 Hello everyone. Based on where you're joining from, good morning, good afternoon or good evening to you. First I would like to extend a special thanks to Product School for bringing this awesome community together and facilitating these amazing conferences. I learn a lot from them and looking forward to networking. I am Babini Suneji. I do consulting as fractional CTO, CPO and executive coach. Today I'm humbled to share tips from my experience on the topic of mastering ownership mindset. So why this topic? Plain and simple ownership mindset gets the result. First let's reflect on what does product manager success look like. In my mind it's building exceptional products while advocating for customers and driving business goals. One of the keys to achieving this lies in cultivating an ownership mindset. As one may know, why is that so? Owners have unwavering belief in their purpose. They strive in ambiguous situations actively seeking opportunities to learn and grow. They have remarkable perseverance persisting through challenges and finding creative solutions. They have broad perspective. They are unafraid to explore new possibilities and bridge any gaps they encounter and they go all in. Now let me share my personal journey and why the ownership mindset resonates so deeply with me. This goes back in time from an early age I observed my parents building a business from scratch. Witnessing their dedication, their commitment, going over and beyond and paving way in uncharted territory. They instilled in me the value of operating beyond boundaries and prioritizing the needs of customers even offering pro bono advice to some of their clients which were not even their clients at that time. As I look back throughout my 25 years career in tech industry, I have implicitly embodied these ownership mindset and that's what I look for in the talent and in coaching that I do. With that, let me give you a little bit of my background. I have led leadership roles at both Microsoft and at other startups going from CTO at Heal to VP of Headspace and most recently VP of Cruise. Recently I've started my own consulting and doing fractional CTO and executive coach. I believe in paying it forward and enjoy mentoring at Techstars, First Round, Plato and CTO community which is a women engineering tech leadership community. And in my personal life I find joy and energy and exploring nature with my twins as well as a huge proponent of mindfulness. I love the code from time and again everything needs a reset and same thing for you. Let's jump into the next slide. Here is the way my mental model works for the four pillars that are core to mastering the ownership mindset. In my mind this applies to unlocking your potential whether you have an individual contributor or in a management position. One, transforming into product led companies. Second, working the problem. Third, looking beyond your role and last but not the least walking your dog. Let's dive into the concept of being product led. First in product led companies product partners with business moving beyond serving business. That's a huge mindset shift. It's about true partnership between product and the rest of the organization with technology as a powerful enabler. Here are the questions that might help assess a situation. Example, does product leadership have a seat at the table? Are they actively involved in shaping the company's direction? Unfortunately and sadly that's not always true. I've come across instances where product teams feel frustrated due to lack of support from company leadership when it comes to taking bold risks. It's crucial for leadership to understand and embrace the power of product and technology including the value of customer research. Next, let's discuss the importance of investment. And this investment is in terms of investing in product teams to transform the business into smart forward-thinking entity rather than just merely sustaining the business. For example, product led companies allocate resources to enhance product design and engineering capabilities to strategically power data which is really key to understand the insights and drive automation. This holds especially true for back office technology. I've seen this pitfall happen quite often where companies prioritize investments in end-user facing features at the cost of back office. They normally overlook the prioritization and importance of back office tooling. Without making these investments, it becomes impossible to make the entire operation intelligent. At cruise, it was really nice to see the investment in building products for the operator persona who handled fleet management. This was crucial aspect of meeting company goals and achieving the ROIs. The last bullet here is about product vision. In product led companies, the product vision is seamlessly integrated into the overall company strategy. I'm a strong advocate of having an alignment triangle that encompasses the mission, values, true non-star strategy, priorities and metrics. I often use this triangle as a starting point for all hands meetings or strategy presentations. This reminds everyone how their work ties into the bigger picture. You can do this at the broad level, company level, to department level, to your team level. It really helps connect the dots and stay true towards the non-star. A well-defined product vision drives alignment across teams, ensuring that the product doesn't become a disjointed patchwork looking like Frankenstein. As the companies and teams grow, it's really helpful to have this high-level vision and alignment that way teams can go faster on their own without having to be slowing down. As owners, they take responsibility for keeping the vision updated periodically because the product expands and new insights emerge. Let's pick two transformation stories to reflect some of this. I especially picked non-traditional tech companies like Disney and PepsiCo, where both the leaders drove the change to become product-led companies. First, let's go into the story for Disney. CEO Robert Eiger's strategy for Disney transformation, as depicted in his book, The Rite of Lifetime, spans three pillars. First, storytelling excellence. Focus on high-quality branded content. Second, embrace technology to the fullest, seeing it as an opportunity, not a threat. Third, become a truly global