 Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, and digital marketing courses online and at our 15 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams, and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Today we have an awesome guest presenting. I'd like to introduce you to Premal. Premal is an experienced leader with an emphasis on e-commerce solutions that drive business growth and improve customer experience across all sales channels. He is passionate about building usable solutions and product features that deliver desired business outcomes. He also has an inherent ability to articulate product and technology positioning to both business and technical users, thus driving customer satisfaction. He's highly motivated, persuasive, innovative, a team player and a builder. Feel free to leave any questions for Premal in the comments and we'll be sure to address them in the end. Without further ado, let's welcome Premal. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks Dan, and thanks everyone for joining. All right, let me quickly pull up the presentation for why you're all here. All right, can everyone see the screen? All good. Awesome. So we're here, like Dan said, we're here to talk about some of my experiences and how we can build some great products. Before we start, I just want to let you know that whatever I say here, this presentation is based on my personal learnings, experiences, my journey that I've gone through and this is not endorsed by Salesforce or the previous companies that I've worked for. So some of the key topics that we're going to cover today is my journey into product management, how I ended up where I am, the role of a product manager, how do you build great products, what goes into that, and then how do you adapt and learn within your journey and keep innovating. So my journey, I started back in 2006 with an e-commerce company called GSI Commerce, which was one of the leading providers for e-commerce solutions back in the day. And they had a whole bunch of e-commerce sites for a lot of different brands, Dick's Sporting Goods, Aeropostale, all of the sporting leagues, NFL, MLB, NBA, every one of them was on the GSI e-commerce platform. And I started as a business analyst and a product owner. I wrote multiple user stories and features and things like that for the platform that could be adopted by our customers. In 2009, I transitioned into another vertical within the same company to learn more about business-facing aspects of what customers cared about that cannot be delivered through a product. So a product can only do so much, but there could be business needs that could go beyond what a product can deliver. So how do you implement certain features and functionalities that are customized to a customer's need. And when eBay acquired GSI Commerce, I got an opportunity to move into the business side of things and work closely with the retailers to help them drive strategic growth, revenue growth, drive projects that could help them with all those aspects, as well as drive customer satisfaction. And in 2015, everything that I'd learned, I got an opportunity again to go back into the product management team, lead the product management team to take everything that I've learned and define product and strategy for omnichannel technologies, including auto management. And in 2016, Salesforce came calling, not literally, but they came calling. I had a good opportunity to join their commerce and retail team to help customers around the globe by providing them with the right story and solutions. So just want to summarize my journey by saying you can be any in any role within the company. But if you're passionate about your customers, your business as to what your company is doing. And if you're passionate about that, you believe in that you would be able to build solutions for your customers and product management would be lucky to have you and you would be happy there. So a role of a product manager, it's not what says here in the Dilbert cartoon that I really like your role is not to include every requirement that everyone asks for within the product. And when you do that, sometimes it could, you know, just backfire. So be careful about what your role is within the product management, how you would go about doing that. So I think a product manager really is the CEO of the product. You have to think like a CEO, act like a CEO. But that does not mean you start acting like a boss, like a CEO does. But you have to make sure that you're working with your teams, your different teams, whether it's your user experience team, whether it's your business and your customers, whether it's your engineering teams, whether it's the marketing team, you work with them, you take input feedback from them, and you're able to make the right decisions to drive the success for your product. You are the one that are defining what vision of that product is, and you're the ones that is responsible for collaborating with those different teams to bring about success. Sometimes you may not always make the right decisions, but you have to ensure that you're making the best decision based on whatever's available to you at that point in time, and you have to solve problems for your customer. That should be your aim as a product manager. You're not there to create something that you love, but you have to do something that your customers will love, and you're passionate about delivering that experience for the customer. So how do you go about building a great product? What are some of the steps? One of my all-time favorite codes is people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and it's by Simon Sinek. He's an amazing orator, presenter, and a lot of product managers can learn from it, and he has a book called Start With Why, which I've read, and I would encourage others to read it too, but you have to remember people don't buy what you've just built just for the heck of you've built it, but they buy why you're doing it, because that should help them solve their problems. So remember that every time you're building products, and for you to be able to do that, first and foremost, it's all about learning. You cannot just build a product in a finance industry if you're not familiar with that industry, if you're not familiar with your company, if you're not familiar