How the PM Role is Changing in 2024 | PM Expert Panel

if you draw a pie chart and divide every PM's time spent increasingly over the last 10 years it has gone towards internal processes internal systems internal communication taking away the precious time needed to understand the customer and actually focus on the product right and that is why the Genesis started at airbm start thinking about how can we switch that py chart into more customer focused customer obsessed and less on the internal I don't want to use the word Shenanigans but like let's just you know internal stuff I'll give you a couple of examples right there's meetings there's status reports there's conbine processes to manage there's scrum standups to go to there's a lot of stuff that PMS do right and as a result they lose time and Jealousy on that that's one Trend that happened today my guests are sonan exgen manager at Airbnb Nikki product director at dualingo and John senior director at toast we talked about how the PM row is evolving the case for du career track for PMS our favorite product manager use cases for AI and how to avoid PM title and the and pick your own path over 200 people tune into this conversation live so I think you'll love it too be sure to like And subscribe for more interviews like this let's get started yeah I'm super excited to be here today I guess today we're going to talk about how the PM rooll is evolving and how you can also Advance your product career and I'm really lucky today to be joined by three amazing product leaders I'll let them introduce themselves San do you want to go first happy do hey everybody welcome I'm excited to be here U my name is sonin I've been in Silicon Valley for the last 18 years my first job was at Microsoft that brought me over here most recently I was at coinbase as a v product and then before that I was a head of product at Airbnb and before that amongst the first 100 employees of Instagram it was a fun ride excited to be here thanks Nikki you want to go next great thing so I'm calling in from almost snowy not quite snowy Minnesota and currently I'm a director of product at du lingo where I manag the new subjects initiative but I've been working in product roles for I think like 13 or 14 years I was also at Airbnb where I worked on Airbnb experiences so sonan how's it going good to see you and then before that I was a director of product at Etsy and I was an early employee at Etsy I joined also in their first 100 employees which was also a crazy wild ride so I'm excited to be here today I think the PM role has really evolved in my last 13 years but is really speeding up and changing especially into 2024 so happy to be here with you all okay and last but not least John uh John Cutler I currently work at toast in an interesting role senior director of product enablement so I enable our great PMs and product teams prior to toast I was at amplitude where I was a product evangelist for four years I probably met with many of your companies while I did that which was a lot of fun and then worked at zenes and pendo and a couple other companies after a life of plain music and other things before I got into Tech so that's a bit about me and I write a newsletter I enjoy writing a lot and drawing pictures of product stuff awesome so I also want to say that you know for all of our panelists everything that we say here is our own opinion doesn't represent our employers just get that out of the way so let's start with the PM row itself right so maybe I'll share two anecdotes to start I think a few months ago breski from Airbnb shared that he had eliminated the classic PM function and then later he had to clarify that he actually meant unifying product management and product marketing and recently I think it's because spent too

much time on Twitter but recently I seen several startup Founders talk about you know how they're proud of not hiring PMs and you know also they're more focused on Craft than on AB testing or metrics so curious to hear from all of you about the PM rooll I guess s CH I start with you since you worked at Airbnb yeah happy to share so actually one thing I'll share is even though the announcement happened right now when I was there the journey or the path had already started so I'll actually want to share with you all the Genesis of this idea a little bit more so how many of you when asked at your company's survey say man I spend like 80% of my time on internal meetings internal processes internal things you know and as a result I don't have enough time you know I'm overloaded with the if you can just type in over there or give me a response that'll be great because a lot of times what I hear is like oh my God 80% of my time is going into this internal the other thing that I hear a lot is oh my God I can't I don't have enough time to talk to my customers innovate because I am drowning in meetings or status reports or something else right I mean these are the most common thing that I hear a lot and that was true at Airbnb too back in the day right so one of the things that happened was Brian chesy was inspired by Apple you know there's a lot of people at Airbnb in the board as well who are from Apple and the thought process was if you draw a high chart and divide every PM's time span increasingly over the last 10 years it has gone towards internal processes internal systems internal communication taking away the precious time needed to understand the customer and actually focus on the product right and that is why the Genesis started at airbn start thinking about how can we switch that pie chart into more customer focused customer obsessed and less on the internal I don't want to use the word Shenanigans but like let's just you know internal stuff I'll give you a couple of examples right there's meetings there's status reports there's conbine processes to manage there's scrum standups to go to there's a lot of stuff that PMS do right and as a result they lose time and Jealousy on that that's one Trend that happened the other Trend that happened was that Brian personally came from a design world and if you ever talk to a designer you know they don't made the painting you know because they did a user research with 10 customers and said this is what the painting should say they don't work like that right the way they work is like I build what I want to build and I'll find people who actually love what I'm selling right so what the process changes as well from ideation right so at Airbnb AB testing was truly a bad word it doesn't mean that you don't AB test but what it meant was if you ever ask someone what are you working on they don't open up an Excel spreadsheet line by line showing you the hypothesis and the experiments they're going to run and the unit economics that they're going to get out of that is the how the what was equally more important so as PMS you'll be spending a lot of your time thinking about what are we building why are we building who's it who are we building for and with an awesome design team be fabricating what we call the Prototype of what it is building so at Airbnb it's a prototyp driven product management not a spec driven product management right I don't remember any of my PMS riding detail prds you know I remember a lot of them spending a lot of time with designers actually making the product that we want to ship so we can touch it feel it smell it you know again you can't smell software but you get that and the the metaphor that I'm using over here is that was really important so I think those were the two trends that led to the outcome that Brian has announced recently you know but this is a trend that I think everybody has to understand because I don't think everybody should adopt what Airbnb is doing just like everybody shouldn't adopt what apple is doing right just like everybody shouldn't adop what Google is ring one of the biggest mistakes you can make is you join startup X and say I came from company Y and work for them it's going to work over here as well I think that's another thing to keep in mind is that does it doesn't happen that way so you have to contextualize all the learnings but I do believe that the product management time span has to shift away from internal cooking inter internal management to actually be more allowed to do more on customer building the product testing the product Etc around there so I'll pause there and then we can go around the RO and there's a lot more to unpack here yeah the only thing I would build on that was so I also used to work at Airbnb so this was really

