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The Agile Coach with Vivek and Pabitra chats with Andrej Dzidic, Director of Project Management - Technical at Mastercard. He breaks down the role of people skills in the success of a product management role, as well as shares how he built trust to navigate people's expectations. Different stakeholders have different priorities, so being able to build a relationship with each of them creates less friction when actually performing your role as a product manager.
HIGHLIGHT QUOTES
Sales skills are a good foundation for product management - Andrej: "I think sales is a great way to break into product management because you do have that people communication skills. You think about success, you think about revenue, and then you're also getting customer feedback so you are working with the product every now and then by providing input on what the customer wants. And second, with product management and product ownership, you care a lot about go-to-market strategy."
Product managers need to earn trust - Andrej: "From the outside looking in, product management looks like such a cakewalk. It's not. There's a whole political landscape you have to navigate. And so, with product coming in, I knew some of the business stuff from the MBA and from previous roles I had in previous experience and I was pretty good with people so when it came to talking to people, okay, I got this in the bag. Now what I didn't realize is you have an engineering team who's like oh yeah, that's a ton of work. It's not. And so you have to decide for it and figure out what's actually true and what isn't. So you have to earn trust."
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About Andrej
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The Agile Coach with Vivek and Pabitra chats with Andrej Dzidic, Director of Project Management - Technical at Mastercard. He breaks down the role of people skills in the success of a product management role, as well as shares how he built trust to navigate people's expectations. Different stakeholders have different priorities, so being able to build a relationship with each of them creates less friction when actually performing your role as a product manager.
HIGHLIGHT QUOTES
Sales skills are a good foundation for product management - Andrej: "I think sales is a great way to break into product management because you do have that people communication skills. You think about success, you think about revenue, and then you're also getting customer feedback so you are working with the product every now and then by providing input on what the customer wants. And second, with product management and product ownership, you care a lot about go-to-market strategy."
Product managers need to earn trust - Andrej: "From the outside looking in, product management looks like such a cakewalk. It's not. There's a whole political landscape you have to navigate. And so, with product coming in, I knew some of the business stuff from the MBA and from previous roles I had in previous experience and I was pretty good with people so when it came to talking to people, okay, I got this in the bag. Now what I didn't realize is you have an engineering team who's like oh yeah, that's a ton of work. It's not. And so you have to decide for it and figure out what's actually true and what isn't. So you have to earn trust."
Get to know Andrej and what he’s up to:
Connect with Vivek and Pabitra to find out more about what they're up to:
If you enjoy The Agile Coach and are interested in learning more, you can check us out at the link below:
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