 Hi everyone, today I want to share a bit about my perspective on this topic. How to accelerate our career as a product manager. I still remember the first time when I started as a product manager. I was so eager to do a good job, improve myself, and stand out as a trustworthy product partner. However, there are so many directions that I could take myself in and so many things that I can focus my time on learning. But what should I really start with? What should I focus on? And how to make the most out of my time? If those are questions that's on your mind as well, don't worry. Today, I will share how you can own your career growth and prepare yourself for what you aspire to do. First, a bit about me. Before I found my passion in product, I've tried out a couple of different fields including data, marketing, and consulting. My full-time PM career has started with credit karma around less than three years ago. And now I'm a staff product manager here. There are of course a lot of people who have had faster career growth than me, but I still get asked this question a lot. How does it become a staff product manager in less than three years? To be short, I was very fortunate to have met some great mentors who taught me how to grow intentionally. I believe that with enough intention and diligence, we all can improve our product skills, gain credibility, and become a better product manager faster. Through trial and errors and observing other successful product managers, I found a set of key product pillars that anyone can work on to accelerate their product career. For today's presentation, I will first give an introduction of what these key career pillars are for a product manager and then dive into each one of them to explain why they're important and tactics on how to improve them. First, let's start with the pillars. The pillars of a product manager's career framework are made up with three key elements. It starts with the yellow foundation of our triangle, which represents the core product management skills. This is a set of core product skills that are closely tied with the success of our product work. By mastering these, you can maximize your ability to achieve impact through your product. Then on top of this, there is your superpower. Superpower is how you differentiate as a product manager. Your superpower helps you to stand out among competition and become a known expert in certain fields. I often think of our product core product skills as the admission GPA, where you have to reach a certain level of competency to do well in delivering products, whereas your superpower is like your awards, it's like your extracurricular activities. It's the kind of things that are unique about you that makes you stand out. Then lastly, it's important to pair your application with a great cover letter. This is where advocacy fits in. This is how you scale your impact, how you showcase your work, how you improve the visibility of not only your work, but also represent your team to make sure good work are rewarded with the right credits. To sum it all up, your superpower and core PM skills will allow you to become a proficient PM and maximize your product impact. The advocacy allows your great work to be seen, which will help you get more opportunity to continue better your career. Now let's dive into each one of them to see how we can win through them. First, our core PM skills. Even though product manager as a job is very inclusive and it can be hard to define, there's still a set of core skills that are often relevant for a product manager to do well in. They will help us up level our performance and as a result, accelerate our career. For example, the core PM skills that we recognize as a credit karma are execution, communication and collaboration, problem solving, product design, product strategy and leadership. Different companies might have different versions of this, but it's also possible that some companies don't formally define this as product managers. However, no matter which version you're looking at or you want to define for yourself, you can take actions to grow them. Know that the expectation or importance level of these skills obviously differ based on the stage that you are in with your career. Among the skills that we outlined, the most important ones for junior PMs tend to be execution and communication. These are very universal skills that apply to any type of project that you work on. Then depending on your projects, at least one of problem solving product design and product strategy will be highly relevant. Now you're familiar with the idea of core product management skills. How can we grow the core product management skills that we have? Let's start from evaluating ourselves to set a baseline. From there, we can decide on one area of focus among our weaknesses. It's also often helpful to get our manager or other stakeholders involved in this process. Not only they can provide us with more objective feedbacks, they can also offer their opinion on what's important to us at the moment that we should be working on. And also it's great that we can use them as a resource to bring storm together on things that we can do to improve these focus areas. With a clear understanding of what we want to focus on, our manager can help us find the projects that best align with our interests. Lastly, it's important for us to track our progress on an ongoing basis to refine our evaluation and focus area. This not only helps us to stay on top of our career, but also help to serve as a great tool for other people, including our managers and stakeholders, to show our progress over time. Now here's the activity to help you get started on this. Pull out a pen and paper or open up your preferred way of note-taking. Draw down the core PM skills, either from this version or your own version. Evaluate your competency in each one of them from a degree of 0 to 5, where 0 means not familiar at all and 5 means mastery. Reach