 Hello everyone. Welcome to today's webinar by Product School. Our topic for discussion today is bringing clarity to chaos. Before we dive into this topic, let me briefly introduce myself. My name is Valentin Coria and I'm a product manager with Amazon. I've been with Amazon for almost two years now and have worked across two organizations, Customer Trust and Partner Support and Amazon Transportation Services. So let's take a look into the agenda. The agenda for today is why is clarity important? How can you create clarity as a product leader by following three steps, iterating and improving and key takeaways from today's webinar? So why is clarity important? As we all know, technological wonders are built by a team. When a team working together towards a common goal as clarity, they have a clear understanding of everything they need to implement to effectively achieve their goal. Basically, they have an understanding of the below questions. What's the goal? What's the strategy to achieve this goal? What's the step-by-step plan? What's their exact role on the team? What are they responsible for? What decisions can they make? And the most important, why is their team trying to achieve this goal in the first place? So wouldn't it be wonderful if clarity were the default state of teams? Unfortunately, it's the opposite. The default state of teams in today's world is chaos and confusion. In today's world where technology is growing exponentially and business demands speed to market, strategies shift, plans usually change and teams grow really fast. This leads to teams becoming even more confused. So what is the problem with confused teams? Confused teams usually find it hard to achieve their goal. They are usually distracted by low priority work. They duplicate efforts. They notice too late that things fell through cracks. They'll miss deadline or their product quality suffers and their anger about how to proceed. Clarity enables teams to be focused on their actual work. The step-by-step plan and the goal instead of continuously reassessing what needs to be done next. So how can you create clarity as a product leader? One of the most vital functions of a PM's job is actually to move their team from chaos to clarity. Unfortunately, we as product managers usually tend to overestimate how much clarity our team has and it's usually because of human tendency. As product managers, the plan is clear in our heads and our teams tend not to surface the need for more clarity as it can get embarrassing to admit you have no idea what you're supposed to be working on. It is also important to note while the entire team is responsible for product success, only the product manager is responsible for the product's failure and that's because you as a product manager had all the tools, people, teams, resources in place and the decisions you made actually tend the product to fail. This reason makes it even more clear why clarity is a crucial function for a product manager. From my own learnings and experience, I've uncovered three following steps that will help PM's create clarity. The first one is defining the purpose and starting with why. Second one is creating a plan and the third step is assigning responsibilities. Let's dive deep into each one of these steps. So let's look into defining the purpose and starting with why. It is very crucial that everyone on the team shares a common purpose. They have a clear understanding of why they are doing whatever it is they are working on in the first place. For example, an engineer with clarity on how people use their product can make better performance tradeoffs that optimize the customer's experience. As a PM, we often lead a team that is part of the larger organization and one of the most important things we can do is to help everyone on the team understand how the larger organization is impacting the world, how our team is crucial or critical to that success, and how their individual work is important to the success of the team. So the best way to start with why is by defining your team's mission statement. To develop a mission statement, consider the five key elements below. What, how, who, why, and your distinctive competence? What is your customer needs you're attempting to fill in? How defines the task, technology, methods you will build or create? Who is the primary customers? Why is the reason or motivation behind your work? And distinctive competence, also known as moat, is what you want emphasized, what makes you different, what you want your customers to think of you. Let's look at Spotify's mission statement and break it down. Their mission statement is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it. So breaking it down, what does Spotify do? It's basically unlock the potential of human creativity. How they do it is giving an opportunity. Who they do it for is creative artists and their fans. And the value they bring is those artists are able to make a living off of it and the fans can enjoy and be inspired by the art. Your mission statement may not be perfect to the T as of Spotify's, but it's very important to capture the five key elements we discussed. Once you have identified the why, the work to maintain clarity continues indefinitely. Every team meeting, every important document, every project kickoff, every onboarding session is an opportunity for you as a PM to repeat the mission and explain how work at hand is in service of your team's mission. The best way to verify you have succeeded in achieving clarity of purpose is when everyone on your team can answer the below two questions. The first question is if you are wildly successful, how will the world be different? The second question is how is the work you're doing now directly contributes to that success? The important point here is to understand there is no point in moving fast if you as a team are not moving in the same direction. The second step to creating clarity is to create a plan. By defining the why, the team will know the destination and by creating the plan, the team will know how to get there. The plan PMs co-create with their team defines how to best achieve the mission. A plan has multiple layers, each getting progressively