 I always wanted to become a product manager and I felt very scary to give up on my engineering career and transition into product management. But I overcome all my fears and I gave it a try and I aced my transition. If I could do it, all the women could do it. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy, the founder, product manager accelerator from DrNC.com. I help people transition from worker B to product manager and business leader. If you want to learn the most effective way to become product manager, you should subscribe to the channel and turn on the bell button so you'll be notified every time you post a new video every Wednesday. Today we have a special topic about how to become product manager as a new mom and invite our special guest speaker Priyanka. She's going to share with you guys how she broke into product management with like about 10 years, 12 years engineering diagram and also how she became a product manager, how did she solve the challenges in terms of having her second baby. She also addressed the H1B issue at the beginning of the pandemic. So there's lots of overload advice in today's talk. So thank you so much. Let's welcome Priyanka. All right. So Priyanka, can you quickly introduce yourself? Sure Nancy. First of all, thank you so much for having me here. Hi everyone. I currently work as a product manager in a public traded cloud company that builds cloud software for the life sciences industry and it supports different pharma companies like Pfizer, Genentech, etc. So I'm currently working in this role from the past one year and prior to that I worked as a software developer and I had 10 years of experience in different industries like e-commerce, travel, mobile application development and also building enterprise software. So let's talk about your number one challenge and let's start from the top. How do you conquer those challenges Priyanka? Yeah. So coming to my first challenge where I didn't have a direction or guidance on what to look for and where to go. I went through a lot of online self-reading and I looked at a lot of content online in YouTube and different websites and different forums and that's where I came across your program and I approached you and I joined you and that helped me immensely in understanding different frameworks and also how to answer these different product questions and the different categories in these product manager interviews like product design, product estimation, product strategy and all that. So I was able to also brush up on my behavioral questions using the great framework you've taught us. Thank you for putting all that amazing sessions and you would always be there to answer my questions and you always boost the confidence in me so that helped a lot for me to make this transition. Thank you. Thank you for telling me this. It's always my pleasure to see all of you guys succeed and also see you a big contributor to the communities and by speaking in alumni panel and also helping other students to achieve the same outcome as well. Thank you so much for helping us out. So before we get into the details let's also talk about your second biggest challenge. Yeah. So my second biggest challenge is managing my time wisely. Initially I was struggling a lot and I still do to be frank but I realized that I needed to do a lot of planning and preparation ahead of time like for example for the week I'm a person who doesn't eat outside so I plan my breakfast and meals ahead on the weekend and the same with my work. If I have to start my day I try to see what meetings I have I try to prepare for them ahead of the day or at the end of the day for the next day I prepare everything and being a product manager joining a company that's already have a vast product I need to understand a lot of details so I have to do a lot of homework I have to spend my weekends on it and after hours on it so I would say it needs a lot of planning and preparation. I usually spend nine to five for my work and most of the time I spend in meetings like sprint meetings or anything anything like that so after five I try to go for a walk relax or take care of my kids and then I again resume back at nine thirty and I start learning like if I have to do any feature design work or if I have to learn about any feature I try to spend that nine to twelve because I'm a late sleeper so I spend nine to twelve to learn something or work on my feature design work and all that. Yeah so and also on weekends as well including weekends but weekends I don't get much time so whenever I get one hour here and there I try to open my laptop and try to find out do small tasks like if there are very small tasks that doesn't need a lot of usage of brain I try to do them on the weekends in between whenever I find time. Gotcha wow clearly you're very devoted into your work not only you work normal hours you also spend more time learning new features thinking about it and learning and in your knowledge as well no wonder you're doing a very good job after you become a PM thank you for sharing with us so Priyanka so tell us more regarding how you conquer your search challenge in terms of your H1B challenges and getting transitioned into quite a management. Yeah definitely Nancy so the third challenge I had was I wasn't sure whether my H1B would be approved or not since I'm transitioning from engineering to product so what I have done is I initially I communicated with my manager that I need H1B sponsorship and then I worked with my lawyer closely to prepare my case and I gave them all the documentation needed to support my case and I went through different forums to understand what needs to be supported in my case and I also have a very supporting manager who tried to fall up with me and also gathered as much information as possible from me to support the lawyers to prepare the case so all this process was amazing and it was a nice experience for me awesome so eventually you basically successfully lend your H1B sponsorship as a manager even if your originally like profession was more engineering exactly yeah I was my H1B was approved even though I had an engineering background and even though I didn't had an MBA I'm still able to transition from engineering to product I love this I love this I also love that you mentioned that your company was also very supportive throughout the process I personally believe that lots of things can be done because I was I was director and so I knew internally and if your manager was very supportive he is able to align all the resources to make it happen for you I'm so glad he's so impressive and supportive throughout the entire career growth yeah that's definitely true awesome so Priyanka so as a mom with two kids and one newborn baby and I do have a personal question for you which is how do you manage work by balance you kind of alluded a little bit earlier and so do you think work by balance actually exists and any advice you could give to new moms how would you manage work by balance as a product manager yeah that's a great question and yeah it's hard for me to answer that but I'll try my best so managing work and personal life with kids is definitely challenging I know that you must be knowing this better as I mentioned it needs a lot of planning and preparation and what I would say is for a working mother your partner should be of great support luckily I have an amazing husband who helped me shares each and every responsibility so that way I'm still able to stand up get to work and do everything so I think that's a huge help you can ask for and as I mentioned planning and preparation you