A Degree in Everything

Lisa: My name is Lisa Dyer. I work at IBM and I currently run IBM's associate product manager program.

Suzanne: Okay. Associate product manager program because I didn't dive in to whatever that means. So many acronyms, IBM, APM, is that ...

Lisa: APM, yup.

Suzanne: Yeah, exactly. I see product management is nothing if not just a whole series of acronyms for things we spend our careers learning.

Lisa: For sure, and there's like a Slackbot for that too.

Suzanne: All right. Let's talk about your particular path into product management because, well, frankly, we ask all of our guests about this. From what I can glean, you did study some computer science, you have some kind of engineering management background, how did you go from the beginning to being the head of APM at IBM?

Lisa: Yeah. When I was growing up and looking around what college degree I wanted, I was having some trouble figuring that out because nothing around me really looks like what I wanted to do which was give me a degree on everything, I wanted to do everything. I ended up going to a liberal arts college where I studied international communications. I basically took articles, translated them into multiple different languages, Finnish, Swedish, what have you, and wrote articles in different languages. There was a huge variety of things that I could learn about and so that was the closest to me as the degree in everything. Then I got a little bit fascinated by computer science because, first of all, it's logical, it deals with solving problems and I'm a maker at heart. I took a few studies in a language called SNOBOL which now probably doesn't exist anymore, it was kind of an early artificial intelligence language. Then I decided at some point this isn't enough, I want to do something different. I want to get more into the design aspect of things so I took a product design, industrial design degree.

Then coming out of that, I started looking around, well, where could I apply this to. I know a lot about stuff a little bit, I can design products, I love making products, I love finding problems and figuring out solutions for them so what can I do with this. I joined a series of start-ups, I was growing up in Finland at this time. An American company who was dealing with supply chain software bought a company in Finland, it was a tiny little company, 40 people or so and they were doing some e-commerce stuff. I joined that company and then came over to America, to Austin, Texas to integrate with the team.

I, then, found again that I needed some variety so I went into a couple of different start-ups and this will be the 12 people at a CEO kitchen table kind of start-ups, doing things like predictive analytics, application management and all these kinds of things, primarily technical. Then I started getting interested in how can we make these products better because my team was developing content around the products and how to use them so we were basically doing technical documentation for our users and some presales documentation as well. I started focusing on the product itself and why do we have to spend all this money creating all this basic documentation when we can improve the product itself and make it more intuitive and then focus our content on higher value things, so that was my first pass at product.

Then I joined a company called Lombardi Software in Austin, Texas. It was a business process management company. I was number 40 at the time. While I was there six years or so, we grew to about 250, 280 people. This is where I really had an awakening as a product manager. I found myself building platforms for our clients, our users, our partners, our own services folks and our support folks to co-create solutions together, that wasn't something that was happening so I built a platform to enable that. There's a very pivotal moment when I understood I'm a product manager. A friend of mine, John Reynolds, at the company, he had moved from services to a product manager role. He was by my office one day after I launched his platform and it was successful, he pokes his head into my office and he says, "Hey, why aren't you in the product management team?" I'm like, "Do you really think I'm a product manager?" He goes, "Duh," or words to that effect. That really clicked, everything that I had been doing up until now, I now had a name for it.

Suzanne: Did you know what product management was in that moment? Was your hesitation, I don't know if I'm good enough to be a product manager or you just didn't know that that was a thing even though you've been doing it for, sounds like, almost a decade, frankly?

Lisa: Yeah. I think I knew it was a thing but there were aspects to the role that I wasn't as exposed to, if you will, kind of the business side of things. The platform I built had no revenue but it indirectly contributed to our revenue. I just had less of the exposure into the revenue aspects of things, the business modeling and pricing kinds of things so I didn't think that I was a product manager because of that so I really set out to add those things to my toolkit after that.

Suzanne: Did you go and take classes? I mean, you're talking about building business acumen.

