矽谷資深產品經理收入公開 ft.@chloeshih

Hello everyone, I'm Terry. Recently, the number of US tech companies is still growing, but there are still a lot of people who get offers. In fact, I think this series of operations is to change the blood of employees, to cut off unnecessary jobs, and then introduce a new wave of talents willing to work for the company, especially now that all companies are transforming AI. I know some viewers who watch my channel actually want to come to the US, especially to work in the US department store. Not only do you have a good income, but your resume has Fang or Mangga, which looks better.

So I invited Chloe Hsu today. Chloe has a YouTube channel and she has over 100,000 LinkedIn posts. I think this is really awesome. It's not easy to have 100,000 LinkedIn posts. She also joined the "Payment is 30 Under 30" campaign. Chloe is a senior product manager. She used to work at Google, Meta, TikTok, and Discord. Today, I'm here to share with you how to cultivate your personal skills, her story behind her salary and the offer. In addition, Chloe was born and raised in LA.

So her Chinese is not very good. I hope you don't mind. But during this interview, I will try to speak to her in Chinese. OK. Yeah, that's cool.

She was a PM, working at Tech. And today, she's especially here in Seattle. Yeah, it's been a while. It's been a while. You were here in Seattle, right? It seems like 10 years ago. Oh, yeah. Yeah, when I was in college. Chloe grew up in the U.S. Yeah, Los Angeles. Last time, a teacher came to my channel to talk to everyone about PM. And today, I'm especially inviting Chloe here.

Okay, I did management engineering in the Claremont Colleges, and then yeah, IOR at Columbia. But then, 大部分的人在Columbia, 如果他們選這個的話, they go to Wall Street to do banking, like investment banking. And I did not like that at all. So I always knew I wanted to go to tech.

And then I moved over, but I was like, oh, everyone's doing software engineering, but I don't want to do that. I'm a people person. I did a lot of leadership clubs, and then I wanted to go into something more people-related, so I joined Google doing people operations. Right. So Chloe, you studied operational research before, industrial engineering. Did you share with us how you got into the PM job?

So I started with people operations, and then I thought maybe this is not for me. And then I went to more like data-oriented jobs and interviews. I found a startup company. I joined it as one of the first non-technical hires doing business development. And it was in the streaming space, so I would go work with gaming companies and live streamers and do partnership deals. I realized that being a streamer is very tiring and difficult, and making money is also difficult.

And they have so many problems that they have so much tech. And I realized, wow, we can solve so many things if we built XYZ feature. So I would take their pain points, bring them back to the product team and be like, we need to build this. I can't sell a product faster than you building it because it doesn't matter how good I am. If the product is not good, then we can't do it. So then I realized that was like product management. And then I learned more about

the career and I was like, oh, in Silicon Valley in tech, 当一个PM有很多能力 and leadership and prestige. So I feel, wow, this is something that has longevity and I don't know where my current career is going to go, but product can go so far. They're considered like mini CEOs of the company.

And lastly, I think that product management pays really well. So 薪水很高。 對。 講到薪水,我覺得... 你喜歡這個 topic。 不是我喜歡,我覺得我的觀眾喜歡。 大家應該很好奇。 在矽谷工作這麼多年,

So actually I had a hard time transitioning from business development to product. After the Xinchang company, I went to Facebook to do product operations. So it's not PM. It's just like PMs work with product operations. And then on Facebook, I did PM work. Like I was the PM for this small product, but I wasn't by title. And I was making like 95,000, 95K. And I had like equity and stuff, but it's not a lot. The first job was like underpaid, right?

Yeah, I've been underpaid my entire career. If you're not in product engineering data, then literally your pay is so much lower than everyone else. So it just like changed everything. Right.

Right. It's very hard to live in San Francisco for that amount. So when I got the TikTok offer, I actually got a senior PM role for $18,000 base salary, 25% target bonus, $217,000 in equity over four years. And it was a total first year comp of $279,000. So I feel like it changed my life. Yeah. Then I was trying to move it.

off. Yeah. You're working as a PM, but then you're getting paid as an operator. Because doing these transfers in a big company is very troublesome. It takes like a long time. It really changed my life. It went from like I had to budget everything to now I don't have to look at. So that was TikTok. How about Discord? They gave me a lower offer at the beginning, but I negotiated and I'm pretty good at negotiating. I went from $180,000 base to a $215,000 base.

Which is pretty good because it's the same level. Then I got a 50K sign on bonus and then I got equity. And equity, unfortunately, I can't really talk about because the numbers are just like up and down, but it's in the multi six figures.

