Shadowing Practice: The Technical, Business and UX Skills Every Product Manager Needs - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Hi everyone, my name is Liam.
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I'm a product manager at Google.
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I was a program manager at Microsoft and I founded a few startups in the past.
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So today we're going to be talking about what technical, business, and UX skills do product managers need.
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Let's dive into it.
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So let's start with a refresher.
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What is a product manager, right?
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Like let's just go back to the basics quickly and just do a quick recap.
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So a product manager is three parts, right?
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You have UX, business, and engineering.
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And PMs are the little purple spot in this diagram that are smack the middle pms are here and i've had this conversation way too many times
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right so so this is the conversation that i get with my friends with people that are interested in becoming product managers in my linkedin inbox is it
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goes exactly like this right so so you're saying i need three master's degrees in each category ux business and eng that seems like too much and my reply is like well no not really but you need to know each category pretty well
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and then the immediate reply is well liam that doesn't really help me i need specifics How deep do I need to go in each one of these categories to be a very good product manager?
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And that's what we're going to talk about today.
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So let's take the next 10 minutes or less, ideally less, and dive into the technical, business, and UX skills required to be a great product manager.
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So what technical skills does a PM need?
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Let's start with the tech side, right?
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You need to know what's possible.
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You need to kind of have a basic understanding of the impact to effort curve in your head.
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So I'd say you need to be able to answer these questions.
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Right.
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Like how does the Internet work at a high level?
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Can you diagram it?
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And here's a crude diagram that I just quickly drew up on my iPad of how the Internet works.
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When you type in www.whatever.com, it's going to the Wi-Fi router, which goes to a Comcast switch, which goes to a DNS lookup to convert to an IP address, which goes to Amazon.
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Blah.
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Right.
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Like something like this.
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Go Google it.
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You'll find a much better version of this.
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But this is kind of what you're looking for and you should be able to do.
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Also, an understanding of how data is stored at a high level.
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right?
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Like what are some data types?
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What's a string, integer, double, floating point, file types?
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And here's a quick diagram of maybe some types, right?
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So I'd be able to kind of list things out of what's an integer.
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Well, it's like 10 or one.
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It's not like 2.7, right?
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The decimal point there.
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What scenario would you use each of these in?
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For example, an integer, maybe you'd store how many views this video got.
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Hopefully it's a lot.
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A double is like a 2.7, 2.5 at a decimal.
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Maybe It's the average star rating for your favorite restaurant, Google Maps.
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A slight bias because I work on that product, right?
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But a string, right?
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Like that would be my name.
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That would be your name.
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That's the first name of a user.
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Just understanding these concepts and these data types is super important.
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And I've already given you a head start here.
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I would try to understand what an API is, right?
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I'm not going to spoil it for you.
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Go Google it.
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Application programming interface.
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What does it look like?
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What does it do?
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Why do you need a key to authenticate with an API?
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Just a basic understanding of what that is.
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I would also try to understand a few programming languages, not how to build with them, but what they're used for, right?
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Like you would not use Swift to write an HTML front end web page.
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You would not use Java to write an iPhone app, right?
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Like there's kind of, there's specialties for programming languages.
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I would try to see what the top programming languages are.
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I'm gonna link below the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for 2022.
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I forget which year it was.
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That shows the most popular programming languages that developers are using right now.
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I would understand what they're good for.
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What is an app?
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This is such a hypothetical thing, but what is a client?
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What are the trade-offs between web apps versus native apps?
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And I'm giving you again, a nice little diagram, a little bit of a cheat sheet.
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I keep pointing this direction, but it's actually going to be over here.
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So you can see there's a native app.
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You use Swift.
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It's downloaded on the device as opposed to a web app, which is a cached React, maybe HTML type of thing that you pull as soon as you type in www.x.com.
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They all connect to an API, and the API is using some Node.js service potentially in the backend.
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So understanding these concepts and what I'm talking about here is going to be super important, and it's easily Google-able.
