Tech sales closing for product management

How to create outlook signature

hey everyone and welcome to another product management video my name is darius kumari and i've been doing product management for the last 10 years in my own company as well as large enterprise publicly traded tech companies i'm a csmba and i've worked directly under product management directors and vps from companies like servicenow paypal and google to name a few now one of the most common questions that i get from friends new grads and co-workers is how do you break into a product management role how do you become a product manager and so the premise of this video and this discussion today is that you are someone interested in but hasn't yet landed a product manager owner or analyst role and you're looking for advice and information on how to break into product management and so whether you're a new grad or maybe you've been working for some time and you just want to make that role change into pm this video will have advice for you to consider from everything that i've learned and i've seen as a product manager the last 10 years here in tech and so quick disclaimer though you know my perspectives are limited to my kind of tech and sas view product management might change a bit the responsibilities and requirements might change a bit depending on the industry you're in but more or less the takeaways from today's discussion will be applicable to most product manager roles and as a quick disclaimer uh the other quick piece of advice i always give on the onset is getting into product management or into pm on average will be more difficult than a number of other roles available in the business unit or organization just due to the role scarcity and ratio between a product manager role and some of these other individual contributors so for example if i made it comparable to a sports team in soccer you know the product manager role is like a goalie you only have one goalie really on the field at a time yet you might have three defenders three midfield three forward right and so there's a lot higher uh probability if you're equally qualified for every role to get into one of these you know contributing roles and you know if we think about uh football another sport example here pm is very much like the quarterback or again it's a very uh a single role that interfaces with multiple other individuals and you'll have multiple receivers right that that can also have a spot on the team and so that's not to say that it's emission impossible right i'm here living proof that someone especially someone newer to the industry could break into product management and make it happen so in today's video i'm gonna give you the tips i'm gonna give you the two techniques i've seen successful to helping you break into a product manager role so that being said right there's no need to give up without learning more and giving it your best shot so the first piece of advice that i get as you think about breaking into product management is thinking about how and where you're going to apply and let's break that down starting with the where what i find as being a product manager the last 10 years is that purpose is everything you need to start with a larger purpose thinking about either the industry or theme of types of problems that you want to solve and identify companies that are available and are hiring in that space for example do you want to work on consumer technology do you want to work on enterprise do you want to work in healthcare or life sciences you know you need to find that domain that industry and that product type that you think you will really enjoy ideating on problem solving on and in many cases you know spending a lot of effort toiling on as well and so you want to create products and solutions around problems you're passionate about as the passion will come through also when you're interviewing for the given role so having that passion will be a key to landing the role as well now let's get into the how to apply right i generally see two ways to breaking into a product management rule one is to move horizontally within an existing organization you work for which we'll refer to as an internal break-in the other is to apply and directly land a product management related position which we'll call an external break-in and this is at you know an organization you don't currently work for now i personally took the internal route meaning i applied and i started working somewhere before becoming a product manager and then shifted into that product management role internally in that existing organization so let's actually start there and i'll mention that it's a more common route i think for new grads to take this approach of going first at an organizational line to your purpose or an interest and then moving into that product rule because you don't have as much relevant industry experience it allows you to build up a bit of your own knowledge product and industry experience in that adjacent role before making the move into product so with that let's talk about the first way to project uh to really break into product management the internal break-in so talking about the internal break-in let's start with my story when i graduated with my computer science degree i knew i wanted to work for and get into a tech company and i wanted it to be local to where i lived here in san diego and so i looked for local opportunities and i found a local tech company that was hiring now i always wanted to become a product manager i wanted to blur those lines between the technical and the non-technical the business and the technology and so that was definitely already on my long-term road map but i figured let me get started first with a role that i can get my foot in the door with before trying to expand and really narrow down my horizon to something more specific and so i actually began in a role referred to as solution consulting or technical pre-sales at this enterprise software company as a technical pre-sale resource you're in meetings with prospective customers and you're demoing new product features and capabilities hoping that they're going to convert and become a customer pay you your subscription service agreement to ultimately use that software you're offering to solve some kind of a need so in my case as a solution consultant i ended up actually specializing in a specific product line and over time and with a lot of effort i became a subject matter expert on this product you see i was having daily customer conversations and i would start hearing the patterns and trends of what