Yeah, multi-six figures for every year. Has it gone down? I guess when I signed my offer, it was good and then it went up and then it kind of went down a bit. And we're still, it's still not public yet. So I don't even know. Cool. Why don't you share a little bit more about product manager? What skills do you need to become a successful product manager?

manager so in tech the product manager owns though the why and the what we're building why are we building this and what is it that we're building and the engineers and designers and everyone else works on the how we build it and let's build it and get it to launch so as a product manager you have to have extremely strong product sense to figure out why you're building something

and leadership to convince everyone else that this is the right move and then have really strong executional skills to spec out exactly what it looks like, how it works. Honestly, your boss will just say, we need to grow by 10%, go. And you just have to take that and then break down everything to the problem and figure out where we can go from there and build innovative solutions. And also another essential skill set

is user empathy. Like being able to convert your customer insights to product tactical to-dos and action items. It's such a superpower that you need to build. What do you think makes a great PM versus a PM that you just hate working with? Yeah, I think it all comes down to communication. Probably like the key. If you know how to talk to engineers, you'll get a pretty good plus. You'll get a lot of respect from engineers, which is good. You want that, right?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I get it. There's so many case questions, like hundreds and hundreds. Yeah. It's like there's product sense interview, product execution interview, the strategy ones. Maybe we can do a presentation on our product work or they will give us a prompt.

It sounds like it takes a lot of time.

Yes, it takes a lot of time. Because there's like frameworks that you can kind of follow and just practice those questions. There's like an expected answer, basically. They're looking for how well you can think on the spot and what's your decision-making framework. Many viewers actually have questions about me. How is the entire tech environment now? Like before Chloe was laid off, I was also laid off. So do you think after being laid off, do you have any feelings?

I wasn't that surprised when it happened. In tech, in Silicon Valley, actually 40% of Americans get laid off in their career. And so it's a pretty normal thing, at least in the United States. But with tech layoffs, I think the only thing is like, I'm pretty sad because I really like Discord. And then just like bittersweet. And then you just move on to the next thing. I always feel I have to work all the time. I can't really take vacation. And every year it's like new goals. I can finally reset, take a moment to think about what I want in my life.

And all of a sudden, all of these doors opened for me. I had so many conversations with startups, with educational institutions. If I was in a role, I would just always say no to everyone. But now all of these doors are opening and I feel really excited for my next chapter. I heard that Discord is very good. Your engineering is actually very small, but your scope is very good. When I entered Discord, I think there was only like 8 PM in the whole company. Even when I left, it was only like 25 PM.

One product team takes on so much surface area. It's kind of crazy. It's really fun. Gotta do a lot of zero. 零到一零到一,对。 零到一,lunch. Nice. Chloe, 我看你的 Instagram 上面,之前在台湾拍了一些东西, 我给大家分享一下。

三月的时候回台湾 for three weeks. 我跟一个 educational tech company called 知识卫星 work together as a 老师 I'm so excited because actually 去年十二月我有去台湾做一个 career talk for a cake resume and then talk about my product career. And from that, 知识卫星 reached out and was like teaching product thinking

help tech in Taiwan. When this opportunity came up, I was like, yes, I would love to. So I went back, I shot the course three weeks every day, nine to six. And we finally put together one of the most comprehensive courses on product thinking in the industry. It's eight to 10 hours long. I cover everything from breaking into product

to what do you do in the product role, to how do you think like a product manager. It's not just for PMs, it's for like anyone who wants to build the skill set for the future of their business. More of like my first steps into helping Tech for Taiwan. - There are four, the first one is, I don't know how to say in Chinese. It's like big picture thinking. - You don't know why you're doing it and you're like,

If you take a step back, does that really fall in line with the vision and the impact? And is this actually achieving something bigger? You'll get a sense of that because we go through a bunch of case studies on all kinds of companies. And so you'll see how those are broken down. The second is problem solving where you get that hard question. Your boss is like, we need to raise revenue by 20%. We need to double everything. Go, go do it. And it's like a really scary question. So how do you do that? You use first principles thinking.

I think the best example that I know is like, you have to improve the speed of an elevator and you're like, oh, that's a lot of work. But then maybe if you like break down the problem, maybe the problem is customers feel that it's slow. You don't necessarily have to fix the elevator. Maybe you can add a mirror, add some music, add an eye

pad so it feels like the time is passing by faster. It's a much lower cost way of solving the problem. Now you can go on to other problems that are probably more important. So that's what first principles is very much like. And the third is user centric approach, building your user empathy, customer insights, like how do you go from

all these customer interviews and user interviews and taking that and building actual product insights and a plan of action for your product team. I think anyone who built a product or owns a business, you have to know what your audience, your customers want and create an action plan from it. Lastly, it's data-driven thinking. So obviously you have your opinion. I have my opinion. We can argue all day, but the one thing that will align us clearly is data. Yeah. So how do you do experimentation? How do you take analytics?

and take those numbers and tell a story that can align everyone so we can just go start executing immediately. Those are the four components. Cool. Yeah. I really think that this course, although it focuses on product, but like I am an engineer, I want to go up in tech work. I want to be more senior. Maybe I want to be an EM or I want to be a people manager.

- Mm-hmm.

I put everything into it. So I wrote the entire course. Then I'm like,

I went to ask my friends. They work at SoundCloud, Riot Games, Uber, Faire, Headspace, Spotify, Figma, Discord, Instagram, and Twitch to review everything and give me their input. Feedback, right? Yeah. Because obviously product is, we work with everyone. And so we can't just think in our own space. I was able to work with so many people in the industry to review and share their perspective. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Right? Now, Chloe is going to share this course with you. This course is from

- Yay, thank you. Thank you, Terry, for having me.