 Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining today. Happy to be here with everyone and happy to be presenting in this webinar that is I'm going to be discussing how to optimize your journey to product management. So this webinar is kind of timely because it's that time of the year when a lot of us are doing our retrospection, looking back at the year, seeing what went well, what didn't go well and trying to make sure that what didn't go well goes well next year and goes that we didn't hit last year. Sorry that we didn't hit this year. We actually get to them next year. So it's not so much focused on the tacticals of PM and all that is focused more on like, it's targeted more at those at first who are trying to make that transition to product management and have been kind of stuck and want to get some clarity going forward so that we can achieve that goal next year. And that's why it's a very good time of the year for this and we're going to be going through how to make that transition high, make my transition and giving very clear actionable frameworks for how to make your own transition, right? So we're kind of like segueing from that. I'll just want to share what we will be talking about and what we will not be covering on this presentation. So we'll talk about your product management. We're going to look at the framework for creating your transition plan. Everyone has a unique background. Everyone's experience is different, right? So the career transition plan is going to be specific to your own situation. And that's part of one of the reasons why we find that a lot of people don't have clarity. And we're going to give a framework for that. The question I get the most is how do I make this transition? I get that all the time on my LinkedIn. And hopefully at the end of this presentation you have that framework that can help you to make that define the career transition plan and then take the necessary steps. And then useful strategies for creating that. We have a framework and then some strategies that will help you to create an actionable plan. We're not going to be covering how to interview for PM roles, product management skills and all that. There is a lot of content on that already on this platform, on product school. If you search the videos on the LinkedIn page and also on the product school page, you find a lot of very useful videos on the tacticals I call them, of PMing, product management product. So we're not going to be focusing more on that. And again, like I said, the target audience for this presentation is those of us who are trying to make that transition have been kind of stuck or don't have the guidance or direction and want to actually create an actionable plan that we will execute on in the coming year. And maybe not even starting this month, right? So that's why we're focusing, we're trying to define the scope of this presentation. And with that out of the way, I'll go straight into, just to introduce myself. My name is Ifai Yokafor. I'm a product manager right now in AWS AI. I have a bachelor's degree in electrical, electronic engineering from FUTO in Nigeria. And after that, my undergrad, I went to work for Schlumberger Oil Service Company and global multinational oil service company. I started as a field engineer, flying out to oil rigs in the middle of the ocean. I did a lot of deep offshore projects and also land. Out the under rig, on the oil rig, floating vessel out in the middle of the ocean for two weeks to sometimes one up to a month, doing engineering project, core engineering. And then I moved on from that role to becoming a field service manager. I walked in West Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and then I walked in Brazil for about three and a half years, learned Portuguese, good experience, got a very good exposure there. And then I went from my MBA. So the Schlumberger experience that you see on that work experience was kind of sandwiched between my bachelor's degree and my MBA. So I went to Yale for my MBA, very good experience, very good exposure. And after my MBA, I joined AWS. I joined through a leadership development program and cloud expansion, basically getting the cloud into new geographies. And then I moved to machine learning and AI, which is where I'm currently. I summarized the, I call that an elevator explanation. Okay, my simple explanation for what I do, when I say, oh, I'm in front of my AI, like what kind of, what do you do with AI, right? I explain it to my little cousins this way. I say, I have an intelligent software because I'm application in a web-based service. But I say, I have an intelligent system that can tell you that your server is gonna crash before your server crashes. So basically I support a product, an AWS product called DevOps School. You can Google it, DevOps School. And it's a machine learning part service that pretty much observes your applications, your cloud applications and informs you, predicts if you're gonna have, uses anomaly detection mostly, to find patterns that signify impending application issues. So that's the, if your application, your server is gonna crash, I tell you before it kind of helps. So it's AI ML, basically based. And then we look at very, very, very intelligent and interesting space where we're pretty much looking at, these applications are deployed all over different, across different services, support most of the web applications. And sometimes, you have to kind of like keep an eye on everything, make sure everything is running. My AI system basically sits down observing. It's a pretty interesting product. So far it's been a very good, so I just keep my, when I go into tacticals of like anomaly detection, pattern recognition reinforcement lane and all that, that's not the scope, but it's, I just keep an explanation pretty much, AI system that kind of uses an anomaly detection to detect and predict application, potential application issues, and then offer what we call recommendations on how to avert those pending up, just potential application issues. So that's it about me, and I'm gonna just go into the what is product management. So basically product management has a lot of, there's a lot of definitions out there, right? You can hear, there's a lot of definitions, but generally you will see them converge around, there's a lot of like kind of like think of it like set, you know, in the section where everyone kind of like, no matter how the definition is kind of converges that it's basically the practice of strategically driving development, launch, and continuous improvement of a product, right? And the continuous improvement part is very important because some people actually believe that once you've launched a product or that's no, there's a lot of work after you've launched a product to add new features, to improve on existing features, to fix bugs, fix, you know, experiences that users are having that can be better, you know, improving the product. If you launch a product and you don't maintain the product, you know, product to die, someone else is gonna launch a better one that listens to the customers and see how customer behavior is changing and adapts will knock you off your, you know, off your pedestal. So it's the developmental launch and continuous improvement of a product. The key phase is generally high level, but this is generally what you will see across different definitions of research phase, user research and market research. You wanna know what your users want. The last thing you wanna do is build a product that nobody wants. You wanna know what the market for that product is. If users might want it, but how big is the