 So about myself, I'm a product management leader. I've been doing this for the past 15 years. I have lots of experience in developing vision and roadmap, how to do people management, how to do leadership, how to bring the goal-driven product management, and how to do that. That translates into data-driven product management. That's how established goals. So this is, I have done a lot of this in different companies. I have been in healthcare. I've been in advertising. I'm in healthcare right now. I've been in technology industry. I've been in advertising. I've been in community-driven communities. So I've been in different verticals, and also I've worked with different customer segments. So B2B, B2C, Community-Based. I've done it for different companies. I've done it for small-scale, medium-scale enterprises, and also for startups, so different kinds of different sizes of organizations. I'm currently working as product lead for Kaiser Permanente in the digital services team. Where my role is to develop the vision and roadmap for their digital websites, so for their website and mobile app. So whatever their core priorities are for Kaiser, how their digital team or digital properties can support those core strategic priorities. How can we do member retention? How can we achieve market growth? So what are those initiatives that Kaiser should be pursuing from digital standpoint to meet their strategic goals? That's what I'm doing. Before that, I have been at Microsoft for a decade almost, working in different teams from MSN and doing advertising to working in enterprise services and going through digital transformation. And before that, I've worked in small and medium industries. This is my way of giving back to community. I'm very passionate about giving back to community. And when we go through what are some of the other skillset that you can harvest to grow yourself as product manager, we'll be talking a little bit more about that, that how this helps giving back to community. I'm also passionate about women in workforce and also women in, especially women in leadership roles. We need more women in boardroom. We have very few, even if we are doing a good job of providing support to women in being in workforce, but we still can get better in providing more and more support to them so that they can be in the boardroom. They can be in leadership roles. Also, I take pride in being a change agent. It is not easy. It is not, it is always, we can always go about with our life without even if we notice things are odd around us, but it takes courage, it takes sensitivity, it takes a lot to go and say or tell somebody or just if the restroom is not okay, right? You go in, you walk out and you're frustrated, but it takes a step to walk and tell somebody a store manager or something, hey, something is not right, can you take a look? So it is easy to go out and about with our life even if we do not like something, but it is hard to take a step forward in the right direction. And we have to, and we have to be, if we are just a little bit more thoughtful, it everybody can be a change agent in their own capacity. So I always pursue that and I always encourage people to be a change agent in whatever capacity they can. And the reason I talk about all these skills set as we go through the content, we'll be talking specifically about tools so which are hard skills for product manager, but when in the end we talk about the long-term growth of project manager, product manager, excuse me. So you'll see that how those skills set help you in becoming, you will then product management will start coming naturally to you because that is what product management is. There is, there are tools that help you, but there is a lot about those softer skills that also help in making you a better product manager. Okay, so the agenda would be that we will talk about need for tools because last time when I had such session, somebody said, hey, why do we even need tools? So which sounded like a fair question and I want to address that first and then talk about tools further. Art of building your custom toolbox. So when you are thinking about tools, what are those tools, what are those different criteria that you should keep in mind as you are thinking about building your custom toolbox. Tools from my toolbox, as I was saying, the tools, some of the tools that I have used, I will be talking about those tools, what have been the benefits, what I liked about them, what I did not like about them so much. And then beyond tools, how do you harvest the skills set because tools is only product management is part art and part science. Tools are part science but there is also a lot of art involved in it. So how do you harvest those skills set that would make you a successful product manager? So need for tools, why do we need tools? So this is the picture that says it, right? We need tools because there is always a way. We will get there one way or the other. Tools help us in getting from point A to point B effectively and in a most productive way as possible. Tools doesn't mean that it has to be something automated in cloud fancy subscription base. Even your Post-it notes are tools. Even your PowerPoint presentations are tools. Even whiteboard is a tool. Whatever works in your setting, whatever works in your stakeholder with your stakeholders with your needs, use that as a tool. Even just having a meeting and talking through it is also a medium. So it is just a way for you to get your point across, learn something and move to the next step. That's what tool is for and that's why we use tool. I think of product manager as handyman. So they have to have all kinds of tools in their back pocket. So you should always have those hammer and Phillips screwdriver and flashlight. And also you should know about those power tools. So that whenever, whatever you need, you can bring that up in the situation you are. With that, that's a very good segue to art of building our custom toolbox. So how to think about what kind of toolbox you need or you need to build. So type of project, it depends upon what kind of project you're working on. Software, hardware, I worked with, I