 Today my guest is Rich Edwards. He is a Product Manager at IBM. Welcome Rich. Tell us a little more about the products that you're working on at IBM. Well first of all thanks Felix. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. So I've been with IBM for 10 years and I'm currently working on the IBM Watson Group around the developer cloud offering and these are the services that we're making available to individual developers you know in a platform as a service offering around some of the componentized technology that we have around the IBM Watson system. So you may have seen some of the things you know on the TV commercials are certainly the Jeopardy Challenge a couple years ago. We're trying to enable largely independent software vendors and startups and other people who are just generally want to tinker around with it the ability to use some of those individual component technologies and build on top of it. Yes some very cool stuff I think that there's a lot of innovation in that space so it's really awesome to see Eric to have you on and to talk about that. So you know I was looking at I was looking at your LinkedIn and you know the different jobs you've had in the past and you weren't always working as a product manager you kind of did different things at different companies. You know can you tell us a little more about your past and you know what drove you towards product management? Sure so going all the way back to undergrad I had an engineering undergraduate degree and I went to school on a army scholarship. So I did ROTC when I was in college and then I went in the army as an engineer officer after that and did that for four years and decided I was going to get married to my then girlfriend and she was in graduate school and so we said okay time to show her to leave graduate school and me to leave the army and we ended up moving to North Carolina and I started working for Alcatel for a subsidiary of Alcatel called Birk Tech and making fiber optic cable which is a rather large industry specific to North Carolina and worked there for a couple years and very much like operationally focused it was manufacturing and I really wanted to get into either a marketing or sales role and one of the opportunities to do that was to go back to school and so I went and got my MBA from UNC Chapel Hill from their executive MBA program and kind of did that at nights and weekends while I was still working in the plant and when I was done with that was really you know that was the impetus for me to make this change into you know more marketing role and I ended up going to work for IBM actually hired by a classmate of mine from grad school and I worked in a role that was kind of half finance half marketing in services and this was in a business that was selling hardware and we had a services practice so this was kind of like the last mile of configuration and installation work and it was largely around some of the new technology that was coming out at the time and it was really interesting and really got my interest particularly in product management because I worked with a lot of product managers because we were trying to figure out how do we have you know this new technology that's coming out that there isn't a lot of knowledge around particularly how to use it or how to get the most out of it in the market and trying to close that gap and really turning the experience we were getting working with customers and seeing how they were using it and turning that into requirements that were showing up in the in the product roadmap and I thought that was really interesting and so I started looking for a role to go do that and I got the opportunity to move over to IBM software group and I worked in the data center automation group for a while doing general strategy doing a lot of analyst work a lot of allocation from from an investment standpoint some things around M&A it was really really interesting work and then had the chance to go into a business unit and actually get involved in owning a product and moving it you know dealing with shipping a product and taking it all the way from concept through development you know into what was then a adoption of agile development in IBM and particularly in the software business and delivering that and it was that was really really interesting work and after a couple of years of doing that I had an opportunity to go work for this brand new business unit that IBM was considering forming and it was specifically around the Watson technology and the work that had come out of IBM research after the Jeopardy grand challenge and they began to think about how do we commercialize that and they had spent a lot of time just fielding as you could imagine a lot of rather interesting proposals and ideas from the market and the preponderance of them came from the healthcare market so that kind of led the initial strategy and the the initial work around developing Watson based solutions in healthcare the the one that gets the most attention is Watson for oncology and that was through a partnership with several hospitals and institutions and it's really pretty impressive is this kind of idea about taking things based on some existing technology and machine learning and natural language processing and and really advancing the state of the art where you know you can think of some of the solutions as like the world's greatest research assistant that that kind of follows you around all day and doesn't really make decisions for you but makes really really good recommendations and things that you might have thought of and certainly in a domain like medicine where the volume of research even within a fairly narrow specialization is so large that no one person can consume it all it's it's really really impressive to see some of the things that could be done and certainly an area that has such a big impact on it so you know I jumped at that that that was just a great opportunity to jump over there and and work on that and so I've been doing that for the the past year just about since we launched the the Watson business unit as a kind of an independent business unit within IBM and started working on the developer cloud and this was a you know very