Taking your Product Management career to the Next Level – with Büşra Coşkuner (Part 2: The Frameworks)

Summary:

This is the second episode of a special Podcast with Büşra, dedicated to leveling up Product Manager’s skills.

Ready to unlock the potential of your product management? Tune in for a profound conversation with our guest, Büşra, who will guide us through the best frameworks that can empower product managers to make a real impact. We’ll focus on the power of North Star Metrics and Impact Mapping, two essential tools used by product teams to measure impact and translate value into revenue.

Little bonus… Büşra and Salva make sure that this, as usual, a pragmatic and “100% no BS talk”!

Our journey with Büşra takes us deeper into 

• North Star Metrics, a key concept that needs careful definition and testing. 
• We’ll discuss why it’s vital for a North Star Metric to be specific and measurable and shed light on its effectiveness. 
• As we pivot towards Impact Mapping, prepare to get a grasp of this visual toolkit that aligns teams and charts a roadmap to business goals. 

We’ll also delve into the skill set every product manager needs to succeed. From understanding data and market insights to identifying user needs and taking the initiative in collaboration, we’ll explore how these skills underpin successful strategies.
 
And remember – taking risks and putting theory into practice is key. 


You can contact Büşra Coşkuner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/busra-coskuner/

You can also read the full transcript here:

00:00
Hello and welcome back to reasonable product. My name is Salva and today I’m back with Bushra. We’ve been talking with Bushra a few weeks ago. We got a special about product management careers, what it takes to become a great product manager and personal development. Today we’re gonna continue our discussion with Bushra and the focus is gonna be the best frameworks for product managers to be successful in their jobs. We’re gonna discuss about North Star metrics. We’re gonna talk also about impact mapping.

00:29
and many other frameworks and tips that Bushra’s got to share with us. So stay with us and enjoy this part two of our podcast with Bushra. I know it’s going to be a long shot. I’m going to try this anyway. Imagine all of this set of different, let’s say, skills or set of different tools or set of different gaps, if you want, that you might observe among those people. And again, I know it’s going to be a long shot,

00:59
If you would say that’s the one thing that people are either asking more if they are aware or lacking more, if they’re not aware, but you are, which one would you say if I had to bring one particular silver bullet to fix those people, that would be the kind of knowledge I would drop? You know what my answer will be. It depends. Are you a lawyer or? No, I’m just a good product person.

01:32
Well, actually, again, there is a bias. Again, selection bias. The people come to me because I am good in specific things. So what I’m good at is strategic thinking, analytics, data, analytics metrics, and NOSDAQ metric, and impact mapping to connect business outcomes and user outcomes. And these are the topics that they come to me with. So.

02:00
Therefore, if you’d ask me, I would answer one of them. OK. I like this. Let’s get through them. Because even if it’s your reality, it’s still a reality. And I think it’s very worth for everybody to learn these four elements you mentioned. So it’s that strategic thinking, data, right? Yeah. I was trying to get notes, but you were faster than I was. Nostometric and impact mapping. While nostometric and impact mapping

02:29
frameworks. So the reason for that is actually, again, not some metric is because they want to understand how they can measure impact throughout the company and have an alignment that everybody goes in the same direction and can work with metrics that are not very much legging that product teams cannot work with, but also how to organize the company along these structures.

02:59
one thing and the impact mapping is because so the more senior you become, the more you have to train your skills to combine the business world with the product world. We are pretty much trained into combining the tech world with the product world and now we also have to combine the business world with the product world. Of course it depends if you’re a product person who comes from the business world, you still lack the ability to combine the…

03:28
the tech world with the product world. But so far, what I’ve seen, it’s rather the other way around. But let’s go through them one by one. Because I think there is merit in this. So NURSTAR mapping, what is NURSTAR mapping? NURSTAR metric. Sorry, it’s my bad. Yes, NURSTAR metric is one metric that basically stands for how you create value that will turn into revenue. So.

