 Alright, thank you so much for joining today's webinar and a quick introduction about myself. I'm Nidhi Kanagia, Product Manager at Amazon. I'm also president at IIT Bay Area Alumni Association. And basically I've been in industry for more than 15 years, been Product Manager pretty much all my work life and worked on multiple different products over the years ranging from hardware to software and most recently working on the security product line right now. And being part of multiple different organizations from big corporate to small companies to start up and being part of multiple different product life cycles as well. So a lot of experience comes from there from the product perspective. And a lot of my experience also comes in from a non-profit work as well. So as I mentioned that I'm president at IIT Bay Area Alumni and there is a lot of learning of driving decisions and how do you get things done, right? And how do you do things the right way? So there's a lot of learning that comes from there as well. So today's topic of influencing with rationale basically touches upon soft skills of being a PM or anyone who is trying to reach to an outcome for their project or work, right? And it is one of a big part of Product Manager's work. So definitely the topic is very relevant to how do you influence with rationale. Now, so as I mentioned that what we'll talk today is how do you arrive at the why and how piece of influencing with rationale. And it is a very, very important piece of our work to make sure that we are leading towards right outcome. We are making right decisions and we are executing and we are meeting the timelines as well, right? So before we even talk about influence, like arriving influence and rationale are somewhere in the middle, but there is a bigger work that goes on before and after it as well. So before we even talk about influence, there's another aspect that we have to talk about which is a precursor to influence, which is leadership, right? So as I mentioned that leadership is a precursor to creating influence because leadership is not just related to title, right? Title can be given, but leadership is assumed, right? So leadership is not same as management, right? Leadership comes from within. Leadership is having that ownership of making sure that you want to do something and keeping your eyes on the outcome and then leading towards that goal, right? And you can be leader from wherever, whichever position you are, right? Because what you're targeting is to reach a goal, reach an outcome with whatever you have at hand, right? So you may have a big team to execute your goal and vision and mission or you may be by yourself. So the leadership is tied to your own perspective and personality. So before you even think of how do you create influence, you have to be a true leader in yourself, right? So this is what I call the circle of impact. And you see the first thing shown here is leadership. And one thing that's eventually that you want to get to is outcome. But there's a path to that. So step one is leadership, knowing that what is your ownership, what you want to achieve and until you have that, you will not be very effective in creating creating influence in making the difference. Now, after once you have these skills of true leadership, the next aspect is creating influence, right? Now, as I mentioned that depending on which place or position in your career you are, you might have authority, right? Which gives you a legitimate power to create that influence. And that's one way of doing it. But there might be many or in many aspect in your work or life, you may not have the legitimate power or authority to coerce someone or to affect the outcome with just the authority. And the great part about that is creating influence is very different than leading with authority, right? It is about many different, many different powers. So when you go and read more and more about influence, there are many ways of influencing. For example, three ways that you see listed right here, legitimate power and the other two is referent and expert. There are many more ways. Creating influence without authority ties to some of the key skills that you need, which is definitely driven by your core personality or how you handle certain situations or people because leadership and influence is all about people, right? So it is how do you, in very simple words, right? How do you influence an outcome by telling what you're telling, right? And the core is that what you are telling is where it comes, where the referent power and expert power comes in. To have the referent power, you're basically, to have that referent power, you have to be genuine, right? You have to be right, you have to have honesty and integrity. And that's not optional, right? Because that is what that gives you that authenticity of being right, being honest, having that integrity. You are probably the first person to do the right thing, right? You're probably the first person to take that first step that will lead you to the right outcome, even if others are not doing it. And once you do it over time, that inspires trust and builds respect for you. And having trust and respect, having that bond and relationship with the people you work with is very influential. When people trust you and people respect you, they know that you're coming from the right and genuine angle and you are the first one who will take the right step that gives you the power of influence in a right way. Similar thing is expert power as well, which is the power of knowledge. No one knows everything. So even then, you can have the expert power by knowing your domain or trying to expand your knowledge base, trying to gain those expertise. And over time, basically make that circle bigger and bigger. The more you know, the better you are. But also know that you'll never know all, you'll never know enough. And that is why your reference power is important as well. Because there will be times when even within your circle of knowledge, there is more that you need to think through, right? And that is where you're bond with people, that is where your trust and communication with people that comes in that helps you build a better rationale that we'll talk on the next slide. So eventually your goal is reaching to the right outcome, right? And to reach to that right outcome, you're trying to create that influence without authority. Now, the key thing is as a product manager, you may have authority on certain things and you may not have authority on certain things. You may be working cross-functionally with multiple different teams and not only the product managers. Many of us would work cross-functionally in an organization where you may have authority or you may not have authority. And that is where inspiring trust, honesty, integrity and knowing what you're doing and trying to know more and get better is important. So the key thing that comes in is even when what do you do when you have the authority and you can use your authority to influence a decision, what do you choose to do in that situation? The point is if you try to, there is one way that this is how I think is right and let's do it, that's one way of doing it. And in few cases, that might be the best way. But for majority