yourself around where you think you are with each one of them. Once you're done that, circle around your weaker skills that you would love to spend more time improving on. If you can't make a decision right now, it's also completely okay to come back to it and spend more time on it. In fact, I want to leave you with the homework to do this exercise with your manager. And once you finish that, bring storm five ways to improve your focus area and make plans to work on it. Don't forget to also start a document to track your evaluation, focus area and action items. These exercises will help you become more aware of where you are, but also start working on it. It's also a great way to invite collaboration and opinion from your manager so that they are brought in to help you set up your success next. Now onto your superpower. Again, your superpower is what's unique about you, is what people remember about you and is what you do especially while in. This could be one of the core PM skills. It could also be more specific than that. For example, there are PMs who are very good at product strategy who have a track of record of delivering zero to one type of product exploration. There are also PMs who are very likable, great at building relationships and collaborating with other teammates. Once you have an idea about what your superpower can be, it can be very intentional about doing this exceptionally well and brand yourself around it. Your superpower will help you stand out among competition when there are opportunities that meet your expertise. Now think about what that means for you. Draw them three adjectives or phrases that you think others will use to describe you. And then draw them three adjectives or phrases that you will like to be known as. Examine the theme in these and find one core skill area that fits the theme that you want to grow the most as your superpower. The homework that I have for you here is to actually brainstorm specific ways to really stand out in your superpower area. Think about ways that you can be very extra here. For example, if your focus area is say communication, a specific action that you can take is for example, sending off weekly progress newsletters about your project to keep everyone aligned and motivated. Whatever that you decide to be for your focus area, make sure that you have specific and actionable items that you can do to specifically brand yourself to be strong at that area. Now with the combination of your core PM skills and your superpower, you can be a very great product manager. However, how to make sure great work is seen and how to maximize your impact and visibility. This is where advocating for yourself become extra important. To start advocating for our work is embedded in what we do as a product manager. It is our job to represent our team, showcase wins, and as a result pitch for more resources to grow our product and team. On top of that, visibility of our work is also great for our own personal benefits. No matter that's for promotion or getting good opportunities for what's next from our network. There are many ways that we can advocate for ourselves and our teams. It's important to think about what's appropriate for your specific situation. For example, if you work on a more horizontal type of team and your work is relevant to many others in the organizations, then maybe you can be more proactive about sharing processes and success that your team has with the work more broadly. Whether that's through email newsletters, show presentations, or any other format that you think are best relevant for your work. Another way that you can go about this is to actively think about how will your work benefit other teams or individuals. For example, you've been working on improving the collaboration process between your design and engineering partner, and you've had some success. You can think about how to formalize this workflow and share with the broader company or whoever else might be interested to learn more. Lastly, I always find it helpful to grow through the help of others. You can build relationships to have your own advocates in your company and also in the general industry. These people can help us go a long way. They can be our managers, mentors, or even peers. Not only we can learn from them closely, it also gives them a chance to know our work very well by helping us closely. In this process, they will see our growth firsthand and they will be able to vouch for our ability to other people who doesn't know us as well. Now, let's try to carve this out for yourself. List out three specific ways that you can do to share wins and learnings more proactively, create values for others, or build your network of advocates. Now, homework here is very simple. Actually, I think it would be great that you guys actually make this a plan that you can work on with specific timelines and more specificity around how you can achieve these things. Hope you all had fun getting to know yourself better and have had some ways and ideas on how to improve your own career. In the end of days, there is no single right answer to the best path to grow as a product manager. However, you have the answer for yourself. It was an intentional effort to build your core skill foundation, strengthen your superpower, and advocate for yourself. You will be able to learn, perform, and grow on the fast line. Many people like to use years of experience to evaluate PM. However, with an intentional strategy and effort to grow, you can really make the most out of the years of experience you have. My hope in sharing these activities is so you can feel empowered to own your own career growth. It has certainly made me feel this way when I try to apply these. Thank you so much for being a part of this presentation. Don't be shy to reach out if you have any questions or just want to stay in touch. You can follow me on Medium or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thank you.