03:56
What we get quite often from the business side, from the management side is we get business goals, like really, really high level business goals that product teams cannot work with, right? And the highest ultimate lagging indicator is revenue. Like anyone and everyone and no one can actually influence revenue, right? So we don’t have to build anything and revenue will rise because I don’t know the next marketing campaign will…

04:25
brings so and so many new leads, right? So we can all work with that. What we can work with however, are metrics, leading indicators, so-called leading indicators that we can direct, where we know we can influence them directly and in order to do that, there are like different techniques how you can come to that. You can build KPI trees to bring the business perspective.

04:55
and the user perspective in form of a tree together to get to those leading indicators. You can use the goals, questions, metrics framework for that. You can use an impact map for that. Or if you want to pull it through the whole organization, you can use the North Star metric for that. And the North Star metric is more than just…

05:23
finding leading indicators is really like finding the one metric, still leading metric, but the one metric where we know, where we see a clear correlation that if we increase that, we know that revenue will increase. When we are good in doing this metric, then the revenue will definitely increase. And therefore, product teams, then

05:52
any team in an organization, but I focus on product teams. So product teams work towards this North Star metric and everybody else too. And when we increase this, then we know we are making revenue. So shall everybody have the same North Star metric in the organization? Or can you live with different teams with different North Star metrics? Per product. So within the same product should be the same North Star metric.

06:21
Yes. And I would even say, now I will get again to the, it depends world, right? So there are like some people who are very strict about it, but I’m more like, okay, what, what, what does reality, reality look like if the products have different business models, then it’s difficult actually to have like one more star metric that is, you know, that applies to all of the products. If they have a similar business model and they kind of tie into each other.

06:49
and have one ultimate funnel to go through just in different ways, then you can have one north star metric that applies to all of your products. If you are one product company, then it’s clear. So how do they relate to, for example, key results, QRs, are they related at all? Is one of the key results can be a north star metric or something different? And do you have an example of a good

07:19
or a bad Noistar metric? So OKRs are rather than on the input metrics part. So Noistar metric has different input metrics. And you can break down the input metrics even further and even further. And somewhere down this path, you can find the objectives to pick from. And then you still have to find the key results, because the key results are the very actionable metrics that you want to focus on that quarter,

07:49
time horizon. I mean, there are companies, at least one, who are using four months period and not three months period. So which is amazing. It works very well. I love it. Yeah. So down that path, there’s the objective and then you find the key results. A bad North Star metric is something very generic and you will find a lot of examples like weekly active users or monthly active users.

08:20
And you will be tempted to have this as your North Star metric as well, but it’s a bad metric because it doesn’t say anything. It just says somebody has to be active. But what does active actually mean? And you have no clue about that, right? Is it a problem of the definition or is it a problem of the metric itself? Is that? It’s a problem of the definition. And now let me try to find…

08:48
amplitude null star metric again. So I love that, but I have difficulties in keeping this in my mind. If we have to talk about good null star metric, so not good null star metric is defined. So instead of saying just something like weekly active users, for example, amplitudes null star metric is called weekly learning users, and they have a definition for that. So they define it as the count of

09:17
active amplitude users who have shared a learning that is consumed by at least two other people in the previous seven days. So it’s very specific. You want to be extremely specific. Don’t let it be very generic, active, and then its subject interpretation is really be a little bit strict in what active in this case means or not, right? Yes. And it’s beautiful, isn’t it? Let it sink in. It’s a really nice…

09:46
Definition. It’s pretty precise. I am very enthusiastic about it. You cannot fight about it later, right? You cannot just assume and then argue once the measure is there. Say, is this really what we wanted to measure or not? The definition is there from the beginning. That’s, I mean, that’s a thing, right? So when we find North Star metrics, and we don’t just find them and say like, this is it.

10:15
So the next thing, the next step is of course, taking the time to test if this is really a good null symmetric or if this works, right? So there are multiple pieces to it. So one thing is, do we really have the measures in place so that we can track this and measure it and find the numbers? If not, can we, like, do we have the ability to get this track?