market? Can it sustain the business? You know, at the end of the day, it's still a business that you're running. So that's a very key aspect of the key phase of the product management. And next is the product strategy. When you finally narrow down on, okay, there is a need here that needs to be filled. How can I build this product? What's my roadmap? What do I wanna build first, right? There's always a ton of things you can do, or you're kind of like, where do I wanna start? You're always that starting point, the highest priority. If your product is a two-sided platform, right? Who do I wanna, like what, how do I wanna start my, you know, position my product? Do I wanna focus more on one side or one side? So it's two-sided platform, sorry. A two-sided platform is basically, you know, a market place. It's so to say platform that bring or with two sides of a market interact. You know, thinking of it, you know, the first one that comes to mind is Uber, drivers and riders, right? Do you wanna start onboarding drivers first so that when the first few riders come on board, they don't see what app is this, that and then no drivers and then they don't install it? Or do you wanna start onboarding, you know, and riders first? So that, you know, basically think strategic decisions on how you wanna approach it. Amazon is a two-sided platform. The sellers, you know, and the people who come to buy, you know, so there's so many products these days are two-sided platform. Google used to be a two-sided platform, right? Users that come to watch videos and create us. These days, most, a lot of two-sided platforms are actually becoming three-sided platform because of advertisers. So you have the, like YouTube, for example, you have the viewers on side of the platform, you have the content creators on the other side, and then you have advertisers. So it's becoming even way more complex. But basically, all these things, all these questions happen in production. How do you wanna like, you know, when do you wanna start monetizing, like Clubhouse? I don't know if Clubhouse are still monetizing yet, but, you know, basically at some point, they're gonna start, you know, all these things that I'm sure they have a roadmap, but when they wanna start adding ads that will look at the topic of the room, you know, and pretty much put in banner there based on what the topic of the room is, so that people click there. That's all gonna be on the roadmap. Then execution is now, you know, when you now actually launch the products. And then you, what you call incremental delivery, you can deliver everything at once. You normally would be releasing things in phases. You know, release things in phases, the most important ones first, and then you keep supporting, you know, the product. That's standard. Pivot's a very important one, right? In the modern software development or app development or product development, you have to be flexible enough to decide to pivot, right? It's something that can happen, sometimes may not need to happen, but it's something that can happen if you find that some assumptions that were made or some designs that, some designs or some critical product decisions that were made and when product hits the market, you find that, you know, they are no longer vital, not enough to support the business case or things change, right? You can actually pivot your, you know, it's an age-sent use case that happens. So as a product manager, you know, that's why I put it in blue. It doesn't always happen, but you have to know and have a plan that if this doesn't pan out well, we can convert this product, right? From, you know, an Amazon that sells to, you know, let's say, sell it and buy it to maybe a wholesale, a wholesale platform, just using it as an example, where, you know, wholesale has come and then retail, retail has in more and pop shops come down, buy at wholesale price instead of a regular platform where every business to consumer, right? Where every consumer comes to buy it. Let's let it be big businesses like, I'm just giving, I'm just being hypothetical here, but pivoting is something that, you know, you have to be ready to do as a product manager. So this is basically an overview of product management, you know, in a nutshell. We're not going to go deeper into the tacticals of, you know, of the product management role, but basically what I want to show here is that the phases of the skills that are needed to execute, you know, research, product strategy, execution, product execution and to pivot at skills that you can learn from many roles. And for that reason, the product management role can actually draw people from different backgrounds. And because it draws from different backgrounds, we find that there's a lot of, you know, questions going around. If you search, how do I transition to product management on Google, you're going to find so many results, right? And that's the reason why, you know, I felt it was good to like put this framework that we're going to share out here, right? There's so many different backgrounds. I have people, I know people from finance that have moved to product management. I came from oil and gas, I mean, product manager now, you know, it's, and people do well from different backgrounds, you know. So if everyone, that now drives the question, right? You know, with the right strategy, all men have to do one contraption, and be a successful product manager, right? Why then is people think product management challenging for many? I get, the number of times I get those questions, you know, kind of says that, you know, there's something missing, right? And for me, the reason why it's challenging for many people, you know, it's just one word, ambiguity, right? Ambiguity is just the fact that, you know, because there's so many backgrounds that people come from to product management, what then happens is that one, there's no cookie cutter solution for everyone. And because of that, you know, people applying what for somebody else to themselves is not working and then people kind of get stuck, right? So there's ambiguity in how to navigate that process. And we'll try, the objective of this presentation is to try to take away the ambiguity and give clarity, right? Clarity is a very big factor in whether or not you achieve your goals, even outside product management in life. Once you're clear about the steps and the things you need to do, you start to see that even procrastination starts to go away, right? So there's this comment. So basically what we're trying to do is take away the ambiguity. And I find this comment from James Clare, he's the author of a book called Atomic Habits, right? It's a book on habits and, you know, behavior, how your habits accumulate to like kind of shape your trajectory in life. It says, people think they lack motivation. What they lack is actually clarity. And this is very true, right? People feel frustrated that they don't know what to do and they can't move, they feel stuck. But the reason why they're stuck is not because they're not motivated to move to PM. It's because they don't have clarity on what steps to take. And again, like I said, I probably sound like a broken record now. The objective here is to give a level of clarity that allows you to start taking the right steps in the right direction. This is some snapshots of some articles that you can just, you can Google these same keywords, you'll find them, you know, top of your Google search results. But basically just, there's also the PhD study on how goal clarity kind of makes people to increase the likelihood of achieving your goals. So I believe that when we achieve a level of clarity