 Hi everyone. I am so excited to be here today. It's very special for me because I love PradaCon. It's one of the PradaCon conferences that I look forward to every year. And this year I can be here as a speaker versus an attendee. And as Chantel mentioned, my father is in the crowd today. Who I haven't been able to spend a ton of time with due to the pandemic and because he lives in Thailand. So it's very special that he's been able to come join and hear me speak. I do have a lot of content to cover today. And I think I'm the last act standing between you all and lunch, so I'll jump right to it. As Chantel mentioned, today I'm going to be talking to you all about how to gamify your product career. As far as agenda, we'll talk about games first, a little bit about the games industry, and we'll also talk about how do we dismissify gamification. What is it and talk through some use cases of it in product. Finally, we'll apply some of these techniques to your actual product career. So first I'll tell you all a little bit about myself. I started my career in management consulting and there I worked with some of the top Fortune 500 companies on things like new product development, M&A, and growth strategy. I also spent some time working with early and growth stage startups too. This is really where I learned to love product because I was working with founding CEOs. These were the visionaries and bootstrappers who were working and getting money from their friends and family to really drive a vision that they believed in. And it really inspired me to pursue a career in product because I wanted to be a builder too. I overlapped a little bit with Jose who spoke before me at American Express where I worked on a number of different products and built teams across data, personalization, martech, and a developer experience platforms. And today I work in Amazon games. So many of you all probably know or have used Amazon to buy physical goods, but we have also invested a ton in terms of our entertainment businesses. And my role in the game growth team is to figure out how do we take that super successful commerce flywheel and reimagine it for digital experiential products like games. And games has been one of the most challenging, dynamic, and fun industries that I've worked in. So let's talk about games. How many of you all are gamers? If you are, raise your hands. Let me see them. Put them up. Okay. Do you see some maybe 20, 30% of the crowd? So historically, when we thought about gamers, we probably had something like this in mind. We probably, yes, we probably imagined maybe kids, probably usually guys, a little bit socially inept, maybe hanging out in their mom's basement. So obviously not the most flattering stereotypes that are associated with gamers. And it was the pervasiveness and persistence of the stereotype that prevented a lot of people from wanting to identify with the gamer title. Now today, looking at today's landscape, it's quite different. In terms of the games industry, it is set to be a $200 billion industry by the end of this year. It has a keger of 8.4%, which makes it the fastest growing entertainment industry in the world. So this is faster than sports and television. Looking globally, there are 3.2 billion players worldwide. That's 40% of the entire world's population. And if we're going to look at the U.S., we can really see just how diverse the industry has gotten. So today, when we look at the U.S., it's about 50% who are actually female. Over 66% is over the age of 18, and the median age of a gamer is actually 34 years old. More and more we see people playing mobile games instead of PC and console, and more and more we see people playing casual games. And casual games are different because they're not just marketed towards hardcore gamers. Basically, they're marketed towards a wider audience, and they're going to be games like your Stardew Valley, your Angry Birds, and Candy Crush. The reason why I wanted to talk a little bit about this is that I wanted to highlight just how diverse of an industry it's become, just how large it's become, and the idea that you might not see yourself as a gamer, but honestly anyone can be a gamer today. And it's a lot more socially accepted and something that people are proud of. So let's talk about gamification. So it's no surprise that with the success of games, people wanted to copy it, figure out what works so well with games and how can we apply it to other things. So the dictionary definition of gamification is the application of game design elements and game principles in non-game context to be able to drive engagement. So when we talk about game design elements, that includes things like rules of play, it can include mechanics like reward systems, points, leaderboards, and things like that. And basically gamification became popular because people realized that folks were willing to spend hours and hours playing games, but when it came time to do something that was challenging or important to someone's life, they often delayed it or were hesitant to actually do it. So they said, I wonder if we can harness some of the things that make games so addicting, so fun, and try to apply it in a different context. There's a lot of literature that's been written about gamification from people who are way smarter than I am, but today I'm going to take you through a very popular framework. This framework is called Yukai Chow's Octalysis Framework. Yukai Chow is a