10:42
down in a reasonable amount of time and with reasonable effort. If not, then we might need to look for something else. So if we need like a year to build our systems in a way in order that we can track that, maybe we need to look for something else. And then also we have to test it with some product increments that we release and then

11:11
correlation, right? So we wanted to improve for sharing, for example, does sharing really have an effect on revenue? Yes, or no, right? So we have to analyze that and understand if what we defined really adds to the revenue piece. Right. And that’s an iteration, it can take a year until you have, sometimes even longer until you have the right

11:41
Most symmetric. So if I put the pieces together, you’re saying, you get your, let’s say, real company, business, revenue-like metric, which you really want to optimize for, then out of this, you set something where you can have any impact as a product, and this is going to be your North Star metric. You ensure there’s something you know how to measure and is specific enough for you not to argue too much in meetings after about what it really meant when it’s too late.

12:08
And in the different increments, you actually test and verify that this Nullstar metrics do correlate, which was your previous hypothesis to the business impact you wanted to create in this example of revenue. Right. Yeah. And there’s also a tool, I think. So I think it’s called loops or something like that. So I’m not this is not a promotion. I don’t get any commission on that or whatever. It’s just something.

12:35
Maybe it’s just something that I saw and that was in a webinar of them. And I find found it because of curiosity, right? And all stop metric. Oh, cool. And to have a look. And then, yeah, I noticed what they’re, for example, doing is they have a they have a. Correlation check. So when you enter the north star metric, the input matrix, the output matrix, etc. And then you connect it to your data, then they have an automatic correlation check.

13:04
to show you if there’s really a correlation or not, which is super cool. Like if you ask me, this is super cool. So the takeaway here, bringing this back to this learning or coaching or developing discussion is North Star metric is important. It’s also a very complex topic, so no doubt that people find it a little bit difficult at the beginning. But it’s potentially if you are in this leadership track, something you really want to get covered on.

13:33
because you can’t really drive your teams if you don’t understand what you’re trying, which direction you’re going with your products. And Northstar is potentially a very valid tool or artifact to get there. Yeah. You mentioned another one, which was Impact Mapping. Yes, my most favorite tool. Oh, I love it. I feel like when you know how Impact Mapping works, you don’t need anything else. Just keeping the expectations, right?

14:02
Oh yeah, of course. Tell us more about this. Impact mapping. It’s a tool that is built by Kojko Atic. I hope I said it correctly. And it’s basically a visual tool that was built for creating alignment.

14:30
for creating alignment between management teams and teams. And basically finding the path that creates or that helps you to find those deliverables, those ideas that really help to move the business goal, so that really pay into the business goal. So basically, it has four levels. It starts with a business goal.

15:00
And then it continues with actors. So in the original language of the business, of the impact mapping, it starts with a goal. Then you have a level, the next level of actors. And where you say these actors can have a positive or negative impact on achieving this goal. So negative is also important, right? So for example, regulators. Then you have the impact level, what we know as the user outcome level.

15:29
And here you find those impacts that are crucial or those behaviors that we want these actors to adopt in order we can achieve the business goal. And then you come with the ideation of deliverables. So in the original name, deliverables for us, it’s the output level. Right. So when I say for us, then I mean, for people like me who talk with numbers and.

15:58
and in data ways, right? So this is what we call output. And then what we can add after that is the experiments to actually see which gain more evidence. Yeah, I still say validate. So people don’t like to use the word validate. I say validate how much you can, right? So gain more evidence and confidence if the output is really going to contribute to the user outcome, which in a way, it’s going

16:27
in turn will contribute to the business goal by helping this actor or preventing this actor from doing something. Right. So you would start… So let me see if I understand. You start from the business outcome you want to get, right? That’s your route. And down from this, you start defining… I don’t know, how is it like a kind of a brainstorming session you usually run? Is more like an open-ended one? Yeah, it depends. So you can combine it with discovery or you can do a

16:56
brainstorming sessions. So for initial, yeah, initial workshops, we do pure brainstorming. But we already start with what our assumptions, what our beliefs and what our gnomes. And then we naturally go into the known space where they already have like some data and so on and so forth. This is not always like the best way.

17:23
I’ll be very honest with you because sometimes behind those assumptions, there are those big bets, right? And there are those very interesting pieces. So it depends on the context. That’s why I’m like, you only need impact mapping because it depends on what we are trying to do. So if, but in general, yes, you start with a business goal or business outcome, and then you brainstorm actors with or without.

