Annie Pearl: belief

Transcript context

…Transitioning a little bit to product, the main focus of chat, you transitioned into product from being a lawyer. You told me at one point that a lot of people ask you for advice about how to transition into product from other functions, especially non-technical functions as someone without a technical background. So, what advice do you give people when they ask you how to transition into a product role? I got what I'll call lucky, which is I kind of stumbled into product management after law school, joined the founding team of a startup and ended up doing product management there. But when I think about folks who are looking to get in their product management, I think there's really two paths. I think one is more formal in nature. There are associate product manager programs out there and many scaled companies, Google, Meta. All have APM programs that you can formally apply to. And actually, when we were at Box, much earlier stage company than either of those companies I just mentioned, we actually created an APM program to help grow our bench of more junior PM. So, I think you can actually find APM programs even at smaller, earlier stage companies than even kind of big tech. So that's one, it's just formal APM programs. I think another "more formal" way to get into PM is really by just directly applying to a junior PM role where there's no expectation of any sort of experience. I've usually seen this work best when you're already working somewhere in some product adjacency. Maybe you're in customer support, implementation, or maybe you're a sales engineer. But you can look at the internal job board and find junior PM roles that are posted and that's one way to make the move. So that's kind of on the formal side like APM programs and just applying via internal job boards. I think on the informal side, really two suggestions here. The first one is to seek out opportunities to shadow or partner closely with a product manager and maybe even offer to take on some work. So, some of the best PMs that I've brought over to product from other functions, they really start by expressing interest in product and then start partnering closely with the product manager and maybe even doing a little bit of product work before they make that transition. And one tactical suggestion is there's oftentimes companies will have subject matter expert programs where they want to pair someone from a go-to-market function with a certain product squad or a certain product area. And so that's becoming a SME. It allows you to really get more involved and embedded into the product team. So, that's one suggestion. And then maybe last one is just the path I did, which is joining an early stage startup. There's really usually an expectation that everyone's going to get their hands dirty doing a lot of different things. And so, I think that's one way where you might have an opportunity to try product management if you end up joining an early stage company. So, maybe it was four, maybe it was more paths that you described. Join APM program. What was the second one again?…

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