met somebody recently who works at T-Mobile and is responsible for IOT. So and they use this, the kind of tools that they use is very different. So there is always tool that you need in the kind of organization you're working or kind of what industry that is. Telecommunication, a small internal, do you need it for the small internal projects or it is for large across organization and you have like huge enterprise and there are different teams and that you need some broader scalable tool that would span across different teams in the organization. Level of teams expertise. So do you need something that is more drag and drop because your team needs that kind of intuitiveness, intuitive tool or you have a team that is more technical. You can build your own scripts. They can run their own scripts and make it more custom for your own usage. So it depends upon how much customization or how much customization or what is the expertise of your team is when you're thinking about tools. Budget, how much budget do you have? Is it, do you have very small budget because there are all kinds of tools requiring all kinds of packages, yes. So if you don't have budget, a lot of times companies also, I've worked in company where they ran on trial version one after the other, right. And also there are companies like the thousands and thousands of dollars every year is earmarked just for subscription. So it depends how much budget you have. You can start small and you can also scale over time. Security, there are lots of companies who would come what may, will not work with third party tools or would never share any kind of their information or data on the third party platforms of third party tools. So that is also something for you to keep in mind. Resources, is that something if you even have a tool, do you have in-house expertise who can bring team up to speed on using that tool or is that something that you would need to bring a contractor in because there are tools, different levels of tools and depending upon how much complex tools are and how much deeper you can go, you might need contractor, a consulting company to come in and educate or the same provider, tool provider, you might need them to come in and educate your company or your team to use that tool to effectively utilize all the benefits of that tool. So it depends how much expertise, how much you can, how much, what kind of resources you have in-house. Capacity, is that a small business or is it something that it's a startup today but you see your runway to be growing. So you have very few hundred customers today but in five years your projection is that we'll have millions of customers using this. So you want a tool that you can scale over time. So very important that what kind of customer segment or what kind of usage are you looking to get out from that tool. So these are just some of the key areas as you are thinking about tools in your company, in your setting to keep in mind but there are various others as well. And the tools from my toolbox. So this is where the meat of today's evening is. So we'll be talking about what are those tools that I have used and the way I have grouped this or I have structured this is different stages of product management, different functions of product management. So what those different functions of product management are key functions of product management are and what are those tools that we need to support those key functions of product management. So this is going to come little bit crooked because I did it in Windows and now this is one as an Apple. So the formatting is a little bit off but that shouldn't hinder us from talking about the meat here. So strategic roadmap, very important role for a product manager to establish a strategic roadmap. What is a strategic roadmap? A strategic roadmap is every company has a vision, has a goal that we need to increase revenue. We need to open ourselves for increasing revenue we need to establish ourselves in new market or for increasing revenue we need to come up with new kinds of subscription packages. So it depends upon what their vision is. It can be to increase revenue. It can be to beat competition. It can be to increase market share. It can be to reduce our investment on tools and processes. It can be to increase our people to spend on people retention, on employee retention. So it depends upon what those key goals for a company are and how your product, the work that you are or what are those initiatives that you can establish or what are those key features that your product should support that would contribute directly to that strategic goals of the company. And when you put that visually on any either in a tool or in a PowerPoint that becomes a strategic roadmap. That then when you start showing that and then you also show goal in that what is your goal by when you're going to deliver this which is going to contribute to the strategic goal of the overall company. So that is one strategic roadmap. The big portion, big responsibility for product managers that is a meet for the product manager that goes directly into what kind of product you should be building, what kind of features you should be prioritizing based on how it is going to contribute directly to the company's goals and mission. Second big part, customer journey mapping which has still not yet flown into mainstream product management. But this is such a huge way for product managers to come up with some of the areas that are causing friction to our customers. And since Amazon has taken friction away from retail all of a lot of companies, 99% of the companies are thinking about putting their customers first. How can we take friction away? One of the ways one of the artifact or one of the tools are customer journey mapping. So the way to do that is whatever way your customer is going to interact with your tool, with your product. What are those, what is that starting point and what is that endpoint? And what are those current as is ways in which your customer interacts and what are those points where it's causing friction? And how can you develop a way to take that friction away? I heard T-Mobile's VP of customer