 Hi everyone and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. I'm Katrin, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon Lab 126. I've been a PM for about eight years now with almost six years in robotics. Before I get into the meaty part of this talk, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my path to launching a consumer robot. I studied media technology at Elmino University of Technology. It's a small university in the middle of Germany. During these studies, I developed a very strong interest in the usefulness and usability of technology. Often when I'm asked, or when I have asked engineers, why are they building something? I got a response similar to the response in Big Bang Theory because we can. To me, this was not really the right reason. So I started doing research and usability engineering and followed through with a dissertation on user experience engineering. During the research, I noticed in order to actually make an impact and to reach the right audience, the thesis needs to be targeted at product managers, not at engineers. And this was my very first touch point with product managers. As part of the thesis, I got to interview highly successful product managers to understand their major challenges and what they would need to define more human-centered products. With their responses, I got more and more interested in that field and decided in order to make an impact myself, I need to become product manager. Hence, I accepted a management trainee position at RobotBarsch in Germany that allowed me to get glimpses of different business units and the overall workings in a relatively large corporation. During this program, I really got fascinating opportunities to manage innovative products from the idea on and I became the product leader for a voice-enabled smart home hub. Also, the program allowed me to come to the amazing Silicon Valley and let me stay here to get kind of my product to an important prototype development stage. I'm not going to go into the details, but this product did not launch as well, a popular voice-enabled smart speaker swiftly gained market dominance. However, this led me to my next adventure and the opportunity to be a product manager for Curry, the adorable home robot, my first chance to work on an autonomously moving character in the home. Curry's value proposition was more emotional, so not utilitarian as its goal was to bridge the gap between people's fears of having robots in their homes to welcoming like a robot companion in their families. Curry's mission was to bring smiles to its family members with moments the robot captured autonomously throughout the day. I'm also not going into the details here either, but this robot didn't launch. It was a pretty hard time for consumer robots. So I went on to my next adventure. To round up my PM experiences, I wanted to finally launch the products of features I'm working on. So I decided to follow an offer from Fetch Robotics to work on intralogistic robots that were already on the market. Although not in the B2C space, so no consumer robots, I was able to collect valuable launch and post launch expertise. And this time, there was no other reason besides Amazon knocked on the door. And basically, without being explicit, asked me to be a PM for a consumer robot. I could not say no as my heart was still wanting to launch a consumer robot so badly. And overall, my professional goal was to launch one of the first home robots that can become a companion. So here I am, the team announced Amazon Astro in September this year. And yeah, this also concludes my journey to finally launching a consumer robot. Enough about me. When I was asked to present at product school, I not only felt honored, but I also wondered what would be of interest for the audience. Unfortunately, I was not able to ask you that question. But I learned that most of you are aspiring PMs, so I'm giving it a shot with the following takeaways for this webinar. From my personal expertise or experience, what are the qualities and skills of a well-rounded consumer robot PM? What is a robot experience? And how do we create a robot experience? And believe me, this takes a village. Before I dive into the qualities and skills of a consumer robot PM, let me briefly define what I mean when I talk about consumer robots. For a consumer robot, the target user is the end user. So a typical person like you and me, in contrast to, for instance, a warehouse robot. The robots I worked on at Fetch Robotics, where the target user is more like a warehouse worker, a very special type of person using the product in a very specific context. Why is this important? Because it is important to understand that the target user well, specifically their needs, goals and limitations, with respect to the robot's context of use. It's also important to understand the target customer, so you know who would be buying your product to keep the business going. In the consumer robot field, this is typically a normal consumer like you and me. If I use the warehouse robot example again, though, the target customer would be the warehouse owner or manager. Also, I already mentioned the context of use earlier, so for the consumer robots I'm referring to, the context of use is more in the home with focus on everyday life. And key features include autonomous mobility, a character AI that learns to become their user's companion and be useful throughout their day. Examples are Curry, to some extent vacuum robots, although they're missing the companion part, however they get the usefulness pretty right, and Astral. Now, since I defined the product category a little bit