So, hello, everyone. Hope all of you are doing great. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Nancy Mittel and in today's session, I'll be sharing my journey to product management and how you can do it too.But before we dive into the agenda, let me start by giving a brief about myself to set the context. I did my graduation from Indian Institute of Technology, one of the premium Institute in India. I then moved on to become a developer with Visa where I worked for three years as a developer. I understood one aspect of product as in how to build it, but I hope to gain a more holistic understanding of why to build it for who to build it of. Uh and what exactly to build. This led me to a start up uh a London based start up as A PM intern. And before the and that too, before joining Isb or Indian School of Business to pursue my MB A. At the start up, I had a steep learning curve and had the opportunity to build and witness a product from 0 to 1. This hands on experience crystallized my vision and after months of preparation and multiple interviews, I'm now headed to Microsoft as a product manager too.

This is a brief about me. I would encourage you all to introduce yourself in the chat. Uh make meaningful connections further. Let's keep the session very interactive so that every one of us can make the most of it. I will initially go with the slides and then open the floor for questions given time permits. In today's session, I have tried to break down the journey of product management into actionable pieces. So without further ado, let's get started. The number one step is to evaluate one of the initial and very important steps for anyone looking to move to product management is to evaluate and understand what the rule entails. And if it is something that makes sense for you, some of the things which helped me in this evaluation process was first to talk to experienced product professionals and understand what are their daily duties and what the what are the trades that they have then to understand the career trajectory of product management.

So this can be done through research, uh online courses and different articles to gauge if you end product management, what will your trajectory look like? And what will your exit options be? Number third to evaluate is to analyze the space. Do you want to be a product manager in A B to B place or in A B to C place? Do you want to join a big firm or a growth start up for this network with product managers from different fields? I always find linkedin to be a great asset for such networking. There are a ton of PM communities on linkedin or Slack that can help you with the above. Uh Some of them are mind the product, product, school, women and product, et cetera. Also, there are conferences such as women tech conference, industry, uh et cetera, which are amazing in this aspect. And with this kudos to all of you for already taking the steps in this direction by attending the women Tech conference today. With the above information conclude and decide if the traits career trajectory and the space particularly interest you. And it's something you would like to dip your feet in once the go decision is taken, then we come to the next step which is experience. The catch 22 of product management is a belief that no one will hire you as a PM unless you have product management experience. So how to sail through this. Some of the methods I have personally employed that open gates to new opportunities for me were first internship.

A lot of companies especially start ups have now opened internships opportunities. Uh These not only help you build your resume but also give you the chance to try and test the work before I personally like to go by the route of referrals rather than applying to a larger pool of candidates. And it has worked wonders for me. The next method to gain experience would be case competitions, numerous communities such as the PM school, the product folks, the product would uh conduct weekly or monthly case competitions. Repeatedly participating in them has helped me improve a lot because as soon as the results were announced, I would go through the winning entries and just try to figure out and reflect what where and what I have done wrong. Also on the next slide, you can see some of the case prompts from some of the ca case competitions. Just to give a brief on how case competitions are, the experience will help you build product thinking and many times also lead to interviews or full time opportunities. So with your interviews, scheduled or applications to interviews going on, we come to the third step which is practice. So there are majorly five type of questions that are asked in a PM interview, product design, analytic estimation, technical product strategy.

So let's go through one of like through each of them one by one first we come to product design. So these are the questions where you are asked to improve an existing product design, a new product or suggest improvement to your favorite product. It evaluates your creativity and customer empathy. Uh One of the examples would be improve youtube. Then we come to analytical questions. These are more focused on metrics and are more quantitative in nature. One of the examples here would be how will you measure the success of Facebook reactions?

Then we come to estimation questions or uh popularly known as guesstimates. So here you have to break down the big problem into a smaller chunk and then try to guess what the number or what the answer might be. One of the example would be, what is the weight of Mount Everest? The fourth question are seldom asked, given which company or which team you are interviewing for companies such as Google and Microsoft may tap into it. Uh Just to gauge your ability to communicate with the technical team. But in my experience, none of the companies ask you to code specifically. The fourth is product strategy. This is something that is recently introduced in uh product questions. These are very high level uh and might not even be asked in an entry level position. It is more about whether you can think on a macro scale questions like uh should whatsapp have a Spotify integration or not. So this would form the product strategy question out of these design and analytic. Uh Questions are the most frequently asked questions for preparing for these. Some of the good resources are just typed below which are exponent uh the youtube videos of from them PM school youtube videos and many questions from PM exercises. Apart from the above five behavioral questions is what you can always expect in an interview.

So along with practicing uh the different type of questions, the next step is to read, read leading techniques and trends such as techcrunch and Ken. To develop the awareness to this end, you can pick up new products, analyze and break them down on your own and then check online for the product community's evaluation. Additionally, you can find a ton of already solved cases on the internet. So head over to growth dot design or to uh PM school or the product folks for these routinely go through them and they have inspired me a lot. So once you feel that you are 50% ready start giving mock interviews, this is one of the crucial steps that has helped me a lot answering something on the fly with time constraint and constantly trying to showcase your structural thinking is very difficult. You need to simulate the final day, multiple times with your friends, your peers or your mentors before my interview with Google and Microsoft. I used to have minimum two marks every day for 45 minutes each. So the final stage is then the interview. One tip here is to to start out initially by giving out interviews for smaller start ups or any of the firm that you are particularly not that keen on joining and then slowly move on to your dream company.