on what we need to do for our own respective case, the framework we're gonna try to share here is gonna speak to your own respect. Everyone's case is unique. And hopefully we'll leave this webinar with enough clarity to actually start taking action. So we're gonna play a small phone game. Everyone bring out your phone, right? Bring out your phone and disable location services. If you're using, that's what it's called on Android, you know, settings, location services, turn it off. If you're an iPhone, I think it's, let me see. Is it also called location services? But basically, yeah. Okay, yeah, location, location, yeah. Location service, yes, location service on iPhone. Take your, turn it off and open Google Maps. So when you open Google Maps, try to put any destination. Put the, just put the address of a Starbucks that is close to you. Any place that you often go around your area, right? Put the address there and then try to navigate. You're gonna say choose a starting point. It's gonna keep telling you choose starting points. Keep choosing starting points. Normally, it would navigate from your location by default, but it doesn't know where you are and it keeps telling you, and it's not gonna give you what you see on the screen. This game is just, I mean, I think everyone in the corner knew that that was gonna happen, but it's just a reinforcement exercise. The objective is to reinforce the fact that, you know, without knowing where you are and defining clearly, you know, Google Maps will ask you to put, you know, the house number and all that, you know, you put all that and then it's to draw your, the optimal route, right? So the objective is just a reinforcement exercise so that when you leave here, right, you always remember this game you played that if you don't know where you're starting from, getting that route, the map, which is a strategy for how you're gonna transition to your destination, it's almost, you know, it becomes difficult even for Google, you know, the app tells you, you have to put your destination. So based on what we, you know, just again, I know that we go in into this game, everyone knows that this is gonna happen, it's just to reinforce that concept, right? So if this current position, right, and destination are critical to finding your, drawing up your navigation or carrier transition plan, right? It then means that there are three critical elements, right? Your current position, the strategy, which is in Google Maps speak will be your route, the blue line that shows you go left, turn right in that strategy, in navigation, in terms of kind of, it should be applied to this role, do this interview, network with this, you know? So go left, go right, go left, turn left, turn right, and all that, you know, take the first exit, that's the strategy. And then the last is your goal, where you're actually going, you know? And what I have below this tricky word is the challenge that I often see when people approach me to help them, to talk about carrier transition to port of management. And the current position, they don't frame me correctly, we're gonna do that, they're framing exercise here. The strategy, they don't have clarity. We already talked about the fact that you still have clarity, you don't even know how to act. And then they go, they don't define the goal, you know, with the kind of precision that you need to actually know, drop a good plan. We're gonna do all that. So these are the things I see as a common problems that people have, or shortcomings that people have when it comes to defining their carrier transition plan. Now, what we're gonna try to do is right, is to create a plan. And as a title of this webinar goes, it says optimizing, there's a reason why I chose that word, right? Optimizing means you're just doing the right and putting the right amount of work, not over killing, not under investing. You're putting the right amount of work for you on a situation. That's why it's optimizing. So we have to create a plan. I just put a definition of it to where they bring some decisions and optimize, kind of optimize it, put it in a, make it efficient. If you need to do more work, you're doing more. If you're supposed to do more work because your role is way off from product management and you're not doing enough, you're gonna be running in circles, right? And then you end up burning at the end cumulatively, you might actually even do more than you would have done if you knew exactly what you should do, or you had a good idea of what you should do and you went straight for that amount. Which might be more than what your neighbor is doing because your neighbor is probably in tech already and you're just in an adjacent role. We're going to what adjacent roles are. So optimizing is doing the right amount of work to get to where you're going, not doing more, not doing less, right? Kind of be efficient with your resources and your efforts, right? So we're gonna create and we're gonna optimize. That's the objective. And to do these things, you need to have clarity. How then do we have clarity to define our strategy? The next slide I'm gonna show is probably the most important slide in this webinar. It's called the RIG framework, right? The critical three for defining your current location and defining your target location. The role is what you're currently doing. It's a job title, probably what's your header and LinkedIn, right? And you're asking how far off is this role from product management. If you're ready, product manager, then you're probably not even gonna be on this call, right? But basically your role is what you do. And I have an example of what a role looks like at the bottom there, right? Finance manager, automotive, North America. So if you, this person here, as we say in product manager, is a finance manager, right? He does maybe financial models, financial protections, protections for general models, right? In Detroit, right? So we use North America generally, Canada and the US kind of like, you know, it's the same geo, so we use North America. Now that the role of person's finance manager, the industry is automotive. It could be healthcare, it could be manufacturing, it could be industrials, you know, it could be construction industry. But knowing your role, knowing your industry and knowing your geography, very important. And you see how we're gonna layer in everything else we do based on this definition. So we're gonna play a small game or a small exercise. I want you to put down your role, industry, and group in this format that I have on the screen, your role slash your industry slash your geography on the chat window. Everyone here is probably trying to make a transition and the objective is to see that, you know, people come from all backgrounds, they're gonna see all sorts of background, right? You know, people coming from already in tech, people that are, you know, maybe program managers and people who are, maybe like in healthcare, you know, people who are, you know, I have friends who move from finance and some people who move from consults and business consulted and all, you know, move to product management. So that the whole idea is to see the diversity of the talent pool that is trying to transition to product management. So yeah, so you can see how diverse the, you know, the entries are, right? And that's gonna take us to the next exercise. Now, we're gonna repeat our Google Maps navigation game, but this time I want you to get a piece of paper, an A4 paper, you know, and a pen. You're gonna need that. So I'll just give you a few seconds for you to grab a piece of paper and pen and draw up a table just like this on the piece