Main takeaways: -Identifying the right stakeholders in your growth -How to leverage all opportunities correctly with these stakeholders -Important skills to demonstrate in your work that make you eligible for next level

1. www.productschool.com
How to Grow and Become a Seasoned PM
by Microsoft Sr PM

2. CERTIFICATES
Your Product Management Certificate Path
Product Leadership
Certificate™
Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
Product Management
Certificate™

3. Corporate
Training
Level up your team’s Product
Management skills

4. Free Product Management Resources
BOOKS
EVENTS
JOB PORTAL
COMMUNITIES
bit.ly/product_resources
COURSES

5. How to become a Seasoned PM
ADITYA SINGH
SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER MICROSOFT

6. About Me
• Name: Aditya Singh
• Company: Microsoft
• Designation: Senior Program (a.k.a) Product Manager
• Total Experience: 7 years (4 years as PM in Microsoft)
• Role:
• PM for PowerPoint Web app.
• Experience as PM for PowerPoint Mobile (Android & iOS) app.

7. Agenda
Difference between a PM and a
Seasoned PM
Managing Perception
Deep Dives
Change Management
Customer Empathy
Influencing Strategy
Most important attribute of a
seasoned PM

8. Difference
b/w a PM &
Seasoned PM
A PM creates impact however a seasoned PM creates the
impact with the right perception.
• Impact: What you show
Ex: Achieved X OKR by doing Y,Z
• Perception: What your work group* thinks about your
contributions
Ex.: Will your work group vouch that X OKR wouldn’t be
achieved if you weren’t there
• *Work Group – All the members across discipline your work with to achieve the OKR

9. Managing Perception
▪ Perception gets developed as work with multiple people to
achieve your deliverables
▪ Mastery of the following 3 pillars will help you get established
as a seasoned PM
1. Change Management: How well you manage all stakeholders
to achieve your tasks and show impact
2. Customer Empathy: Does your workgroup sees you as a good
customer advocate
3. Influence Strategy: Does your work impacts product/business
strategy and what are you doing to increase that impact

10. Change Management
1. Good Product Management Skills.
• Understand the goal you’re are trying to achieve and be convinced with it. In case not, improve
the goal.
• Make sure you are doing what’s right for the customer and business as well (Scope definition)
• Build consensus on the proposal by working with people from across disciplines, hierarchy and
teams
2. Contributing to team knowledge
• Creating visibility about your project via email statuses, updates & demos in exec meetings.
Focus should be on sharing learnings.
• Help team build good proposals by providing constructive feedback in meetings, spec reviews
etc.

11. Change Management
3. Seek regular feedback from all important stakeholders
• Identify all important stakeholders in the project and ensure to do regular 1:1 with all of them
Important Stakeholders: Engineering Manager, GEM, Fellow PMs who contributed, Own Manager, Skip
Level Managers
• 2 questions to discuss in 1:1 with stakeholders (immediate)
1. What is working well?
2. What can be improved?
• Conversation guide with skip managers
• Your career aspirations and opportunities you have
• In your areas what could you do more to achieve the goal faster
• Try to pick their brain on what are the top problems they would like to be solved in the product /
project

12. Customer Empathy
1. Become a customer advocate (Develop an understanding of the latent needs of customers)
Primary Research – How frequently do you indulge in this?
• Customer Feedback – Daily (At least 10 piece of feedback)
• Past User research – 1 per week
• New User Researches & Customer Interviews – 1 per month
Secondary Research (Most Imp.)
• Product usage telemetry – As high as possible
• Compete Study – 1 per month
2. Improve customer obsession within team
• Add values in meetings and reviews by bringing insights about customer needs and helping team go deeper
in defining latent needs of customers.
• Initiate a culture within the team where everyone connects with customers and develop more advocates.

13. Influence Strategy
1. Understand Strategy
• Attend business review meetings of yours and other products as well and see what questions exec
asks. Will give you insights about what problems the business is looking to solve.
• Read and internalize product goals and map your deliverables to the goals and look for opportunities
to increase impact
2. Initiator to solve ambiguous problems
• Ambiguous problems are problems to which no one has answers to (there are plenty of these in the
product)
Ex: What does it take to beat a competitor in existing markets
• Pick such problems one at a time and work with a team to come up with a solution
• Contribute to other people success in solving ambiguous problems

14. Most Important Attribute of a Seasoned PM
Be patient and be subtle Ask for feedback and work on it
• Some efforts you try won’t deliver as expected –
Be patient and keep trying
• Be subtle about brining insights in the meeting and
encourage (not force) others to develop customer
obsession and think about strategy
• One way to measure – People actively seeks and
value your feedback in all the tasks there are doing
• Set up regular 1:1 with all stakeholders, get
feedback and diligently work on it
• Give feedback to fellow colleagues and help them
improve – First step in becoming a leader

15. Thank You!

16. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training