 Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, and digital marketing classes at our 15 campuses around the world. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Today, we have an awesome guest presenting. I'd like to introduce you to Richa Rai. Richa is a leader in product management with more than 12 years of expertise in building strategy and roadmaps, defining business values, and delivering multi-million dollar products and programs. She is analytical at heart with an exceptional ability to bring order to chaos. Her bachelor's in engineering and master's in business provides a strong foundation for her to understand and analyze customer pain points, business drivers, and solution delivery. Feel free to leave any questions for Richa in the comments of Facebook and I'll ask her them at the end. Without further ado, let's welcome Richa. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, hey, hi Dan. Thank you so much for having me. No problem. Can you see me though? Yep, I see you. And I don't see your screen share just yet though. You don't see my screen share yet? Okay, hold on. I think I had my, sorry about that. Okay, I think we will be in business soon. I'm almost there. Okay, you see? Great, okay, take it away. Yes, so let's get going. We have a lot to cover and the topic that I have chosen for this webinar today is talking about product managers toolbox. And it's a lot of content. I do this session in two hours in a classroom setting and I would try to, I have curated some of it and I would try to, if you see me cruising just know that because I have a lot of content that I really want to share with awesome folks out there that I am cruising through. But feel free to leave your comments, questions and I will get back to them. And if not here, then of course you can catch on LinkedIn and I can connect offline as well. So with that, let's dive into the agenda for today. We will be talking about the need for tools. Why do we need tools? Art for building your custom toolbox when we are thinking about toolbox of product managers, how you should be thinking about building your toolbox. What are some of the pointers for that? And tools from my toolbox, what are the tools that I have used over the years and what are the tools that I, what can I recommend or what their pros and cons are that I can talk to you about. And then last but not the least is setting product managers up ourselves. What are those, how can we harvest and grow skills that cannot be replaced by tools? Equally important, we have to continue to grow ourselves as product managers and what are some of the things that we can continue to do. The new need for tools, why do we need tools? This was one of the best way I found pictures, speak louder than words. And this is the picture that I thought would convey the sentiment that why do we, why as product managers we need tools? And this is one of the reasons we need tools. Tools are a means to an end. They help us get our job done effectively and efficiently. We, there are tools, Post-it notes are tools, projectors are tools, PowerPoint is tools, and from there to all these cloud-based mobile and apps and web-based, there are subscription-based new tools out there as well. So there is a broad spectrum of tools and we need tools because we can get our job done. Sorry, I was just setting up my screen. So that's a means to an end. I think our product managers as handymans, we have to have all our tools in our arsenal from a hammer to a flashlight to all the power tools and depending upon, and when we talk about the next agenda is what are those some of the key criteria when we are thinking about the toolbox. So based on what the situation is, what kind of projects we are doing, what are the resources, in what company are we in, what's the surrounding is like. And based on that, we should be able to pick up our tool or build our custom toolbox for that purpose for those needs. So out of building your custom toolbox, what are the tools that would work for you and for your company and for your customer needs? So when we think about that, it depends upon a lot of different criteria. Type of project, is it a software? Is it a hardware? Is it a chip company? Is it a company that's building IOTs? Is it a telecommunication company? Is it a small project internal? Is it large interdepartmental or across the organization? What kind of project is that? So your tool set would depend a lot upon the type of work you are working on. Level of teams expertise, how your team for a tool, when you're selecting a tool, if your team is going to work on that tool and it's a collaborative tool, is there how expert your team is? Is that a team where you need more tool that are more intuitive and that they're for beginners and you can more drag and drop and a lot of features are built in which you can customize on the fly and it just fills you in or your team has expertise and you have developers and you have quarters on the team who can make the custom some tools in it and some tools in it or you can take and write steps and they can create some of the custom nuances and in a more free setting tool. It depends upon the level of teams expertise. Budget, what kind of budget your company has? I have worked in smaller companies, I have worked in enterprises and I have worked in companies where budget was never an issue. So depending upon how much the appetite is there for your company, that also determines the kind of tool that you can use. A security, the kind of company you work in, the kind of environment, how much that company is willing to share data and based on what kind of data it is, can you share it on third party with third party or is it customer data? Is it internal data? Are they sensitive about it? So based on that, I work in a healthcare organization today and there are a lot of compliance regulations. We can't have host a lot of data on third party servers. So for a lot of security reasons, we have to keep everything in-house when I worked at Microsoft. I was at Microsoft, that's Microsoft, a lot of their tools were internal and a lot of their, and also it made it was more efficient and effective before the scale that the organization was using