different market from where I had been before where I previously been working largely in the enterprise space working with very large data centers particularly high volume transaction business and shifting over into you know a space that was largely servicing independent developers so the the persona the individual users we were working with very different it was a very different business model where it had been you know the delivery of traditional software into now cloud services trying to figure out how are we going to do that with you know rather unique piece of technology and being able to break that down in a way that made sense both for how we were building you know these larger solutions that we would build privately or with IBM's brand name on them but also individually for customers that were interested in building individual applications yes you know so as you're talking about this it sounds like a lot of your job has been finding the finding technology that already exists or has already been developed and looking for business use for it and you know giving your background in both having engineering undergrad and then getting an MBA do you find that product management can be highly technical where you do need to come up with a tech or is it more of like a marketing kind of a marketing like operation or marketing role where you're going out and looking for these like markets or finding business cases or business uses for existing technology yeah that's a that's an interesting question and you know the way I would answer that is it very much depends on the type of organization you're in and not only like big business small business but also where are they in the life cycle is it early on is it later on and you know one of the best ways to figure out like what type of role you're in is to look at ratios of things like how many product managers are there per engineer because that's pretty descriptive about what the scope of the role is I want to say it was Ian McAllister from Amazon had a pretty good breakdown on this and had some interesting benchmarks so one of the on the lower end if I if I remember you know very technical very close to what's going on much more feature function related would be Microsoft from an enterprise standpoint and I want to say the ratio was something around three or four engineers per product manager so you kind of see the you know the reach of you know how far you're going from people who are actually writing code you know what's your relationship to those how close are you and you can look on the higher end around where the role is going to be much more strategic is going to be something over 10 and that's the type of role where you're one step back and you're not looking at things from say an individual sprint standpoint or an individual feature standpoint it's going to be more let me think of the high level strategy of really more at the individual problem that we're solving for customers and to use the the agile terminology you know you live at the epic level you know in that type of environment so it's a lot about the type of the type of company where you are in your life cycle and certainly how the what your organization looks like yeah that that makes a lot of sense you know and it seems like you know when you were trying to get your not that maybe you weren't necessarily trying to get a product manager role but once you got to one and you're looking back on your career path it seems like you're inching closer and closer to product by doing things or you know being involved in more projects or working with more departments that were more and more related to product management do you find that that is a typical career path for somebody that wants to get into product is that they you know see kind of maybe have this kind of drive towards being more hands-on and being more involved in the development of the product and then just kind of trying to find more roles that move them closer and closer to to that role so you know a lot of questions I get sometimes you know being a you know a manager of product managers where I'm you know part of the role is hiring product managers is what's the career path that gets you there and I never have one straight answer for that and the reason is that you know you look at the domain of everything that you need to do as a discipline of product management and it's it's fairly broad enough that you never see one person totally cover it they may be able to cover it for a while or they may be able to cover it during a certain life stage but when you think of it as you know there's an element of technical expertise and really under this understanding the technology of what you're doing plus understanding the market that you work in and the individual customers you're dealing with and then understanding maybe the specific domain of within that market that you're serving you know that's a pretty broad diverse set of skills set of understanding set of experience that that type of role demands and so you know I look at it as you're usually building a team of two or three people that are overlapping sometimes in what they're doing if not individual products then certainly responsibilities for the entire business and to that end you end up hiring people with different backgrounds so if I look at you know my team now and the teams that I've managed in the past it's a pretty diverse group you have people who have come in from you know very technical roles either developers or architects or product service or support standpoint people who come in from you know a more straight marketing background you know who would not be comfortable doing things from a command line or writing code but really understand the market and maybe how we go to market and can talk to the talk to the to the individual customers and then you have people who are actually customers done that once or twice with with some pretty good success of people who have been users of your product and have come in that way each one of them had their own strengths and certainly came at it from a different way so you know that's that that's one of those angles of you know you should never feel well you know I only have technical experience I don't