Kirill Osipenko has a resume most people would die for. As a product leader at Google, and with a stellar history of product management roles at McKinsey and Accenture, you can be sure that he absorbed and applied every piece of common business advice during his career. But it is the nontechnical leftfield skills – the courses, practices, and exercises you might call “crazy” – that he believes all technology professionals and founders need to propel their professional development and the success of their teams.
Osipenko believes these uncommon additions to your armory are the key to building a successful startup or developing an exemplary career in the technology space. You know the normal advice if you work in startups or are an entrepreneur. While the most common suggestions often include learning about your industry, developing a solid business plan, and building a strong team, there are several less conventional ways to prepare yourself for success. I spoke to Osipenko to extract the best of these leftfield approaches and learned why they are so critical in the technology world.
Taking Storytelling Courses
Storytelling is a critical aspect of building a successful business. By taking filmmaking, scriptwriting, and storyboarding courses, you can vastly improve your storytelling abilities.
Recognizing uncanny similarities between product management and film production, Osipenko attended a Filmmaking & Producing Program at the New York Film Academy. He believes that compelling storytelling is something that any technology leader should become proficient at, regardless of how amazing the technology may be or how significant its potential impact is.
“When I took the storytelling class at New York Film Academy, I learned about ‘narrative arcs,’ which allow you to engage your audience right off the bat and have them follow the story until the end,” Osipenko told me. “You don’t have to follow this framework precisely, but it is essential that your story presents a conflict (the complication, or what’s at stake), builds up tension through a series of events or discoveries, delivers a climax (the ‘a-ha moment’), and then finally hits home with the resolution.”
Storytelling, using story and narrative arc structures, isn’t just at the crux of great communication either. Incredible storytelling is the difference between “another app” and wild interest in your creation. It helps you in fundraising, marketing, branding, and selling. A compelling story can help you differentiate your product or service from the competition and connect with your target audience on a deeper level.
“This technique works wonders in job interviews, pitch decks, case studies, and more,” Osipenko said. “I once coached a product manager who needed help preparing for behavioral interviews at Amazon. He came to me with a story of how he worked with a group of senior experts at Boeing aiming to change the manufacturing process. Initially, his delivery was very dry – something akin to ‘I shared my view, they didn’t listen, so I organized more meetings.’ After we built a compelling story using a narrative arc, it truly sounded like a synopsis of a Hollywood movie, and was a blockbuster hit!”
Improv and Stand-Up Comedy? Hell Yes!
Public speaking and customer-facing skills are essential for any technology professional, especially product executives. By taking improv, stand-up comedy, and professional speaking classes, you can overcome any fear of being in front of stakeholders at any level – end-user or executive – and improve your ability to think on your feet.
I imagine you’re eyes wide open at the suggestion of taking stand-up comedy classes, but humor, when used appropriately, is a great way to keep conversations human, alleviate tension when something doesn’t quite work during a pitch, and connect at a deeper emotional level with your audience.
“My mentor, Eugene, is from an immigrant family from Ukraine, and his personality has always been of that type that’s quiet and reserved,” Ospienko said. “Early in his career, he took an improv class and it literally changed his perspective on building connections. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it changed his personality – I believe that there are many fundamental character traits that stay with us for life. Nonetheless, what this experience did was it gave him permission to be curious, to ask more questions, and to be his true authentic self outside of constraints and self-limiting beliefs.”
These skills also allow you to build a platform as a confident public speaker in your niche. Honing your speaking skills can help you be known as the leading expert in your field and build a strong personal brand, which in turn has a positive effect on your bottom line, but in a way that doesn’t give you a negative, overtly sales-driven reputation.
Emotional Intelligence Is Beyond Powerful
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions and those of others. It is an essential skill in business, and yet it is most commonly overlooked in favor of domain expertise.
By reading books and taking online courses on improving EQ, you can better understand yourself and your clients. This can help you build stronger relationships, communicate more effectively, and make better decisions. EQ can also be improved as a result of what you naturally do regularly over time.
