S1 E7: So Many Options to Learn (Emily / @epatt6)

Eddie: 00:00:02

Welcome to episode 7 of the WebJoy podcast.

Eddie: 00:00:06

I'm your host, Eddie.

Eddie: 00:00:08

In this podcast, we interview guests about their origin story and what

Eddie: 00:00:11

makes them excited and joyful to be part of the tech community.

Eddie: 00:00:15

I hope you enjoy today's episode "So Many Options to Learn" with Emily Patterson

Eddie: 00:00:21

I'm excited to have Emily joining us today.

Eddie: 00:00:25

Emily say hi, and let people know a little bit about who

Eddie: 00:00:29

you are and what you do.

Emily: 00:00:31

Yeah for sure.

Emily: 00:00:31

Thanks for having me on Eddie Hi everyone.

Emily: 00:00:33

My name is Emily Patterson.

Emily: 00:00:35

I am the Director of Product Management at Fortress Information Security.

Emily: 00:00:40

So I am helping build cybersecurity software for

Emily: 00:00:44

critical infrastructure companies.

Emily: 00:00:45

Anyone who provides your power in the United States.

Emily: 00:00:48

I've been in technology for about 15 years did that math the

Emily: 00:00:51

other day got very depressed.

Emily: 00:00:54

I've worked in a lot of different industries, primarily in B2B SaaS

Emily: 00:00:58

so I've done immigration SaaS, I've done health tech, and most recently

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I've been in cyber security So this is my second stint in cyber security

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and it's a really great field.

Emily: 00:01:07

Can't recommend it enough if folks are interested in it.

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I do product management.

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I've gone through the gamut of levels of product management from individual

Emily: 00:01:15

contributor to running my entire team.

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In general have really spent a lot of time around technologists and working in

Emily: 00:01:23

different contexts and making different connections with folks et cetera.

Emily: 00:01:26

So very excited to be on this podcast with you, Eddie and talking

Emily: 00:01:30

about what I like about it about it, cause it's easy to be negative.

Eddie: 00:01:33

Yeah, absolutely.

Eddie: 00:01:35

Well, so how did you get involved in product management?

Eddie: 00:01:38

How did you decide, oh, Hey, this sounds like a thing I'd like to do.

Emily: 00:01:42

Yeah So product is one of those fields that back when I was in college,

Emily: 00:01:45

that was definitely not a thing at all.

Emily: 00:01:47

So I knew I wanted to get into technology.

Emily: 00:01:50

I did my undergraduate degree at Boston University and I started

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doing some consulting work and got familiar with what opportunities

Emily: 00:01:58

there are actually in technology.

Emily: 00:02:00

One of the things I really thought I was good at and things that I liked

Emily: 00:02:03

was working around software engineers.

Emily: 00:02:06

I'd taken a couple coding classes in high

Emily: 00:02:07

school and college.

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To be honest, not very good at it.

Emily: 00:02:10

can't debug my own code for my life, so it's really limiting for

Emily: 00:02:14

a developer career path so I was working as a project coordinator

Emily: 00:02:18

type person and a business analyst.

Emily: 00:02:20

When I was very early in my career, and then from the business analyst role, I

Emily: 00:02:24

kind of morphed into product management.

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There was a large rebranding, that a lot of tech companies did in the late

Emily: 00:02:31

zero zeros early tens, to move away from the title of business analyst

Emily: 00:02:36

to product manager, product owner so that's kind of how I got into it

Emily: 00:02:40

and I've just been in it ever since.

Emily: 00:02:41

So I started my career writing business requirements.

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BRDs in the waterfall world, PRDs in the agile world.

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who just did a

Emily: 00:02:49

rebranding, but doing a lot of that documentation, working with the

Emily: 00:02:53

engineers, getting work planned, getting roadmaps made that sort of thing.

Emily: 00:02:56

It's just been my life ever since.

Emily: 00:02:58

I'm pretty good at it now, I like to think.

Eddie: 00:03:01

Yeah.

Eddie: 00:03:01

I'm sure you all, if you've made it this long, I think you're

Eddie: 00:03:05

probably pretty good at what you do.

Eddie: 00:03:08

What is it about product management that keeps you excited?

Eddie: 00:03:12

Keeps you kind of plugged into things and enjoying what you do.

Emily: 00:03:16

Yeah product is one of those roles that actually can be pretty exhausting.

Emily: 00:03:19

I certainly have burned out in my career a couple of years ago.

Emily: 00:03:22

I had a pretty pretty tough mental health couple of months there.

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After, you know, really just giving your all to a company

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and it really can drain you.

