[00:00.5]
Welcome to Inside Personal Growth podcast Deep Dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive. Here. Growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform, and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

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Well, welcome back to another episode of Inside Personal Growth. This is Greg Voisen in San Diego. And joining us from the Bay Area is Allison J. Taylor. And Allison. Allison and Chris Nauenheimer have written a book called Power Up Product Management, Not Project Management.

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I want to make sure that people get that right. And it's a Quick Start guide. And this is a Rutledge Press. Good day to you, Allison. Hello, Greg. Thanks for having me. Love the work that you're doing. Well, thank you for the compliments and thank you for supporting our nonprofit Compassionate Communications.

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I appreciate that. And I'm going to let our listeners know something about you, and then we'll get into diving into the book at greater depth. So, you know, today Alison Taylor sits in Silicon Valley.

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And all of us know that Silicon Valley is a powerhouse where new items are invented all the time. And you, you know, she's brought in over 20 enterprise software solutions across 35 countries, representing 3 billion in revenue.

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She's the founder and CEO of Thought Marketing. And we're going to have a link below, so look down below here if you're listening on, YouTube and we'll mention the website during this podcast as well. It's just Thought marketing dot com.

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Is that create Allison? That's correct. So she's earned a reputation as a go to strategist for companies ranging from Fortune 500 giants like Honeywell, Dell, EMC and GE and cutting edge, cutting edge cyber security companies, SaaS, startups worldwide.

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Today we're going to explore her latest venture into the world of product management with her new book, Power Up Product Management. And this really isn't a typical academic deep dive. It's a practical toolkit designed to empower new product managers to excel from one day on the job.

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You know, like, this is the Quick Start Guide. So that's what makes this special. And she teamed up with Chris to write this and they've created, something that in my estimation is really desperately needed in the market.

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It's a guide, and it cuts through the buzzwords and focuses on what actually works. So as far as I'm concerned, the timing couldn't be better. Product management is one of the most in demand roles in the tech today.

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Yet new PMs often struggle to find practical guidance that helps them succeed in those critical first weeks and months. So Alison and her partner fill that gap. So you can go to their website@thoughtmarketing.com and you can learn more.

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You can also pick up a copy of this book off of Amazon, and we'll have a link to that. So let's dive in. Allison, are you ready? No, I'm ready. Let's do it. I'm, grateful to your listeners for tuning in, and I hope you learned something through the conversation today.

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Oh, I'm sure they will. There isn't one conversation I've had where I don't think people don't learn something. The question is whether or not they have the patience enough to sit through the whole podcast. Better keep it interesting. There we go. So you've described yourself as being often called an energy bomb, and, you founded your first company at 24.

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What drives that entrepreneurial energy? And how has it kind of shaped your approach to product management, of all things? Right. Not product management is a completely different thing than project management.

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Yeah, you there? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think any listener. And what makes me move? What makes me. Allison?

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Allison?

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Yes? Can you hear me? Well, I. You know what? I'm losing your connection. We lost connection during the whole answer to the start of the answer to that question. And I'm getting, like, not a steady connection.

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I don't know if it's your end or my end or what. Are you still there?

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Let's try a different network and see if that's better. We have. I was going to say you might want to log off and then log back in, because what happened is your picture just went completely blurry, and then your sound went off, and so you're back.

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Now, if we can keep this connection, why don't you just, I can answer. Ask the question again, and my editor will edit it. But I am seeing, just so you know, don't move around a lot because you're fuzzing up as you move. Almost like the Internet is not stable.

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Okay. And I did switch networks. I can see that network might have been lower, bandwidth than this other one I'm now on. Okay. All right, so let's see. And if you can kind of keep yourself steady, you'll be in a much better position. So then we won't have a bunch of blur.

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Let me see. I've got this on 4P recording as well. So I think from my end, I'm Good. So let's try this question again. Now, Allison, you've described yourself as being often called the energy bomb. And you founded your own Co. At 24.

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What drives this entrepreneurial energy and how has it shaped your approach to product management? Yeah, Such a great question. I'm sure every listener can relate to, why should I get out of bed this morning? What's the point? What am I doing? How do I stay motivated? And I thought about this.

