0:00 Evaluating career opportunities and finding specialization
14:16 Discovering talents and passion for AI
18:24 Career specialization and job evaluation factors
Featured Links: Follow Hoang on LinkedIn
Episode transcript
Randy Silver:
Hey, Lily. So you know, I did a talk at Mind the Products Conference a few weeks ago.
Lily Smith :
Yes, yes, you do know, I was there, don’t you, randy?
Randy Silver:
Of course, but you know, one of the things I talked about was that the average tenure of a senior product person is, you know, just about two years. That’s a lot of people changing jobs all the time. I’ve been coaching and consulting for the past few years. So how do people evaluate the opportunities out there and why does it seem like they keep making the wrong choices?
Lily Smith :
Well, I could answer that, but I have an even better idea. Let’s leave that to our guest today, Huang Nguyen-Vu, Director of Product at West Wing. He’s put a lot of thought into evaluating career opportunities and finding your specialisation, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Randy Silver:
Ooh, that sounds a lot better than putting you on the spot. Let’s get straight to it. The product experience is brought to you by Mind the Product. Every week on the podcast we talk to the best product people from around the globe.
Lily Smith :
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover loads of free resources to help you with your product practice. You can also find more information about Mind, the Products Conferences and their great training opportunities happening around the world and online.
Randy Silver:
Create a free account on the website for a fully personalised experience and to get access to the full library of awesome content and the weekly curated newsletter Mind. The Product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. There’s probably one near you, huang, thank you so much for joining us this week. How are you doing? I’m doing fine. How about you Doing? All right? So, for anyone who hasn’t already met you, can you just give a quick intro? What do you do these days and how did you get into product in the first place?
Hoang Nguyen:
Oh, that’s a great question. So nowadays I’m a director of product at West Wing, which is an e-commerce furniture company. We have about half a billion in revenue and there I’m responsible for the following areas search and recommendation, seo and marketing technology. Now to answer the second part of your question how did they get into product? It’s a long story. Shall I dive into the story right away now?
Randy Silver:
Let’s do the quick version, because I think we’re going to get into the longer version as part of the topic today.
Hoang Nguyen:
Okay, right Then how I dove into product was basically I was in university and I had a background as an industrial engineer and I was searching for a job which could allow me to work in a field which was very diverse, so not only pure technical things or pure business things, but something which was mixed. And product management was something I came across in a guide about effective altruism and it instantly caught my attention because it not only combined technical stuff with business stuff, but also design.
Randy Silver:
Effective altruism. I’m curious to see how that weaves into all this, given all the FTX and SEM bank and freed stuff that’s going on with that these days. But the topic that we’re going to talk about today, and the reason that this is all tied up, is talking about how to evaluate a job and how to figure out what job you should take, as well as looking a bit into figuring out what your specialization is. So you said there’s a longer story about this. So I think you tied all together about the first job you were taking out of college was how you started to come across this methodology. So what did you do then?
Hoang Nguyen:
Yeah, so the whole methodology actually ties up with, like the past points. But the first job was a major inflection point in my career because back then I had the following three criterias and now all the listeners will laugh at them, but my criterias back then were the title, the salary and the number of vacation days. Now you can guess, Randy, how long did they last at the job? A year, a year. So it was a bad matchup and that got me thinking a lot. So, hey, what did go wrong? Because I wanted to reflect on whether they make a wrong decision. And then I noticed, okay, I didn’t put that much thought into the criterias when selecting the job and I came across some deep reflection and introspection and I realized, hey, why don’t I manage a product career just like I manage a product? So that means try to find product market fit, understand the market and also try to find your own specialization and how you fit into that.
Lily Smith :
So how did you go about that? You kind of mentioned product market fit for your own career. But what does that process look like when you’re trying to find the right career for you?
Hoang Nguyen:
That’s a good question. So, first of all, I think we can dive into the left side of the equation, because the equation has two components One is the market, which is the companies that you’re going to join, and the other one is you like. What is your specialization? In terms of finding your specialization, I highly encourage all my PMs that I mentor, coach or I work directly with to do a couple of experiments to understand where their specialization lies in, and with experience I mean trying out different kinds of things. I will take one example that I use by myself in order to understand where should I specialize technically in terms of technical skills? It was during my yeah, I basically had Luke you can cut this out but I basically had three options which I wanted to explore. One is the technical option, like being going more into the technology part. Second, one is in the UX part and the third one is into the data part. Now for the UX part. I started to draw some mockups, become more involved into UX discussions, which also ended up into me trying out to build a prototype by my own in order to understand if it’s something I would like to do in the long term or get deeper into In terms of technology, I started to run small experiments, such as getting more involved into technical conversations with my developers, starting a Python and front-end course, also on a SSI project, and building small things. And finally, for data, I started a data science course, started to incorporate more SQL work in my daily work and it accumulated into doing a small data internship in our data science department.