interesting when I heard that news but as somebody who's worked at a number of different companies in various different product roles both IC roles as well as management roles one thing I've seen is the PM role is very different inside of every company and it should be right like you're building a very different product everywhere you have different sorts of customers that have different needs and so I was excited to see Airbnb experimenting I think they're doing what's right for their product which feels like a trend I imagine you'll continue to see as people evolve their orgs and figure out just what works from a process standpoint for them so good on them I'm really curious to see like what the next couple years look like for them honestly but I was excited to hear it yeah I think one thing I would add there meeting so many teams and my role in amplitude is I started to think of product management is just a collection of hats and you started to I met team that just ran the complete Spectrum so like this Airbnb thing did not surprise me in one bit because I could just pattern match across other companies that had decided to put those hats on those particular heads as you were kind of working through so the one thing I observed too at amplitude was it was almost like I was you know not only is the role different but the product management role I would say that on any given week it was like a 20year journey of maturity of different companies where they were you know we'd be talking to some companies it felt like it was 2002 and 2022 in the same week right so the thing that occurred to me there is that it's very easy to pinpoint these specific transitions for specific companies realistically you know there's some orgs where engineering wears some of those particular hats there's some orgs where design wears some of those hats there's some where pmm so that's one thing that really hammered home that product there are product managers and there is product management and product management is a series of half and some companies product managers choose to wear some of those hats or not and frankly I've seen other companies that said we have no product managers yet every product management hat was being worn by someone they just didn't decide on the title of that so I just add there the difference between product management and product managers and the hats that you wear you notice the Spectrum as you go out and interact with different companies yeah so true and Peter one part of the question I don't think we dug deeper into but if we can take two seconds to talk about it your question was also how you know l years of the world that are posting on Twitter and others they don't need some of that stuff is also happening so I wanted to add a little bit of that comment over there if that's okay go for yeah so I think one thing I want to also share is product development methodology and approach is also very unique across companies so one is the role of product management is different and the other is how companies actually build products itself is also different so I want to take a minute to talk with you all about how Airbnb decided to build products

over the last three years or so often times what we do is we write a PRD or do a design mock or whatever that might be you know H for a feature or a group of features or a product area right and then what we do is the entire company does that and everybody has resource constraints so they cut things and in the end what ships is literally your orc chart or some version of that orc chart that is not fun for the customer so what air does is slightly different there's a guy by the name of hiroi you can search him he was Steve Jobs left-hand guy and he actually left Apple to join Airbnb to become the Chief marketing officer at Airbnb so I work very closely with him and now both product and marketing reported to him by the as a as an example so this is how it works at Airbnb the first thing at Airbnb that they write is what is known as a marketing narrative it is a simple language term description of what will happen to a user's life when your Partnerships so they work backwards from the communication to the user rather than forward from what can we ship and then craft a narrative for the user of what is shipped there's a fundamental difference in the approach that this company takes it is very much inspired by Hardware companies and Apple for example and this is the difference you'll see so twice a year they do major releases and at that time they have written down the narrative this is what we're going to ship and this is what the customer must feel for example when I book when I want to travel at Airbnb and I'm traveling with a large group of people I'm able to easily find the home that I desire that's the marketing narrative that they're writing and from there each team that takes that marketing narrative thinks about what products they must ship to meet that marketing narrative so there's never a debate on hey you know we got a cut features to ship you know there another Paradigm of Lean Startup right like cutting is shipping you might have heard this before right in Airbnb World slightly different which is here's the marking narrative we got to rise to that occasion and ship that cohesive structure and the biggest advantage of this is that if there are five or six different teams working together they're all working with the same outcome in mind as opposed to your backend team cutting certain features while your front end team is not cut certain features and what ships becomes very unusable by the user so this is another thing that I wanted to just highlight to make sure people understand how obsessed Airbnb is about the customers understanding of their product and the Simplicity of the journey so as product leaders how do you design the incentives right cuz I show me incentives and I'll show result so like as company scale you have these career ladders and you know you get evaluate based on you know some big product review and like stakeholder feedback you don't get value it based on like customer feedback necessarily yeah how do you design incentives for big companies to actually focus more on building and customer interaction yeah I mean um I can share some example that I would love to hear others as well but I think this all starts down U very top

