths new world at a minimum you guys have learned a new word and polymaths are again, individuals that have deep knowledge across multiple areas. They sit between generalists and specialists. Some of their key core traits are that they have this open and growth mindset, they have this insatiable curiosity, they have the ability to achieve mastery, they are interested in broader areas and they also have this resilience and perseverance and finally they have this ability to integrate across areas and connect dots to create new ways of value. PMs really strive to cultivate polymathic traits because we're well positioned to, it's an expectation of our role pretty much and things that polymathism can help with, it can help us solve these wicked problems that are really, really gnarly. It also positions us well for success and to future proof ourselves. And in order to cultivate polymathism, it's really great to just remember that you're gonna do it across areas and start off broad, figure out what the right actions are, what the right questions you have at each step and then go a little bit more narrow and then go broad again as you integrate and connect. I'll leave you guys with this quote from again, the original or the OG polymath Leo, but whether you're debating if you should take a job or not because it feels like it's off the beaten path or if you feel like an imposter in a new domain or if you're looking for a new purpose in life or different ways to achieve that purpose. I hope this presentation has helped you and thank you again so much everyone for all the time today. Bye.