are these customers or prospective customers asking for in my demo that they want to see are there questions and features they asked for that the product didn't have are there areas that they really liked and so i know that these are differentiators over time those multiple customer interactions helped me understand the voice of the customer and what ended up happening was the product team at the time in the business unit actually would come to me as a subject matter expert on this product now and ask me for feedback on roadmap and feedback on voice of customer and eventually that actually translated into being offered a role as a technical marketing engineer in that business business unit of that product line that i was the solution consulting lead on and that you know over time ended up into helping write requirements and you know once the old pm left the organization i was the natural fit to come in and replace that resource and continue providing requirements to the engineering team and getting this product developed aligned to where the customer need and product market fit was right and so to recap i started taking a role in the organization i wanted to work for i learned and i gained skills for the domain and specialized in a product and then i moved horizontally into a position in the business unit where ultimately i took on responsibilities and tasks proactively related to that of a product manager so that ultimately when the opportunity arose i made sure that i was first in line to say hey i'm interested in taking up this position in full responsibility all right and for many individuals i've talked to the road to product has been similar it hasn't been direct they've actually moved horizontally into product management roles after already working at the company for some time half of my product organization at the tech company i was working for came from an internal horizontal move and i've seen this for a few reasons one first business units generally have a lot of roles that interface with product during the life cycle right it could be design research uh pre-sales as we were talking about post sales and professional services and so resources in these adjacent areas may end up specializing in a specific product and portfolio area that is related to what a product manager is working on and so if you're in post sales for example and you've been advising on an enterprise project management app you probably spent a few years implementing this project managing app consulting customers on how to get value out of it and there's a good chance that you now understand the customer the problem space and the types of solutions and features they're after the use cases they have and that goes for if you've been doing design right if you've been doing solution consulting like i was before there's a lot of these customer facing roles that gain that knowledge on what the product should be doing what the customer needs are and any of those roles are great segues into moving into product because you already have that ramp of the domain you have the ramp of the product and the needs and you even have a customer contact list potentially that you can take with you and continue to cultivate those relationships so the significance here is that the knowledge you gain in those customer facing adjacent roles that might work alongside product is transferable to the role of product management so that if a product opening occurs you can give that say that hey i've been working on this enterprise project management line for some time i know there's a product opening on that line let me and please on the conversations right and so customer and domain experience is key but the rules that interface with product will definitely begin you down the right path right and so if i had to list it it's project manager solution consultant professional services engineering development research design product marketing are even a business analyst process owner working in the business unit right so identify one of those roles that you can enjoy and succeed in in the short term at the organization you want to work for and keep your eye on product management opportunities in the longer term right that's important is you need to proactively look for these pm opportunities internally that may open because new projects get funded you head cones headcount opens up or maybe there's just simply resource churn right existing pms leave the company move positions get promoted and there's now an opening that you could internally request that transfer or that opportunity to be evaluated for right and so one way to do that as well is be very transparent in your one-on-ones with your manager notify your manager or hiring manager upfront of that interest in that product management role and then as they open up internally again apply make your intention known positions are not proactively given to individuals you know you're not just going to be given a product management role out of nowhere that you've wanted you need to proactively make your intention know and vocalize that desire to move into that other internal position now another way internally that you might find yourself moving into a product position other than that horizontal move after gaining relevant experience and customer insights in an adjacent role is actually pitching your own product and your own vision right you could always create a pitch deck around a business need and a product strategy that you want to bring to the market in a zero to one fashion be the founding product management for outline what you want to build when you think you could build it by what the addressable market looks like and why it's in line with market trends how it fits into the company's existing business strategy and importantly how many resources you think you need to get it done right and pitching this business idea to business leaders even if they're not in your chain if they're in the business unit you could try to set some time on the calendar shoot them a slack message send them a powerpoint of your idea to see if in an upcoming quarter they might be willing to invest resources into your idea you know as that annual budgeting cycle occurs and so those two approaches one applying for the organization spending some time in a role building customer experience and product the domain experience and then applying internally for that product management transfer or two coming up with your own pitch for a zero to one product and trying to get resources to just organically grow your own team in that zero to one fashion at entrepreneurial