better, we can talk about the skills needed to be a well-rounded consumer robot PM. And I want to do this on the example of my launching a consumer robot journey. First and foremost, I feel there needs to be the passion and curiosity about consumer robots, user needs and emerging technologies. Secondly, the PM needs to be able to innovate and execute, think about solutions for the needs and problems identified and create a prototype to validate assumptions on need or problem fulfillment. Thirdly, prioritize and communicate. The well-rounded PM is able to make judgment calls on priorities for features and bugs that are typically quite complex with various dependencies and is effectively communicating their strategy, requirements and prioritization to the team, in fact, to various stakeholders. I further learned that it is very important for a PM to not only listen very closely to their users and customers, but also to their stakeholders in order to make the right judgment calls. With that, it is important to empathize with users, customers, partners and other stakeholders such as engineers, sales, marketing and designers. And lastly, this is something that Amazon looks into deeply too when selecting their PMs. The well-rounded consumer robotics PM needs to have strong customer obsession that means decisions will always be made with the best interest of the customer in mind. And of course, we also need very technical, deep technical knowledge in order to be able to dive deep into problems and solutions. And that concludes the qualities and skills of a consumer robotics PM at least based on my personal experience. So let's shift gears a little bit and dive into the more interesting part of this webinar or meaty part. With the title, Creating Robot Experiences That People Love, I hope I was able to get all of you thinking, what does that mean? Specifically, what is a robot experience? Good question. Let's start with what a user experience short UX is. You probably all have heard about UX, but as a refresher, the International Organization of Standardization, ISO, defines UX as a person's perceptions and responses resulting from the use and or anticipated use of a product, system or service. They also note that this includes all the user's emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, even behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use. It's adding a lot of psychology to it. But also they note it's a consequence of brand image, presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behavior, assistive capabilities, as well as the user's internal and physical state. But although this captures UX well from a psychological perspective with a focus on the user, it is important to add how the UX is influenced by business needs and technological feasibility, which I find is greatly summarized in this model of ideas, design, thinking methodology, and this is specifically relevant for PMs. In order to create user experiences, PMs need to balance business needs, technological feasibility and user needs. But now how does this translate to robot experience? Well, I'm taking this very well thought through and standardized definition of user experience and personally, so this is not standardized, define robot experience as a person's perception and responses resulting from the interaction with and or anticipated interaction with a robot. So this representation kind of outlines the dynamic nature of UX and also RX, so the robot experience. By creating anticipated experiences, we also influence the momentary experience as emotional reactions are evaluative feelings based on the ability of how the robot is able to meet the expected or anticipated experience. Furthermore, this evaluative feeling needs, feeds the reflective experience, post interaction and influences future interactions with the robot, which again feeds the anticipated experience of future interaction. So all of these aspects deserve their own presentation and definitely deeper consideration, which I don't have a lot of time for, but let me spend a few seconds to briefly speak about each of the aspects. So need fulfillment and feature promise are influenced by brand, system, properties, user characteristics and context parameters. They form the motivation to use the robot while interacting with it. Users are perceiving functional and non-functional characteristics of the robot, novelty, value, as well as obstacles in control. And this perception leads to measurable emotional reactions specifically like balance and arousal in the short term, as well as mood and sentiment in the long term. And I'm pointing this out as measuring the RX is important to validate your RX assumptions. And with this, I want to conclude discussing the definition of RX. It is important to understand what defines it in order to not only measure it correctly, but more importantly, in order to create it. So that leads us to how do we create such robot experiences? It was mentioned before, if you remember, but they are more central to an experience than previously pointed out, psychological needs. I'm truly convinced that this is the basis and key to creating experiences. And my theory is backed by a popular group of psychologists called Sheldon et al. who argue that fulfilling psychological needs leads to positive experiences. After various experiments on which needs actually create positive experiences, they boil down the list to a bit more of a handful of key needs. Autonomy, independence, competence, effectiveness, relatedness, belongingness, self-esteem, self-respect, security control and pleasure stimulation. This list already provides a pretty