eSignature Legality for Product Management in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: eSignature legality for Product Management in United Kingdom

hi guys welcome thank you for coming first before I start I like to do a little bit of a survey can you guys hear me in the back okay without a mic part cool that's not the survey but the survey is how we need how many of you our current product managers just show pants okay see you how many are kind of aspiring product managers okay Wow okay cool about 75 80 percent of you and then how many people are not in tech right now all right a couple cool um that's that's good because that's just a little bit of background of how how I got here I'm like Carlos hood I'm a product manager right now at prior to this as a product manager at lift and part of that LPM at Amazon but what this is so you might be wondering why is there a factory here so this was actually my first job out of school I was a mechanical engineering major and right out of school I went and worked for Apple to run factories in China in supply change something totally unrelated to what I'm doing now and that actually it's kind of the course a lot of product managers I know take 2 to get 2 p.m. there's not really up I guess it's not really a product school until now but even today there's not really you can't really major in product management as an undergrad so mostly am/pm so I know kind of take a roundabout way to get to the role so after after right I went to Apple I went to business school and then I started at Amazon and that's how I got here so I frequently get asked a lot of questions but mostly you know what do you do all day what skills do I need as a p.m. and also what what can I do to become a p.m. so given our audience today I think it's pretty good to go into that anyone watch Silicon Valley the show yeah good that's why you would get this so this is what my mom thinks I do all day so she basically this is a scrum scrum master kind of managing the work for for the years since we're getting out what is the next thing it's not too far from the truth so I went back and looked through my calendars and try to figure out how much I spend my time did you hear more than half the time I'm in meetings and this hasn't changed throughout all the companies that I've worked at as a p.m. not have a change for any other PM's I know basically your meetings all day I'll talk more about what those meetings are about of those besides meetings the next biggest chunk is for research and that includes you know talking with customers talking looking at the data that you gather from your customers and seeing how the users are using a product that's hot that that also includes working with your UX research group working with your researchers looking at UX studies basically and then then also looking at competitors and see what your competitors are doing so that's a good chunk of time they're the second most amount of time is ask when a project actually should stay project management but basically that the scrum part of it so your JIRA all de Jerez of software used to manage workflow for engineering and your you're kind of there for your engineers for the engineers on your team to clarify any requirements any questions they have on your requirements kind of doing project managing the next chunk of time is spent on presentations this varies depending on what phase you're in what kind of company you work for and what your product is so basically presentations is your at the p.m. you're the face of the product and you're supposed to be the expert of your product and so anything that goes around people kind of tend to blame you for it and a lot of the times you know you're kind of presenting either to your team to your engineering team on what we're doing why we're doing it where are the current results or you're presenting to the sea levels or you know other officers within the company right as as a product leader this is what our is going to build and sometimes we present to customers if you're in the kind of a business of business type of role your intended present to we're in customers a lot and then the next chunk of time is in planning and that's mostly kind of forward-looking about maybe a quarter or maybe a few sprint ahead and planning the work planning the product roadmap and trying to figure out what it is that your team will build and then finally a little bit of hiring here is this really varies depending on what kind of what level of product management you're in SPMS in sort of small companies who will be called upon to kind of interview other PMZ and screen resumes and stuff but the biggest chunk of meetings is here and I find that again looking through my calendar it seems that a huge role as a p.m. is kind of to be the shield for your team as in as a product leader you will get many many requests from across the company from marketing from illegal from operations everybody will have ideas on what your company should build and and everyone will come up to you all the time and say hey you know we thought of this idea we should build it right and this happens basically multiple times a day as you think about it there's never enough time to build all the ideas that we have right so as a part of your job description really is you want to kill your team from building unnecessary things that you don't think it should be a priority for the company so that's what a lot of those meetings are about and then the other half is basically about meeting with other other kind of groups within the company to try to get your project map roadmap done so most of the projects we built will have dependencies on other teams right for example if you want to launch a new product you have to work with marketing team to figure out a marketing campaign to write a blog you might have to work with their brand team to figure out you know some sort of block loads or branding marketing stuff and then also you have it clear with legal and make sure you're not breaking any laws you have to clear with security team to make sure you're not exposing you know personal information from your customers so a lot of that throughout the three companies I've worked for I found a few essential skills that that seems to be a common thread across across the spectrum so first you need to speak with data second you need to modal you you need to come up with a strategy you need to come up with a strategy and you need to communicate a strategy and you need to motivate your team engine a team I hear a lot that