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So just search on the internet what these words mean if you don't quite understand them read the two first sentences on Wikipedia and you're done and finally I'd also
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try to understand what a server is what what is servers what do they do what is latency how do you build servers right where do you rent them what
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do they cost right so these are kind of the questions I would be asking and just have that general curiosity for the topics that I just laid
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out also I'd recommend for the technical side to be able to break down you know with help from your engineering team a problem into smaller high level solutions, right?
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So breaking down problems into smaller things, that's very basic thing, I would recommend having the ability to own which metrics you're going to track and fully understand the difference between a health metrics, success metric, progress metric, whatever it is.
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But my advice and rule of thumb is it's never daily active users, that's never your answer.
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Don't go after that look for specific metrics that will actually help you achieve your goals.
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As a product manager, metrics are the way you're going to track success and you'll be graded upon those metrics as well.
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So you should really understand how they're calculated and how to calculate them yourself.
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Finally, always be learning.
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Always be curious about technical trends.
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Read tech news sites, go on Stack Overflow, just look around for answers and questions.
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See the most popular repos on GitHub.
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What's the open source community doing?
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Maybe you even take an intro to a computer science course online.
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Only do a free one.
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There's a bunch by Harvard and Stanford, great universities that I'll link below.
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Like my rule of thumb is don't pay for this stuff.
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There's so much free content like this on the internet.
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You need to understand why a technical decision was made.
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And you can talk to your engineers to learn more about the specifics.
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But you should be able to understand the trade offs that you made to come to that decision.
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While you don't need to know any programming languages, I will say the one thing you should understand is SQL or a querying language that's equivalent to it.
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You need to understand how to get your own data.
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Sometimes your data science team, your analyst team won't be available.
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You need to be able to query it and get your hands dirty.
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I don't know the expression, whatever, to figure it out yourself.
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I would also avoid unicorn thoughts, right?
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I call them unicorn thoughts.
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I don't know what the right word is, but buzzwords.
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Don't use AI, blockchain, ML.
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If you don't know what they mean or they're not actually useful in this context, it just looks very bad.
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Don't do it.
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And like the diagrams that I've been showing, be able to draw those diagrams with some confidence, right?
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Be able to draw the boxes that point to the other boxes and see how it all works together.
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You don't need to know the specifics on how each box works, but know the diagram and the architecture.
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You can have an opinion on long-term features, but I would really say don't have an opinion on specific technologies, right?
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Your job as a product manager is to determine why we're doing it and kind of what we're doing, but not how we're going to get there specifically.
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Leave that to the engineers.
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They're the experts.
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Honestly, my rule of thumb is you've gone too far if you're considered to be the best engineer while you're being a product manager, I would say you've gone way too technical, right?
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So just do what I've outlined here.
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And I think that is more than enough.
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All right.
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So enough with the technical.
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That was the longest section.
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What business skills do you need as a product manager?
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So you need to understand the basics of business economics, right?
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What is revenue?
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What are costs?
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What is profit?
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What is EBITDA?
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Here's a cheat sheet that shows you all of those definitions, but you can also Google them.
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Just knowing these basic definitions and what they do is super important.
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I would also try to understand pricing strategies and monetization, right?
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Freemium, ad supported, pay to play, subscription.
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Here are a couple notes that I took, right?
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Like freemium, we're thinking Clash of Clans or Afterlight, one of my favorite like photo editing apps.
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Ad supported, we're thinking Instagram, it's Google search, there's ads and that's how they make money.
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Pay to play, that's just a one-time upfront fee like Procreate or when you buy like a license of Windows.
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And then subscriptions, thinking Netflix, Spotify, things like that where you're paying every month for as long as you use the service.
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You need to understand competition and you need to develop substantial advantages to your product and understand how and why your competitors succeed or failed.
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For example, I'm a product manager at Google.
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I work on Google Maps.
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So I'm looking at Apple Maps.
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I'm looking at Bing Maps.
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I'm looking at competitors in other countries.
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That's what's really important to me and understanding the landscape of competition.
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Also, I want to emphasize emotional intelligence.
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It's super critical to being a product manager, having a lot of empathy, having a lot of EQ.
