so I don't think I had a very linear path. Um, and my background. So just like for context, I'm a product manager. Andi. I primarily work within artificial intelligence, and my path wasn't berry linear. Like I was mentioning. I didn't come from a background in our Christian intelligence. Um, but I had a background analytics through, like finance, accounting, um, and business in general. Andi came out of college doing health care and consulting. So I took the opportunity, um, to work on a product team doing financed for them and understanding, like, you know, their investments and strategies around that and that kind of set the stage for me. Thio explore product management roles where that those kind of skills which were primarily analytic skills, transitionary well into that. So that's one big piece of it. Another big piece of it is that, you know, the reality was that growing up, I was exposed to technology software. Um, that was emerging, and I dabbled with it. I experimented with it. I acted as an entrepreneur. I explored those things. Um, it went out of my comfort zone to build things. So those skills which range from you know, photo and video editing on Adobe Creative Suite Thio Um, you know, like running a store? Um, the e commerce or even, like, you know, via eBay? Um, e mean all those experiences kind of lend to, um what became the penultimate, like career choice for me, which was product management. And I think the reason is because it requires a facet of each of those sort of responsibilities of like, being a salesperson of being Somebody could build something of being something design and think like the user and talk to people and understand their problems and be able to spring string all those things together into a product and reiterate. So, um, that's that's, you know, a very high level, like, you know, story of how I got to where I am.

mhm just to clarify. I do product strategy, but not for global services within IBM, but within our IBM Watson team. Um and yeah, I mean, I think I was kind of transitioning into those responsibilities. But a product managers responsibilities are around, um, setting. You know the stage for their product with other teams. Um, so, like when there's no team where there's no product in your you know, starting off creating a product, you're kind of understanding the market and opportunities in that market you're trying to understand. Is there an opportunity? How big is that opportunity with competitors there? Um, that's very important analysis to do before you go on build a product itself when you start actually building that product. It's all about listening to the user understanding. You know what their feedback is, what their you know, whats working for them? It's not working for them and reiterating that product. But along the way, you are working with other teams that typically a product manager, um, doesn't order reporting structure to so developers don't report to me. Designers don't report to me. I get an assigned amount of them. And my job is to, um influence like are, you know, team to be able to work on the right thing for the customer. Eso A lot of my time is spent, you know, talking to clients. Or it should be. It's not always easy to do that. If you're a consumer products, it's probably, um, much more easy to get feedback from customers when an enterprise, you're dealing with other people in business who are just as busy as you are. So it's tough. Thio Um, you know, get the CEO of a company to talk to you when they have their own company to manage, right? But your time is primarily spent on understanding the customer feedback and what they're looking for out of your product, what their priorities are, and then combining all that feedback you get from the market and prioritizing it and then building a road map so that you are executing the right product and creating the right solution. Um, in terms of like time Spence and travel on things like that, Um, it changes, um, depends on the product. Your own depends on who you're working for, so there's no there's no real like step amount. I try to keep a healthy lifestyle. Um, in terms of the top three priorities Um, mhm. As a product manager, I know a top priority is understanding the user and being able to communicate that back to my designers and developers. So they build the right product. S o. I don't know how to describe Top Three, but I could I could describe the top, and that's the top.

S o. I think I mentioned earlier. You don't hold like the resource is in your reporting structure and product management job. So in a way, you don't really have, like, you know, a power you have thio learn to influence with around you prioritize the right work to build the product. It's taking a write in the book, the customer feedback because so the best way to like, you know, deal with that kind of a challenge is, well, one do your job, right? Like developer expects you thio spend time doing that work because they're spending time building on a designer expects to be the same. So pulling your weight goes a long way because being Able Thio perform a task of research and getting the right feedback is born and not not a very straightforward thing. And then, synthesizing the wide gamut of feedback you get into what's actionable, um, is is a hard task to do. It's not always simple. Communication is huge, so being able to do that gives you the report you need, you know, and the confidence from the people around you to actually build the right product on. But sometimes you have to go and actually design the product yourself and then communicated that way or or even like, you know, by the program to go straight that product for your team to understand. Hey, this is the customer wants. Yes, but these people, uh, this is their feedback. This is how surprising that feedback. And by the way, I also designed the mock up. This is what I think look like? Like what? You know, let's let's start planning this out. Um, so So that Z you know, I guess like one example of that is I worked as a product manager on growth on our team and within a year, um so our focus was on, like, developers and, um, selling AI services for developers making them available and an easily easy way to consume them and understand them. Yeah. And throughout that role, there wasn't One week I went by where I didn't talk to at least one customer and understand what their needs are. And I constantly had new criteria of, like, questions or research. I was looking into to better understand the direction actually going with, you know, growing my product. So you know, whether it was 50 to 200 customers. I think I was somewhere in that range of like, 75. Really, I I got feedback. I brought that feed back in. It was things like, um, you know what I love? Like using your product. I get e could connect to your A p i easily. But I have a hard time finding your a p i k eso when I create the service for Watson Natural language understanding, you know, capability. You know, it's there at the demos. Great. I could find it. I can create the service, but for some reason of having trouble connecting to by the A p I. And that, like, question would lead me to, like, understand. Okay. What's going on there? Why is there a problem here? I want to grow up product. I need to solve that problem for not just this customer, all customers to experience that. So what can I do to design a product to alleviate that? So, like an example? It was that way. Made it easier to find that, you know, a pikey. And he made it s or the auto generates when you create the service. And that helped boost our product growth considerably. Um, And to do that, we experiment that we you know, I went and experimenting this with customers first, and I got data to show that be effective. And then I went back to my development team that showed them. Hey, so this is what I'm telling me. I ran this experiment with the customer s, um, of development. You could help from the experiments, and this is the result we got and at a 50% improvement by just making this change. And here's how the challenge works, and then they develop it. And then we realized that the results usually so that z kind of like a really good example of how all this gonna put together.