Lisa: Yeah. I took some classes. I also took some classes at MIT and Harvard around dealing with difficult people and situations which was an amazing course, it was taught by one of the lead negotiators in the Egypt–Israel situation back in the '70s or something where he had, literally, a gun to his head. It was a really really eye–opening course. Then there was another one about negotiation skills. I felt that I needed to really hone those skills because it was pivotal to growing myself as a product manager. I read a bunch of books, I talked to other product managers a lot, that was really primarily how I learned other things.

Suzanne: Inside the company at Lombardi?

Lisa: Inside the company and outside the company.

Suzanne: Just go over and say, "Hey, can you tell me more about what you do all day?"

Lisa: Yeah, and outside the company because one of the things I really want to make sure is that I never got stuck inside any given company, I want to get outside of it and get everyone's perspective so I talked to a lot of product managers at the time. I decided that this is what I want to do.

The other aspect that really interested me is building teams, getting very talented people together, connecting to great ideas and helping those people do the best work they ever could imagine doing. It's kind of a servant leadership role if you think of it, you're trying to bring the best out in people all around you where everyone is smarter than you in the room.

Suzanne: It's a theme that comes up a lot in the show exactly is the product manager role is not one for glory. If that's what you're looking for, I hate to break it to you, listeners out there, that's not what it is. It is a role for creators, you know, you talk about loving to build things. It is a role that if you can find within yourself an ability to build and foster intimacy across different perspectives because that's the other thing, we all know developers see the world a specific kind of way, designers equally business people, to lump all of them into a single generic category and say business people, have a way of speaking and thinking and so it's absolutely a critical part of the process, for sure.

Lisa: I think that's a great point. You're describing the necessity for a product manager to be able to speak in different languages and I bring that back to my very first college degree where I wanted to be able to tailor my message to speak the language of the listener, of the recipient. I think that mindset actually helped me later on because now I'm working with engineers, designers, sellers, marketers, stakeholders, executives, all of them. For all of these conversations, to be able to build a high trust relationship, you have to be able to speak their language.

Suzanne: Right. How did you get from Lombardi to IBM?

Lisa: 2010, I think, around Christmas time, I looked at my phone and I saw an email from our CEO that said, "Hey, IBM just acquired us." To be honest ...

Suzanne: Is that the subject?

Lisa: Yes.

Suzanne: We've been bought by IBM.

Lisa: We're going to IBM. To be honest, my visceral reaction, just having really no knowledge about how IBM operates, just knowing it as a big brand, my first reaction, honestly, was I have to find another job because I didn't know anything about it. I've been a start-up person all my life, going into nothing and building up something from scratch was my thing. I thought about it for the first two months but as I started to research the company more and get to know people, I literally spent that first two months researching up and down, all across everything, the products, all 3,000 of them, the people, all 400,000 ...

Suzanne: That's your developer brain coming up, by the way.

Lisa: Probably, yes.

Suzanne: That's the structure piece.

Lisa: Yes, it's my market research. I came out with an understanding and a perspective that there are really great pockets of excellence in this company. Yes, there are some inertia in there as well and forthright antibodies who resist change. Those three things, to me, painted a perfect place for a start-up person to be in because the inertia is all busy being inert, the antibodies, you could try to bring them along, some will come, some will not, don't worry about it and then the pockets of excellence. We had to integrate our products and our people first and that took about a year and a half to two years. During that phase, I became very passionate about making change.

Suzanne: Inside of IBM.

Lisa: Yes.

Suzanne: Okay.

Lisa: Yup. I saw so much potential and there are ways of working that could have been much better. You think about products often from a seller perspective, who's going to buy our thing and we optimize our language around that and our ways of working or you're engineering led, you have this awesome piece of tech and you try to fit it in to a solution. What we wanted to do was bring it to a more user-centric way of thinking about problems, finding the right problems to solve and why and then bringing down silos that were preventing that radical collaboration together, that's one thing about big companies. By the way, this can happen in smaller companies too, you just become focus on your own area of expertise and before you know it, you have silos, wall guard those around you and you lose visibility into what everybody is doing. Think of the loss of serendipitous opportunity there when you have these silos so that's what I wanted to change.

Suzanne: You wanted to bust down all the walls of IBM.

Lisa: I wanted to bust them down.

Suzanne: They let you.

