Hari Srinivasan: preference

Transcript context

…A lot of the people listening to this are people that want to get into product management and aren't PMs yet. I imagine you get asked this a lot, how do I get into product management? What is your advice that you often give? Yeah. Well, let's start with how we look at the world, which is this idea of skills. We have a diagram that I think about, which is skills are on a triangle. You might have heard this one before. I don't know if you have. Skills are on a triangle, and I think you need three different skills to be a great PM. You need to be a Steven Spielberg type creator. Something around data science and the ability to really look at data and see patterns and then see the future. And then especially get more senior. I think it's a lot of general management. You have to basically be able to shine and innovate across the team, understand the budget, understand how companies differently work. I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the center of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges. There's always someone who's this exceptional data scientist and the ability to maybe be a great GM and lead and inspire, or maybe someone who's so creative, who can lead a team in a different way. I think that one thing I would really, really encourage people to do is understand where they fit on that graph and gravitate towards those kinds of roles. Because a lot of times, I think what people do is they think they have to make up for the other pieces of that graph, and it leads them to a path where maybe they're not playing to their strengths. That's one thing I always encourage people. The other thing I would say, and I know it's a little bit of luck in how this works, but I think about my journey, one thing I've really found was really helpful is, I was on the first team that did a hybrid SUV in the US. At the time, it was the Hybrid Escape at Ford. I came from the Midwest and it was one of those products where people would really drive out for hundreds of miles and see, and really a community gravitated around because it was a very special product. Being able to work on something that people loved, really loved early on, and see what that felt like and look like and that success was, it created a bar for what I would hope my products could do. It would. If you're able to get into something that people really love and feel that and experience that, and really understand what that looks like and what it takes to get there, I think that's actually been a really valuable lesson throughout my career because you can understand the whole path on the way up. I look back at that as really something that I would hope other people if they can do it. I know you're making world decisions on many different criteria, but try to find something people love and really experience what that feels like. To build on that, with PMs that work for you and work with you, when they're looking to get better and build their skills, other than go take some courses on LinkedIn Learning, what do you often recommend they do to help become stronger and better at their job?…

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