tools to keep most of the tools internal or even build the tools internal. It was more cost effective that way as well. So that, so it was budget and security. Resources, do you have resources in-house who can establish or customize a tool that you take a subscription of or you build a tool in-house? What do you have resources at hand who can make it more custom for your own purposes or needs? Or do you need a consultation? You need to work with another company who can come in and establish the expertise first, not just customize the tool for your team, but also establish the expertise, train your folks, train your team on the usability of that tool. capacity, is it small? Do you need the tool that is for a smaller need or do you need to scale that tool over time? Right now you're just piloting it when then you're just, even if you're in a team but in a very smaller setting, but over time you want that, you would like that tool to be broadly used across the organization. So would be, how do you want to think about scaling that tool over time? So that is also an important factor would that still be able to scale as you think about scaling that? Audience, who are your audience that you need to use these tools for or with? Are these only for internal meetings or just when you are doing a small brainstorming with business or is it with customers? How is your team or even organization open to experimentation? Every day there are new tools that are coming in the market and they are all very, and coming with new features and even for a very small niche, not excuse me, the tools not today are mostly that cut across and they do everything. It's not just everything in one but the tools that are coming in are more flexible and for one segment and they just solve one niche, but reliability is because they're so new and they're also experimenting. It's hard to say if they're going to be there two years down the road. So how open your organization is for experimentation because that is something that I recommend if you need to open that and experiment with those tools. A lot of times those tools offer early adopters free subscriptions and your for your feedback and also you get to learn a lot with them from them for your business processes. So those are some of the very high level pointers when you are thinking about building your custom tool box there is a lot more that goes when you're thinking about that. With that moving on to our third and the most meaty topic for today is tools from my toolbox and how I have structured this section is I've created a one pager that has all the tools but we'll go through one tool after the other but it's more like a product's lifecycle. So tools that is starting from the seed maybe you start thinking how the ideation of a product happens through the delivery and what are those tools along the way that help a product manager when you're thinking about delivering that product that is how I have structured this section and we will go through that one after the other and we'll be talking about the tools that I have used and if I have any tip or note or what my feedback is for that tool. So first we'll be talking about strategic roadmap. Strategic roadmap is a visual representation of aligning initiatives with business goals and timeline. The tool that I have used so far and I really like is aha. Even I was on Microsoft we had our own custom tools that we used for strategic roadmap and mostly it was PowerPoint, it was nothing more than that but after because there were also teams that were that they mostly thought through like there was a strategy team and then they built strategy and then it flowed to different teams to the delivery team to the product team the delivery team and so on and so forth but in a different setting in a smaller companies or in there there is more cohesive culture. For example, I work on projects starting from strategy to conception of the product to the delivery not necessarily day-to-day delivery. We have tech PMs who look after the day-to-day delivery and incident support so going live and then the operation and incident support. So in my current role I oversee all of that across and this tool helps me a lot because this is a tool where I can set up product vision and strategy. I can map business goals to the vision. I can generate Epic and then create feature backlog and then because of the integration with Jira all of this flows in Jira automatically and I don't have to manually go and do all the work again or my functional analyst doesn't have to do all of that work again. So what I have but what works best and what has worked for me best in the past is when I'm thinking about creating roadmap I first do that with sticky notes, with PowerPoint and not even going to the PowerPoint first using whiteboard. White sticky notes and whiteboard and getting to one final view and vision of what does that roadmap look like and then putting it in a software when it is more solidified. Of course it's an open document. We continue to change and evolve as our thinking changes over time but for the initial fresh start the first all of this is the tools that are used to first solidify all of this are mostly whiteboards and sticky notes and after that it moves on to live in any tool from where it is dragged and changes and versioning and all of that happens over time. So this is an example of the strategic roadmap. I don't have time but I would have preferred to go a little bit deeper in this but strategy wrote and all of these topics are like a half hour webinar topic in itself talking about the strategy and roadmap that is such a core component for a product manager when you're thinking about any product and what is it that we are trying to solve? What's the strategy defines that? What at a high level, what your company is after? What are the key strategic goals for your companies are? And how your product, how you should be thinking of course why you should be thinking about your product so the product should align to the one of the strategies. It should be turning on or should be an enabler for one of the strategies. And then secondly, what are they when you're thinking about prioritization and feature sets then strategy defines