 Hello, everyone. Welcome to our session about driving product strategy. First, a little about me. My name is Asaf Al-Tagar. I first started my journey as a software developer after several years that I moved into product. Now I've been doing product management for the last nine years. During those years, I had the privilege to work with product teams of various sizes across multiple industries, such as gaming, ad tech, and cyber security. Now I'm part of Salesforce, focusing on service cloud products and services. What we will cover today, we will go over three topics. First, we'll explain what strategy is. Second, we'll review how we can approach building a strategy, and third, we'll deep dive into how PMs are helping to execute on that strategy. As we'll go along, I'll also share tips regarding the different aspects of that. Now, I'll briefly mention what we will not be covering today, so we will not be deep diving into specific product strategies, such as go to market, and we will not expand on data mining methods that product managers can leverage to go-point more justification into the strategy. Let's start. There was a time, this world was a complete mistow to me. I honestly didn't know what it means. It seemed like a very big world, strategy. Sounds like something that means a whole lot, right? But what is strategy? Strategy comes to answer a simple question, with a not so simple answer most of the time. It comes to answer, how do I make that happen? That's it. Strategy are the things that I do to achieve something. In a matter of fact, it applies to anything I want to achieve. Now, in product and the business it supports, strategy takes a certain form, and we'll check that later. Now, from time to time, I hear this. I have a vision of what my business and product would do. It's very clear to me, I can see it, I know my strategy. Now, that might be a problematic state, because we might get confused between the vision we have of what will happen, and the path we need to take in order to manifest that vision. Even if you are visualizing the end result, you still need to make it a reality. And in that reality, your vision needs to bring together multiple outcomes to manifest. Okay, so we have our vision, that we need to articulate what would be the product and business outcomes that vision is bringing together. Those might be that your business is a leading solution in the market. It might be that the business is going x% each year. It might be that you have hundreds of customers using the service unit. Still, not yet your strategy. Your strategy would be the initiatives you'll pursue that help you make progress towards those. Your vision is the end state, the goal, the thing that we want to become a reality. The strategy are the actions we take in order to make that dream come true. So, we now understand what strategy is, but how should we approach building it? Now, when formulating a strategy, you'll basically answer this question. What needs to happen? Okay, how can we better plan for those things that need to happen? So, let's talk about three key points to consider. Where we want to be, or when we want to achieve, those would be the initiatives, those would be the objectives. We talked about those. Where we are right now, that would be the current state of our business or product. And what we want to do, those would be the initiatives. We'll also mention additional aspects, such as timeline of the plan, the players involved, and the dependencies that might be created, starting with center objectives. So, when we are defining our objectives, and we can list any objectives that come to mind, it would be wise if it's a business objective of ours. It might be even wiser if that business objective brings our business or product to its next phase from a market leadership perspective. Might be from an annual revenue perspective, you name it. Next, we have to start somewhere. Now, no matter where, when we are, we are planning the strategy, we need to assess the current situation. After all, we are starting somewhere. So, we should assess the status of our brand, our product, our operation, and our business. Being more specific, we start by asking ourselves, which customer segments are we currently catering for? Can those segments help us achieve our objectives? Do we need to penetrate additional markets? Next, we will need to examine our value proposition. So, what do we currently offer customers? Is it providing substantial value? Is it well differentiated from the other alternatives that are out there? And does it help us bring significant business? And last, we will look at our operations. So, what can our current operations can achieve? What's the current capacity? Is there anything holding us back? Have we built strong marketing and sales channels? Can we rely on those to propel us forward? That is where we start. Of course, each type of business or product might be different and add more considerations. But I see these three as goal to do a majority of models. Next, we actually need to determine what would be the initiatives that will help us obtain the objectives we set. Now, the initiatives that we will get us where we wanna go, we are thinking of the required initiatives that it's easier when you think of the top level activities required to obtain an objective. Let's take an example. We have an objective of growing the business x% a year. Now, as a business, we need to do the following. We need to market, right? We need to attract customers and build our sales pipeline. We need to convert that pipeline into paying customers. We need to demonstrate how the service is valuable. When the goal is to increase the win rate for each segment. And we also need to retain, meaning that our service provides repeatable value. And we can