Unlock the Power of Uber Bill Format for Product Management

Uber bill format for Product Management

hello everyone my name is uncle and I'm clean and I'm going to talking about what makes a good p.m. and some of my learning since I've transitioned into the into the career of a product manager before I begin I'm gonna give you a quick introduction about my journey so far in terms of my career as well as how I broke into product management so L brought me currently working as a product manager at uber focused on risk and identity which sort of makes sure that users were transacting on uber have valid and authentic identities that belong to them and the main goal for teams to ensure that we reduce overs exposure to financial safety and regulatory risks on the platform but prior to sort of you know starting off you know work as a product manager I graduated in 2014 I'll then will be in electronics and communication engineering funny enough I you know somehow managed to score a job a telecom company I didn't have the greatest creates but three months into my job I saw you know left it for an alternate career path and while I'm sort of waiting for my new job to start I was looking for free you were promo codes and decided to you know heat up Uber's Twitter handle and found and they tweeted for internships and I just tweeted to them and started working with them as an Operations intern joining a team of three or four people essentially surpassed with the responsibility to launch uber in a new country in a few City and it was an amazing experience where you know launch new products like uber X or me signing up drivers at the airport or you know doing a whole host of crazy things which were very smart people but it said I'll join the team full-time I think the whole idea of you know requesting a ride by the push of a button anywhere and everywhere around the world really excited me and sound pretty crazy at that point it seemed too good to be true so I sort of joined the operations team full-time and you know what that team for about two years got a lot of experience you know doing things like launching new products or building new operational processes and you know try to sort of build different skills given the freedom I had during that time in my career and it was at this time when I essentially had a chance to connect with some of our p.m. sat over and wonderful PM's on the driver team I was chatting with her when she was doing a user research trip in India and I was like this is one of the career path that I would love to have there I came to sort of solve problems at scale using design engineering and you know being at that position to sort of build solve some of the most challenging problems of the business for something that really excited me so after about two years in operations I start decided to you know move closer to product and decided transfer to San Francisco Bay or product and engineering team group a start-up at that time and when you do career for product operations where essentially I have responsible for things like go to market strategy working on prioritizing the top things based on you know go to the top challenges for our business making sure once parts will build we you know verlan good spot in terms of making them successful be it through the right operational roll our plants or making sure that we have right ami testing strategies in place etc and then in two years into product operations I sort of you know decided to again you know transition into product management through some of our internal programs that allow people who come from non PM backgrounds to move into product management have a structured path in terms of graduating them by you know investing in the learning and development throughout the process cool so yeah recovered the introduction I'm gonna be deep diving deeper into you know what is product management business of my experience what makes a good p.m. items on the underlying traits and finally like what are some of the common paths towards transitioning into product management so what do product managers do and I'm sure like this is all these questions which you hear different answers to depending on who you ask depending on what industry they belong to but he was a really fine YouTube video that you know I came across a few weeks ago when I was going through my own graduation for the product manager so I'm gonna share it's is : gets sarcastic view of what a p.m. does but you know digging deeper into what you know my experience has been so this is a Venn diagram that you're probably gonna come across a lot hearing those conversations that you know PMS who are currently working in different industries but essentially part managers are leaders operating at the intersection of design engineering and business and well and identify user problems and prioritize solutions to address them and achieve business course now I've some highlighted a few words I wanna sort of you know covers some of the some of the aspects there so product manager are dealing teams but they don't necessarily have anyone reporting to them so it's so it's important for them to be you know torch bearers for their products but be able to influence their teams without necessarily having the coding authority over them through you know strong research through a strong product vision through through being able to operate at different levels and find the right traits as a product manager it's important for strong PMS to focus on identifying user problems because at the end of the day you want to be focusing on areas which are relevant for your customers and aren't sort of things that nobody really wants anymore it is always gonna be a lot of stuff that you can do right so you want to be able to be someone who can prioritize very effectively and make tough decisions there are times where you know people are often locked in you know sort of the idea of hey should we do this or not in this sort of you know lose time on so p.m. should be able to paradise solution and have bias