 Hello everyone. My name is Anand Bhatt and I am a Senior Product Manager at Amazon. Today I'll be talking about how to overcome imposter syndrome as a product manager. Throughout my career I've had different phases where I've experienced imposter syndrome and in this talk I hope I will put forward those experiences and provide few tips and tricks for you to keep in mind as you experience imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome by definition is a feeling of inadequacy or a feeling of not being enough in your roles and responsibility. I started off as a software developer and transitioned into a product manager so I would say this is sort of a traditional path to being a product manager. Despite that I have experienced a lot of imposter syndrome during this transition and even after I transitioned into product management. So I can see that different phases of my product management journey I've had imposter syndrome kicking me hard and in that process I've learnt a lot about myself and what works for me and what doesn't work for me. So hopefully this talk will provide you with some information in this regard. A little more background about myself I started off as a computer science undergrad transitioned into software engineering. Given that I had the same background helped me a lot and so the first two years of my software engineering was more about learning and understanding how software engineers work in the industry. Two years down the line I realized that software engineering was not for me and so I started doing PM-ish stuff within Honeywell. I enjoyed writing system requirements, testing and basically owning end-to-end product development life cycle and this kind of ambiguity gave me a lot of excitement and that was something that I really enjoyed. Next I transitioned to go back to school and do my MBA. This was a period of a lot of ambiguity, a different kind of ambiguity because I was going back to being a student, learning a lot of new stuff which kind of made me uncomfortable. I took a stab at consulting and quickly realized that consulting was not for me and so I decided to double down on product management. The good thing in being anxious as I was doing MBA was that I had a group of students who were in the similar situation and so I felt less anxious during this time. At the same time, given that I was back to being a student, failure was part of learning and there was no downside or risks of failing as opposed to one failing while at work and so it really did not bother me that I was working or I was learning something ambiguous and I would eventually fail at it as well. So there was a little bit of anxiety or imposter syndrome but I would say there was more to come later on in my career. During this time, I got an opportunity to intern at Amazon as a product manager and it was during this time where my imposter syndrome was at its peak. It was a 12-week internship and all throughout the 12-week I felt really judged. I had huge confidence issues on whether I would be able to deliver at Amazon, a top company and whether or not I was worthy of even being there. I always had this feeling that people would figure out that I became a PM intern at Amazon as a fluke and I had this feeling of not being deserved in the role. I'd say at the end of 12 weeks, this feeling of anxiety got the better of me. I did not convert my PM internship into a full-time role and at the end of it, I was less anxious and more analytical in understanding what went wrong and it is during this time that I learned of imposter syndrome as a thing. So I did a little bit of soul searching. I went back to my MBA, finished my courses and was looking for a full-time role and back in my mind, I always had this feeling of what went wrong, what could I have done better and it boiled down to me concluding that I had to be a lot less anxious. I did not want to be in that situation of self-doubting myself. And so I had that feeling in my mind and prepared for searching a full-time product manager role going forward. So for the next couple of years, I quote and quote was a product manager for different companies. So I joined an early stage startup called Gallup.ai. There the product management was a really scrappy role where I had to do a lot of different things. The role there lasted for three months and I eventually switched to a PMO role at Amadeus. Now this was far away from product management. PMO was project management office and I had to do a lot of presentations, Excel tooling, project management and support different teams. So it was during this time where I really questioned myself on whether PM was a product management was the thing for me. I did not necessarily enjoy the role. So I knew that these roles were really transitioning a transitionary in the long scheme of things in my life. But at the same time, I wanted to kind of get back to product management eventually because I liked the true essence of product management, which was defining problem statements and providing solutions with the customers in mind. Sort of something that I had done back at Honeywell. During this time, I got an opportunity to interview again at Amazon. This time as a product program manager, with my past experience, I was able to crack the interview again. And then so I joined as a program manager. Program manager was a different kind of a role and I eventually wanted to take a stab again at being a product manager at Amazon. And so I transitioned into product manager in May of 2021. So I've been a product manager at Amazon since then and I have not only transitioned into being a product manager, but also have been promoted into a senior product manager. And so I feel the past few years have given me a lot of confidence, a lot of applications of my past experience that have helped me set