you know people say your p.m. that you're kind of the CEO of the product I haven't found that really to be the case because as a p.m. you can't really direct people what to do nobody reports to you directly so it's a lot of soft skills that you have to develop to try to coax and try to convince try to motivate people to see things your way in order to build what you want them to build so motivation is actually a really key key component in your effectiveness as a product manager and lastly technical communication we'll talk a little bit more about that first so speak with data so here's a here's a quote in God We Trust all others bring data I think I find that to be pretty pretty true when I was working at Amazon because that Amazon basically unless you have the data it's just talk no one really listened to your opinion unless you can back it up with data so any any decision you make any any points you try to make everyone will challenge you and say where's the data and there are two types of data there's quantitative and qualitative so quantitated is kind of stuff you can query from your database and you can look at how many users are using your product you know these are hard numbers there's qualitative data which is a little bit softer it's kind of the data you get from talking to your customers the data you get from you know survey the results and just reading what people are talking about your products from online stuff like that but sometimes like the PM you are we comfortable with taking all the data points and then also making decision without all of the data you have so here's an example this is a product that I worked on while I was at Amazon so Amazon vehicle garage so as the user you can you can go on Amazon you can tell us what what car you all right this isn't my car I wish I had a test love it so once you tell us what car you own we can then suggest products that you can buy that you're likely to buy that other people have bought you know different a merchandise to you at the time that I was there there were about some something like five million cars in the garages and a huge user base already so you look at this this feature down here the future categories list where we should suggest parts and accessories that you can buy on Amazon this is a huge amount of revenue generation so one one question was how should we how should we order and how should we what categories and what products should we should we merchandise here right at the time and also there's hundreds of thousands of different SKUs like that different things that we sell so well why do we merchandise one versus the other and me being kind of a car guy I love cars just as a hobby right so at first I was like oh yeah this is easy and I've had a Tesla I would totally buy this back and then of course somebody challenging me well where's the data in that how do you know people are going to buy this right of course they didn't have any data so okay the first thing we did is look at the quantitative data so you can do that at Amazon by H is querying the database and there's hundreds of millions of rows because everybody shops on Amazon right and each of these queries takes hours or sometimes at old day to get back result so after after many hours that got back a result of sales data by volume so it seems like it makes it it makes sense for you to curve is for us to merchandise the most sold products right the problem is if you look at what's what a Mozilla what Amazon sells most of its a lot of bumper stickers you just only purely look by volume so makes sense we just if all of the stuff fits bumper stickers so then okay so what if we look at it by revenue so after a few more hours to write record the database again and it turns out that if you look at it by revenue it's a bunch of very very expensive things like hydraulic lifts kind of tools things that cost apparel you can buy a hydraulic lift for $3,000 on Amazon anyway so having a lot of automotive tools on here doesn't make sense either right if you only go by that data so then okay well what if we just look at how many views each each product has made what people what are people researching well turns out those are wiper blades people people buy a lot of wiper blades for their cars so then it also doesn't make sense for us to have 10 different multiply categories on here so then we turn to qualitative data and you know we interview the vendor managers that that were working there then your managers are really the people that own the PML for the business so they're the the guys that go to like Bridgestone and go to different vendors and try to you know negotiate pricing and try to you know buy price buy things that are lower price so they're kind of the business owners okay so they understand their portion of the business very well so for automotive you know there's a vendor manager for like trust or submitted manager for fluids or something like that so that one to each of them and said hey you know you know your business well what are the things that you would put onto this merchandise merchandising page so then I got a looks several lists of those things and then we interviewed the internal SMEs they're our subject matter experts so for example if you have a Tesla if you have a electric vehicle it doesn't make sense for us to show you motor oil as the category right because you don't have a engine that lets me that takes motor oil or if you have a truck it doesn't make sense for us to actually so people that have trucks buy in a totally different behavior than people have cars right if you have a truck you tend to buy giant lights for off-roading for some reason and then other types of truck related accessories so then we'll have to kind of separate the the categories by body type so anyways talking with different internal subject matter experts we got some more qualitative answers in terms of what we should recognize here and then of course we research as competitors with what everyone else doing other automotive online retailers and then also looked at research papers in terms of how is the automotive space growing which are the categories that we should go after to merchandise more and at the end of the day we kind of use blended all of these sources of data we use the quantitative data at the base and then kind of tweaked it with the qualitative data we got from all these different types of data sources and that's how we came up with this I'll pause here there any questions good question the question was who is doing the research and