have any sales experience so I can't be a product manager and it's certainly not the case it's certainly not the case the other way and that it's really a fit for what the organization needs at that time to help move the product along and keep it relevant in the market yeah and you know speaking about you know getting that job and preparing for uh or you know depending on what kind of skill sets the company's looking for what do you find is kind of the most important skills to have as a as a product manager what kind of skills you think are most in demand right now for for companies that are hiring product managers so um I mean so so the the way to answer that is to think about what product management does uh and and why product management is as a discipline is important to an organization um and when you think of product delivery there's really kind of three main disciplines um and and this goes back to kind of the the thinking around like design thinking right and you have you have technical development roles that are really geared towards feasibility can can we do what's being asked of us and can we deliver and then there's there's design and design thinking where you start thinking about it from a user experience standpoint and is the thing that we're delivering is it desirable is it a pleasurable experience working with our product and then you have product management who's really about um differentiation you know are we doing something that's important to the market and are we going to remain relevant to them not just with this release but the next release and the release after that you know are we are we staying on a path that's going to keep us uh you know essential to our customers or are we going down a path where they could probably pick from five or six different competitors and it wouldn't really matter that's really where you're going to add values of product management so to that end um really one of the most important skills you can have is uh being able to understand the market that you serve being able to understand your customers uh really having true empathy for them and the problems they deal with um because you find that a lot of times uh while you you know your day to day and what you focus on is about solving a rather well-defined technical problem uh in the eyes of the customer the problem you're solving is a lot of times more deeper than that that there's often uh a lot of uh emotional content to it right um you know you can think of some technical things that you could solve where you know given this input or given this state of where a customer is we provide this you know very well-defined fixed feature function service to them but what you find is what you're often doing for them is making them relevant and important to say they're boss in an organization and it's like not looking dumb in front of their peers you know it's like those type of things that you really do for them um and when you think of it at that level that's where you really get that relevance for what you're doing you're you're able to to uh provide for them something that they can't get anywhere else uh either at the price or in the model or in the method that you're delivering it to it and and that's when you're really keyed in on something that's important yeah that's a really good point you know because most of the time you know IBM is being a product manager IBM I think for the most part is more of a B2B kind of uh I guess a product manager role and a lot of uh other people looking to get into a product manager role uh they usually look at B2C as the company as the types of product management jobs that require you to think about the emotions of the customer but you know at the end of the day even at a B2B company or B2B um uh like software company you're still selling to a person at the end of the day and the person at the end of the day still making a purchase decision or making a decision to continue to use a product or not yeah so you know you still have to think about um their emotions and in one thing that you mentioned that I hear over and over again is the empathy being able to understand the problems that your customers have in and being able to understand what they need and want to to help them through their day like you're saying to to look good to their boss and and that I think was the the very I think it was the IBM back in the day was the the popular phrase where you don't get fired for purchasing IBM or something like that is that I think it was like you want to make sure that your customer at the end of the day is happy with their their decision regardless if it's a consumer or or a business and you know to to that end do you spend a lot of time or do you're proud of me I just spent a lot of time with the customer or what is what is there how do how do they interact with the and customer yeah yeah yeah so uh just to go back to one point uh you know you think about the difference between B2B and B2C um and I I really believe that the only difference there is in who's paying the bill um that in in B2B the only difference is you know they're trying to justify an expense or a purchase um which is sometimes about money and sometimes about personal reputation and risk but they're trying to justify it to somebody else to making their boss happy um other than that the all the emotions wrapped up into it very similar not a lot of differences there um so we can get into the difference between the user persona and the buyer persona but but you know it's not it's not like it's uh it's a completely different discipline or you're looking at it differently um but as far as uh as far as the customer interaction that's a really big part of being a product manager um not so much from say just doing straight like user testing and seeing people use your your product which which is important and a part of what you're doing but it's also understanding kind of the context around what they're doing um when they're using your product and really the problem that you're solving for them um so you know I spend a good chunk of my time I would guess somewhere between uh 20 and 25 percent would be a good guess right about a day a week it is a is a good average it's