fashion is how you'll be able to move into a product management role which is what i've done at the existing company that you work for so let's though talk about also approach number two and you could try both these approaches in parallel approach number two is that external break-in so with that external break-in you are actively applying to new product roles in a new organization that you currently do not work for right it's that direct application that direct break-in so when sending out your resumes or considering where to work again i recommend applying to these positions directly alongside that internal approach that we just covered earlier now unless there's a small organization struggling to fill a role most organizations will require some form of historical product management experience when they're hiring for a product manager role right so even if you're going explicitly and you're applying in most cases they're going to look for some relevant experience on your resume if you just graduated and you may not have internship experience the question becomes how do you close that experience gap right and so many large organizations actually what they offer is what they call rotational product management programs which are meant to take new resources many cases new grads and offer them a view of multiple products along different life cycles as an entry-level role that supports a product management function and other roles like this could include things like an intern or a business analyst where you're doing more tactical tasks like story writing refining acceptance criteria and so on but they're all roles that is part of the product management function and that directly supports a product manager or a group product manager and so those direct applications to those roles are key and you could always start with those roles as you then mature and move up into a standalone product manager or group product manager position and so it might be called product owner but the tactical deliveries is mentioned around usually user stories or some form of user research competitive analysis all tied to product execution another great idea to close your experience gap for the external hire especially if you're new grad is having your own relevant side project and startup right it's a great proof point that you're able to ideate bring an idea to market and even potentially you know who knows you might monetize it and so ideally that startup is in the same industry solving the same types of problems that the current position and company you're applying for would also be related to but any general form of entrepreneurship will really allow you to show that hey you can pitch your own ideas you can form your own teams you can form your own hypothesis on a product need and you can actually act on it and bring it to market and who knows depending on the success of the startup it's also very common that once a startup gets acquired those founders become product management leaders at the organization that acquired their company so that's things to consider in terms of closing that resume and skill gap is those rotational pm programs the business analyst roles the internships and your own startup in a related space but specifically let's also talk about what you want to put in your resume what are those experience points you want to highlight what's relevant to see as a product manager who is doing the interviewing and the hiring to make sure that you're successful in the role and so your resume should be relevant with as much objective and tactical metrics related to your performance as you can right so let's say you did sales don't just say you did sales talk about the bottom line impact the percentage revenue growth the percentage acv you landed and if it's a lot of ace what the financial noun is if you could disclose it right take as much actual and objective data points around your historical performance at any historical job you had and put it into your resume and if you don't have a lot of historical job experience there's a great thing called industry certifications and for product management you do deal with a lot of process you do deal with a lot of domain expertise and so having industry certifications will absolutely help you and cement your understanding as you apply for a product role now there's two types of certificates that i see valuable one is general product management related certificates and this is around process things like agile scrum sdlc and product management you can find information on this other certificates is industry and domain related specifications so take it for example there are frameworks around itil it4it devops sre there's these trends and processes and methodology that exists as certifications in that domain that you want to apply for that you could pay for these tests you could take them and you'll learn and ramp on the language of that domain and importantly again even if you didn't have the role experience the previous product experience it'll show that you have some attestation of that knowledge through the certificate and so it's a great way to understand what industry practitioners use and as always you could even you know explore certificates while you're doing that horizontal transfer from an internal role right as you move in from a product adjacent role to product management while you're at it go for those certificates learn about product learn about software delivery if you're in that space doing you know sas products learn about the domain that you want to become a product manager for and so to understand though fully what else you should focus on and highlight in your resume when you're applying to that new product role let's talk about what skills are needed to succeed right what does a product manager do how do they succeed what makes you a good product manager so what does product management do and what are the skills needed anyways to successfully apply or move into such a role first of all we do want to make sure that product management aligns to your hard and soft skills as well as your interests i mean this role is a pretty meeting heavy role 40 to 70 percent of your time is in meetings you do a lot of soft skills a lot of collaboration a lot of communication as i get into in a second and i definitely recommend checking out my lengthier tech talk uh day in life of a product manager where i talk about the 10 core activities of product management through a real life zero to one example of a product that i brought to market and so that video will be in the description below and i do