experience last year in one of the conferences. So T-Mobile and bigger organization are so much behind in putting customers need first that they have now leadership roles for customer journey. And that's when I really got into this. In my current company, I now for appointing, I design a customer journey map is how a member comes to our site if they have to take an appointment not just for yourself but to their mom. So different personas for their mom, for their child, for the newborn baby. And what does that custom because it is not same for each and every persona even if it is same for one person. So and what is that customer journey for each member and what are those fictions? Where do they drop out? Where do they have access issues? Where do they have to click seven different clicks to even get to the outcome that they want to get? Right, so that's what customer journey is about. When I had that T-Mobile VP talk about customer journey, he said when John Ledger came on board five years back, T-Mobile was losing customers, millions of customers. It was at the brink of that being bought by another company or merger with another big telecommunication giant. When John Ledger came, he not only created this leadership role, he asked him to create this customer journey map and he said let's just start taking friction away one after the other. And that's when, and he has been so passionately behind that, that this VP of customer journey said that he has been personally so involved in this that after they started doing this taking friction away, no contracts. T-Mobile was the first one to say that we will not have any contracts. You can switch anytime from any provider to another provider, right? So this was just an example. But as he started taking those friction away, he said we have added for the past two years three million customer every quarter. So this is how powerful this is. You can make it a powerful tool. This is also one of the ways when you draw a customer journey and when you talk to the teams, you can use this to rally people behind you. There are a lot of teams as a product manager when you work, they are not directly involved in making a difference. They work as developer or tester or UX designer, but their work that they do directly impacts the outcome. And you can use this to show them, hey, so this is an example. So you can use this to show them how the work that they are doing is impacting the customer, the end customer. And this is how their work is important. So to rally people behind them, this is how important customer journey is. And there is no rocket science in customer journey. You can become a customer in your own organization, and you just go through the motion, just go through the flow and figure out that where did you have that friction? What were those points? And that's what customer journey is. So that was one example that you can do using PowerPoint. This is if you have more resources, if you have designer in-house, you can make it more formal, nice-looking, which you can then share with your business partners or other stakeholders. Another important part where, another responsibility for product manager is to oversee, make their vision visual. And one of the ways in which they make it visual is going through wireframe mock-up and prototype. They work with UX designer, they share their idea of what they're looking for. This is the first step towards making that vision tangible. The way they can convey what their stakeholders want, what business wants, what customer needs are. And then they work very closely with UX designers to create wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes. And these are a couple of tools that my current company uses to create wireframes. Again, wireframe is something that you don't need a tool tool. It's like you can just stand on a whiteboard and draw and make it visual for them and take a picture and just print it out and float it around. So to get a first idea of that. So this is just a wireframe, right? So as you are going through the ideation process, as you are thinking through what kind of product you want to build, this is an example that you can build it in whatever way you form. It's just a rough sketch of what you have in your mind. But then it gets to the stage of mock-up when you have first validation of what you are looking to build. Then you can get to the stage of mock-up and then once you have little bit more validation, okay, we are going in the right direction, then you can invest into creating a prototype that is nothing not connected at all into any of the background data, but it is just the UI works. The look and feel, you can touch, you can play around, all of that will work, but it is in the back and it's not connected with any data, with any information. So next, it brings us to product backlog management. So how do we do that? So with all of this, we have new features, we know what we need to develop, and then it's not just for one product, there are multiple features, and then we need to prioritize because we cannot get everything delivered at once. There is a roadmap. We can only work on something and it has to be in a structured, timely fashion that we can deliver some of the work. So how do we do that? What we use at Microsoft were TFS, Team Foundation Server. I use this to prioritize work with my business partners, and now it is a lot better. When I first was using it almost five years back, it was horrible, horrendous. Now they have made it very neat, clean colors and it's more user-friendly, and a UI that is appealing. But before, it just such a bad engineering app that nobody wanted to use. But I'm glad that they have done a little work on this and now it is much better. But I don't know how many, I think enterprises have the Microsoft subscription and they might be using this, but there are now other fancier lightweight tools also, which are I'm sure more user-friendly than this. They're more appealing than this and you can do more work with them. But this is one of the places where I had like initiative. This is the key strategy. Then there is this Epic and then Feature, and then these are the user