Starting a new PM position - with Shaun Russell, Product Coach

Welcome again to the Product Bakery Podcast. I'm Christian and today with Alex we spoke to Sean Russell, a product coach, about the challenges people have when they're starting their first job and what it means to succeed in a product organization as a junior product manager. Alex, what have been your key takeaways from today? We talked a lot about mindsets, right? And I think every time when we talk about product roles, when we talk about the skills a product manager, a product designer needs, it always comes down to mindset, I feel. And I think it's like a little bit a specific kind of people who can work in products. And yeah, I don't want to take away too much of the details of what we discussed and what it takes to be a product manager. I did also have some time to rant about bootcamps, product bootcamps, product design bootcamps. Don't miss that part. I probably regret some. No, I don't regret any of the things that I said. I really believe what I said, while obviously you can never generalize things. I think that's important to say. And for the rest, you should listen to the episode if you want to know more about it. But Christian, anything specifically that you want to highlight? I think it's very important to ask yourself what you want to do in a product job and how you imagine this job to be instead of just jumping into the cold water and then getting confronted with the dark real world with bad forces. So with that said, tune in. And in case you like this episode, feel free to follow us on social media and make sure to share this episode with your friends and network if you like this episode. With that, let's get started. Hi Christian. Hi Sean. Hey there. Hey there. Great to have you here, Sean. Before we jump to our conversation, I just, as usual, want to introduce you to our audience. And for everyone who doesn't know Sean, he started his career in 2005. He founded his own company. Back in the days, it was like a marketplace for mp3. So I think like pretty early days also for the digital music industry. And after his experience there, he then moved into product, spent some years working as a product manager, and then co-organized the product tank in Berlin and is still co-organizing it as of today and is like in his full-time job coaching different product managers and product professionals as a freelance consultant. So Sean, speaking about being a product coach, as you probably know, we have another product coach in this call. And I always hear Christian complaining. How is being a product coach for you? So for me, it's a really interesting and challenging job. You can learn the ideas of products and you can experience being a product manager, but it's another thing altogether to transfer that knowledge or those abilities to people around you. Because product is such a complex job, it's such a personal job, and this makes it a really big challenge. But it's also the reason that I was drawn to it is that it's people-focused and it's really interesting solving that problem of how do you get someone from where they are now to where they want to be. And as a coach in general, you also need to have a slightly different skill set than just like a product manager. It's a lot about listening, understanding, and being able to help your coaches also through some difficult solutions by finding or by helping them find the problems. It's usually not the coach who finds the solution. Yeah. Arguably, I'd say that this is very similar to a product manager, or at least how product management ideally should be, because we don't want the product manager to be the person that is dictatorial or deciding all the right answers. The most effective product managers are really inclusive. They're really enabling people. So in that sense, I see a connection between the two. But of course, as a coach, you're even further along. Sometimes, at least for myself, I would go to quite significant lengths to try and get the person to have the realization for themselves rather than telling them, I think you should do this or that. And then you got them of the real moment of figuring it out and a much longer lasting learning journey. And I can imagine, especially for junior product people or people who just get started with it, you sometimes need to bite on your tongue and not telling them too much and still helping them to move into the right direction. How do you deal with people who just got started with product? So there are different routes to this. Roughly, you can imagine like two different kinds of people that are being coached. One kind, whether they're actually quite experienced by this point or just in their first job, this kind of person would have a pretty clear idea of their development goals. So in a coaching engagement, they say, I want to achieve this, I want to be at the top table with management, or I want to be giving better presentations or being able to break stories down, whatever it might be. And in those cases, the coach is really leading the way. And as a coach, that is an ideal situation. But then, of course, the reality of starting off as a product manager is that you have really the other half of people who probably feel pretty overwhelmed by the situation. And possibly a big reason why they're in coaching is they need a bit of direction, someone who can help them look in the right places and help them understand what to achieve as a product manager. Like what even is this job? It's probably like one of the most fundamental questions. I'm sure you hear it many times as well. We have no idea. Yeah, we're trying to figure it out by talking to people in this podcast. Actually, I'm not a product coach, but I just try to learn as much as I can for you to just get started with it. Yeah. So then when it comes to solving this kind of problem with someone, I guess my approach has actually changed here a bit. So at first I was very led by doing a kind of like assessment upfront with people, which I still do sometimes. You have different assessment frameworks. I built my own, which over time I've discovered to be flawed in many ways, but still a useful exercise. But I feel like this is not necessarily the best way to approach things because then often what you end up with is like a list of, oh, we want to learn roadmaps. We want to learn how