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And I try to caution younger, early career product managers to not let that happen.

Emily: 00:03:34

Cause it's very easy You owe a lot of people, a lot of things

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as a product person you owe your engineers, some good explanations and

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business justification and context.

Emily: 00:03:43

You owe your stakeholders information about what's coming up next and

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what's happening and if, anything has gone wrong wrong and you owe

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your customers follow ups and release notes and all those sorts of things.

Emily: 00:03:55

Product management can very easily be too big of a job, to be honest with you.

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There's a lot you have to do, and there's a lot of responsibilities.

Emily: 00:04:01

I think as a group product managers tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves . We

Emily: 00:04:04

always have to be showing up for our team and showing up for our boss and showing

Emily: 00:04:08

up for the C-suite and showing up for our customers, and our other stakeholders.

Emily: 00:04:11

And it can be really exhausting to, and you forget that you also

Emily: 00:04:15

have to show up for yourself.

Emily: 00:04:16

So product for me has always been a thing that I just really like building stuff.

Emily: 00:04:21

I like seeing it go from an idea to a real thing that people use I work

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in B2B SaaS so one of the things that I get a lot of joy from is actually

Emily: 00:04:30

helping other people do their job.

Emily: 00:04:32

So when you're in B2B, someone is trying to be an accountant or trying to be

Emily: 00:04:39

an immigration lawyer or trying to be a Cybersecurity engineer or analyst

Emily: 00:04:44

and your software is helping them do a better job at what they do . So

Emily: 00:04:49

you're literally enabling someone to do their job and that can be really

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powerful to think about at scale.

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Cause if you are working in marketing technology and you have 50 big customers.

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Think about how many people that's impacting, not only the marketers, but

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the people receiving the marketing, right?

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So actually even the smaller things that you do can have a really big ripple

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effect And if you take really good like pride and care of your products

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and you keep improving them and giving them love and care and affection.

Emily: 00:05:15

You can really have a big impact on how someone's day goes.

Emily: 00:05:19

If you think about that, some random cybersecurity engineer like logs into

Emily: 00:05:24

my product on a daily or weekly basis.

Emily: 00:05:27

And that's a part of their life.

Emily: 00:05:28

That's what they get paid to do.

Emily: 00:05:30

If you don't enable them to do their job well, you're kind of failing at your job.

Emily: 00:05:33

So it's a responsibility but I love having that kind of an of an impact.

Emily: 00:05:38

Right now we literally secure the grid of the United States.

Emily: 00:05:42

That's a big thing, right?

Emily: 00:05:43

I get a lot of personal satisfaction from those moments, when you take a

Emily: 00:05:46

step back and really think about the big picture on on what we're doing here

Emily: 00:05:50

in software I think it's easy to kinda get swept away and in the bugs and the

Emily: 00:05:54

backlog and you know, oh my goodness.

Emily: 00:05:56

The sprint and story points and all of that stuff Thinking about the big picture.

Emily: 00:06:01

It's really fulfilling what we do if you really think about it and

Emily: 00:06:05

your product is providing, a good service and hopefully everyone's

Emily: 00:06:08

product is providing a good service.

Eddie: 00:06:10

And if it's not you may want to think about things reflect a little bit

Emily: 00:06:15

you might consider maybe another company company . But that's what

Emily: 00:06:18

keeps me coming back every day, to be honest with you I just love building.

Emily: 00:06:21

I love working with engineers.

Emily: 00:06:23

I really appreciate hanging out with my fellow nerds on a

Emily: 00:06:27

regular basis I think it's great.

Emily: 00:06:28

I found myself a couple years ago after I burned out trying to think what else

Emily: 00:06:31

would I do with my life and I have decided that this is just what I do with my life I

Emily: 00:06:35

can't imagine myself doing anything else.

Emily: 00:06:37

To be honest.

Eddie: 00:06:37

That's awesome.

Eddie: 00:06:38

I think two things that stood out, first of all, I love that idea, product

Eddie: 00:06:42

managers are showing up for everyone else.

Eddie: 00:06:44

You've gotta show up for yourself too.

Eddie: 00:06:46

I feel like that's probably gonna end up as a quote somewhere on a page in

Eddie: 00:06:50

marketing about this podcast in some way.

Eddie: 00:06:53

Cuz I love that quote.

Eddie: 00:06:54

That's amazing.

Eddie: 00:06:54

You probably should use that quote if you haven't like on your

Eddie: 00:06:58

Twitter and different things.

Eddie: 00:06:59

I that's excellent.

