 Hi everyone, my name is Ranki Magica-Dumi and I'm here to talk to you all today about innovative leadership is product management and why that is. I want to thank Product School for giving me this lovely opportunity to talk to you all today. And once again, I want to thank you for taking the time to attend this webinar. So as I said, I'm Ranki Magica-Dumi. I am a Senior Product Manager at PayPal. As most of you know, PayPal is an American company that operates an online payment system where you can transfer money. And this is of course, in majority of the countries around the world, that accepts payments transfers. And this is of course, in view of money orders and checks. And also as most of you know, PayPal is double-sided. There is the consumer side and then there's the merchant side. And at PayPal, I help large enterprise merchants to manage and grow their business. For most of my career, I've worked in FinTech. I've helped to build B2C and built B platforms. So thank you all for joining today. I always like to start my presentations by talking about my PM superpower. I've thrived in finding opportunities being on the side of others. The reason I like to share my superpower as a PM is because, well, it's gotten me through some tough days. And as my PM always, my superpower always reminds me of why I am here, which is to build the best products for my customers that would change their lives. And so I implore you all to use your PM superpower because guess what? That's how we're all going to build products that are going to continue to change humanity for the better. We got to use our PM superpower. So let's start, shall we? What is leadership? So in my perspective, leadership can be characterized as that person, that individual or group of people that have this ability to not only affect, but guide and support and lead our own entire organization. They can provide that thing that we all rally around and believe in that cause, which is to build products that would change our customers' lives. That to me is leadership. So let's talk about innovation. To me, innovation is something different. It is something novel. It is that brand-new thing and it's something unfamiliar. And innovation can be adding an existing feature to your product. You could also be building a completely different product. That is innovation. And that, in its essence, is part of our job as product leaders to innovate. So what is innovation or leadership? Well, to me, it can be characterized as a model of leadership that employs innovative, creative, and unconventional ideas. Meaning, my cross-functional partners and I are free to go dream big and come up with really big ideas so that we can again build products that are going to impart our customers' lives for the better. That's innovation, innovative leadership. So during our discussion today, we're going to cover a couple of topics that I believe help to enhance innovation. So we're going to talk about embracing diversity and neurodiversity and what do I mean by that? Well, so let's start with diversity. So I build products for global markets. The global market is ever changing every single day. The demographics in our market changes every day. Their needs change every day. So how do I succeed? How do I get them what they want? I gotta go meet them where they are. So that means in order to be able to figure out what that diverse demographic needs, I need diverse people in my cross-functional teams. So that means I need people that are diverse in gender. I need people that are diverse in thoughts, diverse geography, diverse circumstances because I need their viewpoints, even diverse geographical experiences, because I need their viewpoints, their perspective when we're talking about building a new experience, a new feature for a customer because we all represent different ethnic groups and different perspectives that we can build the best product. So I need to embrace diversity. When I talk about neurodiversity, what I mean is we all have team members in the organization who are quiet, who kind of keep to themselves, who don't really say much. And what tends to happen is those people get ignored. And I'm challenging all of us to not ignore our colleagues just because they are quiet and they keep to themselves and they don't really say much. But rather, go meet them where they are because those folks that are quiet do have best ideas to help us bring our product vision to life. Well, one of my successes is to embrace diversity and neurodiversity because then that gives me a cross-functional partner team that just come from different walks of life. They have different perspectives and they can bring those perspectives into the products that we built. And that means that we can build for an emerging demographic and we can meet them where they are. That's why diversity and neurodiversity are super important. Another thing is organizational storytelling. What do I mean by that? Well, so I have a diverse team. Cross-functional partners are diverse. My leadership is diverse. But there's one thing that binds all of us together. There's a reason why we all wake up every single day and we come to work. The core value of our organization. Because our values are aligned to that core value. So therefore, we want to come to work every day and make a difference in our customers' lives and build products that's going to help them to do their job and change their lives. And it starts with our organizational storytelling, which is, well, first we all align on the reason why we are here. Then we tell the story of our product. Now, I tell the story of my product in two ways. One, internally within my organization, with my cross-functional partners, we align on why we come to work every day, which is our core value. But then we also tell the story of how our product is a hero. Our product is a hero that's going to help our customers. And that's because I want my own entire organization and cross-functional partners to rally, to all rally behind this idea of our product being a hero. Externally, the way we tell the story to our customers is our customers are the hero and they are using our product to solve a problem in their organization. So, it starts with our organizational storytelling. Making sure we're all aligned as to why we come in every single day. Why our own value ties to our organizational core value. And that, by the way, is where the love comes from, the love for our products comes from. And once we've established that and we all aligned on why we're here, then the next thing is, okay, now let's tell our story. So, within my organization, my product is a hero. My product solves problems. Externally, for my customers, my customers are the hero and they're using my product to solve a