 Good afternoon and good evening to everyone who is out around the world. All right, first off, very quickly, what do I mean by team? Because this question has come up. I'm assuming that most of you work on some kind of cross-functional scrum team, maybe with engineers, designers, analysts, others like we've heard about. But even if you are on some different kind of configuration of team, if you're in product, you work on a team. So I'm talking about that immediate circle of people that you work with on a day-to-day basis. So I would like to ask you to help me validate a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that my dream team is about the same idea as your dream team. So I'm going to list off a few team attributes, and I would like you to clap when I say one that resonates with you. So I'll read, and then you clap. You could do hallelujahs or hurrahs, whatever you want to. All right, so let's go. The team of my dreams is open and honest, fearlessly transparent. The team of my dreams is confident that we're doing meaningful work. The team of my dreams is trusted inside and outside the team. And the team of my dreams is taking risks and learning new things. So those were softballs, but I'm pleased that I'm at the right conference, and that I've found my tribe here at ProductCon. I'm sure we could come up with 100 more things we want to put down, but I think I've hopefully set the message as to what I'm talking about when I talk about a dream team. It's those qualities of the team that make us frankly want to come to work every day. So my fellow product managers, every single one of you out there are the single most important factor in bringing your dream team to life. I admit I may be biased having spent over 20 years in product management, but I believe that product management is the center of the universe as far as team dynamics and team culture. If you have a unique opportunity, I would say even responsibility to create and nurture a team culture that enables your team to do their very best work. You can make it happen. So quickly, what your team needs from you. I don't think I'm telling you anything new with this, but just to recap what your team is expecting from you and what they need to succeed. The duties of a PM vary company to company and even team to team within a company, right? We've got our platform PMs and we might have our customer facing PMs and different things like that, but there are a few universal truths to the job that we have all signed up to do. One, you all have a customer. Your customer may be internal, it may be external, but you've got some kind of customer that you are building something for. Your team is counting on you to understand your customers and what's important to them. And I know we all just heard Bavini talk a lot about that. Selling is part of the job, whether you like it or not, and I know a lot of us don't like that part, but your team is counting on you to be kind of the chief salesperson for your team. You need to sell your vision, sell your plans, sell the value that your team is bringing and represent your team. So they're counting on you to be that salesperson. Additionally, whatever level you're at, whether you're an intern or the CPO, you have an opportunity to be a leader. One thing I want to clarify is you don't need to be a manager to be a leader. I've got a lot of people thinking this, like, oh, if I can just become a manager and manage some people, then I'll be able to show that I'm leading. Your team wants to do the things that you ask them to do because they're inspiring and they're the right thing to do, and not because you tell them to. So figure out how you can sell your own team on the vision, and they will follow you to the ends of the earth. So if your role is to help build the culture that enables your team to succeed, what are the three qualities or skills that you can embody to help create that culture? And this is the heart of my talk. I believe that these soft skills, which are not, in fact, so easy, are the key things. These are skills that you can practice and develop. These are not inherent personality traits or something like that. And you need to consciously be aware of these and developing them over time. I would argue that the things we're used to thinking about, things like perform competitive research and write detailed acceptance criteria, these things in job descriptions, doing those well all derive from expertise in these three skills. You can teach anyone to write a user story, but the people who really understand how the engineers will use that information and what they need to know from you are the people who those great engineers are going to want to work with. That is empathy. So empathy is not just for your customers. It's for everyone around you and for your own team. Empathy leads to transparency, boundary setting, context setting, and awareness. It's the ability to manage up and down. Be curious. Being curious will lead you to try new things, understand the larger context of the business that you're operating in, and will help you make better decisions and improve your intuition. Without a little bravery, you won't be able to put all of this empathy and curiosity into practice. You will not achieve your or your team's potential without a little bit of courage. As the leader, your team is looking to you to embody and demonstrate all of these skills. Let's look at them one by one. Empathy is like building a set of muscles, and it is a superpower if you can unlock it. You can deploy empathy on any unsuspecting target. Your boss, the CEO, that person in marketing that always holds up your launches, it's really an amazing technique. And all of these things that we've heard about earlier in terms of doing customer empathy building, you can deploy internally as well to learn more about the people around you and what motivates them. Using it will get you a better understanding of what they need from you and why. Empathy will improve your communication skills, build trust, and help you learn how to anticipate their needs and feelings. It'll make you a better leader and a better partner. I'll give you one example of how to practice empathy at work and something that it's done to help me. Several years ago, I got feedback from my manager, his name was Justin at the time, that my team loved working with me and believed in me, but I wasn't very good at executive communications. I'd go to those executive reviews and they'd all be a little bit confused