Randy Silver:
Well, let’s come back to all those. I want to talk in the more general sense before we talk about the experimentation side. So you said you started off the first job, salary, number of vacation days and job title, which, to be honest, at the beginning of your career, sounds like a reasonable way of evaluating things. But now that you’re more mature about it and I’m not implying to your bosses that you’re searching now, but now that you’re more mature about it what kind of things do you look for and what do you advise other people to be looking for specifically?
Hoang Nguyen:
Yeah. So let me start with why this Approach that I use in my first job is Something I would not do nowadays, and that is because it lacks a long term view. So overall, when you’ve just focused on the salary or the job title, you’re not really taking into consideration if what the long-term prospects are. Now taking the analogy of your product, you can do a very bad short-term decisions, but bump up short-term metrics, such as you can offer all your products for 50% discount. It would bump up your metrics, but it would be the long-term horrendous. And now why would you take a job? Just because it takes pace you 20% more, but in the long term might be, yeah, a step back actually. So what I do nowadays, or what I advise, is that there are a couple of factors that I encourage everyone to look out for. The first and foremost, I think the most important of them, is the type of team that you’re joining. We, thanks to Marty Kagan, we all now know the concept of empower teams and what the differences are between the feature team, a product team and the delivery team. Second to the one of these key factors is also the type of industry that you are joining, because each industry has its own merits. And Besides industry, there’s also a big factor of whether you join a B2B or B2C company. And, last but not least, product maturity also plays integral role because, depending on the maturity of the product, different skills will be necessary to succeed in that role and Hwang with the Delivery team versus feature team versus product team.
Lily Smith :
Do you have, like certain questions that you ask it, like when you’re interviewing or Research that you do so that you can understand, you know, what kind of team you would be joining? It’s I feel like it’s not always obvious from the outside.
Hoang Nguyen:
It’s not always obvious. That’s a very, very good question, lily, and I think there are two parts to that, and the first part is you can do some outside research, which is to check some company blog posts. What do the people publish? There is just some interesting articles. And the second one is you can basically apply to Theresa Torres continuous interviewing techniques, but in the job context. So instead of you know you finish the interview, they want you, you asked for interview with additional person. It’s asked for additional time to talk with them and then you can ask them hey, actually now I’m curious, tell me about the last time you shipped the feature. Where did the feature come from? What did they look like? What did they take into consideration? And when you hear things like oh yeah, it came from our stakeholders and they wanted to like we, we had this idea from the stakeholders and then we Shipped it according to the specifications that they made, you know that you’re talking to a delivery team or Slash feature team, depending on the team setup. But when you hear like, hey, we had this product strategy and In the product strategy we had the clear problem space that we wanted to explore and in these problem space we had actually our top five priorities and this one we decided upon based on quantitative and qualitative data. You know you’re talking to a product team.
Lily Smith :
I love that. That sounds brilliant and in terms of like B2B or B2C, like how do you decide which one is going to be right for you?
Hoang Nguyen:
so I had the fortunate Experience to be working in both sides so I could make up my mind in terms of B2B and B2C. And now I’m gonna generalize here. But in general, when the majority of the product is at the same stage, I noticed that there’s a Couple of differences. But the most important for me is that in B2C You’re dealing with a lot of more users than in B2B. B2b usually when I was working on B2B product, it was always a small hand of users and my own specialization lies within data science, ml, and, yeah, I’m a very quantitative person. Now you can see why I decided to go for B2C because in B2B I didn’t had a lot of data to work with, which was actually also a past manager who actually also gave me that feedback that hey, maybe you should try the B2C company, maybe that could be a good fit for you.
Randy Silver:
So you were talking about all this in in context and you were just saying that you know why would you take a job that paid more if it’s gonna set you back? But how do you put that together in context? And you’re talking about treating your job as a career. What’s the the way that you think about this? To try and put together a picture, you know, a longer term plan for what you’re going to be doing?
