 Hello everyone, my name is Sumitra Marin and I'm working as a product manager in Microsoft in the M365 core platform team. I'm really very excited to be doing this webinar on the topic of different route to product management. The agenda that I'm looking to cover is what are the different paths to product management? What is the value addition of a product school certification and how it has personally helped me in my product management career? Some classical questions that I'm going to answer on PMing which was asked by aspiring PM aspirants whom I meet in my day to day life and I hope it will be useful for everyone tuning in. With no further ado, I'm going to move on to what are the different paths to product management? Before that, I would like to give a very descriptive summary of my career transitioning into product management. The reason that I want to give an elaborative details of my product management journey is because I feel a lot of PM aspirants are in the career stages that I was in my career and eventually got into product management and I think it will be beneficial for those folks to work in some learnings out of it. So I started my career as a software engineer at Visa in 2015. Immediately after college, I joined Visa as a site reliability engineer. The roles and responsibilities that I had as a site reliability engineer is to identify production issues and raise those as bugs to my engineering team, work with customers on live production issues and troubleshoot them to help solve it and also perform a root cause analysis of why the issues had occurred. In addition to doing this role in the day to day activity, I also tried my hands on bedding by learning UI skills and I built a UI dashboard which was primarily used by my senior leadership team. The end users of this dashboard were senior leadership team, product analysts and my customers, service engineers who were using this dashboard to look at the tickets that were raised by customers and what is the resolution date and how long it's taken for them to resolve a ticket and so on and so forth. I would say the skill that I gained from doing this role for close to three years is that I got better at analytical skills and looking at issues and I also got experience to work with the customer support engineers to understand the life problems that is being raised by the consumers. Then I moved to a different team in Visa which is the data products team. As many of the folks, it was also very curious about the bus words that were in the market which was artificial intelligence and machine learning and I wanted to do some development work in the data products team and I eventually switched to a different team in Visa. In the data products team, I was responsible for developing a solution which is a search engine that I developed for my internal consumers to look at the Visa's transactional data. Visa's transactional data as such was a very large volume of data and the search engine that I built was solving the problem of searching through this data very seamlessly. The one thing that I liked doing in both these roles is that it gave me a lot of clarity about why I'm building a certain product, what are the customer pain points and what is that I can do to enhance the experience of the customers. I really enjoyed doing these aspects when I was developing a product. Hence after four years in my career, it was time for me to think about what is something that I really like to do in the day to day life. One role that I could think of and that came to my mind is a product manager role and the immediate question that I popped up in my mind was should I be pursuing an MBA? But due to the personal choices that I had to make, it was a no-brainer for me that I wouldn't be able to pursue an MBA for getting a career into product management. Then I started researching about what are the different ways that I can look at for getting into PM online and I spoke to a number of folks on LinkedIn where they gave me different advices on how I can move into a product management career. Then I spoke to different folks and understood that one valuable advice that I could get is that to try out opportunities in my current work environment to transition from an engineering role to a product management role which would be relatively an easier path to take than trying it outside of your work environment. So I took that seriously and I reached out to different teams in visa, the product management teams where I could shadow some of the senior PMs on their day to day PM activities and I gained a lot of experience in that and some senior PMs were very helpful enough for me to offer their work and also let me try my hands at it and that's when I got an opportunity to move to a real-time payments team where I did the product 1-0 activities like developing product features, specs, requirements document, working with customers and I got the holistic PM experience in that team. So it was almost six years for me in visa and I was looking at how can I enrich my product management experience and see what are the different aspects of product and become a subject matter expert in a particular area. So that's when I got to know about the product school certification and I did the product school certification which I think has really helped me to connect with the different product folks, in fact like-minded product folks who give me a lot of inputs on how we can enrich my PM experience. I got to solve a real product case study and I worked on end-to-end from a launch to delivering a product which was like a simulation and the different product thinking skills that I learned from it. Just to summarize my entire product management journey, I started as a software engineer, tried my hands at development for four years into learning UI designing, UI development skills, analytical skills and working with a lot of analysis and numbers. I looked at what is that I want to do in my career and why product management the why of product management, the sense of ownership and owning the product got my energy level pumped up and I looked at different ways to move to product management after deciding that I would not be able to pursue an MBA and worked with the product school to do a certification to learn the actual product management skills practically and then I moved to a career in the product manager. I will say the key takeaways for the product management journey and the first answer is why you want to get into product management. Product management is a role that gives you a sense of ownership that you will be developing a solution end-to-end working with the different parties that they are involved in the product and it's a very important role for the success of any product that is one and the other thing is if you're looking to move into product management explore the opportunities that you have in hand which is in your current work environment the research on internet trust me there are a lot of resources available on internet that's going to help you make this switch and the third important thing is that try your product roles before taking in a full-time product management role shadow senior PMs try to understand what their related activities are learn about the different product functions and see if it really interests you before making the switch and the fourth is which I think is an important factor in any job search that you're going to do is build an effective resume it's very important to highlight your skills and experience in your resume and show that what you're really capable of I think these four should be the four takeaways of different parts to product management moving on what are the value of a product school certification there are a lot of skills and abilities that a product manager require and it's possible to learn the skills and the abilities while you are doing a product management role but the kind of experience the product school certification is going to give you is almost equal to a practical experience that you get as a product manager I think in my experience what is really very important to break into product management is that getting to know the like-minded product folks networking and understanding if there's any opportunity that can open up for you for making this transition and definitely product school help me in that and the second most important thing is how to improve your confidence that you will be able to land a product manager job because most of the PM aspirants in their current roles will be Q engineers, will be software engineers, will be into marketing and different kind of roles they will be doing I think a product school certification will eventually give you the confidence that you will be able to land a product manager job through its PMK study experience like I said the PMK study experience is really valuable because you