with your customers, if you're not familiar with the market. Similarly, I was not able to build the products that I built with GSI, eBay, Enterprise, without knowing what that industry, what that market is, what the company is, what our customers are asking for, what shoppers are asking for. I had to understand how technology was changing, I had to learn everything to make sure that I'm taking all that into account to drive business value to my organization and to the company, and in the process achieving the business goals that are set for the company as well as solving problems for the customers, because while you're solving problems for the customers, they need to meet goals that your company has set for themselves. So in the age of internet, your customers are not local, so you have to understand your customers. That's the most important thing. Your customers are global, your customers are in different countries, different regions, they have different sets of problems, different sets of needs, so you have to understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and you should be able to prioritize those needs, those problems when you start planning on what your product. And if I look at my own experience, I constantly learn from what our customers and other retailers are doing, what they're asking for, how they're adopting newer technologies, and everyone knows how Amazon is just reshaping the entire shopping experience. I have to keep an eye on what Amazon's doing, because ultimately, Amazon is that bar when it comes to the customer satisfaction, the customer experience. Long gone are the days when customers waited for seven to 10 days for the product to arrive. Now with Prime and Prime Now, they want instant gratification. They're able to order products from their mobile devices with one click. They're able to order products through Alexa. So I have to stay on top of all these technology things and make sure that customers who are buying through Amazon and are shaping their experience of retail through Amazon or other retailers are able to drive a similar experience. So that's first and foremost. So it's learn, learn, learn where you're making sure that you've learned what you can do within your industry, within your business, within your customers, and your competition and the market to be able to drive value. Once you do that, once you've learned everything that you have to learn, or if it shouldn't take that long to learn something, but again, varies on people, varies on industries, varies by product. But once you do that, you start with the vision. What is the vision of my product? When Salesforce was launched 20 years ago, Internet was still in a very early nascent stage. Mark Banyov, the founder CEO of Salesforce, decided to leave Oracle, his executive position as Oracle, and start build a software application on the cloud when cloud was not even a word. But he said, I am going to build something that customers can start using whenever, wherever they are, through their computers, and they don't have to rely on being in the office, being in front of their monolithic application and on-premise installation, and being able to serve their customers wherever, wherever. And I should be able to deliver continuous improvement to the customers. And that's how Salesforce started. And now we all know Salesforce is the pioneer in software as a service. And others are now following suit and building capabilities and features and functions on the cloud. So it's very critical when you design your first product that you have a vision for your product. What are the problems that you're trying to solve for your customers, both short-term and long-term? And once you've done that, you start defining and prioritizing those problems. Everyone here has probably taken an Uber or a Lyft, but did we really need Uber or a Lyft? Did we even think before Uber and Lyft out there that we needed like a ride hailing app, right? We all used taxis and we would wait in line for a taxi or we would wait on the street, putting our hands up and saying, waiting for a taxi driver to stop and take us to our destination. Sometimes they would refuse. Sometimes the fare was not what they would be asking us or estimated fare. So Uber and Lyft saw an opportunity with those problems and said, I can solve these pain points for the customers. And they revolutionized the taxi industry by creating a ride hailing app that essentially does the same thing. It takes you from point A to point B, but what they did was they created an app that made it so easier for customers to just ping the drivers around them, get an approximate fare estimate. They know exactly how long they have to wait for the driver to get to that. They know exactly how long it's going to take for them to reach the destination. So they just simplified their experience for their customers. So you have to start focusing on users' needs and you cannot do that alone. You have to work as a team. You should brainstorm on the problems for your customers with the extended team. You have to involve them as a part of the group and solve that problem. Next step. So this is just one of the template that I used to use for product vision statements and then I customize it for my own needs. But these are the typical questions you should be asking when you're writing a vision statement. Who are my target customers? What is the opportunity here? What am I trying to solve? What category is it in? Why would someone buy from me and not go to someone else? What is my competitive advantage? What is my differentiation between my product and the competitor's product? And once you have all that, you know you have a vision statement. Once you have a vision statement, that's not the end of it. That's just the start. Now comes the heavy lifting where you take the product vision, which is the long horizon, right? But you have to start building multiple milestones and how are you going to get to that, you know, long horizon? How are you going to go to it? You're going to write your short term, your long term goals and you start building towards that. You need to develop a culture in your organization that helps you meet these goals. Sometimes goals can take longer to achieve and some can be quick, right? And there might be a few failures along the way, but you learn from it. So