Lisa: Well, I'm a little bit of a rule breaker too.

Suzanne: Right.

Lisa: I have a penchant for the grassroots activism. As a product manager, anyone really, it's your responsibility to look at any given rule and to question why that exists. There are good reasons for rules to exist but certain things exist there, in my opinion, to optimize for the 0.01% of something going wrong and you lose out on all the other great things that could be happening. For example, I have created this platform where we enabled our folks inside the company, our users and our partners to co-create solutions together and to share their knowledge and share their solution assets together with the goal that it would help everyone get their solutions out 70% faster, benefit to everybody. This wasn't a common practice in IBM, there were rules around that and those were the very first things that I had to sort out as inhibitors when I brought this platform into the company.

Suzanne: APM, it stands for associate product manager program, is that right?

Lisa: Yes. In IBM, just so you know, product managers are called offering managers.

Suzanne: Right, okay. I'm glad you bring that up because part of the challenge aside from all the challenges we speak about on this show and that we're speaking about is that the product manager position exists under different euphemistic titles in different organizations. For anyone listening who wants to get into product management at IBM, you're looking for, essentially, a PO. Is it product offering? How do you describe that?

Lisa: Offering manager.

Suzanne: OM.

Lisa: Yes, an OM.

Suzanne: Gosh.

Lisa: Offerings, really, are the entire ecosystem, they encompass the entire thing around a given solution. You have a product or service, that product or service could be either a software service or a hardware service. Just as an umbrella term, an offering is agnostic to whatever that product is, if that makes sense.

Suzanne: Right. Because they want it to equally encapsulate in the mind a service offering or a product offering.

Lisa: Yeah.

Suzanne: I think that, myself included candidly, IBM is so big. I mean, how many employees globally do you think, approximately?

Lisa: Probably around 400,000.

Suzanne: It's enormous.

Lisa: Yeah.

Suzanne: I don't think a lot of people know what IBM does. There's this piece, okay, well, we know there's computers, we know there's a consulting-ish element, can you give our listeners just a brief cross section into what some of these offerings really constitute under the umbrella that is IBM?

Lisa: Sure. IBM clients are all over the world at all kinds of different sizes. IBM is really a full service house in that you can get your IT infrastructure there, you can get your analytics there, you can get your cognitive solutions. IBM talks about cognitive area, it talks about data as a renewable resource that we all have to use everyday and it's growing just mind-boggling fast. It basically has all of these components to build an offering or solution for your business with every vital component in them.

Now, I mentioned there's something like, at last count, 3,000 or so products, those could be products that you buy, it could be on-premise solutions, they could be SaaS products that you subscribe to, they could be hardware, they could be hardware components, they could be a combination of hardware and software. It's a very broad range of products and so the clients that work with us work with us because there is this full suite of capabilities that they can come to.

Suzanne: Yeah, it's whole product solution to the power of 100, basically.

Lisa: It really is, yeah.

Suzanne: Presumably then, in an organization with 400,000 or so employees and 3,000 or so products, you have more than a few offering managers or product managers as we talk about them. The APM program that you're piloting or you launched this ... I mean, you are the person ...

Lisa: I launched it, yeah, early last year.

Suzanne: Early last year is like an in-house training, incubatory ... I mean, help us to understand what are you doing.

Lisa: Yeah. This isn't that different from the Facebook rotational PM programs or the Google APM programs. As you know, Marissa Mayer, when she was at Google, she has started the Google APM product. The premise there is that you define the type of product manager that will fit in terms of the capabilities that this person used to have from a culture fit perspective. You define what that person looks like and you apprentice them such that when you release them out in the wild, they can be most effective in their roles.

Suzanne: When you say out in the wild, in this context you're talking about out in the wild within the IBM.

Lisa: Within your company, yes. The way it works is that I defined with my team, nothing happens in a silo, I have an amazing team. We set out first to do all the market research, what are all the programs out there, why do they exist, what are the differentiators, how did they work, how could this be different.

