 All this fun to have a post-run session, right? Cool, so let's start. And I am the moderator of this session. I'm going to discuss with the very smart set of people that I have here, product leadership in an uncertain economy. Let me set some context here. What this includes is I have the easiest gig in town. I have a bunch of questions. They're very smart people. I will look smart. I will ask them questions, put them on the spot, and just enjoy. And half of you are asleep, but I'm hoping you will wake up. Right? Cool. So the context, product leadership in an uncertain economy, if the last two years has taught us anything, is that we cannot take anything for granted. And the word is not very rosy now either. So how do us as product leaders change when the scenario comes into picture? And before I actually dive deeper into Sanjay Thir, I'm a director of the product for booking.com. I take care of the data science and machine learning stack. I've done around 10 years of product all across the ecosystem and was a software engineer, actually a hardware engineer. For around four years before that, I'm a bachelor's of engineers in engineering. And in between, I managed to waste one year of my life doing an MBA. And now I throw it open to Esmeralda. Hey, guys, I'm Esmeralda, leading product at Indicative, which is a product analytics platform for product managers like you. I've been there for five and a half years. Thanks, Esmeralda. I feel full energised after the high five. My name's Alex Thompson. I lead the EMEA business at Quantum Metric. We work with customers across all verticals and product owners like yourselves to help them understand their customer journeys. Hi, everyone. I'm Vijay. I run the product team at Mixpanel. I've been at Mixpanel about six years in a variety of engineering and product leadership roles. And Mixpanel helps product teams make better decisions through product analytics. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. And without further ado, let's start. So my first question, and I'm hoping it's going to start an organic discussion so that I don't have to refer to the document more than once, uncertainty naturally is leading to a lot of changes. We don't have a committed direction. But how do we as product leaders make some sense of this direction? How do we make sense in this uncertain scenario of what we have to do or not do on a day-to-day basis? And Vijay, if you would like to go first. Yeah, that's a good question. I think one of the traps is to be reactive to all the changes and feedback that you're getting constantly. And I think one of the strategies here is to decouple strategy and tactics. You should be really patient on strategy, but really urgent when it comes to tactics. And actually, when it comes to strategy, it's really about thinking about what are the things that aren't changing very often, things that are very long-term and durable trends that you can really latch on your strategy to. So for example, a mixed panel, I think one of the interesting things is, are we focusing on growth, engagement, or monetization at any given point in time? And picking that as a long-term focus area for us. And then within that, trying a lot of tactics, try building features, trying and improving our customer success motions, iterate on pricing, things like that. Those are tactics where we should define success and move quickly and react to changes. But we should really align on and be really clear about what's the long-term strategy and what's something that's not going to change for a very long time. Because that helps anchor you when you're dealing with this constant influx of feedback and possible reactive changes. Yeah, makes sense. Alex? Yeah, I think you make a really good point around those constant changes in the business and the teams. And I think I was watching one of the sessions earlier on. I think Georgie was talking about that team changing all the time around maybe your best product owners, become product managers, and they're getting all this new feedback all the time in as well. So when we look at our customers and also in quantum metric, it's always around, how do we make sure we're focusing on the right feedback when we make those changes? Because there's so many inputs at any one point. So it's adapting to that, but also still delivering the product that you need to for your customers, right? And then today. Yeah, and Esmeralda, what do you think? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I would also argue that while we are experiencing and have experienced many macroeconomic changes over the past few years, if you look at just the changes that a business goes through, you're constantly going through changes. So in Dicative, we were recently acquired by M Particles. So now I technically work at M Particle. And that was a huge change, completely unrelated to macroeconomic situation. And then prior to that, in Dicative was a 25-person company, so we were constantly having to adjust our tactics and how we are going to achieve our greater strategy. And the one thing I'll add to that also is it's important not to be afraid to place bets. So we instill placing bets as part of our culture. And so a few years ago, we placed a bet on data warehouses the future. We want to build integrations to the data warehouse. And there was no other product in a Linux platform that was doing that at the time. So it was definitely a bet, and it has been extremely fruitful and really, really helped this grow and was a huge part of the acquisition as well. Makes sense. I can confirm that. