Coffee with Product

Tune in to listen to Susan Stavitzski, Senior Product Manager @ CarMax, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Susan's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. How to develop customer empathy? Go talk to as many people as possible every single day.
2. 3 buckets of PM specialties; customer-focused, tech-focused, business-focused
3. You can stand out as an aspiring PM by taking on personal projects, put your ideas out there, get feedback from others, don't just sit on it and do nothing
4. Everyone has workarounds when the software does not do what they want it to do, these are opportunities 
5. Make it a priority to hang out with your customer success team, they are the front-line
6. The most powerful teams are the ones that actually do everything together.
7. Take every opportunity, create your own luck

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Tune in to listen to Greg, Product Manager at Veygo UK, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Greg's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. Never underestimate the value of networking
2. Take a step back and never forget the goal you are there to deliver ... meaningful solutions to customer problems
3. There are two sides to the product coin, discover problems and deliver against them
4. it's way more difficult to deliver something that actually works for your customers if you're not starting with the problems they're facing
5. Cool tech does not equal customer value
6. When applying for your next product rile, look just beyond the product leader when you're stalking people on LinkedIn and think about, okay, who else am I going to learn from here? Who else is in this company is going to teach me stuff.

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Tune in to listen to Avinoam Zelenko, Senior Product Manager of Feed at LinkedIn, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Avinoam product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. Try to solve the problem any way you can, don't wait for a perfect solution
2. Worry less about looking the role and trying to check the boxes of like what a PM should be doing
3. During change, you have to bring people along for the journey- applies to the people you are working with and applies to your customers
4. If you're doing anything that involves change, like change management, it is not a sideline thing, it is not the byproduct, it is a thing within itself that deserves principles and attention, and thoughtfulness
5. There are problems everywhere, all around you, try to solve them any way you can, but you can't solve them on your own, so be collaborative, get out of theoretical, get into the driver’s seat

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Tune in to listen to Jess Sudo, Product Manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Jess's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. When pivoting to product, It's important to understand how your previous experience ties into being a product manager
2. I would say with a great opportunity as a product manager comes great ambiguity
3. Your performance is going to be evaluated on how much you're either saving the company or gaining the company financially
4. You are not going to be an amazing product manager because you know everything about your product. That's a great skill set. You're the conductor, but people don't necessarily see you that way.
5. Do the planning that you need to do to make your career pivot a good idea.

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Tune in to listen to Merlin Woodman, former Senior Product Manager at QorusDocs.com, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Merlin's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. You need to understand the market, and not just the marketing
2. Be comfortable with the unknown
3. Aggregate the tribal knowledge that you've accrued and present it in such a way that other teams respect the decisions that you make,
4. Get from an idea and direction through to execution; there's a lot of opportunity for learning
5. Define the success metrics, but also define the failure metrics- they are just as important because you will not be right all the time
6. A real challenge is being able to aggregate tribal knowledge and present it in ways that other teams can understand and respect the direction you are heading
7. If you're sitting on the fence, it's better to tumble forward than back.

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#productmanagement #breakintoproduct #pivottoproduct #productmanagementcareeradvice

Tune in to listen to Lauren Lee, Founder & CEO ProductLivity, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring product managers.

Lauren's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. Set aside 10 minutes a week to journal what are the top three things that I really did that added value, or what did I learn
2. Be mindful of your comms strategy when you change something in your product, your end users are people too and if they are on the losing end of a change, you may need to help them through it
3. Product decagon framework to help you grow your product career
   1. Product discovery and execution - insights, roadmap, to execution
   2. People management - beyond IC, peoples, managers
   3. Leadership - any PM should be displaying some amount of
   4. Communication - tons of meetings, devs, designers, stockholders, customers - articulate what you are trying to do
   5. Strategic thinking - more important as you get more senior in your product career, what is the right set of things to put on the roadmap in the next 12 months
   6. User empathy - understanding users, how to best solve problems, uniquely do that that the alternatives are not
   7. Analysis - understand the data, quant / qual - why success criteria
   8. Technical fundamentals - speak enough engineering to have trade off conversations
   9. Design fundamentals - good conversations with your designers
   10. New technologies - always changing 
4. Don't wait for perfect, share it, workshop it along the way, get feedback