Hoang Nguyen:
So, as I said, it’s about finding your own understanding, your own product, which is yourself, and understanding the market. And if you have this understanding, you will realize which opportunities fit into that product market fit, so to say, and which opportunities are just not fitting. So one example if we take this, what we just discussed now with Lili, let’s say we have a product manager. He noticed that he’s a very technical person, he knows a lot about infrastructure and has a deep specialization in that field. Now B2C opportunity opens up which is in a non-technical field but very customer-facing, user-centric role. It’s up to him now to understand if he wants to make the move or not. But without that understanding it might sound like, hey, I get more money, why don’t I check it? But it can be that this would be a wrong decision, depending on if he wants to stay in that space, because he already has this profile carved out for him and this speciality, this superpower. And yeah, that’s one example. If he knows what his product market fit is, he would then go for a company which is bigger technical challenges or bigger technical scope, instead of going for a company where he is also a product person but in a different specialization.
Lily Smith :
And you mentioned that your superpower is data and machine learning. How does one uncover their superpower, do you think? Is it just a case of trying different things and developing and learning and seeing what you love?
Hoang Nguyen:
Yeah, so essentially, we call it the superpower, right? So what do superheroes do? They don’t get born and they believe like, oh, I’m going to become a superhero. No, something happens and they discover that they have a superpower for something. And that’s exactly what you said, Lily. I think that you are innate talents, something that you need to discover, so that’s something you need to experiment on until you find something you can stick to. I can connect this to the experiments I was talking to you earlier in this podcast. So after my experiments in data and tech and UX, I noticed, okay, hey, UX is kind of fun. I had a lot of fun doing all these prototypes and mockups and getting deeper into there. But I noticed me personally. I don’t have a talent to become very good at this. I can be decent, probably if I would give it a long try, but totally not top 10% or top 20% For tech. On the other hand, I noticed it’s doable because I also have a technical background, but it didn’t caught my fire. So another thing you need to evaluate for is how much do you like the superpower that you’re going to discover? And here we come to data. This is where I found the sweet spot, where it’s something that I really like to do and I noticed I can improve myself very at the high speed. What I’m learning.
Lily Smith :
It seems like you just can’t breathe these days without hearing the term AI Tell me about it.
Randy Silver:
If I hear someone say AI one more time, I’m going to scream.
Lily Smith :
When chat GPT launched, it felt like things absolutely snowballed, and it’s quite an effort to keep up with it all, which is why I wanted to tell you all about mine. The products, brand new AI Knowledge Hub.
Randy Silver:
I told you I was going to scream, didn’t I? But actually tell me more, please don’t scream.
Lily Smith :
It’s a dedicated place for all things AI, with a wealth of completely free content from voices in the field, including insights from working product managers and AI experts. In the AI Knowledge Hub created in collaboration with Pendo, you’ll discover a range of free resources that will help you delve into the world of AI. You can learn what AI truly is, explore its impact on product management and dive into extensive case studies that showcase how product teams have harnessed AI to improve their craft.
Randy Silver:
Okay, there’ll be no screaming this time, because that sounds like a good way to actually explore the angles of AI and product management. Are there anything in particular you’d recommend?
Lily Smith :
Absolutely. Sign up for a free AI webinar, download the free AI playbook and take the brand new AI for product management online course in partnership with Google Cloud. Just visit minetheproductcom forward slash AI Knowledge Hub and dive in. This reminds me of one of the interview questions that I love to ask, which is when do you find yourself completely lost in your work and you’re so in the zone that the time is just flying by? I love asking that question because the responses that you get really give you a sense for what that person really, really deeply enjoys doing. I think that’s what you’re saying as well, isn’t it? You have to really enjoy it and also be good at it.
Hoang Nguyen:
Exactly. You have to find something which you can get very good at it and you have to enjoy it. In a sense, when we transfer another concept we know the four big products from Marty Kagan Essentially trying to understand if it can be good or something is the feasibility risk. It’s just that you self need to understand. Can I pull this off? Can I become top notch at something If you can enjoy it? It’s for me something like viability risk. Viability is does it work for your business? Does this specialization work for you as a person, or is it something? Yeah, I know I can become good at it, but I don’t really enjoy doing it.
Randy Silver:
I’m curious when people come to you for advice, do you recommend that they continue to specialize in something and build up that superpower, or do you recommend that they work towards getting a more general background sometimes and going wider than just that one specialty?
Hoang Nguyen:
So that’s an excellent question, and I think it depends and I will tell you on what factors it depends. A big factor is what maturity their product, so to say, has, and with their product I mean their career. If they are in the early stage, I generally advise to go abroad, because this is usually a time when you need to try things out to find what you really like. But if I’m talking with a more, let’s say, experienced person in the mid-stage of their career, especially station is usually a better answer. So depending on where your maturity stage lies, the recommendation would be different. But overall, I think that everybody can benefit from doing both. That means going broader and going deeper, because by that way you acquire a T-shaped profile, something which I think is perfect for our jobs as product managers.