down you know I always tell people is that your company's culture is pretty much dictated by your executive team or the founder that you're working at right so I think it's really important to start at the top and I think Peter to your point the aligning of this in successful companies that I've seen is very much about the what and the outcome I'll give you an example when I was at certain companies that I don't want to name you know because it'll be published somewhere and then I'll have to be sorry if I use their name but I just assume there was a company that I worked with where peer feedback was very important as a result of that nobody bloody pushed boundaries because I was worried what Peter Yang is going to say in my perer feedback at the ual performance review so I'm just going to do the least controversial that I can to put this thing forward right so the most successful companies that I worked in I have found that what you deliver was very important and peer feedback did not make more than 10% of the rating of a person's performance review right so this just an example of how you can strengthen these things so customer Obsession customer focus translates very clearly sometimes in the output and the impact you're delivering for your area right so the conversations in right performance reviews in the right company should be obsessed over what did we deliver for the customer what was the impact of delivering that and I'm not saying the how is not important yes you got to work with people you got to have collaboration Etc but the way you attach to some of these other things that are culture Killers like peer feedback you know stakeholder reviews oh did I get a chance to have a product review with the CEO because if one of my colleagues did they have a feedback from the CEO saying that product review was amazing I don't even have a chance to do that so how will I get promoted right those secondary things are not very important that's one example that I think we should think about and I personally as a leader as I built Airbnb and coinbase product management organization to me not all feedback is gift sorry Cheryl sber not all feedback back is gift at feedback is paralyzing it forces people to sometimes not do the right thing so I'm also of the camp that incentivize need to be aligned towards the customer obession awesome uh Nikki and John i' love to hear from you on this topic too yeah I was the first thing that comes to mind I realized in the last year of my career at least don't fool yourself into believing you can perfectly design incentive systems in that sense that there's a lot of second and third order effects and it kind of assumes a certain worldview of everyone you work with so I'll give you a specific example you know I'll talk to a leader they'll say well everyone just wants this you know everyone just wants that and you'll talk to those people and they don't just want that they might have a very you know some people are craft oriented some people are really like the process that they're working through some people could care less about how they got there they only want to know kind of what that thing is and maybe some people do care about career advancement all the time and doing this stuff so just to add you know as the counterbalance to what s just said is that I've come very cautious about designing games for teams because and I think that this is what I would say is incentives start with the behaviors of the leaders and what you celebrate and the behaviors of what you value and what you talk about and if you don't it's so easy to overthink incentives like you can design a game for everyone but really it does start with what do we spend a bulk of our time talking about an example being you know when the first three slides of a deck are all about the process of the team and then you only spend a little bit of time at the end talking about how the customer felt when they used it that's essentially creating part of the incentive system that you had so I think it for product leaders listening you know don't always I think be cautious about your ability to design the perfect incentive system especially assuming that everyone in the world thinks just like you because they probably don't start with the behaviors that send the messages that you want to send and then I think incent people often craft the incentives they care about around those outcomes in that part of the culture so I mean just as a counter balanced that statement Nikki curious uh your thoughts yeah one thing to add so I think

this is something that dualingo does really well actually and you know you can feel this when you use their product right it's just very delightful clearly designed around customer needs and one of the big things that is incentivized and talked about every like all the way up to the product review with the CEO down into like team product reviews is do customers like this is this going to have a good impact are we hitting achieving the outcomes that we've set out to achieve and I think if you can do a good job of just making sure that's baked into your culture so that comes up in it's in job ladders it's in performance review feedback it is basically everywhere and everyone's talking about it then the org will take it seriously and they'll bake it into the product itself and I think you can tell honestly like if you use a product I was going to try to pick one I don't want to pick on anyone's product in case there's somebody out there but you can kind of tell when you use somebody's product if the product team is not incentivized with the right things right like you're like oh there's a lot of red notifications here clearly it's different teams fighting with each other over eyeballs things like that right and so I think just making sure that's part of your process just is extremely impactful love that all right so along similar lines let's talk about a dual career track for PMS so you know like there's been a lot of layoff recently and middle managers were hit especially hard and now you know head counts very constrained at many companies and you know before it was like hey how can I manage more PMS how can like manage managers and now so like so now that there isn't as much of an option to hire and build a team do you guys think like a IC plus management track is possible for PMS or is that already happening why don't we start with Nikki actually on this yeah yeah so I hope to see