sometimes lumpy particularly when you kind of lump in going to um uh like big conferences um or or meetups you know where you'll spend an inordinate amount of time talking to a whole bunch of customers at once versus just doing like one on ones but uh that's really really key to what you're doing because really again that the value that you bring here is understanding that customer and what they're dealing with and depending on the market those things change over time um the nature of the problems will change over time what alternatives they have uh to solving those problems will change over time uh the type of market that you're addressing will change uh as time goes along and it's there's a lot of angles around how fast is that changing and that kind of dictates you know how much this researcher you're going to have to do um but like I said it it it it becomes one of those things that it it's a struggle um in that you have to do it and you can't stay relevant if you don't but if you don't manage your time and you're not able to prioritize it you can very quickly get caught up in the kind of nuts and bolts of of what you're doing and and become very inward focused right focused on your own process and your own product and your own company um and if you find yourself doing that as a product manager you're likely on the path of becoming irrelevant because you're you're not there as kind of the advocate for look this is really important to our customer um and when you look at things a lot of the methodologies and I'll I'll talk to the agile methodology because you know I'm somewhat familiar with it um the the idea of having very crisp well-defined personas you know like the first time you deal with with like a like a well thought out persona and you go in there and they have like a picture of some guy and he's got a name and they talk about where he went to school you're like well this is silly right because I this is all manufactured this isn't a real person um but you begin to think of them that way right and so when you kind of come to this decision uh that invariably you do where it's not a clear choice you know do we deliver this feature this function or do we delay it or do we take an alternate course you find yourself saying um you know well you know Joe Smith is our persona would Joe like this decision or wouldn't you know you have these like really silly debates about Joe and what Joe wants but it kind of forces you to say let's look at it from the side of our customers right and if we're making a decision that's good for us and bad for Joe then maybe we need to back up and rethink this right that's um definitely a great approach to think about just one person rather than a bunch of statistics and you know a whole massive people yeah you know when you what you're saying you spend about one day a week actually interacting and talking to customers and I think that um that's something that no doesn't happen enough and you hear that a lot now in the in the um the product manager space about how do you have to get out the office and not spend so much time you know working in the business rather than working on it and finding ways to you know grow it and and make it align with where what your customers want to need um you know but what do you actually do like you know once you go into the office I think that that's a um an experience that a lot of new product managers or aspiring product managers are not uh you know we don't get we don't get taught that we don't really learn like what kind of questions to ask how what to talk to customers about what's your goal when you go in and how do you kind of accomplish your goals this is this is talking to customers yeah talking to customers sure yeah so so there's I mean there's a couple angles on this you know if you don't know where to start one of the best ways to deal with this is uh with however you do this get involved with your support organization whether that means spending a day a week for the first couple of weeks or a month just just dealing with with customer support go answer the phones go deal with uh you know the zendesk you um go in there and solve their problems and if best meet with them you know spend time with them and understand what why why have you reached out to us what is your problem what isn't our product doing uh and talking to them and then get into the you know so why is this important to you why is this and sometimes it's obvious but sometimes it's not you know and that those are always good questions to have um but you because begin to feel that you know build that experience and understanding of what's going on um it's always good like as you said get out of the office and actually go visit customers and not just your customers but maybe competitors customers or other people that fit your market definition that uh you know haven't bought something yet or using an alternative that they built themselves or it's it's it's free or it's cobbled together right like invariably uh every software solution that that i've run into there's somebody doing some version of it in a spreadsheet somewhere and really kind of talking to that person like okay you have a problem that's so important you're essentially building your own solution around spending a lot of time doing that why what are you doing and why is this so important to you and if you can really get to the base of those problems and understand what it is that you know that's that's where the real insight in the magic comes from because then you can turn around and be able to turn that into a requirement and when you have a good list of requirements going and you can be able to go out and test those uh you can come back with some level of credibility to go into your business and whether it's you know your your product development organization or or your engineering organization or some higher level to an executive be able to come in and speak authoritatively about what's important to the market and and not do it in a way where it's it's it's debatable i mean that's one of the hardest things right you kind of go in there and you go well i think this is the most important thing to do uh and depending on your standing in the organization that