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. When you think about it, outside this room, outside this kind of situation, there's a whole world changing economically. And that's impacting everything we're doing as product teams, as customers, as businesses, and choices we make. But if you think back to the last time there was a similar situation, financial crisis, a lot of businesses made bets in that period that they're still paying dividends now. And the reality is that I believe when you're thinking about product and how you've kind of taken those inputs, making those bets and changes now are going to set you up for future success. So there is a risk sometimes that you look at, we need to become more risk-averse and make less bets. But the reality is, OK, maybe don't make bets that are, we know we're going to fail, right? But the reality is sometimes that failure influences the next decision. So you still need to go make them. And I think that's kind of what you were touching on with those changes happening around. Makes sense. I just want to double-click on what Esmeralda said. When you say small bets, the data for the last two years was hardly unreliable, right? COVID, everything damped. But how do you make the small bets? What do you base the small bets on? Yeah, I really like that concept of bets. And it's actually a terminology that we use internally to mix panel as well. And one of the things that we've been working on is sort of a bet template, like thinking about what is the anatomy of a bet and how do you describe it? And sort of our framework there is thinking about what is the core user problem that we're trying to solve? What is the evidence of that problem? And why is that kind of a durable real problem that users have? And also setting a risk appetite or sort of a tolerance. And this kind of like sort of setting appetites versus setting estimates are two very different things. We're going to do this thing and let's estimate how long it's going to take. We want to solve this problem. And this is the amount of time we're willing to allocate to solve that problem. And at which point, we're going to set a checkpoint and revisit. And then final thing is how do you measure success at that checkpoint? How do you define, was this appetite fruitful in terms of achieving a goal? And to Alex's point, I agree it's like either you make an impact or you learn, which are both valid outcomes. That measuring impact piece is sometimes, I think, what people forget about. OK, we went and did this project. We made that bet. Success goal achieved. The reality is what impact did it have on our customer experience? What change did we align to in the customer journey? And I think you said something that kind of sparked something in my head around you're making those bets and you're kind of adapting them to what the customer's saying. But I'm sure everybody in this room who's involved in product, the vision of where they want to go as a company, we were talking about in the green room, actually, but the inputs you get from outside sources. And the reality is you have a balance at any one point. And if you're just doing bets based on inputs from outside, then are you pushing it forward in the, you may be answering the problem, but not providing the right solutions, right? And I think that's part of it when you talk about the bets. I guess that's my perspective anyway. Makes sense. Actually, that's a good segue to my second question. How do we surface these small bits? How do we make our pods, if I can say that, more agile that these small bits are more visible to us? So we are product leaders. What do we need to do and what do our teams need to do so that these small bits are more visible to us? Maybe Esmeralda will go with you first. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I think it's really important to kind of double-click on the agile part of that to understand that not every organization is the same. Every team is unique. They have unique managers, unique people, unique resources, tools even. And so it's really important to make agile methodologies work for your team specifically. And to not be afraid to try different things and be okay to dump it if it fails, right? Like for example, very small example with us, we recently started to implement a lot more agile methodology. And daily stand-ups don't work for us. We tried it out. We found two to three times a week is actually better for our team so that we can remain agile and not put in too much process, right? The process should be making you more efficient and it should be working for you. You should not be working because there's a process in place. Makes sense. The process shouldn't be a restriction, a gate to success. It should be to your point, making you more efficient, driving those results faster. Sorry, I jumped in. No, we're just, yeah, we're doing fine. No, I think, yeah, those are all great points. I really like that point about process. It works for you and not the other way around. I think one of the things that we've been thinking about in terms of making the teams more agile is setting up teams with all of the sort of skill sets and context that they need to be successful, right? I think one of the things that often hinders agility is when you've got a team that's constantly blocked on another technical function to perform their job. I think this is why we're seeing this rise of these pods that are engineering product and design versus having this more waterfall model where you're passing context back and forth from the business people to the technology people to the design people who might be in an agency. It's like, actually, let's bring those people together along on the journey, give them all the shared context. Like, it's not just the PM doing customer calls, it should be the design lead and the engineering lead that are part of that. And when you're leading with that context and providing context around the problems, both quantitative and qualitative context, I think high talented teams make the right decisions and move really quickly because they're not blocked on. Makes sense, makes sense in theory. But let's say hypothetically, we have such a setup. How do we democratize the decision-making? Who is empowered to make the decision-making that part? Because let's say we have product hierarchy, right? So is it the individual product manager? Are you looking for the engineering manager to step up? Who actually takes a hard call to okay pivot here or there? Maybe Alex, you should go first. I don't know, as