stories that I prioritized work with our business partners at feature level. Then that got broken down into user stories and user stories got broken down into tasks by the engineering team to deliver work. So that was a tool for backlog management. Now how do you do methodology for prioritization? So you have a backlog and that's the tool, the way you can record all your backlog. How do you prioritize that with business? There are lots of ways to prioritize. This is one of the ways that I learned from pros at Microsoft and this, which I continue to use till today. One of the easiest, simplest, neatest method of prioritization. So what I do is that I have a list, a backlog list of features. What are the must deliver? Must deliver are the underpinnings that are required for that system to even work, like for a car. The engine is the important feature for even for us to drive a starter car. So this is must have. What it should have? So like steering wheel, wheels. So these are the features that you need for the, for even if there is an engine for us to be able to drive the car. So that become should have. What are could have? Could have are more like nice to have. So having like seat warmer, or having like music system, or be automated or up-down window, the power windows. So these are more like nice to have features. So the first, what I would do with business partners in the room, and business partners and stakeholders. So engineering also would be in the room when we did prioritization, and I made sure that engineering was involved in prioritization and when we prioritized the backlog. So first grouped them all the work in these three categories, and then after. So whatever we went through the list one by one, what is this should have, is this must have, is this could have, and then just bucketed these in these three different categories, and then started prioritizing, first prioritizing the must have. So what is the work that we should do first? So even for creating the engine, what do we need to do first? And then second, and then third, and then fourth, and then fifth. So what is the order that we should go? A lot of times business helps in prioritizing because they know business from business needs standpoint. Okay, the customer can wait for this feature. So this can come later. No, this has been the major pain point. So in first release we have to go with this. So that helps in prioritizing. A lot of times engineering also has big input on the deliverables. So they can say that, hey, if we do this feature along with this feature, when you have the order in which you have, say this feature, if I bundle that with your prioritized number 10, we would be able to do that much quicker because they both go together. So that kind of input also helps. Or yes, you have this prioritized at number three, but we do not have those kind of resources or hardware as are ordered and we cannot start it until we have those resources. So even though you have it at prioritized at number three, we can't deliver it at that time. So that kind of drives a healthy discussion and also breaks the barrier. If I do this in isolation with business and then take this to engineering, first in product management, a lot of times, not a lot of times, but you have to work and bring all the major stakeholders together as a team. When you work in isolation with business and take this to engineering, it's to me and because I have worked also on that side, it feels like an order-taker or order-giver. This is the prioritized list, go and deliver, which feels very disconnected. Then there's a lot of back and forth and you lose time and you lose credibility, you lose trust among your team. Rather, when you have all these teams in the room, when you're doing prioritization, it builds trust, it brings transparency, and it helps you in getting ahead of the time, you don't lose time in that back and forth. So which is and also every team feels, even especially engineering, that they are being heard. They are also involved. They have a voice in how you build this, rather than just getting a memo that, oh, you need to deliver this, work on this and this is our prioritized backlog. Also, another way to look at it is, because there is a trend of deliver fast and fail fast. So how do we test it? Whatever we are building, how do we test that? This is what our customers want. One of the ways to do that is deliver high value features first, so that you can test that if you are even going in the right direction. How do you think about that? What are those high value features? One of the ways in which you can talk to the team or steer them in the right direction is 80-20 rule. What are those 20 percent of the features that will be used by 80 percent of the customer? What are those features that will be needed by majority? That will be used by majority. It is, I don't remember exactly Porter's law or something, it's called, and he was a Spains, I don't know what he was, but he's somebody who first came up with this hypothesis, and he later proved it true that 80 percent of Spain's wealth is with 20 percent of the people, or 20 percent of the pea crop produced 80 percent of the peas. Then he later proved this theory, and then over a period of time, it started to get adopted in different streams, in different verticals, and people started adopting it. Now, it's a highly used phenomena even in technology when we are thinking about delivering features, or even what are the features sets if it's completely new. Excuse me, then what are the features sets that we should prioritize and deliver? So this is one of the way to think about it, that which ones are the features that have maximum reach, and let's go after them, and then we will add bells and whistles, or then we'll target the niche segment, the niche audience. Then after we have prioritized, we have a backlog, we have prioritized the backlog, then starts the delivery work for our engineering team. As a product manager, you not necessarily get involved in day-to-day delivery with engineering team, but you have to continue to have an oversight of work that is being developed or delivered by engineering team. You