may work and it may not that may be an easy uh an easy argument to knock down but if you go in there and say okay i've talked to 200 customers and 75 percent of them say this is their most important unmet need um that they would be willing to buy a solution for today nobody are nobody argues with that right because you've done the work uh and there's there's an old adage i remember hearing from an executive that said you know he who names customer wins argument uh and it's you know when you can bring the voice of the customer into that you know the site decision process uh that carries more weight than anything else than anyone person's individual opinion yeah that's definitely the the one thing that i think has made my job as a product manager much easier is to have data and to have the person that's putting the dollars down the people that are paying for the products to have their opinions and have their thoughts and uh to just some degree you're really just a conduit for for them and for how to have them you know voice their to voice uh you know their opinions for them to back to the back to the organization so you know we've covered like you know one day i have the week for you which is you know working with and talking to and and uh understanding the customers like what else is your your week made of like what is your typical day to day look like sure so you know it's it's it's one of those those type jobs that if you like to come in and do the same thing every day this is not for you because it's so very it's so different um you know if you kind of lend yourself more to being kind of periprotetic and having to do something different all the time then this is a very interesting job uh and part of that is uh you know you're you're you're you're really solving these very complicated problems right how do we bring this market this product or this solution to market in a time that makes sense considering what our customers want what we're able to deliver in the time frame allotted to us with the amount of resources we have and also considering uh what our competitors are doing and what may be going on in the market from a technology standpoint i mean those those are a lot of different moving pieces to kind of keep keep track of um so it's it's tends to lend itself is to be very complicated problems you're solving uh and at the end of the day if you're really taking charge of the product and really fulfilling everything that you can as a product manager you're ultimately responsible for all of that even though probably most of the resources to accomplish that don't directly report to you um so there's a there's an awful lot of uh work that's done between organizations and typically product managers work you know a lot with with development and uh engineering staff a lot with sales and support um and then some with other parts of the organization marketing marketing communications if that's a separate part of the company you're tied in with PR other aspects of of your delivery process like legal like finance like pricing putting together business cases and those are not one of those things that you're constantly doing you're either coming up with new ones or coming at it from a different angle dealing with you know a new release or a new idea um and you know soliciting feedback and building consensus from the people who could potentially say no to what you're doing um I was going to ask you know so you're saying how a job as a product manager is it sounds like you're just a huge balancing act and you're not doing the same thing every day was that did you know that going in or like what is something I guess what is the thing that most surprised you about the role before you you got started that you didn't expect to run into so I I didn't um I didn't really appreciate from the outside looking in um how much influence you can potentially have as a product manager so and again my my perspective here is somewhat skewed as you know having never worked in a startup or a small business but having worked in largely enterprise most of my career um and there's you know from what I've seen certainly with our customers and everything there's this inverse correlation between uh the amount of assets and resources you have available and the amount of autonomy you have um so you know at the very high end you think of a company like IBM um we have a tremendous amount of resource available uh from a sheer manpower standpoint but also from the depth of technology and things like IBM research which is my entire product line came out of um but then when you get to that level and you know you look at your your business plan and there's a whole lot of zeros in the end of it um there's a lot more people who have to sign off on something like that there's a lot of more people who have some slice of responsibility and so you know it ends up being very much uh you're making your case uh to a pretty wide court around that so you know building building alliances and and being able to um you know negotiate through the different process elements of what you're doing becomes a a big part of the role um and you know having to build uh you know a network like that and have uh credibility in a group a fairly diverse group um yeah that was that was something I didn't appreciate coming into you know how much you kind of had to really play for lack of better term politician but not necessarily in the in the negative sense right right more you know you really have to be able to convince people from very different backgrounds who have different incentives for how they support the business um that what you're doing is the right thing to do yeah it's um it's definitely something I've heard before that's the the best product managers are also good politicians and like you're saying not in negative kind of connotations that has kind of gotten over in the recent past but it's more about how do you show people that what you want to do or where you want to be is beneficial for them or beneficial for for the business um and do you have any tips on how to how to actually you know build a case like you're saying or or working for resources and getting people aligned with the same goals that you have sure