that a lot is what is it that I should be going after? If I turn on this feature, if increasing revenue is one of our strategy for this year then if I turn on this feature this is going to increase revenue but if I turn on other features it's more like customer satisfaction and delighting the customer and all of that but that has to take a backseat because strategy for us is to increase revenue and what are those features that would help me meet that are all our company's overall goal and that defines the features for your product. So it is strategy and roadmap in itself is a huge topic to cover but I'm just cruising through this and talking briefly about it which. So moving on to the second tool that almost follows in that journey of a product is customer journey mapping. As you think about the product you start thinking about that how your customer is going to interact with this is something very new in product management but this something is extremely critical also a lot of times we think about this as after the fact but as a product manager we should always be thinking then even before we start thinking about features of our product is how our customer is going to interact with that product like thinking about their touch and feel and what kind of emotions they want to feel with that product how and where in that customer journey they are going to interact with that product so kind of doing that customer journey mapping and then thinking about okay then what are the areas that we need to make sure that as we are developing this product we cover so that we can keep that customer journey as smooth and as delightful as possible for our customers. So customer journey mapping is something very new but very core to any product manager and that's how any product manager should be thinking about when they're developing their product. So this is again something that you don't have to use a tool for but depending upon you can experiment I have used PowerPoint for customer journey mapping and I have also seen tools around. So it depends on what I have done mostly is gotten my team together we have brainstormed we have used mostly post-its and markers to create that customer journey mapping or moving it around drawing phases and swim lanes the vertical swim lanes on the on whiteboard and then moving those posters around and before landing on one of the customer journeys that okay for this product this is how the customer journey is going to be and what are those frictions? What are those barriers and what do we need to break here? And also how once you have reached on that customer journey mapping view what it has been very helpful in is making a lot of my extended team understand who are behind the scenes who are not really in front of the business or who are not really in front of those strategic who do not have the view of strategy and who do not have the view of at the strategic level at the leadership level it's very helpful in having them understand that hey this is how you are impacting a customer. This is customer both from here, here, here until the customer makes a payment or gives us reviews or writes about us on social media this is how your piece here helps in that end goal. So this is very helpful that to understand their role in that life cycle of a customer. This is one of the PowerPoint that says there are different categories. Those are the different verticals where of different phases of a customer and how in each phase that customer is interact with any product and just an example. Third is wire free mock-ups and prototypes. So once we have established what do we want to build and how the features that should look like the first the industry is moving towards a stage where we quickly before even we have started writing a code everybody wants to get visual. Everybody even our stake for our stakeholder validation for any work that we do even getting buy-in for internal teams making our teams understand the development teams understand hey what are we trying to achieve. The goal now has become primarily and because I work in a web and mobile world a lot now is to do visual is to create something visual put it in front of our customers for a stakeholder validation and create like even when we're thinking about A, B kind of views. This is how A view would look and this is how B view would look. And so wire free mock-ups and prototypes have become extremely important too. And a lot of, and we have visual designers and in-house so not necessarily that I work in a company in an organization where I have those resources who are sneeze in though in using these tools and they are the ones who create it. I work very closely with them. I kind of get the brain dump and work with them to create those. But in a lot of companies and in smaller companies there may not be different roles. And as a product manager and I have been in an organization where it's a very small company and I am the visual designer or graphic designer and everything. So for wireframes and when you're doing even mock-ups you don't need any specific tools if you don't have, you can always do white coding and you don't have to be very specific. It's just a visual representation of whatever team has discussed, what you want to achieve. When you're creating a prototype yes, you need something a little bit more because it is visually look and feel and spec-wise in that way. So you need a little bit more expertise but nothing that you can't learn in visual is also a tool which is very widely popular for prototyping and it can be used very easily. This is an example of like a wireframe that you can just draw and then the mock-up that looks a little bit more color and your branding and a little bit more look and feel to it. And prototypes are more like quick moves. So the tool helps you put it in the web view or in the mobile view. So you can quickly write the code, change the code also and you can just hit send and it just changes the code real-time and you can see the change real-time in your mobile app or in your website. So those are the kind of prototyping tools that are available today that you can leverage. That makes you really efficient and that makes you take your story to your stakeholders