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Really, for me, Greg, it comes down to what I call the human condition. Right? We have a finite amount of time that we're here, and we do not want to squander it. And that's how I feel every day when I think about, okay, what's the point? Where am I going?

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And I also think about people that would give anything to be here, right? People who are in hospice, people who are having issues and really can't function. We're here, we're functional, we're fully capable to do anything. And so that motivates me to say, okay, I'm not going to squat on my time. I'm going to make the most.

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And ideally, can I possibly leave this world a little better off than when I found it? Well, that's a good philosophy to kind of shape up, power up product management because your journey is an interesting one. You know, it spans from the Mid east journalism to cybersecurity to companies like Check Point and it's McAfee to now running thought marketing and co founding the, the AI startup.

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You say it Discernia AI. How has this diverse background that you've experienced through your life informed your philosophy on product management? Yeah, and I think there's a three thread.

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I think every life has its own path and from one direction it could look diverse. And from internally you may have a three thread. And I would say the three thread for me has been people understanding people very quickly and also information and data to use, critical thinking quickly.

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Whether you're a journalist, you have a deadline, you have to figure something out very quickly. Or in the tech world, right, we're basically getting a PhD every month in the amount of data and information we have to swallow. I feel like that's the three thread is people in information.

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And I think that part leads very well into product management and what we need to be focused on there, which is essentially who's the person I'm building this product for and am I listening well enough to get them what they need? Not just building it, but also selling and monetizing it. And you know, one of the elements of a character, of individuals that do this work should be a high level of curiosity.

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Where would you say that you derive this level of curiosity from, after all these experiences that you've been through, to actually be a good, what I'm going to say advisor and consultant to people? Yeah, that's a great question.

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I think it hits on the, nurture versus nature conversation. So I think there's something you're born with innately as a personality set and how you expose yourself to different things either grows that or shrinks it. And so I've always tried to just expose myself to completely different things, completely different types of people, completely different types of culture.

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And I feel like once you do that and you learn something completely new, it just creates more of the hunger because you're thinking, hey, what else is there that I don't know? I had no idea this existed. And it's not just finding something, it's changing your entire way of thinking and how you operate.

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And so I think a lot of curiosity was probably innate. But then when you expose it to the cybersecurity field and also the people who are so much more intelligent than I am, so smart, you're around those people, it just makes you want to learn and keep up. So I think that's some of the drivers and hopefully some of your listeners can relate to that and thinking, hey, if I'm not feeling that way right now, what do I need to change?

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Who do I need to go be around? What do I need to change in my environment or situation? Well, my sense of you is that you're kind of the glue that sticks that all together. You're the one that sees the dots in between. You're the one that works with these teams and has the ability from an emotional intelligence standpoint to actually, get them to work.

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And in PowerUp product management, you emphasize real world PM vignettes over theoretical frameworks. Can you share a specific example where traditional product management wisdom failed and the unconventional approach that you emphasize actually worked?

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Sure. And let me just for the record say that foundational research, academic research is still critical. So I'm thrilled that people do that all day long because without that we wouldn't have something to build on, especially cross disciplines. Although I am a believer in theoretical research, this book is not that.

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This book is all action oriented. So an example would be, conventional wisdom will say, if I do everything right, I build this perfectly. I thought of everything. It's just going to go viral. And in eight months we're going to be having this amazing success.

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Well, in reality it's very rarely the case actually. And even things that look like overnight success are not. They've actually been planning and working for years behind the scenes before people understand what they've actually been doing. So I think conventional wisdom will say do everything right and you're done.

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You, you launch it, you're done. And reality is no, you, you do the best you can, you put it and then you observe, listen and iterate. And that's what we talk about in the book of how the different skill sets, you really need both to keep iterating. It's not just a static, I've launched it, I'm done.

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It's no, I've taken it to the point that I can. But it's going to go into a dynamic environment and once humans are involved, all bets are off. Any behavior is possible. Right. So I need to observe and iterate and then continue to refine it. So iteration versus innovation is a completely different thing.

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And we're not really talking about innovation, we're talking about product management and probably a company that has to do that the best. And I just watched Tim Cook is Apple, release all these new products with different iterations of those products.

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And all the product managers spoke on that event that came out and I was just thoroughly impressed that you can go through an iterative cycle and get people excited about the next iteration of something.

