 Hello everyone and welcome to this webinar by Product School, which is all about problems that PMs face as problem solvers. My name is Kaushal Jain and I'm a Product Manager at Microsoft, and I'll be taking you through this journey today. All right, so let's begin with a little bit about myself. I have over six years of product and engineering experience, and I started off with engineering degree from IIT Bombay, both Pastors and Masters, after which I moved to Japan to work for Sony and design their smartphone cameras. After Sony, I took a big shift and moved to the healthcare space, where I was working on building health tech products with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. Post that, I completed my MBA from Harvard Business School, after which I've been at Microsoft. At Microsoft, I've worked on the Cloud AI and networking space, and more recently with IITs engineering team to build great products. Right, so let's talk a little bit about what we are going to be talking about today. I'll start with a quick context and walk through three key challenges that PMs face. We will walk through different examples or case studies across industries to focus on these challenges and then steps you can take to overcome them. Right, so it all begins with this. You are a PM and you are asked to solve a problem. Now that problem can be anything and at any stage of the product life cycle. Let me start with introducing three different examples in different industries that I have been a part of as a product manager, and walk throughout this discussion as case studies. So the first one is from my stint in the healthcare space. So imagine you are a product manager and you've been tasked with this. So make public health workers efficient through technology. The second word is about the Cloud Security Space, which is again a very fast and rapid growing industry in the last few years. So this is more of a B2B problem. Here imagine you're a PM for Networking Security Services in the Cloud and you have been tasked with increasing the adoption of Cloud Security Services amongst the customers. And then the third one is from the advertising stint that I'm currently a part of. So this is more of a B2C problem and so imagine you're an ad product PM and the goal is to improve user engagement on shopping experiences. So as you can see, these are very broad problem statements across very different industries. I am hoping that at least one of these will fit what you are doing and will help you in your careers. Right, so the first thought that comes to my mind often is, all right, so what's the problem? And I get confused. I think too much. I think through like the million possibilities that could potentially be there to understand the problem and to uncover it. So talking about problems, let's start with the first challenge or first problem, which is all about unpacking options. This is also what I call the cold start problem. Almost always the problem statement that you are given as a product manager is ambiguous, it is unclear, and it's really hard to understand where to start and kind of how to explore the possible options. There are three ways to kind of deal with this and each of these methods rely on getting more information from multiple sources. So the first one is about research and reading. So whenever I'm given a problem statement, the first thing that I would do is really understand what the industry landscape looks like, understand who are the competitors and what have they been doing, and also look out for case studies, which are kind of similar to the problem statement that I am dealing with and have been tried on either successfully or not so successfully in sister teams, organizations or outside in the industry. It is also important to look at what the company's strengths are and what historically has been the capabilities of your team. For customer feedback, which is the second key bucket here, I would say it is a very, very critical one and any information that you can get about the customers or the users, just take it all. The best way to possibly do that, if you have access to customers is through direct interviews. If you already have a very rich data repository sitting in your team or you understand what are the key metrics, how trends look like for the set of customers you are going to be working with, understand and analyze those, that will give you a lot of insights as well. A third way to kind of think about the customer feedback is through support tickets or any formal feedback mechanism if that has been set up in place for the customers that you are dealing with. If you cannot access customers directly, having conversations with the sales and account teams can also provide you valuable information that can be used to understand what are the potential options and how can you solve for those customers. User research can also be a valuable tool, especially when you are building a new interface for customers. Finally, a PM's job involves a lot of talking, a lot of discussion and a lot of meetings and you work with a lot of stakeholders each of them will have certain opinions. It is always helpful to talk to fellow PM's or PM's from sister teams or engineers who have been working with these PM's or engineers from the neighboring teams to get their opinion on how they think about this problem. For example, if you are a new product manager in a particular team, there will be more experienced people from which who will have much more valuable information to share. Marketing, finance and other stakeholders can also be valuable in really understanding the problem space in certain situations. Now, after doing all this, here are two things that we are looking at from all this research at customer feedback and talking to a lot of stakeholders. The first one is having a clearly defined problem statement and the second is having a list of several potential options that you could go figure out to solve the problem. Ideally, these options should be logically bucketed into categories that kind of make sense. So for example, some of the ideas for working for a core tech product could be categorized as back end changes, front end changes or infrastructure changes or something that you are kind of trying to solve for could be bucketed into new features or building new features or just incremental changes or just marketing and sales driven change or problem solving. And getting to this is not easy and