One of the things that I found to be a differentiator for this program is that oftentimes when you come in to a company as a product manager, that role is fairly well-understood inside the company, it has a definition that everybody understand. You're really landing into the company where you're an apprentice in a well-defined role. It's different in IBM because this capacity, this talent, this role of associate PM didn't really exist so there was no shared definition for what this role does and can do. Not only are you coming in and we apprentice you into this role but everyone around you, the teams that you then land into, are also learning what it means. By the way, this isn't the only transformation going on in IBM, there's agile transformation, there's new ways of marketing, how we work with marketing, how we work with sellers, there's all this change going on and so everybody around you also is adjusting through this which is different from many other companies.

Suzanne: I want to go back a step because how you described the experience of coming into an organization as a PM is an important point, it's part of the reason this show exists. For example, I could be a perfectly seasoned product manager with a specific set of experiences and a significant number of accomplishments and then walk into an organization and be a beginner again because what that organization, to build on what you're saying, has defined as the product manager role is outside of what I know.

I think that works both ways, by the way, which is to say maybe I came from a start-up environment where I got to touch a lot, I was doing user experience design, I was owning the product in a scrum type of environment and then I come into a more structured organization, "No, no, no, we have user experiences. You're not going to be doing any wireframe, settle down," or the inverse where you are used to having a lot of collaborators and then suddenly the expectation is, well, we need you to own a bigger piece so that's a real challenge in any organization. Can it even be streamlined in IBM? I mean, with 3,000 different products, isn't every vertical had its own idea of what they need to serve well?

Lisa: Yeah. That's a great question. I mentioned this cognitive aspect of IBM's product and essentially it comes from technologies like Watson.

Suzanne: I love Watson, by the way. For those of you who don't know, IBM has a phenomenal constellation of APIs to really leverage in machine learning opportunities, bots. If you want to get into the neural net way of doing, get involved ... There's a developer program around it, right? Watson developer program?

Lisa: There is, yeah. The APIs, you can use them on a cloud platform that IBM has.

Suzanne: It's cool stuff but we digress.

Lisa: Context is important. In any product, you need to really understand what problems you're solving and for whom, that's not different across any other product. Regardless of what product you're working on, you have to start with understanding the users and the buyers' problems and to figure out what problems are worth solving from a business perspective as well. I think there's some common things across all of the product manager, all the offering managers in IBM that regardless of what product you're working on, you need to have.

The context of the problem itself is, of course, where it's different. There's a lot of talk about and I think this is one of the problems in hiring product managers is that it's kind of a chick and an egg thing, I need a product manager, I need to hire a product manager and this is my problem domain, it's, whatever, social media and I want to be able to have this product manager hit the ground running, be able to understand the problem context lightning fast and bring new ideas. I've seen two counts of thought here where one is the expectation that the product manager already knows that problem domain and this really work with this product and these users for a long time and then the other cap, it says it doesn't matter what your problem domain is, as a product manager, you have to have the ability to ask the right questions to understand the problem domain and the users to get into their shoes.

Suzanne: Yeah. I mean, this is such a critical point. First of all, managing a product consultancy for as many years as we have and we do end-to-end solutions have had countless clients come in and say, "We want your help conceiving, designing and building this entirely unique thing that we want to bring to market. Can you also show us three other examples of times when you build this unique thing so that we can rely that you're the right partner?" I think anybody out there in this space of whether it's design, whether it's engineering can relate to that. You're touching on, for me, what is such an important ... I talk about this a lot in the context of instruction and coaching, product management is nothing if not a series of frameworks and ideas for how to think differently about things.

To your point, yeah, the context will be the context will be the context and what you're trying to build up is a breadcrumb trail that says, "Great, I'm going to ..." I do an assignment with students of my class where they basically come in day one, they have to figure out a problem. Then they get spit out at the end of the program with a problem that they've conceived, validated, iterated on and ultimately put a design, road map and business model around. I think it's the same thing, I say, "Look, if you're successful, it actually has less to do with the product that you came up with in the context of the course and everything to do with the fact that you can go through this process end-to-end now on your own 100 times over and that 100 times over is actually what's going to build your skills as a PM. These are the frameworks and then you learn the frameworks and then you assimilate it and then you assimilate it in a different context."