much as you have a point on that first. I thought you jumped in. I did and then I lost it. Okay, okay, I'll go, I'll go. Maybe we'll come back. I'll try it, I'll try instigate it. I think what you're highlighting for me and I think feeds in what you're saying, VJ, is if you're reliant just on one person, then the reality is you're probably not making a decision as a whole to the goal. And what I see in quantum metric is, and we see this in our customers as well, to be clear is around breaking down the silos between those teams. And you mentioned like the VP of engineering or product or whoever, it kind of doesn't matter. The reality is that the data and the decision making across those teams should be the same so that when the decision is being made, it's actually not a decision with a, this is something that contradicts what everything else is telling us. It should be aligned to the data. Now that doesn't mean you don't need decisiveness because obviously if you don't have the decisiveness, then you can kind of sway in the wind a little bit in what is the strategy. But when you're thinking about that agile motion, it's the clear goal, the clear targets and the clear driving towards them and the decision making on what they're gonna focus on should come from the overarching data that all the teams have access to, not just one squad, pod, whatever you wanna call them in the business potentially. Yeah, definitely, and it did actually remind me. So speaking of cross-functional teams and alignment between the cross-functional teams, so the way that we organize our squads is, you know, we work very closely with, there's the PM, the engineers, there's also the TPM, so like the technical project manager, product marketing is part of it and product design is all part of it. And so we have two-week sprints, we all meet on that two-week cadence to make sure we're all aligned, we understand what's next, we talk about the success metrics based off of the projects we're working on to make sure that we are all looking at the same things and are aligned. So yeah, definitely reminded me of that. The other part I think is really important to trust, to place trust on the team to execute, right? No one likes a micromanager, but in order to not micromanage, it has, there has to be an understanding on the vision, there's alignment on the vision on how we're going to achieve that vision and on how we're going to measure success of that vision. So I'm definitely oversimplifying it, but those are some kind of three key components I see to make sure that there is alignment across the teams and you trust that the team is going to execute towards those three components. Makes sense, Vijay. Yeah, I really like that. Having like one of the trade-offs of having the teams organized in these squads, which is valuable in a lot of ways in terms of setting them up for success is how do you align across pods, right? And like if all these teams are going to, they're individual silos of meetings, how do you make sure you're building a coherent product that has a coherent strategy? And I totally agree, some of that needs to come, to some extent top-down or just kind of be decided organizationally, consistently. I think that's one piece. I think the other piece is kind of having a forum for review and editing. So it's less about sort of like, top-down deciding this is what we need to build. It's like problems come to the teams and then having the teams feel empowered to come up and actually seek review and get input and then figure out ways to give feedback to the teams. And I think that's an interesting challenge because you don't want that space to be the type of space where teams are afraid to get feedback on what they're working on or come too late and it's just a meeting where they get skewered by leadership, right? It's more about, it should be a helpful space to find out, like, root out misalignment and actually make a more coherent product. So I think that's another aspect. Do you feel that's gotta be continuous though? That kind of, like you mentioned the two-week kind of circle backs, like, do you sometimes find that that isn't continuous enough or too frequent? I'm just curious just based on what you both said, like, is that, not the challenge, I think, I think it's both valid, I'm just curious about the timelines. Yeah, definitely, now that's a good point. So I think going back to process and making sure it's not working against you, I think the two-week cadence works to have all of those people in the same room, but there's constant communication as we collaborate within each sprint, right? You know, that's not the only time we all talk. So I think it's important to find the flow that works for the team with the different cross-functional parties, but it's important not to only focus on that, right? We still need to all regroup every two weeks. Because every team is different as well, right? Exactly. So just what works maybe for yourselves or it might be different for everybody else. And I think it's sometimes good remembering that. Like I often find that, you know, you hear Amazon talk about what they're doing or you hear Wal-Mart or whoever it may be and the reality is like, something's gonna, well, maybe that works for you because you're Amazon, right? Or you're Wal-Mart or you're whoever and it's finding that balance of what's the right blend, I guess, is the way I maybe describe it? Yeah. Of what you're describing. I just wanted to hear your thoughts. Yeah, one thing to add to that. What worked at Indicative, a 25-person company, is not the same as what works at M Particle, a 300-person company. So we definitely have to adjust and we've adjusted a lot and made a lot of improvements that would not have worked at our size before. So, yeah, important to adapt and keep that in mind. So, makes sense. It looks very good theoretically. But how do you handle, we all work in big matrix organizations, right? They're bound to be cross-pod, cross-functional disagreements. And especially with the way that we are proposing, it's an uncertain world. Be