 Hey, all right crowd filling up loving this this audience a lot of familiar faces already Calvin and see you at Matt Chantel, it's it's awesome to see everybody. This is fantastic. So, man. How are you? I'm doing well Always happy to be in the same room as you Andrew Hey, likewise likewise and loving how we have some distinguished guests as well Mayon and Shilpa Mayon, how are you? It's it's a few days after your birthday. Happy belated Welcome. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew Yeah, I'm doing well. Thank you so much super excited always great to be in this in this room so much energy and so excited man Hello, hello, we share the same birthday month mine was September 2nd Happy belated birthday Well, count me in the club as well, September 9th This is fantastic. I didn't make that cut. I missed out By three days on August 28. Oh, wow. Yeah I think if I believed in horoscope, I would say there is a there is like a pattern here I was going to say that we should collect some data to see if there is a certain correlation between birthday month and career choice Or it could be awesome mess Awesome. Hey, um, we'll go through a similar welcome back into the weekend product The product manifesto This topic will be how do I prioritize and we're out here with each other to build this up as a community Because that's what we're here for for each other and to also give back so The folks that you see on stage we're a part of the working group on the product manifesto and we gladly and warmly invite the community to Um, really just Co-create collaborate together and get this thing out there to help many many others beyond ourselves um, so with that, um I'm gonna kick it over to you mayonka if you want to do your your intros and Shilpa, of course, and we'll take it from there Awesome. Thank you. Andrew. Thank you so much. Uh, hello everyone. Once again, I'm my uncle I work at facebook as a product manager Part of the working group with product manifesto just quick tlv on product manifesto. What is this? When we all came together you're wondering Is there a playbook for pms to get better at our jobs to get better as pms to get better How do we grow in an organization? How do we create a team or an organization? But if you are leading to us, uh Becoming head of products So we said we have learnings from all sides Why don't we bring it together into one playbook that pms can use we can use for our challenges to get to the next level to take the product to the next level So we started with 10 key questions that pms face as a challenge in their career or in the journey to build products Today is about how do I prioritize the fourth question of our five or six series? Discussion so very very excited to talk about that with you all I'll pass it over to Shilpa and then we'll get started with the discussion later. Shilpa go for it, please Hello, everyone. My name is Shilpa Veer currently working as a product lead Yeah, oh Yeah Hello, everyone very nice to be here with all my friends and I'm currently working as a product leader in google But I've been in the industry for a while and have been an engineer in the past and been an entrepreneur in the past And outside of my nine to five. I really like teaching product management Which is why I've been associated with product school for a while and as as As somebody who had to jump into the deep end and figure out product management Prioritization is very close to my heart because that's where I made a ton of mistakes and And somebody who likes to do multiple things It's not just something that's relevant to product management. I think it's relevant to life also Is learn learn prioritization. So I'm excited to talk about product manifesto and prioritization today with all of you Awesome. Love it Well, Shilpa, you're no stranger to the weekend products. Absolutely to the product school and the manifesto So so glad that you're here on stage Sumea Who I like to say needs no introduction, but we do it anyway for fun. Sumea Yeah, would you take it away? Thanks Andrew and then I'll turn it over to you. Welcome everyone. I'm Sumea Binganam I'm a products management leader currently at VMware. Uh, I've been building products for some time Um, this topic of prioritization is also near and dear to my heart. I think uh within it is this Whole concept of decision-making and how you arrive to decisions Although there is a little bit of a chicken and the egg um Part as part of this conversation So I'm excited for us to dig in and and talk about this a little more and talk about Tactics and frameworks and and all the good stuff that can be helpful to all of us Over to you, Andrew Awesome, and I'm excited about it. I'm glad that these are passionate subjects for for both you Sumea and Shopa Now similar for me. I think that goes with all product people prioritization is just core to what we do Um, so I'm Andrew. I had a product over at bark Um had a few a couple rounds over at zappos slash amazon capital one. Well hyper focused on consumer facing products, but really My passion is just watching and being a part of somebody else's growth And and that's why i'm here too for the product manifesto and why i'm here with the weak end product as um an honored Uh co-founder and and hosts alongside Sumea and Shopa um, all right mayunk Your show Oh, he's saying do you think all right? All right, Andrew. Thank you. Thank you so much I think uh prioritization I think we always think from a product perspective Well, I think as a new parent, it's also in our life With the baby with work with cooking with cleaning. Come on, man. It's everywhere It's it's everywhere. Right. It's a part of asking. Yeah So I'll start with the first question which always comes to our mind Like when someone talks to you about how do I answer this question about how do I prioritize? I think before that we should the question we should be asking is Why is prioritization prioritization so important? And knowing that will help us figure