 Hey everyone. Thank you for joining today. Super excited to have you all and have this conversation over the next 30 minutes. I'm just going to do a quick introduction for myself and then maybe for if you want to do a short introduction and then we can get started. So my name is Parth. I have been in product management career for close to a decade. Most of my career I've been product manager for e-commerce space, etc. But more recently I spent about a year and a half doing product management for Alexa and their smart home experience. And then more recently I've been working on AWS for a few of their AI and computer vision products. I'm based out of Austin, Texas. It's pretty sunny out right here. So that kind of summarizes me. Why don't you spend like a few minutes to introduce yourself and then we can get started. I can start. My name is Victoria. I'm from Brazil and I'm working for a company that's also based in Brazil. But since we get to work remotely I have moved to France. So now I live in Bordeaux in France. And I started doing product manager for one and a half years. And I feel like it's going to be a really good opportunity to learn how to actually structure process better and understand how to actually roll more into this position. Yeah, sounds good. Lila? Hello. I most recently have been a group product manager at EdTech startup called Career Karma. And I've been in digital products and growth for over 16 years now. I've been working across a lot of different environments and different capacities. I didn't start off in product management. I've been in digital marketing, SEO, consulting as an analyst, as an engagement manager. So I've operated across marketing, product consulting during that time and B2B, B2C. And as I am joining today, I'm really looking to learn from you, Parth, about your own career journey. I mean, everybody's journey is different. There's no right way. But I'm very interested in learning about your experiences and how you evolved over time. Like the lessons you've learned over time. Okay. Manohar? Yes, great. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Manohar Kamath. I'm based in San Francisco Bay Area. My background basically is in engineering. I have had about at least a quarter century in engineering. I have co-founded two companies. So I have developed mobile products. The reason I'm here is basically I want to understand from Parth about product management. I have done product management about 10 years ago. The reason I'm here is I want to understand how I can come back into the industry and go into product management and what are some of the things that new things I need to learn. So that's why I'm here. Sounds good. Hopefully, I will also learn a little bit from your founder journey. Okay, great. Priyanshu? Hi, this is Priyanshu. I'm based out of Australia. Currently, it's quite night over here, 1 a.m. I have walked into the product management space into the payment office for around two years. But later on, I have moved into the business manager's side. Now, I would like to go back into the product management side. That's why I'm over here to basically learn and how to jump over to the product management side. As well as I would like to know more about the product strategy that I believe I'm a little bit weak on that side. So I want to make that point stronger or at the full part of my skill. Okay. That's pretty good. Okay. All right. Let's get started then. Just FYI, we're going to make this chat very conversational back and forth. Feel free to interrupt the ideas to make it very informal. So with that said, we can get started and we can probably go top to bottom. But as I said, when questions are asked or I'm sharing my experiences, et cetera, feel free to chime in and ask your questions. Or if you have any experiences to share with the group, that's also fine. So yeah, we'll try and make it as informal as possible. So with that said, I'm just going to go top to bottom as to what I'm seeing on the panel. So Manohar, if you want to go first, you can kick us off with what you may want to talk about. Yeah. So I want to understand from product management, I'm trying to basically get back into the corporate world. So the challenges that I have is getting traction. So I don't know, I have created a resume. Sometimes I don't get traction. So I'm trying to understand what I'm doing wrong. Do they see me too much overqualified or whatever it is that I'm applying for? And also at the same time, I want to understand what are some of the new technologies or the new tools that product managers use these days in order to manage products. As I said, I co-founded two companies, both were mobile products. I have done basically everything from scratch. So I'm here to understand, I might not have gone through a formal channel of being a product manager. So I want to understand some new things that I need to do. Yeah. So let's unpack on both of those questions. Like first part was more about breaking into product management with your specific set of experiences, etc. Of course, like how Leila was saying, everyone has their own product management journey, breaking into product management and growing in their roles and all. But there are two ways I look at it. One is if you come with very specific set of experiences around certain domain, you can absolutely leverage on it. For example, let's say you have a ton of experience in 5G or telecommunications, etc. It would make absolute sense for you to go after those kind of roles and those kind of companies that can see more value in your prior experiences, either as a founder or