Eddie: 00:07:01

But also with your story it seems like not only have you been in a lot of B2B

Eddie: 00:07:07

spaces, but it sounds like you've been in a lot of B2B spaces that really

Eddie: 00:07:11

are kind of public utility focused.

Eddie: 00:07:13

The grid, cyber security , I believe you said kind of healthcare and stuff.

Emily: 00:07:18

Mm-hmm and not everybody I think needs to follow a path of needing to

Emily: 00:07:23

work in a place like that necessarily.

Emily: 00:07:25

It takes all sorts for sure.

Emily: 00:07:27

And even the fun stuff is there to give people joy and pleasure

Emily: 00:07:30

and things like that But yes, it definitely makes the tough days easier

Emily: 00:07:34

to recover when you can think about the good that you are helping to do.

Emily: 00:07:39

I know a lot of people actually trying to get into like climate

Emily: 00:07:41

tech right now for the same reasons.

Emily: 00:07:43

There's just the appeal of doing something for future generations and for the good

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of the earth and for other people and that sort of things I think there's more

Emily: 00:07:51

of an appeal now if you're thinking about a career change or a different

Emily: 00:07:55

industry, I have found it to be a great motivator in my day to day work.

Eddie: 00:08:01

Awesome that's great.

Eddie: 00:08:03

As we do with this podcast, we talk about, Hey, what's something that

Eddie: 00:08:07

brings you joy in the tech industry.

Eddie: 00:08:10

And so I wanna extend that question to you, Emily, what is it that you've

Eddie: 00:08:13

found or noticed that brings you joy that you'd like to talk about today?

Emily: 00:08:17

Yeah.

Emily: 00:08:17

So the one thing I have been doing is standing up a product management

Emily: 00:08:21

incubator, which we could talk about a little bit later but in doing that,

Emily: 00:08:25

I have been exploring and looking at a bunch of different B2B SaaS tools that

Emily: 00:08:30

maybe I don't get to use in my day job but I know other people get to use in

Emily: 00:08:34

their day job and so I have been looking a lot at like Miro and some of the other

Emily: 00:08:39

collaboration tools like Mural with an L at the end, Figma, all of these kind

Emily: 00:08:43

of tools that product managers use, even Atlassian with Confluence and Jira.

Emily: 00:08:48

What I've been seeing lately is this trend, and I love it of just a lot of

Emily: 00:08:54

best practices and knowledge sharing.

Emily: 00:08:57

So when you sign up for Miro, you're not just getting a whiteboarding

Emily: 00:09:00

tool, and someone just put this on Twitter that I saw like yesterday or

Emily: 00:09:04

today or something like that, you're also getting all of these templates.

Emily: 00:09:07

And if you look at the templates, they have done an amazing job of writing like

Emily: 00:09:12

"this is a jobs to be done" template.

Emily: 00:09:14

Here's what jobs to be done is here's how you would use this template.

Emily: 00:09:17

Here's how you could use this template.

Emily: 00:09:18

Here's who generally is using this template.

Emily: 00:09:21

This is great for product managers and designers and UX researchers.

Emily: 00:09:24

And they've done such a good job of creating that content.

Emily: 00:09:27

Not only are they doing it for retention and conversion and tracking those metrics.

Emily: 00:09:32

They're making it more valuable as a product But I mean, it's out there.

Emily: 00:09:38

It's free to look at.

Emily: 00:09:39

You can go look at the Figma help pages.

Emily: 00:09:41

You don't have to be a Figma customer to go see their support section And they have

Emily: 00:09:45

so much knowledge sharing that they're doing about best practices, about how they

Emily: 00:09:49

use tools about how tools can be used And then I thought Miro was a great example,

Emily: 00:09:54

cuz you could learn like all of the really big product manager frameworks that we

Emily: 00:09:59

use Very simply by clicking through all of these templates and reading about them.

Emily: 00:10:04

I thought it was so great to see.

Emily: 00:10:06

I've seen this on a bunch of other tools too, and it I think in my

Emily: 00:10:10

opinion, not only is it helping obviously their retention and metrics

Emily: 00:10:13

et cetera but it's also allowing people who don't have access to that

Emily: 00:10:16

information to learn about it, which is traditionally been the gate, right.

Emily: 00:10:21

On a lot of technical topics and in product management, especially, it's

Emily: 00:10:25

really hard to know what goes on over there, unless you already work in

Emily: 00:10:29

a tech company, unless you already work with the software development

Emily: 00:10:31

team in some capacity, and you've interacted with a product manager

Emily: 00:10:34

before and you can see them work.

Emily: 00:10:36

Like what do they do over there exactly?

