 My name is Toby and I work for a company called Pytop. I don't know if you guys have heard of it before but just in case not we're trying to develop these these technology and this learning programs that gets the next generation of people into making and building so that is both on the hardware side on the software side as well as the actual learning learning material that's provided and therefore really what we're prioritizing ahead of everything else is preparing the next generation for this this very new job market which is a little scary which we'll be kind of touching on in this talk and so yes what I'll be kind of covering off predominantly is actually the skills that you'll be needing in preparation as a product manager for this this future workplace what I what we refer to as the fourth industrial revolution and you will notice that a lot of these skills that I'm covering off are actually soft skills and they're transferable which is important for adapting for jobs that actually as it stands right now don't even exist okay so before I go into the skills before I kind of talk around fourth industrial revolution I want to talk a little bit I want to take it back to the job market let's say a thousand years ago it was a very very different time and the fact is obviously they had a huge amount of issues a huge amount of problems with plague with famine with empires crumbling but fundamentally the basic features of the society stayed strong depending on the cost level you were involved in you worked in the army you were maybe a farmer you were maybe a weaver so you were given a specific set of skills and because of the life expectancy was so short back then you had those skills that would usually last for that for that whole lifetime and you know that's it's an interesting shift change to now where we have this sort of new world and these these whole new issues that have come through and right now it's really difficult for us to even predict what the future holds so we need to you know already we need to start thinking on things like as you can see some of the problems that are kicking in with climate change with population growth but also some exciting things as well like the increase in life expectancy and with the increase in life expectancy we've got the big the big big change which is this technology which is also affecting this increase in life expectancy and this this sort of new technological wave is going to be full scale in the next decade or two you know what we've been referring to is automation and these we know already are taking people's jobs very really and so we've already got to start looking at preparing ourselves for this fourth industrial revolution when all of these jobs all of these menial tasks that can potentially be done better by machines will be will be taken by machines and you know I'm going to be talking about this in particular from my own professional standpoint so in pi top I spent a huge amount of time in the classroom and I'm a little horrified sometimes when I'm in the classroom because of how much they prioritize this standardization standard form of educational system which prioritizes measurements and prioritizes content as the main focus and and they do that because that goes back to the industrialization that goes back to the industrial age when at that stage they needed to develop people very specifically for to help for this exponent exponential growth this exponential change and they needed to make sure that they had workers and they needed to make sure that they had office people doing these specific similar jobs over and over again and back then as well the content played such an important part because of the fact that there wasn't a huge amount content was incredibly scarce back then but now it's very different and not only was the information scarce back then but the information that was provided was more than likely censored which is the whole other thing and now we've got this time where we've got this huge influx of information you can spend lifetimes just scrolling through the internet on free online courses on you know everything from Wikipedia to TED Talks you guys all know it and with this we don't therefore need to teach kids or we don't need to teach us any more information because we have all that information online actually what we need to start learning now is how to synthesize that information and how to do something with that information and that's something I'll be kind of covering off a little bit you know in this in this in this time now is what that means for a product manager on how to synthesize this information you know and I'm sure you guys have probably seen this one before um but it's the age old quote of forcing everyone into doing exactly the same test and that is literally what's going on in the classroom which is which is horrifying it means that a lot of incredibly gifted students are not being given the opportunity to flourish and so now we've got to start looking at prioritizing some of these soft skills and deprioritizing some of these predetermined slightly harder skills and unfortunately there's a number of companies a number of products out there in the market who who do look at this standardized model because that's the way that they can very easily scale their opportunity they know that if they just integrate into education then they can just scale as is already going on but we need to with with this sort of with these sort of products unfortunately what we're doing for ourselves and for the students out there in this world is we are developing people who will compete against robots rather than working with them so not even robots machines so and that's not just an issue with students the reason I'm bringing that up that's an issue for all of us right now as well but you know it's not all doom and gloom don't worry I'm sorry I've kind of obviously gone a little bit down on the negative on the negative side but the only reason I'm saying all of that is to give a little bit of context because right now we've got to start adapting to this sort of changing well we've got to start preparing for these new jobs that don't even necessarily exist and that's why we've got to right now work on prioritizing these transferable skills that can work in a multitude of different sectors you know at the moment the the number of robots are at the highest unprecedented number in history and yet in 2018 there was a report on unemployment which said that the numbers were the lowest they've been in 38 years just dropped down 5.2 percent so even though there's this huge amount going on in the machine age or in the fourth industrial soon to be the fourth industrial revolution we can still adapt and evolve to work in unison with this new technological revolution rather than seeing ourselves as competing against it and so with with that in mind I think the most important part of what I want to talk to you guys about today