ALEX LEVICH: Hi everyone, this is Alex Levich.
I'm a product manager at Google.
Today we'll be talking about product management.
And we have a great guest with us,
Aparna, who is actually building Google Now,
the smart assistant of the future.
Aparna's going to share some insights
about the different skills that product managers need.
Welcome, Aparna.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Thank you.
Happy to be here.
ALEX LEVICH: Wonderful.
Aparna, tell us, in your career, what kind of skills did you see
is important for product managers to have?
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: I think I mean,
if I were to draw the feature spec for a PM, if you will,
I think the baseline characteristic that I look for,
and I think that's a huge predictor of your success,
is growth mindset.
Right?
That is, are you able to think of an experience, a failure,
and actually say, what are the things that you can learn
from it, and what are the specific learnings that you can
apply in the next phase of your career
or next phase of your project, and so on.
And that sounds super cliche, right?
Everyone's talking about this growth mindset and like--
ALEX LEVICH: So important for in our industry.
Changes every day.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Exactly, I mean it's super cliche
to say this, but in the tech industry, the way you succeed
is by failing.
Take every successful product worth its salt,
both within Google, but also apps like Twitter or Instagram
or the recent one, Slack, where literally, it
grew out of a failed gaming startup, right?
And it's unclear that you can actually
get to good instincts and good judgment
without actually burning your hands and experiencing--
ALEX LEVICH: It's all feelings and learning, yeah.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: So to me, I
think that's a huge characteristic.
If you're unable or unwilling to learn from failure,
that's a difficult transition to make into PM because that's
exactly how you learn.
I do think the typical skills that
are useful for a successful product manager--
and these three things are things
that I keep thinking about, which
is one is, I mean the name is product manager,
so you do need to have product judgment.
And again, that's not something that you're born with or not.
It's something that's honed and developed repeatedly.
But the instinct about what makes-- you're
in the business of making useful products.
ALEX LEVICH: Useful products, yeah.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: You need to have
a good judgment and a nose for what's useful versus not.
That's table stakes.
I think the second thing I think about is more around execution,
and specifically, OK, it's great you have a great product plan.
But you're here.
How do you actually build that onramp?
How do you break down things into manageable stuff?
ALEX LEVICH: How do you translate vision into reality?
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Right?
Into reality.
And to me, a lot of product managers kind of struggle
there because they're either really good
at painting this 20,000 feet picture
or really good at the day-to-day minutiae.
ALEX LEVICH: You mentioned failure
as part of growth mindset.
That's very interesting.
Tell us about a failure of yours where you learned a lot.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: So in my own case,
I think one of the examples that comes to mind
is-- when I first joined Google, I was working on these projects
with-- so I was the PM for this research team
that was doing amazing things with computer vision.
And one of the product ideas I'd come up with is, wait a minute,
we have YouTube.
Can we apply this computer vision technology
to detect objects within videos?
Wouldn't it be cool if you could say--
ALEX LEVICH: I think it's cool.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: --hey, this
is a racing car, a race car video.
Or this is a video with a helicopter or whatever, right?
ALEX LEVICH: That's what people are still trying to do today.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: They're still trying to do it,
and now, the thing that was-- well,
it was a failure, first of all.
It didn't go anywhere.
But the reason it was a failure, or in retrospect,
what I learned was that it was a bit too early.
That is, the stage of YouTube as a product
there was-- the product was just getting traction.
There's some basic first startup problems
that the team was trying to solve.
Basically, being able to say, I don't know, Justin Bieber,
and find videos.
ALEX LEVICH: Yeah, yeah.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Or being able to monetize a site,
being able to scale the bandwidth issues.
And so here I was, I had this futuristic idea.
And it was just too early.
So that's one lesson I've learned.
That's one kind of failure where there's a timing issue.
You can do everything right.
ALEX LEVICH: That makes sense.
Yeah.
You got to-- [INAUDIBLE].
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: So that's one mistake
that I won't make again.
There'll be others.
ALEX LEVICH: Tell us about you personally.
Across your career, what are the skills
that made you personally be great, be very successful
product leader?
Whether it's at Google Now or before, what comes to mind?
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: I think one
of the things I've been able to do again by just learning
and improving is this onramp that I talk about between
there's a huge, very powerful idea,
and there is basically us at the start--
ALEX LEVICH: At the beginning.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: --at the beginning.
And how do you actually build this onramp from here
to there, but in a way that's sustainable and tractable.
Right?
ALEX LEVICH: And brings user value along the way.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: And brings user value across the way.
And I think it's one of those things where
if you do it too-- if you build a very steep onramp,
you may get far enough soon, but very soon you'll burn out.
You kind of slip back.
And if it's too slow, then you just
don't get enough momentum, right?
So that's one thing at least.
So for a--
ALEX LEVICH: It's a tough balance.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: It's a tough balance.
ALEX LEVICH: Very important.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Right, and I
think it's the trade off between how do you actually build
the right set of initial features
that still makes the product successful
and engaging, but then not say that, oh yeah,
we'll throw the kitchen sink into the first version.
Which is a temptation for all product managers.
ALEX LEVICH: Yes.
I was kind of watching you guys build Google Now.
You have this amazing vision, this assistant
of the future that knows everything and helps
with everything, right?
And we are kind of in the beginning.
And we see more and more and more and more.
So that's fascinating to see.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Yeah, and it's
very tempting because you say, OK, you're
frustrated that, oh, the product should
be able to do everything and then some.
But the reality is that you have to pace yourself.
You have to steadily increase the user value here.
ALEX LEVICH: What are you most excited about from Google Now?
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: I'm just motivated by the fact
that these phones have kind of turned
3.5 billion users into broadcasting machines, right?
It's a whole bunch of information
being generated all the while by so many folks talking.
And now suddenly-- but in a world where everyone talking,
you just need to have the selective listening, right?
You--
ALEX LEVICH: Absolutely.
There's way too much information, information
overload.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: There's way too much information.
Yeah.
And you have to be able to pay attention to the information
that you need, and that you can act on
that makes your life, the day-to-day hundreds
and hundreds of micro-decisions that you
make throughout the day better.
And I feel like we have a chance,
we have a crack at solving that problem.
ALEX LEVICH: It's not about adding information.
It's about reducing information--
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: It's about filtering it
down to what you want.
Yeah.
ALEX LEVICH: Yeah, that's awesome.
That's awesome.
Aparna, thanks for sharing your insights.
It's been great and, I'm sure, very valuable to our viewers.
APARNA CHENNAPRAGADA: Yeah, thank you.
ALEX LEVICH: Thanks, everyone, for watching.
Subscribe to Women Techmakers YouTube channel
and stay tuned for upcoming episodes
about product management.
Thanks.