Emily: 00:10:37

And now you can just go Google this and there's 18,000 Medium articles and

Emily: 00:10:43

20,000 Google search results or whatever, probably 2 million Google search results.

Emily: 00:10:47

Product Board was the other one that I was looking at, they do a really great job of

Emily: 00:10:50

trying to tell you, not only about their product, but about product management

Emily: 00:10:53

in general, like here's how to do this.

Emily: 00:10:55

And I just was on a mini conference with them and got introduced to their community

Emily: 00:11:00

and they have put up a whole community and, obviously, to support their product.

Emily: 00:11:05

But in general it's free to use.

Emily: 00:11:07

Anyone can log in and just ask a bunch of questions and there's a huge amount

Emily: 00:11:11

of knowledge sharing that I see.

Emily: 00:11:13

they're also really helping people understand what happens behind

Emily: 00:11:16

the scenes, how people do that and the Dev Community has this too.

Emily: 00:11:19

They're the same way.

Emily: 00:11:21

They have so many resources that are totally free and open

Emily: 00:11:24

and you just register and like, woo here's all your stuff.

Emily: 00:11:26

You can really get yourself acquainted with what goes on and, how it works.

Emily: 00:11:29

You don't necessarily have to pay $15,000 for a bootcamp.

Emily: 00:11:33

To understand if it's something you're interested in, which I

Emily: 00:11:36

think is super duper important for people trying to get into tech,

Emily: 00:11:39

trying to transition around tech.

Emily: 00:11:40

If you're a UX person and you think maybe you wanna learn how to code I maybe you

Emily: 00:11:45

don't wanna pay a bunch of money to get a CS degree or something like that.

Emily: 00:11:49

Or go to a bootcamp and those sorts of options that exist.

Emily: 00:11:53

It's so much easier to just dip your toe into.

Emily: 00:11:55

I was just chatting with the alumni group from Boston university,

Emily: 00:11:58

my undergrad this morning.

Emily: 00:11:59

And I was talking about that in the same lines as like, when I was in college.

Emily: 00:12:03

If you didn't take a class in it you really didn't know about it.

Emily: 00:12:06

There was none of this stuff out there.

Emily: 00:12:07

It was really hard to know what was going on in the tech field to understand

Emily: 00:12:11

what career options are available to you and how does that team work?

Emily: 00:12:15

And if you decide, I don't wanna code there's a million tech jobs that

Emily: 00:12:18

don't involve coding and It's hard to tell what those are sometimes,

Emily: 00:12:23

but now all these resources are out there and you can go find out.

Emily: 00:12:26

It's amazing.

Emily: 00:12:27

It's so great.

Emily: 00:12:27

I was telling someone about being a technical writer.

Emily: 00:12:29

Like you can work in a tech company and use your english major.

Emily: 00:12:33

I'm serious.

Emily: 00:12:33

You can use that English major that you have from your liberal arts college.

Emily: 00:12:37

And you could be a really great tech writer and make a bundle of money and

Emily: 00:12:41

work in these great companies and get all these perks you don't have to be

Emily: 00:12:45

an English teacher to use your degree and I think that is the one thing that

Emily: 00:12:49

I've noticed lately in the last like five or seven years, product marketing

Emily: 00:12:52

is like a really big thing now.

Emily: 00:12:54

And developer relations they produce a ton of great content for free.

Emily: 00:12:58

That's their job is to say, Hey, you could use this tool in this

Emily: 00:13:02

context and do this and you they just help you do your job better.

Emily: 00:13:06

You don't have to hunt down somebody and beg them for their time or spend

Emily: 00:13:11

a bunch of money going to classes or certifications or anything like that.

Emily: 00:13:15

You've got these things that are available to a lot of folks.

Emily: 00:13:19

And all it takes is the internet and a couple of hours that you commit to it

Emily: 00:13:23

and you can learn just so many things.

Emily: 00:13:26

You know I was poking around at cloud security the other day.

Emily: 00:13:28

I don't have ton of cloud security experience, so I was learning about

Emily: 00:13:31

it and it's so easy now to access resources and everyone has written a

Emily: 00:13:35

book there's books about everything.

Emily: 00:13:37

Doesn't matter what the topic is there's gonna be a book about it.

Emily: 00:13:40

Like someone's written a book about the very niche thing.

Emily: 00:13:42

One of my Twitter buddies just published a book about platform product

Emily: 00:13:46

management, like extremely niche.

Emily: 00:13:48

And it was super helpful and very well written And I just love that.

Emily: 00:13:52

I love that.

Emily: 00:13:53

people can go on Gumroad and publish a book.