engineer, etc. So that's one way to look at it. You go towards specialized product management. A second one where you may or may not be getting traction is possibly when you go after generalized product management. Like hey, with the experience that you have had, you most likely feel like you can do product management for almost any kind of product, a B2B product, B2C product, AI product, etc. But I think when it does come to breaking into product management with the kind of experience that you have, it's possible you'd be better off capitalizing on domain and specific skill set that you have gained over recent past. As far as your resume is concerned, you can try and see if product school has any mechanisms or sessions for resume reviewing, etc. And then we can leverage some of those conversations as well. So that's the first part of your question. The second was, remind me what was the second question that you had? What do people basically do these tools and things like that? Any specific things that people use to manage products? Yeah, on this question, I think I'll let both Victor and Leela to also chime in because my experience has been throughout different teams or orgs or companies that have worked in product roles. Each team or org have their own way of operating things, doing things. You sometimes have to come up with your own processes and tools. But what matters the most in product role is you ensuring your engineers have what they need. If they come and say, hey, I'm more comfortable looking at a Word doc with a set of requirements. So be it, you help them with that. If they say, I want to use Jira or Asana or Kanban or Agile. Of course, you do want to look at your priorities and make sure you are picking the right techniques and tools. But what matters the most is you serving your engineers in being unblocked and really delivering value for your customers and innovating on behalf of customers. Now, that's just about core product role in helping your engineers achieve what they need to. You may also then end up having to think about, okay, what about my UX counterpart or designers? And again, in product role, you do want to be able to sort of adjust into whatever tool set the rest of the team or org is comfortable leveraging while, of course, being critical and influential towards what does make sense, what doesn't in long term. So that's kind of long-winded answer to say, like, of course, there are tools right now in market that most of product managers use. But what really matters the most is you ensuring all the counterparts and stakeholders that you are working with, they are bought into whatever tools and processes that you use. And again, as I said, Victoria, Leila, like, you also come with some product management experience, like you can also share, like, what tools, et cetera, use and how much flexibility you end up incorporating in deciding your tools and processes. For us, since we're struggling to find the proper monetization process, we don't have a lot of budget to use with tools. So we've been trying to make the best we can with the free tools that we find available right now. And it was a bit hard to actually encounter the perfect tool and process. But finally, we've reached a point that we are very comfortable with what we are using. Usually we use the Google Docs to share documents between the whole company. So we are writing specs on Google Docs and all of the documents that need to be shared. Also the Excel sheets, the spreadsheets from Google Docs. And for our design and engineering, we are using Trello. So that's where we are organizing our structure. And for myself, I like to use Notion to organize my own work there, my own product, specifically product things. But when we are talking to developers or design, it's in Trello. So, yeah, like, you can probably try and find out what works best for you, what works best for your team and organization. You find not being set to any external standards. Thank you. Cool. All right. We can go to Victoria down the panel. Yes. So we built and started from scratch. And in the beginning, it was a very chaotic environment, because we were trying to find product marketing, trying to find exactly what we should build and trying all of these new ideas. And so, yeah, it was very chaotic. We're always doing different things. And now we've reached a point that we are very comfortable with the products that we have right now. So we are focusing on enhancing the core product and also finish building the ones we have already started. So we are switching now from these very, doing a lot of different things at the same time and trying a lot of different things to actually having more process and routine. And sometimes I struggle a little bit into understanding that this is the moment now and finding some routine and structure inside the whole product routine, especially because now we have other product managers as well handling specific products, whereas I'm handling the whole product as a whole. So I would like to know, in bigger companies and companies that are more structured, how exactly is your week, for example? What are the rituals and the routine that you always follow and how do you structure exactly your work? Yeah, and correct me if I'm wrong, Victoria. I'm seeing two questions. One is operating in product role while you have multiple different product people managing different smaller components of a product while you are trying to operate at scale. The second question is what does a day-to-day operation look like for a product person in a larger org? Those are the two questions. Okay, we'll