myself up for success into being a good product manager, a confident product manager within Amazon. So this has been my overall background. A little note further is, I don't know if you know of Myers-Briggs personality test. I'm a fan of it and I am an ISTJ, which stands for Introverted Sensing, Thinking and Judging. If you want to learn more, do Google this up. It's fun and it's interesting and at the same time it provides a lot of interesting facts about your personality type. All right. Getting back into imposter syndrome, what I've done here is I've just kind of expanded the role of any product manager and a typical PM life cycle in any organization. And this is more relevant I think for PMs in a company as big and as fast-paced as Amazon. So a typical expectation of a product manager onboarding would be like you would join a particular team, you would shadow or learn from different stakeholders, you would deliver different results along the way and you would get buy-in and earn trust of different stakeholders and eventually you would get to an effectiveness of 100% at the end of let's say 12 months. So that's your expectation. The reality is you kind of start onboarding and along the way you are thrown different challenges by your stakeholders and you're expected to solve them or find solutions to them and you fail along the way. And so the reality is somewhat of a zigzag kind of graph as opposed to a parabolic graph where you kind of incrementally learn and deliver results and you're iteratively adding on to your job effectiveness. And so this zigzag effect or deviation from your expectation kind of adds on to anxiety and a feeling of not being worthy of the particular position you are in. And so this affects your happiness, this affects your confidence and so on the right. Just adding on to the same chart, I would say that your feeling of confidence kind of dwindles and this ebbs and flows to it during different phases. And so the gap between expectation and reality as it expands, there's more self-doubt and there's more imposter syndrome kicking in as you carry out your day-to-day or month-to-month task. So that's a typical PM life cycle I would say. And so the takeaway here is imposter syndrome is something that you have to manage. Product manager role is a role of a lot of ambiguity. And so you need to be comfortable with that feeling of ambiguity, a feeling of not knowing a lot of things in the scope of your product. And at the same time providing meaningful insights and providing a working backward solutions to your product. And so whenever there is this gap between your expectation of where you should be as a product manager in your team versus where you are, it is important to be super self-aware of the fact that onboarding or working towards being a good product manager is a non-linear or a non-iterative journey and there are going to be failures. And so knowing that helps you in managing and recognizing imposter syndrome and this feeling of anxiety. Adding on to this, you get imposter syndrome during different phases of your PM career. In mind, when I transitioned from being a software developer to taking up MBA and then taking up full-time PM roles, you have this classic chicken and egg problem where you don't have a lot of PM experience on paper, but at the same time you need to crack into PM roles while those PM roles expect some level of experience in product. And so interviewing for PM roles, getting the domain knowledge in different domains that you want to get your foot into when you don't have those domain knowledge is where imposter syndrome can kick in big time. Now, when you transition into a PM role, you have your daily PM expectations or roles of coming up with problem statements, pitching these different ideas to different stakeholders, earning their buy-ins, influencing different teams, involving in technical discussions with different teams and understanding their agenda and finding common ground. So all of these require a lot of soft skills and hard skills. And so during these different phases of your PM skills as well, PM life cycle, you tend to have different degrees of imposter syndrome too. Another thing, I think the last bottom couple of factors that affect a lot in anxiety and imposter syndrome as a product manager are arc changes. One thing that I've learned in my current role is your team and your manager and your skip level manager set you up for success and managers play a big role in either making or breaking your PM career. And so when you have managers moving in and out of your team, you have leadership moving in and out of your team, it is super important to be aware of that change, aware of the new leaders and new managers coming in and making sure that you have a good communication style with different types of leaders so that you earn their trust in short term and long term and make sure that arc changes do not affect your product journey or your growth journey. The second thing in arc changes is basically understanding the role of the product team in the arc that you work in. This is a little bit of a tricky thing because as you join a new team, you go in with this expectation based off of your interview, the questions and the interactions you had with the different team members in the interview and you have this idea of what this product team is. Eventually over 6 to 12 months, you get different aha moments and you get to a point where you now know you have a reality of what the product team is and it's quite different from what you had thought when you joined during day one. And so there is this moment of realization or feeling that this is not something that you had when you had joined and that is a normal feeling. A lot of product teams and product management arcs have different realities as you gain more experience