VAISHALI MITTAL ON SHAKE THE COSMOS
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Want to get into product management? What is a typical day of product management? What are some organizations helping to empower women’s careers?
Take a listen to Vaishali Mittal on Shake The Cosmos, as she discusses her own story of transitioning from engineering to product management as well as offers actionable tips for people looking to making the switch.
Vaishali is an experienced Senior Product Marketing Manager with a demonstrated history of successful product launches from ideation to launch in the medical device industry. Skilled in Medical Devices, Sales, Research and Development (R&D), Verification and Validation. Strong marketing professional with a Biomedical Engineering background and certificates from Harvard Business School Online in Finance, Disruptive Strategy, Credential of Readiness focused in Business.
Organizations recommended by Vaishali for women empowerment and mentorship:
Healthcare Businesswomen's Association
episode transcript
ABHISHEK: Hi everyone, this is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com. Have you wondered, what is product management? How can you break into product management? Well, my guest today shares her own story and also provides practical tips for people who want to make a switch into product management.
Has somebody told you that you don’t have the experience for product management? Well, take a listen to see just how you can overcome some of those challenges when applying for new jobs or switching careers.
Hi everyone, this is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com, and the guest today is Vaishali Mittal. How are you, Vaishali?
VAISHALI: Good. How’s it going?
ABHISHEK: Good, good. Thanks for meeting and making the time. Can you tell our viewers, maybe 30 seconds or less, a little bit about what you do?
VAISHALI: Yeah, I’m a biomedical engineer, which I kind of transitioned and went into product management/marketing. I was always interested in medical devices, so that was my passion. I did biomedical engineering and eventually wanted to be a cardiologist like most other Indian people.
But I decided that I enjoy talking to customers and being more customer centric, so I switched into product management.
ABHISHEK: Wow. I know a lot of people who want to make that transition from engineering to other places, but I think I can relate to that doctor ideology and that Indian side as well.
So, what is product management? Let’s just jump into it. You’ve been in the trenches. What is it?
VAISHALI: Well, it varies from industry to industry, so I can speak to the medical device industry. For medical devices, product management is understanding what a customer needs, and a lot of the times customers aren’t going to tell you what they need. It’s actually going to be more focused on, “Oh, I want this to be a little bit more blue, or black.” They’ll give you the solution to the problem, but you have to dig deeper and figure out what is the problem that they’re trying to solve.
As a product manager, you’re trying to understand what customers aren’t telling you, so it’s really more of a problem solving type of role.
ABHISHEK: Is that hard? How do you get a customer to talk to you?
VAISHALI: (laughing) You just ask them questions.
ABHISHEK: Yeah.
VAISHALI: But really, you observe. You don’t even need them to talk to you, if you have a product in mind or if you’re trying to observe and do more of a clinical needs finding type of situation. I think you can do this in terms of understanding people and being more intuitive.
A lot of what people don’t tell you is through their nonverbal contact, so if you observe and are really intuitive in that perspective, that’s how you get them to talk to you.
ABHISHEK: Wow. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. What is a typical day like, as a product manager?
VAISHALI: It varies. It can be where you’re creating a business model to pitch your product to your internal teams, it’s visiting customers, it’s being at conferences, it’s just sitting down and looking at all of your data. If you’ve collected a lot of analyses, then figuring out how to pitch that to your internal engineering teams, or sitting with engineering and outlining, or mapping out, or whiteboarding a product. It varies in what your customer need is for that day.
And you have a lot of customers being a product manager. Your customers are your actual customers, so physicians for me… Your engineering teams, your regulatory, clinical management teams.
ABHISHEK: Oh, so you’re looking at customers internal and external.
VAISHALI: As a product manager, yeah, your customers are literally everybody. You are the diplomatic person in the company.
ABHISHEK: All right, so there’s people that want to break into product management. How can they do that? Let’s say somebody’s an engineer. How can people get into it?
VAISHALI: Yeah, it depends on the relationships you have within your company, and in your overall network.
ABHISHEK: Do you have a story you could share with us?
VAISHALI: Yeah. I was a biomedical engineer, and I didn’t really know if being the head of engineering, for example, was my dream job. I wasn’t convinced that that was my dream job, so I sought after other roles within the company, and helped to develop those relationships so that people could tell me what other functions there were. And that’s how I discovered product management.
