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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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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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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

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Tune in to listen to Steph Bigue, President at manyways.io, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. The agency (consulting/contract) environment is a good place to learn a lot, from a lot of different types of customers
2. If you are the orchestrator of the project, sit between everyone and ensure the communication is constant, but avoid micro-managing
3. Find a way that you can interact with your team often and be consistent
4. Figure out what the team needs to be successful, and as the product leader, help feed that to the team
5. Ask a lot of questions shows you are focused on succeeding
6. You can't rely on email chains and threads to sort out all your problems, b/c there are certain things that come up in a person to person conversation that you just won't get to normally in written form
7. Ensure who is doing what, make sure you have clear roles and responsibilities defined, never assume
8. Asking questions is good b/c either you don't have the information, you don't know it, or you think you have the information and you're confirming it
9. Always as a PM, be as enthusiastic as possible b/c because enthusiasm is so contagious and it can keep a team rallied on a difficult project during difficult times

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Tune in to listen to Soumya Sreeram, Product Manager at Ford Motor Company, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. All industries translate to some sort of software, you need to understand the business aspects of the software
2. Have an ownership mindset b/c no one tells you what you need to do next
3. Be a people person b/c you can not lead with control, you must be able to lead with context
4. Be very self-aware b/c a lot of unknowns can create anxiety or stress
5. Don't lose your cool when unknowns happen, think objectively, not emotionally
6. Be open to asking why questions b/c it makes people think about why they are telling you one way or another
7. Partner with the teams that you work with
8. Active listening, don't listen to respond, listen to understand
9. Present information in the right way that will raise the right meaning yet is measurable and understandable
10. Keep learning and keep your calm
11. Be agile yourself

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Tune in to listen to Whitney Knowlton, Product Manager at Dropbox.com, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Contract roles are excellent ways to get a sense of what the real day-to-day is like
2. Don't always look for the right company, look for the right manager
3. If you want it bad enough, go learn it
4. When doing all the things, stop and ask, what's the problem you are trying to solve, just because it's on a backlog does not mean it should be
5. What are the signals you need to look for to know you are solving the right problem
6. What is the minimum scope possible to get signal
7. Learn enough so you know what to do next if you were not on the right track
8. Don't get out of practice of engaging with your customers
9. Find the link between your success metric in the business and what success means for the customer in using your product.
10. Anchor everything back to the end customer needs
11. Find something meaningful in what you do every day

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Tune in to listen to Ramki Vaidanathan, Digital Principal Product Manager at Starbucks, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Your fundamental objective is to drive clarity from ambiguity, really get at the heart of the why
2. Getting to the right problem is half the solution
3. Why? 3 reasons; solve for a customer pain, solve for a business pain point, or initiative from a compliance/legal perspective
4. If you make a mistake; own up to it, learn from it, get better at it
5. You're only as great as your team and it truly takes a village to build an awesome product
6. Assimilate the best of your team into the product thinking
7. Iterate, iterate, iterate because progress eats perfection for lunch
8. Learn to be comfortable with incomplete information, but use data to make directional decisions
9. I don't know what I really don't know, let's figure it out together

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Tune in to listen to Nick Cheever, Divisional Vice President, Global Supply Chain Technology at Trimble Transportation (Trimble.com), share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Understand the role and the scope of product before you step into those shoes because every company defines Product differently
2. Starting with the servant model lets you get TO the leadership model because then people know you're invested in them
3. Assume positive intent when leading a team through a state of change
4. Lead with transparency and openness as it makes it easier for people to connect
5. Keeping perspective, maintaining perspective, bringing your own perspective, listening to other's perspectives - you both had a journey to get here, so it's worth listening

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Tune in to listen to Michaela Sleeth, Head of Product at Bespoke Metrics, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. If you don't tell people what you want, you're not going to get what you want
2. You own the success, and you own the failure, so don't hide from it
3. When you mess up, don't double down and get defensive
4. Check your ego at the door
5. Product managers tend to need to be a jack of all trades, master of none, and that's ok
6. So just take out just in your communications

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Tune in to listen to Jessi Alva, Product Manager at SAP Concur, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Identify all of the different phases of Product Management and figure out what is it that appeals to you the most
2. You need to be true to yourself and think about what your skills are and then lean into those skills
3. It doesn't matter where you are in your career, you're always going to have a product that it's not going to go as planned
4. You should not be afraid to take risks and just look at those opportunities for you to reset
5. Just continue to learn and continue to feel comfortable with not knowing
6. To be influential, step back, present the data and remove the emotion out of it
7. Change comes from two places, it comes from the environment or it comes from within

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Tune in to listen to Elliott White, Head of Product at TangoCard.com, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. To be a really good product manager, you really need to be a good product manager, not a good engineer, not a good salesperson, not a good marketer, etc
2. A bunch of little features that don't align with your company vision & strategy can paint you into a corner later on
3. Use empathy to understand your customers' gaps in order to build the solutions they need to be successful
4. Three-legged stool question, are we addressing feasibility (engineering), viability (pm), usability (design)
5. Indulge yourself in solution exploration
6. KISS - keep it simple silly - you don't have to build all the things

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

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

1. It's not about building the product right, it's about building the right product
2. You are as good as your team
3. Challenge assumptions
4. Embrace your growth journey

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Tune in to our first live AMA with Skyler Bissell who's looking for advice on working remotely while making a career pivot to Product.

Skyler's questions discussed in this episode

1. How is onboarding working in this digital era with remote being the primary work method for people that are joining new teams?
2. How do you stand out if everyone is remote?

How to contact Skyler

• Connect with Skyler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skylerbissell/

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Tune in to listen to Julianne Wu, Sr. Director of Product Management at DocuSign, share the stories behind some of her best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Communicate what you want in your career, don't assume people around you just know
2. Priorities change and you should not take it personally
3. Build the least to learn the most
4. Don't be afraid to take the windy path
5. Product marketing and product management are two sides of the same coin
6. Assume best intent

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Tune in to listen to Sina Yeganeh, Head of Product at Apptentive.com, share the stories behind some of his best product wisdom & career tips for new and aspiring/pivoting product managers.

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

1. Don't forget your internal customers
2. Always assume best intent
3. You can not sacrifice customer experience for a deadline
4. MVE - Minimum Viable Experiment
5. You can make as much money as you want, it can come and go, but education is priceless

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