in them as you understand the politics of different stakeholders and teams and you get familiarized with that. And the final factor is pretty relevant in 2023. It's the effects of post COVID, this different dynamics of working from home versus returning to office and due to macroeconomic conditions, this spending doom of layoffs and big tech. All these factors kick in anxiety and imposter syndrome to different degrees in my career. Now, a more traditional factor or more interpersonal factor where imposter syndrome kicks in or anxiety kicks in is when you work with different types of personalities within your org. So this is a textbook definition or classification of different types of personalities you and this could be one of one of these states could be you as well as one of these states could be your manager or skip or different stakeholders. And so anxiety or different levels of imposter syndrome kicks in when you have disagreements, when you have conflicts and the personality styles of the people that you have conflict or arguments with are of different personalities and it rubs off differently for different people. I personally my personal take is that there is always going to be a feeling of tension when you disagree or when you have conflict with your stakeholders and that is a normal thing. I always go in with this understanding that everybody in my team or with whom I interact with are there to solve a particular problem or a pain point. And so the path that we choose to solve could be different. What is important or what has helped me kind of make peace with this feeling of anxiety is that knowing that the parts might be different and it's okay to take different parts in different situations depending on how passionate I am with those solutions. So that has helped me a lot in dealing with different personalities and taking the personalities out of the problem and focusing more on the problem has helped me kind of get back into being a good product manager and not really worry about the tension that I get or that I sense when I disagree or have a conflict with my peers. Now that we have spoken about when imposter syndrome can kick in, I now want to focus on what has helped me personally. So in the macro, looking at my product management career, I feel some of these factors are super relevant or super important for me to help me forge ahead in my PM journey. So knowing my PM style, so it's super important for me being an introvert to know that I in different circumstances might not be a type A product manager or the go-getter kind of a product manager. And I've gotten this feedback that I am more of a laid back, more of a deep thinker sort of product manager who takes a pause in before providing any sort of recommendation or opinion. So that has helped me a lot in being comfortable with who I am and also choosing and picking the kind of PM roles that I want to be in. At the same time, the teams that I want to operate in. Just to cross-reference this, I highly recommend you look at another product school video that's how to be a successful type B personality PM. I've watched it a couple of times and the talk really gave me some good sense on how I need to basically embrace some of the core beliefs that I have and not try to run behind a quote-unquote ideal definition of a product manager and try to fit myself into those definitions. Some of the things that have also helped me in being myself into a better space is understanding that I'm more of an introvert than an extrovert. In different phases of my career, I have inclined more towards being a scrappy product manager that is working off MLPs and really developing something from scratch. Whereas in some phases, I've been more of an enterprise product manager where I've worked on integrations and that has given me more satisfaction. So it really boils down to you knowing where you are as a PM and what makes you excited and what makes you really run away from it and having a healthy balance of both kind of helps you grow at the same time be grounded to your basic feelings. Second thing is this is an important one is finding your support group. Your manager definitely is one person you spend a lot of time with in your organization and so finding a right fit of your manager has helped me a lot and not only just growing as a product manager but also being really calm and being in the same frequency as just one other person in the team. In Amazon, I've had the fortune of working with different managers of different styles and I can say that striking a card, building a wrapper with your manager early on and being transparent about what you like doing and what you don't like doing kind of helps set that expectations of what type of product manager you are in the short term and in the long term it helps you and your manager build different tracks where you want to grow into specific modes of product manager for the team. So developing a good wrapper with your manager is one thing. The second thing is finding mentors, coaches within your org, outside your org and basically finding a support system is another important thing that I realized recently and that's something I've been working towards. Mentors and coaches help you a lot even though initially I was of the opinion that they did not matter a lot. So one example I would say is my org recently underwent a lot of changes. We had new leadership coming in and my mentors kind of helped me guide in setting up a good transitionary plan for myself and for my manager who was new to the team in basically building a good wrapper with the manager. So my mentors provided me with good guidelines which I blindly followed and that eventually led me to have a good relationship within my org. Similar to that, I think getting support from online product forums has helped me in