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Can you comment on that? Because that's just something that truly amazed me. I mean everything from the earbuds to the Apple watch to the new iPhone 17, an amazing rollout. Yeah, absolutely.

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And I'll talk to it. I'm a B2B. I'm a business to business robust business software person. I'm not a consumer tech person. But I think to your comment on product management iteration right there, what you're seeing, where have they found the pain point and really nailed it on the pain point?

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Because if you remove a pain point, you don't care how many versions of the product you have to go through. You're happy to take on a new product if it removes a pain point. So they probably honed in on a particular segment, probably the largest segment in their situation because they have to scale and they've solved that.

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And so I think that scales to any, any product manager is going to look for that and iteration. So when you're making a decision on what version you're going to do and why on your roadmap, you're often looking and saying, okay, what is the most painful for my customer? It's data migration.

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Right? So, okay, this version is going to be all about data migration. We're going to solve it. And I think that's where you get these iterations. It's really interesting. Now, you know, I know there's a lot of complexities that go into product management.

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And you mentioned that product managers must not only build, but also sell their innovations. This dual responsibility seems to create some tension because I would think a lot of people that take on the role as a product manager are not kind of designed as much emotionally to sell it.

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Okay. And that's just my perception. I've been around it a bit. How do successful PMs navigate between the builder mindset and the seller mindset? Yeah, that's a great question, because it applies. I'll start with the non product manager listeners that you have today that are listening.

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This is the same thing that you're going to experience most leadership is feeling tension, right? There's tension between your stakeholder, who's your shareholder, and the stakeholder, who's your employee. You have tension, right? So if you're a business leader, you're always under tension.

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It's a skill that you have to learn how to, how to deal with. And even if you're not in the business world and you're listening, you may have family tension, right? Uncle Joe, does it get along? Uncle Sally. Aunt Sally. So this idea that we can remove tension leads to be probably taken off the table and just accept there's always going to be tension.

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Things are not simple, things are complex. And so we need to learn how to cope with the tension and then we can really succeed. So as a product manager, you've got to have the skill to deal with tension. It's going to be part of your role because you're going to be pulled in many, many different directions. And so I think the way that they navigate that is they kind of find their own threshold and they might realize, let's say, Greg, you're a startup founder, you're going to create sleeping bags.

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The coolest sleeping bags are going to help homeless, right? You've got to decide, okay, am I going to spend all of my budget, 99% of it on building this, on getting the parachute material and the sewers and machinery to build it, or are you going to simultaneously say, you know what, I'm just going to do this amount that's going to be good enough for the MVP and I'm going to put the rest on finding exactly the right segments and starting to build relationships with them so that by the time it's ready, not only have I built it, but I've started with customer relationships so that that sell side is a little easier.

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So I think internally for product managers, they're always going to have to look at that balance between, okay, am I building it well enough and am I going to be able to sell it or am I going too far? And I often see the overcorrection on the engineering side where I started up. We'll hire, you know, eight engineers and nothing to do with go to market.

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Now they've spent 18 months building it and they turn the lights on and they're like, hey, how come it's not selling? Like, well, you just turn the lights on. Like, unless you want to back that up and parallel track it, it's not going to go away. So I think a PM is going to live with tension.

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I'm just going to have to find their inner threshold to know when they're over undercaracting. We tried to talk about some of that in the book in the early questions of asking them. Okay, what are your thresholds and limits? Yeah, I totally understand that. And you mentioned during that description, mvp, minimal viable product.

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And my question for you is, can you give the listeners kind of a, how you would see the sequencing of product management to this minimal viable product, which is something that's, hey, it's there but it's not ready for prime time yet.

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Yeah, sure. So I'll talk from the tech startup world, right? That's one of the worlds that I live in. And having done this myself, when you do things yourself, you learn exponentially. And I think the product manager in many cases is the founder or the co founder.

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So you're not hiring a separate person who's just taking care of the product at that stage. You can't afford to do that. You're doing everything yourself. And so I think you are that product manager in the beginning and you intuitively know your customer base. If you're going into a field that you're coming from and your MVP is constantly getting tested.