very agile. Agile in the do-it-sense, right? How do we handle the cross-functional, cross-departmental issues? Is there a modicum? Is there an experience you have? Maybe you can share with the group. Do you mean the issues? Or do you mean the, sorry, just to clarify, are you asking about the challenges? Maybe just give an issue and how do you actually sort? Is there a protocol that you have? I think the reality is when you're looking at those functions and those products, those pods, squads, there are always gonna be challenges that present themselves, right? And the reality is, I'm a big believer in some friction is good, right? I call it constructive impatience. And the reality is like, as long as it's constructive where you're creating those challenges and driving the right questions, just because we're doing something and you're kind of head down, you're believing it all the time, it's important that it's challenged. Because otherwise you're sometimes fully engrossed in what you're building in that sense, and that challenge I think is critical. I think that's where the product marketing comes into play, the customer feedback pieces, I think that is where the input's good from outside that pod. So you wanna encourage those cross-pollination of information because it creates the challenges and yes, sometimes it presents ourselves as issues as well, but I think that's where you want those leaders to step in and kind of give the direction. At least that's how I would view it. I don't know what the two of you would think, but... Yeah, I know, I definitely agree on that. I maybe add two things. One is really aligning on the user as the one kind of goal that aligns the whole company, right? Like you oftentimes get into these disagreements and it's like two teams are fundamentally optimizing for their own proxies. Like they're optimizing for proxies, like what's good for my team, what's good for this team, and then we're butting heads and it's impossible to get aligned. And then stepping that up to, okay, but what's better for the user? What ultimately is the better decision for the user? And I think that that's one just, it's more of a cultural thing. Honestly, I don't know if there's any particular process there, but it's just having that reminder and bringing that up repeatedly helps. I think the other thing is having the product manager be the bridge to a partner team, like a customer success team or support team or something else and having those teams actually plan together. Like for example, at Mixpanel, one of our product teams is focusing on scaling an option of Mixpanel within organizations and they actually have a shared KPI with the customer success team. And so they actually do shared planning together and there's a synergy there where you can think about tactics that our CSMs can do manually and then we see what works and then we bring that into the product and then vice versa, they can help drive that option of certain new features that we add. And it's doing that planning up front rather than saves you a lot of sort of disagreements or misalignment on the later end. And so I think that's another strategy that works. Makes sense. And then kind of a new thing to add to that. So there's cross-functional between the product organization, right? And then there's cross-departmental across the entire company. So as product managers, I'm sure you get pulled in different directions from sales, marketing, CS, everyone wants you to build what they want you to build, right? And so going back to having that vision, how you're gonna achieve that vision and the success metrics is really important so you can point to something that everyone is aligned on and know that you're all working towards the same goal and there are different ways to achieve that, right? And so it can be really difficult to kind of have all those different opinions but if you have that unified alignment it can really help kind of sift through all of the fluff. Yeah, and just double click on that and tie it kind of from the current situation everybody's in on the economy and kind of you're gonna get more of those asks because the reality is that like all of those business units are trying to get to their KPIs in potentially a situation where the market's working against them in some ways, like budgets change, budgets get smaller, potentially they're being more efficient with their budget, where before, let's take retail as an example, right? Retail's thinking about what's gonna happen the next three, four months. We've had the summer at least in the UK where people have spent money and so on but obviously not to get into politics but obviously the energy rising bills and so on all over the world, not just in the UK, they're gonna have an impact on what people do with their spend. So you're gonna get more inputs into those product teams from all those departments and it's about balancing those what is actually the problem they're trying to solve so that we find the right solution versus just jumping from problem to problem and fixing the superficial ask, I guess, is maybe the way to... That reminds me of something so I was chatting with the head of product data, one of our customers, they're a large gaming company and we were talking about what's going on in the world, looming recession and their strategy is really doubling down on their existing strategy, right? So they understand their player journey. They already know the path they wanna get to in terms of what experience works with the players and they need to, the strategy's still there but the tactics may change and adjust. Yeah, and you've gotta kinda focus on your gaming or in FSI or whatever it is, right? You're focusing on potentially, I'm gonna use the word VIP, right? That doesn't mean that the other ones aren't important, obviously, but it's around, as a company, you have to make those decisions, right? The loyalty is the key piece because acquiring a customer costs a hell of a lot more than building and retaining on one. So you've got customers who are loyal to your brand and