company with focus on the audience. Now, let's jump into PepsiCo. With PepsiCo, ex-CEO Indra Nui's strategy, as described in her book, My Life in Full, outlines the strategy program called Performance with Purpose. The aim was to put environmental goals and customer and employee well-being on par with financial goals. To achieve her long-term vision, she classified the brands as products into three categories. Fun for you, better for you and good for you. To help customers make informed choices. She also committed herself to a greener future of PepsiCo, switching to renewable energy, redesigning the brand's packaging to help reduce waste, and doubling down on recycling initiatives. As many of you today's consumers relate, supporting brands that align with the causes they care about is important. This kind of future forward mentality is more important than ever. I thoroughly enjoy reading both these books and highly recommend it. So what does this mean? In summary, owners learn how to influence leadership and drive the transition towards a product-led organization, aligning all stakeholders towards a shared vision that meets business goals. Let's dive into the second pillar, work the problem versus fixating on the solution. As human beings, we often have a tendency to jump to solutions without truly understanding the problem. As owners, it's crucial for us to unloan this habit and genuinely listen to our customers, striving to understand the underlying reasons and the why behind their needs. This approach not only keeps us humble, but also helps us avoid the know-it-all bias. Sometimes, we don't even know we are having that. One powerful technique for achieving this is the Five-Wise. I highly advocate its use, not just for incident postmortems, but also during customer research. The Five-Wise technique uncovers valuable insights. For example, during an incident postmortem, the root cause was identified as a server error. However, upon applying the Five-Wise technique, it became apparent there were additional issues that had to be addressed. The customer messaging was not right. The information needed for teams to turn around quickly was not right. All of these helped provide a comprehensive solution that was not just tactical but also strategic. I highly advocate for this as well as suggest applying this in various forms as you do postmortems and learnings. One more thing on the why is a big advocate of the book, Starting with the Why by Simon Sinek. Next is collaboration. Now that we have honed in on the problem, how do we involve others in the ideation process? It is essential to bring design and engineering teams into the problem space and engage them in customer discussions. I have often witnessed where a product manager brings a solution to the team and ask them to execute it or would want to think, oh, the engineer's time is precious. We'll figure this out and just take the solution to the engineer. That's not helping the team neither the project. However, true empowerment lies in leveraging the thought leadership of the team and aligning them with the problem and desired outcomes without just fixating on the how. When the idea comes from the team, there's greater inclination to adapt and make it work and allows adjustments when the solution doesn't meet the desired outcomes. And we all know the first idea doesn't hit it. We have to adjust and tune things to make the final solution work. This leads to the last bullet, driving outcomes. As we continue to refine the problem, it is vital to have clarity on the goals and desired outcomes. This ensures that done doesn't simply mean shipping of feature or conducting an experiment. It involves validating whether the desired solution is effectively meeting the intended goals and outcomes. If not, it is crucial to iterate and make necessary changes before moving on to the next task or project. I often see sometimes the shiny object, next shiny object syndrome that we want to be cautious about and avoid. I have encountered situations where an experiment was shipped, but during analysis, it became apparent that there was confusion in just the basic definition of metrics and different functions had different interpretation resulting in gaps in their implementation. As a result, the experiment had to be redone after addressing these gaps. Clarifying goals and outcomes helps us to avoid such pitfalls and ensures we are driving meaningful outcomes rather than just checkmarking, saying delivery done and rather than just having a different mix of feature factory. Let's go into the two stories, which are more kind of learning stories to depict this section. First, the story is from my experience at Headspace. We decided to build a community feature with the intention of driving engagement among our users. The intention was fine. However, in hindsight, we realized that we had prematurely jumped to the solution without adequately honing in on the underlying problem. It was a case of succumbing to the fear of missing out on the community trend that was going on during that time. And we realized we had to know it all bias that led us to fixate on the solution and build it with all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, the end result did not meet our customer's actual needs. This experience taught us a valuable lesson. We had made a significant investment without first testing the concept and gaining conviction through various lightweight forms of validation. It became evident that the belief of build it and customers will come is simply not accurate. I believe many of us can relate to this experience as we all have encountered something or the other in a similar fashion during our careers. The second story is about the Fisher Bend Company, which reportedly invested one million to create what is now commonly known as the space pen for astronauts. And there's a white paper for those curious to learn more. Again, in this case, there was fixation on the solution versus being open to exploring other means to meet the end goal of notes taking, etc. So in summary, owners start with the why. They bring the team along at the problem phase and focus on driving outcomes rather than getting fixated on the solutions. With this, let's move on to the third pillar, which is looking beyond your job role, becoming a virtual leader across functions. To