17:49
data. So if you use it for discovery, you can also leave it open. And like with every piece you find out, you can add an actor, right? You can do it this way as well. And then you define outcomes per actor. And you can already do a prioritization and pick the most relevant actor or the most relevant three actors or whatever your context is in a moment, right? And only

18:15
Think about outcomes for them. Again, if you use it for discovery, then you add the outcomes after you have discovered them. And then your ideated outputs. Now, you can also combine it with the Opportunity Solution Tree. So basically, after you have the user outcomes, you can use these ones as the product outcome of the Opportunity Solution Tree, and then go into discovery and discover the opportunities.

18:44
the sub opportunities and then again the sub opportunities and then come with the solutions. This is a good one level of depth exactly further basically. Exactly, so having the opportunities between user outcome and deliverables or output. You can also use it with OKRs. So basically the user outcome part is where you can find the objectives for your OKRs. You can make outcome cascades. So…

19:13
Very often we come up with very high level outcomes on an impact map. And then we start asking the five Ys, right? Or the house, the house or the Ys. So basically how would they do that? By doing X, Y, Z. Here’s another level of outcome. How would they do that? Oh, by doing X, Y, Z. Right. So, and then you can also, if you have a very specific outcome in your impact map, you can ask why would they want to do that because X, Y, Z, and they would.

19:42
become even more abstract. So you can have different levels of user outcomes in there with an outcome cascade, and then you can pick the objective from there, whatever is important for you in that quarter, for example. That’s how you would combine it with OKRs. The way how you would combine it with North Star metric. I don’t know if this is going already to deep. I think it’s perfect.

20:13
So basically, whether you have a North Star metric or any KPI tree, what you could do is either taking the business parts of the tree, of the KPI tree, or of the North Star metric tree that are really business KPI, the lagging pieces, and find the underlying sub-legging and sub-legging indicators, so it’s all still business-related, right? And then take from there, for example,

20:44
I know. If we want to expand in the market, right? Increase number of new signups by a new customer signups by whatever, X percent. So then you can have this as a business goal. Yep. Go ahead, sorry. Yeah. And then for the NOSDAI metric, the input metrics, for example, can serve you as outcomes, user outcomes.

21:14
But depends on how you phrase them, you can even take them as business goals. Now it’s getting complicated because then they are not, technically not business goals, but you can use them at the top of your impact map and further break them down through filtering, by filtering through the actors to then have more granular user outcomes. So you can even filter your…

21:43
user outcomes through an impact map. So it’s just crazy framework. I love it. That’s the greatest segue for the question I’ve got in mind for a few minutes now. I think we should follow. We start saying, we really advise you guys not to be stuck on frameworks, not to be too much stubborn on framework. But in reality, when we mention which one are the biggest gaps on, I know we are victim of bias because we’ve been deep diving.

22:12
in this particular category. So I completely allow myself this intellectual jump. But basically we are showing them that there are a lot of frameworks and they are very complex and so on. So how do you and I’m sure you’ve got an answer for this, but how do you conciliate those? Do we need frameworks or not? And what is the takeaway? What people have to understand about what is important or not about those frameworks?

22:40
We need frameworks in order to understand the concepts behind. We need to understand, or we should understand why they exist for which problems they are, they are a good solution. But the main point about frameworks is understanding the first principles that are behind those frameworks. The impact map. I love an impact map for the reason because, because it’s talking about the same things, just giving it.

23:09
a structure. It’s the same things that we keep talking about, right? We’re talking about business value. That’s the business goal. We keep talking about the right target group. These are the actors and actors are even more than just target groups, right? It’s more. We keep talking about user outcomes and about ideas and features and iterations and so on and so forth. But how do we put these together? And an impact map just gives you a good structure of how to put these things together.

23:39
But you don’t have to create a full impact map. Just recently, I talked with someone about how he should structure his workshop. And he told me, oh, yeah, we have ideas how to use chat GPT in XYZ. And then I was like, OK, but who is this for? And why would you want to do it? So yeah, that’s the thing that I want to actually find out in the workshop. But how do I do that? OK.