cannot start your week without planning because I managed to get work and then I cook I we don't eat outside I have to cook everything so I go for groceries planning what I need to cook for the week and I make a plan on what I cook for that week as well as I mentioned meetings I have to prepare each and everything since it's a new role for me I can't go to meetings blank I have to know at least what the future they're going to discuss about what kind of questions I have I should not sound dumb in the meetings I should know the future at least 50% so the other 50% I can fill in during that meeting or after the meeting by talking to the engineer or someone so all that needs planning for me for now work-life balance doesn't exist because I work after hours weekends but I think going forward maybe three or four years in this role I might be able to balance it much better since I'll know most of the feature better and I'll be in that role for a little longer right so it'll be I'll be in a little comfort zone for sure that's awesome and I do love the tip regarding planning and just like people saying failing to prepare is preparing to fail cool Priyanka thank you for sharing the personal side a story of yourself I also love to hear the professional side let's say after you become partner manager which you have been a partner manager for over a year so what does a day to day look like as a partner manager and I believe lots of our audience want to hear different types of partner managers yeah so that's a great question because many people ask me what exactly a product manager do so I would say my my day goes in different phases like 30% of my day I would be spending in talking to customers understanding their pain points and coming up with business requirements to either enhance the existing feature or either build new features to solve their pain points and I also make sure that it aligns with the business goals and the another 30% of my day would go in dealing with sprint work which would include stand-up meetings retrospective meetings and also collaborating with engineers different teams unblocking the team from any any blockers they have and also a lot of work coming a lot of requests come in so I have to prioritize all that sprint work and the other 30% of my day I'll be spending in feature designs and we have a lot of customer data so I have to analyze all that data and we have a customer feedback forum so I have to go through all that customer feedback forum and managing the backlog and prepping for a short term or a long term road map that we have to keep evaluating on it based on the requirements and the rest of the 10% of my day I would be spending in business processes like preparing BRDs which is a business requirement document or writing release notes for any features that are going out and sometimes I do not find time to work on feature work during the day so I end up working after hours or weekends to make sure I'm on track so yeah sounds like a full day very very busy yeah so tell me more regarding when you design the product feature different things what kind of tools do you use what kind of like methodology do you use to be a better PM and also designing those features and I believe lots of people would love to hear as well yeah so I mainly work on a lot of technical features so I work on APIs as well as UI features so what I try to how I design them is I try to first come up with their pain point and I also see what customers are requesting for that feature and how many of them are requesting and what how exactly are they facing that issue so I try to analyze all that and come up with a very generic solution that would serve most of the customers and I also try to see if it aligns with the business goals and also while making while delivering like while developing this feature I sync up with engineers to come up with a feasible solution that would require less time whether it be a MVP that's fine because we have very limited engineering resources and also try to add some analytics on it so that way I can enhance it in the future yeah so this is how I design my feature and definitely I learned all this as part of the PM accelerator program and that I joined and and the sessions we did together that helped me a lot to build this framework and design features this way fantastic yes exactly and usually the way we believe that the best way to create outstanding product manager after they're in a job is actually learning how to be a better PM before they're in a job so that's why when we coach you guys want to make sure you do lots of like cases and build your product portfolio really gain hands-on experience I believe at the time you have so much fun building your product portfolio right you have like a feature design with us together yes yes I had an interesting problem that I tried to solve I did a lot of customer interviews as well and that helped a lot yeah I love this awesome so now Priyanka do you have any advice you want to give to anybody who want to break into product management or want to become a better product manager after they're in a job? Sure so as per my experience what I've noticed is becoming a successful product manager for becoming a better like a successful product manager you need to love your product and you should always crave to enhance it and improve it for your customers if you don't love your product it'll not drive you you'll not be motivated for sure so you should love what you do and product management is not about delivering features in every release it is about finding the right problem to solve so that's what it means to me. Fantastic well said I love when you start to say put a manager it's about solving pain for the customer you gotta love what you do exactly uh total I believe I personally also believe that the purpose of like being a PM is not about hey I design features it's more about I love the customers really have customer empathy there is a big pain point waiting for me to address so let's figure out what kind of new features or new solutions we can create together to solve the customer pain point and you're gonna feel in love with your customers. True yeah that's I have realized being a PM for this period awesome awesome I love this I think that's the true definition of outstanding amazing PM and I covered this in one of the live training regarding how to be a better product manager you guys can check out right here which is number one thing I talk about okay you need to have a strong customer empathy and love feeling love with your customers this is fantastic I love this awesome okay so Priyanka thank you so much for sharing with us and I hope lots of audience also learned a lot from today's lesson from you and I hope all of you guys can start applying the same methodology to break into product management also become an outstanding product manager thank you for sharing all the advice with all of you guys thank you Nancy thank you for doing all this amazing work and putting all this amazing content together I hope this helps someone out there and I wish very good luck to everyone thank you for sure I yeah anybody who learned something from this video please make sure you comment in the description and any any more questions you have for Priyanka especially as mom was two kids we're very looking forward to hearing from all of you guys thank you so much make sure you like share and subscribe and comment this video thank you very much for having you Priyanka and good see all of you guys and next time we'll be teach you how to be a better product manager thank you this is Dr. Nancy bye