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So what we did is we built prototypes, right? So I, viewed certain as we needed and then I brought it to real customers and I asked honestly, okay, what's wrong with this? What do I need to fix? What would be better? And then the ultimate question, how much would you pay for this?

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If I, if I had it right now, what would you pay for it? And it really forces kind of some shaping, and that really helps guide getting at least an MVP put together. And, and again, that's a tech startup scenario. Right. So it's a small company starting something from scratch. It'd be very different if you have an existing product, and we talk about that in the book too, of whether you have an existing product or a new one.

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Some differences. And it's probably an example more of software than it would be of hardware, right? Yes, to some extent and depends what kind of hardware. And this is where my co author and I are wonderful partners. So he's a mechanical engineer and I'm software.

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I'm Silicon Valley, he's Midwest. So we had amazing learnings from each other. And so in a hardware setting, obviously if you're constructing a, blender for an oil and gas facility, you can't necessarily prototype it, but it's pretty cool.

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With a lot of the AI simulation tools today, you can get pretty close to mapping out what the conditions would be like. And there's a lot more capability to do prototyping today on the hardware side than before. Is that what Discerna AI does? Your company? No, we do the messaging and positioning.

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So when you're, let's say Greg, and you're a sleeping bag company, right, and there's 20 other sleeping bag companies on the market, how are they all messaging and positioning on a weekly basis? Is one of them calling it waterproof? Is that really the most important? Important is one of them calling it, a sleep sack.

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And sack is the word to use. There's wording and positioning. That's very important. And so that Discerna tool just makes that very easy to do. It uses AI to immediately rank it and just give you insights. Oh, very cool. So if people are interested to go to Discerna D, I, S, C E, R N, A, AI there you can learn a little more about it.

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So look, with over 3 billion in revenue across 35 countries under your belt, what's the biggest misconception you see new product managers have about scaling global versus domestically? Because you've definitely worked globally yourself, but that doesn't mean that every project manager has.

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Yeah, absolutely. And, I would say this one goes both ways. So I work with countries like Spain, Finland, Mexico, bringing their innovations to the US market. And then I work in the other direction in global rollouts, where we need to take a US made product and sell it globally.

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And so in both directions, there's some misperceptions. I, would say for those that are coming to the United States. Scale is kind of an eye opener. You think about it, we've got something like 374 million people in the United States with certain subgroups and motivations.

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It's massive. So when you're coming to the US it's not about coming to the US it's am I going to Greg, am I going to Alison, what does Greg need? What does Allison need? It really needs to be very fine tuned on segmentation. So I think for those coming in, scale is definitely a challenge.

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And that's where we have to help them find the right segments. The other direction for us is we're trying to roll out globally. It gets very complicated and particularly with regulations. And so in the cybersecurity field right now, for example, if I want to deliver a product into the eu, there's a new Resilience Act, Cybersecurity Resilience Act.

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Anything I deliver that has a digital element, what they call digital element. I have to do so much compliance work. I need to make sure I notify all my customers if the security vulnerability is found. I need to tell them when I'm going to patch it, how, And I need to do this potentially at my cost.

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So I think standardization is something you've really got to think through when you go global and you've got to harmonize different things. You have to harmonize regulations and then you have to harmonize also language. Like when he talked about the messaging and positioning. How am I going to phrase this?

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How am I going to bring it to market? And then you may also standardize partnerships. Every country, right, with their own suppliers, resellers, different and very different doing business in Mexico than in Finland. And those, those cultural differences are real.

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They make a big difference. So you have to be empathetic and try to try and understand, which we talk about in the book, right, Some of the skill sets you need as a product manager. And that could apply in either direction, coming here or going outside. Well, you can see the differences of complexity dealing in an international basis or global basis just because of the rules and regulations of various governmental agencies, especially if you're dealing with cybersecurity stuff.

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All of that. Now, you know, let's shift gears a bit because this really revolves around developing dynamic teams that want to work together. And you write about the importance of identifying your flocks and building relationships in today's remote and hybrid work environments.

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How has this art of cross functional relationship building evolved for product managers? Because I was telling you, my son is an, executive at Adobe and they have this issue every day, working globally with cross functions, with people working off of Zoom and all the kind of things that they've got to do.

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And it is a challenge for him to keep up with it. Sure, sure. And I think for anyone, right, let's say you're not even in a global role and you're just trying to build relationships in any type of business. I guess there's kind of a few here that I would, I would go to.