of paper and pen that you got. This time you are doing the same thing that we did on Google Maps but this time we're doing it with our own situation. We're trying to see how far off we are from what we're doing. So current role, target role, current industry, target industry, current geotarget you. You will put your current role and the first, you know, below the role and the right on current and then you put your target role as you know, that will be product management. You do the same for industry, this is the same for you. Now on the last role, which is the Delta. I mean, everyone here knows that engineering Delta refers to the difference between two values, right? So we really might just use one when there's a difference and zero when there's no difference for this framework. If you are a sales manager, right, in what industry? Let me say pharmaceuticals, healthcare, right? And you're not America. You're trying to move to product management in tech, not America. Because you're sales manager and you're moving product manager there's gonna be a one in Delta because there's a difference and your industry is also different but your geo is there. So you have one, one is there. You're making a two point change. I, this is my own, I think by now you should have your, you know, everything feel that you know how many points you're actually trying to change, how many dimensions you're trying to change, right? This is my own card. I was a field service manager. I said, when I left, I was an engineer then became manager, field service manager, pretty much coordinating the team of engineers. And then I was women's product management, right? So there was a difference in the role. There was one. I was an oil and gas industry and I was moving to tech. There's also a difference in industry. There was a one. I worked in West Africa and South America. I spent time in Brazil about three and a half years and learned Portuguese, amazing experience. And I also learned Nigerian. I have a lot, I worked in Nigeria and Ghana for about, about same amount, about four years soon, right? So basically I have, I had access to both, you know, I had authorization to work in South America. So if I was a plane to say it's, tech startup in South America, I would have had one on that role, one on the industry and zero on that geo because I stayed. So basically I was moving to a different geo. I was moving to a different industry and different role. You know, so I had a three point, I was doing a three point switch. Three point switches are considered to be the hardest to make, but it's not impossible. I'm on this call and I'm doing PM now in AI, right? Who would have thought? So you can also make a three point switch. You just have to know that all you're doing is three points. And this is an example of why people get stuck, right? Someone moves from healthcare. There are product managers in healthcare. Someone is a product manager in healthcare devices. You know, I moved to Google as a product manager and then you are a finance person in maybe in India or something. You want to move product management in maybe in the US. And your story, the number of things you're changing in your career are different. So you might see someone, you know, just your friend, right? Makes them switch. And then you're trying with what the person did and you can't, you get stuck. This is what happens a lot, right? When people try to like, and it's not for, it's no fault of, you know, the person who's trying to make the change is just not having the clarity on what you're trying to do. And this framework is supposed to give you, give us that clarity. We're going to keep going diving deep. And at the end of this, my, my, you know, I hopefully we should have enough clarity to actually act on this and close out this goal. If it's a goal that we have for next year, right? So this is my card. And of course, everyone knows by now that the objective of doing this in kind of a mathematical speak, right? You say the objective, the objective of a career transition to product management is to bring the Delta to zero, right? You want to bring it out to, you know, that role, you want to change it, you know, to be comfortable with that. If you want to close the gap, I call it bridging, right? So there are three things, R, I, and G, that you're trying to bridge. It varies for some people. Some people might be bridging one or two. Some people like me, we're bridging three. I'm going to go, we're going to go together through bridging the R, the role, bridging the I, and the industry, and bridging the, not exhaustive, but some key strategies that are effective for bridging each and every one of those roles, right? So let's go to role, right? Bridging the role means you're something else and you want to move to product management. You kind of underestimate the impact of training and certifications. It kind of gives you credibility. You know, a manager who sees you, your resume, hiring manager and sees that you've gone to a product, a product school, you know. Knows that you know what the user story is, you know. He knows that you know what an agile sprint is, you know. Agile and scrum certifications are also very good. They are pretty much certifications that show that you know how to do iterative fast product deployment versus the conventional style that we use in the past, which is called the waterfall. You know, he or she knows what the manager, the hiring manager knows that you know some basic things. So it's kind of a stamp of credibility on your person. This person at the minimum might not have done it in a real-world scenario, but will pick up definitely from a certain level that it's gonna be less work than someone who is not even, you know. It kind of gives you some credibility. So training and certification, very important. Part of bridging role, right? If the only thing you're bridging is role, that's one very good lever for bridging the role. The next is adjacent positions. Adjacent positions simply mean a role that is very close to product management. So some people call them stick with that position. So as a product manager, I work with machine learning science. If you're a regular product manager for a regular team, you may not deal with science, but I work with machine learning. I work with software engineers. I work with sales and marketing, product marketing. I work with, what's that team, legal and, you know, teams that are very, very, you know, at a second conference, you know, very adjacent to the product management role. If you want to bridge a role and you move to an adjacent role, it becomes easier to move to product management. I'll give an example. If you're a civil engineer, right? Or if you're a mechanical engineer, right? Mechanical engineers build cooling systems. I worked in cloud expansion. When I joined cloud expansion, we built massive data centers for AWS and we have engineers who design the cooling systems. You'll be surprised at how many megawatts of power is needed to cool a data center and AWS cloud data center. Mechanical engineers have to, like, do the whole thermodynamic analysis and put the right one to cool the amount of racks that you're gonna have in that whole data center. Now, a mechanical engineer who's working for AWS, who's working in construction, doing the same thing, but for, let's say hotels, right? So mechanical engineer industry construction, geography, not America. Trying to become a PM, trying to come to my role, PM and AWS in North America is bridging two things, role and industry. And adjacent position to mechanical engineering and agent will be like a program management role, right? So if