Anneka Gupta: belief

Transcript context

…Ideally there's something within the company, there's some program I imagine that does this sort of thing. Some companies have something structured, some are just kind of ad hoc. Is there anything there you're just like should you talk about this in your interview just like, "Hey, I would really love to become product manager someday." Do you have anything along those lines that would help me get into that or not? Or should you not talk? Well, I think it depends. For instance, when I joined LiveRamp, which was my previous company as a software engineer, I actually did say in the interview process I want to become a product manager I think. At that point I was still early in my career, I didn't know for sure, but I said that. Now that was a 20-person startup, so it was worth saying it because they didn't really have a product team and I wanted to put it out there that that was something I was interested in growing into. If you're joining a 5000-person company, you're hiring manager is probably not going to receive it well if you're like, "Hey, I'm interviewing for product marketing, but really what I want to do is go into product." So, it just kind of depends on the company and the stage. You have to play that wisely. But I think once you're in a company, then finding a way to make a relationship with the product leader, or if you're in a startup that is really small and they don't have product management, well then you have the opportunity to take on projects for sure that are product management related because no one is doing that work. Really taking initiative to do that so that you can find an inroad into product management. Kind of along these lines, you have a really unique perspective on new PMs because you teach product management at Stanford. You've been doing that for a while. I just want to ask you work with a lot of people that are new to product, thinking about getting into product, then get into product. What do you find are the things that new PMs or people getting into product most misunderstand about the role of PM or are most surprised by when they become product managers?…

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