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I think first of all, being in the tech sector, I would say many of us have worked remotely for a very long time. That's very typical. We have a colleague in India, a colleague in Europe and so forth. But I guess what's changed are a couple things. One is just the fragmentation.

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So platforms are fragmented. Some teams are on WhatsApp. Right. I'm, I'm on a, on a very specific cybersecurity group. It's only on WhatsApp. There's others that are using teams for chat, others use Slack. So I think the fragmentation is really a problem.

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And I'm hoping someone listening, someone listening is getting an innovation idea, to make it a heck of a lot easier to work cross platform. Because right now they're competing and you and I as users are kind of left with all of the productivity drag of finding where something was.

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So that's kind of just a pragmatic one of the tool sets. If we can improve the tool sets, it would be better. We have already. Now we can see each other, we can send snippets. That's already much better. But the other part is you really can't, in my experience, replace the in person.

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And so I really prefer not to only do 100% remote. Even if my client is in Australia. I want to meet them, I want to know them in person and I want to get to know them as a human being because that's really the only way I get to see the full extent.

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And ideally, depending your skill set, learn the language. Right. People are very different. Certainly, if I were to try and attack Japanese, I think I'd be a very different person. And that's the same for all these folks that are really working hard to speak to us in English.

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If you can learn any of their language, you start to have much more deeper understanding. And like I said in the beginning with my three thread, understanding people is essential. And in product management, it's, it's 100%. What you need is a skill set. It is, you Know, I mean, obviously the environments that we all work in today, like I said, here we sitting on Zoom.

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We're doing this podcast. It's reaching people through all kinds of platforms. Right. And is way more complicated than people actually think. Now you've had this deep cybersecurity background in companies like Nokia and Check Point.

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How should modern product managers think about security as a product feature versus foundational requirement? Because I think as we move forward with AI, the complexities are only going to continue to get more and more complex.

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I always wonder myself every time I go on Claude or I go on ChatGPT or Gemini, well, where's all that data going that I'm putting into there? And is it safe? And, you know, I mean, I have those questions myself, and I'm just a consumer can imagine what it must be like for most consumers.

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There's a reason that many of us in cybersecurity have dark circles under our eyes. Honestly, it's very hard to know things. Honestly. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but we know it because we're deep in it. So I guess a few things on this one, and I'll try not to geek out because some of this kind of goes into some of the technical side, but I don't really.

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I think for the listeners out there, all they probably want to know is, and I know you probably can't get a yes or no answer for this, but is there data that they're feeding these machines actually protected? No. In the majority of cases, no.

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And this is why many corporations have restricted use of those tools. Because if, Greg, you drop in all of your proprietary information, it's now in an LLM, so they've got it. So you need to really think carefully.

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What questions are you asking that LLM, how private is that? Is it confidential information? And that's why many corporations have changed their policies. And the other thing that's been happening is we've been discovering through a lot of these cybersecurity tools that when we're monitoring applications, other applications are doing things they shouldn't be, even though they said they aren't.

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And they're also changing their terms and conditions. So right now it's, a wild west all over again. We've been through many of these tech phases where we're in the wild West. So hopefully things will start to settle. And as product managers, I'm hoping they're going to go between what you're talking about building in some security, which can be done, and that's going to Help.

[28:48.7]
I'm not going to keep Greg's data for longer than 90 days. Right. I can build that into my product. But then they're also going to think about how their products used and what else they can do from a process or people view. Greg's going to do it anyway. Greg's going to drop in his information because he's in a rush and he needs to do something.

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What other safeguards could I put in for Greg? And if you want to get to that, I do think we should probably talk about these teens that are relying on AI companions and kind of some of the recent concerns around that. Well, there obviously, you know, you know way more about this than I do, but I think that the universal, collective intelligence at this point is already being shared, through these machine, machine learning.

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Right. And, 90% of the people using it probably don't realize, this like you do. And it is kind of an eye opener. And you said you've mentioned that artificial intelligence is not intelligent at all and it has no understanding of human consequences.

[29:55.3]
How do you advise product managers? Because in the scope of this book, product managers to maintain human oversight while leveraging AI capabilities. Right. Well, and I'm talking about this renaissance that's happening now with AI, right?

