 Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. My name is Piyush Chandra, and I'm a Principal Product Manager with the Amazon Alexa AI team. Now before we get started, I want to make it clear that I'm not representing Amazon today. The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are my personal views. Today, we're going to be talking about the lesser known key skills to succeed as a product manager. And that begs the question, what are the more known key skills? Now every time I hear about product managers and product management, and when I go online to see what are the skills in job descriptions that people are looking for when they say I need a product manager, a few key things that jump out you have to be analytical, you have to have critical thinking and logical reasoning, and a bunch of similar stuff. You have to be good with numbers. You have to be able to look at the big picture and then funnel it down to something that is more actionable. And I hope that sounds great. But in my opinion, those are the building blocks. Those are the starting points. You have to have those to be a product manager. But simply having all those skills, simply being a critical thinker or very logical, does not guarantee your success as a product manager. Today, I'm going to be talking about a few key skills that have helped me succeed as a product manager but are not so well known or not so well talked about. Before we do that, I want to ask you a question. What do you think product managers do? When I hear that question or when I ask that question to other product managers, I hear a lot of grandiose things that product managers are the CEOs of their product or sometimes that they create the vision for the product. Sometimes I even hear that product managers are the voice of the customer slash end users. Now as a product manager, when I hear all of that, it makes me feel good about myself. But honestly, the day-to-day life of a product manager is quite different. So before we get started about the skills you need, I want to establish a definition of what product managers do. Product managers build a shared understanding of the product vision. They remove roadblocks to ensure smooth development and they define what success looks like for the product and they iterate through this cycle. So that is my own definition of what product managers do on a day-to-day basis. Now product managers do not come up with a vision for the product. It just does not happen. What they do instead is that they socialize a broad concept and refine that concept by taking inputs from the various functions in a product team, engineering, design, sales and marketing, legal and so on. And then they stitch together all these feedbacks and make a coherent vision that is shared by everybody in every team. That is how product managers help create a shared vision. Now to do this, you need facilitation skills because it's clear that PMs are not the decision makers. And even if you were, most of the organizations today are so cross-functional that there is hardly ever one decision maker. One of the key skills of a successful PM is not to make decisions, but to facilitate decision making. The goal of decision making is to help align cross-functional teams, large or small, on a goal that they are all aligned with. This is the concept of shared vision and of course is not limited to just the product vision. In product teams where most decisions impact various teams, there is no centralized decision making. The burden of ensuring that teams reach a common understanding is on the PM. This is key to any successful product because without all hands on deck, the product is doomed to fail. The PM ensures that engineering, design, marketing, sales, legal, and others, everybody are all behind the shared product vision. Now you know that you have to be a good decision facilitator to be a good PM. How do you become a good facilitator? A couple of things that have helped me become a good facilitator are, first of all, cultivate empathy. Empathy for each function and each individual in your team. You have to appreciate and acknowledge that every team and every member has a part to play and you have to see where they are coming from. You have to understand what matters to each of them. While they are all part of the same company and they might be working on the same product, they might not be motivated by the same thing. You need to understand what motivates each team and each individual. The second thing that has helped me is to learn a framework that enables me to facilitate discussions and whiteboarding sessions to help democratize the process of decision making. The one framework that has worked really well for me is the process of design thinking. Now design thinking is a well-researched and well-established method and is something that you can look up online. But this is one thing that is very well-defined and it brings all different parties to a product and enables everybody to share their views openly and builds a process through which teams can come together and define a shared vision. So you need to figure out which framework you're going to use to democratize the process of decision making. And the third thing is, as a PM, you need to be respected. Now, how do you get that respect? One thing that I have figured out and has worked well for me is that every time there's someone who has a quotient about your product, the first person to come to their mind should be you. As the PM, you should be the go-to person for that product. Does not matter what the quotient is about. It could be about the technical architecture of the product, or why did we go with this pricing or that pricing? Or how is it growing? What are the plans for the next year, next five years? Every single quotient, you should be the one people come to get answers