when we talk to experts and then who has a team like right so this project actually it was me and one other product manager there's two two of us mostly I was focused on this this area actually for this it was I was only product manager on it and then I had help from from other people just to interview to do interviews so you'll find that in a lot of I shouldn't generalize but basically in most of the cases right a product manager will be working on one product or I should say one product should have one product manager at least once feature of a product should have one product manager at least not that's what decade lasting you know as that's why as PMS you know you have quite a bit of leeway in terms of what what gets shipped you have quite a bit of ownership over your products yeah yeah look so the question was I where do you draw the line between intuition and data I'd look a question so it really depends on the situation so in some cases if you're building an improvement upon a an existing product right so you should have data already over something you've already shipped right so you can see what how people are using a product today in order to maybe use your intuition and then try to verify it in relation with maybe surveys and some sort of qualitative data in the case of this or in the case of some brand new product you don't have any data right because it doesn't exist so in that case then you have to look at kind of sideways data see maybe if someone else's ship what you want a ship or something like that and within the space how are they doing right if you're trying to say to build an automotive store which nobody has yet right maybe look at some adjacent types of smaller startups that are trying to blow investment and see how they're doing how much funding have they gotten you know like it was a good area to go into at the end of the day it's kind of an art it's not like you know here's the data and then you just look at the data right that's our product management it's also part art and part science yeah cool one more question then we'll move on back yeah yeah so the question was how do you know when you've had enough qualitative data how do how do you know when to stop getting more qualitative data it's really more of a judgement call basically if you have enough you always start with a quantitative data as you can if you have any and then it's more majestical basically if if you can satisfy everybody around you that that's nobody's kind of gonna challenge and say hey I don't agree with this assumption I think that's where you kind of draw the line right it's saying if you want to get something out there and then you want to collect data as soon as possible because you could you could kind of sit around and try to collect more data until the cows come home but then without real data you know without real real product in the in the marketplace and having collecting an actual data you can't really it's all just kind of educated guesses okay let me move on and then come back to you after this okay so the second thing I the second thing I thought would be kind of important with you need to communicate your plan and motivate with okay hours I'll explain okay hours in a second but as part of your responsibility as a product manager it's your job to come up with a strategy and to communicate that strategy and to motivate your your teammates to execute against that strategy if you don't do that I'm going to click here real quick hopefully this works and of like this so if you like South Park [Music] so yes so that's what happens when you don't have a plan to get there and you have you have a shirt yeah and you don't have a strategy really so as a product manager you know you need to get everyone understanding strategy and your roadmap you need to motivate your engineering team the way to do that is the tool that that look use this and also that Google and and LinkedIn and Twitter and many many other Bay Area companies use okay arts it stands for objectives and key results tool to communicate and track results oh okay I help you answer three three questions one what am I going to one am i and three how do I get there so the first the first question where am I going that's what objectives are objectives are kind of business objectives that your company's like your company is trying to go to it's it's kind of a quarterly goal that you're trying to move your team to and to get their key results are the measurable progress that's kind of the metrics that you measure yourself by and combined you use that to drive your roadmap so that's how you determine what you're going to build it set the direction so everyone will work towards the same the same lab goal and there should be no more than five okay are so dark so then you're forced to prioritize you have to figure out what is important what are the most important things and finally it allows you to say no to none okay our items so if any random person kind of suggests hey we should build it as well then you can ask it because does this work towards our goal does those tour towards our objective if not then don't build it so this is an example of an OPR this is not real numbers or not an actual here but something like it and lift so say you're a part of the driver driver experience group or driver group and your objective here is to grow the supply which is the number of drivers we're really number of driver hours so that's the objective that's the business goal and how do you get there so there's three open two three cars here and three key results first one is increase the number of new drivers right that's how you get just get one more people in the second is you try to get the growth conversion rate so try to get people in even faster and third one is you increase the number of rides how that each drivers is driving and each K army to line up to a specific metric with a number so from X is what it is today right so how many new drivers will have today to Y is what you hope to be or what you like it to be at the end of the quarter and and these ones are all the numbers are going to hook up the dashboard and this is shared across the company so every week you report on how you're doing in terms of these key results so everyone knows this is as a team this is what we're trying to do we're trying to grow drivers by increasing the number of new drivers by increasing the sign up conversion rate and by increasing the number of writes per driver nothing else this is what we're doing once you have this but the road map could come