want to make sure that they are unblocked, they have everything what they need, they are ready to meet the timeline, and they are tracking with you, with the dependencies, and you make sure that you have cleared the path for engineering to deliver what they need to deliver in the time they need to deliver. So if they need any sign-offs, compliance, security, make sure that yes, all of that is lined up. If they need any resources, and if they need extra budget for those resources, you make sure you work with your stakeholders and get them the budget that they need. If they have dependency on any upstream systems or downstream systems, then you manage the work to make sure that all the other business stakeholders or from those systems stakeholders are also aligned with the work that you are driving. So with that, it comes sprint planning and tracking Agile project. So that is another important thing to know for product manager is to keep their backlog prioritized, because when engineering does estimation, they are very little conservative because they do not know what roadblocks they are going to hit once they start development work. But a lot of times because they're conservative, they might have some more time in the end and they might be able to add little bit more story points. So if you have prioritized backlog, it is easier for them to just go in the backlog and grab work as and when team is ready to accept more work. So it's important as a product manager to keep to make sure that your backlog is always ready to be consumed by engineering team whenever they have bandwidth to consume. Another important task for a product manager is product feedback management. You hear feedback from different sources. Sales is coming back with feedback, your marketing team is coming back with feedback, your customer service team is coming back with feedback, your business team is coming back with feedback, and as you are developing, growing, scaling your product, you want to do the incremental improvement and also you are thinking about the next generation of the product. All this feedback that is coming is extremely important because you want to factor in based on what the value size of those feedbacks are. Can you factor in in your current development process? Or do you need to think about that next generation, the V2, what are those forward-looking feedback that you're seeing from the market, from competition that you need to think about in the next wave of your product? So all this feedback that is coming from these different sources can be very overwhelming. There are tools now that help you, and then there are social media. So depending upon what kind of product you have, there are people talking about it, tweeting about it, posting Yelp reviews, or sharing on Facebook and on LinkedIn. So there are feedback on social media that you need to capture along with all these traditional channels of feedback. So there are tools now that can help you gather all this feedback at one place and be able to drive meaningful decision from that. So they'll synthesize for you. They'll help you walk you to how to get to a decision without getting overwhelmed with so many feedback coming from different directions. And user voice is one that I have heard good things about, that it helps in capturing all that information. We at Kaiser, because of a lot of security reasons, can't use a lot of third party because of compliance and we have a lot of PII. We have all of our members' healthcare information. So there are a lot of tools that we can't use, but this is one tool that I would have loved because I get bombarded with these feedbacks from different channels and sometimes I feel overwhelmed. And because I am the product owner for digital team, and digital team is website and mobile and other digital properties of Kaiser, we are more like just the front end to surface information. A lot of this feedback that we get is behind the scenes, but we are, because we are the front end, we are the ones that surfaces information. We are the ones that get it first. Oh, your website, it's not working on your website. It's not working on my website. It's just that information that is coming from behind. I'm just pulling that information and putting it, it's like pay it forward, right? But then I have to take that story to other business groups, to other stakeholders and tell the same story to them. So I would love to be able to collect these feedback in a story which I can take them to these business partners and share how important, what is the intensity of each feedback that I'm hearing? Because sometimes it's just hard to tell to them how important or how critical this is because from how many sources are you even hearing this? Two members, it's not important. But because it is coming fragmented from so many sources, when I talk about the data-driven product management, I can't do data-driven product management in this case. It's more like hypothetical or more like gut that oh, so many because I can't collect all this in one place and produce a story or produce an analytics report that I can share. But this is something that you can use for those purposes, to tell your story in a data-driven way. Analytics, web and mobile. One of the key important and a lot of times when I'm really old, so 10 years back we would drop the ball analytics and it was always an afterthought. A product has gone live, we've gone live and then somebody would ask, oh, how many people have access to this? And it's like, huh, how would we know that? Oh, okay, you did not apply any analytics, don't you have any tagging on this? Like, oh yeah, that's true, we need to have tags so that we can track it. So it's important as product managers that it upfront you define what those KPIs are and how you are going to track success of your product and what are those key points where you need it to be measured. You don't want to measure it for the sake of measuring it but you want to tell a story. You want to know that story after your product has gone live because you want to know that feedback so that you can improve your product over time. So it's a very thoughtful thinking. It is