you learn from it, you try it again with the same goals. Maybe the timing wasn't right. Maybe you didn't have the right amount of resources. Maybe the approach wasn't right. You need to go back, see what the end results was, tweak it and keep working towards that. You know, most companies realize the importance of creating a roadmap, but an effective roadmap is the one that clearly communicates the vision, the areas of focus, how you're going to get there and when. So when you're defining your product roadmap and milestone, you know, just make sure that you understand the difference between a product feature and a product itself, right? We all know Facebook likes, Instagram likes, but they are essentially a feature. They're not really a product. They might be considered as a product within Facebook, within Instagram, but you cannot sell a Facebook like by itself to a customer. You cannot sell an Instagram like to a customer by itself. They were designed to drive engagement on Facebook. They were designed to drive engagement on Instagram. So you have to understand what are you driving and what. Now, when we all know when Google Maps was first introduced, turn by turn directions was a feature, right? And Google Maps was a product as customers use Google Maps. They saw the difference of using Google Maps and turn by turn directions versus, you know, following a traditional map through map quest and turn by turn directions printed out and figuring out, you know, where they are, how they are, and someone was not there to guide them. But over time, turn by turn directions turned into a product for itself, for Google, right? Because now they've added AR capabilities. And with those capabilities, you're able to bring in businesses and other helpful content for their customers. So it's no longer a feature, but it's driving more and more value for Google, for their customers by adding more capabilities and top of it. So once you design a feature, it could evolve into a product at a later date, but that would only come as time goes. As you understand how your customers are using it as you evolve in your thinking, everything keeps on changing. So the roadmap is always going to be flexible. Keep it flexible. It's never too rigid. You need to make sure that you do that. The last and the most important thing, once you have a roadmap, once you define everything, what are you going to achieve, how are you going to achieve, right? You have to have, you know, a way to sell your product, your vision across different teams. The engineering team is the most important one where you have to convince them what kind of problems you're going to solve. They have to be on board with you to identify the right ways of solving that problem for the customer. So you need to have a very unique view of what's happening across your customers and your business. You need to have a better understanding of the market opportunity that you have for your product, the problems that the customers are facing, the solutions you have. Once you have that and you have a strong communication skills, which is really, really important for product managers to have, the messaging to internal stakeholders becomes very easy because you're able to help your internal stakeholders, which could be sales, which could be executives, which could be the engineering team understand the problem statement you're trying to solve for your customers and why the product and the vision that you have would be a good way to, you know, solve those problems and drive value to the business and the company. But the messaging is very different when you go to external parties such as your customers and your partners, right? You are going to tell them, you're the problems that you're trying to solve, here's a solution that we have and you're explaining to them in a language that they understand because you're not going to tell them, hey, this is going to help us drive five million dollars in revenue. That's not what you're telling your customers, but maybe your pitch to executives is that, that once our customers start adopting it, we could see a revenue of five million dollars or whatever you come up with as metrics, right? You need to start thinking about those things and for you to start thinking about those things, you need to have a go-to-market strategy, which means what are the problems you're solving, right? Why are the customers buying your product and not your competitors? What's the differentiation factor? How will the customers adopt your product? That's the most important thing, right? Is it an off-the-shelf product, right? I mean, am I downloading it from the App Store and that's it and I don't have to do anything else or is it something that requires implementation where I have to work with a technical team on the customer side or leverage technology partners, system integrators that are going to implement something for my customer. What does that implementation look like? You have to understand all those things because those could be barriers to adoption. If your product needs an implementation, you have to make sure that when you're designing it, the barrier to adoptions is least because the customer has to pay for not just the product, may have to pay for implementation and that could cost an arm and a leg and that could steer them away from your solution to another competitor's solution. So you have to make sure that you understand what it takes for customers to adopt your product. Finally, you have to know, have some idea as to how are you going to charge for that product, how are you going to, what is the pricing going to be? Am I going to charge them based on usage? Am I going to charge them a flat fee? Am I going to charge them an ongoing subscription fee? We all downloaded apps from the App Store and there are apps that charge you $5 and a one-time fee and you're done and you never have to pay it again. And now there are apps that charge you nothing when you install it, but then there are in-app subscriptions and in-app purchases that you have to make to keep playing, to keep getting new features and that's the way they make money. So you have to have a strong an idea as to what your product pricing could be, but you have to be flexible because when you're working with your sales, your executives, you work with them because they understand