for real-time validation. Hey, this is what we are building and from all the discussion that has happened before you've already gone and invested a lot of time in building something for real. Then it is product backlog management. So once you know, okay, this is what you need to deliver this is how you've logged on the design and now we have to start building the code for this. Then how do you do a product backlog? What do you do with a product backlog? So product backlog is a place where you add, adjust, groom, prioritize all of their features and user stories. What do you want to deliver first? What comes after? How do you stack them? How do you first group them, stack them? What I have done in the past is, and has worked in my world is first grouping them. Must need, they're like three categories. Most needed, most, must need, and then there are three categories. And then you first group them in these three categories and then you stack them based on most needed. These are the must have, I don't know, I'm just spacing out right now. So those three categories, and then you stack them on that and you involve your business partners, you all involve engineering teams and based on your business goals and based on the complexity of that engineering team shares with you that this feature maybe is more, would be more efficient if we deliver after this because this is how technically it makes more sense. So kind of, and the business wise, yes, of course their input is most important is, hey, we want these features upstream or ahead of these. And as a product manager, basically your job is to bring a lot of these holders in the room and influence and guide and make sure that all of those decisions are captured and you deliver based on their, based on what the team's input is and different stakeholders have their own input is their input is valued, must have, should have and nice to have. So must have as you can do without, you can turn on should have because they would achieve some of your business goals. And nice to have are the long tail, they're features that will delight your customers. They don't really expect it, but if you give it to them then they're going to explain what it came back to me. I was spacing out, I wasn't really sure if, but so this is, and this is what I live and breathe. And this is the world, this is the world of product manager. So I'm surprised that's happening to me. So those are the three, and that's how you prioritize them as you sort of them in these three categories and then you start writing them. So this is one of the, we have used TFS a lot and at Microsoft and this is how it is, it is an example of how it is in TFS, they are prioritized. So that was the methodology for prioritization that I just talked about. And there is this Moscow model and Moscow is must have, should have something, it could have and won't have. It's an acronym for this, for Moscow and this is how you define your priority list. And this is a visual of must do, should do, could do, must have, should have, nice to have. This is how we had. And so you group them different features in those three categories and then I have start writing them that way. Sprint planning and tracking agile projects. After you have decided what you want to deliver your delivery team goes into delivering those features. You still want to keep a tight eye, a close connection with your delivery team on how they're doing, how the sprint planning is coming along. You want to be involved in up to a level like the kickoff, the sprint planning, you don't want to meet with your engineers or delivery team every day, but you still want to be involved and engaged in sprint demos and what they're delivering and how they're delivering. And if there are any roadblocks that they're going to hit, if there are any technical, if they have any business decisions or confusion that they want business clarity on, or if they're getting roadblocks due to different dependency on upstream and downstream technical teams or any other team, then you have to be tightly in a tight contact with them so that you can resolve those roadblocks and get the product delivery schedule on time or meet that schedule. So what do you do in those sprint planning and tracking the project that's in an agile way is estimate stories, whatever store user stories that they're trying to deliver in any way. Overall, I guess it's that part of that engineering planning that they get together and they estimate all those stories. That's how they estimate how much work, how much time would they need to deliver that product overall. So they estimate their, so you need a tool where the team establishes the stories, they team establish team velocity, how many members are in the team, front-end developers, back-end developers, Java coders, a database analyst, testers, DevOps folks, and what is their capacity for release and what does their release schedule looks like and when can they, so based on that, so they establish a team velocity, they prioritize user stories that we have to deliver all of these user stories which was and what we should be going through. And I signed tasks for the sprint and then they create tasks for those user stories and then they distribute their work. So you need a tool that helps in doing all of that work, the Agile project management. I've used again for our whole engineering teams have used TFS in the past. In my current company, they recently transitioned to Jira and I'm hearing good feedback. I haven't personally invested a lot of time in it but I'm hearing excellent feedback from the delivery teams that they are using Jira now and they love the experience. Now what I really like in TFS also we used Kanban board a lot to track non-developmental tasks where the tasks were put on the Kanban board like a hosted and they were moved around and based on whoever was ready to take them on the industry. So that was a very neat feature. I really loved that. And also, the update was presented, the update was questionable was also very neat. So that I really liked about that. So this is an example of the sprint planning and tracking. So how do you go ahead and do those sprint planning? So you go into the tool and where you have