Lily Smith :
Just talking about maturity levels as well. Earlier we were talking about the maturity level of the business and considering the maturity level. Sorry, I feel like we’re jumping all over the place here, but I think this is an interesting one to come back to as well, Like when you’re considering which role to go into and where your sweet spot is as a product manager. What do you, when you’re considering the different maturity levels of a business, what are the differences that you’re looking out for? What are the things that are going to impact you as a product manager? What do you need to be good at or enjoy in those different maturity levels of start-up, scale-up and I don’t know what? The last one would be A major product, yeah.
Hoang Nguyen:
I think that’s a very good question. I personally had the luck to have worked in my previous job at a company which is a consultancy slash agency and in that role I had the chance to work in companies of all types of maturity sizes. So from really early stage start-ups to scale-ups to very major companies. And what I noticed is that there are two important factors that you need to consider, depending on the maturity stage or how they influence basically the work and the environment. Now, the first one is ambiguity. When you imagine, like the, you know, on the left side the pre-seed start-ups, then the scale-ups, and then to the right side the very major companies, the ambiguity rises the more left you go. So the more early, the more less mature a product is, the more ambiguity you have to deal with. And the second one is process, which is normally inverse to ambiguity. So the more ambiguity you have, the less process you have in place, and the more processes you have in place, usually the less ambiguity exists in your work. And you should like I think everyone can benefit to try to find out their preferences in terms of ambiguity and process. I quickly learned that, while ambiguity was not so much of a problem, I don’t deal well in an environment which has no process at all and which has too much process. So for me the sweet spot at the moment lies in between. But of course, all these variables, they change with time. You change as a person, so it’s also good to reflect from time to time on where your preferences lie.
Randy Silver:
Okay, I’ll ask one other question related to this. So another question about evaluating the job. You were talking earlier about evaluating the people, and are these people you want to work with? Who’s more important? Is it the manager, is it the team, or is it the overall environment? What are you looking for when you’re evaluating the people?
Hoang Nguyen:
What’s more important? I think this is just my personal preference. I think that the most important person is your manager, because that person can make or break your career. He can be a roadblocker or an enabler for you and in the end, he’s the person who is responsible to evaluate you. But in addition to that, the colleagues that you’re working with, the culture there, are also important. And I can’t really stress the importance of the people factor because let’s be real here Money and title might make you join a company, even if you disregard everything that I have said before, but the people component is the one thing that’s going to make you stay or leave the company early. You might not join a company solely based on the people, but you’re going to stay because of it, because in the end, after all, you get used to the salary, you get used to the title and then what you have left is the people around you that you’re going to work with. And of course, there’s another factor growth opportunities at your current world. But people and growth is the two most important things.
Randy Silver:
Yeah, I’ve definitely joined companies. I know other people have joined companies for the manager and then the manager left six months later and sometimes the company was not what I expected it to be without the manager there. So I totally agree with you the manager is incredibly important, but a good manager will not save a bad company and vice versa. You need to make sure that there’s enough of both.
Hoang Nguyen:
Yeah, definitely, definitely, I agree.
Lily Smith :
And when we’re thinking about people and culture and things as well, one thing I find is a good signal for this is the values that the company has, and, quite you know, most companies these days will kind of share their values. Do you sort of pay attention to that? I find that actually you can get more from just conversations with people in the team.
Hoang Nguyen:
Okay. So I’m not sure, like, if I want to publish this, but I’m just saying my honest opinion now and then we can think about later if it’s okay to publish. So, while I do think it’s important for a company to have like clear values, what they stand for, I honestly believe that you get way out of you get way a better trade off by talking to the people there and check like what the people there are like, what they value, how they feel like, because in the end, you can have environments where, yeah, so to say, there are fantastic values, but they only exist on paper and you can have a company which might be a early stage startup, which has not taken the time yet to define hey, what are our values, but which has a fantastic team. So in the end, I believe that talking to the people is, like a way, better investor of your time than investing into researching the company values and into the latest, the smallest detail.
Lily Smith :
Awesome. Okay, I guess there’s always glass door as well, which usually has a few ranty people on that, depending on the size of the company that you’re applying to.
Hoang Nguyen:
Definitely.
Lily Smith :
And one of the other things I’m really curious about is how much attention you give to opportunities that come your way. So you know, sometimes we are applying for jobs because you know we’ve been made redundant or the job’s changed and we’re not really happy there, or we feel like we’ve outgrown it and we need to be, you know, have a new challenge. But sometimes things just come along which kind of look interesting and it might be an ex-colleague who sent it over. He’s like hey, I think you’d like this, come and have a look at this. Like, how do you evaluate those opportunities that you know you’re not necessarily seeking them out, but you’re, but they just come across to you.
