 Okay. Thank you all for joining the Product School Webinar. Today, I'm going to talk about how to delight internal customers through product discovery. I would like to thank my leaders, mentors, and Product School to give me an opportunity to share my experience and learnings with you all today. Let's start with my introduction. I'm a Senior Product Manager at Amazon, AWS team helping our sales team. So our enterprise customers with their cloud and digital transformation. Prior to Amazon, I was at American Express, empowering sales team, help small business and corporate customers with their financial needs and grow their business. At McKesson, I used to help our customer service team help the patient get on therapy as soon as possible. I started my journey as a software engineer. My passion to solve customer problems have led me into this successful product management journey. Before we start the presentation, let's clarify some of the definitions. What is internal products? Internal products are the products that help our colleagues, sales, servicing, marketing, engineers, or any many more, help them better serve our end customers. In this presentation, I'm going to refer them the internal users as customers. Product discovery is a process to deeply understand the customer needs and the pain points. Test and validate the solution before they are built. UX also call us user experience team, help the product team do the research, design, user testing, and many more, such as human-centered design. Today, we will cover why internal products? What defines the success of internal products? Product discovery process, some of the frameworks that I have used, and key takeaways. Why internal products? Internal products are to help our colleagues better serve our end customers. Employee availability is always limited as compared to its demand. As Richard Branson says, take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers. Quite often, internal products are lower in the priority as compared to customer-facing products. With the recent focus on digital transformation, customers expect not only the high-quality products, but also the high-quality customer experience across all channels. Maybe phone, mail, digital, or web. For our colleagues to better serve our customers, they need better tools. Most of the time, their journey with the tools is disjointed and lot of manual and multiple steps. So let's take this opportunity to see how we can improve our internal products for our internal customers. What defines the success of an internal product? Enhance quality, enhance customer experience that can be measured through the customer satisfaction, also known as CSAT rating, or the NPS score, which is also called as net promoter score. Intuitive experience and self-training can help with the early adoption, quick onboarding of the users that can be measured through product adoption, engagement, and retention. Last but not the least, all of this is for the efficiency and productivity for our sales and servicing team. This would help them to attend additional phone calls or additional requests and in turn provide business value to the organization leading to an end customer satisfaction. There is always an uncertainty when you have to make a product decisions and product decisions are made probably monthly, weekly, daily, and every moment. As part of product discovery, we need to mitigate three types of risk. Desirability is the product desirable and usable by a real customer. Viability, will this product work for our business and bring value to our customers? Physibility, K&R engineers build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have. And if we mitigate all these three risks, we would be able to innovate and build the products that our customers cannot live without. Product discovery have two main parts. Problem space, solution space. Problem space help us define the right problem to solve. Solution space helps a product team to solve the product problem in the right way. The input to the product discovery either is a business challenge or a business goal. Let's start with understanding who our customer is. What are their motivations? What are their goals? What are their pain points? And this can be done through user research, interviews, focus group, data analysis. Once we have the problems listed, next is to nail down the problem that is what's solving with your product based on the impact and value it brings to the customer. So that's the prioritization. The outcome of the problem space can be a defined vision, can be a hypothesis statement, or sometimes they call it as product requirements document or a business case. And then the input is to the solution space where you come up with the different ideas, start thinking back, involve your engineering and the design team to come up with different options and create a prototype. Prototype can be as easy as a sketch, markup, working prototype, or might be a flow that mimics the end user experience. Once the prototype is ready, test that idea or the prototype with the customers to validate the usability. That can be done through user testing, A-B testing or user interviews. Once tested, you will have a well-defined customer problem with a validated solution to build and launch. Who should be involved in the product discovery? It's commonly called as product discovery trio with product manager, Techlead and UX. Traditionally, product manager was to do all the discovery work and provide the requirements to the UX and engineering team to design and build the solution. Oftentimes, product manager doesn't know what's possible and engineers cannot build what's been asked without having the validated design from the UX. To solve this problem right, product manager, UX designer and the Techlead should be responsible for the product outcome. They should be doing the interviewing the customers, creating the ideas, validating the prototype. All of this can be done together. You can involve others if available, but at a minimum product manager, Techlead and the UX designer should be involved in the product discovery process. I'm going to walk through one of the discovery method that I have used for my internal products and you can tailor as needed, but I would like to share this with you. The input to this is the business goal and then I go and validate with the customers, identify who the customers are, who this, who can, what are their problems, what are their motivations and the goals creating the personas and then define the problem. And once we have the problem prioritized, what are the problems worth solving that can meet the business goal? Creating a product vision, how might it be and the hypothesis for the product. Once the hypothesis and the vision is ready, creating prototypes, ideating different approaches for the solutions, talking to the engineers and the design team, creating a prototype, testing with the end user to confirm the usability. And then once we have the finalized prototype and the solution, creating a minimum lovable product features and the success metrics, what will define the success of the product so that we will be measuring after launch. And then it goes to the engineering team to build and then we launch it for a handful of users, the champion users. So that we can do a A-B testing for one of the cohort, get their feedback and iterate on the same product before we do a full launch. So in this scenario, I have kind of like involved our customers throughout the product lifecycle. And this help us with iterative learning and making sure that we don't have any unknown needs of the customer that have been deprived. So keeping the customer at the center of the product lifecycle, help us create the product that our customers cannot live without. So let's take this example, which I have kind of mimic it, which for the customer service optimization and what the business goal, the input to the product discovery here is reduce the customer wait time, improve turnaround times and increase the employee skill and satisfaction. These are common goals for the customer service or the call center. Through the user research, the user pain points can be manual customer search, too many complex tools to serve a customer and extended call resolution time. Once we have the user pain points, we can create the journey map to identify what tools are needed, what tools the user currently use as well as looking at what information is needed to serve the customer call. And based on that creating a vision for the product, provide a seamless, intuitive and integrated customer service experience for our agents to efficiently and effectively solve customer issues. And then come up with the ideas, like a couple of ideas that I have listed here is click to dial that can help with the manual customer search and simplified integrated user experience. This can be a UI where we capture the information that's needed for multiple systems in one simple UI so that us customer service agents can attend the call and increase the turnaround time. Success metrics can be call resolution time which should be reduction in the call resolution type, adoption and engagement of this new product and the customer satisfaction level that will help with the qualitative results. So what are the key takeaways? Start with the customer outcome and work backwards. Have recurring meetings with your customer for incremental learning. You don't need to always have the user interviews. You can have focus groups. You can send some surveys or you can have user research. If you have a UX team, you can do the user research or an ongoing for incremental learning. Involve engineering and UX team in your product discovery. Build a continuous feedback mechanism with the customer so that your product continue to evolve for the upcoming needs. Tailor and use your product discovery approach to get closer to your customer that works for you and your team. Thank you. And I would be ending with one of the key code for Martin Kagan. Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user needs, combined with an equally deep understanding of what's just now possible. So getting closer to your customer is the biggest outcome of a product discovery. Thank you. And you can reach out to me at LinkedIn for any feedback or questions. Thank you.