this Epic feature, use a story task issues. And then you also track your bugs and bugs are also then created into tasks. This is an example where it shows the name of the person who the task has been assigned to and then the work. This is the team capacity, velocity or that this is the remaining work, the story points. So these are the story points of the remaining work. This is where they are. So the visual representation of this is amazing. One of the key also confidence of product manager is to gather feedback. As you are thinking about new products, as you're thinking about new features in your product, that how do you collect feedback from different sources and how do you manage that feedback? So this is another one of the areas that gets oversight, but another very important, very poor to a product manager's life. There are a lot of noise takes over and being in a product management function role myself. I understand how noise cuts through, but this is from where everything starts. You have to continue to keep your focus on that I have to collect feedback. And unless you establish a way, the way it gets, it can get very messy. And it's a very crowded space because you're getting feedback from your business, from your customers, from your vendors, from your partners, from different customers from on different platforms, on different sources and social media, on that you have a customer service, they're calling customer service, if you have an email platform and they're emailing in chat. So it is a very busy crowded space. So you need to establish a method by which you are hearing all of these feedback and also you are turning it into some action. And that's where tool is very helpful because it gets crowded. And user voice is one of the tool there. You can collect all this feedback that's coming from different sources. Develop them into actionable actions where you can then drag change and improve user experience. Another key component of our product manager is analytics, making sure that you are, and analytics is not just tracking, but also analytics, the major component of analytics is tracking the business value. What are those key metric that you should be tracking that would help you determine how your product is doing in the market? So it is very important that you put proper tags at proper inflection points where you want, where you would get the result that you really want. So measuring, analyzing, and reporting insights of activity on BevanMobil is what, analytics is what analytics does. And so you have to, I'm just looking at time too. So we're about time. Okay, so I'll keep going and hopefully I'll be able to wrap this up in the next five minutes. So that is why analytics is a big piece and not just tagging, just the navigation or the page or whatever because I'm from the web, web and mobile. But a lot of times it has become after thought too. And but this has to come in the culture is as you roll out these products, as you roll out these services, that you want to measure the business value. And if it is driving the right behavior that you want, and if it is not, then you want to know that to whatever can be measured can be changed. You want to measure it so that you can change it. And there are different tools here, currently the direction is using Adobe Tags. I haven't personally seen the benefit or the differentiation factor from Google Analytics or we use for analysis Power BI in the past and Microsoft. So I haven't yet seen the benefit of Adobe Tags but that's also another analytics way of web and mobile mobile analytics that has been used. And then methodology for readiness and landing. Another extremely overlooked, not a lot of time, but yes, a lot of times gets overlooked because as a product manager, we get fixated on building the product, right? But what is also more important or maybe equally important is getting the product to a market where they are ready for that change. So we're doing that change management for our audience, for our customers is that they know about the change that's coming. They know about the new product that's coming. What are the benefits of that? You have prepared them really well. So a lot of factors that are involved in doing that effective change management and as a product manager, it's important to work very closely with your marketing team, with your teams around you to create that kind of content with that messaging is that will prepare your audience to accept the change and the model that I have followed in the past is ad car model. It's called awareness, awareness, desire, knowledge, action and reinforcement. So both those five things are at a very high level is first you make your target audience aware about the change that it's coming. Then you create desire in them and then you provide them knowledge, how can they access? And these are the different communication that you build a calendar for that with these medium, with these channels or with these artifacts, I'm going to address this area. So this is what I'm going to use, I'm going to send a newsletter out, making them aware. For desire, I'm going to do run some more campaigns. For knowledge, I'm going to send them this link and with all the facts and health document and videos. And then on the day boom of launch that, hey, this is the action, this was coming and now today is the day and you go and you can access this, you can buy this, you can use this and you let us know your feedback and reinforcing that going to them after that and asking them for reconvening that message, hey, if we launch this, this, this, this was what we were hoping and let us know what your feedback is. If you haven't tried it, please try, if not. So that's the reinforcement message is. So this is the model that I have passed but something that is very important as a product manager to be very sincere about and plan for readiness and landing as you are thinking about as you all think about building the product. Right product is important but right readiness and landing of that product is equally important because it can totally make or break your product if the readiness and totally not fault of a product, product could be perfectly fine but if you haven't prepared