to do agile. We want to learn stakeholder management. And then when you try and approach that as a coach, maybe that isn't actually where the value lies so much. So the ideal way to start off with someone, and I think the ideal way for anyone to really think about their development is to look at the situation they're in. What are the problems they're facing day to day in the exact same way that we preach about? We need to understand user problems as a coach. I need to understand the product manager problems. And that when you focus on your own development is the logical place to begin as well. And what would you say are the problems that most of your coaches have? So obviously there's a really wide range, but maybe the most fundamental thing that exists at every organization with product managers is that there is some kind of like deep struggle in the organization between the product managers who want to do a certain approach. They want to be by the book. They want to really have a strong customer focus. They want to work collaboratively, all these things, you know, maybe they've read some Marty Kagan or whatever it might be, but they have often quite like strong ideas of what they want to do, or they're being told they should have strong ideas. But then they exist in an organization which by the nature of business and organization pulls away from this, which is why you have the product manager in the first place to solve some of these problems where an organization without the right kind of oversight and facilitation for a product person will drift towards the wrong things. But then if you're a junior person put into this position, this is a really big ask. So you have new product managers who know that they should be representing a kind of truth as a way of doing things, but the forces they're fighting against are the power from the C-suite or managers that just want things done. So they're not in the position where explicitly they should be able to solve these problems, but they're expected to because that is the product manager job. I would also say sometimes the problem lies in the forces that are training those people because someone with the mindset of getting shit done, to say it like that, who trains a junior person, I think we all know what the outcome will be if someone just trains you to not ask any questions and just execute and just build it. I think we know where we're going to end up. It almost sounds like it's probably hard for someone starting their career in an organization that doesn't have a mature product organization, because I guess if we follow and let's say Marty Kagan, as we talked about it in his book, probably in Silicon Valley, there are some organizations that execute a little bit better on this than maybe some smaller startups that are funds or business founders somewhere that have different asks and also different expectations from a product manager. So is it also a little bit like finding the balance for the people to actually work within the organizations that they find and get the best out of it? Yes. So I think there is a really common thing, which I really felt when I was a product manager actually, which is you really believe in the cause and you hear a lot of stories, this kind of like best versus the rest framing, right? So there's this idea of there are places where product management is done extremely well, it's framed by the organization. And I think there is probably a minority of cases where that's true. But if you're a product manager, particularly a junior one, it's very easy to end up in this place where you're actually just in this negative emotional loop and you're not accepting your circumstance. You're just trying to turn an organization, which isn't a product organization, or certainly isn't close yet into being one. Whereas actually a much healthier way to react is to understand the organization around you. And this is something I wish I'd have learned much earlier on. It was actually until I worked at Outfittery as a product manager. And when I joined, I was reporting into Jesper, who was the CTO there. And the very first thing he did with me was he really wanted me to understand the organization. He says, here's the org chart, here's where you fit in, here's where others fit in. Here are the metrics, here's how they all stack together and the business case that makes the business work. And he even said, here's the meeting where all the things happen, like the real key decisions happen in this room once a week. You should come, you should see it. And he really brought me into those things. And before then as a product manager, I think I hadn't really had an approach where I was trying to understand the other side and trying to accept it and engage with it. I was more like the person fighting the good fight and then feeling the pain over and over again because you make progress, but sometimes you're just ignoring reality if you're not really in that conversation. We have on one hand, the organizational structure that needs to be understood by the product manager and on the other side, also the methodologies and the tools to do a good job as a, let's say, junior person. So where do you see the things that people need to learn from a methodology point of view? So there's definitely an overlap between some of these things, right? So a typical case would be understanding a business model, right? So probably one of the most widely used tools in product management is the business model canvas. And this is a great tool for understanding the organization. It's not going to give you all the answers about your products, but as an exercise to understand what's around you, that is a very valid thing to do. So there are tools that you can learn to help you understand your surroundings. And then there are lots of tools which are more specific to product management, so frameworks which you might use then. And the connection to understanding your surroundings in that case, I think is that you could go away to your training workshop, of which I've experienced many and I've taught many, and I've seen from both perspectives how you can learn the thing, but then you go and take it back to your day-to-day work and maybe you try and apply it, but it's a struggle. It doesn't land. So the whole point about the surroundings topic is that by investing this time, you are