EQ is actually more important than IQ. People in product management don't talk about it enough. Product managers get immense value from using empathy and their social capital to help drive the team and clients. Rock product management with the presentation geared toward the side of product nobody talks about! Things that you'll learn: - How to control your emotion and have better self-awareness when building products. - How to motivate yourself when times get rough and how to motivate the team to get things done. - How to use empathy in your product management day to day from political awareness to leveraging diversity. - How social skills can help you in influence, leadership, and conflict management.

1. Emotional Intelligence for Product Management
w/ VP of Product at LearnVest
/Productschool @ProductSchool /ProductmanagementSF

2. Emotion Intelligence
for
Product Managers
March 29th 2017

3. Emotional Intelligence (EI):
- Ability to manage one’s own emotions as well as others
and use the emotional information to guide thinking and
behavior.
- Adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve
one’s goals.

4. A NOTE ABOUT IQ
“We only recruit the smartest people!”
– Every CEO!
- Engineer (logic)
- Data Models (statistics)
- Consultants (models)

5. What do all IQ fields have in common?

6. The world is black or
white!
Simple Answers
Definitive Solutions
Purity Yes or No

7. Product Mangers
- Live in the Gray
- Different groups
- Different backgrounds
- Influence over Logic
“What if…”
“ Could we..”
“Maybe..”

8. The four areas of EQ!

9. Tips to use your EQ to rock PM!

10. Manage your lizard
brain.
Manage your anger and fear.
Tips:
- Be a bystander.
- Use curiosity to deflect your
emotions.
- Rename the feeling from anger to
“hurt, sad, or scared”

11. User Empathy.
Obsess and learn how your
users use and work!
Tips:
- Fall in love with the problem
(not the solution)
- Immerse yourself.
- Develop personas.
- Increase exposure time.

12. Team Empathy.
Learn your team’s personalities
and emotions.
Tips:
- Let people talk and share.
- Make time for people (outside from
work)
- Pick up on non-verbal clues
- Smile, say hi, keep perspective
- Try to empathize even if you disagree.
- Give genuine recognition.
- Open up and get deeper.

13. Don’t be a perfectionist!
- Looking for the right answer when there isn’t one.
- Just keep pushing forward.
- Make mistake, cool, adjust/learn and keep going.

14. Work & Play
Balance.
Remember to check out and
have fun.
Tips:
- Take the team out for the hell
of it.
- Workout and eat well.
- Check out to recharge and
reduce stress levels.

15. Be a change agent!
- Embrace change and love it!
- Don’t be afraid of it and tackle it head on.
- Adjust course and keep pushing forward your team
needs you to.

16. Have a robust emotional
vocabulary.
- Only 36% of people can do this – research shows.
- Understand why you are feeling a certain way.
- Describe situations with the underlying feeling.

17. You are curious
about people.
Tips:
- Generally care about people
and want to know how they
are thinking.
- Putting your ego to the side.

18. Neutralize toxic people!
- Keep feelings in check.
- Find a common ground.
- Doesn’t affect you or bring you down.
- Don’t hold grudges.

19. Listening Exercise – Scenario
- Alex the CEO is holding a staff meeting. After the PM,
gives a team update Alex breaks the news the project
deadline is moved up by 3 weeks.
- The PMs eyes grew wide open and was confident with a
few adjustments the timeline will be met.
- Others express concern but quickly said they can figure it
out.
- The tech lead sat in the back silently with a dead stare.
- Alex leaves the meeting feeling like things went well.

20. Listening Exercise – Reaction
- After the meeting, the PM left fuming and replied to an email
from a recruiter she otherwise wouldn’t have.
- A few team members went to coffee and one member was in
near tears of exhaustion and anxiety of the new deadline.

21. Listening Exercise – 5 Signs.
1. What was said?
2. What’s not said?
3. Body Language.
4. Words
5. Tone of voice.

22. 2 Minute Story – Brave Soul!

23. Thanks
Email: vivekbedi@gmail.com
Twitter: @blaqindo
Blog: bediweb.com/career

24. www.productschool.com