 Hi, I'm Ashish Nirke. I'm a product manager at Facebook. About 11 years ago, I started my journey as a software engineer through my career at one of the top three firms in India, Infosys. And since then, I have worked at Nokia, Microsoft, Intuit, Roku and now at Facebook. And today I am extremely happy that I get to share my journey, my learnings and three simple secrets that I learned through the journey with you, the aspiring product managers. And so I want to thank Product School for giving me this platform to share my journey and help you guys to get towards the product management. What you are going to learn today is we will look at my journey, what I did. And although I said 1.5 years of journey, how it turned into three years, how I struggled from getting from software engineering to a product management, what tricks and tips I applied and what I learned that can make your journey really simple to get towards the product management. I'm also going to share three simple secrets. And I call it simple because as you see through them, you'll say, hey, these are pretty simple. I know this, right? But it's really the secrets that we ignore and we suffer as we go through that journey. So I'm going to call out them explicitly. And thirdly, I'm going to help you make your plan. We want to make the plan immediately to either start your journey towards product management. And if you have already started that journey, I want to help you accelerate that journey in the right direction. It's important to see what we are not going to cover as well. The first thing I'm not going to cover, PM best practices or what does a product management means? And that's because when I did a Google search of what a software engineer does or what a product management does, there was a clear distinction within 0.5 to seconds. I got about 0.5 billion responses to the first one, which is what a software engineering is. But I got about two billion responses on what a product management is or what a product management does. And that's like 4x. So there's a lot of content available outside that can help understand what a PM is, what the best practices are. And I'm pretty sure if you are listening to this webinar, that means you already know some of the basics and you want to accelerate your journey towards getting to PM. The second thing we are not going to cover is the deep dive into product management pillars. And because if you're listening again to this, that means you have some basic understanding of what PM means. And there's a really lot to cover in this area. So it could be a separate section or a session of its own. So before you get too deep into how to become a good product manager, how to understand the different pillars and strategies, I need to help you first get into the right track and get accelerate your journey towards PM. And the third thing that we are not going to cover is the interview prep. This is not interview preparation session. There is again a lot of resources available outside that can help you. And secondly, the interview preparation really depends on which company and which team you are interviewing for. So it's not something that generally we can talk in this session. All right. So that said, let's get started on our agenda for today to get you to start learning. First thing is my journey towards PM around mid of 2012. I joined Nokia as an software engineer intern, and I joined a secret team at that time called the Tablet Team. I was working on developing different Windows operating system apps or Windows OS apps at that time. Nokia was trying to combine with Microsoft all their efforts. And my team and I were trying to see how we could differentiate our tablets from other tablets. In six months by end of 2012, I became really comfortable in developing the apps and, of course, being an intern and having some free time. It wasn't so much difficult to come up with an idea of my own. And so I created an app that was based on a concept of how earlier communication used to happen. And Kings used to communicate earlier using the scrolls where they would write a message and send it with one of their soldier to somebody else. So based on that idea, I created a Doodle-like application that could have infinite canvas where a Doodle can happen. A user can add images, video, audio, etc. and create various scrolls with these infinite canvases and then share with each other. When I shared this with the leadership, it really became one of the company-wide app that we started developing. We got funding, we got three different teams that started working on it. And as we got a number of engineers, we also got one product manager to work with us. Since I was the initial originator of the idea, product manager worked really closely with me to understand what was my motivation behind it. Together with him, I started interviewing customers, understand their requirements, really think about what impact this app can make, how it can bring differentiation, the thing that we cared about. How can the tablet become just the notebook in your hand and how can you become comfortable if we give you this app to have the Doodle and a notebook kind of experience? As I started working with that product manager on all these things, of course, I started liking this field a lot. And around the beginning of 2013, this is when I created my New Year's resolution that this is a very interesting role and I want to be a product manager by the end of 2013. Of course, it didn't happen by the end of 2013. It took me about 1.5 years to shift my mindset to make people realize that I care about product management, to make people see me as a product manager. And as it was happening right somewhere in the middle of 2013, Microsoft took over Nokia and that just destroyed my plans. So I joined into it as a software engineer, being that was the only experience on that resume. And I restarted my journey towards getting into product management. I again spent 1.5 years and finally I got into product management. But throughout this repeated journey of 1.5 years twice, which is totally three years, I realized three simple secrets that I want to share with you. So the first secret is communication is the most