more of this honestly I think one thing that I've really enjoyed in my career and I've taken roles very strategically based on my desire to keep my hands on the product I haven't really wanted to layer myself with a bunch of managers away from actually building the product and I've been able I've been lucky enough where I've been able to kind of keep very close tabs on the product itself and so I'm kind of in a pseudo IC management role right now I have a team but I'm also still shipping stuff and so this is just my advice to people is get really clear on like what you're looking for in your career some people really are amazing managers and they love to manage and some people do not like to manage but because of career ladders and the way that they are so linear we push people into management roles a lot when it's not always good for them and so I hope to see more of this sort of like dual management meet IC as long as we're not burning people out because I think it's hard to do both things well at the same time but I'm hoping maybe that will be a good output of some of the harder Tech environment times we're in right now yeah I think the one thing that comes to that too is being very conscientious about disrupting your career because I noticed that just looking at hiring in the last year a lot of people were wandering into interviews and they' kind of lost their Edge and their basic claim to success was either one or two or three companies they worked at and their ability to manage lots of people and they' really lost their Edge for talking about outcomes and talking about you know so they had become you know just career managers in that case and I think that people need to be very conscientious about purposely disrupting that track and so if you feel yourself potentially slipping into that I think it's going to be a lot harder in these coming years there's just going to be less demand for folks who are needed for that type of thing and so I've met a lot of leaders recently who have just purposely down ranked you know they've taken titles lower than that in an effort to really like sharpen their skill set again and just be current and so I think it's something folks need to keep in mind such and interested what you think about that yeah I think so a couple of companies that actually do have dual track as well so plus one everything ni John said and I think if you look at Facebook you go all the way up to an IC track to product director level so that's an L8 which is a product director at Facebook is a pretty decently chunky role you have a large team that you're managing but there's also a product director who's at IC as well uh similarly at coinbase during the last year or two we also tried to create an IC role as well and at Airbnb we went it all the way to principal so I think it's possible to do that but there's also understanding that unlike the technical ladder you know where you can become a distinguished engineer or like a VP IC level VP I think in the product management L it becomes really hard to figure out what it looks like beyond that distinguished product manager exactly really funny like what is that right what does that even mean right so I think the short answer is yes there should there you should absolutely continue to rise in the IC track it's totally possible to rise in that all the way up to product director level and I think you can do that and it'll be very successful because you're going to like Nikki said you're going to continue to sharpen your skills but at the same time also recognize that at some point in time that becomes not standable afterwards as well but for majority of the people that's a good path awesome all right so I'm going to take a few questions from uh the audience now so the first question is from Jack which is how do you see the relationship between PMs and designers evolving in the coming years anyone want to take a crack of that do you say relationship or ratios or both relationship yeah we can talk about ratios if you want this is this I I'll just take it maybe I'll do a 10c stab at

least in a lot of companies that I'm observing is designers are becoming increasingly really strategic and business savvy and I think that the main thing from a product manager standpoint is I mean I remember I don't know 2005 or something like that if you were a PM you basically did everything you did everything oh you're writing the marketing copy you're doing this you're doing all these things oh I'm going to just pick some code I'm going to do these things and then there was a time there where you were even like these design sense exercises for PMS I don't believe in them at all like that's why we hire amazing designers I did an interview at Facebook once and they're like we're going to test you on design sense and my answer cuz I've been in a company with amazing designers is like why would we do this I mean we and then I didn't get I didn't even get called back for that thing so my point is that like designers are becoming increasingly business savvy and I know what s was getting at is that prototypical Designer like I just want to ship and everyone's going to come to the thing but I think that is I think PMS are going to need to let go of some of the Reign and like some of their habits that they developed in certain organizations it's probably different at Airbnb but in many organizations PMS need to let go of the delusion that they had that design sense and then also start to acknowledge that these folks that you're working with can be highly strategic and need to be looped into the business perspective as well yeah Nikki yeah I don't know yeah I that's a really awesome question honestly I agree with what you said I think like the partnership between product and design is going to continue to get really tight and designers definitely are becoming more strategic which is wonderful honestly allows them to be more autonomous to make the right decisions I really do think I personally do think you should still invest in your own design sense as a PM like I think it's easy to be like oh that's their job and when I actually just think you're G your critical design feedback at times and hopefully there's no designers in the room today but I think it can help it makes the design better it levels up the product but so I think that's still a skill that you should have but I do agree that designers are becoming more and more strategic and in a perfect world like the team is so good that you as the PM you can just kind of sit in the background and they do their thing and you're just there to kind of help Shepherd everyone in the right direction right that's the ideal scenario although that often is not what happens so maybe we'll get there someday or you get fired because you're not needed anymore because all you were is the shepherd yeah I think less shepherding more doing I guess but I think the short answer is I think the industry is very diverse so it's very hard to give one answer so if you come from the world of B2B it's very different if you come from World of b2c it's very different within b2c there are lots of verticles but I think overall the macro Trend I see is that design becoming more and more strategic in nature having more and more seat at the table having more involvement early on in the ideation phases of the what the product strategy itself is not in the design ideation phase but more of a product ideation phase as well so that trend is clear I have met some incredible designers in my career who are who have product sense design sense and also business sense right so I think it's important to leverage them and last but not the least I just want to remind everybody PMS CH to General career right we tend to be more t-shaped than anything else so I think it's important to understand Nikki's Point what a great design sense mean what a great engineering aspects mean but just don't be delusional that you know anything better than those Specialists would so bring them along at the right space as you continue to do the product management that you're doing yeah I have a very specific example just in 10 seconds is an amplitude one thing that Justin is ahead of product and then our and really empowered our designers to was actually shaping the end of year Vision that sort of catapulted us into the next year and it was just an incredible thing to watch about how galvanizing that was for the rest of the company and how it really it's similar to what I'm hearing a little bit that's happening in Airbnb but it really was like setting that vision and using those design skills to make that real and tangible it didn't mean those were the prototypes it just meant that they were actually setting those outcomes and that Vision was just extremely powerful sorry yeah go ahead you know as I mentioned I think it's still a very tough job market right now so this is question from Nate uh I'm on a hunt for my next job seems like the only way to get hired these days is to either having worked at fan or you know having worked at similar companies how does one break through this wall yeah I can start with that one