24:07
enter the stage of reverse impact mapping. Start with the output, you have the ideas, and now think about which outcomes you want to generate with the ideas and which teams are these outcomes good for. And then final step, which ones of them actually are really paying into any business goal that you have. And you don’t have to see it as in a tree form, it’s just, which business goal do you want to fix?

24:36
or contribute to, because if there is no goal to contribute to, good luck with getting stakeholder buy-in from the management team, right? So you won’t. And it’s just those four elements and understanding how they work together in order to get your point through. It’s not the framework itself. It’s understanding the elements and how they play together. Yeah, that makes sense. And what I also observe is that there is a very thin line between

25:06
Being aware about, let’s say, best practices or frameworks or things that other people, other smart people, already thought about it, you don’t need to reinvent, but also not being too much, I call them usually fundamentalists about that. Say, oh, I have to be very stubborn. Let’s work this way. And there is a very great book on it says you have to apply this way. I’m going to do exactly the same. It’s going to be the same number of lines and rows. Probably figuring out the right level and how much you want to apply them

25:36
is also soft skill somehow. Yeah, absolutely. Be pragmatic, not dogmatic, right? Right. And that’s, if you put on my top list, that’s potentially one of the items number one, potentially, right now. You mentioned two other things that are like usual go to to come to you. One is data, and the other one is strategic thinking. Yeah. Can we briefly elaborate on them too? Yeah, sure. So.

26:04
Data is about, there are different levels of how you use data in product management work, right? So there’s the level of you need data, qualitative and quantitative in discovery. You first need to understand what you actually want to build and why and for whom. And there we are again with impact mapping. You can’t avoid it, yeah. I can. This is my favorite framework. Anyway, so.

26:33
You need these data points, right? So yes, it’s qualitative data mainly when you start up or when you B2B, your whole data world is not whole but majority of it is qualitative anyways. So it’s this discovery part, but then there is also the part about understanding trends, understanding signals, understanding the market. That is also a piece of data and it’s not just…

27:02
So here’s another example. It’s not just about how does my number look like, but it’s how does my number look like compared to others in the industry. So just had a conversation about activity rate. Is an activity rate of x, y, z, whatever, that I’ve just calculated here for our company good or bad? Sorry, I can’t tell you. It’s just a data point. So you have to.

27:32
have something to compare. You always have to compare your data point to something. And the question is, OK, how do others in your market, what you define as your market, when you compare to them, is it a good one or a bad one? That’s the thing that you have to answer. And then there’s the other level of analytics that is really deep into the product itself. So we.

28:01
We try to understand how the product works. And where is the gap? Where is the drop? Where can I fix? Where should I fix something? And there we have to be very careful because there we can fall into the trap of, oh, here there seems to be a drop and the number is cool. Let’s just fix it without having a look why this drop even happens. So get the context what’s happening there. Maybe it’s a very natural drop.

28:29
and you can’t fix it because of seasonality. Or it’s a natural part of the decision-making of a human, and maybe you cannot fix it, or maybe you can, but the way you could fix it is not very ethical. So there are lots of considerations, right? So yes, you should have a look at data. So I think the mix of what I get is

28:59
a lot about this part of how do I analyze what’s going on, but also one step before, how do I actually set the right metrics and set the right goals? And so that’s the one part. So how is my product doing and how do I analyze how my product is going? And the other part is, how do I actually find the right metrics? How do I?

29:28
actually set the right goals with the right metrics. And there we are talking about a step before we actually get into analyzing anything. And that is also the very important step so that we can prioritize anything to understand how our product actually works. There is this whole notion of product-led growth and so on and so forth, which is fine. I’m not an expert in product-led growth.

29:56
But there are some things that you can start with, right? And there my favorite method is actually the pirate metrics, not seen as a funnel, but as a flow. Because in every product, you have these steps, right? You have the acquisition step, you have the activation step, the retention, the referral, and the revenue step, but they are ordered in a different way. But each of the step feeds the other one. For example, activation can come either directly before retention,

30:26
or directly before revenue and then retention. It depends on your business model what comes first. And then it can feed itself into each other. And then there might be, like, if revenue comes before retention, there might be another part of activation that is important. So you have activation twice in your pirate metrics flow, for example. So this is very theoretical. But that already helps you to understand

30:55
piece of my product is responsible for which part of this flow, how can I or which metric is the right one that measures this part of the flow. And then you can analyze the conversion rates and actually see what’s a good conversion rate, what’s a bad conversion rate or what is a drop, for example. You can take the user journey.

