Diversity in Product: Dianna Yau
I'm Dianna, a senior product manager in Silicon Valley. I’ve previously worked at big tech companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, and Rocket Internet, and I’m passionate about sharing the best tips to becoming a product manager and how to get a job in the tech industry.
Having found my dream job, and globetrotting through 95+ countries, I want to help people have their best careers, become super productive, and live their lives to the fullest through travel and growth. Why? Because life is short and everyone deserves to live to their fullest potential.
We’d love to hear about your journey into product management. What were some of the challenges you faced in securing your first PM role?
For me, I didn’t even know that product management existed until I first joined Facebook as a technical program manager. When I first met product managers at Facebook, I saw that they owned the room, and they drove so much impact and clarity on the strategy. So, that was how I learned about product management.
One of the biggest challenges to becoming a PM is the cold start problem. In order to be a product manager, most people want you to have been a product manager before. But then if you’re interested in product management and haven’t done it before, then how do you become a product manager?
The cold start challenge was one thing that was really holding me back as a technical program manager. Technical program management is a very similar role because it’s heavy on execution and stakeholder management. But, because it didn’t have the space to drive product strategy, it was still such a challenge to make the transition and to make the case for the move.
The second challenge I faced was practicing product management skills. For me, the point of becoming a product manager wasn’t the title. It was that I was so excited to do the work of product management!
But, if you’re not in the role, it’s not often that people will give you the responsibilities. I really wanted to work on strategy, but that was left to the product manager. Instead, I was restricted to my own scope.
How do you overcome the cold start problem if no one gives you the opportunity to learn and practice those skills? You can learn about product management all you want by reading about it online, but it’s not the same as actually doing the work.
What are some ways hiring managers can make that first PM role easier to obtain for people who don’t look or think like them?
Product managers perform certain skills, and hiring managers should look for those skills rather than looking for PM titles. It’s more productive and more equitable to look for folks who are coachable rather than people who are perfect fits right out of the gate.
The key skills of product management, in my eyes, are strategy, execution, stakeholder management, team management, etc. These are skills that can be demonstrated in other roles! For example, technical program managers have many of these skills - they’re just missing the “product strategy” skill, and that’s something that hiring managers can coach.
By relaxing the requirements away from having every possible skill required to become a product manager, and leaving a bit of room for coachability, hiring managers can remove a lot of the burden of the cold start problem, and that helps to open up the funnel for a more diverse set of candidates.
The problem in the industry is that there’s just not enough product manager talent supply to keep up with the crazy growing demand for product manager talent. In one of my YouTube videos, I talked about how every company (even non-tech companies) needs product managers - for example, even the butter-making company Land o Lakes has an open product manager position!
Even companies that aren’t tech companies are moving towards needing product managers. People used to say that tech is its own industry, but it’s not. It’s a horizontal capability that every company needs. Tech cuts across all industries, and that’s where the world is headed.
Back when I was working at IBM, my team was focused on getting Fortune 100 companies to implement tech throughout their departments and processes. There are just so many manual processes with paper and pen, and these can be accelerated by incorporating tech into every industry.
For example, within a supermarket company, you might typically have internal IT departments that build lots of one-off custom code for a variety of stakeholders, and all of this code doesn’t talk to each other well. Plus, they’re reinventing the wheel every single time because their code is treated as a custom project rather than a scalable product.
That supermarket would be so much better off by building an internal product or internal platform capability, where they can scale to a variety of use cases through more strategic planning. They could even open up some of their systems to external access to drive partnerships and integrations that they would never have been able to dream of before.
Because of the incorporation of tech into every industry and every company, this trend is pulling in product managers, data scientists, engineers, along with it.
So as a hiring manager, instead of trying to pull product managers away from other companies, train your existing people to become product managers.
And this leads into my second point. As a hiring manager, be willing to coach. It’s a huge missing part in the industry today.
A few decades ago, the apprenticeship model was how people grew to get better, especially for highly-experiential roles. You took people under your wing and helped them master the skills. Product management is a highly-experiential role that can’t be learned simply through academics or on paper. Having the actual hands-on experience really matters.
Looking back on that first PM experience, what advice would you give yourself?
Definitely the first thing I wish I did a better job of was to learn from others, like we talked about in the apprenticeship model. It’s especially important for product management because a lot of what product managers do doesn’t fall into neat buckets.
Our work is experiential and context driven, and a lot of the key insights simply aren’t going to come through in books. Product managers are the people who end up filling all the gaps that are missing, and you’re not necessarily going to hear that when you’re listening to product management courses.
There’s so much nuance to the work. For example, we talked about stakeholder management. When people hear that, they think “oh, that doesn’t seem so hard.”
But really, it’s such a skill to finesse: you have to determine who the right stakeholders are and you need to customize your approach for each one of them. All of these nuances, you might not get in the classroom, and you might not see all of these edge cases. But then when you watch someone do it in the real world, you go “oh, this is what actually happens on the job.”
For many of these imperfect scenarios, because you’re the product manager who’s the catchall for everything on the team, you have to figure it out. It’s important to see product management in action because that’s how you’ll see all of the permutations that can happen when developing a product.
Second, what I like about product is the exposure to different functions. And hence my advice for myself here is to roll up your sleeves and be willing to do every function.
For example, there was a time when I didn’t have a product designer, a data scientist, or a marketer on my team. It was a really chaotic situation for me: how am I going to find all of these people to fill these critical roles?
But eventually, I began to embrace that. I saw it as an opportunity to learn product design. I learned how to do my own SQL queries.
And honestly, this experience made me a more empathetic product leader. As an example, when data scientists bring challenges to me, or when I delegate work to data scientists, I have a much better understanding of their workflows and pain points. That’s helped us as a team prevent falling for certain traps.