it requires multiple iterations, practice and doing it multiple times to kind of get it right. What you focus on out of these three if you have limited time, which almost always is the case, also depends on the context and welcome through practice. All right. So let's connect what we learned in the previous slide to the three case examples that we started with. So the first one about healthcare efficiency, what I did to begin with was conducted a survey and a lot of interviews with the healthcare workers to really understand the situation on ground. And what this told me or what this gave me was the fact that the data that was available to the decision makers or the government officials was highly unreliable and it was pretty dated. So there was a lot of delay in the data collection and data being shared with the government workers. Moreover, there were a lot of data holds when it actually reached the government officials and that created program inefficiency. I also studied what was done in similar situations in different countries. So countries different from the one that I was working with by some of the other teammates in those countries who were working for the same organization. And so a bunch of options came to mind through these discussions and research and understanding all the data we had. They were around building dashboards or Excel tools or maps or IT tools to be able to give the healthcare workers real-time data and plug the data holds with publicly available information as soon as possible. For the cloud security space or the case that we're talking about, the discussion with the PMs or the owners of these individual networking security services were super helpful. That gave me a lot of context about the key challenges, key areas that they were focusing on. What also helped here was how was the industry shaping up? How are the security services, the cloud security services, the industry shaping up and what are competitors doing in this space? The sales and commerce teams also provided valuable insights about how a customer looks at a bunch of these security services and what are the things that they would ideally expect. Some of the ideas that came through these discussions about solving this problem of increasing adoption were around building a mega-security service or kind of doing a deep engineering integrations among these services versus the pure sales and marketing play. For the advertising case, we had a lot of data about users because it all relies on experiments. It's heavily experimented driven culture in the advertising space because the number of consumers or the users you have are way too many to be doing direct interviews. And that's typically the case for any B2C product. So understanding those metrics and trends did help and the UX and the PM discussions with the teams who worked on similar ad products did help. Everybody was super excited and they were very excited and I really understood that the core challenges were around kind of aligning with the fact that we cannot lose a lot of revenue but we still are motivated to improve the user experience. So there were a lot of incremental ideas in terms of, hey, how can we introduce these free offers here or in this position and make the user happy because there was a dissatisfaction between the user or ticket filed in this case and so on. So those were the ideas that kind of came in there. So here's where we landed and hopefully you can see how I brought more clarity to the problem statement based on the research, the discussions, the customer insights and all the information that I gathered as discussed earlier. So in case of healthcare efficiency became more on providing data visualizations and how do we improve their efficiency through those visualizations. In cloud security the focus became product integration led growth and only for existing customers that we had not net new customers. Whereas in advertising the focus became how can we show more relevant and free offers to the customers or to the users without hurting total revenue. All right, so hopefully with the first exercise and the first challenge that we talked about you have a clearly articulated problem statement and you hopefully have a list of ideas that are logically bucketed that you could potentially explore and solve the problem at hand. The next challenge that usually comes with this is how do I select the best idea with a solid rational and this challenge that I'm talking about is about prioritizing and then making sure that you yourself prioritize it and also navigate the chaos around the organization. So I have a three pronged approach for prioritizing the idea and usually it is exhaustive in whatever situation you are in although it might need to be a little bit tuned depending on the context and situation you are in so for example you might want to give more weightage to one versus other but usually these three buckets will cover everything and will cover a broad array of problems that you deal with. So the first bucket is about team alignment or the org alignment the second bucket is about feasibility of implementing the idea and the third bucket is about the value for the customer so when we talk about the team alignment some of the key points to consider here are whatever idea you are proposing or whatever option you are considering how does that align with the team OKRs or objectives and key results and what is the potential to move the KPIs or key performance indicators for your team how much can they be moved with your idea I think that strategic alignment with your idea is super critical and then the other thing to think about is how easy is it going to be to internally coordinate and socialize this idea the easier it is the higher priority your idea should get talking about feasibility here I think the points to consider here are how complex is the idea to implement how much time is it going to take how much money is it going to cost the team and the organization and then are there any other non quantifiable challenges such as legal issues admin regulatory approvals that you might need to go through to really get this idea being approved so I would say that the easier it is the more feasibility it is give it a higher priority and then the third bucket is about value for customer and this is super critical simply put like what is the value that a customer can potentially get that can be quantifiable for the customer that is super important