from the chaos right each each road map item each project that you build needs to line up to at least one of the key results so that's how you know that the project you're building is doing something so for example the number of new increasing of new drivers come from X to Y so I remember serious love this book perfect company's up so one thing that you can do that one thing you can use to increase the number of new drivers to increase the referral program okay so they get a lot of new drivers through the drivers driver referral program so by increasing maybe the decreasing restriction or increasing the effective the effectiveness of the referral program we can we can get there and another another thing we can do is compliance so lyft operates in many countries in the US but every many countries many cities in the US and every city has their own laws and regulations every state has their own laws and regulations so interesting facts that you know if you are a lyft driver in Seattle you have to have a business license also a fire extinguisher I think if you're if you hire a lyft driver in New York you have to be professional driver and if you're if you want to drive in if you want to operate in Portland Oregon you have to have a certain percentage of your fleet be a wave wave which is wheelchair accessible vehicle anyway so there's tons of different laws and regulations governing depending on you know where you operate so compliance was a huge driver of growth because in order for us to operate in some new city we have to comply with local laws which means on the product side we'll have to build some sort of feature to comply with that and then you know increasing drivers I know conversion rate you can do that by reducing the friction for the signup flow so reducing the number of steps for someone to sign up can also do that by increasing the what what site speed I wish we did so that actually showed a dramatic increase in conversions and then also finally you can increase the number of rights that each driver tries by showing them by improving the driver dashboard which shows them pay how much money they're making right away so anyway these are some examples of projects that can map up to the chaos so that's how you kind of build a road map I'll pause here any questions do these ideas of further come after yoga boys you already have them before me oh yeah that's a good question the question was - do you view you figure out the objectives first and then and then the projects or do you figure out hey I want to build this so then what is the objective that will fit this thing right that's a good question so it should be it should be the first time the first way so objectives should map up to your company objectives right so you're the CEO will say hey we're trying to grow drivers and passengers and number Rison and these other initiatives and then these objectives for each of the individual teams should map up to the company objectives and then each of the measurable results kind of mapped to the objectives and then you figure out what you want to build in reality it's kind of a mixture sometimes there will be an idea say hey we want to build this feature right but then how can we justify this wingless feature if it doesn't go towards one of our goals so they don't have to think yes well this feature will do something that touches this goal and then therefore you can justify it but I think if it's some random feature which does happen like that people just suggest hey we should build this and it doesn't go towards and go then then we just cut the future kiss wish yeah you can't just start building it yes yeah the question is the okay I was from my team and then dou how's my team made up there like what it was one team like so generally uh the general ain't anyway the companies I've worked for there's one p.m. and there's they have a dedicated development team so there's some at 14 engineers that list and then I was only p.m. and then on average about one to maybe seven ratio or so for it varies depending on what you're working on and then teams get split up all the time but basically there's 1 p.m. and then there's like a dedicated product or dedicated engineering team and that's kind of and they drive towards like one of the areas of the company excuse your nose yes yeah it's a good question how the question was how you decide the success criteria well so so if you think about some some of the care some could be really broad right some could be you know make more money for the company right or increase increase revenue from X to Y well many things affect that kr but it may not be because you built a much better website that that's why the the revenue increased right it could be many many other factors so you have to choose K ARS that will be affected to more or less directly by the result of your of your product so for example if you're trying to build a feature that that very specifically targets one segment of your customer for example for let's say if we're trying to target Kingdom I don't users not used between midnight and 2:00 a.m. for some reason then we want to build a feature maybe a promotion that pops up in your phone or maybe an alarm or some other idea right that only targets that that segment maybe like after the clothes right and then you're in that case your kr will be very specific to that to that that segment so but more or less it should kind of you get it should map to the objective you shouldn't be just some random things that you know it is affected by your product but it doesn't matter any objective one more attention that one yes yeah the question want to tell you how do you decide on the objectives and how do you decide on what to achieve right how to achieve those objectives yeah so the objectives map up to the company objectives so kind of Steele said this is our corporate objective and then each of these gets mapped down to the individual PM so that's how kind of objectives are driven and then the ARS are so you can break an objective down into the components right what do you think will will move that final objective number so those are its kind of a negotiation between what you think and then what engineering things and then what everyone else thinks honestly at the end cool ah moving on so the last one is be technical by that I don't mean you need to be a software engineer you need to go to to school is to get a degree you but you do need to know how to speak the language or at least know enough to be able to talk with your engineers if you