not just applying the mobile and web analytics but it is about thoughtfully thinking what are those key points where you need to, where you should track so that you can take decisions for your next wave of product. And then last but not the least, and something that I recently learned in the past three years of my product management career of more than 15 years is the importance of readiness and landing. So it doesn't, what I learned was that as much we fixate ourselves as product manager in building the right product, we should fixate ourselves in making our customer successful. And part of making our customer successful, a big part of that is readiness and landing. How we make that product available to our customers. How are we doing that soft handling? How are we making our customers aware of what is coming? How are we making our customers aware of what are the benefits of that product? How have we made sure that if our customer runs into trouble, then what are those sources or resources that they can seek? How are we proactively making all of this available to them so that when they have product which we have thoughtfully built, keeping all of this in mind is still, we know that they will run into trouble. We know that there will be customers who will not be able to, who will not be able to get it as much as much we have taken pain to make it as intuitive as possible. So how, if they run into trouble, what are those resources that they can reach out to? In my last role at Microsoft, I worked on building this platform for our global audience sales team. And this was like the part of digital transformation. What they had used before was like manual broken and now what I was leading was a platform that was all automated and it was all slick and nice and shiny. It's like, wow, this is the best thing. It will blow their mind away, the sales team and they're going to use this because half of the time, they couldn't be 100% productive because half of the time they were spending only in doing this manual data entries and creating reports. How much sales they have made? 15 days they would make sales and 15 days they would just create generate reports and get all the dotted connections lined up. I was working on this product and then Microsoft has readiness and landing team that you can tap, it's like a shared resource. All the companies, all the product groups at Microsoft tap the same resources. And then I went to them, I had my request in the queue, we have to go live by this time and please we need this marketing and communication support so that we can build material and we can make this, whatever material we need to deliver or to launch this product, we can make that. Product, the readiness and landing team or marketing and communication specialist are in readiness and landing team and they were very busy people. I was still waiting to hear from them and my manager, he got me in the room and he said as much hard work you have done to deliver this product, to build this product, if you do not get in front of how you want to deliver this to your customer, to your target audience, if it doesn't land right, the first day when it launches and the sales people have little bit even trouble in accessing this just because they did not have right information, this is going to fail, adoption is going to suffer and it would come down to irrespective of whatever the reason is, it would come down to that product wasn't built right. Nobody will think about that, hey, they did not have enough information. It would be like, yes, adoption is suffering, yes, there has to be something wrong with the product. So how do you get in front of that? As product manager, I thought that probably I have just over the fence, I've put it and now it's their responsibility, no. As a product manager, you start from that vision and your job is not done until it has landed safely in the hands of your target customer and still your job is not done because it is iterative mechanism. So you still get feedback that comes back to you and then you fold it in your roadmap and then you start over. So this is a iterative continuous cycle. So you, as a product manager, you are not of the hook at any point of time and this is what it is about. And this is what I learned then. I had to go and really seek mentorship from somebody from that readiness and landing team and hire a resource internally, a communications person who could prepare that material for me. And this is the methodology that they use at that time. It is called ad car model. So what does that mean is awareness? A stands for awareness. So before your product launch date, say T minus 30, you start sending material out that, hey, our product is coming. You start making your target audience customer aware of what is coming. So that is awareness. Second is T minus 15. You send them another communication that has desire. So why should they even care about this? What is the benefit of using this product? So that's the desire. Knowledge, so T minus one week, T minus seven. You send them another communication out. Hey, we are going live on this, this date. Here is all the material that you may need. You can create your login here, this kind of password you would need. This is the, first the URL. This is the URL where you would access. This is login password. And if you need any help, this is linked to help channel and we would have two weeks of hyper care available 24 by seven support. Anytime you have any, if you need any help for feedback, you can reach out here. This is the fact book. This is where help center is, all of that information. So that you are making them aware of if they need any help, this is how they can reach out to. Action is the day of your launch. You have action, you send another communication out. Hey, we have gone live. Please be sure to use this URL and this is the way if you need any help. And then reinforcement. Another after T plus seven, you reach out to them again. Hey, I hope you have access this. I hope you have downloaded this. I hope you have used this. Please share your feedback here. And if you need any help, then these are ways to, these are the ways to access