 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Scott and today I'm going to be talking about my journey from living and working abroad to my current role as Amazon product manager here in Seattle and I'm going to be doing that through the lens of 12 books that have been really helpful for me. So the agenda of today's talk is basically would do just a bit about me so you kind of understand my background and where I'm coming from. Five minutes on two, since I did a broad one was in Mexico for about three years and then one was a trip around the world I did in 2014. And then for the remainder of the presentation, I'm just going to be talking about some books that I'd like to highlight. It's just one slide per book so obviously we won't go into too much depth, but hopefully this will give you a flavor for what the book's about why I found it helpful in case you'd like to pick the book up and read it yourself. So first we'll start with a little bit about me. First on the personal side I, yeah on the left here you see my family. So this is Victoria. She's 18 months old and she's super cute. This is by my Maria and our Wymer and her dog Nova. And then just kind of on the personal side, I like to do outdoor stuff. This was actually last weekend in Bellingham, Washington. This is my daughter Victoria laying it down on the synthesizer. And this is me back in 2005 rocking the Afro before a basketball game. So yeah and then just about me professionally I studied at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And then shortly after graduating moved to Mexico City as part of a binational business Fulbright program, which I'll talk about a little more, then spent almost three years in Mexico and then went to business school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. And did an internship at Amazon in the summer of 2015 and then came back full-time first into the finance program and then later as a product manager. And currently I work on the delivery experience team. The delivery experience team is kind of the customer facing team for the delivery, kind of the shopping journey that you might be familiar with Amazon from all the way from searching for a product to selecting when, how you want that product delivered and then the from when you order until when you get it make sure that that process is seamless if it's running late we'll let you know with notifications and make sure that that's your products arrived seamlessly. So yeah that's a little bit about me and my background. So next we'll hop into the international nomad bit of this. So as I mentioned I did some time in Mexico through this binational business program, super cool program. Basically I had the opportunity to live a year in Mexico with these other Fulbright scholars and we worked at Mexican companies or nonprofits during the day and then went to school at night and just learned a ton, got to practice Spanish and learn about Mexican business culture and just a whole lot of fun. I worked at a nonprofit named Ashoka. Ashoka focuses on social entrepreneurship and specifically like early stage. So I'm a social entrepreneur. I'm you know working on my idea maybe I'm doing it part-time with my day job. Ashoka gives grants for that stage entrepreneur to make their idea a reality and then scale up with the idea being that after you know three years of kind of a stipend then the entrepreneur can work on their idea full-time after that and so I got the chance to meet a number of really just amazing entrepreneurs in Mexico highlighted three here Enrique who does water captation. There's some like severe water shortage problems in Mexico City especially in the like informal housing part parts of the city. So Enrique is working on solving that problem with his Isla Urbana kind of hybrid nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Jose Carlos Gonzalez created and runs Green Wallet which focuses on transforming the Mexican recycling industry which historically has been like run by mafias and people are like rummaging through dumpsters into like a more modern and market-based recycling system and then finally Javier Lozano has a really awesome model for diabetes clinics in Mexico. Mexico has one of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes and so Javier is really a pioneer in that so really a formative experience for me in terms of meeting all these folks really inspiring the work they're doing so feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to learn more about that. Following my time in Mexico I actually here he is Jeremy taught me a few things about how to travel around the world using credit card points and so here's a link if you'd like to learn more on that but I did about five months you know bouncing all over the world in this flight and the one world ticket so it's like 16 flights and you can buy it using miles and then go all over. I started here in Nashville there's my sister Julie sending me on my way with my travel companion Charlie Chico spent some time in Japan, Korea, China both in Hong Kong and Guilin Philippines did a homestay with these crazy kids and that was a lot of fun. Spent time in Thailand these were some some some protests that I got to witness. Malaysia did about a month in India where I got to be an extra in the Bollywood movie Happy New Year with Shahrukh Khan who's like the Brad Pitt of India so that was also super cool did some time in Amman Jordan you can see me in my Indiana Jones outfit here also went to Israel and Palestine this is a picture of an Israeli soldier kind of patting everybody down in the bus as we go into Palestine did a quick bit in Lagos this is the MoneyGram team who same guy Jeremy connected me through to the MoneyGram team they were super helpful in setting me up for like a good time and and just