Emily: 00:13:56

And now there's this super niche topic that you can pay $5

Emily: 00:14:00

for and have a book available.

Emily: 00:14:02

And it's just so different than if you didn't have an O'Reilly media contract in

Emily: 00:14:06

2001, you weren't gonna get your stuff up.

Emily: 00:14:09

Be thoughtful about what you're signing up for but just the fact that there's

Emily: 00:14:12

so much available I think is incredible.

Emily: 00:14:14

And I love it.

Emily: 00:14:15

And it's so great for decreasing the barriers to get into different

Emily: 00:14:19

jobs inside of the tech world.

Emily: 00:14:21

I remember in high school, like shelving Pearl books.

Emily: 00:14:24

I worked at our public library and I had the computer books

Emily: 00:14:27

section, which was awesome for me.

Emily: 00:14:28

Cause I got to read them sometimes on my break.

Emily: 00:14:31

But that's what we used to do.

Emily: 00:14:32

Right.

Emily: 00:14:32

You checked out a Pearl book from the library and then you went

Emily: 00:14:35

home and you tried to do it.

Emily: 00:14:37

You didn't have a tutorial on your screen on YouTube that you could

Emily: 00:14:40

literally code along with and it's a total game changer, I think for

Emily: 00:14:43

people to learn in different ways.

Emily: 00:14:46

If you can't just read a book and understand it, most of us, I don't think

Emily: 00:14:49

can do that to be totally honest with you.

Emily: 00:14:51

I think especially in technology, a lot of us are visual people, like we

Emily: 00:14:55

want to see it and understand it to fully like process what's going on.

Emily: 00:14:59

And just having the ability to be like, you could read a book or you could watch a

Emily: 00:15:02

YouTube video, or you could read this blog cause it's shorter or you could listen

Emily: 00:15:05

to a podcast or an audio book or something like you've got so many options to learn

Emily: 00:15:10

about whatever developers, relations, product management, there's like 18,000

Emily: 00:15:15

product manager podcasts right now.

Emily: 00:15:17

And I love every single one of them.

Emily: 00:15:18

And I try to listen to as many as I can.

Emily: 00:15:21

Cause it's just so fun.

Emily: 00:15:21

How much is out there.

Emily: 00:15:22

I love it.

Eddie: 00:15:23

I think that's great.

Eddie: 00:15:24

I think the different formats is a huge thing.

Eddie: 00:15:27

I have three kids at home right now, two toddlers and a newborn.

Eddie: 00:15:31

I don't have a lot of time to sit and like read books but I do have to like

Eddie: 00:15:39

do household chores and things like that.

Eddie: 00:15:41

So I listen to podcasts when I'm working in the yard or working around the house

Eddie: 00:15:46

and that way, like I still get to consume stuff while I'm doing other things.

Eddie: 00:15:50

Whereas in other times I've just wanted to read and I haven't

Eddie: 00:15:53

wanted to listen to anything.

Eddie: 00:15:54

You wanna sit in the quiet right.

Eddie: 00:15:56

On a rainy day.

Emily: 00:15:57

Only someone with toddlers and babies can really, I think

Emily: 00:16:00

comprehend like, yes I would like to sit in the silence.

Eddie: 00:16:05

Absolutely.

Eddie: 00:16:06

So I think that's awesome.

Eddie: 00:16:08

Those different formats, but I think one other thing that I think is really cool

Eddie: 00:16:12

about the information sharing about what you're talking about is that these tools

Eddie: 00:16:18

actually also open up the information, sharing across functional areas.

Eddie: 00:16:23

So for example I actually was the one who introduced Miro at my last company.

Eddie: 00:16:27

I was like, Hey, I'm gonna use this.

Eddie: 00:16:29

The pandemic had started and I was like, I need a way to be able

Eddie: 00:16:31

to engage with the team visually.

Eddie: 00:16:33

So I started the trial of Miro and we just happened to use it with one

Eddie: 00:16:40

of the product managers one time, and then he fell in love with it.

Eddie: 00:16:43

Then the product team ended up using it more than my team of

Eddie: 00:16:47

front end engineers and designers.

Eddie: 00:16:49

But they made sure that every time they did a planning sheet,

Eddie: 00:16:54

that we were added to it.

Eddie: 00:16:56

And so we could see their thoughts as they developed.

Eddie: 00:17:00

And when it was time to start talking about where they're

Eddie: 00:17:02

at in the discovery process.

Eddie: 00:17:03

They could walk us through the highlights and we could go down later

Eddie: 00:17:07

and dig in as much as we wanted to.