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I'm going to put a YouTube video below that summarizes this very well.
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I will do a very bad job of summarizing it, but just look into that.
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It's very important to being a great product manager.
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So here are two words that as a product manager, you're thrown out a lot, especially on the business side is storytelling and writing.
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So do your presentations like each slide have a purpose?
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So does your story have a problem solution, landing, launching, right?
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Do you get people excited when you talk about a problem?
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I would Just look at all of those things to gauge if you're good at storytelling and writing.
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And honestly, I don't know what the exact definition is, and I feel like most people just make up the definition, but I would look at those as being a gauge of doing good at that.
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You need to be a leader and have the ability to convince others that the problem that you found is worth chasing, and it is the biggest of the problems, right?
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Influencing without power is by definition being a product manager, and it just is a good thing in general to practice.
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You need to understand the marketing message and potential go to market of your product.
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are consumers or business people or companies going to take the message of why your product is the best product in the world I would be thinking about the
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marketing side of things early on and how you're gonna position it and honestly this is like really high-level kind of buzzwordy stuff like how to position yourself in
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the market you can google it to find better guides on this but just think about like are people gonna resonate with what you're saying and what you're producing that's kind
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of it and again to reiterate where you should be opinionated and where you should kind of back off I would say here you should be very opinionated on the strategy and the long term vision.
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That is your job as a product manager.
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That's what people are looking to you for.
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In terms of specific skills like legal skills, finance, the marketing and advertising folks on like buying Facebook ads or whatever it is, they're going to know best.
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I wouldn't push against them too hard.
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Now to what UX and design skills does a product manager need?
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We're almost there.
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We're almost to the end here.
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You should be able able to use Sketch and probably Figma now at a surface level.
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The rule of thumb is if you can make gray boxes look somewhat like an iPhone app, then I think you're doing fine.
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That's exactly what you need to do.
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I wouldn't go any more high fidelity than that.
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You need to have a basic understanding of terminology in terms of user experience and UI.
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What's a button?
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What's a label?
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What's a text box?
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What's a menu?
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Again, Google all of these things.
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And in terms of like, what does these sketches look like?
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You can either hand draw them.
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You can use boxes on Figma, but this is kind of the fidelity level that I think we're looking for here as a product manager.
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This is Google Maps, right?
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It's a search bar and a map.
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Being able to understand what a button is, a text box, a label, a menu, right?
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Kind of this terminology that's going to be very helpful.
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But if you can draw this stuff, I think you're doing pretty good.
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So I would understand these kind of UX slash design concepts.
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Again, just Google them.
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What is an affordance?
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What is kind of user-centered design, what is a critical user journey, understanding the concept behind it and the rationale for it, super critical, but you don't need to go too deep.
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Another thing that I see a lot of product managers and just people in general is to ask non-biased questions to people using your product, right?
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Just know how to conduct decent user research.
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Don't push what you want to be right.
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Understand what happens, kind of the basics of that.
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Maybe, you know, you could do some Googling to try and figure out what are actual good questions to ask users.
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Having a basic understanding of psychology and just focusing on empathy and having empathy for other people and your users and your partners and your collaborators, whoever it may be, that's pretty much the definition of being a great product manager is having an incredible amount of empathy.
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I can't stress this enough.
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Go look this stuff up.
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And as a great product manager, I would suggest not being opinionated on much here.
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Great designers will likely know the best way to build something.
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They're going to understand how people work, the flows that people go through, the buttons that people use, whatever it may be, the actual execution of that design better than anyone else.
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So I would kind of leave your opinions on the table here.
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You can be opinionated on the requirements from the functionality and the feature set, but the execution of how that's going to look and manifest, I would stay away from that and let your incredible designers do their best work.
