 Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Based on the time zone you are in, hope you are doing well and safe. My name is Anshu. I currently work for HubSpot as a senior product manager and I am based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. So today I will be sharing my journey into product management. Hope my experience will help aspiring PMs and this is my first presentation for the product school. So sorry if I'm missing a few things. Based on a feedback I'll surely make it better next time. So a quick overview of my career. I started my career as a software engineer in TCS, worked for a year and a half before moving to Oracle as a logged in Oracle for almost three years. Here I started working very close to the product management group, got to understand more about their role and next I did my consulting for almost three years in EMEA, APAC and North America region. I traveled to different clients location, understand their pains and based on that I built applications that fulfill their need. I worked for Honeywell as a technical product manager for almost two and a half years. I built finance, manufacturing and project management applications which helped company run their daily operations smoothly. And recently I joined HubSpot as a senior product manager. Regarding my education background, I did my undergrad in IT back from India and did my MBA from Kelly School of Business majoring in marketing and entrepreneurship. Regarding this audience for this presentation, this presentation will help folks who are currently working with other roles like engineering, finance, etc. This talk can also help candidates who are straight out of college and looking to break into product management. I really love this quote. I think in 2010 a study from Princeton University researchers showed that having a higher income increases happiness but only to some extent like and that extent at that time it was defined as $75,000 per annum. Beyond that, higher paid doesn't influence happiness as much as the other factors do and one of the factors is love for your job. So yes, I think that the only way to do a great job is to love what you do and if you haven't found it yet, keep looking for it. Just don't settle for it. So most of the PM's path in product management is different. Some accidentally land into the job, some plan their career and some become PM straight out of the college through programs like APM. Some comes from engineering background like me and other switches from various backgrounds like customer support, business analysis, IT, marketing, finance, arts, and name few. You can get into product management irrespective of the education and the work background that you have right now and there doesn't exist one single path to move into product management. Aspirants can take key points and inspirations from others move and it will definitely help them but they should own their own journey. But the next big question is how will informational interview help? Try to find out connections from the network who had similar background and talk to them. I can't tell you how important this step is and it may make or break your product management career and when I say break, I mean someone might be interested into PM role but after hearing the real ground stories, they may veer off to a different career option. So, informational interviews are quick checks on if this is the career you want to move and if yes, then it also helps you identify the path you want to take. So, one more important asset that you will be creating through informational interview is product management connections. I felt that LinkedIn acts as a key database to find candidates you can reach out to but definitely you can reach out to your alums, the product managers in your company and the people with whom you have worked before. The product management interview should be between like 15 to 30 minutes and prepare the questions well before the interview. Big no in these interviews are like don't ask for a job. It should be strictly informational. In my case, I reach out to the product managers with whom I work before alums who move into product management roles and also product managers from my current company. By now, you should be able to answer this question to yourself like why do you want to be a product manager? Many of you might have already know before the informational interview stage but for others by now it should be crystal clear why you want to be a product manager. What are the aspects of product manager stop that that will delight you? Do you want this job for the next 5 to 10 years? And if you get a positive answers from within, go ahead with your prep. For me, customer or user delight was always fascinating. I always wanted to stay close to our customers, empathize with them and then understand their pain. What really made my day is when I saw our products resolve real world customer pain and product care career was the answer for me. So mindset, yeah. So product management is also a mindset and you can think as a product manager in your current job too. So what I mean by that is like suppose if you are an engineer, ask these important questions like why I am building this feature? Who needs it? Why I am building it now? What will happen if I don't ship this feature now and ship something else? Like try to find the answer to these questions. Talk to your PM, read product documents, read marketing materials about the product that you love or the product in which you are working and get answers to these questions. For me, I was doing consulting. I realized that I wanted to be a product manager and started applying all product management skills like VOCs, customer empathy, etc. in my day to day life. The only thing I can say is don't wait till your first job to do PME. If you are part of a product company, apart from your current job responsibilities, ask for PME responsibilities from your organization leaders. It will help you gain some product experience which will help you during your interviews. This experience can also make you strong contender for internal job switches. For me, I was given a role