to action and finally whatever you do should be to achieve a business school at the end of the day it I mean you should not be in a situation where you're focusing on things that aren't necessarily what the larger organization wants to focus on whatever you're working right so operating at that intersection puts pians in like a unique position and having a bird's-eye view of how a product is unfolding and impacting its users and makes it a pivotal position to actually influence change wherever they actually operate in their respective companies so what OPM's really do on a day-to-day basis right when you think about it so starting off with defining the product vision vision that is essentially define the what and why for their team and when you think about product vision it is essentially the end goal where a team wishes to be in terms of you know what that building and highlights the high level consumer benefit but when you think about what a product which induce does is it basically it informs the how that is the product strategy or getting towards that particular product vision so it would be like what customer benefit would we have how would we approached competition what kind of you know business model will be a dot and then it that in turn the strategy in turn informs your product roadmap in terms of the exact features or exact problem areas that put you would particularly be focusing on through different products and becomes it becomes a critical component of defining why what are we gonna focus and why are we focusing on it helps the team build a synergy towards that end goal when it when it comes to collaborating with each other and bring structure to the overall team's second bit is our customer needs it's absolutely critical for PMS to be customer obsessed and relentlessly here are their customers problems and their needs and sort of evolve their strategy and in this sort of priorities based on what they hear from the customers because at the end of the day as a p.m. you want to be building a product that really solves the problems for your users and doesn't necessarily seem like that cool shiny thing that came up with thirdly prioritization you know this is the one thing that every PM has to deal with on an everyday basis is essentially you'll always have limited resources and unlimited problems to solve and coming up with a way where you can cut through the noise and recognize what's really important for the users and what really helps achieve our goals in the most effective way is going to be a very pivotal become part of how you operate and some of these are like tough decisions but it's it's one important skill that you will develop over the course of time and being great prioritization is often one of the most important things to do on a day to day basis finally leading teams these are the most interesting things some people often compare a PM to being a CEO a mini CEO I honest think that's not really true because you don't necessarily have people reporting in to you you don't control a P&L but you essentially established trust with people and be the torchbearer for your users and your product by having a strong product vision having a good sense of research of being able to operate at different levels and building the rapport with your team members to actually be able to continuously drive towards a particular set of goals or a vision that you put in put in place right so being that leader is sort of an important component of what you do on a daily basis so what is the product managers week look like so it's absolute chaos for a lot of people but if you think about it like you if you look at this particular image you'd see that it's super cross-functional usually you're talking to people from different ASP design research clients executives engineering teams etc and it's very important how you can put on different hats empathize with different stakeholders and finally be able to balance and prioritize your time in the right way to actually be effective as a product manager so always think about how you're using your time and you know I understand how you can use it in the most effective way moving forward because time it's very easy to get caught in that particular loop of not being able to use your time effectively so do invest time into seeing how that you may actually be able to use your time in the most effective manner so now if you come some of the things like where a day looks like it's very important us and like how to decide if product management is the right career for you right and this is some of like stuff that even I had to think about then I was you know earlier in my Korean was had the turning point understand if I want to go down this path or not so these are some common things that you know come to my mind and things that I referred to as parts of like you know your career as product manager is like you should someone who enjoys problem-solving you should be someone who is driven by solving problems achieve business goals you don't mind getting it getting into team getting into working with teams and working with a wide variety of people you should be strategic and structured you should be driven by you know you know outcomes more than outputs and you should should be you know effective at communication and leading teams and not shy away from making decisions even though those decisions might often be challenging and difficult and and finally you know having that right structure and organization is critical component of being able to operate teams and it's very important when you subtract a step back and see are these things that you really enjoy and if you don't then you might wanna think about like the you know trade-offs of see I'm getting into a career that you may not necessarily enjoy so always think it through in terms of what really motivates you are these the kind of activities of kind of you know skills that you would enjoy employing in your day to day now coming to like you know were things that might not necessarily work