So by the time you are giving interview for your dream company, you are already in that state of flow on the D day, be relaxed, be curious about the company, the role and the interview and in the end, just have fun. So this marks the end of the official presentation, but now we can open the floor for any questions. You might have also feel free to reach out to me on linkedin uh where I've shared a lot of uh resources. So yes, let's open for questions. OK. I see a lot of people introducing, hi Rama. Hi Savita. Hi Elena and then Ruchika there. OK. So Eleanor has a question, what do you find to be the hardest part of the PM role? So uh I would say because I'm not yet a practicing PM. So I'll tell you what is the hardest part of actually cracking the PM role. One thing is to actually give the interviews. So basically uh a you do a lot of research, you do a lot of reading and you have gone through a lot of questions, but when you sit one on one with a person while sitting for giving the interviews, the whole scenario is very different. Uh You m may come out to be very unstructured, you may come out to be that you are all over the place.

So that practice of giving interviews and how to stay in a flow rather than just haphazardly saying whatever comes to your mind is something that took a lot of time for me. So my initial interviews with a couple of firms did not go that well. And then eventually, uh with all the other firms I was able to make it through. So hope this answers your question. And Eleanor, uh because I'm not a practicing PM. So actually, what is the hardest part in going through the PM G like day to day? Uh I might not be a good person to answer. Thank you so much. Yeah. Uh OK. High Achilles would be great to have uh more questions and it could be anything as simple as like whatever you want to ask out. OK. This is a very good question, Eleanor. Thank you so much for asking it. So what happened was that I was already a developer uh But I wanted to do internship. So how I approached was that I simply searched on linkedin that in case there were internship opportunities that were there, but rather than applying directly through lien because at that time, there is a very large pool of applicants uh as in 5000 applicants. And most of the time what happens is that there is a third party who's going through the resumes and then shortlisting it to the company that you are applying for.

So I just got to know the opportunities which were open and then reached out to my network in case there was someone working in this company, in case it was not, I directly contacted a person connected with them and like requested them to give me a referral. So what happened was that in case I did not know that person, uh some of them were very willing to help out because these days companies actually even compensate the other employee in case your referral employee gets the job. And there were some folks who did not agree to it, but out of 10, I would say seven people gave me refer referral. So referral is the quickest way to get to the interview. And once you have the interview, then it's the ball is in your court. So I would say find out from different resources, but then go through the referral approach. The second method I also implemented was uh directly just searching about posts which were giving internship and then maybe cold emailing the people who had put out that posts. So that was my approach. OK, I hope that answers. And Achilles has a question. Do you recommend any domain specialization for product management roles or do you advise courses on Udemy Coursera mite surface? So Achilles depends on which phase of your journey you are in. So for example, I am a person who's kind of starting out. I just had a fintech industry experience. But in Microsoft, I'm I might not be working on the fintech industry experience.

So initially, it could be, you know, just to understand just to have that problem solving mindset just to have that product thinking to get the initial level of jobs. But in case you are someone higher on the ladder, then it might be good to actually see how product management is growth start up might work out in an MNC. How does it work out and then develop those skills? But for an entry level position. So I have given uh interviews for Microsoft for Swig Nika, phone pay pay TM. These are all start ups in India and uh Google. So all of them, I did a common preparation. There was nothing different that I did for them and most of them asked similar questions. It was just uh some of the company research that I did just before the job. So nothing specific particularly, but in a lateral hiring, it might matter which position you are applying for. OK. Hope that answers. And Fatima has a question. How did you know this was what you wanted? Oh, nice. Sorry if it was already covered has some issue. No problem, Fatima. So, so to be honest, uh I'll be very frank here. I uh did computer science then I was doing development. One thing I knew that I did not want to do coding. So that was one thing I was sure I did not want to do. And then uh but I loved the tech industry and what the footprint of technology has.

So I wanted to be part of this industry. The second thing I thought my uh uh you know, what works for me or what my super skill is, is to maybe communicate with people is to handle different kind of stakeholders, which kind of aligned with what a product manager is supposed to do. So, a couple of things, uh what was my trait kind of overlapped with product management? And secondly, because I wanted to be in the tech space, somehow, product management made sense for me. This was the initial thought process. But when I did the internship for three months, uh where I could actually go talk to the customers, try to find out what are the features that we want to do and then build that road map. I understood this was something naturally I was good at. This was something I was easy to learn and not feel that I am not good at. So the experience mixed with a little hunch that I initially had kind of led me to product management. So, hi. Hi Ronke. Thank you so much for joining in. So, uh Donkey is also a great speaker and also a great uh advocate for women leadership and women in tech. So do check out her channel as well. Thank you so much, Fatima. We have three minutes more.

So if anyone has any more questions, we can definitely take it up. Also, I would just put out my linkedin on the chat for everyone to connect. You can also scan the QR code. Sure. Sure, Fatima. We can definitely chat on linkedin. No worries in that. So if there are no more questions. Ok. So uh Malka has asked on Q and A, would it be possible to get the lights? Uh Is there anyone who can help out uh from the, would the slides be given otherwise if you people want, I can just go through them and you can take screenshots in case the resources are something that you would want to see later. Yeah, it was a great experience. Thank you so much shake for putting that out. Yeah, no problem. A so I I'm hoping that this would be there on youtube later or you would get the recording later. Otherwise just feel free to take some screenshots of some of the sources. And then I think everyone is free to leave with this. We have ended the session because it's already just one minute away. Thank you so much for chiming in and it was great speaking to all of you. OK? Uh I think Linda has also message something. I'm sorry if it was covered. I did not get a chance. I'm interested if your MB A help you to become a better PM.

Uh This is something Linda that I'll be finding out. So I just graduated one week earlier. But I would say one thing that NBA did help me to find that peer network that uh had the similar mindset and that could kind of inspire me or lead me to different opportunities. But I'm still yet to find it out because my joining is next week in Microsoft, but we can definitely connect offline Linda. Sure. Ok. Ok. Then thank you so much, everyone.