much more likely to understand the context in which this thing needs to happen. So if it's like adopting agile as a simple thing that people go away and can learn about agile, they can get like a scrum certificate, all of these kinds of things. But often in organizations, applying these things requires good empathy and understanding for why they haven't happened to begin with. So I think it enables, it supports you in applying those tools and maybe helps you also understand the tool a bit better if you can see how it connects to the organization around you. And when we, for example, would take an example persona, I don't know, someone who's called Alex who want to start a job as a product person, zero years of experience, what would be the first exercise you would give that person to get started? Possibly the tool which I find myself using most often to coach people and to help them get to grips with the basic concepts in product management is Teresa Torres's Opportunity Solution Tree. So for those that are not familiar, this is basically a way of representing on the one hand, the outcome that you're aiming for. Whenever you're doing some kind of product work, it should be to drive some kind of outcome. You then map below that the customer problems you're trying to solve. And then you map below that the solutions which you think will help solve those problems or customer opportunities as they're described by the framework. The reason I start with this very often is that I think it shows firstly, that there is a connection between these things. It's important for a product manager to understand that you shouldn't be building a thing. You shouldn't be doing an output without having an outcome in mind that relates ideally to an end user. And you shouldn't even really be helping the end user so much unless you understand for the business as a whole, what metric is it driving? Why does this fit into the bigger picture? Which is why this is quite a nice tool because it draws the links between those things. It's very visual and it's a really good platform for then going into discovery as a topic, which I think is critical for really shifting someone from... You can be pretty qualified as a product owner or a project manager without being a product manager. And I think one of the biggest differences there is ultimately discovery and being able to think critically about these wider topics. So the Opportunity Solution Tree is a really nice tool for that. And actually over time, I noticed that whilst it might not be the only way of doing these things as a product manager, as a coach, I think it's a very effective way of showing these concepts, which is why I often recommend it. And thinking also about what we discussed earlier around organizations, obviously it might happen that junior or even more senior product managers are confronted with stakeholders in the company that would say, okay, they maybe are very solution driven. They come up with a solution and ask you to execute it. How would you recommend a product manager now to approach this and to actually bring in discovery or bring in the tool of a solution? Opportunity Solution Tree. Yeah. This is like every single coachee, right? Everyone experiences this. And I certainly have been there in my own time as a product manager. I can say two things. So one is a basic concept and the other is actually using the Opportunity Solution Tree to help solve this problem. So the overall principle I like to really get people to be aware of is what you instinctively feel with the noisy, painful stakeholder is you want to push them as far away as possible, right? So you don't want them in the room, you don't want them in the conversation, you don't want them making decisions. So you create this like moat around you, you make sure you're safe and that's understandable, but it's definitely like a local maximum. It might help you a bit, but it's not going to really solve this stakeholder problem. So what you want to do is you want to engage with them, understand them, talk to them, like grab a coffee, like talk to them, understand their point of view. And then if possible, collaborate with them, involve with them, solicit their opinion and so on. So you make the first move rather than waiting for them. And then they're pissed and you have a difficult conversation. Sounds like dating almost. It varies from day to day. I mean, it's like a pretty painful blind date. A lot of these stakeholders I think. And you are always the one who needs to make the first step. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So in that kind of dynamic where you can see that you're the person that needs to hold out the olive branch. What about people who are stuck in their current position? Sometimes you are faced with, let's say certain organizational structures, or let's say a leadership team that clearly knows or clearly believes that just doing something is the right way to do instead of maybe advocating more for discovery. So that brings you necessarily into the position as a product manager where you are in between the lines, right? At one point you want to develop, on the other hand, your hands are bound. So how do you try to help people in such situations? Because I've been there and I think many people are in such situations sometimes. So it would be cool to hear how you approach the topic. Yeah. Firstly, putting aside as a coach who has hired me, because obviously ultimately if the organization has hired me to coach their junior product manager, and then I'm there and I'm thinking maybe they're not so happy here, then ultimately I'm being paid by the organization. So there's that kind of like bound hand situation. But if we remove that from the equation, we're talking about purely what I would encourage people to think about. I would say it fairly simply, which is that as a product manager, you need minimally two things to really help you grow. The first of those is what Petra Villa, who is another product coach based in Germany, she describes as the next big challenge. So you need to be doing something which to you feels challenging, uncomfortable, feels like you could fail, but you will probably learn. That's a really important thing. If you don't have that, then you either need to seek for that in your current role. So speak to your manager, look around you, look for the