31:23
and analyze that together with this flow. And when I say user journey, I mean as a tree, not as a linear flow, because no user journey is a linear flow. It has its reason why we do that. But if you map it as a tree, and then you compare it to your R flow, for example, or your pirate metrics flow, then you can see what’s happening and which additional metrics you might need to look into.

31:51
in order to understand where you need to actually start looking deeper into to fix something. And when I say look deeper into, then I mean, numbers can tell you what is happening, but not why it’s happening. So you will probably have to bring some qualitative input and look at it as well. Or if you have data scientists in your team, they can do magic. Sometimes they can see the why in the numbers, right? So that might be a chance. So

32:21
Yeah, so that’s what I would say, but that’s also an element. And many product managers struggle with this part already. So there are two things in this data part in this time which are pretty complex, or at least need to be taken care of. One is understanding the context around the data. It’s not only the data itself, it’s more about the context and what it means and can we influence that. And the other one is that things potentially a little bit more complex than they look like. So it’s not only about…

32:49
a linear flow would people go from A to B and to C. And they can just analyze with a conversion or a drop rate. But people potentially go in and out on different paths. And so you need something a little bit more correlated to be able to take care about these complex behaviors, right? Yes, exactly. And that’s where you want to have somebody from a data analytics function in your team helping, I guess. Yeah. Or a user researcher who can do the

33:18
part as well. Yeah, exactly. So I see why you’ve got people coming to you with this gaps. On the last one, it’s potentially what they said is table stake for a product manager. What about strategic thinking? Yeah, we think it’s table stake, but something is missing, right? And I think the reason why so many people, although there’s lots of

33:48
right, that help you with creating a strategy and a product strategy and a product roadmap, strategic thinking comes up as a thing, like still very often. I think this is because we like when we started with junior roles, we tend to start on the delivery side where the product manager doesn’t have to think too much about what needs to be built, but rather building it.

34:17
the right way and the right speed, launching it at the right time and so on and so forth. I think the problem starts already with that, right? So when you’re a junior, you should already be included into strategic thinking in some way. So the junior doesn’t have to make the final decisions, but you can still give the junior some tasks to start exercising this brain muscle.

34:47
And if it’s just pieces of it, right? So when you create a strategy, it’s about long-term thinking. It’s about the bets that we need to take in order to get to a specific point. And these can look differently, right? And what you need is you need input. You need data. Again, there we are with data again, right? So you need input. You need to understand how the market works. You need to understand what your users’ needs are and how they…

35:16
think and what they want. You need to understand how your product works at the moment, but how the market will look like in a couple of years. So what is going to happen in a couple of years is something that you have to be able to assume today. You cannot predict it, but you can assume something or you can anticipate something. Right. And one thing that you could do is you could ask your junior to get their hands dirty and

35:45
bring this piece of information, some of these pieces of information. Of course, like a whole market analysis won’t be something that they will be able to do, but they can, for example, collaborate with the market research agency in order to understand what’s happening, these kind of things. And then it’s about… I studied industrial engineering and management.

36:13
In hindsight, the perfect thing I could have studied to become a product manager, I still use a couple of things from university. My majors were marketing and innovation, software engineering and quality management, technical quality management. So perfect, right? And then technical quality management, we also have this thing of process management and process optimization.