Eddie: 00:17:09

But suddenly as engineers and as designers, we got to see the

Eddie: 00:17:12

discovery process that our product partners were doing and it made

Eddie: 00:17:17

it so much less of a black box.

Eddie: 00:17:18

It made it feel like we were more partners and we were actually

Eddie: 00:17:22

able to share information.

Eddie: 00:17:24

And we understood where they were coming from, and so that helped

Eddie: 00:17:27

take down some of that like product engineering barrier, if you will.

Eddie: 00:17:31

That sometimes exists.

Emily: 00:17:33

Yes.

Emily: 00:17:34

I love to hear that.

Emily: 00:17:35

One of the things that I always try to coach more early career product

Emily: 00:17:38

managers is , there's no such thing as sharing your work too early.

Emily: 00:17:41

Just share it.

Emily: 00:17:42

I don't care what state it's in.

Emily: 00:17:43

Be a hot mess, huge rough draft, bunch of errors in it I don't care.

Emily: 00:17:47

Share it anyway.

Emily: 00:17:48

It's just so nice to give people that transparency and

Emily: 00:17:51

allow them to follow along.

Emily: 00:17:52

Right.

Emily: 00:17:53

Everyone likes to To understand what their colleagues are

Emily: 00:17:55

doing on a day to day basis.

Emily: 00:17:56

And product managers, especially, it's not as cut and dried as I coded a thing.

Emily: 00:18:00

Here's the thing I coded.

Emily: 00:18:01

Now you can see it.

Emily: 00:18:02

QA has tested it.

Emily: 00:18:03

Here's the thing I built You know it's it's not always that not

Emily: 00:18:07

always that straightforward for other functions, not just product managers

Emily: 00:18:10

obviously other people who do more conversational work and more relationship

Emily: 00:18:14

building and things like that.

Emily: 00:18:15

Always kind of you know have that issue of like, well, what did you do today?

Emily: 00:18:18

Like, whoa, look at my calendar but being able to share those conversations

Emily: 00:18:24

in that way is super powerful across an organization for alignment,

Emily: 00:18:29

uh, for trust building, right?

Emily: 00:18:31

Like you don't feel like your product partners are in a black

Emily: 00:18:34

box and they're not talking to you.

Emily: 00:18:35

Oh my goodness.

Emily: 00:18:36

It feels like you're on the same team, which is especially

Emily: 00:18:39

in a full remote Organization that is a very important thing.

Emily: 00:18:43

(laughing)

Eddie: 00:18:44

Yeah absolutely.

Emily: 00:18:47

I started in September, my first fully remote role.

Emily: 00:18:50

and I really appreciate now how much extra effort sometimes you have to put

Emily: 00:18:56

into showing and giving that visibility especially to your engineer teammates

Eddie: 00:19:00

Yeah, absolutely.

Eddie: 00:19:01

It's trickier.

Eddie: 00:19:02

I've been remote since 2015, so definitely there's a lot of tricky things when you're

Eddie: 00:19:08

remote of like, how do I communicate?

Eddie: 00:19:10

And create human connection when you're so far away and stuff.

Emily: 00:19:14

And I think that's another thing that the SaaS tools

Emily: 00:19:16

right now are doing so well.

Emily: 00:19:17

I've seen probably like 10 different startups in the last

Emily: 00:19:20

six months that are like let's all have a coffee at the same time.

Emily: 00:19:24

Like the coffee bot on slack.

Emily: 00:19:25

Hey everybody, it's coffee chat time.

Emily: 00:19:27

And we're all gonna hop on our cameras and have a coffee chat It's just so

Emily: 00:19:30

fun to see like people coming up with answers to these things that like I would

Emily: 00:19:35

describe them as inconveniences a little bit to be honest with you, but they

Emily: 00:19:38

do bring, you know a smile of people's faces and they, I think they improve

Emily: 00:19:43

especially fully remote companies They definitely improve the quality of life.

Eddie: 00:19:49

Like you said, there's definitely a ton of those and some

Eddie: 00:19:51

of them operate better than others.

Eddie: 00:19:53

But, I think the heart of all of them is in the right place of connecting people.

Eddie: 00:19:57

So that's cool.

Emily: 00:19:58

Absolutely

Emily: 00:19:59

(laughing)

Eddie: 00:20:00

As we wrap up here today, one thing we always like to do before the

Eddie: 00:20:03

end is to just see if there's anything that you've been working on that you

Eddie: 00:20:06

think might be helpful to the community.

Eddie: 00:20:08

Anything you'd like to share,

Emily: 00:20:10

Yes, so I have recently, as of March stood up a product

Emily: 00:20:14

manager incubator program.

