 This is the age of the product leader. So if you work in product in 2022 This is the right time and the right place And I'm not just talking about this very own place where there are around 2,000 product leaders in the room taking over the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and many more joining us online today I'm talking more in general terms about what's really happening in product today 33% of the top fortune 33% of the Fortune 100 companies have a chief product officer Just think about it. Not so long ago the highest ranked product person in the organization Would report to maybe a chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer We didn't have that seat at the table now. It's happening It's even better is that this is growing year over year This title the chief product officer has grown by 41 percent over the last three years. It's only getting better. I Remember when I started the company eight years ago a lot of people would ask me is this a project school What's going on? Like why do I need to be in product? Is this for high tech companies? Is this just for Silicon Valley? I'm so excited to see that we are demystifying a lot of those things and really Democratizing this role to many many poor people in so many different industries. So how did we get here? What's really happening? Well, if you use the word product before the year 2000 probably think about something physical just physical and It's only at the very beginning of the 2000 2001 actually when the launch of the agile manifesto happened When that was like a huge shift in how companies went about building software You really understood that it was more about taking customer feedback than creating long plans It was more about iterating faster than just waiting for Something to ship and then see what happens and that started making us realize that product could be something digital as well 2001 2002 Google launched their first associate product management program An internal product school to train some of their software engineers into product management They started to realize that there was a need for product management and that that training wasn't really happening out there in the market More good things kept happening in 2009 a VC firm called and recent hall of it was created They published an article titled software is eating the world That article is incredible because it really Created more awareness around some of the macro trends with internet becoming mainstream Social media becoming mainstream Smartphones and how all of that was creating more adoption for consumers to use the internet to purchase stuff to use it So software is not just for software companies every company is a software company We kept moving and realizing that now product teams product people also need technology in order to build stuff and some of the Technology available out there in the 2010s. It was mostly created for other types of personas. It's a lot of like Tools for presentations for numbers for words But there wasn't really a tech stack for product managers And if you look around today in this venue all of our partners They are creating technology for product managers Some of them are actual unicorns or public companies today, and it only happened in the last 10 years It's absolutely insane The term product lead growth that we are all familiar with was only coin in 2016 by a partner at another VC firm called open view and I was really cool because Unified a lot of the concepts and tactics that some of us were using This really created that motion around Product doesn't only come in at the end when a team says something and then product has to go and deliver Product is elevated to the center of the organization and it's touching every single point across the user journey Users are using the product even before they become customers and now that's something that is more mainstream than ever The rise of the no-code and low-code tools also helped many more creators and product people Ship stuff and be more self-sufficient Long gone are those days where we really need to rely on someone else to give us a data analysis or a user research or Code something now product people can really go there and and and get to the customer faster and directly and ultimately all of these trends were Amplified and accelerated during the pandemic because online as a channel is not optional anymore And that was the only way for a lot of businesses to actually survive and thrive So that's ultimately was been pushing the adoption of the chief product officer and the growth of the product teams But let's take a look at the faces of product leadership today Because that has also changed a lot and by the way when I say product leader I mean it in the most inclusive possible way I'm talking about not just chief executive officers chief product officers Executive vice presidents of product or other fancy titles. I really talk about Anyone who is in the product organization who's building connections with other people both inside the product team outside the product team To make things happen leaders lead regardless of their title in fact most of the people who end up Product leadership title or promotion. They've been living before they actually got that Market validation and that official promotion So Mamuna is actually a VP of product Shopify and very active contributor to the product school community as an instructor Mariano is the CEO of Mural which is the tool that we are using for the presentation today Alex is a principal product manager at Slack and Stephanie is the head of product at Twitch One of the things that these amazing product leaders have in common is that none of them started computer science And they still lead incredible product design and engineering teams. In fact 73% of the product managers today globally Do not have a computer science degree and there is nothing wrong with that. I started computer science It just comes to demonstrate that there's so many paths into product and not just to break into the role But to actually grow as a leader there So let's actually Bring us down to what happens when I actually invest in product growth what happens when I put the right product leader in play and What's the impact that he's going to make in my organizer like if I hire a product leader How is this going to change my date today? Well first and foremost Product is now owning a big part of revenue Product in many cases owns a quota and talking about the self-serve channel that now many companies offer For consumers to go directly and purchase something without interacting with other people But not just that we've also seen that that channel is helping the sales organizations to better qualify The people they should interact with so they can customize bigger packages for them So ultimately if you take SAS software as a service as an example We are seeing that Companies that apply product-led growth in SAS are seeing a higher revenue overall than the SAS companies that are not applying PLG yet Another important dimension of how having the right product leader can impact your organization Is the amount and