I started working on a small project for the head of product at the time, at Philips. And the small project was related to engineering, but also product management. Because it was figuring out how we compete, and have the competitive intel for something that is directly related to our business.
ABHISHEK: What did you have to do to get that type of role, position, with the head of product?
VAISHALI: I walked down the hall and introduced myself and said, “Hi, I’m Vaishali. I’m a new engineer. Can you tell me about your life’s story? Can you tell me about how you got into product management?” Obviously doing the research beforehand, and LinkedIn, and everything. Really just started sparking relationships. And I think you, specifically, are really good at that, too.
ABHISHEK: Thanks, yeah, right back at you, too. I think about you, I think about generating curiosity. So that helps to internally make that transition. That’s interesting. But nitty and gritty, what if they’re looking outside their company?
VAISHALI: I have a friend, she was a staff software engineer right out of college at a startup. And you would think that at a startup it’s really easy to change roles and be jack of all trades within the company, but she just wasn’t being given the opportunity to get the title of a product manager. Eventually she decided that product manager was what she wanted to do.
So she quit her job and took this Stanford course online for product management, and literally through pure perseverance and grit, started applying to only product management jobs. And she would only take those product manager interviews, even though she knew she could get a higher salary or a higher role being a software engineer. But she was like, “No, this is what I want to do.”
ABHISHEK: What are some things… Say she was now being interviewed by these companies, and she’s now sitting across from a hiring manager. What are two or three things that…
VAISHALI: Well they’re always asking, “Why do you want to go into product? What examples do you have of managing key stakeholder requirements? What examples do you have of being able to be customer facing? What examples do you have of being able to understand what a customer is needing or saying without them actually directly saying it? How do you manage timelines? How do you manage 15 different projects going on at the same time, but then needing to move all of them along in the timelines? How do you manage timelines versus costs?”
ABHISHEK: How do people, and I’m gonna make this up, and I’m not an engineer. Let’s say somebody doesn’t have those skills, like timelines, and costs, and business model. How can somebody learn that and answer those questions? It sounds like you’re kind of put in a bad spot if you don’t have experience.
VAISHALI: When you got your first job, I’m pretty sure you didn’t have any experience for that either, right?
ABHISHEK: That is a catch 22, you’re so right. Every time I’m trying to get a new job, they’re like, “Oh, you don’t have the experience.”
VAISHALI: “You don’t have the experience.” But I think there’s a few routes that I always suggest to people. You can always go get an MBA, because that will help get you the general management experience, because you learn financial modeling, and marketing, and everything. You can speak to that more than I can, actually.
ABHISHEK: I remember, I think an MBA definitely got me a seat at the table.
VAISHALI: Mm.
ABHISHEK: And I remember being in the meeting and being like, “Well, who’s gonna do the business model?” “Abhishek.” So, yeah, I can resonate with that.
VAISHALI: Yeah, so I think getting an MBA is definitely a more traditional route. You would definitely have a lot more doors open to you, and it’s much easier. And correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re in the industry you want to be in, and you’re in the location you want to be in, you’re in the rough salary area that you want to be in, $200,000 is a lot to drop to switch roles. So I think there’s a cost benefit analysis.
I’m sure, for my friend, if she hadn’t within a year gotten the role that she wanted, she was going to apply to get an MBA. I personally didn’t go that route, because I was able to, through pure relationships, get different opportunities.
Obviously I had to prove myself 100% along the way, and work my ass off, and have no actual personal life. But, through that, you’re able to move your career along.
ABHISHEK: Now, you’ve broken into product management. Tell me more about that experience.
VAISHALI: Yeah, now I’m essentially 23, 24, have gotten a year of experience under my belt, a whole year, and I’m a product manager telling our staff senior principal engineers who’ve been in the industry for over 20 years what to do. Feels great, right? Being a totally young female doing that.
A lot of the times I would go into meetings and pitch my ideas, or pitch what I believed customers wanted for this new product we were building and they would pretty much say, “No”. They would pretty much tell me, actually directly to my face, “No, that’s actually not what customers want. We’ve been listening to them for 20 years. You’re wrong.”
ABHISHEK: So it’s almost the opposite. You are now listening to customers bringing information to people, but people aren’t listening.