of a lead programmer analyst but I requested my senior director to give me product responsibilities too. She was happy to offer me those responsibilities. So I did not ask for a PM role but I asked for few more responsibilities that would make me happy in my current job. I jotted down those PM responsibilities and I asked for those specific opportunities. And I was already doing 75% of the product management work without even getting in the title of a product manager. It's a cool thing. Trust me and it helped me a lot but it's true. So update your resume with new product management roles and responsibilities that you have been performing over the past year and a half. It will help outsider understand the PM responsibilities that you have performed. And sometimes I have noticed that the candidates write too much technical stuff especially engineers about their product rather than writing stories about their product, general objectives, KPIs and impact that the product has brought. The candidates also tend to write only about the roles and responsibilities that is officially part of their job description. But I guess we should also highlight other PM responsibilities too that you have been performing in your current job for a year, last year and a half. For me, I was a senior consultant having many different roles and responsibilities but I started highlighting any responsibility related to PM that I was performing. It helped the recruiting companies understand what I have done in the past and based on that they can decide if I would be a good match for their PM opening. The next thing is that interview prep. So all your efforts are in vain if you cannot express your views during the interview process. So this is one of the most important steps in your journey. Preparing for interview is a beast of its own and may need few more dedicated sessions to explain. For me, during my search, I noticed that PM interviews can be put into two categories. One is behavioral that is preparing past experiences in a methodological way. Some call it a star method like you provide the situation, task, the action you have taken and what results you have brought in. And most of the companies like Amazon have this kind of interviews. The next thing is that I've seen companies like Google and Facebook, they ask for design interviews, questions like product design, estimations, product strategy is asked in this kind of questions. And in my opinion, if you don't have a PM experience, design questions are easy to prepare. I feel that some PM experience is needed to answer, especially drill down questions on behavioral. The two things that you have to be repeatedly be doing and being ruthless about is practice and apply. Practice your questions, PM interview question and answers with your mentors, friends and any partner who is ready to help you. And also at the same point of time, continuously apply for jobs for which you are looking for. I've read multiple blogs about PM prep I've read books to, but one point I haven't seen much is like people stretching, stressing on wrong preparation. So there are a lot of materials on internet and it may confuse budding PMs on their preparation. So make sure you follow the trusted resource or have mentor to talk to do retrospective about your prep. So if you are not able to convert, then take a step back and try to identify the reason why you are not able to make it wrong preparation will increase your TJ. So TJ is basically the time to land into your first PM job. If needed, take help from your professors, mentors, friends, etc. So the next one is yep, this, this will not only help you now, but it will also help you continuously once you start your PM career. So folks can start with Marty Kagan's and then the list continues, you can find the list in internet with book ratings. And you can do topic specific readings like if you want to learn about OKRs, then you can read the book measure what matters by John. So those things you can do. Yes, I know things are pretty crazy for the last year and a half. We have we are not meeting people in person. And I used to go to these product events, mind the product in my local in my city. But the good news is that these events are happening these days, and it's virtual. So take part in this product events like mind the product, product con, etc. The talks here are very helpful and provide a lot of insights on product management and the best practices that are being performed these days. So and and the suggestion is that if you cannot attend this event, search for videos in YouTube or listen to podcasts, these will really help you out. Yep, I cannot tell you like how important this is throughout your journey. Rejection is a big part of the journey. So it's okay to get early rejections, learn from it, take the challenge heads up and you will see a light at the end of the tunnel. I have seen through my friends have seen through the community has seen through. So definitely you will be so stay motivated. Yeah, the data is PM's friends forever. So if I end this talk without discussing data, like, I will not be doing justice. So as of now, you have like almost 17k. And I think this data is like year and a half old, but still good. So you have almost 17k PM jobs in US and the job count is increasing y or y 32%. So that that's good. That's good. And you have almost like 41,000 pms in US and it's a very big community that that can help you can even connect to people you can ask for mentorship, you can ask questions, you can have into informational interview and definitely you will get get mentors or PM's who will help you out. So you have a big community behind you take help from them. So yeah, that's like end of my talk. Thanks everyone for listening it out. You can reach me reach me on LinkedIn. And you can put out comments. Let me know if you want to know details about any particular step. If I get a substantial request on any particular topic, I can write blog post or a medium post on this. Hope this will help the spying PM community. Welcome again to this PM journey. Stay safe. Stay motivated. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.