Lisa: Yeah, that's perfectly true. I think in the associate offering manager program we have, we have this bootcamp phase where once we've hired the associate offering managers in, we put them through a three-month bootcamp. Which is a big investment, three months is a long time for your business leaders to wait for this talent.

Suzanne: Right, and so you're deploying them into business units as active PMs.

Lisa: Yes.

Suzanne: Okay. It's like an internship inside an internship.

Lisa: Yes. Kind of it is, yeah. The bootcamp really consists of a couple of parts. There's the frameworks, as you said, of what we need these folks to learn and to apply them, then, on real projects that come from the business. I work with the business unit leaders and the product leaders to bring problems to the bootcamp for the APMs to solve. These could range from, hey, our funnel sucks, we don't know really why, there's a bunch of data but we don't know what it's telling us. Within two weeks, the associate offering manager will look at that data and they'll go talk to people because they alone is just going to give you some patterns, some questions to ask but you got to do the homework to go talk to the people to ask the right questions so you can actually get actual answers. They do these small projects and they usually last about two weeks or so.

The output of that is a new idea for the sponsoring product team to implement and it could be something as simple as, okay, your conversion rate is really bad. Discoverability is not a problem, clearly, when looking at the metrics and you have a healthy number of people who are trying your products so why aren't they converting. One output and a recommendation coming out of this could be, well, you've designed the capacity for this trial period to be so big that no one's converting because they can do all their work for free with this capacity or whatever it may be, just an example. There are concrete things that the team can then take and implement on their short-term road map.

Then there's the second part of that which is an incubation project phase where R&D might bring in a piece of tech and the work involved is a seven-week exploration, what problems exist that we could solve with this technology. It's a cross-functional team of the PMs, the designers, the developers and all the stakeholders and business owners working together. Out comes a recommendation or a point of view on where the product team needs to take this in a not short-term but slightly mid to longer term road map.

Suzanne: Okay. I have 1,000 questions that I want to ask, I'm just going to try and put one foot in front of the other here. First, let me back up, it sounds like what you're suggesting is that, initially, the idea will be individual business units would just hire PMs as they need them. Then along comes this program and what you're essentially advocating is that the business leaders come to your pool of talent to hire and the value that you're creating is we're going to put some standardization around the frameworks that we teach, the ways to approach problem-solving and then you can build the context, specific insights by working with that person in a capacity. You're essentially rerouting all new hires into IBM through this program at least in a product management role.

Lisa: Yeah, that's the premise.

Suzanne: I mean, that's amazing.

Lisa: Yeah. We also teach them how IBM works. To your point about context again, every PM is different across companies so we teach them things about how does IBM work and these are just very concrete things. Many of our APMs come out of college, they may have master's degrees, some advanced degree, undergrad degrees, they come from all walks of life, liberal arts to engineering to whatever. They need a common and shared toolkit and a vocabulary, and that vocabulary often is specific to the company they work in. Through the project work, they also learn these things. When they deploy to their teams at the end of the bootcamp, they now go with that toolkit.

Suzanne: I mean, it's a significant investment on IBM's part in education which is huge. I mean, part of my work in the product community is trying to help address some of the tension or the fissures between on one side, companies come to me all the time, "I'm looking for a PM, it's hard to find great talent," on the other hand, I've got folks sending me resumes all the time saying, "How can I get in the door? How can we fix this," it's part of why we even incorporated some of this conversation into the podcast. Meanwhile, you're essentially opening the doors and saying, "Not only would we love to have you here at IBM but we would love to start your career by investing in your education as a PM."

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, it's a phenomenal investment. Well, it's early days in terms of the program, we've had a couple of maybe two or three deployments of AOM classes thus far. We measure everything maniacally and there are some early signs that this is the best way to do it. The teams that we see this talent are seeing real benefit both in the short-term and in terms of being able to make change, I mentioned change several times. The profile that I'm really looking for for people who come through this program is in a tweetable version, data driven, user-centric entrepreneurs who want to work on making change.

