 Hello everyone. I'm Mithi. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Atlassian and today I will be walking you through the process of crafting a winning product strategy, a blueprint for success for new product managers. As a way of introduction I started my career at Cummins in the manufacturing industry as a strategy and planning business analyst. I then moved to Splunk and I started there as a cloud business process analyst and recently when leaving Splunk was in their platform product management team and more recently I've been working at Atlassian as their Senior Product Manager for Confluence Cloud, specifically focused on Confluence permissions. Let's dive in. Today I will be talking you through three topics, the first one being product discovery tactics, the second where we will spend our most time today is on crafting the strategy which also includes activity ideas and lastly sharing and gaining alignment. A small disclaimer here, none of what I represent here in this talk today is a representation of the companies that I have previously worked at or will be working at. These are purely just my opinions and things that I have learned through my experience. All right, so thinking through when you're a new product manager, you might either be new to the product management role or new to the product feature, a team new to the organization, company or simply just completely new to the domain. It is very hard to visualize when you don't know what the current is. You simply cannot visualize what you don't know and so it is critical to dive very quickly into the product to understand the current state of things so that you can then map out what the future looks like and how to get there. And I have found that three pillars of the way to structure this has really helped me dive very quickly into the product and start to understand how it works today. The first among them is stakeholder interviews. So when you think about the company or the immediate people that you work with, think about who might be people who might know something about the product or feature that you're responsible for. Make a list of at least three people. This one of them could just be the manager who hired you or the person who brought you into this team or onto this product and two other people. Make that list which is a very short list to start with and think through a template of questions that you might want to ask them. Things like what are your priorities currently and what are your priorities in the next six months? How do you see that overlapping with this thing that I am responsible for? Do you see our priorities aligning? What have you used this thing that I'm responsible for and what are your opinions on it? Probing questions like these really start to help you identify where there is overlap between your area of work and something else that someone might be responsible for. Finally, you would want to schedule and run these interviews so that you can take notes, plenty of documentation during the interview and one key step beyond conducting the interviews is to synthesize and form summarized notes that you can refer to later on from all of these interviews. The next pillar that I think is critical for all product managers to do is user research. The farther away that a product manager is from their customer, the user that they are solving a problem for, the less likely it is that they are solving the right problem. So it is extremely important for product managers to get in touch with the users to learn how the users feel about their area that they're responsible for and one way to go about doing that or to start with that is by reviewing any existing research that was conducted in the past. This could have been research that a different product manager who was in your role before might have done maybe a different function like the user research team may have done some research. There may be existing things that you already know about your users that you would want to dig up and uncover and go through and the whole point of this is to start to form an opinion. So when you look at it when you're new to as a product manager you have this blank canvas ahead of you. What you need to start to do is to form your opinions and start to draw on that canvas so that you can then have a baseline for things that you would want to change and that goes into the second bullet of synthesized specific things that you wish to learn because the canvas that you're working with might be very large the list of things that you don't know would be very large. You need to take the time to narrow it down to exact things that you want to learn from your users and then conduct the user interviews and in this conducting the user interviews you might think about how do you recruit them the communications you send out before recruiting them how do you pre-select and narrow down the kind of users that you do want to interview you'd also want to think through things like rewards do you want to monetarily reward your interviewees for their time and what will you do post interview the communications that you'll send out to them after that interview is done. So doing this user research will really help you get in touch with the customers and their users that you're trying to solve a problem for very critical for any product manager to do. Sometimes there might not be fast research for you to reference this third pillar can help with that but even outside of that competitive analysis is really critical for you to know exactly what is out there how are other tools solving this problem do my customers have other ways of solving this already do they like those ways do they have workarounds but those are very hard to do all of these questions can be answered by doing a competitive analysis by taking a look at all the other tools that are solving this problem in the market today and how they're doing it. One of the ways that I have found for this competitive analysis that's been successful is a secret shopper exercise just as the name suggests the secret shopper exercise is like imagine you are the product manager for the checkout process in an e-commerce website what a secret shopper exercise would be is you would assume the role of the user who would use your product so in this case you're the person who's trying to buy something from that e-commerce website and then you go through that checkout process yourself and throughout that time you would be writing down the things that you like things that you don't like ideas that you have with the whole point being that you are now almost being a critic to your own product and documenting that as you go and then repeat the same thing in those competitive tools using frameworks like what strength weakness opportunities threats or something as simple as that where you're able to document your competitive analysis will really help you provide some structure and a framework to this analysis I do really believe that these three pillars can help structure your product discovery and some tips on this for the stakeholder interviews ask each person that you talk to for the contact of one other person for you to talk to this way you're expanding your