Kevin Yien: belief

Transcript context

…Okay, so going back to the question of... So your advice is don't go straight into product management if you want to become a great PM. Where do you think people should start if they can? What are some options you recommend? The best way to think about this, in my opinion, is who were the people that you would be taking the PM responsibilities from and then do those jobs? And so for me, the sort of foundational three are going to be engineer, designer or salesperson. I think sales also gets not a bad rep, but a misrepresented reputation in tech where all they care about is quota, it's just about numbers, et cetera. In reality, the best salespeople are the best listeners, the best people at understanding the problem that the customer is having and then translating that into what you can do for them. And so if you get really good at having those calls, getting told no a lot, and being able to translate that, I mean, why would you not want to start there and then eventually move into something like product? So that's the foundational three for me. So your advice is essentially if you want to be a PM, start as a designer or an engineer or a salesperson. I was an engineer, so this is exactly the path I went on. And I think there's an element of you start there and then you realize you're never going to be as amazing as the other people at that role and you're like, "Okay, maybe I should explore this other thing," because I was like, "I'm never going to be an amazing engineer. I'm good enough."…

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