not only cracking different interviews but also learning more about different orgs, learning more about different companies and their product cultures. I'm sure a lot of you are doing this so I would continue to do that practice and be super aware of the teams and the orgs that you're getting in. The other thing is as you grow as a product manager you kind of develop your own personality as a product manager and so you have sort of preferences or pet the use of product cultures that you want to go towards versus that you want to go away from. And so I would say spend some time once in a year trying to understand how you have grown, what are the things that you like as a product manager and what are the things you don't like as a product manager and develop some set of solid non-negotiables that you don't want to cross in your team or in your product org. This has helped me walk away from job opportunities identifying red flags during my interviews and at the same time realizing that if something that doesn't really excite me anymore I shouldn't be just jumping teams. And so that definition kind of helps you walk away from really poor product cultures, poor product definitions that you have developed for yourself that eventually prevents you from getting anxiety or a feeling of imposter syndrome in the long term. The final piece on the macro level I would say that and this is something that I cover in the micro as well is that what I've learned through my different experiences of imposter syndrome is that you always will have this feeling of anxiety kicking in different phases of your career and so it is super important to plan for failure and fail gracefully whenever you do. And so I am a fan of saying I don't know but I will find out which oftentimes isn't the case as you get started in your journey of product manager where you've been taught to not say I don't know or at least not come off as a novice. I for one am vocally self-critical when I fail and even when I don't fail I always look for things where look for white spaces in my career and in my projects and try to see where I could have done better and share it with my team. This has helped me keep grounded at the same time help my teammates recognize that I am honest in my assessment of success and failures. That has helped me build good trust channels with my teammates. The second thing is I think this is an obvious not necessarily for product management but for anyone starting a career is not to compare yourself with others but to compare yourself with your past. In retrospect I can say that I have grown tremendously as a product manager and that has helped me reinforce this feeling that I have grown so much and going forward working on different challenges or challenging myself under different problem domains or problem statements will only allow me to grow than make me more anxious. So that feeling has helped me identify different growth patterns and trajectories in my past and that has helped me not be afraid of taking up new challenges. Coming to the micro and this is the final piece I would say in your day-to-day activities or tasks focus more on getting things done than getting things done perfectly. Ask others whenever you have a big product event let's say a product launch or you're presenting an idea to different stakeholders. At the end of it do ask for feedback. Ask how did the meeting go with your peers. Ask with your stakeholders or your managers how do they feel about the direction that you're taking this particular project in. So constantly getting that validation or confirmation from your peers and managers helps you understand or reinforce that you're either going in the right path or you're not going in the right path so the next logical step would be let's discuss how to build a path to green. The next thing is whenever you're stretched too much demand support from your manager. Ask help from your peers. Be sure to offer help to anybody as well but I'm sure your teammates will help you in setting you and your team up for success. In this last year I have taken help from my teammates shamelessly in different occasions and so in retrospect I felt those moments of assistance have helped me a lot in managing my time and at the same time not feeling anxious and not being up at night. Retreating the same point that I've made in the previous slide plan to fail before any big product event that will help you fail gracefully at the same time have different contingency plans on when things fail. So failure is not really a surprise at that point. It's always something that you anticipated and it's just a normal part of your product outcome. So these were some of the micro tips that have helped me come out more successfully when it comes to a feeling of anxiety or imposter syndrome. So I hope these tips at a higher level and at a lower level have helped you. The last couple of points I want to make is imposter syndrome not necessarily for a product manager but for anybody in any phases of their life is mostly a manifestation of our own mind. As we grow in different phases of our career we have different expectations of ourselves and sometimes the reality might be different and that manifests into imposter syndrome. Now specifically on product manager rules because this deals with a lot of ambiguity that brings in a degree of imposter syndrome. So there is no such thing as overcoming imposter syndrome at least for me I would say. I've come to the conclusion that you will always have imposter syndrome to some degree and being aware of it and trying to mitigate it in some way by asking help or by developing different mechanisms is the way to go. So hopefully this has been informative for you and hope you had a good time learning about me and my experience and imposter syndrome. Thank you for your time.