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Everything is becoming AI and everyone wants to use it for everything. We saw the same thing when cloud came out. We saw the same thing when voice recognition came out. This is, you know, a classic technology wave. And when I say artificial intelligence is not intelligent, it deals really well with recognizing patterns, summarizing information, facts, or maybe not even in facts, words that are just mixed up and thrown back out again.

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So it deals interestingly with that. But what about feelings? Do we want AI in the realm of managing feelings? And specifically, do we want them managing anything that affects a human life? I think that's the question that a lot of us are wrestling with now and working through.

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Where does AI make sense to use and where, if it is used. Wow, you better be incredibly careful. And that's in the book where we talk about, if you are a product manager using AI, all the things you should do. But I want to talk to you about this and get your, even your thoughts on this.

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I read a stat this morning that 72% of teenagers are using AI as a companion. This means instead of talking to their mom or dad or relative or a human, not even their buddy, they're talking to this companion. And we've had this terrible case where the AI has recommended a, child that was thinking about suicide, recommends the child to move forward in that direction.

[31:38.4]
Unacceptable, right? Completely unacceptable. So I ask, you know, your opinion on where do you see, are you comfortable, you know, using AI for feelings or just facts? You know, up till now I've primarily used it for factual kind of stuff.

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I believe the machine, the more you use it, the more it kind of gets to know you and knows what you're feeding it. Obviously I don't know how that works on the back end. I must realize I have an account, it sees stuff that's in my silo, I presume, and it recognizes the kind of questions that I've asked.

[32:19.7]
And it gets more and more intelligent, in that as far as the question you posed about AI giving advice on feelings and potentially suicide for a child, I think it's not ready, it's certainly not even close to ready to give advice.

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And if it was giving advice, it should be saying, you know, go see your mental health consultant or your psychologist or whatever at that point. And those are the kind of things that those should be built into the programming as safety protocols, right?

[32:57.3]
Because I don't think if that actually was happening and a child committed the act of suicide and completed it, that, believe me, those companies that are spewing out that data would be in a world of hurt.

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And this is the case. And I bring up these tough topics, right? Because cybersecurity and AI are going to raise more and more complex topics. And that's why we need to train and build really solid, valid, high integrity product managers to think and not just act, right? There's, there's referenced actors moments to think.

[33:31.1]
And so in this case, you know what I would love to see, there's, there's been discussion right now what happens is what you describe. A, pop up, comes up, says, hey, here's the, here's the crisis hotline. You know, think about it, think about a teenage boy and not having a lot of friends going straight to this and using that.

[33:50.3]
What if you said, hey Joe, that's a really serious topic. What you're talking about is the sacredness of life. That's not something you should be asking me as an LLM. Let's find you a human who cares about you and let's get you connected.

[34:06.3]
You can see the difference between popping up a box that says that and trying to get deep into the empathy and move a behavior in the right direction. And I think in our product management we're just trying to, trying to get people to think and use Critical thinking to not just deliver the product, how's that product going to work?

[34:24.1]
And I love the fact that you're on the side of light, meaning that you're a light worker. That's. It's totally apparent to me on the other side, we have dark forces out there that are operating systems. Right. I mean, I mean, X has gotten its share of bad pr.

[34:42.3]
It just put out stuff for just the other day that Elon Musk said, oh, yeah, we got to fix it. Grog's got to get fixed. Right. The point I'm making is that, if everybody thought like you thought, it would be great, but a lot of people are only in it for the money and how much revenue it's going to generate and how quickly we can generate it.

[35:05.9]
And I don't know if they're putting these safety protocols. The only time that they might consider that we're in philosophical conversation now is when either a government agency or somebody sues them. And then they're going to think twice about what kind of, protocols they put in place to manage that data.

[35:27.7]
Right. You bring up an important point. How to answer it. I don't know right now. I don't know if even, you know. And that's the dialogue and that's what I want our listeners to be thinking about when you're thinking. And I said it's related to product managers because you have control over what you're delivering as a product.

[35:45.9]
But us as users, it's what we demand from our products and the amount of demand and showing a market for that. To your point, I absolutely believe you can still run a solid business with these tweaks. I don't think anyone wants this as the outcome.