you get a program management role in AWS, right? Working with a product manager, it's easier to make that switch, right? That, I would say, okay, let me see the mechanical engineering role might not be the best example for this, but let me use someone who is already in AWS and is doing still product marketing. Product marketing is basically helping the PMs to push the product out when it's released. A product marketing manager works very closely with the PM. One is a product, and we can discuss all the new features so they can put it out there in the market. If you're a product marketing manager, right? If in another industry, right? And you decide to, and you can put a market manager in another industry and you move to tech, right? You're now in tech, but you're still a product marketing manager and you're now in, and you're not America. It becomes easier. It's called a two-step change. You take an adjacent role, still same adjacent role at why you're changing your industry and your geography, why you're changing your industry and keeping geography and constant. Then the next move is now to work with the PM for maybe a year or two and then now try to move. So that moving to an adjacent position first, from wherever you are, you move to an adjacent position that is close to PM and then move to PM is a very effective or bridging role. Exposure jobs, all right? It's often called like exposure or interest jobs, like working with a startup. There are each startups that are usually easier to get into, taking an internship. I do an internship in product management and doing my MBA and that helped me definitely. Taking volunteer jobs are also very good ways to get some credibility in the role, right? And networking events are very good for knowing jobs. Networking events alone are not going to get you, but there are things you should have in mind. If there's a product manager meetup, if there's a product con, you want to go. They are very good for opportunities to actually get to know the ropes of meeting people and start thinking and talking like them, right? So these ones are a little more additional to the core strategies like adjacent positions, exposure jobs and training and certification. Immersion is like, if you want to follow a podcast, there are PM podcasts out there, there are PM, I'm going to show a few people on games that you should follow on Twitter. So you want to follow people who are always tweeting about the latest product management, PM influences us, very helpful to also know what's happening in this space. And then education, right? Education definitely helps to embrace that role. If you have an MBA, I have an MBA. It's helped that a lot of companies come to MBA programs to hire people and they have in mind that these people will be coming from different industries from product management. So if you have an MS in technology management, business analytics or an MBA, it definitely helps you in crafting your resume and your profile in a way that allows you to make that transition, right? So these are some of the things that are very good for bridging just role. And then this is assuming that you're bridging only role, right? If you're bridging role and industry, it becomes different. But we're going to go through each of them one by one and then discuss how if you're bridging more than one. And then discuss particularly if you're bridging all three. Bridging industry, two-step transition is a standard. The example I gave with the construction guy is probably a mechanical engineer, sorry, it's better for industry, right? If you're doing product management in another industry, right? And you want to move to tech to do product management, it's a lot easier, right? Because you're keeping your role constant, you're keeping your geography constant and all your changes is your industry, right? So for example, let's assume you're making a two-point switch. You're changing role and you're also changing industry. Let's use that mechanical engineer in the construction industry who ultimately wants to become a PM in tech but still working in the US. So mechanical engineer working in construction industry, designing cooling systems, decides to move to become a product manager in tech in North America. First step, to bridge industry, right? A good strategy would be to first of all, bridge the industry first and know that the role is intermittent. Join AW as a team that designs our cooling system. So now it's down to one. So still in North America, now in tech, but doing the role as a mechanical engineer. Once you're in a company, generally it's easier to move within, you establish a good track record of performance. It's easily a lot easier to move to a different role in the same company. So it's once a different role in the same company because your performance appraisal have shown that your personal value, everything you have kind of like credibility within the system. It's not an external hire as they call it. So that advantage plays in. So if that mechanical engineer joins a team that does the cooling systems in AWS data centers, then the person is now in tech and also in North America. And then the only thing remaining to bridge is the role and then later can make it change to product management. Exposure rules are also good for industry, right? If you don't have exposure to tech industry and you take a startup role or an internship with a job in the tech industry, it kind of gets into your resume. And if for all the resume screeners that look at certain keywords, those keywords become falling there because you know what tech is like, right? Even though it may not be product management, but you did something with tech, maybe product marketing, maybe sales, but just you've been in tech, you're not entering just the industry. That helps too. And then immersion, of course, if you're trying to go into an industry, you want to be immersed in what is happening. You want to follow the influencers, subscribe to industry journals, learn the trends, learn the lingo. You need to follow some things, understand the key things that are happening in technology in general, if you're trying to move into a tech industry. Very important. I'm going to talk about that later on. And then geography, region geography, right? This one is the very, it's one of the hardest to bridge because of work visa regulations, right? I used the MBA to bridge geography, right? So normally after the MBA, you get the H1 and B and that authorizes it to work here, right? But it's good to call out that region geography with education gives you a high likelihood of success. If you played, you have two years and MBA to actually go to all the, everything we've said about going to conference, doing an internship, I did all those things because I had two years in the MBA program, I took courses on software management, development software, advanced software management and development back and front end. So I had time to actually do a lot. I had a three-month internship between the first and second year of my MBA. I want to work with a startup in Canada, deploying Alexa voice skills. So there's a lot of, there's a lot that was done in that two years. So it gives you a high, you can reposition yourself very well, right? The challenges with using education to bridge geographies that you're working for go salary, full-time MBA, the salary and the tuition and loans and the impact on your family if you're married, moving your family to the US and when you don't have income, it's something you have to consider. And the right way to estimate the forgone salary or the total costs in terms of monetary cost of an MBA is your forgone