Hoang Nguyen:
So, fun fact, my this job that I’m currently working in came exactly in that way. So not to be a friend, but I was speaking at the conference talking about something related to data science and AI, and back then, my manager saw this talk and got in touch with me. So it was indeed, yeah, opportunity which came along. We are, let’s say, inbound, so it’s not. If we take the product terminology, you have outbound sales and inbound sales, and this was totally an inbound opportunity, and it took a while for me to evaluate it properly. I actually took, I think, three or four months until I made my final decision, because it was not I was not in a place where I wanted to leave immediately, but rather I was rather happy in my job back then. So it is something I have to say that you can be lucky and good opportunities come along your way. So that’s why I would also advise everyone to at least take a look and get to here, and the worst case, maybe you can help out somebody, or what I also like to do is to refer them. Maybe another person that I know in my network would be interested in this opportunity. Once I talk to the people there and they know. Oh okay, they’re looking for that kind of product leader. Oh, I actually know one who might fit into that profile.
Randy Silver:
So fitting into profile is one thing, but one of the things you mentioned at the very beginning of our chat today and I thought was really interesting is you said you did an internal internship at one point. So if you want to extend yourself and change your profile, tell us a little bit more about doing that. How did what happened? What was that like?
Hoang Nguyen:
So connecting it back to the framework of product discovery is that, in depending on your stage, you have to deal with more ambiguity and, depending on the ambiguity you have to deal with, you should time or you should bucket your investments of experiments properly, so when you’re in the beginning, you don’t know anything about it. I would not recommend to do an internship, because that’s a rather bigger commitment. I would recommend to do something on the side which is smaller, because there’s a lot of ambiguity. But at that point in time, I already did a course in data science, in Python programming. I could do some simple data analysis by my own, and I was already at a stage where you hate. This is something where I have a lot of fun. And how the internship went. It’s pretty simple. I went to our data science department. I talked to the people there and I told them hey, I would love to help you out. Do you have some tasks that you just need someone to outsource? It can be the simplest task ever, something you hate doing. I would love to take care of that, because I want to learn data science on a much deeper level and collaborate with you. And, yeah, that’s how it then happened that I had the chance to spend the time with them for one month and then do an internship there.
Randy Silver:
Is that something you had to clear with anyone else, or is it you just carved out the time you’re scheduled, talked to them and did it?
Hoang Nguyen:
Yeah, so now I’m don’t remember exactly. It could be one of the two things. One is that back then I was working at this agency consultancy company and they had this model that you work four days a week for the client and one day a week you can invest in your personal development or do some fun projects and so on, and I always use this time to learn Programming and to talk to my data science colleagues. So it could be that it naturally evolved also from from that stage on, but I think that it was the time between projects. I think I had a month between the the last project ending and the next project starting which I Wanted to use for, so I had to get clearance from a manager. But it was all good because the company was very awesome and supportive.
Randy Silver:
That’s fantastic. Well, I think that’s another thing to look for. Ideally is find a company that’s as supportive as that and, if you, if you’re looking for your next role.
Hoang Nguyen:
So yeah, exactly Very good point, Randy.
Lily Smith :
Like in the long term, finding a supportive environment always pays off and I think we have time for just one more question, using the analogy of Product managing your career. Do you have a product vision for your career and or just a vision even for your career, and what does that look like? Does it look like salary, number of vacation days and job title?
Hoang Nguyen:
To be honest, I don’t have a product vision at the moment. I’m still trying to figure out a lot of things for myself, so I’m still in the process of learning, so I can’t really tell, like, what the long-term goal is. But I can tell you, if I had the vision, it would definitely not involve salary or number of vacation days, but rather the type of work that I would be doing from day to day and the impact that I try to aim for or try to achieve. So I think these two would make up my product vision.
Lily Smith :
Amazing Hi. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It’s been really great hearing from you.
Hoang Nguyen:
Thank you so much, randy. Thank you so much, lily for inviting me and having me today. It was a blast and I really enjoyed the past half an hour.
Lily Smith :
The product experience is the first and the best Podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, lily Smith and me, randy Silver. Lu Run Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver:
Our theme music is from Humberg based band POW. That’s PAU. Thanks to Arnie Kittler, who curates both product tank and MTP engage in Humberg and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank Regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith :
If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mind the product comm forward. Slash product tank.
Comments
Join the community
Sign up for free to share your thoughts