Plus, learning how to be scrappy is great. When you don’t have certain resources, now you’re able to fill the gaps or to pick up the slack, and that’s helpful to keep things moving.
Product management can sometimes be an isolating role. What are some approaches you’ve taken to get support?
The PM role can be very isolating, and that can make it hard to get the mentorship and support you need to grow and succeed. If I had found someone to shadow early in my career, I could have done even better back then.
At my company, we currently have something called PM Circles, where we find a group of product managers outside your organization so that the conversation is more focused on career and general product management topics. It’s different from having group discussions with product managers who are inside your current organization, since people are then going to be afraid to share.
It’s a neat way to start a group, to focus on career-related things outside of day to day work! I recommend companies spin up support groups like these.
And if that group doesn’t already exist at your company, then creating your own is a great way to build support and demonstrate leadership!
Another approach is to mentor others. Learning isn’t always learning from peers or people higher up than you.
I’ve actually learned a tremendous amount from people who are actually younger than me. In 2020, there were so many younger college students who wanted to become product managers who reached out to me for help.
I couldn’t handle all of the requests for 1:1 conversations though, since I didn’t have the bandwidth. So, I created a “Women in PM” group from the people who reached out and made an application form to create a group of 5-6 people. Once I selected the participants, we met every week for a couple of months.
In those conversations, some of their questions were “what does your career trajectory look like?” or “how do you deal with stakeholders?” were great questions because I’d forgotten to ask these questions to myself after some time.
Mentoring these students was a forcing function that made me really think through it and be able to communicate it in a coherent way. This was basically a way for me to crystallize a process around it.
They always say, you know you’ve really learned something when you can teach it to someone else.
So to recap, my three pieces of advice to make product management a less isolating function:
Join a product management group that goes outside your company
Spin up your own group if you don’t have one yet
Mentor people who are junior to you
What do you find frustrating about being underrepresented in product management?
Definitely different styles at work. One big stereotype in product is that the product manager should be the loudest in the room, speak the most, be the most confident in the room.
If you think about it from Asian work cultures, that’s not how they do things. Instead, your work speaks for itself, and if you talk too much then people will be turned off.
Especially because product managers are in a leadership role, it’s important to be cognizant of different leadership styles. We need to make sure that we don’t perpetuate the false requirement that product managers need to be the loudest in the room (the Western stereotype) to have influence and to be seen as competent and authoritative.
That’s a big one for me.
Another one is that it’s so important for our product teams to reflect the users that we’re building for.
When I was based in San Francisco, I found it kind of ridiculous that we in Silicon Valley are building products for the entire world, when our product teams don’t really represent the cultural makeup of the entire world. A lot of us in Silicon Valley are honestly very privileged, and how are we supposed to be able to build appropriately for the entire world?
I imagine a world in the future where the diversity of our employees represent the diversity of our users. After all, don’t we think that we’d get much more engagement, traction, retention, and revenue if our product teams looked more like the people they were meant to serve?
From your perspective, what’s one thing people should be more aware of?
I definitely wish there was more community around product. I remember going on a trip with a friend who’s a product manager at WhatsApp, and we sat down for a meal with another product manager friend.
As we were eating, we started chatting about the scenarios that we were tackling at work, and I found that there were so many common situations that I previously didn’t know other people were experiencing. By seeing that situations that I was in were just common patterns rather than specific to me, it helped to recalibrate my expectations and my mindset. Instead of being frustrated about the situation, how do you figure out how to embrace that and create a more effective strategy and process to proactively solve the situation?
As an example, a common situation that people might face is that engineers will ask pointed questions about product decisions. If you didn’t know that was normal, then you might be quite frustrated and feel that they weren’t respecting you or didn’t think you were competent.
But instead, when you learn that it’s part of the natural process and working style, we can then create effective processes that harness the natural curiosity of engineers without derailing product decisions.
Instead of coming up with the strategy without engineers and then trying to convince them on it, include them in crafting the strategy. It’s so important to loop in engineers as part of the product decision making process and have them be a part of the ride, because that makes better products and helps our teams move faster.
The community part goes a really long way in helping our discipline get more effective at working together, not just within product management but also across other departments and organizations.
The second thing is that we see a rise in the number of people who want to become product managers. For some of my clients who reach out to practice PM interviews, I commonly hear reasons like “I want to be the boss in the room!” or “I can make a ton of money as a PM!”
But that motivation is not going to carry you through the day to day. You have to realize the reality of the role.
Sure, product managers make big decisions, but I also always joke that being a PM is like the custodian in the room, we’re always cleaning stuff up. When crap hits the ceiling, cleaning it up is our job too.
So it’s not as glamorous as people make it up to be. Before you jump into product, realize the harsh realities as well and have someone share it with you. Try to get exposure to it by shadowing someone, and make sure you’re doing product management for the right reasons.
Of course, for me it’s a benefit to be paid well as a product manager, and I’m at a company where product managers are really respected, but these weren’t the core motivations for me.
My core motivation is to be at the forefront of figuring out how to solve people problems. I’m truly obsessed with learning about what users care about (I have a psychology background after all) and I’m truly excited about creating interesting business models that will solve problems but also ensure that companies can sustainably stay in business.
What’s the best way for readers to reach out to you and stay on top of what you’re doing?
If you’re preparing for PM interviews, I share tips on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/c/Diannayau
Or if you’re looking for 1:1 interview coaching, here’s my website: https://superpeer.com/dyau
We’re always looking for new perspectives to highlight, to bring more diversity into product management! If you have someone you’d like to nominate, please send us an email at admin@productteacher.com, we’d love to hear from you!