Sonny Patel is a tech executive who ran a team of 250 product managers and engineers at LivePerson. Before that, she ran a cross-functional org of designers, product managers, technical program managers and developers at Amazon. Sonny was also at Microsoft where she grew from an entry level product manager to a leader of leaders.Here's a written summary of our conversation. You can also listen to the audio version via SubStack, Apple and Spotify. Or you can check out the convo on YouTube. Rising to and Operating at Executive LevelCareer Breakthroughs I asked Sonny what was the pivotal moment that put her on the executive path. Sonny recounted how a VP at Amazon took a bet on her by entrusting her with a cross functional team. This expanded her scope significantly and set her up for bigger opportunities. Sonny attributes this breakthrough to both leadership support and a fortuitous situation. However, to position herself Sonny offered the following playbook. Playbook📖 Develop your knowledge and skills over years. No shortcuts here.🏆 Champion - You need a champion to take a bet on you. Your knowledge and skills will enable your champion to stand behind you.📍Situational Awareness - you need to recognize and capitalize on a unique opportunity to distinguish yourself. In Sonny’s case it was about saying yes to managing an engineering team in addition to product.🎗Support System - You can’t make it without a professional support system.Value of Good and Bad Managers in early careerSonny believes that there is value in having one good and one bad manager early on. Watching and learning from other people’s management mistakes is a good way to build empathy for future reports. A good manager is able to provide psychological safety for their reports. This improves performance and sets people up to do their very best work. Sonny’s own experience with a bad manager taught her to have empathy and cultivate patience towards her reports. When people are new to product management or the AI space, managers should be especially patient. How Sonny creates Psychological Safety for her Teams🙋🏻♀️ Encourage and support people to ask silly questions 🙊 Allow people to make mistakes and learn without fear. ✔️ Sonny used regular check-ins and reporting mechanisms to monitor team progress and identify issues earlyBuilding AI Products and Running AI TeamsHow AI products are different 🪩 People tend to get enamored with the latest shiny technology. Sonny emphasized the importance of focusing on usefulness and not just the "cool" factor. AI Products should solve real problems for users in meaningful ways.🔐 Privacy, Transparency and Control are critical. Users are willing to share data when they see a benefit and feel in control. Apply the idea of a privacy transaction when building products - if a product collects users data, the user should get something in return. Users should feel in control and everything should be done with their consent. Provide user control options in a coherent way that all fits together. Why most AI products fail AI products often fail due to edge cases that were not considered during design and testing. User expectations are often higher than what the technology can reliably deliver.What makes Amazon an efficient execution machineBefore building a tech product, start with the customer and work backwards by understanding their problem. Amazon believes in the power of writing down things. Write a Press Release to imagine what your product unveiling may look like including all the related messaging. A Press Release is a one-pager that anybody should be able to read and understand. Some of the questions that a Press Release addresses are:* What is the customer problem?* Who is the target customer?* Why is the idea big enough?* Why now?* What does the product development team say to customers? * What would your customers say after using that product or feature?* How is this overall fitting into your existing product strategy? Furthermore a Press Release includes how the customers can get started, what they need to do, any associated costs, configuration experience, etc. After this, the team starts to dive deeper in terms of thinking about the product design aspect. Sonny’s favorite aspects of the process are two things, Tenets and Rude Questions FAQ. The Power of Tenets Tenets are a set of principles around decision-making criteria. Having a clear set of tenets is useful for breaking debates during product design. Tenets define what is important in terms of trade offs. For example, sacrificing complex additional functionality in favor of simple and intuitive design for a non-tech audience. This is a potential debate that the product team could have. If the team was to make a trade-off, which side would they pick over the other? That's a great tenet. Definition of tenets requires a lot of thought. Why you Need a Rude Questions FAQ for your ProductA...