salary and your tuition. So if you are making, let's say 60K a year and for the two years you're going to count minus 120, you're going to make that 120K and then you're going to take the loans for MBA and you can Google average cost of MBA for two years it should be about maybe meet 100 or something, where 120 to 160 depend on the school for the two years, right? Total tuition and tuition and maybe even expensive for the two years. It varies based on school but without the scholarship, it's in the mid 100 plus range. So again, it varies from school to school but when you add that with the forgone salary, it looks it's significant. But sometimes it's probably, sometimes if you're looking to move to North America there might be one of the only ways to do it and with a high likelihood of success. So it's something you have to look at carefully then there's a two step transition, right? You're working for a healthcare farmer company in another country that has a branch in the US. If you transition within that company to the US you can change roles within the company, right? So that's if you just bridge in geo then moving within your company can be. Some of them might be here, product manager in let's say Hyderabad, India and Microsoft and you can get transferred to the US as a product manager in Seattle where I'm based at Microsoft. So you've just bridged geography. Maybe that might be someone's objective like I wanna be a PM in the headquarters where it's happening in Microsoft. And that's an example of bridging just geography. You just move within the same company and then for someone who's bridging that and then also bridging the role when you move within the same company you can then maybe a finance manager in Microsoft in India two step transition means you take finance manager in Microsoft in the US then after a while you now move to product manager at Microsoft US. That's how you can do a two step transition to bridge use keeping the company constant and then moving your Joe within the company sponsored visa of course. And then exposure roles are also very important, right? For bridging geography. If you've worked in a particular industry geo you know, having startup experience they have a volunteer experience they can actually help you understand how to navigate work visa and all those things. Again, it's very nuanced. There are some places might work, some places might not but I know that a lot of people that maybe quit their job maybe born out, traveled to another country to start up their comeback reposition and then go back there because they like the place and they now know how to navigate immigration there and they get a proper joining maybe same startup or it helps to bridging geography and then self sponsored immigration. Some countries have highly skilled migration programs. I think Canada has something like that going on. That's another way that you can bridge geography. So these are the main levers, right? Now how you have to mix and match them based on your situation. Now that we've talked through the main levers for bridging each and every one of them it's we can go through every combination of what everyone is bridging. There's so many different versions but you know that if you're bridging all three you know the things you need to do. There might be commonalities that were called out across all three you just cancel out just you don't have to apply them three times that's not, but you understand basically now that you can actually look and say I'm bridging this and this these are the things I should do. This I'm gonna drop this one because I don't think it's gonna work for my case but you have some level of understanding on what the task is ahead. Having said that now, the next thing now that you have now that you have the you know the information I believe and you have you know when I explain to people I also hear wow now it makes a lot of sense now and people start saying it kind of makes sense. Now I see how far off I am now I know what I need to do, right? The next step is actually to make a plan and there's this phrase that I'm gonna put up here that really affected how I you know how I look at things in terms of life goals and all that and you know it's basically big goal, no plan, right? This is Sharon, he's a productivity coach and he has this model where he talks about big goal, no plan. A lot of people have big goals but no plan for the goal like I'm gonna be a millionaire by X years before I turn what no big goal, what's the plan? And then people get kind of like deer and headlights for every goal that you have to have a plan. So even for this career transition goal it's a big goal I'm gonna be I wanna be a PM in 2022, what's the plan? If you don't have a plan you're living into chance but I will see what that works about. Big goal, no plan is a phrase that really changed how I pursue life goals and it's very effective, always keep it in mind. Big goal, no plan. It's not, it's a sarcastic comment here it's not saying, it's not saying he's not saying that you should have big goals with no plan. It's basically saying that people have big goals with no plan, which is not a good thing. So you basically have to make a plan, a detailed process how you're gonna do it. And that is something you have to do based on what we've shared, right? If you are bridging geography, you have to sit down and say, okay, I walk in Mexico, for example, I work for GE and I know I wanna end up in can I transfer first same role I'm doing to make GE US, walk for two years, and then move to product GE has product managers. They have a lot of digital product, healthcare products, right? Let me move to the US, because I wanna do product management in the US, maybe ultimately move to tech, but if I move from my role and I move to GE, maybe manufacturing manager, I move to manufacturing manager in GE US, and I do it for two years, I get, maybe I get a green, however it works out, then I can transition to this team. I know someone who has made it before move from manufacturing manager in their office in say Detroit or wherever city to product manager in our office in San Francisco, or wherever it is the product managers, do the product design and all that stuff, still within GE. This is a kind of plan that everything we've discussed should help you to start drawing up. So you draw this plan, whether it's gonna be a two-step change, okay, I'm too far off, let me go into Google first, I say sales manager, then when I do sales for two years, I'm a sales manager right now in Verizon. So I can be a sales manager in Google in your 5G division, Google has Google Fi, that's an, if you're a sales manager in Verizon, one in multiple five sales, very, very possible move. Now when I get in there, the product I'm supporting, I'll try to position myself, build relationship with the team to now become, so now you know, one person can't draw up the plan for you, but you kind of see where this is going, how you make those moves. You know your bridging, you know what, every move you're making, you should know which one you're bringing a delta to zero. Is that move gonna close the gap on geography? Is it designed to close the gap on, on role, is it designed to close the gap on industry? So going from Verizon to Google Fi, it's going from telecom, telecommunications tech. So you know that you're doing that, you're changing industry, but you're changing industry, but you're keeping your role, same your sales manager before, you keep, you're keeping, you can't change all things at once in some cases. So you do it step by step. Let me change industry first. Now my food isn't doing I'm in tech, I mean Google, but