Emily: 00:20:16

So this is a program aimed at underrepresented

Emily: 00:20:19

backgrounds in technology.

Emily: 00:20:21

So non-men.

Emily: 00:20:22

Right?

Emily: 00:20:23

So if you identify as not a man, hey, yeah, let's hang out.

Emily: 00:20:26

Um, and if you are not white, basically for lack of a better phrase right

Eddie: 00:20:32

Essentially if you are not me

Emily: 00:20:34

Not Eddie, Yeah.

Eddie: 00:20:36

You're It.

Emily: 00:20:36

I was looking at some of the big tech companies and they're

Emily: 00:20:40

diversity inclusion reports and the numbers are just still not great.

Emily: 00:20:44

So I'm trying to find like ways that I can help, especially in product

Emily: 00:20:47

management I've spent a lot of time being literally the only woman

Emily: 00:20:51

in a zoom meeting of 15 people.

Emily: 00:20:54

And it's 2022 at this point So I'm trying to do my little part to fix it.

Emily: 00:20:58

So right now.

Emily: 00:20:59

It's free.

Emily: 00:21:00

I'm not sure if it will always be free, but it will absolutely always be low cost.

Emily: 00:21:03

I can promise you that a hundred percent the point is

Emily: 00:21:05

that we're not charging $4,000.

Emily: 00:21:08

For product manager certificates that may or may not be impactful,

Emily: 00:21:11

but it's a free program right now for underrepresented folks in technology

Emily: 00:21:14

to learn how to be a product manager.

Emily: 00:21:16

And we do the whole product management life cycle.

Emily: 00:21:18

So we teach you how to do the things, but then we're actually applying those things.

Emily: 00:21:22

So we're building with no code tools and all of the members of the cohort

Emily: 00:21:26

are literally building a product at the end they're going to be able to

Emily: 00:21:30

chat with some really great product leaders, get some feedback on their

Emily: 00:21:33

product and how they built it and their techniques and their presentation skills.

Emily: 00:21:37

That's important too, get some really actionable feedback and then actually

Emily: 00:21:41

have not only a polished, beautiful presentation they also have a real product

Emily: 00:21:46

that they can show potential employers.

Emily: 00:21:49

And build some credibility that I have built a thing before I have experience

Emily: 00:21:53

you can hire me for this, you know product owner, APM, early career product manager

Emily: 00:21:59

role and allow hiring managers to just be more confident that the person they hire

Emily: 00:22:04

is gonna be able to land and keep up.

Emily: 00:22:06

That's all we're trying to do.

Emily: 00:22:07

Right.

Emily: 00:22:08

Cause that's the biggest issue for product managers.

Emily: 00:22:10

Especially in junior roles, early career roles is it's really easy to

Emily: 00:22:13

get over your head to get overwhelmed.

Emily: 00:22:16

People are so busy, they don't have time to mentor sometimes, which isn't

Emily: 00:22:19

great but it happens, totally happens.

Emily: 00:22:20

So giving them more skills so that they can land in these

Emily: 00:22:24

roles and be successful, right?

Emily: 00:22:26

Cause it's not just getting the job, it's staying in the

Emily: 00:22:29

job and staying in the career.

Emily: 00:22:30

I think it's been a big success.

Emily: 00:22:31

We've already had two out of our six people get new roles while

Emily: 00:22:35

they're in the program, where they haven't even finished yet.

Emily: 00:22:37

And we've got people who are getting a lot of traction on resumes and job

Emily: 00:22:40

applications and things like that And the products they're designing are so cool.

Emily: 00:22:44

I'm meeting with two women are building out a gifting suggestion service.

Emily: 00:22:48

It's so cool to watch them think about it.

Emily: 00:22:50

What would make that different?

Emily: 00:22:51

What would make that special?

Emily: 00:22:52

What would make people wanna use it.

Emily: 00:22:54

Actually go through it's really about going through those thought process.

Emily: 00:22:58

The product at the end of the day is fine, the important

Emily: 00:23:00

part is that they did the work.

Emily: 00:23:01

They put in the reps.

Emily: 00:23:03

It's kinda like running, you don't just sign up for a marathon without training.

Emily: 00:23:06

You've gotta do some training.

Emily: 00:23:07

And that's how I feel about product management as a product leader and

Emily: 00:23:10

as a former hiring manager, I used to hire a whole bunch of product folks.

Emily: 00:23:14

It's really important to be able to have some experience actually doing

Emily: 00:23:18

the work so you don't get overwhelmed.