your market in the right way it might just fall flat and without and all of that hard work of not just the product manager but the team hard work goes for nothing. So with that, we come to the last topic and the last agenda item that is setting product managers up for success for long-term success. So beyond toolbox, what are those skills that are critical for a successful to be a successful product manager? And I think product managers need to be hustler if you have to hustle always think about the ways you can push the wall push the limit or get something that you need in the time that you need because you're always priced either for time or resources or getting some answers from your leadership from your business partners. So you have to as a product manager you have to hustle a lot and you have to continue to nurture that in you. Scrappy as a product manager it doesn't matter you are in a small company or a big company but you will never have enough resources that are required to deliver any product to your liking to the liking that how you want to deliver in time but it's very important for you to get scrappy how to be creative in smaller companies you always have at unit resources you don't have enough resources the budget is tight in bigger companies by the time the funding or that the channels that you have to go through or the hoops that you have to jump to get funding is always far too long far too complicated and in that time you would have missed your timeline anyways so you have to get scrappy one way or the other curious you have to be very curious you when you are working building a product you have to ask a lot of questions you should open you should be open to asking a lot of questions around you the folks who are SME's in their areas and also folks who are not SME's but who are probably potential personas as a user of your product so always be very curious always keep asking questions open mind you work with so many other people so many different teams and keeping an open mind it's very easy for a product manager to get emotionally attached to their products they have thought about it they have been very close to it they have probably thought about incorporating everything that they needed to in the product but when things there are ideas and their suggestions and hey we can do it this way let's talk about doing it so there are lots of opinions that come in and at one point of time you might feel like it's too many cooks in the kitchen so it's a time where you have to keep an open mind and everybody's opinion is valued that's how you have to think about it and the bigger goal is that the goal is to develop a product that meets the strategy of this company that's the most important paramount importance for everybody that there is no ego there is no personal connection this is part of that bigger goal of delivering something that is best for our customers and meets our company's goals building credibility you work with so many people with so many other teams who are in your management who are outside of your management it's very important to build a trust a trusting relationship with folks around you so that you they feel confident in following you they feel that hey this is the leader I can put myself behind I trust what this leader is saying I trust what this leader is doing I trust what that person is trying to build and I am confidently I can put myself or folks on my team behind this person because I am sure something something of importance for our customers or for a company will come out of this that's the kind of credibility you need to build with folks around you staying focused as a product manager when you're thinking about delivering a product there is only so much you can do in the time that you always get that you have to keep yourself focused there will always be things that you won't be able to deliver 100% but you have to chunk it out phase it out and keep the focus there that hey the most important goal is getting in front of the customer as early as possible with whatever the minimum required set of MVP is that's what my goal is and I'm not willing to get defocused from that path the risk taker that things are not 100% sure a lot of times when we are even as a product manager when we are stepping out and thinking about the products or the features in the product we have to make the decision based a lot on our gut we don't have all the data all the information going in and we're thinking about that those decisions so we have to get comfortable with taking risks and we have to make our management comfortable with taking risks we have to coach them guide them that if we were to wait really long to collect all the information to all the kind of press and all of that early on so that when we are 100% confident oh this is a sure bet by that time it would be too late for us to get to the market so it is okay based on gut based on some preliminary data from the trends that we're seeing seeing we can take that risk and move forward learning something new continue to learn something new you guys are here attending this webinar this shows that you have the curiosity you're here to learn something new continue to learn something new go out with somebody who's new who has a new function on your team or company you don't know that about and just take that person out for a coffee just sit down and talk about hey what do you do what does your role look like and what are your challenges and getting to know that person or their role a little bit more so learning something new about somebody giving back to community and the way I do it is I do these webinars I do these sessions I talk to a lot of aspiring product managers or folks who want to know more about product managers this is my way of giving back to community and every time I do this I walk away learning more and that also keeps an open mind that gives you a very different perspective every time somebody asks me a question and more often than not two out of 10 times the question is like hey I think I'll have to think a little bit more about that and I'll get back to you and that's where my growth most of my growth happens so I always recommend for you guys to be a mentor to somebody there's