because I took so long to get to the point. I'd heard this kind of feedback before, right? So it's pretty common. You'll start hearing themes of feedback over your career. And I had just sort of assumed that I was really good at managing down and not so good at managing up, and it was just sort of how things were for me. Justin said something then kind of amazing, which really like unlocked my mind about the opportunity I was missing. He said, Heidi, they trust you. You don't need to give the whole rationale on how you got there. And what I realized was I hadn't put myself in their shoes. I was so busy looking at what I thought I needed to do, that I hadn't thought about what they needed from me. So it made me realize what else can I learn about these people that might help me be, frankly, a better subordinate in some ways to them, right? So I did a careful study of the C-suite executives and created a technique I call the empathy field study and basically applied a lot of those customer empathy techniques that we've been learning about all day to the executives. I recruited a CMO to be a mentor for me and interviewed her about her role to learn more about what her goals are, how she makes decisions, and what she really needs from the people under her. This was incredibly helpful. And I summarized at the end of this my learnings and observations about kind of the C-suites and what they need from us. Some of these are pretty obvious. Like, they want you focused on the most important things. Others were not so obvious. Like, they don't actually care who does the work so long as it gets done. And you probably know more than they do. But when I had these insights in front of me, I found that I was able to craft my communications to them in a different way that was a lot more effective. I tailored my story to my audience. I'm happy to say that a few months later, Justin came back and said I was nailing it. My team was happier, too, because they realized that they were being better represented by me in those meetings. And they were getting a lot more positive commentary about their work and more awareness. So you can do your own empathy field study on anyone you don't fully understand. It might be someone in your team, the engineers. It might be some stakeholder, someone outside the team that you don't really understand their motivations and what they need from you. I guarantee that you will develop a better understanding of why they act the way they do and you'll be better equipped to work with them. If you want extra bonus points, try this on someone who infuriates you. That person where you just do not understand why are they doing the things they do and they always seem to be in your way. Take a step back from them and objectively sort of study them and try and understand what it is they're trying to do and you'll get a better understanding of what motivates them. Moving on to number two, curiosity. When I decided to leave tech some years ago and start a restaurant, I knew only one important thing and that was that I had no idea how to run a restaurant. I also knew that 60% of restaurants fail in the first year. I did it anyway. We can talk about that separately. But I decided to set out and learn everything I could about the industry and the thousand and one ways there were to fail. I had this huge advantage of having a beginner's mind, which is something I'd sort of forgotten about in my tech career. I took every class that I could find. I stripped mind to every expert I could get my hands on. I wrote a 110-page business plan. I took part-time jobs in bakeries and cafes to get hands on experience. I figured my best chance against, my best bets against failure were voracious curiosity and a huge dose of humility. And I was right. It worked. So how does this apply to product? We product people, our proudly data and customer-driven, right? Before we get to having any decisions to make, though, we are conducting research, uncovering insights, coming up with hypotheses, and all along the way we are choosing what questions we ask of whom. All of these activities have curiosity at their core. And the more curious you are, the more golden insight nuggets that you will surface that you can use to make better decisions. That beginner's mind is something you need to go back to over and over. Context is another area I would encourage you to be curious about. What I mean by context is a larger business context that your company is operating in, including the market, market dynamics, the customer. So the more you can understand your company's goals, strategy, challenges, and other macro forces, the more likely you are to build a product roadmap that delivers things that have an impact to the customer, to the company. A few fun facts about curiosity. This is a real summary of these articles. I would encourage you to go read them on your own. But Harvard Business Review did a sort of meta roundup of studies around curiosity, and they found a measurable impact on business performance and job satisfaction correlated to the levels of curiosity that people had. Curious people are admired by others and seem to be happier. So curiosity is worth the investment. Also, one not so fun fact about curiosity, and that is that you have to put in effort to keep it going. Curiosity was found to drop 20% after six months on a new job, right? You settle in, you understand how things are, you lose that beginner's mind. So you have to proactively keep investing in your curiosity, it won't just happen on its own. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day, right? You need to fill out that product review deck and write your self-evaluation and complete this month's compliance training, right? And it can be easy to just keep ticking those things off the list and not set aside the time to go learn something new, scratch that itch about what is that weird new trend going on in the industry, but find the time to do it. It will pay off. So embrace your inner three-year-old and keep asking why. Skill number three, bravery. I will let the inimitable Maya Angelou explain why this is so important. In terms of our world, we talk about failing fast and continuous learning, right? These are important things that we strive for. Bravery is the skill you need to take the risks that you have to endure to fail fast. If you're not brave, you're just as likely to fail, but it's gonna take longer and it won't be as much fun along the way. I know from personal experience that few things are more gratifying to a PM than shipping something, right? And I promise that if you are a little more courageous and a little more brave, you will ship more things. So here's a few suggestions of times when you can unleash your bravery at work. If you see something that isn't working, whatever it is, speak up, admit it, call it out and suggest something else. Don't just accept that things are the way they are. Try to change them. Volunteer your team for the most important projects in the company, even if they're daunting, especially if they're daunting. If you're working on the most important things, you're more likely to get a yes when you ask for resources, support or priority on your projects. If something needs an owner, take charge. Why not you? Yeah, maybe there's someone better for the job, but they're doing something else. So here's your chance to step up and learn something new. It also takes guts to admit when you were wrong or you made a mistake. And it may be counterintuitive, but these are actually some of the best opportunities to show leadership. When I was a GoDaddy a few years ago, I had a team that was responsible for a major checkout flow, among other things. And I won't get into details about what we did because it's a public company, but suffice to say in the course of running an experiment we managed to kind of break this major checkout flow and it had a non-trivial impact on customers and the company. This was a little bit embarrassing. I will admit it, we totally should have caught it before it ever got out the door, mistakes happened. It took us also a week to figure out exactly what had happened and how to roll this back. So what I chose to do as a leader of the team was own it. So I stepped up and said this is my fault, took one for the team and I proactively went on what I call the great apology tour across the company to all of the stakeholders who I thought would have a strong opinion about this, apologized, told them we're on it, told them it was my fault, and proactively told them we're coming up with a plan, we're doing our retro and I'm gonna share that out with you and make sure that we never do this again. It can be easy to sort of wanna feel a little bit defensive and hide with those things, but by choosing to kind of protect my team, I actually got a really great response to this. People were grateful, it kind of undermined that instinct to blame someone about this thing that went wrong. So I got great kudos for this and they actually expanded my role and somewhat intuitively gave me a much larger part of this checkout flow as a result and everyone just really appreciated their transparency. So don't be afraid to just stand up when a mistake is made and own it, even if it's not your mistake. People will be grateful to you for taking charge. All right, so how do we work on these three key critical skills? Step one, often the hardest, and that is self-awareness. So having a clear understanding of really what your strengths and weaknesses are in these spaces. These are just a few suggestions of the kinds of questions you can start asking yourself or potentially someone else if you've got a close person that you work with that you might be able to have a conversation like this with. If you like to journal or write things down, this might be a good opportunity to do that. So for assessing empathy, start with a map of your own work galaxy. Map out who's that immediate circle of people that you work with on a day-to-day basis? Who are those key stakeholders surrounding that? And start asking yourself, do you understand what's important to these people? What are their goals? Both near-term things like OKRs, which in my opinion should just be publicly available on an intranet, and also their longer-term goals, like what are their career aspirations? And how can you help them? For that matter, are you clear on your own goals and aspirations? If not, that might be a good place to start too. If you run into a blank spot where you just don't know, well, that's a good time to conduct an empathy-filled study and see if you can understand these folks a little better. Once you understand your immediate team, you can widen the circle and think about the stakeholders and decision-makers that you need to influence. It can be hard to think about your own curiosity, but give it a try. It can also be hard to separate curiosity from bravery, because sometimes it's hard to ask questions if you think it's something you should already know the answer to, right, and you don't wanna look stupid. So one key here is to maybe check yourself and see how often are you asking why and how, versus asking what and when. Once you have some self-awareness, you can do an assessment of yourself and give yourself some ratings, and maybe think about what are the areas you want to prioritize and invest in getting better in, versus the areas where you're already pretty strong and can coast along. I recommend validating your self-assessment, if you can, with your manager, or if you're lucky enough to have a work spouse with your work spouse. I know we don't all have the kind of relationship with our manager where we can have this kind of conversation, so if that's you, no need, and if you don't have someone you could talk to, you can sort of talk to yourself and go it alone. We all know what step three is, make a plan. So once you have identified the areas you want to invest in, make a plan and look for opportunities to practice these things. Don't forget to prioritize. We all know that we have too many competing projects. That is a recipe for disaster. These opportunities really are all around you. Just open your eyes and look for them. For instance, you are helping me practice bravery right now. Speaking in front of several thousand of your peers is scary, but it gets a little less scary every time you do it, and sometimes the best way to have an impact is to speak up, even when it gives you some anxiety. So in summary, empathy, curiosity, bravery, your soft skills that are a golden ticket to a great team. And I will be on hop in soon. We might be a little over time actually. Any minute now for a Q&A, I'm going to go ahead and answer the most common question of my life, which is not, what are you doing later? Are you single? What's your favorite grilled cheese sandwich? It's a mac and cheese grilled cheese. It is mac and cheese stuffed inside a grilled cheese, and it is amazing. You're gonna have to trust me on this. Thank you all very much.