 Agents, I have a very important mission for you. Should you choose to accept? But be aware that if you are not successful or you get caught, CEO won't take any responsibility. We'll keep all the credit in case mission is successful. This message is going to self-destruct in 10 minutes. Do you accept this mission? Do you want to learn a little bit more about it? All right, let's do it. We are the beginning of a very important era. Oh, sorry, sorry. That wasn't the right slide. I mean, the artificial intelligence era. As you've been fully aware, we are the very beginning of a new industrial revolution. And during this time, this is the opportunity to pick winners and losers. So the mission for you is to become a winner in this new industrial revolution era. Because the way we've been taught to build digital products in the previous era no longer is relevant. Let me say it one more time. The way we've been taught to build digital products in the previous era is no longer relevant. So what we're going to do today is to meet some of the winners in the new era, the Magnificent Seven. These seven tech stocks combined represent over $13 trillion in market valuation today. In the last 12 months, they grew their valuation by over $5 trillion. They are driving the SP500 index to our all-time record hike. In fact, if you look at the other 493 stocks, they are way below the average. So what is happening and how can we apply some of the learnings that those Magnificent Seven are doing today to become winners in the new AI era? Because what we are seeing these companies, which is big tech, is not only for big tech. Every single company is a tech-enabled company. Hence, we can still pick some of those insights and apply them to our own scenario. All of the large companies that you work at or you know have tons of technology and they are also making tremendous progress in this new era. But here's the problem, 70% of all transformations fail. And I'm going to ask you a question about it because it's very strange if we believe that we want to transform to be a winner in the new era and we try, why do most of these companies still fail when they try to do it? So I have three options for you. And they are here. Number one is lack of CEO buy-in. Number two is lack of team buy-in. And number three is lack of investment in capability building for the organization. So raise your hand if you think that the single most important reason is CEO buy-in. All right, not too many hands. Raise your hand if you think the single most important reason is the team buy-in. Okay, see more hands. Number three, raise your hand if you think the most important reason is lack of investment or low investment in capability building. Okay, similar. So you are all winners because these all three reasons are absolutely critical. But in general, the single most important reason is lack of CEO buy-in. Because these initiatives are not a pet project. They need to come supported from the very, very top. And these are some of the clients we work with, support them along their transformations. And as you can tell, they work, all work in very different industries from financial services to healthcare, consumer package goods. They're also in very different locations. This is not just for Silicon Valley or New York or London companies. These are companies from all over the world. And what we learned while doing all of the transformations in partnership with them is that there were three key components that these companies are implementing that are working very well. And that's what I want to share with you today. These are the three key product trends that all of these companies are implementing. And I hope that this can be helpful to you as you apply them into your own context. Number one, product teams are contributing to revenue growth. They are not just adding user value. Long gone are the days where just building a customer experience is at the lighter. It is not. It is table stakes. And do not get me wrong. It is very hard to build an excellent customer experience. You cannot fake an excellent customer experience. However, it is not enough anymore. We're moving into a world where building something users love is just no longer enough. We need to build something users love and are willing to pay for. Now I know you might be thinking, well, but the sales team is in charge of selling and we can't fully control the revenue of the company. Well, I agree. Not all the revenue will be fully owned by the product team. But product teams need to be more accountable for the bottom line. In many cases, they can actually contribute to revenue directly. But even in the cases where they do not, they still need to do it in a strong partnership with go-to-market teams. And this is my next point. Go-to-market teams are not just sales teams. We're talking about marketing, sales, and customer success. And we can all be friends. And there are different ways we've seen product teams successfully partner with each of those go-to-market teams. For example, in case of marketing, leveraging product as an inbound channel to generate more demand is complementary to leveraging other marketing channels. For example, we can enrich the quality of a marketing qualified lead by identifying some of the activity that some of those users are having in our product so they can be in a much better position to convert into a paid user. Another example of good partnership between product and sales team is to