good framework to think through and should also overall provide a basis for you as a PM to operationalize those needs for your specific product robotic area and target user group. I'm not going to go into those details, but rather provide examples of robot features that help to fulfill those specific needs. So example for autonomy, independence, voice interaction, or the variety of responses and content, the need for competence, effectiveness can be fulfilled with a feature like find my keys like an IoT integration or in general intelligent mobility, so the ability of the robot to autonomously move around. The need for relatedness, belongingness can be fulfilled in many different ways. For instance, two-way talk when you're utilizing the robot, but also maybe a companion app with it. Staying nearby, which is more kind of the robot person direct relationship while the robot is staying close to a person or the character in order to improve building that relationship. So I suspect you're getting the idea. I'm not going. I'm not reading what is on that slide, but I hope that these examples can give you a good first step into thinking about the psychological needs and how they can translate into robot features. Although this is a great framework to have as a basis to creating experiences, it doesn't get us to an experience yet. So what do we need to know or to do to create robot experiences? And I'm looking through the experience driven PM lens here and now we'll bombard you with this flow. I call this the IREEP, the iterative robot experience engineering process. There with me, we will go through it step by step. And you will see a lot of the steps are likely familiar to you. I simply want to make sure that I provide you an applicable flow that incorporates all the previous learnings. So you will be able to create great robot experiences that make people's life better in the not so far future. Let's start with envisioning the robot experience, the very first step. Goal of this step is to scope and identify our X criteria that are known typically based on evidence as such as user research or thought to be drivers for your specific robot. In this step, it is important to define a visionary goal. That means defining a long-term vision, including a time frame that explains why the robot is supporting people in the future. Typically, that vision is based on fulfilling those earlier mentioned psychological needs and defining this visionary goal helps to communicate the product's conceptual idea and provides the starting point for building a roadmap for product development. So very important. And then you decide on our X strategy based on the understanding of the marketplace and human needs. You decide on a strategy that is either market driven or market driving. And I'm sure you know all about that already. So I won't go into those details just so you kind of find it in the right step within the process. So based on your vision and strategy, you start defining your requirements. In order to do so, you need to have a clear criteria or in general clear criteria for greatness or great experience. Those also help to provide metrics for our X evaluations and to understand users' personal goals. Understanding personal goals help you to define use cases, write your user stories and to prioritize your features. And you guessed it, a general context for these goals are provided by the needs you have identified to fulfill with your robot. Let's dive deeper into specifying your RX requirements. So the goal of this step is to specify the perceived usability and attractiveness of the robot by breaking down the high level psychological needs into kind of neat items and then relating them to actual product features. The general result of specifying that RX is a clear understanding of that usability of the desired product that you incorporate into very first design drafts. And this, on the other hand, builds the basis for implementing the RX and therefore for the concept, prototype or product to be evaluated. So implementing the RX is a fun one that I personally leave to the engineers. At least this is not a very typical PM task. However, as a PM, you want to work extremely closely with your engineers and your designers, and you want to help your partners, your engineering and designer partners, to prioritize features, triage bugs, maybe revisit the customer experience or the flow in order for the features to be truly usable and desirable to use. On we go. Now, since we have some sort of a design concept, prototype or product, we need to evaluate whether our planned RX, in fact, creates these experience by collecting user feedback regarding the anticipated and or actual experience. Starting early, such as evaluating rough prototypes and mockups of potential designs will help obtain a deeper understanding of your user needs and provide initial feedback on those design concepts. Results of evaluating the RX affects about how the concept, prototype or product is able to fulfill the specified needs as well as the overall visionary goal. They provide further indications to improve the refined, defined RX. In that case, PMs go back, revisiting their requirements and specifications. So this is back into the loop. But if findings reveal that need fulfillment is similar to what is planned, the iterations will end. And that is it. Although this was rather high level, I hope you were able to take away an overall framework on what defines a robot experience and how to create the experience. With that, I really thank you for your patience and I'm curious to hear or read from you any questions and comments you may have. Thank you.