always somebody who's looking to learn something that you know feel free to find that person and give something back to the person and be patient continue to do the right thing and you'll see yourself maturing over time it doesn't happen overnight and a lot of times you do things you will get in trouble but that's fine that's how you grow that's how you learn and that's how maturity will happen over time and also there are other resources that are for product managers that I really like I haven't read all these books myself these are my wish list or my reading list also but I have read a few of them I have read Bill Walsh the score takes care of itself I highly recommend that book I am currently reading the Lean startup right now but I want to get to all these books and these are excellent resources for product managers so keep yourself whenever you have any free time please read as much as you can get to those product management resources because product management is a function again it's a very different you need perspective from different angles and that's not one mundane topic which is very interesting about the product management different fires to fight every day different battles to fight every day and all of these books are so diverse in nature and in topic yet they are so integral for a product manager so when you read them it's interesting it's very interesting because it's not just one topic that you're reading over and over again it's a different topic altogether and then the takeaway as I was saying you need to be patient as much you may read as much you may learn as much you have the right tools as much you have grown yourself and read all the books out there on product management don't repeat yourself up whatever you will plan is going to be very different from the reality and that's where the growth is so be confident that even though things didn't go right as you planned but you have learned something that now you can apply next time that is the growth that has happened that makes you mature over time with that thank you so much to product school and to the awesome community of aspiring product managers thank you so much for coming out and hearing me here it was rushed it was quick but I wanted to cover this with you all but here is my email and here is my LinkedIn account as well so feel free to reach out I'm happy to answer questions for you have to get on a call with you or brainstorm with you whatever you are doing I'm happy to partner with you in whatever way I can help Thank you so much for that awesome presentation that was great really enjoyed that so I do have a quick question for you there's a two-part question actually so how do you determine the priorities on the strategic roadmap? So determining the priorities on the strategic roadmap is based on what our leadership it's a very strategic priority on the strategic roadmap is a very leadership driven ask it depends on what our leadership what the strategic priorities for our leadership are I work in a healthcare company and we have very different the strategic priorities are determined by a leadership that we have to make sure that we are compliant to these regulations we have to make sure that we are taking care of our new Medicaid members are such so based on those strategic priorities whatever we decide whatever there are we have a list of projects or products that we want to roll out but these are the strategic these are the five strategic priorities for our business and which ones align or which are indirect or indirect alignment with those strategic priorities where we are turning those priorities on those are the ones that take precedence automatically so those are so we have to map one on one with those strategic priorities hey this is the work that if we deliver it right then this is these are the strategic priorities for our company our organization are going to be met so if they need 5% of this and if we turn this feature on then at least 1% of our member will meet this so there are 5% 1% goal from that 5% will be met by doing this work so this is how so this is the prioritization is indirect relation with the strategy that our leadership has decided interesting okay so this you might have just answered the second part to this question then how do you balance long term and short term goals on the roadmap are there any guidelines so generally they so that is what a leadership does too so this is the job of the leadership they have vision that is a short term vision this is our short term goal and they have a long term vision this is our 3 to 5 year roadmap this is where we want to go we want to beat competition or we want to be on cloud all our application needs to be on cloud in 5 years or all we should have at least 5 new subsidiaries in the next 5 years and in short term goal is that hey we have to accomplish these different things so this is this is the part where leadership has access to a lot more broader landscape what is going around us at the company level at our product level and also from the competition from where they want from what their vision and their vision has been for the company so they define the long term and short term and that governs the work that you deliver as a product manager awesome okay so that wraps up the questions there aren't any other questions here so thank you thank you so much for coming out a bunch of people are saying thank you so before we go I just wanted to give you all some more information on product schools upcoming courses and events so you guys have the resources to become a product manager our product management coding, data analytics and digital marketing courses are taught by industry experts working at companies like Google and Facebook in addition to that we offer weekly online and on-site events at our 15 campuses in the US UK and Canada so if you're located near a campus make sure you stop by one of our weekly events you can also find us on social media at product school and be sure to keep up with the latest product management content at the product blog at productschool.com so thank you all for joining enjoy the rest of your day and I hope to see you next week thank you so much, Rich have a great night or afternoon