fairly renowned gamification expert and pioneer in the field. And what he came up with is this octagonal shaped framework. Basically what he said in his belief was that the reason why we do certain things is because we have certain drivers or reasons or motivations. And there's eight key drivers usually involved in human behavior. The first driver he talks about is epic meaning. So basically the desire to do something that's bigger than yourself. The second is accomplishment. So the desire to be able to achieve mastery and progression. The third is empowerment, feeling like you're in control to be able to use your creativity and get feedback on things. The fourth is on ownership. So the desire to collect things, whether it's well for actual physical things. Fifth, social influence. So how others interact with you make you do things differently. The sixth is around scarcity. So because there isn't a lot of something or because something is out of reach, you actually want it more. And the seventh is unpredictability because you don't know what's going to happen next. You're even more interested and motivated. And the last is an obvious one, which is avoidance, where you want to actually stay away from something that's going to give you a negative response. So he looks at all these different things and he says, usually it's one or multiple of these things that drive us to behave a certain way. And he actually splits it towards the left side. He says these activities are more associated with the left brain. It involves things like logic and calculations and are actually more extrinsically motivated. And on the right side, it's more creativity, more self-expression, and this is more intrinsic motivation. And because this framework wasn't complex enough as it is, he decided to split it down from top to bottom as well. And on the top, he has things that he calls white hat. Basically, all the motivations on the top are things that are actually positive, inspirational, and kind of give you a growing feeling to want to do things. Whereas the things on the bottom, he calls black hat, meaning you want to do it because you're trying to avoid something that's negative. And the reason why I wanted to go through this framework is because the whole idea is that gamification is not about throwing in a bunch of game mechanics into something and hoping that it'll make it more effective. That's really how you kind of end up with Frankenstein products or early applications of gamification that really failed. So nowadays, we see things that are a lot more mature, a lot more developed. His model basically says that you should start in the middle, start within the octagon, first understand what are the motivations that you're trying to drive, and then from there, figure out which mechanics make the most sense. So for example, if you are looking at ownership, there are certain key game mechanics that help you enhance that. Ownership for digital games could be things like virtual goods or virtual pets. For social influence, you see features like likes or funding. And for accomplishment, probably one of the more obvious, you see things like leaderboards, reward systems, and progression bars. So let's go through some of the use cases where we see gamification being successfully applied in products. The first is dual lingo. So this is an education use case, but dual lingo is basically a language learning app. It actually has lots of different game mechanics throughout the app, but we're just going to focus on a few today. So for the first one, basically, dual lingo has you go through multiple lessons, and as you go through it, you gain more and more mastery. And it has something called feedback loops where after you complete a lesson, you usually get some sort of compliment, tell you that you're acing to skill, you get immediate feedback on something that you've done. The second is it ties to achievement, basically where you can see progression. You can set your goals for the day, but you can also set goals over time and see how you are tracking. The third that it looks to is leaderboards. So leaderboards has a little bit of a social element to it, as well as an achievement element. The leaderboards essentially let you see where you fall across friends and family so that if you see that you're falling behind or if you're ahead of someone, you might want to be more motivated to move forward. The next example is from Amazon. So at Amazon, we have something called a phone tool. And our phone tool is essentially a bunch of employee profiles where you can see who a person is, you can see what team they're on, you can read a little bit of a bio about them. But we also have a section called awards or phone tool badges. And these are badges that are given to you for completing a certain event. You might get a custom badge for completing a training for a certain product launch or a leadership principle. So for example, this individual has a badge for being a frugal flyer. And basically the whole idea is, again, to tap into things like achievement to show that because you're so engaged with the company, you're acquiring more and more things. It also taps into ownership because you want all the badges. They're all different. And it's especially appealing for folks like me, frankly, where I'm a big collector. I like accumulating things. And I often compare it to if folks have seen the movie Office Space where Jennifer Aniston works at a restaurant