 All right. This is Deepam Dube. Thank you all for joining my session today. I'm taking all the time. I'm senior product manager at Dominator Lab. And today, I'm going to talk to you all a lot about my journey with product management. I also have an agenda around how did I got into project management and how can I become successful at it. So really looking forward to this session. I started PMing in 2013. And I'm really passionate about the ML and the AI space. So I'm really excited to talk to you all about that in this session today. OK, so a bit about where I work. Dominator Data Lab, we help enterprises scale and accelerate their data finds initiatives. Our platform is trusted by more than 20% of the Fortune 100 companies. We are precisely in the MLR space. And we offer, we have offerings to help you scale your data finds and then help you build and deploy your models faster. So we are in the cutting edge business. The startup was founded in 2013. It's headquartered in the Bay Area. Recently, we raised 100 million, which was pretty exciting. And so the company, we also have funding by NVIDIA now and backed by NVIDIA. So really exciting stuff within the company. All right. With that, let's talk a bit about what are we going to be covering in this session, right? I'm going to go give you an overview about how to get into product management and how to be successful. This is not a deep dive. We're going to holistically talk about a few of the various dimensions or a few of the various aspects of project management and misconceptions and what people think about being a PM and a big company versus a startup. Do you really need to be a software engineer to be successful in product management and also last but not the least, a lot of people talk about do I really need an MBA to be a product manager? So I'm going to go through my journey and give you anecdotes and stories from my experiences that are going to help you make decisions as you embark on your product management journey, help you build your own brand, and hopefully take out any of the misconceptions you might have. All right. So with that, a bit of a timeline about my product management journey and how did I got where I am today? I graduated from the University of Arizona back in 2012. It was an exciting time. Started as a program manager in Microsoft right after my graduate program. Microsoft is one of those companies which show a lot trust in grads and then make them and introduce them into project management and product management disciplines right out of the gate. And they sort of allow you to take on challenges and work on cutting edge as your services for Windows and Office adoption. And I was lucky to be a part of a lot of those products. It's a great company with a very strong enterprise presence. The cloud growth has been unprecedented. When I got into the company, obviously I had to build out my own brand and expertise. And I want to talk to you all about that, hey, if you want to be a product manager, figure out what is that niche which you have, right? Do you want to be a design PM? Do you want to be a UX PM? Are you great at data? Are you great at security? So find that niche of yours. Even my first role at the company was not in the data space, which I was very passionate about. I did my master's in business intelligence and data analytics. But that was not my first gig at the company, right? But I really knew that that was my calling. So I made connections within my team or other teams who were doing exciting stuff in the big data space and then really sort of understood the space. I also gained a lot of B2B skills and customer facing skills, represented my products and international conferences which are attended by thousands of employees gave me a lot of confidence to go talk about my product and really make it successful. That was a stint with Microsoft. I did for about eight years. It was a long time. And recently, in 2021, I got a chance to join Dominator Lab, which was a complete 360 turn from such a huge company to about 250 individuals startup, right? What got me to Dominator Lab was my passion about data and to take it to the next level. I'm really passionate about the data science space. It intrigues me to see how interesting problems can be solved with data modeling with the power of machine learning and deep learning. Our product at Dominator Lab impacts various industries today. We are actually delivering vaccines, COVID vaccines, by projecting demands through the models which the enterprises are building with our software. We are disrupting banking. We are also disrupting the nautical industry and being used by a lot of top-notch customers. It's a huge industry. As often, market is projected to go to $125 billion by 2025. A lot of size, impact, and potential. That was a bit about where I started and where I am. Let's talk about the three dimensions. The first one being, do you need a software engineering background? In my opinion, it's optional. Great PMs don't necessarily have software engineering background. Personally work with very smart individuals from arts, literatures, and other backgrounds. And then each and every individual bring a very different perspective about how they understand their customers and how they represent them. So if you are passionate about product management, your Asked Discipline really doesn't matter. You really should try to demonstrate core skills of a PM. And you can exhibit them or learn them or show your managers the management that you want to go into that space as an engineer, designer, or a marketer. It really doesn't matter. The three things, I mean, the three buzzwords, the why and the what and the how, that's the thing which really matters for a PM. For why, you've got to understand the product sense. Learn more about the space, your customer. If you are in a B2C space, really immerse yourself in that experience. If you're working for a great app, download the app, see the pain points, see how users are going to use it, how hard or easy is it to activate or to make payments, and then really go through that customer journey. If you are in a B2V space, which is also very different in nature, talk to your enterprises, talk to your ITs and organizations, sit with them and understand with them their day to day, understand their pain points, and how can you help with them? So always find opportunity to go talk to your customers, tag along with sales and customer success. As and when an opportunity arrives, those are great avenues to go avail, if you really want to learn more about product management. And then also understand what is the problem statement? What are your goals? Like what are you trying to do as a company, like measuring you want to get more adoption? Are you looking for improving metrics or customer satisfaction? Or are you trying to define OKRs? Are you trying to impact your revenue, the top line and the bottom line? Understand what really matters to your company? Like it can be one of the things that I just talked about, revenue, customer satisfaction, understand what the underlying goals are. That actually