is working on actually developing these sort of transferable skills that can quite nicely fit into a variety of different sectors up until quite recently well even now in the educational system the most important part was these pre-determined skills you know you must know c++ you must know a foreign language but we all know that the computers or technology the way it's evolving the way it's advancing they're going to be better than us doing all of this stuff we can already see that google translation you know so we we shouldn't look at like I said before we shouldn't look at competing we should be looking at developing skills that work in unison with this incredible technology that's evolving and changing and that's why we need to start looking at these soft skills these what we refer to as 21st 21st century competency skills and these skills are particularly pertinent for product managers which is why I brought them up and you know I don't mean this lightly but I do think that a product manager is a role for the 21st century because it's one of those roles that is prepared to adapt and evolve even if there's an unknown future around it any company that you go to every single time it's going to be very different dependent on the business needs of what they require from that specific product manager and so they're very prepared for turbulence and for adaptability and that's why why I'm bringing up these transferable skills and why I'm bringing up the fact that product managers such an important part for this 21st century is I want for now for you guys to understand at least while I'm looking out when I'm involved in the hiring process and when I'm looking for candidates I'm looking for people who can actually adapt and evolve to these sort of scenarios with these sort of transferable skills and you know these are the skills that we're also actually teaching students right now in the classroom we're trying to um and you know these these general purpose or soft skills as I've referred to before we've just found electrify the students a lot more and also allow them to really become their own self rather than the standardized model that has been taught taught from them from the very beginning that they are supposed to be without further ado kind of kicking off with what are the four C's based around the 21st century competencies dictated earlier on in the in the century by the UN and so one is critical thinking now critical thinking is I would say one of the most important parts of a product manager's role because you're inundated with information every single day there's a huge influx coming from all different departments and not only that but you have conflicting reports you have corrupted data you have all of this you also have red herrings that send you in the wrong wrong direction and it's very important as a product manager that you can quite clearly show how you can deal with this influx of information and constantly test it and based around that give feedback while also asking the correct targeted questions being able to always challenge the assumptions that you've set up and off the back of that actually have this basis this useful data to work from and with this useful data you can then develop a market driven product or a market driven solution that your market actually wants rather than based around all this sort of analysis is going on and you can then really chart the course or the direction that your product goes using this sort of useful data rather than this this sort of corrupted data that's why critical thinking is so important and you know this can also cover off a number of areas personally in the areas that I work is you know everything from when you're developing feature details to prototyping for early prototypes maybe working with the industrial design team to developing user flows and you're constantly given all of this information you have to constantly make trade-offs all the time because you know there's nothing worse when a department hears you say no but you've got to do that at this role because your priority is navigating that ship for that product into the in the correct direction that's your number one priority and you know right the way down to the product backlog which I'm sure all of you work or have known a lot of to managing the sprints and all of this what we work with internally which I'll cover off in a little bit is this sort of design thinking methodology and that's how that all nicely fits together for us critical critical thinking is obviously incredible incredibly important but collaboration is another one of those soft skills that's fundamental for a product manager to prepare for this this this sort of coming time and in particular with these soft skills you want I mean with this soft skill you want to make sure that you are constantly leveraging experts both internally and externally to make sure that you get the best result out of the product at pi top we have some of the best learning team you know ex director of learning from apple and we're being able to use and refine that information to make sure the learning framework and the product is developed precisely but if I just relied on that bit of information then we would have a product which wasn't customer centered that would be a product that was developed purely with the learning ethos in mind and so that's why it's important like I mentioned before to always make trade offs with the decisions listen to leverage all the different experts take in that data and then critically analyze the data based around that and then yeah so it's very important to curate that and then also another thing is this encouraging peer participation now this is particularly important at pi top on the software development side so I work across the hardware software and the learning it's a it's a bit of a beast it's a very very wide remit but it's you know it's startups for you and on the software side we've got on the operating system side they work on this thing called PED programming which is a really clever way of introducing someone who's never ever used the code base before to understand how the company works and in particular how that particular environment works and what they'll do they'll be someone who'll be doing the code more than likely the new recruit and then there'll be someone overhead navigating and constantly giving feedback to make sure and reviewing that code so that's also an incredibly important part is always collaborating and that works in any different departments then that feeds into communication I'm going to be talking a little bit around both the internal communication and then external so I think again maybe you guys have seen this this this chart before but there's a big you're as a product manager you're the glue between all of these different beliefs that's what the product is from sales to ops to qa to customer service to marketing every single one of them has this different