the market, they understand the customers. Your marketing team plays a crucial role in that because they understand the feedback from the customers through a variety of different channels that could be coming in. So work with them to find out what's going to be the best pricing model for your product and be flexible in that so that you could ultimately see the goals that you want for your customers and also internally. And how do you see those goals? Those are the goals that are measured through KPIs. You have to define how are you going to say KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators and that really is when do you say that my product was a success? Is it customer adoption? Is it time spent on my product? Facebook really looks at how many monthly active users does it have, how much time they're spending on the Facebook site or the app, the involvement that they do, and then based on that, they're driving revenue through ads. So similarly, you would have those goals that you need to define as to how are you going to measure the success? Sometimes product could just be based on customer satisfaction. In retail, it's more about based on the feature, it could be that we're driving revenue for our customers. So when our customers get more revenue from shoppers, because we're making the shopping experience better, that means our customers are making money and that when customers are making money, that means they're happy, which drives customer satisfaction. And when they're happy with the product, with what we've built, they're more likely to promote our product to other customers, right, to other prospects. So that is the net promoter score. So when your customers are happy and they love your product, they truly become your ambassadors of your product, because then that is the marketing that you will get for free, because they'll talk about your product with other customers and with other prospects, with other people in the industry, and you will get the free press and the mileage that you need when you build a successful product. So last before we leave a few minutes for Q&A, always keep learning and always keep adapting. Product management and that role is always going to be fluid. So it doesn't stop with what you know. What's new today could be old tomorrow, right? Technology is always changing. You need to review feedback from your initial product launch, your initial discovery, talk to your customers, identify what is working, what isn't, right? Sometimes when you review your results and your findings and you're deeper into customer adoption, you may realize that, hey, what I had originally thought that this product would do this, it could actually do much more, right? It may open up more opportunities, more target markets, address other customer problems that you had not thought about, and open up new opportunities and probably a new business model for you and the company, right? And when that happens, right? You pivot from your original strategy to a new strategy and a new vision that could be much more, right? Just talking about Uber, right? Uber started as a point A to point B ride-hailing app. They realized that now I can use those same drivers to do deliveries for retail businesses, right? I could just tap them to say, hey, while you're on your way working for rides, pick up this item from the store and deliver it to this particular customer, right? And they still get to make money. They opened up Uber Eats, right? They realized, hey, there's a market opportunity, again, leveraging the same drivers by picking up food from the restaurants and delivering it to the customer. So you can also do that once you start seeing how customers are adopting your products, how are they tweaking it, what kind of additional opportunities and markets you may be able to achieve? Microsoft did the same thing when they realized, right, that customers love their office apps, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, everything. And just because they love their apps, it's not like customers are going and clamoring for Nokia devices when Microsoft bought that handset division, right? When the new CEO took over, he made a conscious decision to say, I'm going to open up these apps for iOS and Android devices. And that's what I really care about because I care about my customers getting to use our products more versus trying to use our products to drive revenue to another set of business, right? So think about all those things when you announce a product, when you're launching a product, when you do discovery with your customer, there is always something to learn, right? You always have to stay in touch with what's going on in the market as well. So there are new and upcoming technologies in your domain that could help you accelerate your product vision, help deliver better solutions to customers' problems, right? Who would have thought that Apple would abandon the Touch ID button that they just introduced three years ago, five years ago, actually, and get rid of it altogether and replace it with Face ID, right? They just were like, okay, the technology is there where I could make Face as the security for a secure interface for users to log into their device and it could be not just with a camera but 3D, the technology is cheaper now and I can do this and I can replace this Touch ID button which takes a lot of real estate on the device and make the screen bigger, right? So think about everything that you could do from that standpoint. Keep aware, be aware of the technology, be aware of your competition, be aware of what the customers are asking, talking about your products and learn from that. I always see what Amazon's doing in the retail business and I always tell my customers, right? Learn from Amazon. Amazon may be a competition and a threat to you but you too should be able to deliver an Amazon-like experience for your customers and for them to drive that experience, I have to make sure that when we're building products at Salesforce for retail customers, right? That we're empowering these retailers to deliver a similar experience to Amazon or sometimes even go above and beyond, right? So keep that in mind and with that, I just want to say that's all I had to share for today. Thank you for your time and I'll leave room for questions if there are any out there.