[36:00.9]
Right? Right. No. Build better product. Let's build better product. Build safer product. I think that from a business standpoint, most people in the business environment see it as another tool and it's a tool in the tool chest that helps them, move maybe more quickly toward an outcome that the desired outcome is, it's doing something for them that would have probably cost a lot more than if they had gone through AI to do it.

[36:31.4]
But that brings me to, really the current state of product management with the rise of AI, the economic insecurity, the changing consumer behaviors.

[36:47.1]
Just like you've talked about, what skills should aspiring PMs focus on when developing? That might not be obvious right now. Yeah, that's a great question. I think the most obvious one that's not obvious is this eeq versus IQ component.

[37:07.1]
And there's literally a direct correlation between your EQ and your compensation. And it turns out I forget the number. I think 29,000. You make $29,000 a year more if you have more EQ skills right off the bat.

[37:24.2]
And then for every point that you grow, you do more. I think for a product manager, that EQ set and understanding what EQ means, I myself went back to it and read it again and again for the book purposes. And part of it is managing your own self.

[37:40.1]
And I thought, well, that's really helpful information. So if I'm listening to a customer and that customer's telling me something, but I'm not hearing him, because I'm not managing my own emotion about a topic that's, you know, that's not high eq. It's not just having empathy.

[37:55.1]
It's really kind of managing your own self and your own feelings, which is not something we're taught. Right. We're taught all the rational and all the hardcore things to make us successful. But this internal management is pretty crucial. So I think in the book we get into more detail on that. But I would say EQ is probably the high level answer.

[38:13.9]
It is. I mean, I just finished a course up, from London, on performance coaching. And they played a video of Daniel Goldman. And I watched the whole thing and it was pretty interesting. Like you said, looking at your own emotions, looking at how you're responding, asking the right questions, the things that are there.

[38:34.7]
And it is so important for a project manager to really be really astute and have a high emotional intelligence in my estimation, because that's gonna make them so much. You said they make 29,000 more.

[38:50.7]
I would be surprised if it's not a lot more than that. But that's a good number to go with at this point. And so, you know, when people go out there, Allison, and they look at your LinkedIn profile, you know, you're supporting charities, you work on, end domestic violence, provide, clean water through your business profits.

[39:15.0]
How does having a purpose beyond the profit influence your approach to product strategy and team leadership? I mean, I sense it in the whole dialogue we've had today that there's a real strong feeling individual in there that cares much more deeply about what she's doing, how it's impacting society.

[39:37.3]
But talk with us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. This is not an easy topic either. And I talk with a lot of my startup colleagues. A lot of them are in their 20s. That might be just out of school, that might still be in school if they're interns and they're really struggling with, hey, I want to work in tech, but I, want to have purpose.

[39:58.5]
And when you read a lot of the social entrepreneurship books, which I did a while ago, and thinking maybe that was the way to combine the two, you realize that there's thousands and thousands of nonprofits that already exist. They are already doing all the work and what they need is funding.

[40:15.7]
Right. In a sense, we are venture capitalists for these nonprofits. So you have to think carefully for yourself. Okay, I know I want to do this charity work in a way, but is it going to be my core job or can I have it as a byproduct?

[40:31.6]
And so what I'm striving to do is do the best possible client work that I can, and out of that, carve a portion that I know is going to go to certain nonprofits because they're the ones that are so much better at it. I am the worst person to send to the desert to help build water pumps.

[40:49.7]
I am going to be miserable and cranky and I'm not going to be fine. But these folks are exceptional, right? They're engineers and they're used to. I would much rather fund those ventures. And so every year we have a family tradition where we, at, Christmas time, we decide, okay, what are we going to do?

[41:06.1]
Where, where are we going to donate this year? And it's become a really nice tradition and, opening up some conversations because, you know, you might have one idea, your son may have a totally different idea, and you start to learn a lot about each other. And so I started with that, and then wherever I was with the business, either I could or couldn't fund them all or I couldn't.

[41:25.7]
Right? It was whatever the business situation was. Then I got my clients involved and then it became really, really just a great kind of, what are those? When you roll the ball down the hill and it becomes a larger and larger thing. And so I would just ask them every Christmas, okay, I want to donate to your favorite charity.