help. So this is one of the ways in which you softly hand your product in the lands of your target customer. So they also feel that, so you're not just dropping the ball somewhere. And they feel that, okay, they are well taken care of. Even if they run into trouble, they know that you are in safe, that they are in safe hands. And there is somebody to look after them. So setting product managers up for success. So how do we harvest skill set that make us a successful product manager? What is some of the art part of it? So this shows the growth. So you grow over time. Product management, yes, you learn the tools, the skill set, the hard skills, but there are some things that only come over time. And you see that growth happening in yourself. Now I can feel that, that happens over time. And still there is a long way to go. But there are some of these key traits that you proactively have to work on if they are not already there because that will go a long way to make you a successful product manager. So being a hustler. There will never be enough resources for the kind of work or the amount of work that you have to do. In smaller companies, there always be less resources. For example, that you may not even have a communication resource and you have to write the communication material yourself. In larger companies, even though there is a team, I had to fight to get my work prioritized and still it couldn't be. So you can never have enough resources at any given time for available for every step of the way to support you. So there is a lot of work that you need to do yourself. So you have to be a hustler. You have to just get going, get going, get going. Scrappy. It is hard to, so you have to wear different hats at different times. So you have to learn how to make things work. A lot of times you have to do workarounds. You have to do creative thinking because you have a deadline to meet. You have challenges from compliance. You have challenges from your last minute. Your CEO has come up with something. You did just a demo. You're about to launch. But now it's all paused because your CEO says, hey, we have to have this before you can go live. So you have to get scrappy. You have to get creative. How can you make, how can you do more with less? Curious. A lot of times I'm asked this question that, hey, I don't have any, I don't come from technical background. Would I make a successful product manager? And always my answer is, you do not need to be an expert in any field. You have to trust your stakeholder, your other partner teams. They are experts. You have to trust your UX designer for that. You have to trust your engineering team for that. You don't have to come from even, in fact, people who come from engineering background, I have engineering degree. I have to stop myself because I don't want to overstep. Yes, my job is to bring just right people in the room and drive right conversation and get to a decision that keeping that customer focus in mind. That what are we here for? What do we need to support? So just being genuinely curious, just asking the right questions and just, so that's what you need to be a product manager. Even if there is an architectural discussion going on, you don't have to be a code ninja. It's just general knowledge. And you can ask question, oh, how do you think this is going to work? And then can you just step up and show me on the whiteboard? Just can you draw it? And you can also have like, can we then work it this way, not this way? Like this is just general curiosity, just having a general opinion, general discussion. And in that you will come across, and you will see that how people are open for that. And people would be willing to share that information and knowledge, and they like that, healthy discussion, they would like that. But the minute you start stepping into somebody's field, that's when they feel vulnerable, they feel threatened. So, and you don't want to do that. Open mind, because you are the person from which the idea starts, originates, and you, so it becomes kind of your baby. You get emotionally attached to it. But as you take this idea forward with different stakeholders, with different partner teams, you hear their opinion. And you have to keep an open mind. You have to, and what helps me generally to keep that focus being an emotional person myself is what is that key strategy? What are we after? If that is the goal, whatever we are discussing in the room right now, is it going to help to get us closer to that? That's all matters. There is no, as humans, our nature is to jump to solutioning. And we always, as soon as we hear a problem, we form a solution in our mind. Oh, this is how we should solve it. Oh, this is how I should go about it. But just break free of that mindset. And just let, that's what data-driven product management is. Let data speak, but not a lot of it can be 100% data. So your gut, your discussion in the room, your opinion from experts, from different team matters. And that's how you get to the decision that you need to make. But you have to keep an open mind because there are different stakeholders involved. Building credibility. Because you work with so many different partner teams and you do not always have management control over them. They are, you don't have hiring and firing capacity over them, yet you need their support. You need those people to rally behind you, to come behind you for whatever they need to trust you. That whatever vision you are driving, you will take them to that end. So how do you, so that's important, it's important for you to build that credibility so that they can, they don't feel threatened and they feel empowered to share what they need to and they can rally behind you. So you need to build that credibility with them so that they come with you and trust you to lead them. Stay focused, laser focused, very important. Because there are so many, as I was saying, so many cooks in the kitchen, very easy that somebody would say, oh, let's not do it this way. Let's do it this way. So you can get, you can get swayed very easily. So you have to make sure that you keep yourself laser focused, not let yourself get