effectively lead and drive success, it is crucial for product managers to adopt one team mindset. Product acts as a glue that holds various functions together. As owners, we have the responsibility to motivate and influence all stakeholders and teams, ensuring that everyone is growing in the same direction. What I call this is the sphere of influence, which extends to external partners and customers, as well as internal product groups such as engineering, design, as well as non-product groups like sales, marketing, support, and operations. Owners try to do justice to do all these functions and avoid biases towards addressing only the loudest complaints or concerns. Watch for this squeaky wheel. Now, let's talk about breaking the silos. An owner mindset possesses the ability to see the bigger picture and identify the patterns and gaps across different roles and functions. As product managers, you are tuned to this bigger picture and how do you take advantage and how do you speak up to address the gaps and drive the outcomes? Instead of falling into a victim mindset of merely complaining or pointing fingers, owners proactively drive closure to identify the gaps and address them. Example in a situation when I saw mistrust among functions, we put together a V team of different cross-function representatives to clearly identify the expectations of each function during the development cycle and what are the expectations during the different handoffs across these functions and roles. This was very helpful for the team to come together, discuss, have a shared one-consciousness viewpoint, and to drive accountability. On to the final point, decision-making. A product manager's role often involves making very difficult and hard decisions. Let's consider the case of roadmaps, which is a well-debated point across all the stakeholders. It's an anti-pattern to have product managers pigeonhole into solely advocating just for features and think that other functions should have their own separate roadmaps if time permits. Well, this is not going to help meet the overarching goals and have the one team mindset. And owner mindset, on the other hand, ensures a unified roadmap that serves the best interest of both the customer and the business. This comprehensive roadmap includes addressing chapter that hinders scalability, resolving the backlog of bugs that's causing customer friction and impacting the brand. Owner mindset establishes a prioritization framework that guides clear decision-making, enabling effective trade-offs and alignment with the overarching product vision. I'd like to talk about the two tactics that apply here. One is the solution excellence and the second is the decision-making framework. As the famous owner and as a famous coach and product leader, Marty Kagan says, solution excellence is about empowering product teams, creating solutions that are valuable, viable, usable, and feasible. This is super helpful to have this comprehensive viewpoint as you do your road mapping and backlogging, because it's not just the feature, it is how the feature was implemented and how the operational excellence support of it is prioritized that truly transforms the customer experience. The second is the decision-making. To empower teams, decisions are pushed down to the product team level. I'm sure many are familiar with the one-way-to-way door decision-making framework, which is widely talked about by Amazon. One-way door decisions are decisions that you can't easily reverse. These decisions need to be done carefully and methodically. Versus two-way door decisions can be reversed. You can walk through the door, see if you like it, and if not, go back. These decisions can be made fast or even automated. So keep in mind as you are going through, are we debating and elevating too much on a decision, which is actually two-way door? How do we push that down? How do we empower the teams in going faster with data and customer-driven decision-making? With that, in summary, owner transcribes beyond the functional boundaries with effective communication and frameworks to model one team. Well, that brings us to the last pillar. Walk your talk. Drive trust by doing. Be courageous to explore and it's okay to say I don't know. You're not expected to be an expert at all or expected to know it all. I usually muster up courage to raise my hand to ask a question when I did not understand and then later on get thanks from others in the room who are in a similar situation but were afraid to ask because of fear of being judged. So don't be afraid to ask and say I don't know. Second bullet, be vulnerable. Be vulnerable to acknowledge when hypotheses don't pan out and embrace the learnings. Do you know research indicates 90% of experiments fail? What this means is failure is part of the journey and it means you have to do various experiments to get it right to get the final success. Also, it's okay to change your stance or alter your decision or accept being wrong as new information surfaces. We all have been through this. This keeps us humble and helps learn from others. Example, I had my team's leadership workshop agenda and then based on listening to them, I realized that I needed to do a better job of checking on my know it all bias and I adjusted it to meet the team's suggestions and acknowledged some of the bias and things that did not go well during my planning. We do monthly manager roundtables and share these aha moments where people are vulnerable and also learning from others pitfalls. In my mind, this helps connect the team and enables us to have the growth mindset. The third bullet, be accountable and be accountable for the impact and have the grid to follow through. Don't run after the shiny object syndrome, rather seek truth and I need to stay true to meeting the goals. You want to democratize failure so that you no longer have fear of failure holding you hostage or fear influencing your decision making. I love this quote from Coach Bill Campbell. Leadership is about recognizing that there's greatness in everyone and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge. With that, it's a wrap from me and in closing, I would like to say be your unique self, be authentic and bring out the owner attitude that's already within you. Think big, trust yourself and make it happen. Have a great day. Thank you.