of the situations, even if you have authority, it is good to go with the path of explaining the rationale of why you are doing it or why someone should be as excited as you are for certain outcome. So what that does is that even if you have authority but you're humble enough and you have done your groundwork, you know more to share the real reason behind it that why the path that you're proposing is important and why does it matter for that particular outcome? The moment you tie back your logic to the outcome, that's when it becomes important. In the process, what you do is that you learn more about the domain. You learn more about the people that you're working with. You learn more about their style of work and you still come across as humble. And once you explain the rationale and the other person agrees with you, first thing is you create a bond with them, right? That they are more open to, you're basically more open to influence from you in a positive way. And also you give them a reason to think through. You create that ownership and leadership within them. So now whatever action they're taking, whether they're going above and beyond, they're not doing it for you for the leadership. They're doing it because they believe in it. That is why influencing with authority is one way but influencing without authority even if you have, even if you are in the place of legitimate power, doing things with rationale and telling the reason why and why it affects that exact outcome that the whole team is trying to achieve is way better than going with just from the place of authority. Now, coming down to rationale. So when you choose to influence, when you choose to follow the path of influencing without authority, you have to really, really think through the rationale and outcome and how these two relate to each other. Now, know that not everyone's rationale is going to be same. Many people would do the same thing for different reasons. And that is where that reference power that I was talking about in the previous slide comes in. You have to know why someone does something. It's an angle of perspective taking. It is like, for example, you have a product and you are positioning that in multiple different markets. Your messaging is going to be different. Similar to that, once you have a goal to achieve and there is a particular outcome that you want to get to, the rationale for doing things or taking specific action to achieve that outcome would be different for different people. There would be a different angle. There would be a different reason why engineering would be working at some particular pace. There would be a different rationale why sales is working towards certain goals. Even though the product is same and you want to generate revenue and be on the growth curve. But the rationale is different. So when you have that conversation with them, it's very important to know which angle they are coming from. Still find out that common goal. And few times you may even have to find out a common plane to work with people. There are multiple different personalities in different teams, different personalities. Everyone's angle of looking at the same outcome is different. There's also personality angle as well. Not everyone may respond to the same approach. So once you are when you are thinking of in what language or in what angle I explain the rationale, think about perspective taking. Think about what is that particular person or that particular team response to what matters to them. And then when you give your message in the words that matter to them, that relate more to them, rather than having a conversation in a way where you're talking from your angle and you're telling what matters to you and expecting them to respond to the things that matter to you. That may not work as fast and efficient versus you're taking the perspective and thinking what matters to that particular team and then explaining the things, explaining the rationale from that particular angle. After all this, even if you have that drive and passion and ownership, you're working on building that influence and making that bigger circle of doing things the right way and you're working on the rationale, it is still very, very important how you communicate your rationale. So again, as I mentioned, perspective taking is a very, very important thing. Also, there are some unwritten rules, right? Many times in many of the conversation and product management, you will come across situations where something is a right or the right can be done in many ways, right? Now, which way, which path you take or which particular conversation will become easy by following one certain approach, there are certain unwritten rules. For example, some person may respond better if you talk to them one-on-one. Some person may respond better if there is more consensus across team and that's how they finalize their approach, right? Some person may be very, very data-driven and that's their approach to agreeing with you. So it is important to be generally aware of what are those unwritten rules? How does the team dynamic work, right? And before you even try to create your plan of how do I make sure that I reach the right outcome and how do you build that influence without just using the power of authority, you have to think through those things before you communicate. So even if you build your rationale, know that it is important how it is communicated to everyone and of course, reiterate the approach, right? Because many things, you would do it one time, you would follow one certain approach and then it may not work, right? Or over the time you may improvise that for example, hey, when I tried to solve this problem and I've been trying to solve this problem and trying to come to a decision, if I get sales, marketing and product management, everyone in the same room, it just becomes a lengthy conversation and we never arrive to a decision quickly. So reiterate that approach and follow a different approach. Is it better to give them heads up in a short summary? Is it better to have one-on-one conversations with people ahead of time? And reiterate that approach and see that what works better over time, right? But eventually the goal is the outcome. So in this overall process of when you're trying to communicate, you have the passion, you have the leadership skills and you're trying to create that influence to reach to certain outcome, that is the only constant in this. Your outcome is constant and your drive to reach to that outcome is constant. But other than that, creating the influence, following multiple ways of creating that influence, thinking through the rationale in multiple different ways and communicating them appropriately, those are all your moving pieces that you can fit and make it the part of this puzzle and reach to the eventual outcome. And this is why it is very important as a product manager or even beyond that you think through how you're communicating, how you're building rationale, how you're trying to create that influence, even if you may or may not have authority to drive those conversations, right? So this was a very quick overview of how do we think to lead to a certain outcome? Thank you so much for listening and I hope this was useful. Thank you.