network and growing that list that you started with for user research maybe try doing something fun like a one-minute rapid fire round where you ask your user to rate x number of features and that could be very enlightening for you to know do your users even recognize these features do they like it do they not like it you could make this numerical ask them to rate it on a scale of 10 and the tip on competitive analysis is you can make this a team activity it doesn't have to be something that you do by yourself it could be a team activity you could assign one product or one competitive tool to each group or each person who is helping you out and each of them does the same exercise follows the same steps in those tools and you then have this the all the documentation that's created for all of these different tools one thing I will say is there is no substitute for you going into this competitor to yourself and doing that sort of analysis yourself so be sure to make the time for that at some point it doesn't have to be right now when everything is new to you so yes these are the product discovery tools how can you as a new product manager quickly start to learn about your product and its current state going into the next topic which is crafting the strategy there are three key components of a strategy document the first one being what is the problem the second is who are we solving for and third is how will we be solving it these three components are basically the main things that someone will look for when you share a strategy document with them and not having any of these pieces will really make will leave a lot of questions and answer it for the reader or whoever is consuming your strategy document for this first one on what is the problem two main pieces that that you would want your strategy to to answer the first of them is the problem statement what exactly is the problem that we are trying to solve for written out in an easy to consume manner for anyone to be able to understand it and the second one is data proving why this is worth solving right now and that data could be in the form of competitive insights that you gained by in this in the previous exercise of competitive analysis it could also be by reviewing feature requests and different companies have different avenues of collecting future requests some companies have support teams who create support tickets and you would see the number of support tickets on a certain topic and know that it's important for the customers some companies also do a public ticketing system where customers can create those tickets themselves the other customers can then vote on it and so the highly voted tickets would be the ones that you would know are worth solving right now but the main the main aim of this section on what is the problem is to set some context for your reader on what is the rest of the strategy document going to talk about it's about this problem that you're trying to solve on that here's a fun activity that you could run to get to answering what is the problem and it could be this well known commonly known exercise called the rose thorn but exercise it's also called I like I wish I wonder activity or the start stop continue activity there are templates out there that you could reuse I've just shown some templates from mural and figma basically a way for you to start to think about what are the things that are going well what are the things that should absolutely change and what are the other things that maybe are ideas or opportunities but really just birds right now that can grow into more later on doing this rose thorn but exercise either by yourself while you're doing the secret shopper exercise in your product or with your team where you just have a group of people who come together and think through all the things that you know all of these prompts would really help so at the end of this activity what you can expect is a bunch of sticky notes whether you're doing it in a digital tool or physically on the whiteboard you will have a bunch of sticky notes which will then give you an understanding of very quickly what are the things that are going well right now what are the things that need to change again what are the ideas that we have so yeah that's a fun activity for what is the problem and then once you have written out what is the problem section the second thing to highlight in the strategy document is who are we solving for this problem that exists who is it a problem for and there are two main things to include in that section the first one being in the form of user personas highlighting exactly who we are going to solve for an example of this might be you might think of an admin persona and then you might think of an end user persona I've written here that user personas with segmentation is a good idea you would want to think through are there different ways to segment my target audience and it could be small business versus enterprise it could be paid user versus the user who's on a free trial it could be geographically someone who is accessing something from amer versus a pack region so a way to classify so that you're then able to really critically look at the user personas the breadth of user personas and exactly who you want to target the who are we solving for section also usually has the top user pain points that you're trying to solve for so the pain points would be accompanied by customer codes to drive home the point on this is really a problem and here's what the customers are saying about this right now and a lot of the times those customer codes or the top user pain points would be accompanied by a why and this would be in terms of a job to be done that the customer was trying to do so I was trying to do something but here's a problem and it's really something that I think needs to change right now and therefore it's a top user pain point this is what you're trying to drive with this section for these two here's a fun activity that could be worth doing with the team or by yourself and again there are templates on figma and mural that can be reused in creating these user personas one way to go about it is to think about end to end every single different user type that your process of your system might touch and why that's what is the thing that attracts them or keeps them irrelevant to that process or system and so you would come up with this profile of in that previous example of an admin and admins main job to be done is x y and z but they are you know they're an introvert as seen in this figma template that we have here since they're an introvert they don't communicate often enough and we need an easier vapor than to create a ticket for example and so that is their pain point using these to really drive home who is the user persona that we're trying to solve for will allow us to come up with that that second part of the strategy document on what is that target audience that we're solving this problem for lastly is how will we be solving it and for how will we be solving it it could be as as broad and deep as you want it to be and usually this is where most readers or people who are consuming your strategy document are going to spend their time on number