assume that our business can grow on top of those existing customers. Each such activity can be broken into themes, buckets of initiatives. Those initiatives would end up being the strategy that we would execute. Of course, which initiatives should be determined using the data points that we have at hand. Now, this is just an example. Each phase of the product or business may call for emphasis to be made in specific area. Finally, now that we know what we wanna do, we need to determine under which timeline we can deliver all those supporting initiatives. Of course, who is doing what is critical. There will be dependencies between different functions in the org, teams, and even departments. So getting those cleared out early increases the chance of the plan succeeding. Now for our last chapter of this session, this is all about how PMs make that happen. We'll talk about the expectations from PMs as they are the organization or function that promotes large portions of the strategy. Maybe what value would be generated for the customer. Now, while there are various expectations, I think that the following three are core when looking for PMs to forward strategy all the time. The first is to drive alignment. See, it's the PM's responsibility to harness different stakeholders to follow the strategy and without alignment, it would be a lot more challenging. The second is to deliver ongoing value. When executing strategy, PMs are there to make sure progress is made. It might be customer facing or non-customer facing. But moving towards that set objective is a must. Number three is keeping a pulse on what's going on. So when you determine what your plan is, but then things aren't going according to plan, you better adjust it. Otherwise, you risk it not being relevant and kiss your objectives goodbye. Now, alignment is critical to get people working together. People, PMs, they must generate alignment between the dev teams, between marketing and sales, customer success and support teams. The first step for any alignment to take place is to increase awareness. PMs need to be the voice of the market. And when a certain plan or strategy needs to be executed, the teams involved must understand the why. Increasing awareness should message the why before it messages the what. Or promotes the what. You might get compliance if you won't message the why, you might get compliance, but what you really want is buying from your stakeholders and teams. Now, as a PM, you are adding inputs for multiple sources, both internal and external. Those inputs are data points. So some might relate to a gap in the market. Might be the customer is struggling with. Might be something else. Might be something that your competitors are doing. In any case, here are my three tips to increase awareness. First, send a team email with new insights. Can be message, right? But don't be afraid of that unrelated email that has no action items, nothing but pure information or insight. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking. It can provide just another thing to be aware of or consider. Number two is have coffee with your stakeholders. So basic, right? So the main fact of having this time and talk what's top of mind can be the perfect opportunity to discuss strategy. And number three is organizing your data. I'm not talking about your analytics. I'm talking about the scenarios, the triggers, the use cases. Those related customer and customer segments and how those work together. Organizing your product model has immense benefits for everything you do as a peer, specifically on how you communicate and organizing the data helps you structure better communications. Now for our next talking point, you'll need to tell your customers a story. Speaking and describing how your plan is set to achieve its objective is great. But as a PM, you are telling the story of your product and the story needs to make sense from a customer standpoint. Now here are my three tips to making better stories. The story starts with the customer, always. The customer is the hero. It has a name, it has a face, it has an identity. Try to avoid starting from the solution or the technology. My second tip is always map the journey of the customer. The customer is going through a journey and it's within a certain scenario when he's facing a challenge. So make sure you always start with reviewing that scenario, really detailing what the challenge really is. And number three, try to make your slides pop. Seriously, nothing talks to the mind of people like having that mental image of how things work together. The right visuals, illustrations, images sketched, journeys, anything else that increases how relatable your view would feel to the topic. Now the third pillar of alignment is trust. Trust doesn't mean that team should or would blindly follow whatever path was chosen. Trust is for everyone to feel they are together in this decision to execute one strategy over another. So to build trust, you need to get supporting data. Either qualitative or quantitative, it might sound trivial to some, but still, you don't want people to simply take your world for it. Give people external validation to consider. Next thing that we can do to promote trust is to invite developers to customer calls. Specifically with developers, some might really want to hop on calls with a real user. This builds a culture of information sharing and prevents that gated feeling sometimes created when devs only hear from product requirements from the product manager. And the number three thing that you can do to promote trust is don't make it about your own grand vision. Make it about the value that that strategy would generate to your customers. So people want to get around a mission, not a person. So make sure that the value-blinging is number