Discover the Event Invoice Sample for Product Management

Event invoice sample for Product Management

hi I'm Nina I am a director of product at Forbes my team is focused on forbes.com basically every page on Forbes calm so the front end for products were split into two teams one manages all the pages that you see so if you go to article you probably Google something coronavirus you'll see a Forbes article come up as in your Google search don't click on that those pages are article pages are ninety percent of our revenue so my team is responsible for that ninety percent and our other front-end team is responsible for user engagement so anything that happens on this site that's helping us get loyal users get more information about our users and create kind of like subscription model here's a little bit my background for my professional background you can see that I have an affinity for media I started my career working in broadcast journalism I graduated in 2008 and I wanted to be in local news as everyone knows in 2008 everything kind of crashed and local news wasn't really a thing and people were creating their own types of news like Huffington Post and I was kind of doing like you know their own on-the-ground journalism and so everything changed and my head of the station at channel 5 in Boston told me that media is a business like it's that business more than ever we're relying on advertisers to stay afloat so you should probably go to business school so I went to business school I learned a lot there and at that time there actually was no such thing called product like product was really starting in Silicon Valley and trickling in as the concept so I couldn't take classes and that I think the closest thing would have been like computer science major so one go into business school and I went back into media I kind of realized that my background in journalism plus my understanding of business actually was the perfect combination to go into products and so after business school all my jobs and media were no longer focused on the journalism but they were in product side fun facts so I'm doing you talk February 26 it's gonna be about innovating Forbes is 101 year old company so how do you innovate in a in product but also culturally how do you innovate I'm getting married in June so anyone that's been married or thinking about getting married or went to a wedding knows that it's definitely like a second job so that's been actually I feel like I should put that on my resume I feel like I'm a project manager to now so and then I'm teaching a class in the fall I'm not sure what their what class but we'll go over their types of classes and that's my contact information feel free to reach out to me so just to kick off my favorite product is this anyone that has not straight hair knows that you know for for for a person to get out of the house as fast as possible your hair is a big kind of part of your day and I value time so for me as a user I want something that's gonna give me two and one and so this device it drives my hair and it's straight in my hair and I only need this I don't need a brush or anything else so for me this is my beard product so what is product I think for me being in media product means that we don't have something tangible it's not like I have you know like something that I can hold in my hand or something that I can give to somebody or sell to them it's kind of really the content is the products in media is anyone in media here okay so you guys know like Ark where we are only as good as our content and really my job is to you know think about how we can deliver the content to our users in a way that's delightful and also create content that our our advertisers will you know see and value and want to work with us so content is the mechanism for for us to to build platforms that will drive the that content at other companies products like for example Amazon product means something different Apple product is very designed focused Facebook product very data focused so I think product is so different in different organizations but what doesn't change in my opinion and with a lot of other opinions I'm Hari I'm sure you guys have seen this is that product is really the intersection of business engineering and design and really if you have an understanding of one and an interest in the others then product is something that you can do additionally product also has a lot of different kind of subsets like the in between these areas in my organization week we have product owners and then versus product managers there's a lot of different terminology each organization defines product in their own way but I actually started working as a technical project manager before I got into product I was the kind of the intermediary between our CTO and our developers and we were trying to build a back-end platform so that's when eventually they were like oh your product manager I don't think that they even know like what that concept was early on but there's a lot of Engineers that are trying to go to products because we work closely with our engineers and if they have an understanding of the backend front-end technologies and an interest in the users the end users then it seems like you know it's a kind of easy progression design same thing they understand the experience for the user they understand the pain points for the user visually how it should look functionally how it should feel and then for business product analysts in my company it's a business intelligence role where they really look at the data and they say ok like these types of users are high value they come back 6 or more times a month I think you should think of ways to really kind of you know give them some more like once they come to the sixth time in a month that means they're really loyal to Forbes they like our content let's find more about them so product as the concept is so big and it has all these kind of areas around it where if you either work in it you're you know you're kind of easily integrated in product or if you're interested in some subset of product like this kind of is a great map to look at so when I look at new people that come to our office that want to get a job of product I personally am focused for our junior people more on organization communication and stakeholder management and really that says to me you can keep things you know together when there's 10 million things happening you're organized you can you know have notes you can share you you can communicate properly communication and then stakeholder management is important because in products we're dealing with so many different types of people in the organization who all think that they have the most important problems that needs to be solved and there's a lot of times where you're in a meeting and one you know part of the company is asking you for something and another part is asking for something and they're both mad at you because you're not delivering them and the most important part of that is to stay calm so those three things as far as like soft skills I really look for as a new someone who's trying to break into product that might be different at organizations where they value a technical skill like you know Amazon probably wants somebody who has an understanding of some technical language and then for a product manager I've really look for those three things always but then also some tangible experience and products and that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have an actual title that says product manager but something that cues that you are curious about it because really product management product development is a curiosity it's a curiosity about like who your user is like what are you trying to communicate to the to your end user and what is the value that you're bringing them so if you you know if you if you are having trouble getting a job there's a lot of different ways that you can prove that you have changel full experience and products and I'll get to that as well do some other things within product like some technical requirements for early on if you can you know just look at some data and understand what it means like Google Analytics or use Excel then you can be taught you know you can be on boarded into any kind of platform that your company may use some nice-to-haves for me at Forbes as a media company some understanding of web