learning a lot in Lagos a little bit in Kenya so this was Nairobi and then Lake Naiva Shana and we did a safari there super cool popped up to the UK and did a quick layover with my friend Victor and then the final stint of the trip was in Rio so here's the motorcycle ride up to the top of the mountain and here's a few from the top really amazing trip and here I am back in Nashville meeting up with my now wife Maria so pretty awesome trip so do check out these links if you're interested in doing a similar trip at some point so after that trip I was pretty tired out and was gearing up for business school and so these books that I read will speak a little bit to my journey as a product manager and also just in general navigating professional stuff not having either a product or finance you know background at all so so first and so these are kind of an order of how I would approach like if you're interested in getting into product management or understanding what it is that's kind of the high-level order but this book describes really well what is a product owner's job and I use the word owner because I think it is important to think about your job as an owner because at the end of the day you're on the hook for delivering things that customers and users like and enjoy and engage with but that involves working with senior management all these you know here would be like the software engineers your scrum master and then we're close with your users so really cool role and this book goes a little bit deeper into what does this mean it's full of stories you want me to read this but this basically summarizes at the end the 11 step process that you would do if you want to implement scrum in your workplace and I found that super helpful both to have the background stories and then have this like kind of quick start guide and you can see like pick a product owner pick a team pick a scrum master and that definition of terminology has been really helpful for me next up so imagine you've you know you know what a product manager is and you're about to transition into a product management job I found this book helpful in thinking about how to ramp up into your job for like long-term success so for example and this is also applicable to starting at Amazon or starting at any new company and this is advice I give to people where you kind of want to invest in yourself and invest in understanding the situation that you find yourself in here you're going to be consuming value naturally in the first couple days and weeks of your role but this book will help you accelerate the timeline by which you're able to move from consuming value to producing value so I found that mental model helpful okay so now you're on the job probably the most important relationship that you want to manage is that of your manager and this book I found helpful especially when you and your manager aren't like naturally the same style so I found this book helpful and unpacking like well what are the things that I need to do to improve to make sure that I'm performing at a high level and then thinks about your relationship with your boss as like you're the protagonist like you know it's your responsibility to make sure that you're managed well and I found that concept quite helpful as well this one's a classic so you know you're on your job you've met with your boss set up expectations the next thing that you should do is get out there and talk to customers and there's a term in this book and it's called get out of the building and what it means is like go out to the street go do customer interviews go like walk through the customer's journey and go go talk to them and and observe them through that like that purchasing process or engagement process and that'll really help you move more quickly in designing a product that's meaningful to those customers and as you can see that process will then give you ideas you'll build the scrappiest thing that you can get out the door quickly which is your product then you'll measure hey do customers like it or not which parts do they like that will then generate data which will help you learn and the faster you can spend around that loop the better and this book is helpful for thinking about creative ways to spin up things that can get a reaction from a customer without going through a lot of expensive dev weeks really really important concept and a great book so you know thinking about you know we talked about how product owners sits in the middle here I found that often development teams and in my world software engineers and data scientists are often introverts and that makes sense because software engineers and data scientists need to dive deep and really just zone in and have that focus that many extroverts don't have and so that ability to focus in is what makes great software engineers great however myself as an extrovert it's not necessarily intuitive as to like well why isn't the team speaking up in meetings or you may feel like hey I'm you know I'm just getting crickets out there you know why don't people speak up this book was really helpful for me to think through the lens of an introvert in terms of like how can I as a product manager fit an environment in which I can more quickly and efficiently connect and build relationships with my development team so would highly recommend this book all right cool well that's the end of the product management books that I recommend and next we'll get into the motivation and productivity bit so this book really sits at the core of like why we do why we're motivated to do what we do and you'll you can read the Twitter summary there but my big takeaway from this book was both like what motivates me and what motivates my team and unpacking for each person what motivates each person and so you can see here