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So finally,
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to answer the question of do you need three master's degrees in all three of these categories to be a great product manager the answer is no you just
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need to watch this video and now i can reply to all of your dms saying well here's the video share with people that are
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asking the same question we've gone over today the engineering skills the business skills and the ux skills required to be a great product manager
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and hopefully you found it useful thanks again subscribe share this out to people that are asking the same question and thank you so much for watching today it means so much to me have a great day
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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les
Deze spreekles op niveau C1 is gebaseerd op de video “The Technical, Business and UX Skills Every Product Manager Needs”. Deze woorden komen het vaakst terug: product, manager, google. Deze video bevat 213 zinnen en 2792 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 12:51. De spreker praat snel, ongeveer 217 woorden per minuut, dus reken op verbonden en ingeslikte klanken. 84% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken. 52 van de 213 zinnen zijn vragen, dus het is goede oefening voor vraagintonatie en korte antwoorden.
Belangrijke woorden in deze video
De 15 moeilijkste woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:
| Woord | Uitspraak | Betekenis |
|---|---|---|
| diagram zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈdaɪ.ə.ɡɹæm/ | diagram |
| metric bijvoeglijk naamwoord | /ˈmɛt.ɹɪk/ | metriek |
| empathy zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɛmpəθi/ | inlevingsvermogen, empathie |
| thumb zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈθʌm/ | duim |
| integer zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɪn.tɪ.d͡ʒə(ɹ)/ | geheel getal |
| decimal zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈdɛs.ɪ.məl/ | decimaalstelsel, tientallig talstelsel |
| summarize werkwoord | /ˈsʌməˌɹaɪz/ | samenvatten, opsommen |
| unicorn zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈju.nɪ.kɔɹn/ | eenhoorn |
| query zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈkwɪɹ.i/ | vraag, verzoek |
| terminology zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˌtɝ.məˈnɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | terminologie |
| competitor zelfstandig naamwoord | /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/ | concurrent, concurent |
| calculate werkwoord | /ˈkælkjʊleɪt/ | berekenen, uitwerken |
| gauge zelfstandig naamwoord | /ˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/ | meter |
| subscription zelfstandig naamwoord | /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/ | abonnement |
| cheat werkwoord | /ˈt͡ʃiːt/ | valsspelen, bedriegen |
Phrasal verbs die je zult horen
| Woord | Betekenis |
|---|---|
| break down werkwoord | stukgaan, kapot gaan |
| figure out werkwoord | uitvogelen, er achter komen |
Zinnen om te herhalen
Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:
- Let's start with the tech side, right?
- You need to know what's possible.
- Can you diagram it?
- You'll find a much better version of this.
- What scenario would you use each of these in?
Grammatica in deze video
De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:
| Structuur | In de video |
|---|---|
| Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet | is stored · be graded · was made |
| Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt | i've had · I've already given · you've gone |
Uitspraak om op te letten
De spreker gebruikt 79 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals you're, don't, I'm. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.
- De “th”-klanken: empathy /ˈɛmpəθi/, thumb /ˈθʌm/, authenticate /ɔˈθɛn.tɪ.keɪt/, hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/
- De klanken “sh” en “zh”: subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, monetization /ˌmɒnətaɪˈzeɪʃən/, refresher /ɹɪˈfɹɛʃɚ/, rationale /ˌɹæʃ.əˈnæl/, cache /kæʃ/
- Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: opinionated /əˈpɪn.jə.neɪ.tɪd/, terminology /ˌtɝ.məˈnɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, competitor /kəmˈpɛt.ɪ.tɚ/, authenticate /ɔˈθɛn.tɪ.keɪt/, collaborator /kəˈlæbəɹeɪtɚ/
Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:
- Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: opinionated /əˈpɪn.jə.neɪ.tɪd/, summarize /ˈsʌməˌɹaɪz/, gauge /ˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/, emphasize /ˈɛm.fə.saɪz/, oppose /əˈpoʊz/
- /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: diagram /ˈdaɪ.ə.ɡɹæm/, calculate /ˈkælkjʊleɪt/, collaborator /kəˈlæbəɹeɪtɚ/, rationale /ˌɹæʃ.əˈnæl/, cache /kæʃ/
- /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: diagram /ˈdaɪ.ə.ɡɹæm/, gauge /ˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/
Zo oefen je met deze video
- Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
- Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
- Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als diagram, metric, empathy.
Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?
Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.