 Hi, I'm Krithy and today I'm going to be talking about my product experiences working at an SMB versus an enterprise and we'll dive into a use case as well. A lot of what I'm going to be talking about really applies to people who are, you know, entry level PMs, APMs looking to get into product management and I hope that this will be helpful. You'll hear me refer to product management as a product practice because I really believe it's that exactly that a practice that you have to really try and do in order to get better at and improve. I know there's a lot of books out there and I know there's a lot of resources out there that are helpful, but the best way to really learn and jump into it is by just doing product management. So we've heard of the concept of digital transformation a lot lately, especially it's the era of leveraging technology and numerous changes that it brings with it to automate business processes, software development and enhance customers experience to meet the needs of the market at that time. So this has especially been true. Like we've all experienced it and seen this, especially during COVID, where remote working was enabled in a record time across multiple industries, the push to e-commerce increased and businesses have had to found new ways of being productive and connecting with their customers. When it comes to increasing productivity, creating value, developing agility and driving customer centricity, companies found out that the best way to do that is through a product focused model. A product focused model is where companies are driven by outcome and growth rather than a project focused model that's more focused for programs and activities. So this paradigm shift brings incredible business value to companies because they can create relevant products faster, improve existing products as well and lead into the future, really being able to make user centric and customer focused products. And in my experience, I felt I was working a lot more in the project focused model when I first started out in my career. And when I was doing that, I felt really far away to the why and who, why do we care about this data? Who is it really impacting and where is the value being shown? When I moved towards a product focused model, I was really able to own a product area end to end, drive business value. And I made that leap with Engage 3, where I had a larger scope of ownership and I was able to be more agile and wear multiple hats that allowed me to contribute in a direct, tangible and measurable way. Additionally, at HubSpot, I learned that there was a greater need to be more strategic and focus more on customer centricity in order to meet customer demands and employee productivity as well. So I'm going to walk through a use case that showcases the benefit of this product focused model now and also different skills that PMs can leverage. So a lot of the times as a product manager, you're going to have multiple stakeholders, internal users, external users, depending on what product area you're a product manager of come to you with multiple pain points. And it's going to be your job at the end of the day to figure out and analyze that problem, determine the size of it and work with different teams to actually build a solution. So an internal team has a pain point of spending time manually adjusting invoices for their customers. They've come to PM Critty and express this concern. PM Critty has to determine if this problem should be prioritized, worked on, and if it's beneficial for the company to spend their resources, money and time on. Critty knows this is a problem, but she wants to understand how big of a problem it truly is and the impact of the company. She decides to explore the database and pulls invoice data for the last six months to see the number of invoices that were adjusted based on specific reason code and the amount adjusted in certain locations. After validating the data, she sums up the amount and finds out that the total value of mainly adjusted invoices is $900,000. She also does more digging and notices there's discrepancies worth of $70,000. She now takes this information and understands that this 900,000 number is the size that the solution is worth. She now has a compelling case to go to various stakeholders and teams, present the problem and the solution as well. The impact of the solution as well to the teams. So the way she does that is she goes to leverages her relationships with finance and to influence and get buying from them. She goes to finance and she expresses that there's 50 discrepancies worth of $70,000 and if we were to work on this problem, it would help improve the team's financial performance index and she's able to get buying that way. She also goes to support team and mentions that it would save them five manual hours a week and increase employee efficiency as well as save costs for the organization. She also goes and talks to the sales team and leverages her relationships with the sales teams to communicate that there'll be a decrease in friction and they'll be able to sell more if we are able to prioritize this problem and possibly expand in other locations. Then PM Krithi is able to scope out the work with the team once the buy-ins have been presented. She's able to break down the requirements, understand the level of effort from the team, how many developers are needed, how long is it going to take to build the solution, are there a lot of risks and limitations, define the MVP to begin development to showcase the ROI. So in order to do this, PM Krithi has used multiple skills, data analytics skills, which you do not need to be super technical in order to do this. I'm not suggesting all product managers have to be. You know, you can ask someone for help. That's technical to fetch data. The main point is to really understand the user pain points, size the problem, get enough information and data in order to do that, leverage your relationship, building skills to work cross functionally, use storytelling to communicate your findings and get the team motivated to work on the problem by explaining trade-offs and impacts, and then problem cycling as well with the team. All of these skills can be used in any product optimization scenario, whether it's an added SMB or an enterprise. There's a lot of different ways this could have been explored or solved for. You know, there's a lot of frameworks out there as well. The important takeaways to determine what skills to leverage when and to find a problem solving process that works for your product practice. I'm still on my journey to continue adding to my product practice, so please feel free to reach out, share your experiences as well, so we can support each other. Thank you for listening to this presentation.