to what you're doing and your products, you've gotta invest in that space potentially and maybe come back to that's the bets you're making in the current climate that tie back to that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think, yeah, I totally agree with that and especially when double clicking on that core user, I think it's often more important to focus and times when things are changing and uncertain, it's important to focus on user engagement and retention rather than growth. Like you don't wanna be spending a lot to fill a leaky bucket and oftentimes that means refocusing on your core product, right? Like refocusing on user delight and all the friction points and pain points in the core and seeing retention improve over time which tends to compound and builds user delight. New customers will always still be like a priority, obviously, and conversion and whether you're trying to, whatever you're trying to do, acquire as a business, but you're 100% right. I think it has to be on that existing customer base where you just, if maybe you are losing customers or they were bouncing back or going to other places because of the experience, people expect a different experience now, right? In a different world, particularly when money is tighter, they wanna have a different experience from their products that they're using. So it's gonna be better, right? And that's all. Makes sense. In the interest of time, what do you see the trends in our craft product management as a craft? What do you see the major trend lines in the uncertain world that we are in? What should we, as product managers, product leaders, should be doing? How should we be structuring our resume, if I can say that? Yeah. I think one obvious trend. Oh, sorry. Yeah, no way. I think one obvious trend is with COVID and quarantine. Remote, like the workplace has changed forever. You know, prior to COVID, we had office, like five different offices at EMParticle, and now there's two, I believe, but the team has grown itself, right? And so we noticed Zoom, for example. Zoom blew up during COVID because everyone needed to be able to communicate and you wanna see your coworkers too. And so I think there's a huge opportunity in collaboration tools and adjusting existing tools to work more in the current and, I think, future state of remote work. Yeah, I think, I think that's a, I would agree with that, and I would maybe just enhance it a little bit from my perspective on what I see at Quantum, where we were actually already a remote-first company before this all started. And I often think that in the software world, where all three of us are, come from at the moment, at least, you know, I remember the days when you used to join a conference call and the one who was on video was the weirdo, right? I'm sure everybody remembers that, like, you join a conference call, everyone be off video and one person's on, like, I guess we're all on video now, like, here we go. And now that's sometimes really the opposite, right? Because people miss that engagement, that collaboration, and I think it's about finding the balance, right? It's about the collaboration in that hybrid workforce, and I think it's maybe too early to tell where the trends are gonna go in the current climate, but I think what will always be at the center of it is that culture. I think that's what people realized over the past two years and will continue to prioritize, it's that culture piece. Don't know if you disagree or agree, but... No, yeah, that totally makes sense, and actually to add on to that point, I think one of the interesting things of being in product, of course, is influencing without authority, and I think that's even more challenging in the remote work environment, for sure, because the currency there is trust, and the question is how do you build trust in this remote world? And I think a lot of it comes down to sharing context about what you're doing, why you're doing it, making sure everybody's aligned and bought in, everyone's heard, and has a kind of coherent picture of why we're doing the things that we're doing. So I totally agree on the rise of, like, collaboration is kind of a table stakes tool, and a table stakes feature in any productivity tool, because it's now kind of just a default, but it's also about SPMs leveling up on how do we build trust in a scalable way throughout an organization, when oftentimes there's new people you've never seen before, and then how do you kind of level that up, whether it's some element of hybrid, or setting up things where teams can come together and plan together, or having shared metrics that everybody aligns on, or writing notion docs and sharing it with their companies. I think that's a great point, because part of building trust is building camaraderie, and a sense of community within a company, and that has been, I personally find that incredibly difficult with remote work. Like, if they were up to me, I would see my coworkers every day in person, but I would say I'm probably in the minority of what people want. People don't want to go to an office, but they do want a sense of community within the company that they work at. So I think there's a lot, there's still a lot lacking in the world, in terms of how you build that community, and I do expect those types of products to start to pop up as well. Yeah, I know almost the time, just one final point on that, is that ability to build those relationships are what build the trust, right? And if you're all one or all the other, I think that will have the impact on the current climate, on what those trends look like, and I think that will be where the influence comes from. It's, are you meeting up as a team and building that trust together? So yeah. I fully agree. Thank you. Thank you, the three of you. So you heard it first, while the things are changing, our jobs are not going away. Trust is still going to be the key. And the robots come. Absolutely. People are still going to work with people. Yeah, thank you so much. I think we are dot on time and thank you everyone. Thank you.