I really do I mean I think yes people value Fang experience and it is very validating for your resume however I actually really think an early stage startup experience is can sometimes be even more validating honestly because you get to wear so many different hats and you really can career climb and career jump faster at a startup then you can if you go into a Fang and you kind of got to work your way up their traditional ladder that takes a long time so I wouldn't be too worried about that honestly I would say find a good series B startup that looks like they're on some sort of growth rocket ship and I would argue that you probably are going to get better experience and you're going to grow faster that's slightly controversial hot take but I know Fang experience is relevant you could eventually go to a Fang if you have a really good startup experience so don't pigeon hole yourself honestly I think there's lots of other opportunities that are not Fang and they're still thankfully at least now startups are starting to get funded again I think we've starting to see that flywheel spin a little bit faster which is good and so hopefully there will be more jobs in those roles soon anyone else want to anything on this it's hard out there that's just the bottom I think yeah I have some on this I also agree with Nikki's advice to find a growing company not necessarily like the big companies and find one that matches your domain and skill set and another hack is like just like find and reach out to your hiring manager directly don't be like another resume in the pile usually the hiring manager is a little bit more open to if you come from a non-traditional background if you have a really good pitch if you did some research on their product and have some feedback they'll at least have a conversation with you so try that just one thing you just brought up there remember the economy didn't affect all companies in the same way so one thing I noticed big time was that at amplitude we were dealing with lots of companies at different things there's a lot of these kind of like I'll give an example something like a Lego or one of these companies like Lego still was selling stuff this whole time they were actually like growing their whole product or the same thing with like a Home Depot or these companies now normally you'd look at that and be like oh I might get stuck in this like slow moving Enterprise division but that's not the case in all of those things like there are roles for Lego popping up around certain Community plays that they're doing or certain cool products that they're building and so one thing I wouldn't is like don't completely write off large major brands that are building now that have a strong leader in a division that you could understand their background and maybe worked at a company that you enjoyed their products if you see that leader building out those teams they actually have a lot more budget now than some other companies have been impacted in a different way so I don't overlook the hidden roles that might be out there just based on what you might assume of a big company that works in a certain way that would be a bit of advice to get F yeah one last thing I would add and I think this is one of the places where our industry has really evolved which is really exciting and this wasn't the case when I started in my career like 13 years ago but you can also build something yourself and ship it give yourself your own practice you could build an AI bot you could write a newsletter you could just launch a thing and practice putting something out in the world and having people consume it and learn from that and I think with like no code tools and just generally with AI there's so many things you can build so much easier today than you could have 10 years ago so again like if you really are struggling to find a PM rooll somewhere create your own PM rooll for yourself and ship some stuff and then eventually get your things out there and more opportunities will come yeah I think that's a great transitioning to our next topic which is you know there's a big AI wave happening now and in some ways with AI you know PMs can actually ship stuff themselves but you know let's say I'm a PM and I'm not really working on a ji product right now like how do I ramp up on space and get my hands dirty any advice I can go

nights and weekends now go Niki you go that's good advice yeah I just give myself like a six hour week experimentation Budget on all this stuff because I feel I need to stay sharp and like I build things and like I just think it's like some like a muscle you need to learn about if you don't have the opportunity and then it's P paid off at work you know just even like silly things that we've figured out can be make a lot more even in enablement in product operations were're able to use these things but it was only by staying sharp and researching Nikki go ahead yeah no I agree with that I think that's what I've been doing too honestly I just been trying to use AI multiple times throughout my day every day and surprisingly like have becoming I'm getting more Adept at using it both personally and professionally and so I think like just start using it is a good place to start also just honestly sign on to Twitter everyone's if you follow some people in Tech everyone's sharing awesome new AI use cases every single day continue to blow my mind and so continue to just get out there and try things and you're going to start learning more and more yeah and I think one recommendation in addition to everything that people have said is that don't be afraid to go into the technology itself one of the things I've learned in my career is that unless I can buy a million products on Amazon I still may or may not know how to build a retail product or scalable e-commerce thing but if I can actually understand how the shipping Works Logistics Works Etc I can probably do a lot so my advice would be there's actually a very good course or a set of courses from Google that are available for free that I did like six months ago myself over the weekend night to John's example and actually help me understand how the thing actually works and actually what are the limitations of it and what the trajectory looks like so I would also encourage in addition to what John and Nikki said please give that a shot as well free course available over the week weekend you will learn a lot from it one thing I'd say without going into specifics because I can't but even as a company if you're an enablement or a leadership role even creating sandboxes where people can experiment this is something we've done internally and trying to clear any legal hurdles or other things that might exist to be able to experiment in a very in a way that will never impact your customers it's like you just little things like that count because in a corporate environment that there can actually be just a lot of things that limit your ability to do it so even if you wanted to try to solve a problem internally in your company if you work at any kind of bigger company it might be harder than you think so that's like a very actionable thing if you're a leader to you know partner with legal and partner with any team that's working around this and create a Sandbox environment where people don't feel worried or limited or concerned about what's going to happen with that data because we obviously don't want anything like that to happen so that's something you could do another tip I actually just shipped A J product and after shipping I realized hey I actually don't understand exactly how this thing was built so another tip is like if you have Engineers who are experts at this stuff just like grab 30 minutes of their time and make them draw diagrams and make them walk through like how retrieval augment generation works or how all this stuff actually works right and I think you'll learn a lot and they love explaining this stuff to you so let's wrap up the AI topic let's maybe you guys can all share one AI use case either from work or your personal life that you use like chat GPT or these products for like what's your favorite

