 Hi, everybody. My name is Liz K. Moore, and I'm here to talk about my journey into product and how having mindful grit is getting me to where I want to be. Thanks so much to Product School for hosting me today. I think this topic of how to get into product is such an interesting one because of the enormously varied paths that PNs tend to take. So for the aspiring PNs listening today, I hope you find some inspiration in this chat and it helps you take command of where you wanna be. All right, as a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. My dad was a mechanical engineer and that meant that invention was frequent in our house. Around age eight, I started racing soapbox derby cars that we built together. The first years was wooden and super boxy and by the third year, it really started to take shape. It was made of fiberglass and it looked more like a jet. Somewhere along the line, I started replacing my invention aspirations with engineer. So I started Georgia Tech as an undecided engineer. I learned about industrial engineering and considering my frustration at the time with picking the wrong checkout line at the grocery store and the turmoil of deciding whether to switch lanes. I knew it would be a good fit for me. Earning my degree was a challenge though and I wasn't ready for it. The coursework was super tough. The lecture halls were enormous and my confidence was low as those first grades started coming in. High school was easy, but when college started, I really hadn't yet discovered the power of asking questions. It took too long for me to overcome some shame, I felt in my struggle and instead started asking questions. Joining a sorority though, was the best academic move I made. I saw that others had some struggles too and I started teaming up with them. Asking questions became easier at this point and I realized that sometimes I understood a piece of the puzzle that they didn't. So I graduated a transformed person who recognized that a lot of obstacles can really be cleared through tenacity. After graduation, I once again entered a phase of life without concrete direction. I accepted a role in a leadership rotational program with the Department of Homeland Security, partly if not mostly because I got to live in DC, which was a dream of mine. So for three years, I worked in different agencies within the department and I experienced a bunch of different roles loosely aligned with my major. While I was on a team focused on operational requirements for a redesigned piece of technology, I met the one and only human factors engineer in the over 300 person organization and she was in charge of interviewing users of the existing technology and supporting a redesign from a true user perspective. I was enthralled and at the time I felt it was the work that really mattered in the organization who better to tell us what the requirements should be than the users themselves. It was this experience that really gave me exposure to UX and product as a concept at all. As my rotation ended though with the human factors engineer, my next was less exciting and it continued to be so. I had moved to Seattle after getting married and the options for growth in the federal government shrunk significantly compared to what I was used to in DC. A friend of mine had started working at Amazon and loved it. She worked many more hours than I did but she was having fun and thriving. Prime Video or Amazon Instant Video as is called then was exploding and so was her team. After weeks of interview prep and a total blur of an intense onsite loop, I started as an associate program manager. My job was to ensure that all movie and TV content in specific marketplaces went live on time and to spec. It may sound trivial but a lot went into ensuring this for hundreds of titles we had each week. I became a publishing pro in this role. I mastered the clunky internal tools. I stood up workarounds and process changes that would prevent any problem we encountered from happening again. It was there that I began working with a software engineering team for the very first time. I was kind of the unofficial liaison between the engineers who were building the tools and we operators who relied on them. I got exposure to gaining consensus, setting priorities and I was doing so on behalf of my entire team. I use Balsamic to mock up the changes we wanted to see and every two weeks I'd come out from a meeting with the engineers with news for when we get the features that our team wanted. It seems obvious now but I really didn't know it then that I was doing the work of a PM. Only then I knew that I was thriving. As big customer facing changes started happening I learned about the roles of product, research and UX. These job titles at the time seemed out of reach but I did put them on my radar. I took an adult learning class about UX where we designed a mobile app for Dix Burgers, a Seattle staple if you know it. The class was only six weeks long, twice a week after work and super reasonably priced compared to other options. It felt like the right level of investment to start exploring something I was interested in more deeply. Every other person in the class though had prior experience or education in UX but this time I really didn't let my insecurities win. I partnered up with others and I met my goal for that class. I learned some core principles. I upped my UX vocab game and I learned that I liked problem solving more so than design. My product aspirations were really starting to take shape at this point. I had my first child in 2017. My eyes were immediately open to the magnitude to which having a child alters a parent's life. Having mostly only work friends then we wanted to get back to where our families were and build that village you hear people talk about. Luckily Amazon's virtual customer service team was hiring a program manager to lead special hiring and retention programs for students and veterans. The skills I learned in Prime Video would not apply. There were no UX designers on the team but it allowed me to stay at a company I loved and I knew it had potential for more opportunities later. So I moved back to Atlanta and joined the team. Shortly after I started expressing my interest in product and asking questions about the future of product in this large customer service organization I took on a pet project. I wrote a narrative about the need for an automated onboarding process for the thousands of customer service agents hired globally each quarter. Then I welcomed my second baby. After four months of juggling two kids under two on my maternity leave I came back with a sense of resilience and continued self-advocating for a product role. To my surprise, my new manager then already knew of these aspirations and seemed ready to help me get there. When a fellow team member announced she was leaving I asked to own one of the programs she had. Owning the program came with owning maintenance on a couple small products. One of which though was related to this onboarding process I had already learned about earlier in depth. So soon I was working with a single engineer who built and maintained that product. I started to get to know our users who were our customer service associates and I used what I learned to have more input into what that sole engineer focused on. I got some guidance from a designer who was sympathetic enough to lend me some of her time and I became more familiar with product principles and Amazon's product practices. I did all of these things over a span of about six months. It wasn't rushed, it wasn't overly intense. I had other responsibilities to maintain but I knew that my North Star goal of eventually becoming a PM was constant. I continued to exercise my product muscles and similar to justification for promotion that you might do I started documenting examples of the ways in which I was already doing the role of a product manager. I was transparent and I told my manager what I was up to. We reviewed the process together and she started helping by pointing out ways that I could gain enriching experiences to fill out what was effectively a checklist of skills that I needed. So by the time I was confident in that document the people that really mattered were already expecting it. The review was straightforward and I was granted the title I'd been wanting for so long. I was officially a product manager. I worked for another two years at Amazon building products for customer service associates. The solutions we built gave them scheduling flexibility and I really liked that I was making a positive impact on their lives while driving savings for the business. Into the pandemic though, I wanted to broaden my scope and impact of the products that I delivered. I wanted to reach more people and work on something more pertinent to the cultural moment. So when a role opened up with CNN I jumped at the opportunity and now I'm nine months into my product role at CNN. I'm working on bringing engaging, best in class news consumption experiences via web and mobile app products. And again, I'm thriving. So what can you learn from one person's meandering journey into product? Most importantly, set ambitious professional goals and make them known to people who support you and prioritize that work as it will move you closer to achieving them. So more specifically figure out what you're working towards and why, help your leadership team, make sure that they're giving you the work that really matters to you. Number two, recalibration is perfectly okay. Give yourself some grace when you miss your targets. Whether it's a personal or professional reason setbacks are gonna happen. It's reasonable and expected. Don't let it get you down and you can already start again. Number three, keep learning and stay curious. Don't let skill or knowledge gaps block your aspirations. Structured and unstructured resources to learn are abundant these days no matter your budget. So don't be intimidated by a gap in your knowledge or skills instead work on building up your know-how. I will really show and other people will respect it. So if I were to roll these takeaways into one phrase, it'd be to maintain mindful grit. Push and advocate for your goals, but honor each step that you take no matter if it's going forward or backwards. I hope you've enjoyed listening today. If you want to ever want to chat more about breaking into the product space, let's connect. Thanks again to Product School for hosting me and to all the listeners. Thanks everybody.