yeah um so it it's never easy and it's never straightforward and it's not the type of thing where it's step one step two step three um it always starts with having done your homework and really understanding your market so again being able to come in and say I have done the research I have talked to the market this is what's going on um and and not really just saying well I I have an opinion that you may not think is very well informed and so it's easy to say no to but coming in with the facts being able to be make very fact-based decisions um and you know make the case around things in a very unassailable way uh is a good start the other thing is much the way you have to build empathy for your customer is you have to build empathy for who you're dealing with inside and and understand that the way you see the business and the way you see the product is not the way they do um and that often for very good reasons they have different incentives um you know someone who is say um from part of the finance department um may alternately be very much incentive around us attaining a revenue amount and then conversely about containing costs to a certain level and making sure we meet goals sometimes those things align and sometimes they don't um sometimes you find people that are very much about avoiding risk and again for very good reason you need people who are looking out for that um but you know they kind of care about one angle of this but not really the other ones because of how you're organized or how you're incentive uh so being able to understand that there is a diverse set of requirements or concerns people have and being able to address those individually and and you know not have to rely on fairly weak arguments about why they should listen to you um but really addressing their core concerns right because much the way you know that idea of the difference between b2b and b2c everyone's job is ultimately to make their boss happy and if you can understand what this person's trying to do to make their boss happy and align that with what you're doing or change what you're doing in a way that it makes their boss happy but also achieves your goals that greases an awful lot of skids yeah that that's that totally makes sense I think understanding like what's the core motivation for your your end customer can really guide you in the right direction um and so once you you know have an idea of what you want to uh what your customers needs are can you walk us through the the product management process at IBM and what's the development cycle like and how the product manager fits into the process sure sure yeah so so i mean typically i mean i'll describe very cleanly you know from beginning to end but it never works like that right because you either come in midway through the process or you've got three products that you're dealing with and they're all multiple phases so it's not like you kind of get on the train at the beginning and ride it all the way through it's you jump on at some point and that always that that's difficult sometimes um but really you know it kind of starts with with a very clear articulation about what the market need is um and who you're solving it for and you kind of get to this point of being able to um build a case for you know what are the what are the jobs that we're being hired to go do um what pains are we solving for them and and what's potentially the gain that they get out of it and you always kind of gear towards them solving a pain right because um you know you have the old adage about is your product a an aspirin or a vitamin um nobody quivers over price for aspirin they may look twice for vitamins but man when you've got a headache you want that thing to go away and your price sensitivity and maybe the objections that you have around it those vanish very quickly yeah um so you kind of start at that level understanding what that is what is the thing that we need to do to go solve that and and then it's going back and looking at like what are we capable of doing um what technology do we have what skills do we have what relationships do we have in the market um so i'll i'll give you an example in this case uh specifically for watson um we have now built uh both through the watson initiative and the existing life science business in in um ibm essentially the right to sell things in the healthcare market we can sell solutions to um largely institutions but to the to the medical industry and they will buy things from ibm there are industries where ibm has no business selling anything um you can kind of think of like the consumer market right ibm would have a very hard time selling a consumer product particularly since we no longer sell uh pcs anymore um you know when was the last time you know you as an individual bought something that had the ibm logo on it but yeah probably maybe never right yeah maybe it's like that or something right exactly um so that's you know that's one of those areas where it's kind of understanding like both from not not just your channels but what is somebody actually going to go oh yeah no i know them and i would buy something from them because i probably bought something from you already um so being able to serve the market making the market addressable having you know essentially the right from the sense of the market standpoint uh the the ability to sell to them so you kind of begin to like narrow things down here um and so what once you kind of got the concept down then you start getting into the nuts and bolts of actually product product development and product delivery and as a product manager the probably the most important thing you're doing here from the you know developing the roadmap as far as these are the discrete things we're going to do with when we're going to do them is writing requirements um this is this is a hard skill for product managers um and uh it's often a difficult what it can be elusive um because if you're not a nor an organization that's very well disciplined around this um they'll let you get by with really crappy requirements um requirements that are non-specific in the language they use right non-specific language about what you know better or faster is right the onus is on you