AI use case I train AI or I make it believe that it's like eight different people and then I simulate discussions between those people to create training internally so for like conflict resolution or for thinking about how to handle crucial conversations what I'll do is I'll actually and if you follow my writing you can probably tell I'm doing this behind the scenes and thinking about it is you know I'll say you know you've got this individualistic highly meritocratic leader who believes that the whole world roles around them and you've got this you know communitarian ex hippie who wants to do this and then you've got this other person and then I'll have create training material quickly by getting different perspectives of people so then people can learn how to like navigate different worldviews in their company so that's like one specific thing I've done in the last two weeks you should try it it's funny nian do you wantan to yeah one of the clever use cases that we've been using at dualingo is somebody at dualingo made an okr reviewer so you can pass your quarterly okrs through it and it basically gives you feedback on you know are these measurable are they clear and you know synthesized in a thoughtful way Etc and it is has it probably saved me hours this most time like this last time of okrs just making sure that I was saying the right things and that they made sense and it just felt like I had a little buddy who was helping me out which I needed that day so that was great I've also used it at home personally I've just said okay here's what's in my fridge what would you make for dinner and it will send me full recipes for things which is stupidly helpful that's awesome yeah I think I'll give two use kids one work I use Chad GPD style usage for data analysis a lot so I have a lot of data that comes to me from all different places and I don't want to create anything of course I have a data science awesome data science team that is a lot but still there's a lot of stuff over there so that's one handy Nifty buddy for me if I'm presenting to the board I use it to create certain charts if I'm analyzing certain aspects I can do that the second thing that I just saw was having a work assistant I'm forgetting the name of the company if I do find it I'll post it over here but what it is you know if you want to know about our travel policy what the paternity maternity leaves are you know there's now a company that has a work buddy you know it's you don't call up HR anymore you don't have to look at Wei I forget the name but like you just type and say hey what is our HR policy or what is our this thing about that oh what is the document that talks about the 2023 vision for the company you know he just gets everything done you know so i f over this an Incredible use case to Traverse a Trav toes of information in every company that you join that's amazing I guess I'll share one too so I got access to the recent chat gbt voice feature and on my drive to work like I basically talk to it I upload a bunch of custom instructions about my life and I talk to it about everything from weekend trips to stuff at work to you know like my new newsletter stuff and yeah it's like it's actually like feels like a real human conversation in some ways it listens to you more than real people so it's a great experience if you have access you should try it out all right so why don't we move to our last topic and we'll do a Q& A so we talked about how the PM R is involving not everyone wants to be a manager and you know how individual PMs can leverage AI maybe you guys can share some idea about the kind of the end state of the PM career right like does everyone destined to become like a VP or CPO or like other paths that people can pursue anyone want to take a go first yeah I mean I don't think logistically speaking

