Anneka Gupta: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned I see product managers, and this is a good segue too. You're a big deal, fancy chief product officer person. A lot of people listening to this podcast are early career PMs or trying to get into product. I want to ask a couple of questions along these lines. One is about getting into products. So, interestingly, you got into product the same way I got into product, which is you used to be an engineer and then you moved into product within a company, which is maybe one of the simplest ways to get into product potentially. For people that are trying to break into product management, what advice do you often give them of how they could go about doing it? I know there's never the silver bullet, but what's your advice? I definitely think doing it within the same company is a lot easier than trying to switch companies and switch jobs at the same time because when you're within a company, you've already built credibility, hopefully. And if you haven't, then go crush it at your job so you build the credibility. Then you can start to raise your hand, interact with the product team, take on projects and do things that allow you to get some experience and build a relationship with a leader on the product team who then may be willing to take a chance on you to put you into a product role even if you don't have the experience. Especially when you're within the same company, you bring other things to the table. Let's say you're working in customer support, well, you have a huge amount of knowledge about what are the big problems that people are calling up the support team or opening tickets on the support team for, and that is valuable knowledge for being a product manager. You're coming from the sales side, you're coming with a knowledge of how to sell the product, what really resonates, how do you do the objection handling, and that can be a valuable perspective. If you come from the engineering side, but you understand how the product is built and you understand that technical nuances of that well, that can also be a valuable way to enter into the product team. That way, even though you don't have the direct product experience, you're still bringing something to the table where you are going to have to get trained on core product management, but you're not going to have to be totally trained on the business or the technology. So is the advice basically get a job in any function, not necessarily any function, but join a company however you can essentially and then push to try to get into the product team in some form?…

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