combine two different motions in go-to-market, a top-down approach from a sales team with a bottom-up approach from a product team. It's not about either or anymore. We've seen that teams that better identify opportunities based on product activity can help product sales teams better engage with the accounts that have more potential, not just to become new customers, but also to upgrade to other plans. And lastly, customer success, the classic second-clan citizen. Well, customer success is also part of go-to-market and customer success is also a critical component as we think about revenue because we can also partner with them to identify opportunities to increase adoption for the existing customers to prevent turn and increase renewals. The second trend that we are seeing in these large organizations that are navigating transformations in digital are the fact that the product function is no longer under tech. Many of these companies still call technology IT, information technology. I still try to stop and think, what does IT mean? Regardless of how you call it, this is not just technology. Product is that the intersection between technology and business. And we finally have a seat at the table. This time last year, when I presented this information mentioned that around 33% of product teams in our companies in Fortune 100 had a chief product officer. Today I'm very happy to announce that over 50% of companies in the Fortune 100 already have a chief product officer. Some cases they might call it chief digital officer or they might have an SVP of product. The point is that person reports directly into the CEO. They are not reporting to a chief technology officer or a chief marketing officer. Now we have a seat at the table and that is what trickling down a lot of the changes in the organizations that are really committing to being successful in this new era. For example, there's not only now a career ladder for product professionals, but we're also noticing that that career ladder is becoming flatter, especially starting at the second half of last year. That means that even positions that are the director level or group PM level are expected to play more of a player coach role. In a traditional scenario, when things are going very well and growth is going up and to the right, the expectation is that group PMs or directors of product are only people managers, but the reality is that that doesn't fly anymore. And now we're seeing not only those roles, but even VPs trying to keep some icy responsibilities to stay in touch with reality, to stay sharp and obviously be faster when it comes to evolving our products. The other thing that we are seeing is that the frameworks that we used to be called agile are not really agile anymore. If someone can please explain this to me. I really tried. I still can't figure it out. And this is not agile in my opinion. The intentions are good. The problem is that it became to a point that it just got so complicated that just people got stuck. First of all, those frameworks are focused on a very specific part of the entire lifecycle. They are obsessed about the development phase and do not get me wrong. Developing is important, but those metrics do not matter if there is no connection to revenue and ultimate business outcomes. They also don't matter if we're not building the right thing. So the components of discovery and go-to-market who are absolutely critical for the entire lifecycle are missing in this type of agile quote-unquote frameworks. The other thing we notice is that those frameworks were perfectly suited in a project management world. And with all due respect to project managers, because it's an important function, product is, as you know, very different. So some of the people who are installing those frameworks are under covered project managers. They are not really representing the role of the product manager. So we're seeing organizations reducing the amount of agile coaches, product owners, or scramb masters. And I see some of you looking down, thinking, oh my God, what's happening? Look, I totally see the value of some of these functions. However, they are not driving the next generation of work-class products in the AI era. These are the people who are driving the next generation of work-class products, the product managers. And in this new scenario, those frameworks or processes are much more simple. They integrate the three key components of the lifecycle. And in order to be successful in this new framework, we are seeing that the PMs that are taking the lead in the strategy as well as the lifecycle, they are becoming much better equipped in discovery and go-to-market skills. So when I'm talking about discovery, I'm talking about research, data analytics, competitive intelligence, no more handoffs to the research team that does some sort of discovery and tells us what to build and then we go and build it. PMs are embedded into the discovery phase. The same way we see PMs being embedded into the go-to-market phase, now we are not just about shipping the thing or shipping that next feature and hoping that it will be adopted in the market. We're seeing PMs being much more experienced in pricing, positioning, and revenue enablement, just to name a few. The third trend that we are seeing, of course, as you could expect, is about artificial intelligence, but the way I'm going to phrase this, tries to provide some insights into how we are experiencing AI for our product teams. Well, first