well if you sort of trying to approach bag management path a appreciation it's pretty much of like a triangle is job where you essentially often have to be the owner and do anything and everything right from like building CRM campaigns to filing perks to testing to often you know conducting research on your own so it's it's one of those jobs where you may not necessarily feel recognized but that's this should not be your end goal right secondly you'll be working with you know a lot of diverse people so it's important to emphasize here are different opinions and often you may not have the same opinion of the people so it's not it's important to take feedback in the right way and you know not necessarily feel left alone in that situation you know being able to always validate your ideas is again another important aspect it's operating with the assumption that you're always right doesn't necessarily cut it well as a product manager and finally like you as a PM would always need help so try to do everything yourself never really works it just leads to pray now so being someone who can work effectively with other people and you know is this sort of a team player is is again a critical component of enjoying or being successful as yes so now that we've sort of covered some of the things around you know some of things around like what does the PM do were things that you should consider before entering into power management is a career path about what things you enjoy I want to cover how I you know how some of the paths that you can take to actually breaking in to product management right and there are a few things that I've observed based on my colleagues based on people have work where based on people my friend friends network and I'm gonna share some of these with you guys and so see what might be the most appropriate one based on some of your strengths so one of the most common paths I see my classmates from college take is education a lot of them either mine for a mass or go to business school and use that as a path to enter into park management the only thing that I would sort of you know mention here is that one thing with education that's important is that if you go for a master's is your prior experience before you did the Masters is often taken into account as you apply for some of these jobs so that's something that you might want to keep in mind as you think about these opportunities the other alternative to formal education is go into a boot camp so a lot of people approach boot camps and those have become increasingly popular lately to approach product management as a career path secondly transfer internally let's write it so I worked at a big tech company and I essentially you know identified a path which could help me go towards product management which involved a building the right skill sets before I applied finding the right sponsors internally who could help create a rule or an opportunity preparing for the right interviews having the right project spire to showcase some of my experience as conversations so this is very common path there are a lot of people who aren't necessarily you know early on in their career look for is essentially transfer internally at where the currently working into a product management role some of it could be like I'm a business analyst I started working as a product analyst and then graduated to product management some companies have more formal product management paths like uber where anyone and everyone in the company can actually apply for product management roles and go through a structured lnd program to graduate as a PM third one is starting as a PM at a start-up so there's a high risk high game scenario here there you put entually will have access to a lot more opportunities but again there is of you know startups have the high risk high games in are you as well the second thing there's a very different learning experience when you become a BNI the startup versus becoming a PM at a bigger tech company in terms of access to mentorship access to prior experience access to scale so just think about some of those things when you know approaching product management start of this I would necessarily say it's a bad experience very different experience working as a p.m. at a start-up and it's definitely one of those very good learning experiences there you definitely get a chance do a lot of different things at the same time but it's really good if you're someone who's sort of a self-starter and can also doesn't mind getting their hands dirty by learning new things as you know and making mistakes as because you again another great common path is APM and internships at big tech companies these are often very high in demand so everybody essentially you know is graduating out of colleges often applying for these opportunities so it's often very challenging to get APM opportunities but yeah if you if you if you sort of you know build the right skill set and build the right network and kids right internships going into the application process you do have a good chance to actually crack them through but yeah junior PM controls and big tech companies are often a very big source of new product managers who join go join the club every year so that's again another path and finally the hardest one is starting your own company obviously rewards are also pretty pretty much higher it's also as high and it's very intense but this close if you like it if this fits your style and your strengths this can also be another strategy there you could potentially start exploring starting your own thing and you know leading that has you know as founder of the company cool so now I have covered some things are like how to break into p.m. into broad management career I'm going to cover like some traits that make someone a strong p.m. right and I had a few things that I sort of want to cover as common denominators because no matter who you speak to be a designer an engineer an analyst or somebody from leadership they always come up with different traits that make