and she gets scolded because she has these suspenders and doesn't have enough pins in it. These pins and these suspenders are a way for the restaurant workers to show how excited they're working for that franchise. And she only has a few and it's called flair. So basically this is a way for you to show your flair at Amazon. So now that I've talked through a few examples of gamification, let's talk through how we can apply these to your career. One of the first things I want to just make sure is clear is when I talk about gamification, there's a lot of different games and genres out there. But in this instance, the genre that's probably most similar to this is something called RPGs or role-playing games. And in these games, you basically choose a character and you go through different quests, missions, allies to be able to achieve some overarching goal. So this is probably the most similar to what I'm talking through today. And the most obvious analogy I just want to make sure folks know is that in this instance of the game, you basically are the main character. You are the main player and the game is an analogy for your life or in this case, your product career. So I will talk through four different ways to do this today. The first is to define that mission or what are you, what you are trying to achieve. The second is to map out the levels and quests that are tied to that mission. The third is to assess your stats and the four fists to play co-op. So the first is the most important. It's about defining this epic mission, something that is greater than yourself. And again, that greater than yourself component is the most important part. In a few gamification books, there is an example that's cited about this professor named Adam Grant from the University of Wharton. And basically, he does this study where a bunch of different faculty are required to help fund raise at the end of the year to raise money for the school. And study A, he reminds the faculty that if we do this, you'll get paid your bonuses, you'll get your salaries. And the second group, he says, if you do this, these can be used as scholarships for students who really need them. These can be used to improve the actual campus and make it a better place for everyone. You can probably see where I'm going with this, but obviously in study B, they were able to raise two times as much money because they cared about something, again, that felt greater than themselves and their individual needs. So that's really, really important. The whole reason why we're doing is because there's something epic about it. Now in games, oh, now in games, my mic's not working. So now in games, epic missions can vary. In Mario, his epic mission is to save Princess Peach. Those of you who play among us, your epic mission as a crewmate is to be able to figure out who the imposter is on the ship and kind of defeat them. In Final Fantasy, Cloud's epic mission is to save the planet. So again, the underlying theme is this idea that it's something that's greater than yourself. Now, if we look at this with people, what are some personal epic missions for founders or CEOs? We have some examples here. So Oprah's, Oprah's epic mission is to be a teacher and to be able to inspire her students so that they can do more than they realize they can do. Steve Jobs is always a product favorite. His epic mission when he was Apple was to create tools and products for the mind that could advance the mankind. Amanda Steinberg is the CEO of a company, founder of a company, rather called Daily Worth, which is a financial media company for women. And her mission was around cultivating self-worth and financial security for women. Now the fourth one is myself. My epic mission is to use some intrinsic qualities I have around curiosity, empathy, and tenacity to really build learnings not just for myself, but also for others and potentially the industry and experiences. And notice I said experiences, not products that can actually change people's lives for good. So it's really important for you to formulate that epic mission, figure out what's most important to you, and make sure that, again, that it's bigger than yourself. The second thing is once you define your epic mission, your norfs are what you're working towards, you're going to want to map out levels and quests. So what are levels and quests for the non-gamers in the audience? Take this example here for World of Warcraft if we have some World of Warcraft players in the crowd. The mechanics vary by game, but in the case of the World of Warcraft, you essentially have a player, and that player starts off at a certain level. And over time it can go and progress through multiple levels. Levels are essentially stages for that player. In order for them to advance to the next level, they have to complete something called quests. And quests are essentially tasks that they have to do. It could be something like killing a monster, solving a puzzle, saving somebody. And over time they get more and more experience, and they can quote-unquote level up. By completing quests, you get something called experience points. So each level usually has a certain number of quests so that you can advance forward. But there's also this concept in games of side quests. Side quests are different from main quests. They're not mandatory, they're optional, and basically they're created as a way for you to further explore the game, basically to interact with the digital