is to define that you know what is what does faster mean i got to do this in less than five minutes that you know this type of ui should have a sub second response time that that's how specific you need to be in developing um uh requirements because you need to be able to hand hand something to your your engineers to go build right that's that specific this is what winning looks like if you do this we will win and it can't be wishy washy you really got to be able to understand what you're doing at that level of granularity so part of that discussion about you know going to customers and talking to them is is kind of smoke testing that even before you put it in the roadmap you know it kind of behooves you to go talk to you know developers and say well you know i have a i have an idea here of what we might do let me describe it to you i'm not asking you to do it but let me describe the problem to you now given that do you think you could go build it or what questions do you have right and then you start to get that well you know could we do it this way could we do it that way if we use this technology and we deliver this way is that going to solve the problem and either you'll be able to know enough about the problem to say oh yeah no here's the context and why that doesn't work or why it does work or you've just got more questions to go ask the market right and this is the indication that you don't know it well enough yet so you know it's really that's the that's the hard part and um you know there's a lot to be said about you know the nuts and bolts of individual development processes whether it's waterfall or agile or agile xp or you know all the different methodology from a product management standpoint it doesn't really matter it's can i give them requirements on the front end let them go build it and then work with them on the back end about testing you know did we actually do this for the market did we do it in you know the time in the way that it's it's going to satisfy the needs for that problem and we're doing in the concept of our overall strategy that it makes sense of how we play in the market why we win and how we're differentiated from our competition and alternatives yeah that's definitely um you know a great overview and so if someone's out there is you know looking to get their first product management job or either they're out of right out of school or maybe has worked in the technology um industry for a bit and wants to transition into a product management role what are what do you would you say are some key things that they should focus on to make them look like or to make them become a you know ideal candidate so i mean one thing you can do if you're in a company that has product managers just kind of do what you're doing here sit down and buy them a cup of coffee and say tell me your story you know what what's it what's it like what are you dealing with you know what problems are you dealing with right now what's what's your headache um and uh you know think through how could you help that scenario um because what you know for for me is as a as a you know as a hiring manager one of the one of the best interview techniques once you kind of qualify you know yes you have the knowledge yes you have the skills you have the attitude or the experience that we need um i'm going to bring you a problem that i'm dealing with right we're going to sit down and we're going to talk through something that i'm currently dealing with that i don't have a solution for and if i present you a problem and you got nothing for me yeah okay nice try but probably you know you've just disqualified yourself um if you kind of bring me a solution that the team has already come up with that that's that's a good sign right like you are you are sufficiently smart enough sufficient understanding of what's going on uh that you're you're running at pace with everyone else in the team if you bring me something new and novel that we haven't thought of before that looks like it's going to add value that no one on the team has come up with you just got pushed to the front of line on the whole thing um so you know really understanding where where that team is sitting and what they're dealing with um and what new ideas can you bring to the table because this is very much a uh you know a knowledge worker kind of see cerebral type role right you got to come in with your brain fully engaged in what you're doing because you know as i described before you're dealing with like very complex fluid problems that you're trying to solve uh they're they're not discreet um there's always multiple solutions for what you're doing um and very rarely is it is it obvious to any of us um yeah exactly yeah that's where you add the value because you've got to come in and find the solution and then not only find the right solution but that convince a fairly broad set of stakeholders both inside and outside your company that this is the right move yeah and i think one of the great things about getting a job as a product manager or applying for a job as a product manager is that it's a it's a meritocracy you know if you can prove they can do the job because there's no necessarily like a pedigree or like a a school that's there that you can go to and and you know just transition into a product manager job i think a lot of the the hiring that's done is really dependent on showing that you can do the job and i like to always say to aspiring product managers that if you want to get the job do the job before you get it and you know prove that you can do it you know and you know going along those lines i think i hear a lot of um product managers or companies are hiring product managers suggest that side projects are really important like being able to show that you can build something like what's your opinion on that like in you know how can a what should a candidate do to to in terms of a side project to really kind of wow you in you know blow your way when it comes to them to come in so i mean that's a that's a great suggestion and if you're working in a company that has product management i will tell you like any product manager that is sufficiently engaged in what they're doing has 10 or 15 things that