VAISHALI: Yeah, they weren’t. They were pretty much telling me I was wrong. Actually, directly telling me I was wrong.
ABHISHEK: Sounds harsh.
VAISHALI: There were so many times where I was like, “Shit. Maybe I should have gotten this MBA.” Yeah, there were many times where I was questioning myself, and wondering am I actually cut out for this, am I too early in my career? Maybe I should have gotten an MBA or some other credential to have a stamp on it to say, “Hey, actually, you know what you’re talking about.”
But what I did instead was…
ABHISHEK: Thanks for sharing this, by the way.
VAISHALI: Yeah. I questioned myself a lot. But I went back to my skill set of engineering. I went back to, okay, if I was an engineer, what would I do? I would dive into a lot of the data, I would develop the experience, I would bring data to fight my beliefs, or fight my experiences.
ABHISHEK: And you had data, I would think, considering you were talking to customers. Was that the plan?
VAISHALI: Yeah, I spent about a week and a half on the road, went to visit a lot of customers, and asked them very direct questions, and did a lot of observations. And recorded how they were using our current products. And through that, I then compiled a full analysis and shared that with the teams. And from there I started developing more of a trust with them, so then they started trusting that what I was saying was data driven, was not just what I thought, but really had a lot of experience backing it. So then they started slowly believing and trusting me.
ABHISHEK: Going back to what you said. You said, “Yeah, I’m female.” Are there different components of this, is it the inexperience, is it the female part, does this all play into…
VAISHALI: You can add “Indian” to that, too.
ABHISHEK: (laughing) And Indian, too. So there’s all these things also at play.
VAISHALI: Yeah, completely. The medical device industry is notorious for being slow to adopt new technologies. If I was in tech, and in San Francisco, I think I would have a lot more tailwinds. But being in medical devices and being a young, Indian, female, had a lot of headwinds. So a lot of it was winning people over. A lot of it was probably gathering a lot more data than what my male counterparts would have to do.
ABHISHEK: Mhm. All right. So you’re a product manager now. What’s the long-term game plan with this career?
VAISHALI: What’s my career goal and life goal? I definitely don’t know the amount of years to get to there, but eventually I’d like to be the general manager, CEO, of a medical device company. And I think that I’m heading in that direction by having various experiences. I’ve been collecting experiences as I grow in my career. So engineering, product management, sales, therapy development, clinical developing, those experiences.
But then also keeping my focus on mentoring, and developing, and motivating women in this space. I’m a part of various organizations for nonprofit that help connect women and give them the confidence to aim high, and believe in themselves, and push the envelope.
ABHISHEK: When I think about a general manager, I think about somebody who has a responsibility of a P&L, a profit and law statement. And I guess you’ve blurred the lines between sale and product management sometimes.
What about this supporting, mentoring, where does that come from? Why do you think that’s become a driver in your life?
VAISHALI: I feel like it’s always been a driver. I was a biomedical engineer. It’s a field of engineering where you don’t have too many women, and I didn’t have very many female mentors, but I sought them out. There was a really, really good mentor in my biomedical engineering group, this professor who was the head of the department for a while, and she created various networks as well as organizations for women in the field to push themselves. So I was part of the Society of Women Engineers, and have continued to be part of that professional network perspective, too. Now having moved to San Francisco, I’m the audit chair for our division and the Golden Gate section.
ABHISHEK: Oh, wow. Now I’m trying to relate it to my audience. Let’s say that some of them are females. How can they support other females at work? Or if they’re in positions of management or leadership, what kinds of things can they do to maybe support the organizations you’re a part of? Or resources they can get to?
VAISHALI: Yeah, there’s a few organizations that I’m a part of, and I have personally sought these out because I enjoy meeting people, but also learning from their experiences. As I mentioned before, I like hearing people’s life stories, I like understanding how did they navigate their careers and get to where they are now?
One organization that I’m a part of is the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, HBA.
ABHISHEK: And we’ll include these links when I publish this.
VAISHALI: Yeah, it’s a global organization. And I just became the SF chapter mentor, mentorship program chair, so I’m helping figure out what do those group circles look like? How do we connect people to senior director, director-level people, so that they can learn how to navigate challenging conversations? What types of roles, what types of activities should you be taking if you want to reach a certain level? How do you talk about salary negotiation? How do you say, “No, actually, I want 20% more than what I’m being given right now,” and stand your ground?