will be working end to end from a product and even though you will not be able to deep dive into every element of it I think it gives you the different flavors of product thinking and it will help you to think product sense when you are actually doing the assignment and one of the other important skills for a product manager is to have soft skills when you think about a product, when you try to solve a problem I think it's very important to have clarity in your mind while explaining the problem statement or what is the solution that you are proposing and talking to different engineers, different design teams so soft skills is an area that you will be able to get some tips on how you can improve through this product school certification and the two main important things that I have highlighted in my product management journey is that how can I explore product manager job opportunities when I am trying to transition so product school is a place that you give you ways on how you can do this exploration and how you will be able to find a job opportunity and then it's up to you to do the work to get there and building effective resume is a common thing in any product search and the product school certification will give you certain tips and tricks of how to make your resume stand out and it is definitely very valuable and for newbies into product management it's most common that the different functions of product management is not something that you can Google on the internet and learn about because different organizations have different streams in product management and the product school certification helps you learn those different functions and understand what are the different fields in product management and what is that that will be suitable for you in your long-term career journey as well For me from the product school certification I think these eight takeaways are something that helped in my product management journey and some of which are really being useful for me even today when I'm talking to customers or when I'm building my resume or when I'm networking with the different product folks who I found in my PS school community Moving on, the next one is the million dollar questions on PMing There were a couple of classic questions that I was asked by a lot of aspiring PM folks who are in the same career stage or as mine or some of the APMs that I got to meet in different conferences I'm going to try and answer those in a crisp manner and I hope that it will benefit the wide audience How can I get into product management experience while I'm a software engineer, tester and I'm pursuing different roles I think the first thing that you should be doing is asking yourself why you want to get into product management and the second thing is exploring product opportunities in your current environment trying to get that experience by putting in extra effort by working with the senior PMs in your org Third thing is getting a product certification will definitely help to give you a flavor of what product management exactly is and is definitely valuable The fourth thing is reaching out to product folks understanding about what is PMing in different orgs what is their PM journey what is that they do in your day to day life so that it will give you a flavor of different streams in product management and also internet and YouTube There are tons of resources available that will help you get the product management experience in some way but it definitely needs a lot of effort to find the right content That's one classic thing that I've always been asked as to how do you get the product management experience and I think these four things that I have coded would definitely help to get you that The next one is how to prepare for product interviews Product management interviews in itself have a framework where the PMs will be tested at based on the experience that one has So I think in order to start preparing for product interviews what has personally helped me the most is mock interviews I signed up for different free sites on the internet and I gave a lot of mock interviews while I was also trying to land a job in product management So mock interviews helps you understand different PMs product thinking capability how the structure of interviews happens in different organization helps you get formed up and prepared before your actual interview So I think one key thing for product interviews is doing as many mock interviews as you can And the second important thing is understanding the PM interview framework itself For example, in an engineering role there are always very predefined set of roles and rounds that's defined so that you will be able to know what you will be tested And for example, data structures is one common problem solving round that happens in engineering interviews Similarly for product management as well there is an interview framework based on what you will be tested at like the estimation questions or the strategical thinking or the problem solving abilities So I think it's important to understand the PM interview frameworks and make yourself formed up and prepared to answer questions in the actual interview The third thing is networking Network via LinkedIn, network via product communities to understand what their interview experience is while they are being interviewed for their PM job I think it's definitely very helpful because each one has a different product management journey and the interview process every organization is different and the key things that you will learn by networking with different product managers will definitely help And talking about what are the different PM functions So now the product management role or the domain in itself has different product manager discriminations of the roles and responsibilities Some of which are technical product manager which is more a technical role of a product manager in getting into deep level analysis of the designs of the engineering teams are working on or working very closely with architects and understanding how the problem is getting developed Then you have the APMs and the PMs who are more functional product managers who are responsible for developing feature specifications writing PRD product requirements document and working with customers to understand the actual pain points And that is the content product manager who is responsible for the specifications of the product and the content that gets marketed to the outside world when it's especially an external facing manager And the other one is a marketing product manager which is an exclusively marketing facing role where you get to do a lot of sales along with product management and you talk to your customers on a daily basis understanding their pain points and how you are able to product to the next level by working with the daily customers So these are some of the different PM functions that one could look at in a long term career aspiration as this is the area that I want to be good at I want to be a functional product manager and I want to be a subject matter expert in this So understanding the different PM functions is also a very valuable thing to know when you're looking for a career in product management And the last and final question that I get asked is MBA mandatory for switching into product management I would say yes and no Yes, if you're looking to shift your career in a definite period of time No, if you're willing to invest time and effort and get an opportunity in product management at the level of uncertainty Because when you're pursuing an MBA you have a short short answer of you are going to land a job in a more non-technical domain where it can be consulting, marketing or can be product management But in case of not choosing to do an MBA I think it takes a lot of effort and time and pursuing what it is for you to break into product management and eventually make the transition So the answers to this question would be as or no depending on the career stage and the path that you are in I really hope the questions on PMing, whatever I tried to answer in a very crisp way has been really helpful for the ones who have tuned in And I also have certain useful resources that has certainly helped me to transition into a career in product management and I would strongly recommend to go through these books these valuable Indian product profiles this mock interview sites for mock interviews and amazing YouTubers that you can follow for preparing for your PM interviews This has definitely benefited me in a really valuable way and I hope it will benefit you as well And that's all I think this is the Jinta that I had in mind and I wanted to share this through this webinar and I am always available on LinkedIn You can see my LinkedIn profile and please reach out to me if you need any help I will try my best to help you in the ways that I can Thank you so much