one and number two is really just setting the stage the context and who it really impacts but number three is where we're really going and driving the point home on what the future is and there are four key things here as listed which is the vision with a time frame time frame here could include vision for fiscal year 23 to 25 or the two-year vision so basically usually this vision is accompanied by a time frame that the vision is applicable for the second aspect on in this section is guiding principles the third one is strategies and roadmap on how we will get there and the last one is success metrics and okay ours i will be touching on all four of these in the coming slides so just this is just a brief list on the things that are included in this section before we go into that list there are some key terms to refresh or review and to understand better when we say vision vision usually communicates what we will be achieving in the future and it's used to align and inspire a group of people about a shared goal strategies are used to communicate how people achieve that vision okay ours are objectives and key results are measurable goals that achieve that vision so how are we going to achieve that vision that we can track using these okay ours these are stepping stones towards implementing our strategies and lastly guiding principles guiding principles are an agreed upon set of models that will guide our decision making i'll touch on all of these in the coming slides but here is what the interaction between them looks like a vision describes an ideal future that is achieved by the strategies the strategies are converted into actionable objectives and those objectives are influenced by the guiding principles and the achievement of those objectives is measured using the key results um specifically this vision piece of a strategy document is very important and usually a vision is written in this manner which is like i see a world where x y z happens and so when you think of this framing this really helps in creating a vision statement and here i just have some examples that i picked up from various parts this these are just samples there's nothing here to say that these are the exact vision statements of these companies but if vision statements for famous companies were public maybe this is what they might look like for an ike to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world apple a computer in the hands of every big people disney make people happy child's show helping investors help themselves so what you will see here is these vision statements are inspiring and visionary they help to see the future of exactly what that future looks like two tips here doing just a quick 15 minute brainstorm session with a five plus group of people will get you some rough ideas for vision statements and a way to do this would be to just give a prompt for example confluence permissions and tell them hey write one statement on what do you think confluence permissions in the ideal world would look like and so you have a bunch of different statements all rough spend need to be polished and so that's where the second tip comes in use tools that we have like ai your chat jpt to refine the vision statement and make your work easier in coming up with a sustained yet inspiring way to capture your vision of where you want your product to go the next thing is the strategies and roadmap so strategy is really a statement on we will achieve this vision by strategy it's usually not just one single statement it's a bunch of things that we will do so it's the how we will get the vision we had done the rose fun part exercise previously so my suggestion here is to take that and continue group those previous sticky notes that we got into themes and then use the data that you gathered from your first round of product deep dive in order to inform the priority between these teams lastly you assign timelines based on the overall company priorities and engineering feasibility to come up with what now looks like a roadmap so you would have these ideas and then you'll have some time that is associated with completion of each idea and then you also have priority and that together is as easy as having your strategies and roadmap finished so if you take a look at the how will we be solving it the one thing I didn't touch on is the success metrics and objectives and key results these are as simple as they sound is to a measurable way to really track for the success of the project or product feature that you're building exactly how will you know that you've been successful in releasing and solving a customer need so in that this is the summary of the strategy document three key components one the spectrum should be around what is the problem the next one around who are we solving for and the last one is how we will be solving it so all of this together encompasses the strategy document the last topic here was around sharing and gaining alignment not only do you write up your product strategy it's also important for you to then share it out broadcast it and then gain alignment on that strategy dog um there are I would say and there's an iterative process with sharing and gaining alignment the first one is really share it with more people you could consider sharing it broadly so you would share it across your entire thing or you could take it vertically you can share it higher up to leadership you can share it to other teams that you work with cross functionally across to engineering and design and product marketing what you really want to do here is to try and get more people to take a look at the strategy document and start to evaluate it start to align with your idea of the future and that's where the second aspect comes in which is seeking feedback it's important to align on the priorities with the partner teams say another team takes a look at your strategy document and realizes you have prioritized A over B and they have an influence over B and they cannot do it at that time that you have indicated in your roadmap now is the time to really seek that feedback and align on those priorities and seek the help that you need to get the priorities right one tip here is when you do get feedback it's it's great if you can get that clarified whether it is a suggestion whether it's a must do or an opinion usually when you get feedback from this from leadership team it is important to get this so that you know exactly how you should be the in taking that feedback and the third one here is on updating the strategy document this one I would personally say is the hardest it's easy to come up and write up a document and it's the hardest to keep it up to date make changes based on the feedback but also updated periodically to keep that document relevant and alive and then repeat the other document is more people they'll give you more feedback update it again and then this is iterative as you get more and more people using and sharing your strategy document and that's everything that I wanted to cover today on crafting a winning product strategy the blueprint for success how new product managers can go about writing their strategy document for their product thank you so much for your time