recommend if you want to really get a bigger deep dive on what product management does to make sure that your skills will be aligned to this role now product management is a leadership role right in that you're managing a set of resources across research design development testing documentation marketing sales enablement and beyond ensuring you're getting a value-adding product out the door for the business now while these resources don't report to you you need to gain their trust and confidence in order to efficiently command a position of authority and leadership on the product roadmap and features you want them to deliver when i interview product managers to join my team i look for experience related to these team leadership items and the tasks and skills covered in that 10 core activities of a pm video that i refer to earlier and i generally ask for a tactical walkthrough of product development that that individual interviewing led right and that's where in your case if you haven't done product that standalone side project entrepreneurial experience you may have is a great proof point you can talk to i also listen very key for the soft skills as they come through while that product manager that i'm interviewing is talking about themselves and emotional intelligence is as if not more important than general intelligence for our product manager role you know and so let me list it out now what are those soft and hard skills i recommend for product management let's start with the soft skills because i do think that's the most critical one communication product managers are really the face of the product but they're also the vision centers you need to be able to present communicate at conferences webinars within your own team for stakeholders and you really need to make sure that they understand and align to the mental vision you have as a product manager collaboration is also key you need to know how to talk with your entire team value other perspectives challenge ideas in a healthy way handle conflict in a healthy way and really foster contrarian thinking and ideas to bubble up bottoms up from your entire team persuasion and negotiation is also extremely key for product management not only for customers for your own engineering team but also for stakeholders making sure you can align to reality and align to where you think the product needs to go with its feature set and roadmap empathy is also extremely critical for product management i practice what i refer to as human centered product management and really it's all about empathizing with the customer pain points but also empathizing with your coworkers with your engineering team and their capacity and with the constraints that you may be working in internally charisma is also a big thing and i think it's more of a energy and this also comes back to working on a product that you're passionate about right product managers that really could care less and are very dry and not excited about the product they work on that energy carries through to the team and they don't deliver as great of a product their velocity is much slower and so having high energy and interest in your own product will help motivate the team in achieving goals you need to be entrepreneurial as i mentioned there's a lot of ideating you do thinking through new technologies keeping head of market trends and knowing what problems you want to solve for customers that have the biggest revenue in return and with that also comes problem solving right you have to be a consultant as a product manager when you're talking to customers abstracting what they're saying and identifying what is their real pain point what is what what they're actually asking for are they asking for a screwdriver to hit a nail in the wall or do they really need a hammer right really deconstructing and helping with problem solving customers your solutions and product adoption issues even why is my product not being adopted why are users falling off right a lot of problem solving abstraction there is as i mentioned key and having emotional intelligence and balance is key when you're in a lot of situations customers might be yelling at you there might be high pressure individuals in your team or stakeholders might really feel like their career rests on a deliverable and so you need to manage a lot of emotions keep your own emotions in balance and make sure that you can manage the stress that comes with the role because you are as i talked about in my product management video to 10 activities is you're very much the hub and you have all these spokes of resources that count on you and that you need to deliver for and so multitasking as a result is extremely key you have multiple stakeholders internal and external coming at you with their needs at the same time and so you need to know how to balance that how to manage your time and do time management and multiple competing demands getting those really through every day productive in a productive fashion and finally you need to be confident and decisive if you don't appear confident in your product roadmap your team is not going to trust what they're building and they're going to be hesitant to build so so you need to be very confident and decisive on the roadmap and vision you're setting for your product the features you're asking your team to build so that you have the highest velocity possible with the most motivational possible now the last thing we're going to talk about is hard skills right we just talked about soft skills you need to know technical basics especially if you're working in tech and sas some form of computer science knowledge around how cloud works around you know whatever it is your product is you know if you're in biotech you should have some fundamental knowledge of your domain you know what what's going on technically with the solution that you're building whether it's hardware or software you need to be proficient in interfacing with the engineering team and at least being able to speak their language understanding a build understanding potential technical constraints you know at a high level and understanding relative sizing at a high level as well more importantly than technical knowledge because that's what your engineering team is for is domain experience right a product manager is that subject matter expert that confident authority on the space on building the best product possible for the customers and so you need to be able to pick up domain language domain knowledge and become a domain expert whose ideas are almost in the realm of thought leadership right so let's