Suzanne: That's me. Basically, you just offered me ... We could talk about that more. Are you running it like a cohort? I would imagine that you have to have a hiring period where it's like, "Okay. All the new entrants ..." Is that how it works?

Lisa: It's a seasonable model. I mentioned that we bring in a lot of the associate offering managers that come in through the program have just graduated or they've recently graduated, early career professionals. Some come with their own start-ups, they're running their own start-ups or some come with some intern experience in product management in places like Google and Facebook. We bring them in twice a year to align with the university graduation season. It gets earlier and earlier every year but for the spring class, we start around February timeframe and by May, we will have selected ... It's a very small pool of people that we select. We will have selected our summer class by end of May. Then again, we start up in the fall around September timeframe, at which time we'll be hiring both for the summer and the following winter class. It's a cyclical, seasonal program.

I think there's opportunity though within this program to start looking at other cycles as well because, as I mentioned, three months is a long time to wait and so twice a year is not particularly agile. I think there's other places where we ought to be looking for this talent and there's more and more of these outfits that are coming up like Product School, General Assembly, many others where there is a similar model where talent comes in and they do a project based thing for three months and then they go out in the world and find a place. I think that will be a natural way to tap into talent and make it more frequent.

Suzanne: Right. We offer General Assembly a one week format of the product management class, for example. I say to people who are considering it, the one week course is essentially an accelerated version of a 10-week course that I also teach, and I say, "The one week version is great if you're already working as a PM and you just want a really quick hit of a bunch of stuff that you can learn, a bunch of which you'll forget because it's highly compacted but when you go back to the office come Monday, you have a place to immediately start assimilating that information." There's no merit in jamming it all down in an accelerated timeline only to have it collect dust on the mental shelf because, as we described earlier, product management is learning to think differently and then applying that into different context. What I love about the program as you're describing it is that this internship piece is critical because you're getting the education, you're getting the conceptual but then you're also getting a place to assimilate it in a really real way.

I mean, another thing that gets brought up a lot on the show from guests when you say, "What advice do you have for someone looking to get a job," "We do some side projects." I mean, this is a side project with cache. I mean, it's IBM.

Lisa: Yeah. I learned product management on the job. People come at it from all kinds of different ways. Fundamentally, you're always having to learn things and unless you're applying them as you learn them, they're not as likely to stick. That's what I love about the project based learning because it has the highest return and the highest retention rate. When you go out and you deploy to your teams, you've already done that work on real projects. There's a variety of products too, going back to our mention about the different products and the different problem domains. You get a really good taste of the different problem domains and what kinds of things users are struggling out there and why.

Suzanne: Is students the right word? I mean, what do you describe your members of your class?

Lisa: Awesome people.

Suzanne: As part of the program, do you help each awesome person deploy into a business unit that you think might be a good match for their skill set? There's also kind of a mentoring matchmaking piece that's really important, can you talk about that a little?

Lisa: I think you put your finger on the toughest part of the job. In order to make the best matchmaking, if you will, of the associate offering manager and the receiving teams, not only do you need to understand that associate offering manager well and there's ways in which we do it. Before bootcamp and during bootcamp, we create these things, we call them baseball cards or profile cards which really paint a very deep understanding of who this person is, what motivates them, where did they come from, what did they have in the toolkit, how did they rank on the different dimensions of a product manager role today to give them a baseline. I use that same thing to go to the receiving teams to do the matchmaking process with them.

I also need to understand from the business perspective, from the product context perspective, where is that product now, is it a new product, is it on-prem, is it SaaS, is it both, what's your role in that look like, what is the biggest need in terms of the capacity. Maybe you're getting more into SaaS and you don't have that experience yet or you don't have enough capacity on your team to do that, maybe that's where I can help you. It's a very deep conversation that happens before we hire the associate OMs and then at the time when we start matching them to their receiving teams.

Then after that, we go back, measuring frantically. We go back a few months, three months, six months after these associate OMs have been on their teams and we do another review of, okay, how is this helping, how is it not helping, all those kinds of things.