the depth of the relationships that the product team is going to have with so many other functions in the organization I'm sure you're familiar with the Venture then bring a diagram here that says that product is at the intersection of engineering Design and marketing. That's not new. We I grew up believing that but then you realize that This goes much bigger than that Product is at the core of the entire company. There are strong relationships being built not only with those three functions But also with customer success user research Data analytics just to name a few and of course sales So this is the next generation of product organizations And if you dig and if you zoom in into the actual product org chart the people who are in the product team You realize that these teams are not just made up of product managers designers engineers, maybe business analysts and a few other roles They if we are saying that product is now at the core of the organization If we are saying that product is now building stronger relationships with many more teams than ever We also need to invest in those Product teams to be able to prove to properly create those connections And what I mean by that is that the actual org chart of a product team is looking more like a t-shape Which means is that in addition to having some of the generalized roles that I just described We're also seeing specialist roles that are being part of the product team. I'm talking about product analytics, for example product corporations or product growth These are the specialist that are going to help product be more self-sufficient run experiments faster Get insights faster and ultimately orchestrate the actual delivery faster So this looks amazing like after looking at this who wouldn't want to be in a product led organization with amazing product leaders That's an easy set at this point. The problem is that it requires a village Houston we have a problem here because you're probably imagine that okay. We need to hire a lot But that they need to be all at once, but we still need to hire it would really want to do this the right way The additional problem is that we not only have to hire maybe Specific people that we don't have in house yet. We also need to take it off our people Given the current situation where and that's report that we run on the future product management We identified that around 26% of product people today will leave their current company within the next 12 months Maybe you're thinking well, that's not me. Well, what if it's you too? What if you lose 25% 26% of your current product team on top of having to hire additional product people just to really build this High growth product team well don't get too scared because there's ways to go about it and The most obvious one is probably Throw money at the problem Let's go out there to market and start hire people and there's nothing wrong with hiring people. It's absolutely necessary to hire talent But I cannot be the only Strategy in fact, it's just not sustainable because it's always going to be a get more expensive more competitive And still if we don't really improve retention, even if you go out there and hire the best people What if they also live? so What best companies or best product lead companies are doing in this case is to complement that approach with Improving and investing in retention of their product team now Retention what is retention? When applied to a team well specifically the biggest lever for retention is training it's really investing in the people that are building stuff and There are so many flavors to it we'll get into that in a second But before that I also want to demystify something around training Sometimes in product we tend to believe that Only the the new or despite in pms are the ones that require training and once you're in the game Kind of learned on the go and of course There's a lot of things that you learn on the go, but we are seeing that actually the fastest growing companies Prolet organizations they are investing in their existing product teams So they can be upskilled and they can become leaders faster So if you look at this in two dimensions on the one hand we're seeing Product managers being upskilled LinkedIn published a report two months ago saying that today Product management is the is the job that will get you a promotion the fastest that validates There are a lot of companies already Training pms to grow them as fast as possible just because it's more efficient than that's hiding from from the outside But there's another huge opportunity Maybe a dentury level of the pyramid, which is what about all of these hungry? People who are there who are business analysts who are project managers who are UX designers who want a chance at becoming a product person Investing in those people and given that opportunity can be probably the best opportunity to build your own pipeline and not Just rely on The market because let's face it every single time We want to go there and hire a p.m. On average Especially in the area. There's a cost of $240,000 let me say it again $240,000 for every time a product manager leaves your organization or you need to go there and So how are these large organizations going about this? Well? Companies like Google I mentioned before but others Facebook Amazon into it others They build their own associate p.m. Programs or product schools basically That requires a lot of investment. It makes sense for you at a certain scale There are other organizations that are offering stipends to their employees so they can go out there and pick the right solutions for them There are other companies that would set up mentorship programs The point is all of these companies are investing in the retention because they know That's the only way they can grow their product teams in a health way So before I say bye, I want to close this with a final thought I want to appeal to the morality of the product leader Yeah, the morality of the product leader and I see some of you are smiling because some of you might be thinking well, I'm good like Recruiters pinging me all the time my company just gave me a raise or maybe a title promotion. I don't need any of this And you might be right For a short period of time because right now it's not a secret that product is hot And if you are in product today, you are going to have different options But that is just not sustainable things change all the time So what best product leaders would best product organizations are doing is to be proactive about it It's capitalizing on this opportunity to grow even faster than just the trends Because if you think about it in Star Wars theme and I brought my lightsaber here We are facing now a Situation we have the dark side of the force that is saying do nothing Yes cruise and you'll be good But you will also have the light side of the force that is telling us get a little uncomfortable Take care of yourself invest in yourself if you are in a leadership position today invest in your team Because ultimately the teams that do that are going to better take care of the customers and that's the ultimate win Thank you very much