say you're working in uh healthcare or biotech and you're working on a let's just take kobit as an example then you need to know exactly say you're building a sequencing app that that sequences proteins you should have a fundamental understanding of how sequencing works what other technologies are in place what the protein structures would look like etc and so domain experience is not about the technical of how does my product get built it's about how is my product actually being used in the real world what's the context that's being used and who's using it the persona and understanding all that broader information and all the terminology trends and practitioner best practices related to that you need to also be able to do analytical decision making so once your products out in market everything is really data driven you want to look at what's being used what's not being used where you need to help the product to gain adoption where you can potentially acquire more revenue because you can see through like a market bask analysis what is being used and where there's opportunity to upsell uh or break out your packaging and with that you also need to know you know delivery frameworks i talked about earlier certificates as a great way to understand frameworks and methodology you as a product manager need to know all the common industry frameworks agile scrum safe you know figure out lee and figure out what that organization is doing and make sure you understand that framework for working you should have basic design and mock-up skills something like a balsamic very just able to draw down your ideas of how the product should look and function when you're working with design you should work on powerpoint presentation building and delivery as mentioned a lot of powerpoint presentations talking about the vision of your product the needs it's solving and the larger persona that you're solving for and importantly you need to do product demos as well i think product demos is key for product managers because it's really they are the number one sales person for their product line you need to be confident talking about your product knowing who it's for what the value is all the differentiators all the reasons why you built why you built with the justification and doing that in real time answering questions in real time whether it's software or hardware doing the demos and helping enable really whether it's internal external audiences with that comes roadmap planning management and prioritization so being able to do things like maybe an excel weighted short job first uh analysis where you say hey this is why prioritizing and why or business strategy you know and with that business fundamentals i think that every product manager needs is competitive intelligence pricing marketing business strategy to really understand where does your product fit in the larger landscape in a larger market so with that we just covered the soft and hard skills that i see that are crucial for a product manager to succeed in the role let's talk about now what success actually looks like so what makes a product manager successful so with these hard and soft skills in mind let's now think about the dimensions that you're going to be evaluated on in a product management role one you generally might be creating what's called okrs or objectives and key results alongside your product management leader and manager and this will vary by product and it'll vary where in the life cycle your product is and the size of your team but generally this includes things like successful delivery of product scope the timing of the delivery nps from customers adoption of your product and features from customers new revenue brought in and new logos brought in so how many net new customers are you landing with your product you also have metrics around low support calls right you want to have a low red line you want to have low tickets opened up because that's operational cost for your organization the product needs to be high quality and well built you also want to make sure that it's a low defect count right you don't want to have a lot of customers reporting issues that turn into defects showing that the product has bugs has issues and you might have been rushing features out the door and as a result you know sacrificing quality so you want to have low defect count alongside with low tickets you also need as mentioned teams respect and support now this is a bit of a softer dimension but product leaders are evaluated to make sure that they have their team's respect and support and that also goes for customers you need to be respected by customers and be seen as a trusted partner not just as someone you're doing business with so those are all tips and metrics around which product managers get uh routinely evaluated to make sure that they're successful and so you can get more advice on just becoming successful in the workplace in any role with my book tips for new grants to succeed in the workforce it is available on amazon and i'll tell you that the tips and advice i give in this book will help you break into that role you want to break into whether it is product management or something else because it'll help you become a high performer it'll help you be a high performer whether you are doing the internal break-in for that current position you're in or you've landed that pm job and you want to learn what does it mean you know to to really give it my all and become valuable as possible to my employer in the workforce and so that's available to you the link is also in the description and i really really would uh love to connect with you all on linkedin uh connect with me on tiktok i've got a lot of product management humor you can check those links out also in the description and with that i hope this video has been helpful we've talked about breaking into product management either doing it internally moving horizontally or doing it externally we talked about this kind of skills and experience you want to build up and how you could build that up the hard and soft skills you need and what success looks like for product manager role and so with all that information in mind i i really wish you all luck product management is by no means an easy position and so definitely always focus on your health focus on your well-being and don't let you know don't let the pressures stress you out too much and with that i look forward to seeing you all back in another video soon and as always add those comments and any questions anything else you'd like me to cover in the comment section below thank you