Suzanne: Right. I guess the thing that it brings to the mind is the feedback loop which as we know, as product managers, is such an important part of the process. Yet, it's interesting how often we don't, ourselves, or we can't readily get feedback certainly in the context of hiring or trying to get a job or in the context of how am I doing. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart especially because we all have our special blend of skills. Product managers are great generalists and then there tends to be two or three areas where we find this is what I like to do, this is how I like to create impact. Knowing that about yourself and then being able to represent that well is so important as a person going out to look for a new career. I think more companies need to get dialed into what kind of PM do we want because more than just the job description, the right PM is going to change, as you said, depending on the adaption life cycle, depending on so many other variables as well. It's an exciting program.

Lisa: It is, yeah. There is a time and place for the different types of PMs that we have. You wouldn't hire a growth hacker PM necessarily when you're just starting up your program, right? I think one underlying theme that we have with our product managers that we hire is that they are change makers, they are change agents and we bring them in as such. I mentioned earlier that the changes are just happening for the role itself but all the different roles are changing and adjusting and adapting to what's going on in the market in ways in which we need to work.

That resiliency has to be there when you come in and it's, what I like to call, an immutable quality. There are immutable qualities about a person and their immutable qualities, things that you can teach, things that are really hard to teach. When we assess the candidates who come into this program, we assess them on those two kinds of things. If you can teach it, great, what you're looking for is an intelligent person who can learn and who wants to learn. Certain aspects of it are very hard to teach, you can teach them but it takes time. Those qualities do have to exist. One of the qualities is being able to and, in fact, preferring to be in a situation where you have to do a lot of context switching, you're zooming in and out of things, you like to think big but you also like to dive deep, you like to do research but then you're also bias for action. These are almost opposing things and you have to be able to seamlessly deploy them when it's the right thing to do.

Suzanne: Yeah. It's a pendulum swing.

Lisa: It is.

Suzanne: People get stuck in one side or the other. I mean, most of the time, it's in the tactical. I always enjoy this. Whenever I teach road mapping, in particular, you can really see that most of our internal thermostats are set at the tactical level. Once you get down to an epic or a project, everyone comes alive. You ask somebody to establish an OKR for a product for the next five years and it's like, "I don't know how to think big." That is a big part of the journey is swinging toward that longer term, that more strategic mindset and then not getting too comfortable there either.

Lisa: It's tough to assess people on being able to come up with a vision, how do you come up with a vision, how do you test that. It is all about the methodology that we developed to really bring that out in our candidates.

Suzanne: What's the ideal outcome for anybody who comes through the program? How do you sell them on this is going to be good for you because? I mean, I see why there's value but maybe I'm already past the target demo in this case.

Lisa: Well, I think one of the things that has personally driven me to do this and dedicate a year and a half of my life into this program as opposed to working on a product like a traditional product is the impact that you can have. It's far far greater than working on a single product because you have that element of making change. I know just from talking to the associate offering managers who come through the program and who have been candidates, that they feel that one of the biggest differentiators of this program is, in fact, that it has that change agency component. You're not landing in to a world of one thing where everyone expects you to be heading a certain way and do certain things, you are apprenticing with a company that is changing and that's exciting to them.

Other aspects of just the brand itself, IBM opens doors obviously and huge global customers. It's easier perhaps, as a product manager, to engage in explorations about offering solutions that you can give to clients compared to if you're at start-up, it's not easy to knock on every door.

Suzanne: Well, if that ever fails to resonate, you could always just say, "Nobody ever got fired for hiring an IBM APM."

Lisa: I like that.

Suzanne: All right. I mean, essentially, you've pivoted your entire career in service of helping people to get the job, learn the job, love the job which is, as you may know, a segment that I like to do here. I want to ask you to zoom out from beyond just the context of the program, what can you say to folks that are listening in that might be looking to get into product management or get that next opportunity? What advice would you, Lisa, give to that person for how to get the job?

Lisa: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not going to say anything earth-shatteringly new here but look at why you want to do it in the first place. As you mentioned, it's not the most glamorous, easy job to do. At times, you have to be prepared to be misunderstood for long periods of time, you have to make hard trade-offs, you're going to piss people off in certain scenarios so you have to really want to do that.

