 Hello everyone. Welcome to the session today where I'm going to be talking about my journey into a product manager role. I'd like to start by saying that all the views expressed in this session are purely my own and does not reflect views of any of my previous employers. I'd also like to thank Product School for giving me the opportunity of sharing my experiences and learnings with this awesome group of aspiring product managers. So let's get started. Let me start by talking about my professional journey. After completing my engineering, I work for a company called Canbey, which was my introduction into the software and tech world. I coded in Kabul and I developed my sense of logical thinking in this place. Post there, I went in for my MBA where I majored in quantitative finance and systems. And then I started working in a startup called Aptiva, which was in the financial risk consulting space. In a startup, you get flavors of multiple different roles and I was fortunate enough to have that experience. One such role was that of a product manager. Some of the key skills that I picked up there was stakeholder management, the art of storytelling, and requirements gathering that we then translated back into a product that we built for them. Post the startup stint, I went and joined Goldman Sachs as a quantitative risk analyst. And some of the skills that I have learned there have stayed with me ever since. One such skill, which is very, very important in the world of product management as well, is called consensus building or the art of getting everyone to buy into your idea and then move to the execution stage. So how do you do that? Added to that, there were other disciplines that Goldman taught me, chiefly being following through with your commitments, showing up and your sense of self leadership as well as the demonstrated team leadership with or without interested authority. Post Goldman, I started working as the lead of product analytics for risk and trust initially and then for payments in eBay. And then finally in 2022, I took the big step and moved into the world of product management as a group product manager for the stores and feedback team. So this entire journey of mine has been really interesting, especially the last few years in eBay where I was really able to make that transition from a product analytics to a product manager. And that's what we're going to be talking about in detail today. So the first step is to know your why. Why do you want to do product management? And the key to that is to understanding the PM role. Our friend Dilbert here shares some pieces of wisdom. This is not what a PM role is all about. So I said about understanding what the PM role is in a big company with set processes, with methodologies that are associated with a product delivery. I wanted to really understand that to make sure that I make an informed decision. So what were some of the things that I was looking to understand? Skills and what are the experiences that are needed to become a product manager? What do the goals of a product manager look like? Who are some of their key stakeholders? What does a typical day of product management look like? And then what differentiates a successful product manager from the rest of them? So here are some of the actions that I took to understand all these questions that I had in my mind. One, as I said, I was working in the product analytics space. So I had the advantage of working with product managers and observing them in action through my meetings, group meetings, one-on-one meetings. I really developed this sense of appreciation of the way they go about their things, the things that occupy their mind in terms of priority, in terms of the roadmap items and the metrics that they are obsessed about. I also had multiple coffee conversations with a lot of product leaders and product managers, not just within my domain, but outside of that domain, but within eBay. And again, the goal here was to understand when they are looking to hire a PM, what are the skills that matters most to them? Are people open for folks from different backgrounds or do they only look for core PM skills and experiences? I got pointed to a lot of online resources on Reforged, Coursera, YouTube, a lot of videos. And I did a lot of reading as well, spent my time reading articles, books, blogs, listened to a lot of popular podcasts as well on this topic of product management. I'll take this opportunity to recommend one book if you've not read, to definitely read that. And that book is inspired by Marty Kalen. I have actually read that book twice. The first time when I was trying to make this transition, I was binging out on this journey. And then second, once I had completed the journey, I had made the transition, I came back and tried to reread it to make sure that the concepts that I had understood it then, they were, in fact, as it was meant to be. And how did it relate back to the experiences that I was now having as a Group Product Manager at eBay? The second most important thing to do is to do a self-assessment. And actually, let me take a step back, is to first understand what are the skills and competencies that a Product Manager is expected to have, and then do a self-assessment against those skills to see where you are on the skills that are required. There are multiple ways of doing this, but the thing that I used was what is known as a PM competency map that has been developed by Ravi Mehta, who we all know is a strong influential voice in the world of product management. This exercise, and I provided a link in this deck, so you can go and read about it more and do it for yourself. But basically, what Ravi has done is that he's taken 12 competencies and grouped them into four broad buckets, product execution, customer insight, product strategy, and influencing people. And then he asks you for each of these competencies to rank yourself from needs focus to outperform. So I did that exercise, and some of the things that came out for me, where I was doing well or outperforming was fluency with data, because I was working in the analytic space, voice of the customer. So I'm a person who likes to think about customer experience as we build product strategies and solutions. So this was something that I was already doing and doing well. Product vision and road mapping. Again, as a product analyst, there are several opportunities where you work with your DMs and engineering partners to help build the product roadmap. And so I did have a sense of what the skill was all about and how it would be