 Hi everyone, my name is Isha Sharma and I'm a product manager at Microsoft. The topic that I'll be discussing today is building creative thinking as a product manager. Product management, as many of you might know, is all about switching hacks, problem-solving, and exploring new areas while influencing with that authority. And a crucial skill that enables a PM to do all of that is creative thinking. At the end of the day, PMs are trying to solve problems and a lot of problem-solving needs creative thinking to build innovative solutions. In my own experience, I've built upon this skill in these three different ways. These three ways are ways I've personally grew my understanding in creative thinking. The first way is assessing your product area. Thinking about your product area in different perspectives and doing market research will enable you to gather enough information and knowledge about your product that would allow you to build upon your creative thinking. I will walk through each of these and explain the benefits and how do I implement these so you can grow your understanding and hence creativity when trying to problem-solve and build solutions. So like I mentioned earlier, the first way is about assessing your product area. The second way is looking about it in a totally different angle and framing it in a different way. That's why I think taking your data and product area and trying to frame a story around it will help you think of innovative solutions that you might have not thought about before. Finally, the third point is going out in the field and outside of the field altogether. This is looking outside and learning about new insights that you might not have learned within the bounds of your organization, peers, or industry area. So like I mentioned earlier, assessing your product is really about truly understanding the ins and outs of your product by looking at market research, problem and solutions today and also looking at your organization. Understanding the market is crucial in understanding your product and seeing where your feature or product stacks up will enable you to see what is working and what isn't working from a market perspective which would then allow you to start thinking on what problems are plaguing your users today that market players have not tried yet. So here's a competitive analysis template that I've found on the internet which I think is super representative of how you should be asking questions and looking at your competitors in your market today. So these questions where I think is framed very well. So like looking at things that your product does but they don't and vice versa and then also trying to assess what is the level of importance for each of those features to your users and how it stacks up with your competitors. This framework really hones in and gives a very detailed view and understanding of your competitors. The other tool for assessment for your product area is using a SWOT analysis. Really looking intrinsically and seeing what are your product or features, current strengths or weaknesses, opportunities and threats today. Market research, as I mentioned previously, helps with a very macro outlook on the problems your product is trying to solve. A SWOT analysis looks as your product from a very micro and introspective way. It's easy, it's really easy to be vaguely so I really encourage to be as detailed as possible and doing extensive research. Assessing your product area is all about researching and cataloging all the ins and outs of your market and product. So you can really build your knowledge and perspective on your product or feature. You don't have to limit yourself to product and market research but it is also helpful to look at your current organization that you work for and try to notice what are the efficiencies and deficiencies that your organization is going through today. Some questions to ask yourself is, what is my organization doing great in terms of building products? What could they be doing better? Are a lot of folks very technical focused? How can I bridge that gap, for example? Cataloging the strengths and weaknesses of your organization as well would allow you to find places where you can fill in the gaps from both an organizational and product point of view. So now that you've assessed and catalogued your product area you're now in the process of building a feature from scratch. How can you think of creative solutions and innovate? This brings me on to my second point which is trying to enhance your data and product with storytelling. So every product has a purpose and it should have a clear value proposition. Questions to ask yourself is, how do your products or feature bring value? What exactly is the back story of how your product was built? And when you think about a back story you start trying to paint a picture of your users and painting a clear picture of your users would allow you to build a story that would enable you to start thinking your problems of your product in a totally different way. Another way to kind of help framing the story and trying to think about the story about your product is when you start building demos or marketing materials this would really allow you to start thinking from a user perspective how would you market this product, how would you build this user's story and what problem really is my product trying to solve. The story of Airbnb and how Airbnb in its early days built its trust for users to kind of feel comfortable letting strangers into people's homes. Back around 2009 Airbnb was trying to find ways to grow their business and see how they can increase their user base. Upon looking at market research and at their competitors they looked at their own data and then landed on two main points. One point they found was that live-in hosts stays had less traction than absent hosts and then two listings with better photography received more bookings. In fact one of their growth hacks was to offer free photography services to their New York City hosts after looking at their competitor Craigslist listings and noticing that Craigslist did not evoke as much trust amongst its users. When looking at each of these things in isolation so looking at the product, looking at the data and looking at the value proposition you can really get into the weeds of what your product does and the technical specs but when you tie it back to a story you start having more clarity on what your product actually delivers and what features would enable it to really go beyond its initial feature set and go beyond as to what are cool innovative features that would really bring in the potential of the value proposition. And so this underlying story would give you a kind of new goal to work backwards from. And so as I indicated here in this diagram the data on the left