moreover not just the quantifiable value but other qualitative things or indirect things that a customer is getting which may benefit you or the org in future and the customer as well so that also should be consideration here and then if you are proposing an idea or an option or solving a problem for the customer what are the available alternatives and how does this idea fair with the available alternatives for the customer so that is all about value for customer and what I would suggest is to have a simple scorecard that stack ranks your ideas or have a list of ideas in the order of priority an easy way to kind of do that is just have a score of 1, 2, 3 for each of these 3 buckets and have 3 columns here that should kind of give you a good, rudimentary way of prioritizing things now once you have an idea prioritized for you the other challenge is to convince your sponsor or your boss or your immediate team to be excited about the idea now note that your team might be working on a lot of other things it might be chaotic depending on the organization of the team that you're part of so how do you navigate that and make sure that your idea is not only a priority for yourself but also for your team and the best way to kind of do that is whatever you are thinking, whatever you have thought through through this framework put that in writing through convincing pitch be it a presentation format, be it a document or PRD format whatever works in your organization go for it but as long as it's on paper it is going to take you a longer distance the other two things that I have point out here like I said because it is super chaotic or it can get chaotic is to stay calm and stay focused, laser focused on the idea that you have chosen as a priority for the right reasons you might want to talk in more detail with some people, you might want to zoom out with other people so you got to be a little bit flexible when you are talking with people and make this a team priority right, so like we did with the first challenge and walking through the three case scenarios, let's do it with this challenge as well and bring those three scenarios back so the first one, the healthcare efficiency one, what I landed was to create a detailed heat map for disease prevalence and what this would basically do is get all this data through publicly available sources or satellite sources and combine that or conflate that with the publicly available the public health information that's available on ground which might be incomplete or so but I think that conflation would kind of build a richer data set and help the healthcare workers and what we indexed on from the framework that I talked about in the previous slide was on the value that this potential solution could give to the healthcare workers as well as you know how many lives it could save one of the dollars that could be saved by the government if they were able to kind of efficiently implement efficiently take actions and mobilize resources and the other piece that we thought about was on feasibility there was a partnership involved with an external organization who was kind of interested in getting that data and there was a lot of bureaucracy also when you deal with government but we thought it would be manageable in the cloud security space what we ended up finalizing was to go with a product-led growth approach which would combine a little bit of engineering aspects and marketing not just given to the customers who are using either of the services so the two aspects we kind of over indexed on from the framework that I talked about in the previous slide were around feasibility because this would be relatively easy to implement versus building a completely new service for the customers and thinking about the internal alignment what we thought was we will definitely need the buy-in from all the stakeholders for these particular services that we were targeting and that might cause a little bit of friction if you were asking a lot of work from them so that was this seemed like a good compromise situation while delivering the impact and then for advertising the approach which we landed here was experimentation just to a bunch of experiments and iterate and kind of improve here what we balanced was the internal goals of revenue for the organization with the value to the customer which is okay how relevant are the ads how useful are the ads to me and so on so the whole idea was try out one thing incrementally improve it rinse and repeat and keep it keep going until you kind of fit satisfactory metrics alright so let's talk about the third challenge here so now ideally you would have your idea kind of prioritize your team convinced and now it's all about execution your team goes go and you know do it for us usually execution is filled with a lot of hurdles almost always have faced multiple issues when I can go out and execute because most of the things are most of the problems that you're dealing with as a product manager will involve dependency on a lot of other teams which you do not have a direct authority on so some of the issues when you're kind of talking or engaging with other teams are going to be around conflicting goals their goals might be different than what your goals are there might be politics around there's probably going to be accountability issues like they would question why would they do it for you and so on or there might be genuine time constraints there might be bandwidth issues because there's so much backlog with them why and how should they prioritize what you are asking them to do and so the way to deal with those issues and really think about how can you influence these stakeholders without having a formal authority with them is to really think that they are people first and foremost you're dealing with humans here and sort of take the approach of incorporating these four tenets or values when you're dealing with the stakeholders so the first one really is about empathy and what that means is can you step into the shoes of the stakeholders can you live, look and see the world from their perspective only then you would be able to understand what they go through and really adapt what you want to ask for from them and that kind of brings me to the adaptability point here is that when you can really understand or see the world from their perspective you can hopefully understand their incentives what is the environment they operate in and then align what your goals