come from a non-technical background like like me or someone was not in tech you know you should learn from your engineering counterpart is kind of your engineering manager or your other engineers on your team or you can take a intro programming course there's tons of them out there and yeah you just have to understand enough to talk with engineers and then you should be able to understand enough about your product your p.m. to be able to explain to someone to non-technical so try explaining it to say you're your mom or someone who's not in tech right and and see if they understand what it is that you're building this this once I put it here because I think it's important depending on no matter where you work as a PM you should know how exactly a product works by that I don't mean just hey you click this button and then you see this thing you know you see the next page and then you click this button and then you see the next page that that's kind of as from a user perspective that's how it works but also on their underlying technology right where's the data kept where you know where like which which stack is it on you know like how does the data move what is the data model stuff like that so yeah I think to summarize you know speak with data communicate the plan and motivate and that be technical the last slide I put in here is you know I get that question a lot how do I get into product management since most people here are kind of aspiring p.m. there are a few things you can do and for me you know when I try to get a product management role this is the advice that was given to me now you can switch roles or you can switch industries but you can't do both at the same time so for example if you're a if you're someone in the software company already but you're in marketing or InDesign or ian operations and support or whatever you can move into a PM role within your company by kind of networking and seeing what opportunities there are and and some of the other things I'll talk about but if you're currently say in a hardware industry and as an engineer it's very hard to become a p.m. in a software industry it's much more difficult to switch so you should either switch to a software engineer software engineer first and then try to become a PM or go into a PM in a hardware industry first and then switch over to PM so the second one is try to be helpful to product managers that that are in your company you can kind of offer to help with doing user research when doing surveys your project management to try to help QA the products PM's are generally overloaded and they never have enough time to because their meetings all day they never have enough time to do real work so helping helping those guys out or definitely what allow you to to get a piece of a small piece of product management and also you know create some well you know that there I've seen I've seen colleagues that move in from support team to become PM's I've seen people move from marketing to become piensa by kind of slowly gradually moving towards the PM role and then talk to other PM's about the roles of product management because probably over 90% of PM's didn't start out as product managers right we start out doing whatever they used to do in the base somehow moved into the role and then I should network within and outside of your company I'm angel it's a good place to go it's where a lot of small startups can actually post jobs and and actively look for recruits and then also LinkedIn learn some coding skills this one is probably the least directly the least thing that you can do that directly affects your ability to get a PM role but I think having coding skills having technical skills is never will never hurt you it's always going to be a plus for your career later on and then follow the latest technology trends by reading up on blogs you know tech tech news funding rounds it was an interesting one so every time a company gets funding it's on TechCrunch and every time they get funding that means they're trying to expand that means they usually have heads that they're trying to grow new departments have you know have maybe a broad actual product management department being you scroll up so if you look at a company if you see a company that just got you know honey million dollars funding or something they're probably going to have if you just check their website they're going to have a ton of like new openings and then lastly don't give up it's really hard to land your very first product management role for me it took a long time but it's a growing industry by the fact that you know we have a product school and there's so many people here and every time I come here there's like more and more people you know the industry itself is growing is really hard to land your first role because generally companies that look for p.m. what existing p.m. so walk them on with already with p.m. so they get your very first foot in the door it requires all these other things you know I'm not working and trying to help out and try to move slowly towards that role so that would be W questions I saw a hand back sorry is that the way in the back yeah so question one is what advice would I give a college student who's interested in having product management role in the future there's a few things you can do so typically product management roles come up either you start your own company and you're the seal and usually the CEO is the product person right because they're definitely present at a company or you can go to a Google or Facebook or huge company perhaps that has an associate PM role right and those are roles that take in fresh grants Oh fresh yeah fresh scratch straight out of school so those are those are two of the routes or you go to business school which is another kind of typical route the thing is when you're still in school you know you can try to do a lot of school projects right kind of projects on the side and then you try to get noticed that way and then try to do some sort of product management type of work lawyer as part of your project what I see so so okay so the question is what what a good rolls to half down the road I didn't your first roll when you first rolled out of college right what's your pushing you first look for okay cool in order to get a good shot at being p.m. well I think um so product managers ever only by understanding the customer better than anyone else really you should you should really understand the customer so you could I actually p.m. that go to to get the PM rule from either supporter