someone strong p.m. and I want to focus on some things that are like common denominators of what what really constitutes strong p.m. trades and irrespective of who you talk to the first one which I want to serve in a focus on is being a natural storyteller so in a good product managers our story is the tell captivating story is focused around customer pinpoints their emotions and which motivates the large groups to action and the reason why so we must say this is you know if you you are a chance to like view Steve Jobs trying to explain what an iPhone is back you know in the late 2000s it's very captivating experiences is that you know you instantly motivated by what the company is doing what the teams that are doing and it's a model that pm's are those storytellers to be able to sell their product vision be able to convince others that this is what we want to do and keep teams motivated towards a goal or a vision and continue to execute on it PMS want necessarily strong would be more of salesmen and you don't wanna be going down that path you you want to be some of the strong storyteller who can captivate people with your vision stories and be able to be able to explain be able to connect the dots in the most effective way as you go about you know convincing convincing people in any room and on around you to do something so being natural storytellers is definitely a huge huge trait to have as a p.m. second one I wanted to cover was being able to identify the invisible problem so good PM's you know they obsess over their users to identify pain points and address problems that aren't obvious Annamarie is a very specific story so I grew up in the nineties there and I was a kid that you know he should love electronics and first time I bought a phone box was ugly and it had a whole bunch of stickers and no battery in it and that is ruined the starting experience of you know buying a cell phone and you know when I bought an Apple iPhone you know sometime it's late 2000s and it came in this beautiful box no stickers which are like sticking onto the foam on the pad P was charged in the small could be turned on before and he charged it and that was a beautiful experience it might be a very small problem but it instantaneously made me love the product on day one and this is a great example of you know p.m. sex or like hey this is the problem there's no bridge kind of let's just fix it it probably you know it's probably like may not seem like the hue biggest thing but made a big difference to the experience right another great product that I could think about is driver milestones so when I was due governor my colleagues essentially built a solution to recognize drivers for hitting certain milestones like spell number of trips or being you know getting certain ratings etc and know if you don't really know that that's gonna work out but when we did we actually did find out that we had a material impact on business metrics like suppliers or profs bookings just because it was like well drivers did feel under recognized and we weren't doing enough from our side to actually address that gap at that point so yeah as I mentioned good PMS are very good at identifying them and actually addressing them with first the prosecution's now moving on to point good PM's make the right trade-offs good PM's make well-rounded trade-offs by finding the right balance between key variables in order to achieve the coal as a p.m. you know be in a situation where you have limited resources and a lot to do and it's important to make the right trade-offs at these different situations by taking into account the right set of variables and being able to make objective decisions a good example is you know one common thing we often talk about is better than than perfect so if you often want the perfect solution everything that originally envisioned it often might take you forever and it hinders your process of learning and continuing to iterate and improve your experience and they can also can be associated copper tunity costs of you know not doing something within time another example like and like I sort of sometimes reflect on is when you're building tapping so while building the tapping flow like one aspect was building that code flow allowing the user to input a mound having it charge to their credit card and sending them a receipt those are cool features but something like how you can set even you selected an amount or something celebratory and delightful but something that we weren't necessarily able to ship on time for our initial initial product and it has so many external aspects to the launch so you want to make sure that we maintain that right balances we serve up some of some of those problem spaces right so but one important thing to always take into account whenever making these trade-offs is never compromise on quality and always understand the larger impact of making these trade-offs and never think of these decisions from a hyperlocal perspective because your decisions will always have a wider impact as you make them you know with the as time passes another interesting aspect of you know being equal p.m. is focusing on learning and good product managers invest a lot of time energy into learning through different mechanisms period comes from interviews shipping product looking at metrics and our always focus on understanding how they can do things or improve to have a better and higher impact on the consumers a good example is right if you think about today like when uber started off back in the day it was a black car service which is essentially aiming at a certain segment of consumers and if we were said if you said hey we're satisfied with what we have we shared this and we're done with this it wouldn't necessarily lead to bear huger is today where we you know continues to try to understand how to improve the product or customer challenges and continues to only learned from different aspects including competition to be honest and continuously made a better product for its users and that's like