it's very hard for every to become a CP and VP either so I don't that's one but also more important I don't think everybody wants to I've met a lot of amazing product people who actually don't aspire to do that they have other agenda goals I'll give you two or three examples that really inspired me um one is a gentleman at Facebook without naming his name incredible product manager comes from design background and he loves the craft so much that he's wants to continue to be deep dive like hands dirty and continue to be that in their career rather than removing themsel away from it the other career path I see PMS do a lot is becoming Founders you know it's incredible how many Founders are xpms as well in addition to being ex Engineers or ex designers that's another path that I've seen and the adjacent path I've seen many people do is they go into adjacent disciplines like U marketing like uh product operations like uh leading customer success teams in B2B world you know so they're like adj adjacencies as well where I feel like they go on and do amazing things as well so I don't think everybody should aspire to be and I don't think everybody wants to be a CPO VP but I think there are lots of other opportunities that they can continue to pursue and continue to make great career progress career fulfillingness and also good dollars you know yeah just to add on that I mean I think one of the things that I've always it's always kind of bummed me out about career ladders generally is like there's a start and a finish and it's a linear path that you have to travel I feel like somebody uses this analogy so this is not my analogy and I don't remember who it was so sorry feel free to post if you know if you can find this person but I always like to think about your career as a instead of a linear ladder it it's like a jungle gym or some sort of play set where you can move around and try different things and really spend the time figuring out what uniquely is fun to you and what you like and then move your career in that direction um and the cool thing about product management is you get exposure to so many different parts of other people's jobs because you're in touch with so many stakeholders every day you can really figure out what sort of fills up your cup and what you really like and then you can invest and lean in that so I think not everyone has to be a CPO I think you could be a director of product if you're into that you could start a startup write a newsletter if you love to write like John Etc and so I think just you doing your own internal reflection and getting clear on like what do I love about you know product generally and how do I take that forward is such a good exercise that you can invest your time in yeah I mean just to go back to what I echoed before there is a sort of generational component to this I'm almost 50 and there was a time when just a general awareness of how things work and where you can fit into different orgs and the glue you know this glue idea or the shepherd idea or anything and that could be very that could take you a really long way in your career for a good two decades and I think now especially when I see people who are 22 I'm going to be a PM and they're starting when they're 22 I'm just like doing the math in my head like what's gonna like 35 40 like I'm doing the math in my head like what unless they're you know so I really would recommend that you think of your product career is you should build like you should think of your key skills and then maybe build out one or two other really areas of curiosity and interest for yourself Rel Nikki said so that might be really deepening this idea of just general business management like there's still roles for that it could be you know some acknowledgement around operations or it could be service design something like ju just depending on your age and if you're closer to my age then maybe closer to 22 you should think about how you build those extra pillars in your career to be able to not you will not be able to rely on just being an Uber generalist in this particular space for too much longer and so it's important to build those extra pillars those extra chops like I'm doing this course on deep Finance in the last like three weeks that I'm going super deep in that area I'm just you really have to see it it's the product of you kind of cliche but you really have to think about expanding now if you're 22 and you bought into this whole PM is going to be a rocket ship forever and you're going to make tons of money all the time kind of thing you've got your own thing on your hands right so it we're going through a period where that might not be the case and it might be harder than you thought so always really think about you know getting fleshing out your skill set is something that I would think very deeply about yeah I think it's easy to fall for the LinkedIn title Rat Race you know like but I think only willing to take a job the next title up is a very limited view of things like you know there there's like compensation there's culture there's what you're actually interested in so you got to balance all of that all right so why don't we take some more questions from the audience to wrap up so next question is from pry so priy ask when interviewing a user what tactics should we follow to extract the most insights just ask them about how good your product is and you know no how

should you actually talk to your users don't talk a lot just let them talk that's the best thing I can think the if you're in any interview where you're talking more than 20% of the time probably something's going wrong you should re Steve pacal's book on interviewing users so don't take our word for it and then the other thing too is yeah it's that's the major mistake I see it's just talking too much and only knowing how to talk a lot and so you should give yourself extreme challenges like what would it take to only talk five or 10% of the time on a call and then other things come into place as you learn more about ux research and different things you're doing uh Nikki yeah I see some people in the chat talking about the mom test book I love that book that is must read if you're a product person I would also say go to chat G BT describe your product that you're working on and the users you're going to be talking to and have it write a little interview guide take some of the stress out of that having to figure that out yourself that is one thing I've tried and I found it really useful and then agree with John don't talk too much like let them tell you and you can kind of you know get whisps of their product needs just on the way they're describing how they're using the thing which is cool maybe next question from Adam how do you think the core skills needed to be an amazing Pro leader have evolved and because the question focuses on

leader product leader not an not anything else I think it's important to understand what leadership is I think in my mind great product leaders are past the phase of basic product Obsession what do I mean by that when you're in product leadership position I think today it's becoming increasingly more important for these leaders to be very much into the detail and understand what is happening the more you become come becom in a leadership position again I'm not defined leadership just by the number of people you manage but just assume your scope is increasing you have a large surface area Etc it becomes harder in order to stay on top of things so what I notice a lot is that the most successful product leaders are so intimately familiar with the user industry that they are in and the competition that they have that they are like the best Advocate or what's happening you know so the myth that you need to burst is that the more leader like you become the less handson you are now actually you have to be more and more hands on deep deeply involved that's one thing I would say the second is if you are if youire if you're a product leader just remember the amplification aspect of your job is really important what do I mean by that nobody ever got to mount trest alone you know you need to have to know how to lead teams they don't have to be a direct reports they have they could they don't have to you don't even have to have any reports but the more important thing you just got to recognize that it's a team sport it's not tennis it's soccer it's like basketball it's not tennis right so for the American audience who don't know soccer there it's like basketball not tennis so if you're a product leader please try to understand what it takes in human skills perspective to actually amplify the work of people around you whe that sales that it's marketing whether it's design whatever that is one thing I yeah not to dispute that but I was saying also decide what kind of person you want to be like there are people who really Pride themselves on being more of that leader and empowering like three four five six seven eight people to get into all the details there's more there's some people who take a lot of passion with craft and there's some leaders and having met a lot of them and who are very successful at what they do I think also it's like figure out what your own personal style is and the environment you want to be in and learn how to smell out organizations that will actually value what you want to do and where you want to be because nothing's worse than arriving as like operator you know operator leader who wants to get into all the details and you arrive in an org where people are pretty much like yeah thanks like we don't need that right now we need you to do something else so that that's like one bit of advice I would give folks yeah I love that to build on that like as you get more I think as you move along the career path and you get more senior in your career you get really good at figuring out organizationally how organizations work and when you're interviewing especially if you're going to go into a leadership role somewhere getting really plugged into how they work what is important to them what their principles are things like that will help you make sure that your own principles like mesh well and that your skills are going to be additive and not subtractive in an environment like that