is the product so you see the old Airbnb website formerly called Air Bed and Breakfast and how their entire UI looked completely different from today. And then looking at the data they find the two main points like I mentioned earlier and then looking at what their underlying value proposition is which is Airbnb is trusted and cost efficient alternative for short term stays. So looking at all of this and you're trying to figure out what is like a potentially new feature or new kind of like growth hack that you can implement to increase your user base and so when looking at the data you start seeing that hey like listings with better photography receive more bookings and also that listings with absent hosts are also increasing and so when you try to think about a story that kind of ties it in altogether so the story that I put up here is a family can use Airbnb to book a stay that offers privacy and saves them money a home away from home and so when you start painting that picture you can start thinking of other different ways that you might incorporate this story and incorporate it into your feature into building new features as well and so when you think about like from a family perspective and people enjoy privacy and people also enjoy very high quality photos Airbnb started developing other tactics to build that trust within its customers and so that's how they they were originally the founders were originally very into design but they realized that they can use design to their power in comparison to their competitors which were other hotels and Craigslist which didn't really evoke a lot of trust and so when they started building that really nice design and really seamless experience with high quality photos people started trusting in staying and living with a complete stranger's home and the last way that I wanted to discuss is the point about going out in the field and outside of the field altogether and what I mean by that is really trying to expand your horizons and not really think super focused into your current industry or tech area or product area even and so three ways to do this is one to really engage with your customers and you can do that in so many different ways but the main point is to just talk to your customers themselves they can give you so much information that you probably had not thought about for your product at all along with engaging with customers you should try to build and validate in super hacky ways so that you can start iterating upon different ideas quickly and so you can do that in whatever means possible you don't necessarily need to code up a solution in fact Airbnb was initially a super simple website where they just posted listings there are a lot of no code and other kind of tools today which allows you to whip up MVPs and prototypes that you can test with customers the second point to this is discussing with technical experts outside of your organization sometimes when you're talking to technical experts or anyone within your organization everyone is kind of focused on looking at the company mission and how their current work aligns with the company mission which is great but to also kind of expand your horizons and get a different level of thinking and a different perspective it's really interesting to kind of talk to technical experts outside of your organization and you can learn a lot about what is the industry doing today and what is happening in the market and finally the third point to this is exploring new technical or non-technical areas and I think it's extremely important to expand the way you think and the way your mind operates by learning completely new things and when you build that muscle of learning new things understanding how different areas work how different industries work that can help you connect the dots and show me like different ways that you probably have not thought before for your own product or feature and I encourage you to read books from different disciplines engage with content and engage with just in general content that's not necessarily focused in your own industry area I also encourage in learning and building new technical skills so like whether it might be machine learning or other kinds of technical areas it's incredibly important to just kind of keep on building new skills keep on learning new things that might be outside of your scope and that would really help you to start kind of painting a picture about your own product area and how can you take those learnings and implement new solutions for your products and features in different kinds of ways so I wanted to end with reiterating the three ways and hopefully you all see the value in using these to build your creative thinking so the first one that we talked about was really assessing your product area so kind of building this knowledge base about your market, your product, your feature set and this would really allow you to start really thinking about your product and its entirety and seeing what are different opportunities to innovate the second point that we talked about was enhancing your data and product area with storytelling and when you create these stories within your features and you kind of tie it back to your product value proposition these stories help you connect these dots and it really helps when also it has a dual benefit of when you demo, when you market to your users at the end of the day the way you market and demo to your users is by telling a story so when you start thinking of stories at the beginning of the process rather than traditionally demos and marketing is towards the end you start thinking of how you can work backwards and how you can really build that value proposition for your product and then the final point was going out in the field and outside of the field altogether and this is where I talked about really valuing your users perspectives and just engaging with them and talking to them and you can do that in multitudes of ways you can use a social media account you can actually go outside and talk to your users and companies have various different programs to engage with users so really take advantage of those in my experience those have been incredibly helpful and users in their day to day really see some of the things in your product that work and does not work that you might not see and then when I mean by going outside of the field altogether it's really expanding your horizons and going out of scope from what your product is or the industry altogether and really thinking about what our different industries are doing what are different technical advancements that my product doesn't utilize today and then you can see how can I take advantages of those learnings and how can I put that into my own product today so that concludes my presentation thank you all for listening