a key component of how good pm's shape that the products the build is continuously investing in building a better experience for their consumers to learning and finally I want to cover you know providing good pm's of our funds who don't necessarily make all decisions that essentially ones who make small decisions smaller number of decisions but important ones but at the same time give empower them to empower the teams to actually make a larger subset of decisions with the aim of letting builders build and the idea is that you want to inspire creativity in your teams you want to make sure that people are coming up with original ideas and secondly they enjoy working with you people like to learn people don't mind making mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes right but as long as you are continuously learning as well as inspiring that creativity within your team to come up with innovation new ideas that's the kind of culture you would like to foster within a group of super talented people at the end of the day like you've given you've been given some the smartest people you know you can find it's really up to you on how how to best actually empower them and get the best out there in terms of the output and the creativity on the other tables and finally I want to sort of talk about it how good PM's become multipliers for their teams you know p.m. the strong PM's often focus on identifying strengths of the respective team members and figure out a good way to use those strengths for different activities and build a synergy amongst the team to actually can deliver more also imagine a situation where you know you have a team of five people and you're able to double the productivity of each person but I find what they're really good at and continuously doubling down on those strengths and you can in the end achieve 10x output if you think about it right so just being able to identify and harness that you know that strength is a key component that you know smart PMS can actually benefit from if you know they invest the right time and the right energy into that a good example is actually one of my PMS who I work as a program manager with he essentially saw that I was a really cook with analytics and we didn't have a dedicated product analyst at that time so in addition to being a program manager is actually substituting in as a journalist and building our dashboards having tracking the impact experiments being able to you know identify problems in terms of you know hard products working and that did add a lot of value to our team where you know we necessary necessarily have a resource but you actually deliver more value by finding someone who on the team had certain strengths that could be used for for something that sort of valuable in terms of skill set that was just you know create some want to talk about what makes a good p.m. and I wants to jump into the final takeaways first one being PM's are leaders as I sort of mentioned before PMS our torch bearers for their users products and their teams and they lead these talented individual to achieve outcomes in line with business goals and at the end of the day he has a p.m. you are and you are someone who you know has to be that cheerleader for your users and products and and what you decide at the end of the day the outcomes should be to achieve a certain business school and being able to balance all of these things and deliver output is something that is critical and cannot be achieved without being a strong leader and being able to motivate a diverse set of individuals towards their vision through your own research through your own ability to operate at different levels empathize with different stakeholders etc and the leadership will always be the centerpiece of being able to carry on these activities second thing I want to focus on is getting your foot in the door so there are different paths to break into product management it's really important to reflect back on yourself understand what are your strengths and weaknesses and pick the path that makes more sense for you to break into a career be a product management or something else it's really important to understand what our strengths are and how you can double down on them to actually get what you want so for me my strengths were around you know being able to work with different stakeholders and being able to navigate an organization to actually create a role for myself and I sort of you know leverage that to break into it so for every person it's slightly different so just try to understand how your strengths can help you achieve that is and finally I want to cover what traits that make someone strong p.m. so as I mentioned before like depending on who you worked with different teams will have different expectations of what makes it you know good p.m. so it's what really is important as someone who's like so starting off is that fire sort of gather new different skills that are relevant for different teams depending on what kind of product and industry you work on you at least have a common denominator of skill sets or traits that are common to any team or any industry you might work with and some of the ones as are pester power having strong leadership being strong storyteller being focused on learning always listening to your customers being that multipliers for your team empowering your team to make decisions so those are all common things that you should continue to invest in and build as strong States as a product manager as you continue to progress towards building a career and transitioning into product management with that being said that's the things I want to sort of cover with you I'm really thankful for you taking all the time for listening in today in case you have any questions just feel free to like hit me up on LinkedIn I'm pretty responsive and happy to sort of help you do you know give you any form of career guidance or do potential mock interviews always happy to help and thanks a lot guys and wish you all the best thank you bye [Music]