measured. Team leadership, I was in a leadership position. So team leadership is something again that I was already aware of. I was performing that in my current role, as well as stakeholder management. Because I was in the position that I was, I had exposure to a lot of senior leaders. And so managing their expectation, making sure that they are successful, really helping product leaders understand the performance of their product or assess the opportunities for the product strategy. These were all things that I worked on. And those were some of the things that came through in the stakeholder management. So I was doing well on some of the areas. But then there were a bunch of areas where I did not have too much experience or knowledge about. So just to give you a few examples, all of those skills within product execution, feature specification, product delivery, quality assurance, I did not know anything about them. And so I had to pivot back to fill the gap there. I pivoted back to what I had done earlier, which is bank on these online resources like Reforge and courses on YouTube, articles, books, which allows you to understand the concept of product execution and really see how you can develop those skills by really understanding. The advantage that I had was that I was working in product analytics, which is an adjacent function to product management. And so for me, it was relatively easier. But the best thing would be to fill the gaps once you've identified them is to see if there are projects that you can get that allows you to build those skills or exercise these skills that you already have. If your product counterparts are willing, ask them for a stretch assignment where you can work on projects that allow you to develop these skills. Have that open conversation with them and see if that works out. For me, I did not have any project, but I used all these secondary resources to develop my understanding. So before moving on to the next step, so what was my why? As I mentioned earlier, every few years I do want to work in something new and second, so that was the inspiration of doing something different from what I had been doing for almost like 10 years, analytics in financial risk space and then within e-commerce. And then also the fact that I saw that I could have a more direct impact with my customers, the impact that could be measured through customer feedback or through business outcomes as a product manager. As a product analytics person, I could influence some of the decisions, but as a product manager, I could weigh in and then take a decision as well. So I felt that role would give me the ability to have an impact on the customer's experience or business outcome and I was really eager to do that. So that was my why and having understood the competencies, having understood the skill gaps, having understood the PM role, I decided that yes, this is what I wanted to do. So my next step was to craft my story. My next step was to craft my story. For that, there were a few things that I already had under my belt. So as I mentioned, I had a deep understanding of the payments and risk domain because I had been working in that domain for a significant amount of time. And then having been with eBay for that period of time, I also understood the business of my company. So if I do what that meant was that if I did need to make a transition to a different domain, I would still be able to do that because I understood the business of eBay well and how the entire ecosystem worked with buyers and sellers. I then wanted to articulate my experiences in the context of a PM role. What does that mean? So if you think about a PM role and then try to relate, what are some of the projects that you may have worked on which resembled a PM role? So to give you an example, are there projects that you could have worked on which required a lot of cross-functional team collaboration? And you were getting everyone together to make sure that this particular thing gets implemented or gathering requirements from your stakeholders. Your stakeholders have come to you with a problem. You're trying to understand the problem and then translating. Once you've understood the problem space, how do you then translate that into a scalable analytical solution which helps them, which helps resolve their problems. So helps them move faster with execution, helps them understand their product performance better or the business performance better. So doing those things. And thirdly, are there any strategic product changes that you would have recommended as a result of the analysis that you may have done through data analysis insights? I keep saying you, but this is about me. This is how I went about thinking about my experiences and trying to put them in the context of these three or four things that I mentioned. And the last thing was once you've really been thoughtful and thought about your experiences, was to then demonstrate a PM mindset. Now, eventually you will be going through an interview process and you'll need to demonstrate not just your experiences, but the PM mindset as well. So using the PM jargon and lingo to communicate with the hiring manager could come in really helpful. And so how do you do that? Again, there are multiple ways of doing it, but I thought of I leveraged this SAAL framework, which I came across over the internet. SAAL basically is there's a problem that you've solved and you're going to talk about that. So first you start off by setting the context. What was the situation or the problem that you were looking to solve? What were the actions that you took and which were the actions that you thought about you did not take and what were the tradeoffs that you made when you decided to take a particular action? Why did you make that decision of going with one action and not the other? So talking about that and then what was the outcome of the action that you did? Did it have any business outcome? Did it have any outcome on your product performance? What happened as a result of all of this? And then lastly, what were your learnings? If you were to take away some learnings from here and apply it to your next project, what are some of the things that you would do as a result of having gone through the experience of this project? So putting all of that in all of the experiences in that particular structure and then using metrics. PMs are obsessed about metrics. So using metrics to demonstrate the outcome of the project that you work on, talking about metrics and why that metric is important is again something that I was very