swayed by any of these new, any of this ongoing discussion. You have to always then make another table, okay, this is for the next version or this is for future discussion. And right now we are here to discuss this and let's just get out of, let's get out of the room after making these decisions because this is important for this meeting and this is important for the work that needs to happen after this. So these are the key decision that we need to walk away with today and let's just focus on this. Otherwise, as you were saying, right, you can have meeting for two hours and you can because it is just so easy. Everything is like kitchen sink. It becomes everything in there and you can have as much and you can beat any topic to death. Either it's engineering, architecture, UI, the customer needs, customer wants, problems, like you can have all the discussion and you would not get anywhere. And every topic would seem very important. Every topic would seem very relevant that, oh, how can we not talk about this because this is going to impact our product because yes, everything impacts our product. So how do you keep that laser focus? Risk taker, as I said before, as much it is data-driven product management, you would never have all the data you need to make that clear cut distinction or decision. It is a combination of the data and you look at trends. You observe trends in that data and then it's a lot of your gut feeling also, a lot of your experience that you build over time that you start to make those decisions. So you have to take a little bit of risk. So this is the data that I'm seeing. This is the trend I'm seeing and then let's go ahead and try this, test this and you have to make sure that you are working in an environment, your leadership supports. So you have to make sure that you can talk to your leadership. I can take six months and I can study market and I can do market research and gather all this information and bring you this picture. Or we can just do the study for three weeks, learn about market trends and go ahead and build this out in three months and test it in fourth month and then try this. So what way do you, so you want to make sure that your leadership supports because risk-taking is not easy and Amazon is the company that has even made that culture. It's so popular that now every company commits to their employees that it is okay. We want you to take a risk. Otherwise earlier it was that, oh, how can you fail? You cannot. You have to make sure that you are making every right decision so that your product turns out to be right. Learn something new. So learn something new in terms of just hang out if you do not know anything, if you do not know anything about test function. Just hang out with your colleague who works in the test and just grab a coffee and talk about that. Talk because product management is such so much outside view in and from whatever capacity you may be coming in, every perspective is very useful. So having learning something new of any new function, of any new role, helps you in decision that you make moving forward. So that's very helpful. So learn something new or learn something new, not just from function perspective, but from AI, from VR, from whatever is going on around us. Cross-pollination. So if you are in retail, learn about other industry, how they are doing it. If you are in one industry, so what are those other verticals that are, how is automobile doing it? How is retail? How restaurants are doing it? So what are those different other functions so that you can do cross-pollination of information? And then giving back to community. Be a mentor to somebody. It's such a rewarding function and I started doing this since last year and I have done so many classes now but I always tell folks that I walk in wise and I walk out wiser. Because every time I do this class, the perspective that all of you guys bring in the classroom is so different. I have one way of looking at it, but the way you look at it, the way we discuss, the way you ask questions, always bring something new. So just being able to give back you can find a way how you want to but as I think it's cross-pollination. Everything helps you. Being a product manager in whatever, everything would help you in becoming a better product manager, in looking at it from outside the box capacity. And be patient. Continue to do the right thing and you will see yourself growing. You will see that muscle building up over time. And these are some, so some of the, I've been asked this so many times that what are some of those resources that are books that we can read so that we can continue to grow ourselves? Product management is such a diverse function that leadership book or any cross-team collaboration, team building, creative, how to think about design, all of these books from diverse topic help you make a better product manager. So this doesn't get mundane. This doesn't get boring ever. You can always find some new book on any topic, on diverse topic that product management, a product manager needs and read it and it would help you. Sorry. These are some of the other books that are more on, so there is this venture capitalist firm, Kusla Ventures. And these are books. But these are very different. I haven't read them myself. Otherwise I have given feedback, but this is something on my Kindle and I need to get back to you sometime or the other. And then, so that's what I mean. Don't beat yourself. Even though you would know all the tools, you would know all the ways to be perfect product manager, yet whatever you plan, it will never go as you plan. So don't beat yourself up. It's not that you didn't think this through. It is always, it is always going to happen. Even pros do it. That's how I tell myself. So I get away with it and I sleep at night. And that's the way for you to grow. This is how you grow your muscle. Every time you run into the ditch, you know what not to do next time. But then there is a new one. There is a new one and there is a new one. But yes, after 15 years, hopefully, you will know that there will always be one. So it's okay. And with that, thank you so much for coming here tonight.