important skill that you have to master. And I cannot stress enough than saying this like there's no other option. Whether you are trying to become a PM, you're aspiring PM, or once you become a PM, this is the skill that's going to save you. And the question I would ask is think about have you ever sent an email and received a response asking questions to clarify what you write or have you ever emailed someone or tried to convey something with your concerns or you tried to ask for approvals on something and that resulted into chaotic chain of emails going back and forth with multiple people on it. And if the answer is yes, then yes, you need to work on your communication skill. The question I asked myself when I was trying to get into PM is what does it even mean to get or have better communication skill? And after that three years of journey, I realized it really means transforming your talking, your writing and your listening skills into an ability to understand others and ability to convey your thoughts. That's what it means. You may have heard many product managers on your team saying, I need to align with this other team or I need to align with someone and I'll get back to you. And that can only happen if you have a good communication skill. You can only align with people if you can communicate very nicely. If you can understand their point of view and try to negotiate to reach a point that is beneficial to both of you. The second secret I want to share is impact. Always think in terms of impact, some data back impact and let it reflect in your verbal as well as the written communication. Right. If you are not a product manager already, you are aspiring and you are either a software engineer or some other background. I would say, do not hesitate to speak out loud in front of your team. If you see anything else in the discussion that brings value to the table, don't hesitate to discuss that. Don't hesitate to pivot. And if you keep bringing up those points and with the data back communication after a few reputations, people will start noticing you. And more importantly, you will start noticing yourself as how your mind shifts from software engineering into product management. It will create your brand. Right. And the third secret I want to share with you is be always ready. You don't know when the opportunity is going to knock who is judging you when. And I have a plan next to share with you where this is going to be super helpful. So in be ready, what I mean is be ready with three things. First thing is have your elevator speech ready. Anytime if you get an opportunity to talk to someone who is hiring a product manager, you should be ready with a two minute speech about yourself, your background, some projects you have worked on, why you aspire to be a product manager and how you can bring success to the team. Right. Be ready with that elevator speech. Secondly, if this discussion goes any further, the person in front of you is going to ask you, tell me about a few of projects you are working on. And what they want to listen is some of your success stories and some of your failure stories so they can better judge you. So be ready with four to six success stories that you have and about two to three failure stories that you have. And whenever you tell the stories or even any type of communication, you certain format or the model that can help you. The models that I use usually are one of these two. One is called S-A-R, a SAR model, where S is situation, A is action and R is the result. You start with what was the situation that you or your team were in and try to establish the pain point. You really need the person in front of you to understand the situation was complicated. Then you need to talk about the actions, the actions you took specifically to get the team out of that situation. So that's S, situation, A, action, and then talk about results. Be very precise and specific about what were the results achieved when you went through those actions, when you took those action. What was the customer gain? What was the revenue gain? What was number of sessions, for example? Just be very specific on what things you achieved as a result. The second model I use is called S-C-R, situation, complication, resolution. This model is very helpful if you haven't gone through the actions itself, but you face with a challenge and somebody asks you to present it with a plan. Right? So how you start is, again, you start with the situation. You say what it exactly is. Then you write the complications. What are the complications in that situation? Try to establish the pain point. Why it's important to even plan about this thing? Why it's important that we speak about this? Establish that pain point and then go towards the resolution. In the resolution, always try to provide two to three different options, at least go with up to five and then recommend one of those options, which you would say is the best option to go with and why. If you communicate in this way, you will always get your point conveyed in a right direction to the person and they will understand you. So these are the three secrets I'm going to repeat one more time. First is communication. There's no other option you have to master the communication skill if you are aspiring to be a product manager and you would need the skill even after becoming a product manager to become a great product manager. The second thing you are going to need is thinking in terms of impact and later reflect in your communication, your writing skills. And the third thing is you always need to be ready. You don't know who is judging you or what time the opportunity might knock. So be always ready with your elevator speech, with your success stories and with your failure stories. And always remember when you are communicating or conveying your stories, use either S.A.R. model, situation, action resolution or use the S.C.R. model, situation, complication, resolution. All right, with that, I'm going to give you a plan and hoping you'll take immediate actions on this immediately after this webinar. If this plan doesn't seem right for your situation, please tweak it. But make the plan right now when I created this plan. I knew