Because I don’t think we’re necessarily taught those things, and as women, we’re much more timid and shy, and we don’t ask for what we want. We’re like, “Oh, I’m so thankful for whatever I’m getting,” versus… I know you and I have talked about this a lot. Whenever you’re in a salary negotiation, you always ask for 25 or whatever percent more, because you know that’s what you deserve.
ABHISHEK: Sh, you can’t give away any of my tricks. But you’re totally spot on. That’s a known thing, actually.
I’m bringing it back to an office setting. What are some things people can do day to day so they can be part of the organizations?
VAISHALI: Yeah, I think being part of outside-of-work organizations helps because when you see how other people hold themselves, how other people have conversations. Also within the office. I’ve had a lot of mentors, thankfully, both male and female, that have been very cognizant of the challenges in the workplace, and they’ve pushed me to push myself.
My old boss really pushed me to challenge myself, and put myself out there, and ask for more than what I think. And that’s not just in terms of money, that’s also in terms of roles, and that’s also in terms of responsibility.
ABHISHEK: Changing the negotiations to not just be about money?
VAISHALI: Yeah.
ABHISHEK: All right.
VAISHALI: I think seeking out people that you yourself admire, developing stronger relationships with them, and asking them to help you. You’ll find that a lot of people, once they’ve reached a certain point in their careers, they’re insanely busy, but they’re willing to give back and help each other.
ABHISHEK: Thank you. I appreciate that resource, and I’ll be sure to include that organization’s link in the podcast as well.
So what about the startup space, and the founders who are female? Does that play a role?
VAISHALI: Yeah, to be honest, having moved to San Francisco about a year ago, I’ve started assimilating myself more into the startup space, and entrepreneurship, but that’s also something I’m passionate about. And recently I went to this seminar held by the HBA.
ABHISHEK: What’s HBA?
VAISHALI: HBA was the organization that I mentioned. It’s the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association. It’s global, nationwide. I really, really encourage people to join it because you have people from pharmaceuticals, legal, finance, every type of background you can think of. And they’re very, very open to helping. If you reach out to anybody, they’re very open. And we have a really good mentor and mentorship program.
ABHISHEK: We’ll include the link in the podcast as well.
VAISHALI: Yeah, so I went to that program and that seminar, just being curious. It worked out on a weeknight for me, so I joined. It was a panel on women focused on women’s health. They were all entrepreneurs, and they were telling their stories about fundraising and raising capital, because I think this is something that we’re noticing more and more.
If you’re pitching a women’s health company to a guy, I don’t know if they would be able to relate about menopause, or about any of the other challenges that women go through. So they weren’t able to relate, and this really successful woman was pitching to, again, all male investors. And she has a Harvard MBA, she has a Harvard PhD, and she really wasn’t getting anywhere.
Then she found a male co-founder and that helped put things into perspective for her, because she was able to get a better response from those investors. Same investors, better response.
Anyway, I tell that story because it was eye opening for me in that, even if you’re not getting anywhere, it doesn’t mean your idea is bad. It just means that you need to have the right team, and the right way of positioning yourself as well as your idea to have it resonate with other people.
But I think being part of organizations outside of work and a good, solid network can really help.
ABHISHEK: Okay, all right. Anything else you want to close with? Anything else you want to mention?
VAISHALI: Yeah, I think joining the SWE, which is the Society of Women Engineers, is really great. HBA is also really great. And if you’re super focused on medtech, there’s another organization called the MedtechWomen, and that’s in Minnesota, San Diego, Palo Alto, many other areas. But there’s a conference every year, and I’m starting to help organize that as well.
So joining an organization to build your network and learn from other people’s experiences is a really good way to grow. I’m also always available, I’m making myself available to just chat, and hear about your experiences, and learn from each other.
ABHISHEK: I’m excited to find out more about these organizations, and I’ll be sure to get those links from you about them. Thank you so much for your time.
VAISHALI: For sure, I enjoyed this. Thank you, for having me.
ABHISHEK: Hey, everyone. Thank you for listening. Please hit the subscribe button. We’ll be back next week.