are with what their goals potentially are the other piece about expertise here is all the research and analysis that you've done on the problem statement hopefully has made you an expert in at least dealing and solving or advocating for this particular solution so if you have a clear and convincing story about your own goals and your own idea and if you're perceived as an expert by the stakeholder or the party that you're talking to that will help in building a trust or a meaningful relationship with the stakeholder and then the chances of them agreeing to what you say become much, much higher so when it comes to building trust you've got to stay authentic you have to be consistent and remember it's about building meaningful relationships I also want to point out the three modes of influence that were introduced by Alice and so the modes are sort of logos pathos and ethos the three ways in which people are generally influenced or persuaded so logos is reason and logic you kind of try and convince people by giving them a rational a logically justifiable argument and say that here's the reason we should be doing this pathos is about emotion and this is where the empathy really comes into play and hopefully you can understand what are their circumstances unique circumstances that they kind of live and work in and if you can play on some of the emotions that might help them get convinced as well and the third one is ethos which is really about finding a common purpose or common ground in making them realize that this is for a greater good which is just beyond their individual sphere ok so let's apply what we learned in the previous slide to the three case study examples that we have been talking throughout this webinar how do we think about those so let's begin with the health care efficiency piece the two modes of influence that I used here were pathos and ethos so like I mentioned the external partners was working with who owned the models to kind of create those heat maps and they were looking for data so it kind of was a win-win situation and it kind of played on their pathos and ethos the other piece that I kind of worked as I mentioned I was working with healthcare workers and really understanding how their life looks like so convincing them to use this solution was really playing on pathos and really kind of empathizing with what their day-to-day looks like and how can that get better for the cloud security services I think the key point or the key mode here was was around ethos we are collectively improving the adoption for all the security services so it's beyond or above a single individual PM or owner as such so convincing them about that and then also making them realize that this is for a greater good customers will get stickier to our platform and eventually get in more revenue which will help you right so really thinking about the greater good and something that just goes beyond their individual service was critical and the same argument kind of worked with sales marketing and finance teams because this was about improving the overall portfolio rather than a particular service similarly so for in the advertising team like I said this is a lot of experiments and numbers driven P2C nature of this problem statement so what I relied on was logos and ethos we're like okay we'll do these experiment we'll look at the numbers if they get good it's great otherwise we keep iterating and keep improving everybody bought that logic and that kind of worked the other piece was kind of a little bit of ethos around that hey this will be greater good because you know your support tickets are going to go down users are going to be happy and a revenue hopefully is not going to suffer if we do the right experiments and right iterations there was a little bit of ethos there as well so just want to kind of mention here that like I said there might be different modes of influence depending on the situation that you are part of and the type of stakeholders that you're dealing with okay so here we are at the summary slide and just want to share some final thoughts here as a product manager you're often like I said given very broad set of problems often often about industries that you may not have worked in the past they're completely new they might be completely new to you or you might have worked in that industry but the nature of the problem might be completely new to you so we talked about the first challenge which was about cold start problem and how do you really unpack your options and the two key things there are to come up with a really concrete and clearly defined problem statement and do all the research that you possibly can at this stage to understand the possible universe of options that are there and hopefully kind of list them in a logically understandable manner the second challenge of the problem that we talked about was about prioritizing and navigating the organization chaos a key part of being a product manager is to drive clarity in whatever you do no matter what stage you are and in wherever you are and if you can do that through prioritization and making sure things are clear for you as a PM and for your team even more importantly for your team that will set the path for a smooth execution and a greater impact and it will avoid all the chaos that usually is with so many teams and so many stakeholders in place and then finally we talked about the execution mode and the issues that come with that around influencing without authority you are dependent on so many people to kind of do the work for you but then you don't really have a direct authority on them like I said it is all about people it is all about building the right relationships and trust it is all about being the authentic you right so don't forget the logos ethos and pathos that I talked about and the examples that we went through right so that brings me to the end of the presentation and hopefully this was helpful to you not only in terms of the frameworks of thinking about the problems but also implementing them in a diverse set of situations which we talked about B2B B2C or working in public sector with the government kind of a scenario I do want to kind of leave you with a couple of thoughts here is my LinkedIn to kind of would love to connect with you and know more about you I do want to thank Shema Bhattak who is also a product manager at Microsoft for her help in building some of these slides thank you and have a nice day