um talks about autonomy mastery getting better and better at something over time and then purpose and depending on the person and their point in their career they might put more weight on one of these things versus the other two but these three things I think really hit at the core of what motivates both me and the people I work with and starting from there and that understanding is I think really important to kind of get to the core the root of how to get people just super excited about what they're working on so next is this one is called the five choices and it's similar to you know habits of highly effective people and that we talk about like importance and urgency and similar in that way but it builds upon that concept once you've identified what are the kind of not urgent but highly important tasks that you know you need to focus on to deliver great products to your customers how do you in a world in which we're bombarded with notifications and a bunch of emails and news how do you figure out what are the big rocks so this is the step number three that you need to do that require that concentration similar to what I mentioned about like what makes software engineers or data scientists really good is that ability to focus well it's actually the same for product managers thinking about what are the requirements at their core what's one of the simplest way to articulate requirements in writing or writing a document that's really inspiring those big rocks can't fit in between meetings you need to block out time and and so this book provides a framework through which you can kind of manage your schedule and your incoming requests before they even hit your desks with fancy tricks like you know rules in your outlook so that you get a message bling bling bling when your when your boss emails you but for you know some email listserv that you're a part of that's not distracting to you as you're in your you know big rocks concentration time and this is very very important concept because if you don't do this stuff you'll burn out because we have we've faced so many decisions like decision fatigue is real you're making decisions all the time and so making sure that those decisions are ones that are decisions that allow you to be extraordinarily productive and not things that are just arbitrary is a super important way to protect against burnout and kind of zooming all the way out again I found this book it's doubted Jane it's basically just a book of Chinese poems but it's really helpful to come back to and think about concepts like influence without authority or success and failure this number 13 is one of it's a collection of poems so there's this is the number 13 poem but there's a whole bunch of them and so I like to come back to this book in kind of like a meditative or like staying grounded type of way all right and then finally some books that I've enjoyed related to business and culture I grouped these business and culture together because often the most successful companies are those which have a strong and distinctive culture and so I'll talk about a couple of those the first one is this book by Ben Horowitz legendary venture capitalist he tells story after story of just some epic situations that he found himself in and how did he rationalize having to fire people when his company was going under or you know in the early days of the cloud and just really awesome set of stories and it says also a lot about the culture that you want to build in your team and your company that you definitely don't want to build like what is corrosive politics and how do you avoid it so really awesome book um the good product manager bad product manager um that you might have seen around is uh from this book originally um this book is about Google how Google works and it's fascinating uh kind of the stories but also the embedded philosophy about like what has made Google become so successful in delivering all the products that we use Gmail YouTube the whole thing um so put here some some hiring do's and don'ts some kind of like uh career type advice that I think is relevant for product managers um so yeah definitely check this book out um and then of course uh you know I work at Amazon I'm a big fan of the company and the culture and this book gives a window into kind of the origins of the company which at the end of the day are kind of uh the these type of stories are the things that shape culture and leadership principles um and so understanding the story behind kind of the founding and evolution of Amazon I found um fascinating and so so that's a good one to check out and then um finally um this one is a book that um the uh darn school business at University of Virginia has read as one of your first books in business school and um it is an older book but it remains super relevant today and it talks about like any organization even you know like Amazon trying to you know test new stuff in the delivery experience world um um it's super important to have uh this um operations mindset and understand as a product and engineering organization where your bottlenecks and then also like as a company like the delivery experience team we depend on uh the supply chain optimization team uh the transportation team the warehouse team all to deliver um awesome delivery experiences to customers and so the concepts in this book are um super relevant and um it's also really fun it's written as a novel as the protagonist goes through and um kind of stumbles across these concepts uh and uh just great read so would recommend this one as well all right so uh that concludes uh this presentation um hope that uh you know you took something away uh and um if you have any questions yeah and please let me know and also um my email uh you can reach out to me via email as well thanks