tackle the second one first because I can just talk about my day. That's easier to talk about. So the short answer is it depends. But long answer is given Amazon is fairly document-driven place, a lot of my personal time goes into different kind of docs and ensuring I have mechanisms on my calendar to meet whatever needs I have and the org that the product has. And generally what it looks like is, okay, if you need to arrive up on a decision, that looks like one kind of talk. If there's a product idea, then you may have heard of six pages or PRFAQ. If there is a conflict resolution or prioritization conversation, those kind of documents look very different than the others that I talked about. So usually during a week, I sort of know what kind of decisions or conversations are pending and what to go after. You see part of my calendar is blocked for some kind of writing and some kind of doc that I am pursuing. And at the time, I would have a few docs in progress. And just to double-click on that, you may hear a lot about the six pages or PRFAQs. But these are long processes. A good PRFAQ does take sometimes months as it goes through several revisions and approvals and investment cycles, et cetera. So that's what most of my day goes into. But other than that, it really revolves around, in a specific week, what do my stakeholders need? What does the product need? What do the engineers need or UX person needs? And really structuring a week around what needs to happen. And that is a very micro way of looking at things. I also then have quarterly goals or yearly goals to say, here's what I do want to do. And really finding time for it and accountability for it throughout my day. And feel free to interrupt me if it didn't answer your question. But I think given a lot of what it depends, I just shared what areas I end up focusing on. But the second question about managing product at scale and then in sort of a group product manager role, I think what has helped me in past and more recently as well is what I call radical delegation. Be radical about delegating and trusting your product counterparts who may be handling specific parts of the product that you are accountable for or KPS that you are accountable for. At the same time, you do want to place mechanisms so that they also feel supported and get what they need out of you. So if it means spending 30 minutes or an hour every week with each of them trying to figure out and either unblocking them or being a sounding board, I think that plays even better role as to something. They just need a different product person to talk to validate their thought process to say, okay, does this make sense? Is this something should I go after next week or next quarter, et cetera? So those are the two things that have helped me. One, be very radical in delegating and at the same time put mechanisms in place so that they do get the support that they need throughout their product journey. Great. Thank you. Okay. Leela, we can go to you. Yes. By the way, I saw someone in the chat mention that they wanted to know how you formulated goals for a product you follow, okay, our process, and then I can ask my question. Thank you. Yeah. I think how about this? Let's go through all four of you and then we'll go through all the comments top to bottom. But thank you for drawing my attention there. That is helpful. Yeah, for sure. My question has more to do with your career journey. I see that like me, very early in your career, you started off in digital marketing and now you're in more of a technical product role. For myself, my current background is less technical. So in addition to learning about your journey, I'm wondering about, in your day-to-day, how much do you lean into your technical knowledge and how have you developed your technical knowledge throughout your career journey? So there's really two parts of the questions, this overall journey and then how you've developed technical skills throughout that journey and how much of that you need and want to lean into that day-to-day? Absolutely, yeah. So as far as my career and the influence of technology on it is concerned, I did my undergrad in information technology. I did both traditional software engineering courses, et cetera. So that kind of helped their foundation and then my master's was in information systems. So that's where I ended up getting introduced to a lot more system design constructs and concepts, et cetera. Of course, academic art did help. But in my day-to-day role, whenever I do go into a new product area or new team or new org, like one I have to accept, I know almost nothing about it. But then what I do is find right sort of people either directly in my organization or outside of my organization or even external resources to really understand the behind-the-scenes of how it works. And it is not an easy process when I started working on Alexa or smart home. Like I had no prior experience of conversational AI but you do take like two to three months to understand the behind-the-scenes of it and be very okay spending several hours either with your principal engineer or senior engineer to sit down and say, like, how does it work? Help me understand. I personally have been very comfortable parking open postman and making API calls to understand here is how systems are interacting with each other. So that has helped. And more recently, Amazon is concerned, like there are two distinct roles. Like one is product manager, very traditional product management. And then there is PMT, like product management technical. You end up working with a lot more technical products. So