engineering a lot actually I'd say probably try to try to khones software in development that's like SES well and so then you have the technical part covered and then try to develop your business acumen once you're in a software though yes yeah yeah okay so the question is if your is about if your your kind of jr. type of role right now you have a lot experience that you would like to move in a PM role but most of the piano say they want another p.m. with with a couple years of experience right yeah that's that's a good question and that's why I think well when this product school you should come to product school and you you should learn promote other p.m. I think again it's it's always difficult to find your first PM roll the really you can kind of sell yourself a few ways you can say hey you know yes I haven't had that much experience like letting your ass where on the resume or but I've done these other types of work that has product management elements to it and okay hmm yeah okay cool so the question is you're already p.m. how do you why do other people get roles that I guess okay I'm the famous wrong way but got it so I found that on the job descriptions a lot of kind of requirements there they're just filter out the people are truly unqualified but it's not also not a hard requirement so it's really case-by-case right maybe I can't speak to why some people get a PM role one day when others don't but sometimes that you know people interview better sometimes they're just really outperforming obviously on the number of years of experience maybe they if you can try to speak and get more responsibility for your role right maybe your role as an associate p.m. right is only to do not so much the strategy stuff more the tactical and your execution managing engineers type of stuff maybe I didn't try to try to look for roles where you have more of a long term view more of a strategy strategic component to it and then try to kind of go beyond what would be your job calls for that sort of thing yes okay so from a design perspective really every every new product you do should be based on the user right so should be kind of driven by what the user feedback is and what their user once I find that design usually has a lot of good ideas because they work with a user a lot it would they work with a user research group a lot in fact our user research group is in bed as part of the design group so they tend to have a lot of good ideas on the user experience right so a lot of ideas are generated actually came from design so design is one of the one of the sources of new ideas of new things that build for at least for me whenever we say for the next quarter right what are we going to build and then we what I do is I go and get feedback from all of the different cross functional groups right and say hey based on with your experience based off of where you stand what do you think we should build or do you have any suggestions that you know we should consider and and typically you know if you're if you're in product support you get a lot of customer complaints so you may hear the voice of the customer if you're in design you kind of you can really empathize with how how do the product look somewhat from a user perspective user perspective if you're in marketing you can tell you have a lot of competitive data so everybody can add something really different yeah yeah okay so two questions the first one is that what kind of the skills hiring managers to look for or at least me or for me that one so typically kind of a pitch mentioned here but someone who is it's a good question the skills are generally dependent on really during the interview you know you can kind of tease that one I try to look forward to they use data I'm kind of the first thing I've mentioned there so I will ask them a question for example hey here's a very block question I'd like you're trying to increase conversion in this one area how would you go about doing it and then I would try to look for certain keywords that you should really hit on like use data or try to I try to look for you know looking at what the users now what are they doing try to try to use data and then try to talk to other experts in the field and try to get qualitative data so that's one be the ability to make decisions based on data another one I would use for is I look for is you know how do they prioritize among many competing priorities because that's kind of a table to explore as a product manager you always get more asks then you have then you have resources for and the way to answer that is go through kind of a process of hey what are the most important things you want to get done as a company and then what are the one of the metrics you're trying to move and then that's how you prioritize right or you can start with the customer right what are the customer painful and therefore how does that how does that move towards your matrix right sorry the second question was check out got programming languages that that is really dependent on you I think well we try to look for is someone who is somewhat technical someone who has had some experience with at least one programming language or you know at least know the basics of cs101 right how does the web server work and like what is it know stuff like that I will try to go this way yeah so what's the typical path to go from associate p.m. to a p.m. does the amount of time that n depends I've seen some people go from a couple years but it really depends on your company and then how you perform and I've seen people that go there for quite a quite a long time and then your second question was the future career path of p.m. yes so product management is you can do many things if you're p.m. you get as far as the next step goes you can continue to move up it within the product organization so typically you know associate PM PM senior PM director product senior director vp of product and then CPL chief product officer that's one that's one latter but because a product manager has so many other groups that they interact with you can easily move towards product marketing or marketing you easily move towards you know any number of other other fields so I think it's quite flexible it gives you quite a lot of options one thing I noticed in Bay Area is that there's not that many levels of product is the product orc tends to be quite small because if you think about engineering right you tend have many engineers to one product manager right think about how big the engineering organization tend to be not not a huge