Rohan shared his experience on how product roles differ across companies and products. He also shared the path into each of these Product Management roles and his learnings along the way, what worked and what did not.

1. How to Get the Right Product Role by
Netflix Product Manager
www.productschool.com

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3. COURSES
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7. Rohan Thakkar
TONIGHT’S SPEAKER

8. How to Get the Right
Product Role
Rohan Thakkar

9. Diverse PM experience
Test Engineer -> Program Manager -> Product Manager
Developer Platform & Maps PM - Microsoft
E-commerce, Chat-Bot, Facebook Marketing PM - Expedia
Content Engineering PM - Netflix (current)

10. Caveats
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions
of my current or past employers or managers :-)
Learnings based on my experiences

11. Product Personality
Strong opinions, weakly held
Be decisive, and stand by your decision
Own your mistake and learn from it
YOU are responsible

12. Product Management
● Product team
○ Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Product Designer, Data Science Manager, Data EM
● Why?
○ Identify and define opportunity with product strategy and relative priority.
○ Informed Captain: Product Manager
● What?
○ Given the product priority, technical capabilities, what use cases do we deliver and the
experience?
○ Informed Captain: Product Manager or Designer or Engineering Manager
● How?
○ How do we technically deliver it? What tech stack and technical architecture?
○ Informed Captain: Engineering Manager or Tech Lead

13. PM - you either have it or
you don’t

14. What do you need?
Growth Mindset
Discipline
Patience

15. Exact steps and recipe for
success

16. Step #1 - Learn & acquire knowledge

17. Step #2 - Relevant projects/gigs
Identify a user need and attempt to solve it, for real.
Hackathons
Hoodyfoody - as an “experiment”

18. Step #3 - Networking
Get a job
Network within your company
Reach out to friends
or friends of friends
or friends of friends of friends
Hackathons

19. Step #4 - Interview prep
Always be truthful, but sell yourself
Stories - Situation Action Results
Company principle and culture
Take home assignments
Interviews - “Company CEO comes to you with a
problem blah - what would you do?”
Request for feedback and learn
….be patient

20. Exact Steps for path into a Product Role
Step #1 - Learn & acquire knowledge
Step #2 - Relevant side project/gigs
Step #3 - Networking
Step #4 - Interview prep
….be patient

21. You are a PM, now what?

22. Basic getting started for PMs
Product
Manager
Product

23. Product playbook
(1 of 2)
User need and business opportunity
Complexity of the landscape - Why is there no magic wand to solve it?
Vision statement
North star mockups
Product Strategy - What feedback loops will we have to give us a competitive
advantage?
Success Metrics

24. Product playbook
(2 of 2)
Technical Architecture
Product Execution plan
Series of A/B test hypothesis to incrementally validate the product
Multi-quarter roadmap with current resources
If we get x more engineers and designers, we can deliver faster
...you have funding. Go!

25. Q&A

26. Part-time Product Management Courses in
San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Orange
County, New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Denver,
London, Toronto
www.productschool.com