and foremost, there is a reality in the market which is companies are trying to do not just more with less, specifically more with less people and more artificial intelligence. The layoffs that we are seeing in the market globally in 2024 are different than the layoffs that we saw, especially in the first half of 2023. We all remember 2023 was more about the year of efficiency where a lot of companies were trying to be more disciplined and find profitability, but even when they did, they still realized along the way that there is something about working with a linear team and you can still ship faster, you can still be better as an organization even when you get back to those unit economics. And that's why we're seeing more organizations, even in 2024, doing those layoffs. Markets are rewarding those layoffs. We are learning that we can actually be more self-sufficient as a product team if we are more involved in discovery and go to market. And then of course, now we're seeing very specific use cases for the product team that are leveraging artificial intelligence to allow us to be way more productive. And I don't know who coined the term AIPM, but that's not a thing because the same way when we started in the previous revolution and there were mobile and cloud new technologies, there were no like the term of the mobile PM or the cloud PM wasn't a thing. This is a technology, this is something that is expected for PMs to adopt, but it's not just AIPMs versus the rest of the world, versus the rest of the PMs. Every PM is supposed to become an AIPM. And what we are seeing organizations is that the PMs that actually leverage AI are the ones that are replacing PMs who don't. And the ratio is not one to one. So the enemy is not AI. The enemy is the mundane tasks that are preventing us from doing our best work, that are preventing us from focusing more time on strategy, on discovery, on go to market. And this is a study created by McKinsey, was presented in the Global Economic Forum, Davos, last month where they were showing that improvements of AI is expected to generate productivity of trillions in 2024. And this is affecting every single industry. I just showed a few so you can have an example. So obviously we want AI to also generate revenue, and it will, we are at the early stages. What we do see now is that AI is at least generating cost savings and companies are embracing that. So here are some use cases that we see product teams are using AI for. Number one is the ability to gather and synthesize user feedback and data analytics in a much faster way to focus on insights. What do I mean by that? Well, we've all done customer interviews, we've all researched user feedback, we've all tried to make sense or specific data charts, and that's important. However, now we can leverage AI to skip one level in many cases or do that previous level much faster to go straight to insights. So we can go and make those decisions faster and trust that someone that might not be a human is already doing that heavy lifting for us in preparation for those insights. In fact, many of the companies that are sponsoring here today are leveraging technology in many ways. They are software service tools that are already enabling this type of functionalities for all of us. Another use case that we see becoming very, very powerful is feature specification, the classic project management or business analyst responsibilities. Now we can not only create PRDs faster, but create better PRDs, better specifications, better prototypes to enable our engineering design and other functions to have stronger collaboration with us and build the right thing faster. And last but not least is personalized experiences, which is much better than segmentation. The concept of segmentation implies that we are grouping people based on certain criteria. With AI, we're seeing the opportunity to personalize one to one where technology can automatically gather different variables that are relevant to an individual, create a digital experience specific to that individual, learn from the interactions that that individual is having, and then continue iterating. Think of it as a magic A-B test for every single person that is constantly running and is requiring way less human interaction to getting better at a time. It might sound scary, but I know I'm in a room full of visionaries who accepted my mission. So hopefully this can be embraced as an amazing opportunity to be on the winning side. In summary, these are the three key product trends that we are seeing in the product teams. Number one, product is becoming way more accountable for revenue or growth, not just adding user value. Number two, product has a seat at the table at the highest level and is no longer under technology or IT. Product is at the intersection between technology and go-to-market teams. And number three, product teams are doing more with less people and more AI. I know this is a room that is going to be, and it is, and it's going to be even fuller with more and more winners in the new era. And your mission is to make it happen, but you're not alone and we are here to help you. If you want to get an extended version of the report that I presented today, here is access to it. It hasn't been launched worldwide yet. We'll be doing it in a few weeks. So everybody who signs up today will get a free copy in a few days. And I really wish many, many of you can be successful like Taylor Swift in this new era.