[41:44.9]
What is it? And I get the coolest interesting things back. You know, skateboards for kids in Arizona, who are disadvantaged, you know, hunger programs. But you just start to learn. So I think the way that I've come about it, and like I said of these 20 year olds, you got to think about what is the format that you're going to do it.

[42:03.2]
You might think it's go and quit and join the Peace Corps, but You're an AI engineer. Maybe your best contribution, to society is work intact and build safe AI. Maybe that's the contribution. And then take your funds and fund the other nonprofits. So there's lots of ways, I think, that you could come about managing, driving a business which is of a part for profit business and fueling others that are not for profit.

[42:28.3]
Yeah, I think it depends on the person's, really character and where they want to express themselves in the world. You know, not everybody has to do like I did and form a 501C3 and go out and work with homeless people. I just interviewed a gentleman by the name of Rob Acton who started an organization, and he wrote a book called Causey C A U S I E Become a Causeie.

[42:54.4]
And what his, organization does is match people like what you're talking with to the charity. So it's kind of like this matchmaking service. Swipe right, swipe left, but find the right charity that really resonates with you because there's so many people that don't know.

[43:13.1]
So it's kind of a clearinghouse for charities. Great concept, but it literally allows people like the people you're speaking about, who are great project managers to stay project managers, but also feel very connected with an organization that's really right in their, bullseye.

[43:32.2]
Right. That they really want to help. Yeah. And it could come down to the product that you design. So some. Well, many times you're making a choice. I know I'm making a frequent choice on what startups do I support, do I not, based on what the product is. And so sometimes you can also determin.

[43:48.6]
Determine I'm going to do the product that solves an immediate problem. It is financially viable. But you know what, it's actually a great product to have in the world. Right. It's not. It's not plastic that's. That's cluttering things up. So I think your choice in what product you determine you're going to build also plays into that philosophy.

[44:05.9]
I think that's important. I think people. It's important for people to look at their values, before they start any of these things and to look at their purpose and to look at what they want to create in the world. And I think for the younger people coming out of college today, as you said, or maybe even just starting up in product management, really choose carefully.

[44:26.3]
You know, don't just choose. Yeah, don't just choose because you're trying to get a paycheck somewhere. Choose. Mindfully Right. Think about it. So wrapping this up, if someone could only remember one key insight from power up product management six months after reading it, what would you want that to be, Alison?

[44:50.5]
Only one. Come on. Don't you? Well, you can go two. You could go two. Or three. I'm a have it all kind of gal. Oh, no, but seriously, I would say, first of all, build better products. Right? It's within your power, it's within your reach. Build better products and especially build safer AI.

[45:08.1]
Think about the implications and what you can do to help build the future of AI. We're right at the very beginning of it in terms of mass production and mass usage. So that would be the second one. And then I would say third for you and I, Greg, and why we do what we do is we like to hear back from people and what they're doing.

[45:25.0]
And I've had that happen with the book. I've had people share back with me what they've done, and it's incredibly exciting to be part of a community like that. So there's the book itself, but there's also become part of a community and share back. Right. We're all learning from each other.

[45:41.2]
Yeah. Well, you have built your own little community around this, I guarantee you. And it will continue to expand as the book is not just the book, but you and your company thought, marketing are recognized in this space. And I just want to congratulate you on the success you've had so far and the continued success going forward.

[46:02.3]
I appreciate you taking the time to share your insights and your wisdom, with our listeners. And I hope everyone out there listening right now, received something new and looked at something in a new perspective in a way in which they might actually be able to shift their perspective about that.

[46:20.9]
And I think one of those that we touched on might have been just their personal use of AI or if they are a project manager or thinking about it, how they would carefully think about taking on a project. Absolutely. And I want to thank my co author, Chris as well.

[46:36.9]
He's, behind the scenes, but a vital part of this effort as well. Yes, Chris, if you're listening. Kudos to you, Chris. All right, Allison, thanks for being on the show. Namaste to you. Thank you so much, Greg, thank you. Thanks for the great questions and important work that you're doing.

[46:55.1]
Thanks so much. Have a great rest of your afternoon. Thanks Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth. We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast.

[47:13.9]
Thanks again and have a wonderful day.