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Tune in to listen to Patrick McNulty, Regional Director at Twilio.com, share the stories behind some of his best GO TO MARKET product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

Patrick's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. Inputs, Outputs, Constraints
2. Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose - Find your purpose, something you believe in, and then go put yourself in uncomfortable positions 
3. Don't just go looking for something that exists, try to create something, have a hypothesis, have a point of view and go convince somebody that you're the right person to help them solve that.
4. PM's first and foremost in my belief are salespeople, hands-down because a PM at its core is a consensus builder
5. Convey thoughts in writing
6. Have an opinion, have a hypothesis, but you have to be able to take the facts and pivot if something is not working, and quickly do it
7. Your communication style has to adapt to what people are attuned to listening to.
8. When you become a manager one day, you are a career ambassador to your direct reports, give the feedback them the feedback they need to grow
9. Don't overlook the power of a compliment, don't overlook the power of an expression
10. Asking for feedback, what are the things that are going well and what are the things that can be improved
11. if you're not where you want to be today, set a goal and don't have to talk about five, 10 years, just set three months, a few months into the future, write down what some of those actions are.

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Tune in to listen to Tony Tao, Product Manager at Zulily share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

Tony's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. It's possible to become a PM out of college through an APM program (associate product manager)
2. You don't have to be a software engineer coming out\ of college, you can become a product manager
3. Things will not always go according to plan and your career, and that there are going to be a lot of setbacks along the way, so that doesn't mean you should give up on your goals, but it means that you have to be adaptable and how you accomplish your goals
4. When joining a startup, what is your value-prop, what are you bringing to the table 
5. Pivot in the same company, find a mentor if you can who has a similar story
6. There's a lot of preparation that goes into a good career pivot outcome
7. Trust, but verify - you are always one quest away from a different outcome
8. Use a fake door test or proxy metric to test the outcome before building the solution
9. Ask the question, what can I do that my immediate team can't do
10. Your career is going to be very long, they're going to be opportunities you want to run after and they're going to be opportunities you want to steer clear of, but in the end, you are judged by the effort you have applied along the way

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Tune in to a live AMA with Tim Woodson, Product Manager at Expedia Group, who's looking for advice on pivoting from a contract role to a full-time product management role.

Topics discussed in this episode

1. Pivoting from a contract product role to a full-time product role
2. What to look for in a job description
3. What have you done in the past that aligns with what they're asking for and how can you get your foot in the door and actually get that conversation?
4. The job of your resume is not to get the job, it's to get the call for the job 
5. Take inventory of all the things you've done
6. Level up your LinkedIn profile
7. Find YOUR lane
8. Working at DocuSign

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• Tell me how you heard about the podcast with a short 2-minute survey
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Tune in to listen to Peter Overman, Lead Product Manager at PitchBook Data share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

Peter's product wisdom & career tips discussed in this episode

1. The role of Product Management is to solve complex problems by communicating the right questions to be answered
2. Product managers must embrace autonomy
3. What's the first next thing you need to do to move your project forward, you don't have to be perfect, but you need to make progress
4. When you make a mistake, which you will, own up to it - share it - help others avoid the same fate
5. Don't underestimate the power of appreciation
6. If you nurture individual relationships, you are going to have so much more success
7. You create connections by investing in them in order to have the best team and the best opportunity for success
8. Find something you care about, focus on communication, show appreciation

Done listening? Great, do this next...

• Tell me how you heard about the podcast with a short 2-minute survey
• Then, GO TO https://coffeewithproduct.com AND SUBSCRIBE for complete transcripts of every episode as well as even more curated product content that will help you get started and get ahead in your product career

#productmanagement #breakintoproduct #pivottoproduct #productmanagementcareeradvice