they would love to do that they can't and if you can come in and solve that for them or help them with a side or a pet project they're working on great place to start right because you can kind of think of it as a very long interview um now if you're not in a in a company you don't have that type of relationship where you know somebody's not going to be able to bring you in on what they're doing because you're outside um actually actually building a product and shipping something is key and it doesn't matter what it is right it could be a blog as a product but being able to talk about it that way and say i understand my market and this is why i made the decisions i did and how i developed a solution to solve this specific problem for these type of people that's a great example um so i mean philix look at what you're doing right with your with your program here you know you're looking at at solving a problem for a part of the market that is not served at all um where you have you know uh relatively new in their career folks maybe just out of college or maybe just in their first job and they're looking to get into this type role and there really is no guide for them out there you know and so this is an unmet need in the market and and you're providing a service here to help them with that to bridge that gap that's an excellent example of that and and being able to understand you know why you do those things and what makes a good decision and talking about what you struggled with and the the difficult decisions you had to make that that's very much what that role is like and even if it's you know relatively simple or maybe even something that you're you're not even charging for but you have a metric for what success is and can talk about things at that level that really demonstrates a lot of the acumen that this role requires yeah and it sounds like you know as you're talking about this it sounds like a lot of product managers need to have that kind of entrepreneurial self-starter spirit in them where they can take an idea because a lot of people can come up with ideas ideas are you know really easy to come up with but then the hard part is how do you execute on how do you how do you you know figure out what's what should we should prioritize what you know you can wait on and how do you you know make it sustainable i think that there was a really all key you know kind of traits that make a really good product manager and it kind of closes out you know do you have any kind of you know someone came up to you and said that hey i want to apply for a job at IBM as a product manager you know what kind of advice would you give them what should it be focusing on let's say that if they have like a few months preparation to put in like what should they be focusing on yeah you know certainly do your homework you know that's the the base piece do do the research do the google research do the linkedin research understand who the players are but then really get into the market understand what's going on in the market who are you serving what are the problems they're dealing with that really really important what are the general trends that's going on and then take it to the next level right actually go out and do some interviews i will tell you i am floored when somebody comes in and says you know i talked to people in the market who are dealing with this problem maybe they're existing customers or potential customers but here's the insights that i've gleaned from talking to them you know i'm actually coming to the table with a head start it you know not that i know nothing about what you do but i've actually sat down and tried to figure out what the problems are and try to you know come to it with with an idea about where where we should think about going as an organization where the product should be going what are some different angles on this and really looking for that like novel thought that's in there and certainly not rehashing you know ideas that are out there but what's the next thing because again the the value of what you do is keeping your product relevant in the market you know a year 18 months from now what's going to happen in the future it's one of those funny things about product management right because you you could go to probably any organization and fire all the product managers and nothing bad would happen right away but eventually what you would find is without somebody doing that role you drive to obsolescence you drive the commoditization of what you're doing and you're just doing what everybody else is doing and there's a lot of traps there even straight up listening to your customers can lead you in that path right because if you fall into the trap of just saying well you know my job as product manager is to just take all the requirements that our customers give us and put them in order for development to go execute on you're not doing your job because you're really not understanding the market you're not understanding what's going on with competitors you're not understanding how do you reach what in most markets is a fairly broad set of opportunity that is totally unaddressed by what you're doing and if you just consider you know your existing customers as a captive market and how you're going to continue to make them happy and you know in a lot of cases just you know milk the support money you're getting from them you're not doing your job you're not staying relevant to what's going on right awesome thanks so much rich thanks for sharing your experience you know especially from like a larger product management organization if you know the folks that are listening if they want to kind of learn more about what you what you've been doing or how you're you're a career path and and you know the IBM specifically or maybe they're interested in applying for jobs what's the best way for them to stay in touch with you sure so I'm on LinkedIn rich Edwards Watson should get you there certainly take a look at if you're kind of interested in Watson and developer in particular IBM.com slash Watson and if you're you're interested in what I'm doing particularly around developer cloud it's IBM.com slash Watson developer cloud awesome thanks so much rich Joe Felix