that I was a software engineer. My product sense was a little bit weaker. I needed to work on the metric skills. But I knew what was great in me is I could bring innovation. I could bring creative user experience. And I was a very reliable product executioner. So try to figure out what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. Work on your weaknesses and in parallel, start advancing towards the PM roles that can use your strengths. Right, let's look at the plan. The first step in the plan is put yourself in readers or listeners shoes. This is this goes right towards the first secret that I told you. Communication, right? And here's one example of how you can bring simplicity in your writing or speaking skill. If a sentence you are writing is like, at this point in time, we have not yet decided which action plan we will put into operation. By the time the reader reaches the half of the sentence, they already lost the interest. They don't know what you are trying to speak. So try to simplify this and try to convey what point you're really trying to make. Just say, we have not yet chosen an action plan. It's so small and it's so precise. Reading it immediately, the person understands what you're trying to convey. Another example in being specific is this one. If the sentence is he incorporated major inputs from interviews to determine the functional requirements for console construction. Just write in a simple way. He interviewed many experts to learn console building, right? You see the difference like the more bigger sentences you have, the more words you put in. It's that much difficult for a person to understand. Just eliminate the words that do not contribute to readers or listeners understanding when you are either sending an email or trying to verbally communicate. Use always one more technique that I tell myself is read before send. Either it's an email communication or I'm chatting with somebody. I type it and then I pause for a second. I read through it. I see I put myself in the reader's shoes and I see can I understand this? And I'm surprised even to this point how many times I've figured out so many mistakes, either spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, or even wordy sentences. And it happens all the time when you are in Russian, you are trying to type and you make this mistake. So just pause before you send, read it, put yourself in reader's shoes or listeners shoes, think about it and then proceed. The state number two of the plan is increase your network and express your goal, right? This is something I did and it tremendously helped me. Decide some number. I decided I needed to meet at least two people every week, two new people in my company or outside grow my network and tell everyone that I'm interested in product management. I'm looking for jobs. These are my strengths and I'm trying to see which other teams that are hiring for product managers who are skilled in the specific area. Just keep communicating. If you find at least 5% of the people who can help you and lead you in a right direction or can tell you this is a hiring manager that's hiring and you should talk to them, you already got the lead. So continue this. You decide your number, grow your network and communicate your aspirations to them along with the reasoning. And the third step in this plan is unlocking yourself until you find that opportunity. You don't need to lock yourself in saying I'm not a product manager right now. Instead, what I did was unlock myself. I said, I don't need official a position to be the product manager. I can consider in my mind that I'm already a product manager and start acting like one. Many times you will see on the team that product managers are stretched then they either go on vacation or they are working on so many projects that they don't get to focus on specific projects in detail. Take the charge in that case. Ask them if you can jump in and help them. Right. Sometimes you can take to volunteer, run the scrums. Sometimes you can just say on one of the projects, let me write the vision document or let me create some requirements and then you can review it. Right. Do something like that. Unlock yourself to get out of that lock situation or being in one position. Just consider yourself as a PM and start acting like one. Get guidance on where you are making any mistakes and correct your course. Right. So I would pause here for a second. Take a pain in paper. Take action immediately. Make your plan. I'm again going to repeat make your plan. If this plan doesn't work for you, tweak it to your situation. Try to find out what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are and prepare your plan, how you are going to accelerate yourself towards the product management. And at this, finally, I'm going to say be persistent after 1.5 years of effort at Nokia when Microsoft to go to Nokia and I got laid off. I almost lost my hope as I had to again restart my whole journey from software engineer to PM. But I realized that if we have this plan ready, it works, right? I have seen it once. It almost landed me in a PM role. And so I decided I want to be persistent. I'm going to restart this plan again. I'm going to do everything that I did previously and even better. And being persistent really paid off. I finally got into product management role. So I would really, really, very highly recommend be persistent if it takes two years for you, that's fine. Sometimes it might take six months, depending on how the opportunity comes in front of you, right? But be persistent and keep trying. Make your plan. If that plan is not working, change the plan, but do not give your objective. You want to become a product manager. You will become a product manager. And for that, I say all the very best in case you have any questions and you need to reach out to me. This is my LinkedIn URL. It ends with Ashish Nirke, my first name and last name. So link in dot com slash in slash Ashish Nirke. Feel free to reach out, text me, connect with me. You have any questions, you need more information. You need to talk about best practices or interview tips, which we haven't covered. I'm always happy to help. Thank you so much and good luck.