Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea that if you spend enough time of deliberate practice, you eventually become a master in whatever field that you spend those hours in, and so when I Google how product managers train, a lot of the resources that come up are how to get your first job. In your opinion, given that you're very much grew in this space, is what are the best practices for deliberate training that is available for PMs both on and off the job? I definitely took formal training as part of my journey once I made the commitment to get in there. Again, these are recommendations more from me, not per say as part of my AWS recommendation cert. In fact, I took most of this training prior to come into AWS. But I found the pragmatic marketing training really helpful and that's where I started. Then I wanted to have credibility when I was working with engineering teams, so I moved on to the Scrum Alliance and I took Scrum and product owner training there. That gave me really good grounding, the pragmatic marketing training, a little bit misnomer in the brand because it's definitely product management and product marketing training converge, but it gave me a really good holistic business sense, whereas the Scrum and the product owner training, we're really more uniquely aligned to specific playing the role of a Scrum, leading a Scrum session, or being the product owner and a product cycle. Those things were like really important to kick-start me, and then there's tons of sites, and I tend to really just do a lot of searches. Training gets you to a certain point, but you're never going to walk in the door and you're never going to do something in exactly the same way you are schooled in a training course. You have to take all of that stuff in as input and then you have to factor it into the role that you're working in and make it work for you. I tend to normalize a lot of stuff that I learned in training and then spin it in a way that makes sense for the business I'm in. When I was in my EMC role that's where I worked first evolved into product management. I made it applicable to that role, and as I side-wayed into AWS, inner product management function, I refactored a lot of that, brought in a lot of new stuff, and thankfully, being an AWS, there are so many great training resources that are just part of our ecosystem. You just don't suffer finding training opportunity. But honestly, sometimes just searching online and finding those handful of resources that really make a lot of sense for you, that resonate with you, not everything does some things well, depends on your style and your profile and your personality. But I tend to find a handful of those things, and those are the places that I keep going back to. I haven't done any real formal training in product management probably for a handful of years now since I've been at AWS. For sure, and a lot of that as we cover in this course as well, is really hands on, almost apprenticeship like learning to, following what your managers doing or maybe what other teams are doing, sharing best practices. Again, going back to you the perspective of your role leading a product team in the training and certifications area, keeping an entire organization like AWS up-to-date on the latest Cloud practitioner trends, is tough. Can you share with us some strategies that you use to make sure that your team is working on the latest and the most up-to-date content? Yes. That's a great question, that's a challenging question too or challenging activity. First and foremost, honestly for the product managers in my team that are on technical portfolios, making sure that they really understand what's in those portfolios is supercritical. Making sure that they stay connected with the service teams that supercritical and making sure that they understand the value prop of any of the products or services in those portfolios is job one in terms of what puts them into the right mindset of what they need to do. Once they have a really good understanding of what the services are, do, enable, that then allows them to start to think about how are we going to approach different audiences, because we do training for a lot of different roles, and we have some people want to come to instructor-led training, some people want to take online training, so you got to factor all of that, and then on top of that, you need to lay in, so you have the modality of the topics, you have the modalities, and you're going to lay in the job function. It ends up becoming as pretty complicated matrix. I spent a lot of time trying to create visuals to simplify that or checklists or frameworks to help the team, and I have a really great team, lot of smart people. The best advice I'll give any managers try to find people that are smarter than you. That's your goal because that's how your team continues to elevate, and I think that's a core principle of AWS and the hiring philosophy anyway, we want to just keep raising that bar. Getting out there, getting feedback, talking to the key stakeholders that they work with, talking to customers about what they need or they're looking for, or what their preferences are, are really critical things that all the folks in my team need to stay focused on. For sure, and for some of our students, they're going to be very curious as to what a Senior Manager of product management at Amazon does. Can you walk us through a typical day for you? Yeah. Probably not as exciting as it might seem. I spend a lot of time in meetings, frankly, you're in a lot of different meetings. Sometimes you're in product reviews or quarterly review, sometimes you're with the team going through their strategy papers and making sure that you have a clarity on what their strategy is, we have a lot of team meetings. I try to stay really connected to our team and that I try to stay connected to stake holders. When one of my product managers is going into do a strategy review with a Services Team Leader, I tend to like to tag along, almost shadow it to some extent so I can listen to what they're saying, listened to what my product manager is talking about, and then use that as a two-way both coaching and development for them. But also what did I hear? Did I hear something different or did I hear it slightly different than what you're picking up? Then how does that go back and influence your strategy? I would say a lot of time is spent in just a lot of meetings, but then I typically try to block timeout. You know that as an Amazon, AWS employee, writing is quite important in our culture, and I think for any product manager actually writing a supercritical anyway, regardless of where you're at, and so I also try to block out chunks of time in my schedule where I can work on documents, whether I'm reviewing docs from the team and I have a lot of docs myself that I have to write. That is a skill that just keeps on giving, you write docs, you get feedback, you write better docs, you get more feedback, you just keep cycling through it. I think the folks on my team probably have a more interesting day to day job than I do because they're the ones that are like in the firing lines and really focused on like the exciting, what am I going to do for my customer, for this product? You make these over your years of your career, you make ebbs and flow trade-offs, and so I think when I first started out, I was really excited about defining curriculum and getting really involved and more of that type of work, and then as I started building teams outside and within AWS, I like doing that, it's a thing I like to do, it's a thing that resonates with me. There is nothing I like better than seeing combustion, sitting around the table or in a meeting on screen and watching people have "aha" moments. I enjoy most probably collaboration with the team. That's awesome to hear.