world a little bit more. And they're also important because you actually oftentimes can gain a ton of experience by going on these side quests. So let's talk about a sample product manager, Questtree. Questtrees are created for games that have lots of different quests and lots of different side quests. It helps you map out overall how does the game look. So for this one, I'll just use myself as an example. And again, all this is illustrative. But let's say there's four levels. The first is you're being a product manager. The second is around being a people leader. The third is if you're head of product or overseeing a whole suite or portfolio of products. And the last is being a thought leader where you're becoming a teacher or contributing back to the space. For each of these levels, there's a set of quests that you need to complete before you advance to the next one. So for example, you probably cannot be considered someone who has mastery as a people leader if you haven't created a development plan or if you haven't completed a performance review. You probably can't be considered a thought leader if you haven't published any original research. On the right side, we have side quests or things that are not necessarily tied to your job, not necessarily said that it gets you to the next level, but they're equally important. So examples of side quests can be participating in a hackathon. So working on a problem space that's different from your day to day one. Or it could be basically attending a conference like you all are here today, not necessarily part of your job, but you're amping up your skills, your network by being here. So third, you have to assess your stats. Stats, again, like all things in games can get quite complex and there's a lot of different terms for it. Sometimes they're called skills, sometimes powers, sometimes talents, but I'll try to use a fairly simple example to take you all through it. Because we all love Pokemon, we'll use the example of Pokemon. So here we have a character, Bulbasaur, and we have Dragonite. So when it comes to player stats, there are certain things that are intrinsic to the player and we call those attributes, things that are natural and just kind of come naturally with them. And second, we have things called skills. These are learned abilities that you gain as you get more and more experiences. So looking at Bulbasaur, we can see that some of his natural attributes are his ability to vine whip, while Dragonite's natural abilities include his ability to drag and tail. But they also have some common elements that we evaluate them against in terms of skills. There are things like their speed, their hit points, their defense abilities. And you can see it looking at this kind of spider chart where they fall across each of these different areas. So each character has a different set of innate abilities that are special to it, and it has different skills that they get evaluated on. And as you go through the game, this changes over time. When it comes to PM skills, there are tons and tons of scorecards, matrixes out there. Plenty of them have been published on Medium. Your companies probably have some as well. But this is one that is illustrative again. But what I want to stress here is that in order for you to figure out where you want to go, you need to figure out what are the competencies that are necessary, and what's the proficiency at each of these levels. So what you need to be a product manager is going to be different from what you need to be a thought leader. Usually it's a progression where you have to achieve increasing mastery at each skill in order to be able to do this. And what I want to stress here is the importance of a rubic or benchmark to look against. The other thing I would say is, even though there are a lot of scorecards and matrices online, something that I like to do is calibrate it with people who I know are in these roles right now. Are they exhibiting the same levels that I'm seeing, or is it different? So that's just something that's super important. Next, let's kind of look at a character profile together and build on some of the things that we've talked about. We'll use myself as an example, with a little avatar there. The first thing I'd say is, let's figure out what my epic mission is. So I'll put that up there again. Second, what are some of my attributes? So in terms of advantages, I'm a connector. I love connecting with other folks, connecting folks to each other. I have a lot of curiosity, and I like to think that I have a lot of integrity. Disadvantages, just like any good PM, I have lots of bouts of imposter syndrome. I get hyper-focused on things, and I get a lot of high-stubborn. If I were to evaluate my skills against the scorecard prior, it would probably look a little bit like this, which puts me as a Level 3 ahead of product, which is fortunate, because that is what my role is today. So I'm qualified for it. And if you look at this, if I want to move up to the next level, one of the things that I need to work on is my public speaking. Therefore, I might go on some quests to actually gain those public speaking skills. So this is why, again, I am here today, and you are all helping me level up in this area. Another area that I like to include is achievements. You all know, as I mentioned earlier, I like flair and badges. So for this example, I show what kind of different emojis or icons I can use for different certificates