36:41
And it’s nothing else than a gap analysis. What do we have now? Where are we today? Where do we want to be in the future? And what’s the way to get there, right? And this piece of what’s the way to get there is often mistaken as the product roadmap, the very detailed one, right? It’s more of the stepstones that we need to think about. Right, so for example, if we want to create an electric car market, then first we…

37:08
Do we need the car first or do we need the system first, right? That can actually help us to create this market, right? So what is the first stepstone to get there? And once we have made the decision which one we want to try first, then we can go down deeper into, OK, if we say we need the car first so that people actually see this thing is working, right? And the demand rises, then we can also make the…

37:37
authorities become aware that we need a bigger system for actually having more cars and then make the system bigger and then have more cars and make the system bigger. So this is an example. What’s the stepping stones? And that’s the thing that you have to think about. But that’s very interesting what you’re saying. And I think there is a very big misunderstanding around about you want to be agile, you don’t need roadmaps, which is from my perspective,

38:07
things set in stone week after week, but you still want to know what you’re doing. And if there is A before B, as you were mentioning before, do we need before to create the card or the highways? You want to know which one is your approach, which strategy you’re following. And this is not incompatible with being agile or with adapting or seeing how the market reacts. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The market is more

38:36
um, fix than we are. And we have to play a flexible role in a fixed world. Right.

38:45
Bushra, I heard four things today. So again, I think major elements. And I know I had to force you a little bit because it depends, but still. It depends. Everybody has to not forget. Right. I still take it with the benefit of Daab and saying, I mean, it can change, but still I’ve got a feeling there are four pivots that are likely to happen in many of the conversations you’ve got when you try to help people develop themselves.

39:11
And this was about data, strategic thinking, impact mapping, and North Star. So four elements that potentially to different extent are part of people who want to be in product management and create an impact. What would be in closure your suggestion to people, pragmatically, how should they go and get this proficiency around one or more of these topics? What they usually suggest? Is it books? Is it doing?

39:42
So we tend to say that the best way to learn these things is doing them. So you can read a lot of books. You can take any theoretical course or whatever. It will help you to understand what is behind, like the idea behind those topics. But you will only be able to learn it very, very well when you apply these things.

40:12
So now I don’t want to say like the work of all of these things that we product coaches do is for nothing, right? So like the coaching or the workshops or courses, it’s not about saying that. It’s about saying, yes, have an understanding first, but then try to apply these things that you learn. Just reading and living it there will not help you improve your skills, no matter what it is.

40:40
Like if it’s one of those four topics, if it’s anything else, right. So, um, these topics are not the only ones that, that I’m coaching in the end. Right. So I see very big range of, of, of different things, of different topics coming up. And I keep saying the same thing. Okay. We, we are coaching these things. We are going through these, these topics, but you have to apply them. That’s why, for example, I give homeworks.

41:07
And say, next time I want to see this. And then sometimes I feel like a teacher, but like in the end, really, I get good feedback about it because I forced them to try things out. And, um, even if it feels scary to try it out at your own work in your own workplace, that’s where you can actually try it out best because you have all the pieces in place to just apply what you’re just learning.

41:38
And I mean, what’s worse that can happen when you try to apply it, right? So worst thing that can happen is that somebody comes up to you and says like, oh, this is not what you should spend your time doing with, right? Okay. Well, then the question is if it’s the right place to work anyways, right? So if they don’t support your growth, then that’s the other topic anyways, or the other question.

42:06
But yeah, so my ultimate advice is whatever you learn and however you learn, reading, taking courses, taking classes, watching videos, whatever, apply, try to apply it. And if you don’t know how, ask someone to help you apply it. Makes total sense. And probably better to have an imperfect real life implementation, the perfect book.

42:35
one. Bushra, thank you very much for being here today. What is the best way to reach out to you or get in contact with you? Yeah. So the best way is either on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I’m also sharing learning snippets and nuggets.

42:56
I call it mini series from time to time when I take a topic and write about it a week in a row. I do this kind of things on LinkedIn. So that’s a good place. Or you can also write me through my contact form on my website. Yeah, but I guess LinkedIn. Which is? Which is busra.co. So B-U-S.

43:25
RA.co. We’re going to be sure all the links are going to be down in the summer of the podcast, by the way. So anybody just have to click to talk to you. You can also subscribe to my newsletter. I just very freshly newly added a subscription field and the newsletter, basically whenever I write a new blog post in my brain dump, then they will get notified. Excellent.

43:50
So you’ve got plenty of ways to reach out to you. And Bushra, thanks again. I think this really helps people to understand how pragmatic they have to develop their skills in product management. It was great having you today. And talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Talk soon. Gonna check. Bye.