I'm still doing sales. Now the next thing is now, let me move and become a PM. That kind of plan is something you have to sit down and draw, put timelines through it, right? And that takes me to the next thing you have to think, that everything I've been doing now is brainstorming. Think, use the current target worksheet to think through what gaps you need to bridge. Understand, okay, I need to bridge this and this. I need to bridge this, this and this. They make a plan. You know, look at the bridging and the strategies we shared for bridging role industry at Joe and come up with a plan to close each and every one of them, right? Now the important thing, I'm going to get into the baby self steps, right? Break down the actions in baby self steps. The next thing is going to be to act. You know, you have to act on a plan. If you need to enroll in courses, start enrolling us. If you need to read PM books, start reading the PM books and blogs. If you need to start doing mock interviews, which issue should you start doing even while you're still bridging the gap? Mock interviews are like, you have to be doing. The more you interview, the better you get at it. And the more you start to understand things that actually you'll be doing on the job. Networking, if you're going to go to business school, like I did at school, master's degrees, you start preparing if you need to write GI or GMAT. But basically now you know, if the only way for you to get to where you're going is school and you now have the clarity to know that, oh, I need to write the GMAT. I need to start applying now. So you start seeing how everything starts becoming clear once you use this framework. For tracking your progress, I recommend an app called Notion. Notion is really good. Notion is an SO. They have a mobile app. They have a web platform. You can actually create different tracks. You can create a track for geography, create a track for role. And all the actions you're taking to bridge role will be under the road track. You know, you keep knocking them off. It's an amazing app. For me, it's done a lot for me this year. When I start, since I started using it, I can see the difference in terms of my life goal plan and all that stuff. So Notion is the SO, very good. I recommend you use it for tracking each of the three RIGs that you're bridging. Put it in Notion. You can have other ones. It's not a must, but I recommend that app. So think, plan, and then act. Now, the baby self-steps that I'm going to go, and we're going to round up very quickly, but the baby self-steps is very important, right? Lay out the plan like you're two. Lay out the plan like you're talking to your three-year-old self, right? This is another thing that helps people to be able to actually close out tasks. The guy on the left there is a fairly big investment banker or whatever, but a big guy, you know, very busy guy, has an Notion app or whatever, have Ray 2PM books in Q1 2022. That goal is going to be there. I'm not saying for sure, but the likelihood of having a meeting a high level goal like that, the way our brain works is that as complex as the brain is, whenever there is a task to be done that involves it, reading a book is a lot of self-discipline, and sitting down to actually buy the book and read it. It's mentally tasking, right? As easy as it sounds. If whenever the brain meets a task that is mentally tasking, the brain, as small as it is, it takes one quarter of your oxygen. So it's a very, very conservative organ. What it does, it shuts down from, it minimizes the amount of work it pushes that thing out, right? That's how people start to procrastinate. But if the brain sees a task that looks very easy, it jumps on it. It doesn't, that part of the brain that triggers the, okay, let me serve myself from this complex task that is going to take me, that is going to take up all the oxygen again. It's kind of an evolutionary adaptation because the brain is, you know, it takes up so much oxygen, so much energy, right? And so it has to protect itself from unnecessary stress. So that Ray 2PM books in Q1 2022 is kind of scary. And what happens is that that person who kind of sees himself as an adult and knows that as an adult that she wants to do this, will put most likely means that go. But if you say, add the top five PM books on Amazon to your cart, that's a baby step. You're talking to yourself, like as if you were a two-year-old kid. That's an easy thing to do. Go to Amazon, you know, top five just search the first five that come out to add them to your cart, right? The next thing, pick the one with the highest review count. Highest number of counts of reviews means that it's a popular book. Maybe good may not be that good, but it's just a popular, that's the reason why it's popular. You add that one to your, you know, shortlist that one. Okay, this one, pick the one with the highest rating, may not have as 1,000 reviews, may have 4.9, whereas the one with 1,000 review has four stars, right? So that one with the highest rating means that it kind of signals quality. You see how you've used basic frameworks, you know? I use a lot of frameworks in the Shamekanid and it helps me to move on things, you know, a lot with more clarity and more speed. Even if I end up with it, not the best two books, at least those two, the likelihood of getting if two good books from this, there's no how that I won't get a book that covers 80% of what I need to know, you know, by doing this, right? So it's not about being perfect, it's about being able to explain how you arrived where you are. It gives you, it gives you any kind of clarity that allows you to continue moving. So pick the one with the highest rating, 4.9, but fewer rates, I picked just two. And I ordered just two books. I know I have the book with the highest review count and I have the book with the highest number and rating, right? The one, like I said, the one with the highest review count might be 4.2, whereas the one with the highest rating I have only a few reviews, but 4.9 or 4.8. All that would be, and then kind of also put a plan, with one, I read the intro, with two, I would pick chapter one, like that, like that. That is you talking to your baby self, like your baby sitting yourself. Your brain will kind of like push away the task the moment you see that with two PM books in 2021, that's scary. And I'll quickly give another example of that. And that's baby self steps, you know, the same thing, networking with PMs. I read two books and they talk to PMs, right? Networking is part of it. You want to like talk to people in this, the same guy with the big guy there, just kind of like busy guy, just position is this thing, you know, I try not to expect too much of myself and that helps me to actually, you know, stay productive, right? That if you have it like this, you don't have clarity. Again, it's an ambiguous task. This is not how to break down tasks for your baby self. So if you were talking to, if I was talking to my two year old self out there, my two year self to register for product con. Sorry. Which by the way is the product schools conference on product management, very amazing conference. I've attended it virtually a couple of times, register for product con, right? Pen down to instructors that are going to speak, right? Write their names down or somewhere, save it for not bad. Two weeks to product con, add two of them on LinkedIn and introduce myself. Hey, I'm this is this, I'm going to be, I'm excited to see you speaking, you know, product con, I'm going to be there, you know, I'm kind of waiting to hear your experience as a PM and whatever, right? May respond, may not