thoughtful about as I was crafting my story. The next step is the most important one and that is preparation. And I've broken down preparation in two steps and the third one is a little different and I'll talk about that. So the first step, you start off by updating your resume. Your resume is your marketing material. It is the first thing that the hiring manager is going to look at and form an opinion about you. So use this material to highlight the experiences which resemble a PM's role, to show that you have fungible skills which can be applied into a PM's role. And so for me, I brought out things like data-driven mindset, my team leadership, my stakeholder management and how I've worked with the different senior stakeholders that I've had. So really talking about these and highlighting this in your resume becomes really, really important. One other thing I would suggest is use the what the Google recruiters call as the XYZ framework. So talking about your accomplishments like accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z. So try and put your experiences in that format and that'll be helpful in highlighting these experiences. Next, what a PM interviews look like. Again, I spend a lot of time through my conversations with product leaders and product folks through all these videos and podcasts. I got a sense of what the PM interviews could look like and broadly you could think of it as four types of questions that get asked. So the first one is product sense where the hiring manager or the interview panel is really trying to understand how you think about product, how are you structured, how do you take a big problem, boil it down to the most important smaller problem and then go about solving that. So product sense is all about, there are a number of frameworks that can help you answer, that can help you form a way of answering these questions. But to give you an example, a very famous popular product sense question is, what is your favorite product? Why? Sorry about that. Why? And how would you improve it? The second type of questions are KPI definitions. So just talking about metrics, if I had to do this, what kind of metrics would I use to measure? How would I go about doing that? Third is case studies, which can be asynchronous, meaning you're given a case study 48 hours, 72 hours in advance. You need to solve that case study and put it in a presentation and then present it into the interview panel. That's one form. The other form is a shorter case study is given to you during the interview itself and you need to solve that. Again, there are frameworks to handle these types of questions and I would go back and refer to them. One popular framework is circles method. So do go back and refer to that and try and think about some questions and use that framework as you practice your answers. This is something that I had done as I prepared for the interviews. And the last one is behavioral questions. This is more like, tell me about a time when you delivered a project under immense pressure or tell me about a time when you walked into a new team, a demotivated team and you had to motivate them and rally them around a common goal. How did you go about doing that? So these are typical behavioral questions and again, there is this popular framework called STAR, Situation, Task, Action, Results. I showed a version of that in the previous slide. So just use that to frame up your answers and prepare for these questions. The last bit is asking for help. It is not necessary to go on this journey alone. You can get a lot of help from other folks who have been in the product management world for a long time. So my suggestion here, and this is again something that I had done as I was preparing for this, is to build that trusted circle of people who you can approach and ask for help, whether it is resume reviews, whether it is reviewing your answers or responses to any of the behavioral questions that you may have drafted, or even taking mock interviews for you to make sure that your answers are crisp, relevant and well thought through. Particularly for me as I went through this, having these mock interviews with my PM friends and getting their inputs and feedback on how I was showing up was immensely helpful. So let's say you've done all of this and you land interviews, which is the next step. One thing I definitely would like to mention is that it's easier to move into a PM role, transition into a PM role in the same company where you've been working, because you already have a rapport of some kind with the PM community. People would know you, would know the skill sets that you have, and the value add that you can bring in their team. So it is easier to get through in the same company as compared to looking outside. But having said that, it is important to realize when we go and ask for an opportunity to move into a PM role, to join someone's team as a PM, there 100% match of the skill sets is still not there when we are making that ask. And so if a person decides to hire you, they are taking a bet of some sort on you. And this is the reason that you may find resistance as you go through this process, you may find that people may not be willing to take that risk or take that bet with you. So my recommendation would be to stay persistent, to stay focused, go back on understanding your why, knowing your why to keep yourself motivated. And then be focused on your preparation, make sure you're working on your story, you're working on your responses, you're preparing for your interviews with your trusted circle of PM friends, and you're ready as and when the opportunity lands to give your best. It may take time, so be patient. But you know, as you go through this, success will eventually meet you. With that, I'll leave you with three key takeaways. The first and the most important is to really understand and know your why, why do you think, why do you want to move into a PM role? The second step is to craft a compelling story. As I talked about leveraging some of the experiences from past to show how you can leverage them as a PM in your next role. And then staying persistent when you face resistance, when results may or not come your way, just being persistent and making sure that as and when the next opportunity lands, you are prepared to give off your best. With that, I think we've come to a close. That's all that I had for today. I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, reach out over LinkedIn to me. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much. Have a good rest of the day. Bye.