now brings you to understanding the what. How do you define what to build? And that always starts with understanding and defining and getting an alignment on your roadmap. Defining those long-term and short-term investments which you will make for the product. And making the audience understand what sort of trade-offs you have made for that roadmap. A lot of times, you might have to go do some user research. Put yourself in the hat of the users to understand how your users are using your product and build a deeper understanding of it. It also would really help you define your user stories. It will help you document them or brainstorm. A lot of times, people come back and say, hey, how do you get new ideas? You don't have to get all of those ideas. Just go out, extend and look around. Within your company, you will have great resources where you can brainstorm or pick up new ideas. A lot of times, as a product manager, it's not always about generating a new idea. You will have tons of ideas within a company. As a product manager, you should also know how to say no, which is also a very important part of the job. And then the first third one is about how. You have a nice roadmap. You have features. You have user stories. But now it has to implement, right? Otherwise, it's not going to go ship. And that's when you need to really define your scope. You need to rigorously prioritize and do trade-offs, have the technical chops to understand the challenges of which your dev team might have. They can range from privacy to security to infosec to compliance. Data privacy is such a huge thing these days. So you have to be that problem solver or that problem manager as well. A lot of times, product managers are also called as problem managers, where you have to also manage some of the release blockers and understand what sort of trade-offs you might have to go make. Also, when you're shipping something, it's also important for you to know how would you measure it. That is a key thing. And in defining that success and metrics is really important for you as a PM. Because when you ship something, eventually you will have to know how is it performing in the market. Are you getting the right set of adoption or not? Are you getting the right customer satisfaction? Are you getting negative reviews? And that will really decide how will you make further enhancements? Or how can you better improvise a product? All right. So now that brings us to the next section, which is about, hey, I've heard PMs at a big company or a startup are very different. You need very different skillset, the interviewing, style can be very different. But let me tell you one thing. Most of the skills are pretty transferable. You might have to make few adjustments, as I had to go make when I was working within for a company which had more than 100k employees, down to now only 215 employees. My CEO or my CMO is just a thing away. And I will see them probably two to three times in a product review council or in my OKR reviews. So I would recommend you to not think or get boxed with that thinking. Focus more on building a brand, which is important as a PM. Try to get, if you're working in a big company, try to get into teams which have an external facing angle to it or products, which align with your core skillset and also would give you some experience about a product which is end user facing. Product is also increasingly becoming a very important function even at early state startups. You do need individuals to represent voice of customers. Startups are getting product focus. If you go look at the job portfolio, you will find multiple opportunities where very early state startups are hiring PMs with skills which are pretty transferable. Interview processes are also very similar. There's no rocket science to it. At times you may have a take-home assignment, which is a great way for a startup to know about your core fundamental PM skills. And how would you fare the company if you get hired? So these are some of the meta themes I have identified where I feel that these are all the skills which are transferable from a big company to a startup. I would spend some time on this to talk about my experiences or how I feel that you can get benefit from them even if you work at a big company or a startup. Let's start with problem size and scale. In a bigger company, your persona and your target audience might vary a lot because you are working on a suite of products. When I was at Microsoft, I was working at Office and in Windows and then Azure. So my target audience and my persona did differ as I was switching products. Whereas in startups, you have a very focused persona disrupting a new or an existing market with a very fresh take or a new business model. So you will find similarities. Even in bigger companies, if you go into a brand new service or if you go into a brand new business, you would see that your challenges are going to be very similar. Now that is a good segue to product fit where even if you're working for a bigger startup, they're always striving to ensure that whatever your building meets the customer needs. There has to be a constant demand. Otherwise, your startup will go out of business or in a bigger company, your product will be deprecated or it will be defunded. So that product fit is a constant need, which needs to happen regardless. Also, with my experiences, I have seen for adoption curve startups try to get more increased user adoption or revenue because they have limited cash flows. And the product investments they make as a small company with a limited cash pool should really justify what metrics they are trying to impact. And at the beginning, it's all about getting more users. It's all about getting more revenue. There isn't a lot of cushion there. Even at bigger companies, you can find teams or organizations which are very startup-y in nature. When I was at Microsoft, I took up or launched products from scratch where I had to go seek funding. When I say seek funding, I really don't mean that I raise money. It was all about getting sponsorship for getting devs who can do investigations or do some sort of a prototype of the idea or the concept I was trying to build. This was really helpful for me to understand the whole facets of product management. And then how would you go build something from scratch if the way you would do for a startup? So that sort of really helped me in my journey. All right, so let's talk a bit about experimentation as well. I do feel there's a lot of similarities between how do you experiment at a bigger company versus a smaller one? I mean, you can fail fast, try again, but in both scenarios, you don't want to fail forever. You have bigger or a smaller setup. Use data whenever possible. Remember that you might not have data, especially at startups when you're launching a brand new service or an MVP. Most of the best decisions, which I think I've made in my career, were at times a mix of gut and data. So be ready for it when the time comes. And then back yourself. PMs are bound to fail. There is never a PM who have had all of his releases