one mission or consideration. Moving on to our next expectation from PMs, which is deliver ongoing value. So the first step is to have a good plan. The plan would determine which capabilities you will work on first and what would be the sequence later on. The plan should align with priorities for each initiative. Now, to get your planning, to make better planning, you should be scenario first, trigger second and use case third. See customers are going through a journey. They don't suddenly appear and do X or Y. During that journey, things happen. Those are your triggers. Those propel customers for a certain reaction, which is where your use cases come into play. So thinking of the customer scenario will help you validate the sequence of capabilities required to have an end-to-end support for that scenario and reduce functional and use of gaps. Additional thing to promote better planning is to be aware of future dependencies. Flash those early. Bring all related teams together as soon as planning becomes relevant because forgetting or missing out on dependencies is the fastest way to miss out on your deliverables. And the number three is simply don't stop. So planning isn't a one-time activity. It's an ongoing activity. It's the backpack that needs to be groomed. It's that urgent request that needs, that is blocking the deal. It's every input you get and learn from and need to consider for your next batch of deliverables. Next one to promote better, to promote ongoing value. We'll talk about negotiations. Negotiations are almost a routine activity. You negotiate with deaf teams. You negotiate with other teams. You even negotiate with customers. Negotiations are key to deliver ongoing value. Now here are my three tips for better negotiations. When negotiating with other teams, leverage company or department-level priorities. At the end, those priorities should be at the core of capacity planning. So make sure to correlate your asking of them with those. And my second tip is obviously build relationships. So relationships go a long way. When you wanna achieve progress in areas you don't have a daily interface with or much interaction, building and maintaining relationships can be the thing that helps you make progress. And the number third, number three is be persistent. Don't let go. If that commitment is significant, don't stop pinging that lead. It would be persuade eventually. So the third aspect of helping us to maintain our value velocity is to recognize when we should trade one solution for another. It will help you sustain progress instead of getting stuck. And it can increase confidence in delivering the contents and shorting time in which customers get actual value. I have two tips for that. Keep an open mind. So realize there is more than one way to deliver the value you are working on. And my second one is focus on the desired customer outcomes. Sometimes PM might complicate things without meaning to. Focusing on the outcomes enables you to stack up solution one against the other. Okay, moving on to our third expectation, keeping a pulse. Now, the fact that you have a strategy in place doesn't mean that the world stops being, right? So things always change. Your assumptions change. Either those that rely on data might be proving to be false. Keeping a pulse is where the PM tracks for changes in the market. The purpose is to always verify that the plan still makes sense. This is why you should be always wearing your discovery hat. You want to verify that the strategy is modified whenever is needed and that the customer scenarios you plan for are being validated. Now, for continuous discovery, I have three tips to share. One, join product demos whenever possible. This help you facilitate a direct access to customers as they are being demoed with the product and ask questions. Number two is build your own customer advisory form. Form customers that really want to make an impact on the product and taking that as an upcoming initiative or future. And the number three is create a channel where sales executives and solution engineers share product related tips and questions. Hooking into those can be a gold line for product manager. The next one is to monitor. So did the big feature you released last quarter improved the amount of qualified leads? Marketing end up generating. Are you seeing the service being better adopted by first time users? Make sure to watch your KPIs. Now, plans are great, but are they moving the needle for your business KPIs? So you need to keep an eye on how well the product converts, engages and retains customer. Now, the last thing is super important to have in mind. As you monitor your progress versus reality versus your strategy, things would probably change. If there is one tip I can give you here is don't be afraid of change. Your goal isn't to follow a predetermined strategy. It's to deliver the progress required to obtain the objectives that strategy was set to achieve. Update your objectives, reprioritize, remove, add, do whatever the current reality calls for if it indeed calls for it. Now, this was also our last topic of the session. Let's recap. We talked about vision and how it requires a strategy to manifest. We saw strategy is a plan and looked at an approach to build one. We learned strategies there to obtain objectives. We also learned that PMs are there to communicate the vision, reason the plan and drive alignment. Now, to have a consistent value shipped to the market, it's important that PMs will sequence, negotiate and trade the right value at the right time. And last, we learned to watch for changes and adjust the strategy accordingly. This also sums up our session. I want to thank you for your time and I hope I managed to bring clarity on what strategy is and how PMs help drive it. Thank you.