Emily: 00:23:20

That's what I'm working on is called InTheLab Product Management.

Emily: 00:23:23

The website is InTheLabPM.com.

Emily: 00:23:26

I did get the.com label thumbs up Uh and we're just in the process of a pretty

Emily: 00:23:30

new rebrand with our great designer.

Emily: 00:23:32

If anyone out there knows someone who wants to get into product management

Emily: 00:23:36

from outside of tech, or even from inside of tech, if you're in a CS role or an

Emily: 00:23:39

account executive role or something like that, please, tell them to sign up.

Emily: 00:23:42

We're starting our next cohort in the fall.

Emily: 00:23:45

Very exciting

Eddie: 00:23:47

Awesome.

Eddie: 00:23:48

You have a specific month that you're planning on starting?

Emily: 00:23:51

Oh yeah Great point.

Emily: 00:23:53

Just as a caveat here, the program is run by me and me, and I'm the

Emily: 00:23:57

staff of InTheLab Product Management.

Emily: 00:23:58

So I'm doing this all out of pocket.

Emily: 00:24:00

Bootstrapped.

Emily: 00:24:01

There's no money flowing anywhere except out of my out of my wallet

Eddie: 00:24:05

Out of your wallet

Emily: 00:24:06

We're trying to coordinate stuff for the next cohort right now.

Emily: 00:24:09

I am thinking the next cohort's going to kick off in the

Emily: 00:24:13

August, September timeframe.

Emily: 00:24:14

I'm hoping to time it so that it wraps by Thanksgiving because nobody

Emily: 00:24:19

wants to be dealing with this during the rush up to the holidays and then

Emily: 00:24:22

hopefully that cohort goes well, we'll be kicking another one off in January.

Emily: 00:24:26

But there's an open application.

Emily: 00:24:28

It's super easy.

Emily: 00:24:29

There's four fields that you have to fill out.

Emily: 00:24:31

So if you hear this and you're interested at all, please feel

Emily: 00:24:34

free to pop your name in there.

Emily: 00:24:35

And I am personally reviewing everybody's LinkedIns and we'll

Emily: 00:24:39

personally be reaching out to everybody, as we get towards a start time.

Eddie: 00:24:43

Thank you for joining us today, Emily.

Eddie: 00:24:45

It's been a pleasure chatting.

Emily: 00:24:47

Thank you so much Eddie It's been great.

Eddie: 00:24:50

Thanks for joining us for Episode 7.

Eddie: 00:24:52

"So Many Options to Learn" with Emily Patterson.

Eddie: 00:24:56

You can find out more about Emily on her Twitter @epatt6.

Eddie: 00:25:01

You can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as a link

Eddie: 00:25:05

to Emily's Twitter in the show notes.

Eddie: 00:25:08

If you enjoyed this episode, help others discover it as well

Eddie: 00:25:12

by rating and reviewing it in your favorite podcast directory.

Eddie: 00:25:15

And following us on Twitter at @WebJoyFM.

Eddie: 00:25:19

Thank you for listening and have a great day.

Eddie: 00:25:29

Next episode of WebJoy.

Grace: 00:25:33

I think of designing my life as like a big experiment, a big experiment

Grace: 00:25:38

of seeing what brings me joy and what I like to do and what I'm good at.

Grace: 00:25:42

And just trying a lot of things out and testing stuff, because as

Grace: 00:25:46

a designer, or as myself I used to feel like I need to be perfect.

Grace: 00:25:50

I need to wait for the perfect time, I need to ask for permission.

Grace: 00:25:53

To make sure everything's like pixel perfect.

Grace: 00:25:55

But then that really held me back from actually executing things.

Grace: 00:25:58

So I think of myself as having discovery and and just testing things out and seeing

Grace: 00:26:04

what I like the most and what I'm good at.

Grace: 00:26:06

To see what I can make the most impact.

Grace: 00:26:08

It's also like having an infinite mindset of just seeing what

Grace: 00:26:12

works or what doesn't work.

Grace: 00:26:13

And iterating from there.

Grace: 00:26:14

Keep improving instead of worrying about being perfect on the first try.

Grace: 00:26:17

So I kind of seeing designing my life as like designing a product and collecting

Grace: 00:26:21

data and using that to keep improving.

Grace: 00:26:25

And it's always fun to learn because I feel like when I'm learning,

Grace: 00:26:28

I'm growing and I'm improving.

Grace: 00:26:30

And so that feeling that excitement of learning new

Grace: 00:26:32

things is what keeps me going.

" Eddie: 00:26:36

Like a Big Experiment" with Grace Ling.