that I've gained or different products I've managed or different talks that I've given. A lot of you might look at this and say, okay, when you're assessing your stats, it looks a little bit like a resume, but there are some key differences that I want to highlight. The first is that this is for you. It's not for a hiring manager. It's not for a recruiter. This is personal to yourself. So with that being said, you should be honest in it. You should not be exaggerating things because you're using it. You kind of know yourself best. So stick to the facts. Be candid about it. The second is because it's for yourself, make it personal, make it fun. If you guys want this template, I'm happy to share it, but there are probably other templates that you can create so that you can really show your skillset the best. And the third thing I would say is, unlike your resume that only gets updated every time you look for a new job, this should be something that you look at consistently, you consistently update as you go on more quests, as you improve your skills and as you power up. So the last thing is around playing co-op. So Singer Player Games was a lot of where the industry was for a long time, but then the concept of multiplayer came in. And with the pandemic, as well as a lot of technological advances, we've seen more and more multiplayer games. So playing co-op means to play cooperatively. That means it's not just you in the game. That means that there are other characters as well that you can interact with. And there are a lot of benefits to playing co-op that I'll talk about. So when you play co-op in games, again, these RPG games has this idea of classes. I'll use the game Lost Ark as an example, also an Amazon plug for one of our games. But basically in Lost Ark, there's these different classes that you can choose to play in terms of the character you choose. There are some characters that are called warriors. They have a ton of brute force. They're physically really strong. Then there are other characters called mages. Basically, what they have is the ability to heal. They have the ability to cast spells. And we have martial artists who are really speedy and have great agility. So you might choose the one that speaks to you the most, but you also want to create a cohort or a team of folks to have these different skill sets so that you can do things together. And the magic of it is when you play co-op in a game, the mission that you can go on becomes that much more epic. You can achieve so much more because it's not just yourself. So in terms of the worlds that you're conquering, the monsters that you're fighting, they get that much bigger. And that's why a lot of folks like to play co-op. So some tips in terms of how to play co-op in your career. There is the obvious group of folks that you have. I think Jose talked about the three amigos, the product, tech, and design. But that's just one area. I would say that you should definitely look at other areas where you can find players to kind of team up with. You can do things like meetups, look at Slack channels, join affinity groups. You should also look at recruiting some diverse skills. One of the reasons why people love playing co-op is because it can complement your skill set or it can amplify your skill set. Another thing to consider is playing with different people across different levels. You want to be able to level up yourself by playing with someone who's a higher level or working with someone who's a higher level, but you also want to be able to give back and help others level up too. And finally, the most important piece is, what is your shared vision? It's really hard to get behind or play co-op if you don't have a shared vision around things. And in terms of sample group quests that are super epic or especially epic when you do it in a group, these can include things like brainstorming. Brainstorming is the best application of playing co-op because diverse opinions coming together will lead to better ideas. So design sprints, hackathons, idea thons, great ways to play co-op. And when it comes to building things, sure, you can do certain things on your own, but if you do it with other people, it can become that much more impactful and you can also de-risk. So that's why you see so many times co-founders or co-authors of things like books and companies. All right, so again, I know that we have about a couple of minutes before we hit lunchtime, but I did want to leave you all with some key takeaways. The first is that the games industry is huge. It's growing. Anyone can be a gamer. Even if you're not a gamer, I would encourage you to look to this industry for learning. There's a lot of great things going on. The second is that gamification is not just about tactics or mechanics. It's about understanding motivations, figuring out what's most important and then optimizing for that by applying those techniques. And the third is to gamify your career. You have to remember, again, that you're the main character, that you're the key player. This career is for yourself. You should define your own version of an epic mission. You should write it down. You should break it down into where the levels, where the quests, and go on those side quests to get additional learnings. You should assess your stats, be honest about them, track them, and figure out how you're progressing over time. And the fourth is play co-op, find others, and have fun. Thank you all.