respond, it's fine, right? And the moment you start checking off this act on notion, you start to get a kind of a confidence boost that you're actually moving. And it actually helps you to continue to keep going. It's kind of a reward mechanism. You start from the habit of the reward for closing out the task is to do more so that you get that reward. There's a whole psychology, you know, psychological study on that. So you track down two of the next step is track down two of them dream product con and set up coffee, right? Me two of them physically talk with them. Hey, I was what I added you on LinkedIn. This is step by step. You're talking to your baby self now, right? Send follow-up notes after the product con. Hey, we met, you know, thanks for your this, this, this, blah, blah, you know, we had coffee the next day after the conference and before we threw out of wherever the conference happened, San Francisco. Said two months later, hey, I'm now doing this, you know, again, once the, you know, it's just, it's just, you know, keeping in touch. It helps, you know, you never know when the person might see something or say, okay, hey, by the way there's this, you should know, you should apply. It's a good rule for your business what we discussed and that kind of thing. And this is a more, this is an example of baby self steps that will get you to your goal more than just networking PMs. And I can almost bet that because this is me, I would just have on the networking, networking PMs like something a bit, maybe a bit more detail, but nothing like what I have on the right. And that's that what I have on the right actually has helped me a lot to get to where I am. You know, just general stuff, you know what I was trying to show into AI, you know, break it down step by step, by step, by step, like a baby, I mean, knocking them off small by small, small increments that are almost negligible. Registry for protocol is five minutes. Penning down to instructors is two minutes. You know, add them on LinkedIn, introduce yourself as not five minutes, but you're moving, you're moving versus networking PMs and your brain says, what is that? And your brain shows that, okay, I'll figure out what that is. Let's do it later. That's the problem. So recap, this is, you know, we're running out of time, but basically I'm going to just recap what we did. And, you know, I really hope that at this point, the concept of big, go, no plan. And again, these are not product mind, these are just general stuff, you know, but they apply in this go setting for product mind, right? The concept of the big, go, no plan, the baby self steps, you know, and the RIG framework, those three things, you know, getting clarity based on role industry group, planning with big and breaking your plan down with them, even having a plan, creating a plan. So people just want to, they just bring, they're just freestyling through, navigating if they see someone, the network, they don't see someone, they don't network. If they see a course, they don't see, you know, you can't really, it might work, but that's luck. So first of all, having using the RIG to understand where you are and where you're going and see the gap to coming up with a plan. And then that's the big, go, no plan. You don't want to have a big go with no plan, right? So that's where that big, go, no plan. I want that to stick in your head. And then the third one, the baby self step, break your steps, the steps in your plan to baby, talk to yourself as if you're, I won't say dumb, but you're as if you're a child, right? So your brain doesn't push those things away out of, you know, this is a very big task. I don't know where to start. And we really shut down your brain, right? On mixed things, you know, kind of scary. So once the brain sees that big task, I don't know where to start, brain kind of like retreats and wants to push that task to later on. Whereas if it sees register for product con, okay, Google product con. I think it's the end of the year. I don't know. I think product school will share when that is, and it makes it a lot easier. So this is some basically, these are basically things I want you to take away from this. And hopefully you're able to sit down on your own and take away the ambiguity, have clarity, use the RIG framework to analyze your gap and create a plan. Then think, you know, have a plan. Don't be Mr. Biggo, no plan and act with your plan broken down into baby steps. Finally, there are some people you should follow on Twitter. If you want to be a product manager, I would say this guy, Marty Kagan, Google, just maybe take a screenshot of this. This is very, you should, these four people here are good, you know, Melissa Berry, she's a head of HBS, Terri Satoris, very amazing product manager. These are thought leaders in the industry. You want to know them. Search medium for product management articles. Of course, follow products who they release a lot of lovely articles. They have it as a free book from product school that is very good also, right? So with search medium for product management articles, there are a lot of people that have written amazing stuff. There's a browser add-on called pocket.getpocket.com that I have on my browser. Anytime I see an interesting article, I just click on pocket, it saves it there and I put it tag. If it's PM related, I put it there. If it's blockchain related, I'm a blockchain optimist. I believe that blockchain is gonna influence the developing world more than AI, most of the kind of AI in the next 50 years. So I read up a lot about blockchain even though I do AI at work. So my nine to five is AI, my five to nine is blockchain. But basically, I just put a tag, blockchain. If it's PM related, I put PM. It's AI related, I put AI. If it's personal development, I just put, it's an amazing app. Then over the weekend, when I'm not scrambling to get things done at work and I'm not so busy, I just go there, click by tag and I see all the lovely articles. So I think you should use pocket, very good app. There's also a mobile version, whatever you sync on your add-on on the browser syncs on your mobile. So use the pocket browser add-on to save as many PM articles as you can. But follow these people on Twitter. You can look for their LinkedIn profiles and follow them. And if you wanna follow me on LinkedIn or send me a note or add me, you know. Yeah, I try to respond to, you know, I can't guarantee, you know, it gets busier times here, but I try just to find your account for AWS so you go with the link, you'll find me, you know. So feel free to add me. I can guarantee that I can respond to every, I get a lot of, I may be backlog, but I'll try to get to, you know, to share whatever tips I have with anyone here. And that is the end of my presentation. We're just, I'm pretty much a long one, but I kind of feel like because of how many times I get this question, you know, how do I, how do I, you know, if people have, if you have the clarity on how to like do this framework, I can't be like, a lot of people are gonna make the move maybe to sign off a product school for next year. You know, you know, maybe to start preparing for an MBA, but having that clarity, you know, I hope that you have it. I hope that I haven't wasted your time, you know, and I hope that this gives you the clarity that you need to take that step. Thank you, everyone. Again, my name is Yifan Yoka for Product Manager AWS. Happy to be here as we continue on this journey to make the world a better place and by releasing amazing products. Thanks everyone and see you. See you around, I'll be around for questions if you have any briefly. And yeah, cheers, bye.