more detailed until you have connected your overall mission down to actionable steps. It is also referred to as pyramid of clarity. On the right, you can see an example. The exact steps of a plan will usually depend on the size and scope of your team. So let's take a look at the layers of plan of how it would look like for a PM leading a smaller team. As a PM leading a smaller team, your plan will consist of usually five steps. The first one is the mission. This is your team's ambitious goal. Everyone on the team should know this by heart. The second one is strategy. Strategy is a concise explanation of high level approach you are taking as a team to achieve that mission. You can often boil this down to three, four bullet points. Ideally everyone on the team is very familiar with high level strategy. The next step is key results. These are shorter term goals. Key results are usually measurable, specific and time bound. The next step is projects. These are small missions that an individual team can undertake to achieve the key results. And the final granular step is tasks. These are individual steps that need to be taken in order to execute the project. It is not necessary to enumerate every single task right at the beginning of the project. But it's worth writing down what is known and what is an assumption as it forces you to think through what is required and be for your product requirement document. Creating a plan is generally a highly collaborative process. Also, this isn't a set it and forget process. Over time, plans will inevitably change. The exact set of tasks required to execute a project can change frequently as the team learns new things about the work that is required. It is crucial to have a dynamic way to keep everyone on the same page about your team's plan. And you'll often find teams using tools like Jira, Asana, Trello to track the overall project plan, the epics, features, user stories you will build and their timelines. Your plan also helps you communicate launch timelines to external teams. Now that you have defined the mission and created a plan, the next step in creating clarity is assigning responsibility. Clarity within the team increases when each person knows exactly what role they have in execution of the plan. This requires having an owner for each task of the plan. When no one is responsible for a task, it will not get done. And when two or more people share responsibility for the same task, it may still not get done or it may lead to conflicts. Clearly defining roles, areas of responsibility, and decision-making rights associated with the role cuts down ambiguity, increases clarity around who is responsible for what. As a PM, it's important to clarify and assign specific tasks for each team member early on in the project to create clarity and improve team's productivity. So here are the four steps to establish roles and responsibilities. Step one is determining what needs to get done. When assigning responsibilities, it is important to determine the various tasks that need to get done. Some questions you can ask to identify these tasks are what are the tasks on my team's to-do list? What task does each team member complete per sprint? The second step is identifying gaps in responsibilities. After creating your task list, compare and contrast this task with what the team members are doing. This comparison will help you identify the gaps in responsibilities. This comparison becomes your starting point for your team's workload realignment and also will help you figure out tasks that have no owners and if you need additional resourcing. Step three is to clarify roles using a racy matrix. Racy matrix is a great tool for clarifying your team member's roles. R in Racy stands for responsible and this person performs the work. A stands for accountable and this person is responsible for approving the work. C stands for consulted and this person should give input on the work. I stands for informed and this person should be informed of the progress and the outcome. Once you assign four racy letters to each task against a team member, it makes it easy for each team member to know what their specific role for each task is. And final and the last step is getting feedback from your team members. Asking team members for candidate feedback encourages team collaboration and provides insights into whether the roles you have assigned seem functional. You can ask for feedback by holding a team meeting and asking for feedback on the overall plan or scheduling one-on-one meetings so the team members have a safe space to voice their concerns. Successful PMs always iterate and improve. As a PM, it's your responsibility to be vigilant as time goes on in unearthing ways to find that your team lacks clarity and then working to fix it. The faster your work grows in complexity, the more it may feel like you don't have time to sit down and give your team clarity. And that's exactly when it becomes even more critical to create clarity. To validate clarity, proactively ask your teammates if we are wildly successful, how will the world be different? How is the work you are doing now directly contributes to that success? Additionally, look for opportunities and mechanisms you can create for your team from your own unique experiences to increase clarity. Always keep your audience in mind. Creating clarity for your leadership will be very different than creating clarity for your tech team. Let's take a look into the key takeaways. Clarity improves a team's ability to execute, ability to change directions confidently and overall satisfaction. However, it is important to not get addicted to clarity. Doing great things that haven't done before are ingrained in large amount of ambiguity. A team that freezes in face of ambiguity is a team that can't get very far in navigating uncharted territories. Clarity will never be perfect, but the more you can create it on your team, the more context people will share in making the hard calls and the more everyone will keep moving towards a common north star even when the path is zig-zag. Thank you for your time. I hope this session was useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on my email.