for. And I'm not saying that you need to know everything, but you should be the first point of contact. Every product team has multiple functions. And as a PM, what works really well is to know the key things of each function. You need to understand the key things about marketing, key things about engineering of your product, key things about how you're going to sell it, and so on. So what you end up doing is you have a horizontal understanding of different functions in the product team. And what also works really well is if you can develop deep understanding in one of those functions. For me, I'm very passionate about user experience. So I have a little understanding of sales, a little understanding of pricing, some understanding of technology. But I'm really passionate about how is my product solving my end users problem. So I go deep in that one function. So a PM skill set basically looks like a team. You know a little bit of a lot of different functions and you're deep in one function. And you need to figure out what is that one function you'll go deep in and how you'll gather sufficient working knowledge of all the other functions. This will help you create a shared vision and this will help you become a great facilitator for your team. The other critical thing that PMs do on a day-to-day basis is they remove roadblocks for everybody else in the team so that they can continue with their work. And product management at the heart of product management lies influencing without authority. So you remove roadblocks by influencing people and decision makers without authority. Now, if there is one thing that everybody in a product team will look up to a PM for, it is removing roadblocks. Maybe design needs to be approved before front-end engineers can start coding or a KPI needs to be finalized before the BI team can build a dashboard. All eyes will be on you to make sure that it gets done. To make sure you can remove roadblocks for others, influence is your weapon. At the heart of product management lies influencing without authority. The good thing is that as a PM you are already tuned to understand what your users want. Treat your stakeholders as your users. Build personal relationships with them. What does John want to do over the weekends? Did his team win or lose? What does Jane do in her free time? It might sound superficial, but it is hard to influence people unless they feel a connection with you and connections are hard to build without having things in common. Find things in common with people you work with. Make it a point to never have lunch alone, for example. Go for a walk with your colleague. Stop by at their desk to say hello. If you work remotely, maybe take the initiative to share personal stories at the start of a team meeting. And these are just some of the ideas. Now, two bonus skills. First one is communication. Now, we all hear that, yes, product managers have to communicate all the time. Either you're writing documents or you're creating user stories, sending an update to your manager, or maybe giving a presentation, writing a press release. So many different times you are communicating. And I think we all believe that we are great communicators, but it also helps to know what are the things that you can do better? So it's good to know your strengths, but also identify areas that you can improve as a communicator. What works for me is that I record my important speeches to see what can I do better? You can also do a drive-on in front of your colleagues or friends and family and get their feedback. You can also ask your colleagues or your manager after a key presentation to see what part of the message you were able to deliver well and where were you lacking? You'll be surprised when you see yourself from the eyes of the others. This is the best way to learn what the audience expects from you as a speaker. One way to regularly practice the art of connecting with the audience is through Toastmasters. There are also online courses and in-person programs offered by multiple institutions you can make use of. Remember, there is no perfect speaker, but there are things you can do to become a great speaker. A day in the life of a PM involves spending up to 75% of the time in meetings. That leaves you with very little time to work on your own deliverables. Good time management will save you when there are 10 things trying to pull you in 10 different directions. A couple of things that helped me are first, I block time on my calendar way in advance and I dedicate that time to work on my own deliverables. I do not relax this rule unless there is an urgent situation. And one thing that helped me really figure out this concept is a book called Deep Work by Kel Newport. If you can get your hands on a copy, please do read it, it's a great book. I also like to keep a running list of things, which I call my own personal backlog. I structure this backlog as things to do today, things to do this week, things to do this month. And when I block my time on my calendar, I make sure that every day there is zero items on my list to do list for today. And I also try to make slight progress towards things that I have to do this week and things that I have to do this month. And that's how I can maintain my sanity. Now to conclude, these are some of the things that have worked for me, but they say that product management is not science, it's an art, and you need to figure out what works for you. And these are some things that work for me. I hope that you found it useful and maybe you can give it a try and see if any of these clicks for you and makes your life as a professional product manager more productive. And if you have any feedback, any questions, please, you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'll be happy to answer. Thank you very much and thanks for your time. Bye.