opportunity, or you're probably in the wrong place. And then the second thing, which is complimentary to this, is you need to have someone, probably more than one person to learn from. That doesn't have to be a product manager. As a product person, you can learn from all kinds of roles because you are a generalist. And also often people in other roles are capable product people as well. So the second question is who do you have a big challenge to work on would be, do you have at least one person or more people to learn from? If not, can you find them in the organization? Are there people that you've not spent time with that you could be spending time with? Or are there people in another department that you could learn from? Because minimally, if your organization is a messed up place, if your job is really hard, but nonetheless, you have an interesting challenge and you have people that can help you, then that's probably enough for you to grow. And then someday you're going to learn enough that you will be able to hop on to the next place. If you don't have those things, you're going to struggle to learn. You can learn as much theory as you want by the book. If your environment is inhospitable, if you're in the desert of product management, then you probably need to be in somewhere that will allow you to grow and learn faster, particularly in this first job. And especially speaking about the first job, is there something that a product manager should be like look for specifically? Like how much of these things can I already know when I'm, for example, in an interview process? And how can I actually drill down to will there be people that can help me or that I can learn from? Will there be challenges that actually help me grow? And I think more than that, will there be also the environment where I can practice product in a way that it helps me grow into the product manager that I want to become? Because I think that's an additional part when you're junior where it's important that the environment doesn't force you in the wrong direction, maybe. Yeah, this is really important. And actually a conversation which in my kind of coachy circles I've been having many times this year. What a good interview question to ask. And how can you check that an organization is a good place for you to go? And there was also an article, which I can show you the link. I'm sure you can probably pop it alongside the podcast, which gives a really nice thorough approach to this. But in kind of simple summary, the basic idea is that in the same way you would approach a user interview, where you develop hypotheses or assumptions that you want to test, and then you design questions around that, which ideally not like closed questions and ideally questions that are really anchored in behavior. So you don't ask the nice HR person or the potential CPO, oh, is it a good place to grow as a product manager? You ask them about things that have happened in the past and certain patterns, how they reacted in certain situations. For example, when projects were running late, what happened in those cases or whatever it might be. So the basic concept as described in more detail by this article is approach your interview questions that you ask as just like you would a user interview, but the hypotheses are all based on, is this somewhere where I can learn? And you could particularly focus on these, is this somewhere where I will have the next big challenge? And secondly, is this somewhere where there are people who I will learn from? And of course, maybe you can divine that a little bit from these interviews. Do you meet someone in those sessions where, oh man, I want to be in the same room as this person, because that's a great sign. If you already can tell from those conversations, then that's half the puzzle at least. Unfortunately, I know also many people who desperately want to get started a job in product. So they're taking whatever they get. And then during the first job, they realize, okay, I'm just clearly seeing here in this company, what I want and what I don't want. And then making a choice in either speaking up or leaving the job and moving somewhere else. Unfortunately, not everyone has the knowledge that we have or is listening to this podcast. So it happens, unfortunately, quite sometimes that people just starting a job. And I think it's not only related to product management and then in their first role understanding, okay, what do I really want? Maybe I want to be more a technical product manager, or I want to be more focused on the data side of things. But I think it's also like a little bit part of the game, especially in product management due to the fact that it's such a wide topic and such a wide job that you just need to figure it out for yourself a little bit. I totally agree. So the metaphor which I came up with, which I use a lot to explain this to people is the learning product is a bit like learning language. So in German, there's this term Sprachgefühl, which describes how you can know how to speak a language without knowing the concepts of the language. A four-year-old doesn't know about conjugation or what a verb is, and yet they can do these things, often to pretty impressive levels. And then on the other hand, you have adults who are learning language, right? So they're really studying the grammar. They get to theoretically a high level, but you put them in a conversation and they're lost. And products, I think, is a lot like this, right? So just the fact of being exposed, being dumped in the environment as the baby that knows nothing about products, trying things, seeing what happens around you, this is really the fastest way you're going to learn. Theory is going to help. So obviously, if you're studying language, yes, it's great to have exposure, to have conversation, but learning about verbs probably is a good thing, but on its own, it's not going to work. Actually, the most foundational thing is the exposure, is the experience. I see this. The coaches I have who advance the fastest are the ones who they don't just see coaching as like a theory roundabout, where it's like, oh, this week, I learned about this theory. And then the next one, they see the valuable time as almost in between the sessions. So they go away, they take the theory, they apply it, they try it out and they come back and then we revisit it. That's really the, I guess you found the same question. A hundred thousand percent. Yeah. Because in this one hour or how long the session takes, you're going to discuss the problems that they are facing right now, but you always leave the people with certain blog articles or certain templates or whatever they have to inquire about and then digging themselves into the topic and coming back later two weeks with more knowledge and obviously more questions. And then this whole process of going back and forth and adding more and more knowledge to this, popping up Pyramid and getting smarter. That's what I love to see when the person just starts grasping it. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a really hard thing to do because it requires being humble and being vulnerable, being willing to fail. Yeah. The example that I have often come back to is actually the very first person I coached. So when I was working as a product manager outfittery, we were bringing in people from other parts of the organization into the product org. And I coached someone called Lindsay who worked in customer service and she moved across and she basically inspired me to become a coach. And I think one of the reasons why it was an inspiring experience was that she was really the model of someone who just threw herself into problems. And she would take on new responsibilities, new challenges, and she would suffer from it. It would be emotional turmoil that you go through when you're heading up an important project for the first time, or when you take the full reins of a team that has business pressure on it. But that's also why she learned very quickly and went from this kind of baby product manager to someone who was senior and didn't really need support from me. This kind of attitude where you're not scared of failure, you see it as a requirement for progress. You need to expose yourself. You need to have the risks and challenges. This is essential for growth as a product manager. And I have to agree with everything that you both just said, right? Even if I also think purely as a hiring manager, also when I try to get people in, seeing this humbleness and seeing also this approach of trying to learn and figure out also things is exactly what I'm looking for in my team. I don't want people who read some books and think that now they know all the theory and that they can do everything. Because I think that's like also probably where sometimes people get stuck in their careers because they think, they know, and it causes more frustration because they are not open enough. They are not looking at the problems. They see the problem. They complain about it. They see that it doesn't fit the solutions that they learned. And then they get stuck, right? I actually had a coach who wants that you give like assignments or tests to someone like, you can try this thing or that thing. And the assignment I gave this coach he was actually don't read any books for the next three months because we'd come back session after session and he'd have new concepts or theories that he picked up and he could describe them very well. He'd understand these things. He was clearly passionate and interested, but none of them were being applied. People often get into this loop where they're very theoretically strong. And then it's almost like the stronger you get conceptually, then the weaker you are in practice because you start to become afraid of actually doing the product management work and exposing yourself, trying things out. Yeah. So that's a common thing. And I would also add that you're totally right. A hiring manager should be looking for this kind of behavior, but I think there are actually probably a lot of insufficient, not so good product, hiring managers who get fooled by people who sound like they know a lot because they come across well in an interview, they know the answers, but in the environment where their answers aren't always the right ones, they might struggle with that. Yeah. And I think this is exactly what at the end you have to look for. And if I think about my very first hire that I made was a very junior person and he didn't have a design job. Christian knows him as well. He was passionate about design. He was doing a lot like in his free time, but he was working as a recruiter still in the design field. But this gave him this mindset of really willingness to learn openness. And as you say, humbleness. And he grew massively in the first month and he almost became one of the best designers on the team in a very short time. And I think that's the main difference. And now I'm putting myself on very thin ice. One thing, and that's why I love also hearing the way you talk about coaching and telling this to people or showing people how they need to approach these problems. One thing that I see a lot is a lot of people who want to get into product or in my specific case, into product design, they do some bootcamps. And I think what bootcamps do terribly wrong is that they give them the mindset of, okay, now in this two months or one month or two weeks, you learned everything and now you know it because you have all the tools, you have all the theory, you applied it in two sample projects, and now go out and make the world believe that you know it. And that's exactly how they work. And then at one time, they hit the wall and they see, all right, the theory might not be so applicable in every word. And this for me is like when I see a portfolio that you can tell from the portfolio when someone did the bootcamp, and it's something that unfortunately is teaching them wrong because it's not teaching them the openness. Yeah, yeah, I think I basically agree with that. I would give some caveat in that, you know, funnily, in my experience, actually, I was originally working in marketing when I came out of university and after I'd done the audio bubble kind of founding stuff earlier on before I knew what product was. And I decided, I found out about this product thing, I decided I must do it, I must become a product manager. And one of the things that I did on this kind of mission to convert myself and get a product manager job was I did one of these bootcamps, so actually general assembly. And at the time, this was the first product management course they did in London. It was taught by Kate Leto, who funny enough, is someone