One of the reasons I've heard people say wanting to get into product management, they've been in engineering or presales or designer or wherever, is the ability to work on the bigger picture. First, decide if that is one of the things that you want to do because, yes, there'll be execution, every great product manager is also a great project manager and they'll be negotiating in difficult situations with difficult people and all the things that go with it and there'll be leadership aspects to it, you are in charge of people and their careers and they don't report directly to you in most cases. I think understand your motivation first. Go back to when you're five years old, what could you not stop doing. I like to ask that question and it's a question that I ask myself.

The second thing is an idea, come up with an idea, observe things around you. Like when I walk downtown in Chicago, I'm looking up to the skies and all around me and I'm imagining 10 years from now, it's going to look completely different, it's going to sound completely different. Just go out there, open your senses, come up with an idea, bring a couple of buddies with you and go build the thing, test it out, see what happens. That's really the entrepreneurship and the making of it that you need to be excited about.

Suzanne: What about hard lessons learned on the job either drawing from mistakes that you've personally made or just places where you see folks get stuck?

Lisa: Yeah. I think many of us have this innate desire to get things done and do the best we can and not always ask for help or always raise the flag. For me, certainly, this is the hard lesson that I've learned is that when I came up against a problem that was really hard to solve, I went into all kinds of personal heroics to do it when I should have actually raise the flag especially with the stakeholders and articulated the problem and ask for that help. I think that's one of the key lessons and communicate early, overcommunicate and make sure that there's visibility into what's going on and don't always count on yourself to do all the personal heroics.

Suzanne: What's your favorite thing about being a product manager? I mean, some guy stopped by your desk one day and said, "I think this will be good for you." You've spent the last number of years doing this. What do you love about it? He was right, obviously.

Lisa: I just love finding problems that people have like real problems that will make their lives easier and it's in small ways, it's in big ways. I just love doing that, the act of it. I love working with other people who are smarter than me, they have expertise, scenarios where I don't have it and so I can learn from them, hopefully they learn something from me and then coming up with a solution. I mentioned I'm a maker by heart and that's never going away, I'm always going to be a maker at heart. Whatever we call it, 10 years or 100 years from now, that's still essentially what I want to be doing.

Suzanne: What about recommended resources? We have a growing list of resources on our website 100productmanagers.com/resources, any books, blogs, podcasts that you would like to invite our audience to participate in?

Lisa: Yeah. Inside of the associate offering manager program, we keep a current list of all the cool resources that we found. We give those to our AOMs as homework even before they come to the bootcamp and afterwards. One of the things that I recently added was this podcast, in fact.

Suzanne: 100 PM is APM-approved?

Lisa: Yes. I think I found you on a LinkedIn post or maybe I was doing some research, updating the list, I came across it, listened to a couple of episodes, I thought, "This is great. These are perfect longer format stories about people's path to product and the whys and the wherefores," and I found that to be really interesting.

Suzanne: I love that. I'm so honored, thank you.

Lisa: It's fantastic. By the way, you should interview some of our AOMs at some point, they'll tell you great stories, I'm sure. Other things like NPR Freakonomics, I love that show. You'll never quite know what you're getting but the point is to go outside of your day-to-day and look for stories from people, from quarters, problems that you weren't necessarily thinking about. One book that I read, it might be a little bit of a smug but it's a book called How To Measure Everything, I'm now forgetting the author's name. The essential premise is that, yes, you can measure everything and here's how you do it.

Suzanne: Okay. That's great, we'll put those in the list, for sure. You've probably already seeded this answer a dozen times in this very rich conversation we've had but I do want to know, is there a side of the mug quote that you embrace in your personal or professional life that you want to leave us with as an inspiration for how you like to be?

Lisa: Wow.

Suzanne: No pressure, just make sure that it's brilliant, succinct and memorable.

Lisa: Okay. All right, what do I want in my coffee mug? Okay, I'll say this, change is my modern steady state.

Suzanne: Okay. Lisa Dyer, thank you so much for being a part of this show. If you're interested in learning more about this program, we'll be sure to put the information up in the show notes at 100productmanagers.com. Thank you.

Lisa: Thanks a lot.