product org right comes to me too many chips in the kitchen is not good too many chefs in the kitchen so our English is not my first language and good at this how are we doing on time we good okay cool ah yes sir I'm good back yeah yeah yeah yes okay so the question was from Business School what elements of Business School that I find most useful in as a product manager as a good question so in Business School really you learn a couple of things one thing is to look at a problem from many different points of view so a typical problem could be hey if you are they Z like you know CEO or whatever manager of some company and you're in this case what would you do right so there's more than one way to solve any problems so if you look at it at through the maybe the users lente the company should do a if you look at through a financial end that company should do B if you look at through a legal in committee you should do C okay so a Business School kind of gives you perspective on from from other views and that's something they use from as a product manager because you have to put on many hats and and kind of come at a problem when you try to motivate the cross-functional team to do something you have to think from their perspective they say for example one time you know one time I wanted to build this project and it's something it's something that I knew was good for the user but my engineering counterpart didn't really agree right he wanted to build this very he wanted to spend time that on some very technical project to to advance to get our tech stack back to the bleeding edge so then it was kind of a discussion to say okay well we have only a certain number of engineering hours well should we spend it on or you know from from a user's perspective right we should really build product from a financial perspective this project makes sense like from meteor from an engineering perspective I get you know I get your point of view right that we should work on our tech stack but if we get you know I say if we built this project that I want to build then we can move all these other points and then we can build your thing later and then still it's a way of I guess at the end of the day you know it gives you perspective from other people yes yes yeah [Music] yeah yeah so the good question so the question is if you are in sales before and you want to move into product your kind of what kind of suggestions right I actually have seen people that go from support and sales looking in the product the the reason is you have a very big advantage which is that you talk to the customers and which is not an engineer would say they do right typically on a day-to-day basis and and you presumably presumably really good with people right good ways down talking with customer then know their pain points really well so that is something that is table stakes like I said for a product manager to know that the knowledge of but in order to I'm suggest really relevant and really good features to build so I think I think what I would do is try to you know help out your the PM that you currently work with I'm sure you know customers all request different features right hey you guys should build this thing that's only cater to my company even though I'm one out of a thousand customers we have right and because you're working with a product manager you can you can kind of be the voice of a customer and and by that by that dopamine kind of like gradually moving the product I'd say I will talk to your p.m. and p.m. leadership and see if there's any sort of ways you can help out at first and then like once they see how well you do at being the voice of a customer then you can take the next step which is to maybe you know be a junior level traffic manager or something like that yeah I've definitely seen people people do that I've seen I've seen them switch no actually I haven't seen one search company place yeah because the reason being you know like I said before most PM rules look for other PN's people with a product management title on it okay really you just need the first job that has the product management title deck dust actual p.m. work then the second role is much easier to come by yes yes quality have I seen in crappy product measures well I think again it goes back to the customer right as a p.m. you have to talk to a lot of people you never want to do anything in a vacuum well you never want to form a strategy or write a spec write a product requirement really in a vacuum so those that that network a lot outside of the PM role right those that talk to all the different different groups within the company it's tend to do very well those that kind of stick to themselves and have questions and kind of try to figure it out themselves don't do very well that's as a p.m. right it may be okay as maybe an engineer if you'll just like to figure out problems yourselves you can just like you know kind of be by yourself and just put headphones on but I have two p.m. bills that that doesn't work I can take two more questions looks like I'm Damon look yes sir yeah yeah yeah the question was one of my favorite PM tools I think JIRA is something that most companies use those it's kind of like like your left or right hand basically it's like an arm I cannot get away from Chiara so definitely learn that in terms of the data so Mixpanel if your company wants to pay for that or Google Analytics and it's free those are some of the tools that I use a lot because basically I have a dashboard every morning I come to work I look at a dashboard how the dashboard has all of my main metrics for all of my products right just to know how they're doing like so every morning you should get in the habit of looking at data and looking at how your features that were working yeah J IRA it's not laughing tool but yeah yeah yes last question yes to Hutchins first one is Hostin do I see product managers actually work on the product as in code right not very often because your your value as a product manager is not a code right that's what engineer says therefore your various product manager is for you to understand the customer and know what needs to be built and then and then among all the other things and then try to drive you to build it second question was data science yes is advanced data science degree necessary no it's not because they have their data scientists out there that you can leverage but yeah I think that if you go to get get a data science degree just to be a TM I think that's kind of founded the most efficient time yeah ok cool