the expectations are also that not only you do the core product roles but also are capable of influencing technology decisions and system design, et cetera. So the interworking of how Amazon Operates has also helped me recently to kind of maintain a higher bar for my technical needs and performance. I think, again, that was one of the two questions. Your second question was what again? Just about your career journey, like, you know, how you got into product management and why you chose it, how you drove over your career. Yeah. So I found product management by accident. I did do a bunch of... I started my career in data science roles, right? I was essentially doing number crunching data analytics or startup based on balance. And without realizing, I recognized that I was bringing product management of some source when we are the other, whether it is figuring out what should the data visualization look like for a report like this. If I were to standardize this kind of report that does go out to all of our clients every month, what would that process or product look like? And then I ended up inventing, okay, if I run these set of macros, I'm going to produce this kind of data visualization dashboard and I'm going to work with some engineers to write a script to say publish these reports out to these recipients. Now, without realizing, essentially, I was building some sort of product. But then when I got done with the masters, I graduated, I was looking at all possible things that people with information systems degree go into. I identify product management and I ended up finding a few mentors who helped me find my foot in the door and helped me recognize what is product management and how to be better at it. So yeah, it's very much by accident, but mostly all of us would have done some sort of product management without realizing. So that's how I ended up finding it. Thank you. And just one last follow up question to that is, now that you've been a product manager over the years and now are at Amazon, what has evolved about your practice, how you approach product management today versus a couple of years ago? That's an interesting question. I don't know. One thing that I have learned is when to be in control of your product and when to let go of the control on your product. And it's very, very important. You do want your UX designer to feel very comfortable coming up with what the product needs to look like. Your engineers should not feel constrained at the same time, knowing when to take back control and steer the ship as to what makes sense and how to go to market, et cetera. So I wouldn't say I was the best at that part in my first 24 months in product career 10 years ago, but I now feel more comfortable and in tune with what those needs are. Thank you. Let's quickly go through Priyanshu and then we'll see if there's some time left for comments as well. Sure. Okay, so I have 40 years of experience out of the two years in the product management and 12 years in business analysis side. Currently working as a business analyst, but the product management that I have worked in 2017 to 2019. Now, I would like to come back to the product management as per your side, but whenever I apply for a job, usually people basically ask like why you want to go back to the product management side if you have a strong experience in the business analysis side, which is lagging behind applying to the product management side. Second thing, even if one or two interviews are lined up into the product management side, one of the questions I basically say challenges is like how do you make the product strategy because I would say when I was a product manager, my seniors used to basically create the product strategy. I was just helping them out. So if you can basically shed some light on that. Yeah, on the first one, like people asking you, hey, you have been business analyst and why product management, et cetera. I would say like in a product role, at some point or the other in your product life cycle, you will end up wearing multiple different hats. Like you will end up playing part business analyst when you are working with your business analyst counterpart or if you don't have a business analyst counterpart as a startup or a small art, then you are doing it yourself or whether it is like testing or QA or like if it's system design or like if it is like GTM pricing strategy, et cetera. You do end up doing a little bit of all of those things unless you are very much privileged with like actual people in those roles supporting you. So like answering that first question if anyone asks you that is like fairly straightforward. Like, hey, yes, I do have business analyst experience. I just want to take all of my experience and apply it to my product role. So like that kind of gets it out of the way. And I think that that is true for anyone. Like you have been a chef all your life and then you like involve yourself into product and take et cetera and you think how you can serve a company or with your experience that's completely fine. That sort of diversified talent actually does help organizations and companies. So I capitalized on it. Like I was telling one hour as well. So that's one. Second one is strategy. I think like short answer is each company does strategy differently. Like what I've seen. I'm just quickly going to answer Naomi. Yes, Naomi, if you can extend five more minutes I can stay back so that I can also take a look at the LinkedIn comments and answering questions. So like more than knowing what, like how do you drive strategy or what do you strategy? Like what do you