“Improving my emotional intelligence, as with everything, is a daily practice, and sometimes that growth comes from things you absolutely have to do, rather than structured learning,” Osipenko said. “In fact, when I spent several months preparing for my product management interviews at Google and Uber, which ended up with offers from both, it had a pleasant side effect. That experience was a way of engineering a solution for the problem that I personally experienced, but I believe it is directly correlated with improvements in empathy and understanding.”
High EQ isn’t just about better communication and dealing with situations with a healthy mindset. It also adds to your bottom line.
“In my conversations with internal customers, I don’t have a script – I ask people to share their struggles and deeply empathized with them,” Osipenko said. “Instead, I take the time to understand their challenges, explain how I would deal with them, and then pause. In those moments, emotional intelligence helps us build tremendous amounts of credibility.”
Several tech leaders, such as Satya Nadella of Microsoft, have been praised for their high EQ and their ability to create a positive work culture and drive business success. High EQ has been linked to building solutions that work better for a broader client base, which is what startup founders always strive for.
Understanding the Difference Between Important and Urgent
As any successful product professional knows, prioritization is critical not only in building your product but also in managing your time effectively. Understanding the difference between important and urgent things can help you prioritize your tasks and make the most of your time.
We’ve become conditioned to respond to urgency, thanks to smartphones and notifications. But urgent things don’t necessarily demand your attention or help you move the needle.
By identifying what is important and doing that without fail, you can give yourself back the time you would have wasted on merely urgent tasks. It certainly requires discipline, and in a post-pandemic world where we have gotten used to remote work and online further education, diligence to the important and not the urgent is further tested.
Osipenko explains succinctly in an article for Business Because the benefits and challenges of online work and other pressures.
“The biggest advantage of online MBA programs is that students don’t have to sacrifice their full-time employment. Furthermore, if your job requires extensive travel, online MBA classes can be taken from anywhere. Online students still need to manage their time carefully to meet deadlines, however. The built-in flexibility of online coursework can be a double-edged sword – many people find that a fixed schedule improves their self-discipline and helps them avoid distractions.”
Be Your Best, and Get Noticed, by Shutting Up
In every meeting, it is essential to be an effective listener. By listening more than talking and taking notes, you can dissect the information shared in the meeting and pull out the best practices to help you grow.
Additionally, knowing when to offer something of extreme value in a meeting and how to pitch it concisely, based on your full knowledge, wisdom, and experience of that topic, can help you stand out as a thought leader.
Take Osipenko’s role as a product manager at Google. The product manager defines the user segment, then the task or problem that is significant to that segment, and then proceeds to define the product functionality that will serve as a solution. The product manager meets with the development team regularly to maintain a clear understanding of the goals and priorities and to guide the team through the implementation process, presenting and clarifying the business challenges facing them. An important part of the role of a product manager is cross-functional communication – informing all interested functions about the progress of the process, as well as demonstrating intermediate results in product demo sessions and collecting feedback.
In contrast to what people think they should do in a meeting – being the one with all the ideas, taking over, talking everyone to death – it turns out that being quiet, paying attention, and only injecting once, or maybe twice, with something truly valuable, makes you stand out, gain trust, and an expert reputation. This approach also allows you to understand how everyone interacts, each person’s role, and their strengths, and it gives you the knowledge you need to produce the best possible results. It’s hard to gain this kind of team wisdom if you’re the only one talking.
Go Get Those Leftfield Skills – It’ll Pay Off
In conclusion, while building a startup or pursuing a corporate career requires hard work and dedication, there are several less conventional ways to prepare yourself for success. By taking storytelling, speaking, improv, stand-up, and emotional intelligence courses, prioritizing important tasks and becoming an effective listener, you can improve your chances of success and stand out as a thought leader in your field. With these skills, you can better connect with your clients, build a strong personal brand, achieve your business goals, and create a foundation to pursue your dreams and enjoy a truly meaningful life.