that is now one of my peers as a coach, which is a very cool thing. I think I did gain certain things from this. And I certainly remember I was going through like an interview process at the same time for a product manager role. And when you have the security of knowing some of these theories and things, that makes a big difference. But I don't think that was the foundation for me succeeding. I don't think that the bootcamp is the answer you start with. And probably it's an overinvestment in theory, as you described, right? There are better ways of approaching it, more cost efficient ways. But I think it's the mindset also that then people bring to the table, just because the theory, it doesn't know that you can walk into a job and know everything, you still will have to learn a lot. And you still will have to adjust and adapt to the circumstances that you find there. And that's why I was saying like, I'm putting myself on thin ice, there is bootcamps and bootcamps out there. And I think you mentioned General Assembly, they're the ones where I look at candidates, there are others and I don't make names where when you see it on the CV, you can put them in the same drawer. Yeah. And I should probably say as well, I definitely feel that my devil's advocate inside me is ticking right now. So when I counter your point, I basically agree with what you're saying. I think that these things are oversold and don't give that much value to the person in the end, sometimes can actually actively not help them. I think that's a very good point, because I have never made any bootcamp. I got my first job without it. And I have attended a couple of these trainings, but I never took the certificate at the end of the day. You're a baker, Christian, in the end. Yeah, okay, there I got my certificate, but that's something different. But the point that I want to make is, and I think it was like three years ago or four years ago, when I discovered the blog from Ken Norton, who's also a very successful product manager. He was clearly saying, and that was something opening my eyes back then, he was saying he would rather hire someone with no experience, but pure passion and curiosity and humbleness, instead of someone who has maybe shipped five features and can tell you everything about theory, but doesn't have the glance in their eyes. And that's exactly the point. The internet is full of that stuff. They're trying to figure out what is the best course that will make me most successful and make me starting a job where I make 250K, which is impossible, by the way, instead of thinking of what do I want to do? What do I want to do as a product manager? How do I want to change the world? And the first question that I'm always telling people when they want to apply for a job is, what industry do you like? What are you passionate about? How could you imagine changing product X, Y, Z? So rather thinking about more in a practical way, instead of just believing in that theory will make the job. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's even a compounding effect to this because the exact traits we talk about of curiosity and willingness and enthusiasm to learn and to be wrong, these are the same traits that enable a product manager to be good at most of their job. So yeah, it's a really critical thing to be able to have that mindset. It's very hard to teach someone that. You can't really do that for someone. So yeah, for both sides, discovery in your product and also discovery of yourself and learning to be better in yourself, they require the same learning mindset. Fully agree. And I believe the only way to really learn it is with my online courses that are starting soon. So don't listen to other people. They give you the pure truth and you will know everything. The masterclass. No kidding. I love all these points. And I think it's just like highlighting once again, the mindset that people need to have in the job. And I think that's something that someone can learn. And especially like in product, you need to learn it. And as you said, Sean, if I apply the same principles that I applied to product to myself and vice versa, that sounds like a little bit of the secret sauce. Yeah, I think so. I think there are a lot of things about this specific job that makes it necessary to not separate yourself and the work environment. A product manager is working day to day with a lot of challenges, a lot of conflict and their own ability in their life to self-reflect, to challenge themselves, to look for problems and not shy away is going to be really important in their work as a product manager. So it's not just about having that mindset, but also when you are a product manager starting out, you need to be willing to change in yourself. This job is going to change you. And also, if you change yourself outside like in the rest of your life, this will also influence you as a product manager. So that's a crazy, exciting opportunity. It's one of the reasons I love coaching this because I know I'm not just helping someone as a product manager. But the flip side is that change is painful. It's difficult. A lot of times, it's really not fun. Now, it's an important question to ask yourself, is this the kind of life I want to lead? And do I want a career which does really attach to who I am as a person? I can't just clock in and clock out. I have to really come to terms with how I am, how I interact with people, how I manage relationships, how I look at problems, all these kinds of things. Product management is not only riding on a unicorn. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, quite. But Sean, I really feel like those were beautiful closing words, almost. I definitely want to give you the opportunity to add something if you want to. But I think that was a really good summary also that can help people to reflect on, do I want to actually get into product? And then listen to the whole episode from the front again to learn how to get into it. Sounds good. Beautiful. Cool. Thanks a lot, Sean. It was a pleasure talking to you. We will add your links in the description. And if people are interested in getting coached by you, they can also reach out to you. I think your website will be also available in the link description right after. Yes, absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much. Have a nice evening. Cheers.