to be perfect. So be ready that you will have challenges and impediments. The next one is my favorite. So how do you sort of quickly scale up and scale down from 10 feet to a 10 K feet view, right? Every day, every hour can be very different for you as a PM. At times, you might be writing a very detailed one-pager or a two-pager or a six-pager to define a feature or write about an incident which happened for one of your customers. Or you might be doing some analysis about why your customers are churning. If you're losing deals, why is that happening? You're doing some funnel analysis. Or at the next hour, you're probably working on a pitch deck for a customer call or a roadmap, right? So abstracting and presenting information and understanding your audience is a key to success. At times, I've seen folks get too technical where the audience is a leadership. So know your audience and cater your content and then switch context as and when needed. And this is a skill you will need at a big company or a startup no matter what. And the last but not the least is measuring success, right? You've got to measure every feature or product you launch. You have to understand usage behaviors or patterns because they help you make the right trade-offs. And all of this data will also help you convince your internal and external stakeholders when you come up with a new set of investments or new ideas which you want to incorporate or do for your products. So that was a bit about my experiences with big companies and startups and the common updates which I find in the product management space. The last topic is about, and I've heard about this from a lot of people, a lot of aspiring PMs, is about, hey, do I really need an MBA, right? You will see a lot of job postings and they will say, hey, MBA is preferred or we would need to have somebody with MBA background and things like that. I really believe that it helps, like education does help, but do you really need an MBA for a product role? Not really. And in some of these jargons or terms that you're seeing in this slide, you would come across these in your product management journey or in your data-based job. And they sound very MBA-ish. They're typically student-type as MBAs or things which only MBAs can do well. But what I'm going to go talk to you about, how can you still achieve and then learn and gain these skills without an MBA degree and then how I did it in my experiences of being a PM? Always read success stories of other companies and startups and then they will also help you get a better understanding of these topics. Let's start with market sizing. A lot of times, looking at the data yourself helps you project the opportunity size. When you try to pitch a feature, always have a projection when you are telling a story because it helps bring conviction. And at times, you can also consult with your analyst or data scientist within your organization to really validate your hypothesis. So really looking at the data yourself, doing some projections and touching numbers, if you know SQL or some like Python, that really would help you understand what is the opportunity size of the product or the feature you're launching. So enhance your data skills. That's what you need. Project Charter. Product Charter for me is more like a movie script writing. Think about what's the core ethos of your particular product or category. How does it align with the overall offering of your product or the company? Think about the use cases. Think about the pain points. Think about what will you do when you come in as a leader? You are the CEO of this product or feature. Think about what will you do for it in the next one or two, three years and then define that strategy. It's just about it sounds straightforward, but at times it's a lot about really doing a storytelling and then using your peer is to validate and then get feedback upon it. And then that will really help you make solid product charters and demonstrate that you have in yourself to think about the product region and take it ahead. Grow plan. This is also a buzzword, right? How would you grow your product? How would you attain organic growth? So what I really did in the past is I reached out to growth PMs. I reached out to marketing for innovative and net you ideas and really understood like how do they did growth, right? But they're offering tries to the customers, free ties to the customers and then converting them to paid customers. Or they were running some other campaigns which were really helping grow the product. So establishing those connections with the growth PMs or the marketers or product marketing team within your organization would really help you build these jobs. The next one is also pretty interesting, pricing models, right? People say, oh, you really need, do you need some finance or accounting background to really have great pricing models? Well, the way I sort of look at it is look at your competitors, right? Today, most of the data is publicly available, understanding their motivations and understand their motivations and how they're pricing their product, right? You can also talk to your customers and get feedback from them on how do they feel about your pricing strategy, right? Always think broadly about, are you building a product for a niche audience? Does that justify the tag? Or are you only building for Fortune 500? Or are you also targeting small or mid-sized companies? Or you're just building for the masses, right? So when you really have those targets in your mind, it will help you understand how these models are constructed and then what goes behind building a pricing strategy, right? Or a basic thing would be just think about how would you price something if it was your own idea? If you were to go to a startup, you will obviously do some analysis, look at folks around you and how they are pricing their offerings, how would you beat them, right? So start from there and then you will get some great cues about how these pricing models are done, right? Last but not the least is go-to-market, right? It's like a movie. If you don't have a good climate, it ain't going to work, right? So that team with product marketing understand how the go-to-market is done, right? There are pre- and post-launch motions. There is online and offline campaigning, right? A lot of times it's about blogging. It's about going to forums or maybe going to social media to talk about your product or launch or do some sort of a pep talk, you know, and why did you build this and how are you envisioning your customers to leverage this offering? All right, with that, that was the end of my session. If you want to have a chat with me and deep dive on any topics, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to connect with you all. If you need some interviewing prep on how did I go about prepping for a startup, I'm more than happy to share my experiences, my years and my names. And also, if you're experiencing imposter syndrome and if you have felt doubts, yeah, reach out. And let's chat to know more about how to get you into product management. Thank you so much.