your number one career skill is how to smell out orgs we should do a whole session on that but like Po the poor fit that last to one two three four years of your life where you can't necessarily extract yourself immediately from that and then the drain on you psychically and those environments there should be that we will do a maven course just on how to know if you've got a good fit with the place because the interviews will never tell you do you go ahead how do you s that out like is there a question you can ask the person when you're interviewing or after you get the offer any kind of quick tips on that yeah so I'm relatively newish to do a lingo I join actually it's been about two years now so not that new anymore feel new still and I spent a lot of time asking a ton of questions because I had made a different decision in the job that I had before and I didn't love it and I left really quickly after I joined and so I asked a lot of questions on like how do you work how does how do product decisions get made what does the product review process look like who's involved who's deciding and just really spent a lot of time digging into just the day-to-day operations of their product organization and then I also really drilled who was going to be my manager on his management skills how he likes to work with his team his communication style all of those things and ended up feeling great about what I heard and joined in then I'm still here two years later and so I think it's just really kind of again figuring out like what you like and what you don't like in your job and just making sure that's going to you're going to lean into the things that you like by asking the right questions I also think sorry I feel like I'm a broken record for chat GPT ask chat GPT those types of questions what you could be asking when you're interviewing somewhere because I'm sure have some zingers for you to add to that stock members of the board because you're eventally working for so figure out what agendas they've brought to all their prior Investments because you're going to end up working for their incentives and their agendas and then uh unless you have a really strong CEO is going to push back on it and then I would say that the other thing too is you could have a completely chaotic messed up org but there can be a boundary of goodness that you can learn a lot so you all you're picking your leader right like you're picking the person that you're going to work with in your immediate surroundings so you could do as much as you want on the culture of the company but there could be an enclave of goodness or there could be everything's good but you just happen to find The Enclave of nat so goodness those would be two bits of advice sanin yeah I mean I was just reflecting as you guys are speaking about my time at Instagram coinbase and Airbnb I think the thing that I tried to look at these companies was the ensity of the leadership team for change what do I mean by that you know when I joined Airbnb a lot of things were messed up too you know no companies perect there's always a problem in all these companies right so my criteria has always been do the people in power or the people who are decision maker what is their propensity for change because I can come in and build a new product development life cycle I can change the spec template decision flow I can change information flow but if the organization is not willing to change none of that shit's going to happen right so more more likely than not I'll just advise all of you when you join a startup I was among the first employees on Instagram lots of broken problems lots of that was bad then it was right and if I just evaluated against Facebook I would have failed that test and I would have never joined Instagram because Facebook had this amazing thing this is how things happen this is how the development life cyle everything was figured out Instagram had nothing figured out when I joined um Airbnb the biggest problem that I heard from PMS including Nik others was sonin we don't Empower our PMS Brian chesy makes the decisions you know how do we fix that right so there are all these problems in every company that I've been at what I look for is hey if I'm coming in can I change does this organization has nimbleness to change does the founder has a nimbleness and desire to change or not right so that's the journey I took and luckily it turned out to be fine for me yeah one thing to double on that is that know the difference between chronic problems and acute problems s what you said really resonated is that companies that are making progress if you ask them like how often you just work things out it might not happen in one quarter but they'll say you know what six months I thought it was terrible six months ago but we went back and worked it out it's much more important than those are the you want fewer chronic problems and more acute problems which will come up all the time and evidence that you've knocked them out so that's such a great Point s right and all of you if you're at a PM role I mean you yourself know at least half your job is smells like you don't like it right but you still do it because it's important to get the right part the other 50% that you love get that thing done so every job every company is not perfect none of them will be perfect if you're looking for a perfect one you'll never find one your job is to come into an imperfectness and just know that the animal that you join using an analogy is just willing to change all right yeah I think we're out of time here but you know I want to give a chance for our panelists to share like if you want to people want to continue conversation with you or like where can people find you on the internet I'll start with I I guess John who has like a huge following already I don't log into that Twitter thing anymore so I'm not it's going to take me like two three weeks to get back to you there but unfortunately LinkedIn that's probably a good way to get in touch yeah I just started posting a lot on social medias at the real sunshin I only talk real no so if you want to follow the real sunin go follow me on YouTube Instagram I'm over there and we'll chat more yeah you can follow me on LinkedIn I also don't really tweet a lot unfortunately I would love to be a an ex person but I'm not so follow me on LinkedIn I also have a newsletter that I eventually want to get going again it's nikki. sstack. com awesome and you know what I am still on Twitter unfortunately but on Twitter and my newsletter yeah on X and my newsletter is yeah Critter economy. and it's great newsletter so there you go job thank you thank you