interpretation of what they think is the best product and that's your role is to synthesize as mentioned before all that information down and to make sure that all of them adhere to your product vision based around the data that you've been able to critically critically analyze before so always listen to everything that they say in particular the sales teams are very important voice for the customer but make sure that no one opinion is taken too much too much more heavily than the rest you need to make sure that everything is taken on board before you make decisions around the product and then also externally and this this is incredibly important is empathizing with the customer so with every single product that I've worked on that I've developed at the very beginning you work on developing this value proposition and before you do anything around that you've got to start understanding how the customer is you've got to start empathizing with the customer's plight and how you do that is both through qualitative quantitative research and working both internally and externally to get that data then grinding that down into something which you can use to define what the market is after so once you've empathized with the customer you can then start defining what that product is that they're looking for and then you take it to the next stage where you start actually ideating and throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what kind of sticks and I think the most important thing of all of this is then rapid prototypes and testing and a constant feedback loop with this rapid prototypes and testing at pi top both on the hardware on the software side we had about nine or ten stages like full-on stages but pretty much through each of those stages in the sort of double diamond through each of those stages we made sure that we also had rough and ready low-fi rough and ready high-five designs to actually make sure that we constantly had the customer's voice involved in every single step in the process and that is such an important thing that is sometimes looked over especially for younger companies because all they want to do is you'll have a founder who's got a belief in what they think is the perfect product and they know exactly what what the customer wants but that's why again like I mentioned in point one with the critical thinking you've your role is to sometimes say no and to analyze that data and to show them why they need to look elsewhere and that's why rapid prototype rapid feedback is such an important part of this and you know on another note this sort of emotional intelligence bit is another thing that uniquely stands us away from this technology this machine age being able to communicate between between us so yeah then if we move on to the next point which is creativity so there's a number of different bits in creativity I think the what I found in my my my career in creativity is the fact I've had to be very adaptable to chaos very very quickly and that can be down to pivoting of business that can be down to rapid need of fundraising that can be down to a whole host of different things but a product managers role is to be able to creatively interpret what's going on and develop a solution based around that and that's both on the situation and on the product requirement side as well and we are also at the moment trying to develop learning curriculum and learning framework for students to actually start getting them thinking like this as well because at the moment and you guys will all remember this as well it's very instructional it's very step by step recipes for schools but what we want to encourage more and more is interpretive learning and give them a problem-based challenge and see what they come up with because that's where some of the most exciting kind of stuff comes from depending on what avenue they want to go and also on top of that you've got the play aspect and that's just the most most important bit for us is is the play side is always enjoying what you're doing from when you're doing a competitor research to learn early designs always having play enthused in any department that's involved in that right the way up to when you actually start mixing and remixing the product as well and you know we've got this we've got this thing where on our product we see it as three stages for the for the learning you've got this discovery stage where a kid goes out and they're just like i'm going to digest as much information as i can i don't know everything i'm going to digest as much as i can and then they go to control stage it's like i'm stop digesting i'm going to start taking ownership of what i'm doing and then they hit the next stage after that which is transference which is when okay so i've done all that i've got all this knowledge but i've also got all my contextual knowledge around that and i'm going to transfer that into something special and that for us is when the magic really happens in the product in that transference stage where we've done the discovery of doing the competitor research started to control develop the early designs the early prototypes taking them out and then based around the mixed interpretation of data on different customers on both internals and externals we've been able to start remixing and reinterpreting what our product looks like i would love to be able to show you how much our product evolved the one that launched in january but it looked to begin with like a green a green screen with a little fat back on the back when it first started just like a little lump on the back and it went right the way to this this beautiful thing we created the end and what the purpose was at the beginning was completely different to what we developed at the end and that's another important aspect in what you're working on is you've got to be agile you've got to take in this data and then be able to readjust based around this data in an agile way i guess what i'm trying to get at throughout all this talk is really the most important thing of everything else is that you're not competing in any way for tech you're not competing against technology for jobs if you start looking at how important these soft skills are for you and in fact if you start deprioritizing some of the hard skills that are being taught then you can actually help thrive and grow in this sort of this this sort of new time and you know with this sort of coming forth industrial revolution i think it's really exciting time for product development product management and product development as it is as we are going to be the people who are going to be building the infrastructure with great teams to ensure that we all thrive and adapt and reinvent in this sort of coming time in this coming wave and so therefore i think what's most important in all of this is for now you've you've got to start also thinking of developing products that can help us shape this new and exciting world so thank you