Google’s Aqsa Fulara: 5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Product Manager

An Interview With Rachel Kline

…Growth Mindset: Product managers don’t always have all the answers, nor can know every detail. So, a deep intellectual curiosity with growth and learning mindset is critical to thrive in product manager roles, whether that’s for empathizing with user needs, or self improvement…

A product manager’s specific role will vary from one company to the next. Still, all product managers must balance many aspects of their job, including customers’ needs, a vision for new products, and the project team. So what tools and strategies are needed to create a successful career as a product manager? What are the “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Product Manager”? In this interview series, we are talking to Product Managers, founders, and authors who can answer these questions with stories and insights from their experiences. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Aqsa Salim Fulara.

Aqsa Fulara is a product manager at Google, with experience in enterprise data, AI and business intelligence products, from across her time at Google Cloud Recommendations AI, Looker, Google Ads and Google Assistant. She is passionate about building innovative AI products with delightful user experiences, that solve real user problems and deliver differentiated product experiences. Her focus on delivering business value through win-win partnerships has led to her proven track record of achieving business outcomes.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers find it fascinating to trace the evolution of a person’s career trajectory. Can you give me a brief rundown of your career history, from your very first job to the position you hold now?

Thank you for having me!

About 7 years ago, I started my career in a technical consulting role where I worked with some of the largest Google Assistant partners, helping them build actions (or apps) for Google Assistant. Working with enterprise customers, I build a ton of empathy for developers and analysts, solving their deep technical problems and aligning their initiatives to business objectives. The same theme continued as I switched over to consulting for Cloud customers, where I experienced the customers’ pain during largest Cloud deployments, or when modernizing applications leveraging data and analytics, or running AI proof of concepts and pilots. By then, I had built expertise in solving enterprise challenges and onboarding them into Cloud solutions that delivered inherent value. So when an opportunity to move into a product manager role for Recommendations AI presented itself, it felt like a natural transition. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to work on several large scale data and AI products ranging from business intelligence applications, content management, discovery and recommendations systems, whether it’s launching zero to one products, or scaling products.

Most of the product leaders I’ve talked to sort of “fell into” product management and have become passionate about the job. What was the main event in your life that led you to this path?

Working in technical customer facing roles, I noticed that the large enterprises go through similar problems when it comes to their AI initiatives, data architecture, or business intelligence applications, so solving for one or few customers alone with workarounds wasn’t going to cut it. I wanted to solve problems at scale in a native form, where product solutions could transform enterprises beyond immediate patchy solutions, so I would partner closely with product leaders on the products my customers would use. This led to an opportunity to move directly into the product management role for Recommendations AI, where I had the potential to solve enterprise problems at scale.

I’ve often heard from people who work in the product manager capacity that it’s hard to explain what they do to family and friends. What do you say when someone asks, “so, what do you do for a living?”

That’s right! And that’s why, I try to keep it simple. I deeply understand user problems and evolving market trends. With that knowledge, I work with various teams to build innovative products to solve those problems creatively. That means, my typical day varies widely going from customer meetings, to data analysis, to influencing and aligning stakeholders, or presenting roadmaps and making decisions.

Let’s pretend money and social status don’t exist — what is most important to you about your work? What is the North Star in your career?

I care a lot about delivering delightful user experience, while delivering business impact to the field broadly. When retailers are able to build recommendation experiences that enable consumers and shoppers (end users) to have relevant personalized choices, to me, that’s a delightful user experience. When analysts can easily answer a data question owing to a dashboard they built using Looker to inform high impact decisions, or managers can onboard their teams without the pains of going through giving access in Looker Studio Pro, that’s tangible value created with impact to the entire industry. And enabling more and more product managers to solve user problems and unlock value to industry is North star to me.

Can you tell me a story from your professional experience that makes you a little emotional — a moment when you knew you were in the right line of work?

I was once in a user research interview where the interviewee jumped out of their seat when they saw the response to an AI prototype. They said something along the lines of, ‘If this system can help me do this, it would save a ton of time, and help me be soooo much more efficient’. To me, that was incredible! Truly helping human potential, one use case at a time!

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about creating a successful career as a product manager. For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly articulate what precisely a product manager does?

A product manager is the steering wheel to ensure the teams are building the right products, solving the right problems and ultimately delivering business and user value.. They’re responsible for the success of the product, answering the ‘what’ and ‘why’. That translates into a few different kinds of responsibilities:

• Being user focused, where the deeply understand the user needs;
• Being creative, to solve evolving problems of varying complexities;
• Being market focused, where you understand the trends, and lead through innovation to define industry leading products;
• Work well with people, as product is a highly cross functional role;
• Being great at influencing stakeholders, storytelling to motivating and inspiring teams to ultimately convincing customers on value and solution benefits.

This can feel like a lot, which is why no two days in a PM’s job are similar, or no two PMs in different companies have exactly similar experiences.

What are the qualities that you think make someone a great fit for product management? And conversely, what are some traits that would make you hesitate to recommend this profession?

I’ve noticed great product managers go beyond the immediate fluff or needs. They’re able to uncover unsaid needs, and true user motivations. This comes from an insatiable curiosity and learning mindset. Another quality is to critically analyze things, whether that’s working through first principles when coming up with new products, or evaluating choices and decisions. Couple this with creativity, problem solving and optimism, and you have a fantastic palette. In large organizations, storytelling, mastering communications, effective negotiations and cross-functional skills also become imperative to succeed.

When I hear aspiring candidates wanting to switch to product roles for the autonomy or power of decision making, it’s usually a red flag. Another one is where they don’t enjoy working with people, and prefer secluded work.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Successful Career As A Product Manager” and why?

1 . Growth Mindset: Product managers don’t always have all the answers, nor can know every detail. So, a deep intellectual curiosity with growth and learning mindset is critical to thrive in product manager roles, whether that’s for empathizing with user needs, or self improvement.

2 . Ruthless Prioritization: Prioritization creates focus on solving problems that matter, knowing that your and your team’s time is limited and not worth spending on initiatives with limited impact. PMs who can ruthlessly prioritize make space for high impact initiatives even if that’s outside of planning cycles.

3 . Influential Communication: Storytelling, persuasive communications (all forms, written or otherwise) and influencing stakeholders (from employees, executives and stakeholders to customers, investors and press) is key to succeeding in highly dynamic and ambiguous spaces, so you can drive outcomes, remind everyone of the shared goals, and create space for everyone to thrive and be on the same page.

4 . Product sense, with strategy skills: Having strong opinions, and insights about the domain, product and market are crucial to succeeding, as they help through understanding implications deeply. PMs with a clear vision and strategy, with defined goals, non-goals and principles inspire the team and build trust and confidence with leadership, while carving a path to industry leadership for the product.

5 . Ownership mindset: PMs who care more about outcomes (over outputs), consistently follow up on their tasks, and never drop the ball are always a step ahead in anticipating changes. They are proactive, which also enables them to be flexible and agile in ambiguous situations.

You are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I think we’re in an era where AI is truly helping everyone (including PMs) expand human potential. In fact, PMs are at the forefront of building AI products. Even the field of product management itself is evolving with AI. However, we don’t typically think of leveraging AI for our tasks and personal productivity, as we don’t have those habits built yet. I’d love for the readers to consider where they spend most time, and evaluate if AI can help them even in the smallest way possible, thereby building new AI Habits in 2024. #AIHabits2024. Always happy to discuss AI and PM on LinkedIn.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.