do as part of product strategy? What you do want to know is what is not product strategy? Like figuring out a roadmap for next year is not product strategy. Coming out with like set of use cases and product session is not product strategy. And I think maybe during our time constraint we can have like dedicated conversation on product strategy et cetera. But what I can do is I'll probably speak with Naomi to share whatever resources that I have used to have better understanding of product strategy and then putting it in practice. That will possibly help you. Sure, sure. Okay. Given we are extending for five more minutes I'm going to quickly go through LinkedIn comments and see what all we can answer in the next five minutes. I'm going to go from top to bottom as I'm seeing on studio. How is product management different from project management? Yeah. Again, like each company operates differently. They have their own definition of product management and project management. Sometimes the line between them are blurry. I do not enjoy it. I actually run away from those places. But to answer your question, like project management is fairly critical, traditional in recent times in large organizations. You see more of technical program managers versus project managers. So maybe I can talk about like TPMs and then help them differentiate from product management. So technical program managers help you deliver a product in collaboration with dev managers and engineers. They also sometimes get involved in breaking down large size engineering problems into smaller consumable deliverable chunks. And they of course work in collaboration with product managers for productization, et cetera. Product management in its true sense, like the core job of product management is to help make sure engineers get to deliver what the product and customers need. And you do whatever is needed to make that happen. If that includes writing sets of requirements, building roadmap, writing strategy docs, and managing dependencies and stakeholders and like traditional product managers will end up doing a lot of that. But when it comes to actual delivery of an engine solution or product, that is when technical program managers come in place, project management is like a version of it where historically I have seen project managers not getting too involved in technical aspects of the solution, but that is not to say that's how all project managers operate. As I said, it kind of depends on the company and org and how they have formed those roles. The next question I see is how do you formulate your goals for a product or do you follow OKR process? More recently, I'm currently working on more of a zero to one product. More recently, I'm having to depend upon different mechanisms to come up with all sorts of KPIs that I can measure on any specific day. I do come up with like, hey, here are the 20 things I care the most about. And then you spend a lot more time looking at that KPI doc as to here is everything that you can measure or should measure. But then be ruthless in prioritizing those KPIs and say, hey, here are the five most important ones. More importantly, once you do that, once you have that conviction, you do want to take that KPI doc or deck or however you operate to the rest of your org, your peer product managers or your stakeholders, even your engineers, especially your engineers to say, hey, here are the KPIs that I think I'm defining to measure success of our product. Does it make sense or not? So building that cohesion is equally important as you coming up with the right set of KPIs. And for goals, again, I think it does depend a lot more on the product. Like for conversational AI, the goals look very different than something for computer vision. I do have some resources on like the process and frameworks to come up with, not only the KPIs, but also success criteria for those KPIs. And I can probably share that with product school and see how we can get it across this audience. And sorry, I'm having to rush through it. I'm mindful of time, so hopefully we can do more of it in future to answer any additional questions. I'll do one more question, and we have a minute left. Let's see. Product management more into product projects. Yeah, someone answered that question. What helped you make it into Amazon? What is the strategy? Personally, I was looking for interesting problem statements. Like before entering Amazon, I had already spent close to seven or eight years in product manager roles, mostly in e-commerce space. After that, I started looking for like problem statements that do excite me personally, that I do find very interesting and almost knew nothing about. And that's how I ended up with Alexa and Smart Home, et cetera. And now I'm into AWS trying to figure out computer vision and AI and all of that. So more recently in the last couple of years, and I don't know if pandemic has anything to do with it, but what has interested me in figuring out my strategy and what to go after is, what problem statements truly, truly excite me. So yeah, that kind of answers hopefully the question. We are at time, but I do see a bunch of questions. I'm gonna jump on LinkedIn and see if I can answer any of those questions in comments, but this has been super fruitful. I enjoyed this conversation. All of the questions that all the folks in the studio like Manohar, Victoria, Leela and Priyanka asked as well as a bunch of really good questions in comments over LinkedIn. So I just wanna say thank you all for your time. Hope you have a fantastic rest of Friday and a great weekend. Thank you. Thank you.