problem in their organization. And this is super important to have that organizational storytelling. I want to talk about encapsulate alternative solution. What I mean by that is, when my cross-functional partners and I get together and we think about how the customer problem at hand and how we're going to solve it, we don't just come up with one idea, we come up with several. We come up with multiple ideas. We dream big. We don't let all technical debt be the thing that prevents us from coming up with great ideas. We look outside of our organization sometimes. But our goal is to come up with as many ideas as possible because we're not just solving that problem for the now, we're solving that problem for the future. Because even though we might even solve that problem for now, it's going to generate ideas of other things that we can build, that our customers haven't even told us yet. But because we're so close to our customers, we can anticipate they're going to have that problem. But those things happen, those ideas happen because we encapsulate. We look for alternative solution. We don't settle on one. We don't settle on two. We bring multiple ideas to the table to solve customer problems. And this is why that is important. And I want to talk about challenging our assumptions. Studies have shown that our brain does not want to do any work. Our brain wants to kind of take shortcuts. So it's easy for us to just kind of go, well, that's how it works. It's always worked that way. And I challenge the status quo. My cross-functional partners and myself, we make sure that we hold ourselves, we hold our feet to the ground, and we make sure that we're constantly challenging our own assumptions. Yes, there may be technical challenges, but that's why we'll work with our engineering lead to figure out how we can get around it. Or what we must take care of with those technical deaths to be able to bring our product vision to life. But we don't just take status quo as is. We look for alternatives. And the reason is because when we challenge our own assumptions, once again, that's when we're going to come up with those ideas, those multiple ideas to help to solve our customer problem. That one thing I always ask myself every day, how might we? How might we solve this problem? How might we perform this function? So I recommend challenging your assumptions, but challenging your cross-functional partners to challenge their assumptions so that we're not just settling for status quo for the way that things have always been. That's how we're going to build innovative products. And then I want to also chat about leading with empathy. Not just with our customers, but with our cross-functional partners. So I want to start with our customers. Why leading with empathy is so important. As product leaders, especially I'm not sure about other people, but for me, I know that I have biases and I know that I have blind spots. So the only way for me to really get around those and really understand my customer is to put myself in their shoes and have that customer empathy. So I'm going to give you an example. If I've just met a colleague and they invite me to their house, I'm going to go out and I'm going to get a regular bottle of wine, a white or a red, because I don't really know them that well. But if I really knew them that well, I would know what their favorite color is. I would know what their favorite flower is. So I would bring that with me because I really know them. Well, we need to know our customers just as closely as we would a really good friend so that we can anticipate what their needs are. But also means that we can put ourselves in their shoes and we can try to understand the pain that they are having, the pain points that they are having with our products. Or how many of the tools do they have to use to get their jobs done? What are their aspirations and motivation? We need to lead with empathy. And with our own cross-functional teams, same thing. We got to lead with empathy. We need to understand what our cross-functional teams, aspirations and ambitions are. What is their professional ambitions? What is their personal ambition? And it is our job to help them reach those. It is our job as product leaders to make sure that they are genuinely happy and they can bring their authentic self to work. So if you have cross-functional partners that are that you're leading with empathy and they can bring their authentic self to work and they are happy to be there, guess what? They're going to innovate. They're going to build best-in-class products because you're a leader that leads with empathy. And our customers, well, if we continue to build the right products for our customers and we genuinely care about them, they're going to love us. And because they love us, they're not going to leave us for a competitor. We must lead with empathy. So I want to end my presentation by talking about keeping pace with trends. It is important as product leaders that we know what's going on in the world, that we listen to whatever podcast we need to listen to to see what's happening with the market, that we understand how decisions being made through politics and environmental disasters and climate change and so forth are impacting that demographic that we are building for. That way we can be ahead of it. That way we can anticipate what the products and features they would need. Because guess what? Our competitors are paying attention to what's going on in the world and they're going to beat us to it if we're not careful. So we must keep pace with trends. We must know what's going on in the world so that we can anticipate our customers' needs and so that we can innovate and bring those big ideas to the table. So I end my presentation today by talking about product leadership. Being a product manager to me is one of the most humbling opportunities because our actions not only can inspire and motivate our cross-functional partners, but it can encourage them to dream big and not settle for status quo because they themselves can blossom into more than they are. They can grow professionally and personally. And that to me is the embodiment of leadership and why I love being a product leader. So I want to end by sharing with you all my favorite books. My favorite books about leadership, which is something that's very important to me to always grow as a leader, to make sure that I am not only growing as a leader, but as a person. So these are those books. I recommend them all. And I want to thank Product School for having me today to share my insights with you all. I want to thank you all for taking the time to attend this webinar. And this is how you can reach me. It is such a pleasure talking to you all today. Thank you so much for having me.