technologies like what is a front-end what is it back-end what framework are these web pages on and then there's ads on a page so ad operations is important to me and it's just some other affiliate marketing data visualization tools like power bi or Domo these are things that not only product people use so these are we the nice to have if people are interested in them and so to get into products I always give advice I have a lot of friends that are in engineering and they want to go into product and they'd say that it's really difficult when I go into interview because they say what experience have you had and so there's a lot of ways leaving an experience that isn't just getting a job in product that you can have an interim step aside from taking a class at product school on top of that you can also like help your family and friends so I had a friend who asked his dad his dad had a construction company and he noticed that his dad's website for the company was super old it was just like not user friendly it didn't show up on Google search it was just not optimized for anything and so he's like can I have this project can I take it on and try to create a better website and get some insight and so hired a web developer and he worked with them and he updated his dad's website so that's a way that he could put that on his resume and now I can say I have experience helping a small business get modern and grow also I had to interview with someone who he had a company that he really liked but he thought that one part of their products wasn't like done well so he created this whole plan he created a prototype he explained why he created KP I too did this whole kind of plan of how to improve this product and he brought that to an interview and showed it to them I said I don't have experience but look at this is this proves my product thinking this proves that I'm curious and that I actually I'm thoughtful about what what you guys do you can start a blog to up work is a site that you can help with you know a lot of businesses go on there and they need some help on their sites or their companies are trying to start they're trying to create an app after grad school when I was trying to understand what product was and get into it I started helping this startup and it was app actually was kind of similar to concierge where it was like uber for the dental industry it wasn't app that connected you to connect the dentist to temp hygienists so before you would have to go through a recruiting agency and they would it was a whole long process so he just created kind of like an uber for this dental community and he was having me look at his app and I said I think you just need someone to go on your app and be able to sign up while they're in the bathroom like that's that's like that should it be your proof of concept is like can this person sign up for your app in the bathroom like while they're on the toilet can they just sign up because if they have to go and get five million pieces of documents and they have to spend all this time that's a blocker no one's going to sign up we now realize that that is part of product you're thinking about the user you're thinking about how can this person get on-boarded to my company as soon as as soon as possible and so for me why I chose products as an area that I wanted to invest in is because in any single day in my life as a product director these are the types of people that I connect with so these this is all the departments in my company that there's probably more but I like being at the center of the business I like understanding all parts of the business sometimes it can be overwhelming but mostly it's really insight insightful and you're kind of like in a real world case study because you're understanding like why design is so passionate about a button color y-you know bi is so passionate about understand putting a tracking on a on a you know arrow you understand why legal won't let you say use certain words on your explainer sites like so there so as a product manager at a company you really get like schooling almost you get to learn about every single part of the business and I know they call product managers mini CEOs and I don't know if that's still like cool I'm not up to date with the lingo but but you really do get an insight that maybe it's more difficult if your style it off in a different department Marty Kagan is a great author and he wrote a book called inspired and he said the role of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable usable and feasible this is one of my favorite MVPs which is MVP is a minimal Viable Product or a minimum marketable product depending how you look at it in product but drew Houston the founder of Dropbox he had this idea and wanted to prove the concept so how do you think he created a MVP how do you think he proved the concept so instead of like build like a version of Dropbox and seeing if people wanted it he just made a video showing what Dropbox could do and then say like do if you you know after you watch this video sign up if you want to learn more and people signed up and then he's like this is my proof this is my minute this is my MVP and that just shows you that you know MVPs are supposed to open the door they're not supposed to give you the answers but they're supposed to open the door to your next steps and so for him this is a screenshot of his presentation that he did his biggest risk for Dropbox was making something that no one wants not launching is painful but not learning his fatal put something in users hands it doesn't have to be code and get real feedback ASAP so he literally he didn't code anything he didn't make anything he just made a video showing what his product could do and then asked if people wanted wanted it wanted to know more and then know where your target audience hangs out and speak to them in an authentic and authentic way so this video has I can't remember the song but he was very strategic about the song that he picked in his video where he posted the video the apps that he showed in the video like he really was subliminally targeting or calling or you know calling upon his target audience so it seemed so simple a video but it really proved that he knew who his users are and some keys to product success and I'm gonna like talk about it in relationship to Forbes to give some texture but you just start with a vision so for Forbes our vision is really to get people to content as fast as possible it's super simple but that's really what we're trying to do our customers are readers that Google and Google a question and because we have great SEO they'll you know find a Forbes article probably faster than others but also our readers are CMOS CFO's people in the industry that want to read industry specific content our KPIs KPI is always shift but really loyal users has been one of our biggest kpi's is can we get people on our site six or more times in a month because we are no longer a one-and-done industry media used to be kind of like you know 80 to 90% of your users came once and that was it and you really optimized for that one time and now we're shifting towards more shifting that kind of diagram to you know at least like 30 percent or more will come more time so we're not trying to optimize for a one time user an MVP you know for at forbes obviously 101 years ago we don't really have MVPs anymore but when Malcolm Forbes started Forbes he was actually writing books about successful people he was writing books about successful billionaires about successful women and people loved his stories he they loved his books and they wanted more and so he created his first list and really liked his ideas and his point of view was the MVP for Forbes like he was like people want to hear about successful people and they want to read about how they were successful and what their values are and then test validate and iterate on for at Forbes anytime we launch something on our site we test on 10% of the site so we launched it to a specific group of people so if you go on forbes.com and you see something that's like weird or off that's your bucketed in a test and we're testing to see if it affects our KPIs in any way sometimes our validation is all right we added this new thing to the page and none of our metrics change and that's a success it's like okay I didn't break anything like let's launch it fully and see what happens