out how to do it better Right, the y of everything is super important as pms. So andrew i'll start with you like What do you think the y is prioritization so important? Well, you know first first off nice touch always start with why so fantastic question Well, why is prioritization important? Well, so many reasons a few things that Come off the top of my head It's so effective that you can be how you can put things together in a way that Evolves into the grand vision that you might have And you want to heighten the chances of success You might have this long-term vision that you're working up towards Being able to prioritize effectively Will help you get there at a higher probability It can be make or break depending on what kind of life stage or what kind of company that you're a part of so for some instances it's I would even say it's do or die to prioritize effectively Other some thoughts around it Whether you're in that situation or another situation that's maybe well funded and has a long run rate Even then think about how you can prioritize effectively where Your company your organization your your team specifically is well positioned to deliver your piece of Your piece of the product strategy that leads up into the overall mission vision of the company When you do that, you just heighten your chance of success and delivering value To customers whether it's consumer facing or B2B Ultimately, that's a core fundamental way of being successful So that's fairly high level, but that's where I'd like to start the conversation That's the why behind it for me and increasing your chance of success It's fantastic. Let me extract a few words from it and then I'll pass it on to Sumaya for some thoughts and then Shilpa And again, as always, please people raise your hands and love to hear from you as well Why is prioritization important? Some extraction from that like from the from Andrew's thoughts. I heard value We have to focus on value. I heard we have limited resources If to focus on resources and value and there's another angle of Time which is again falls into resources to show value Again at the end we'll summarize it, but these are three words that came out very strongly show value You have limited resources and again value slash in fact and move forward in the shortest time Sumaya thoughts on why is Preparation important from your perspective Yeah, absolutely. Um I think there are circumstances. I worked for example in one startup Uh, where prioritization became important for our survival and so guess underlying all of that is the the the the general concept of constraints around specific resources such as time and budget and all of that But in this specific case, uh, because the market dynamics required That we focus and only focus on One thing that would you know on the survival concept. Uh, we had the highly competitive landscape, uh at the time so um And I I say this and I'm also thinking through uh The the general context because I like to take this into frameworks So if we were to start with a core framework of there are constraints around resources And there are three types, you know, when you're thinking about the The the levers you can pull on people time and scope um, so if you have those three then One other layer on top of them are external, uh constraints or um forces and There i'm thinking about porters five forces everything from You know your competitors to the market, you know the regulators um, and all of those any of those, uh Elements from the five forces can, uh impact um, you know that core Constraint that you have so I might have Overcomplicated it But I think if the the nuance at the end of the day and the decisions you have to make for your product Are driven by one of those five four forces ultimately So man, I think you're I think the the biggest what I heard from you is survival at the best prioritization happens when you are in this survival mode and uh the at that moment Simplicitly and some Subconsciously you pick up the things that matters the most and will show the most high I mean the highest impact in the least amount of resources consumed And in general cases like as you work for large companies and obviously same for me like when I work for startup and then uber e-base Etc the level of urgency To prioritize was much different compared to what it would be in a startup and we have there And of course the efficiency was much higher in a startup. So I think the word survival. I really resonated with that a lot Shubha, I'll come to you now. Like what's what's your perspective on prioritization? And then I'll just talk about mistakes uh, andru and and everyone else like we've come to mistakes after that So please keep thinking Shuba Prioritization is important. Why what's your perspective? Since you are extracting words from everyone's speech. Let me give you the Sorry, you're new to me. Could you please? Yeah, awesome. All right. So since you are Extracting words from what everybody's saying. Let me start with the words by telling you the survival is that definitely one The second is impact and the third is time to value And let me explain to you by giving you a couple analogies because I really like giving analogies So if you were a doctor in the er and if a patient came to you After next after let's say a road crash and they're bleeding their bone is broken They have a sprain and they have a black eye If you don't prioritize and you start treating every single thing at the same time You might not stop the bleeding in time because you are spread thin And the patient dies then breaking the bone or putting a cast doesn't really matter And so keeping in mind the survival as well as the impact of the work you're doing you have to prioritize and say What is the most important thing that needs my full attention? You want to put more fuel on less fires? And with that idea you're going to say In order to save this person Do I really have to put the cast or do I first have to stop the bleeding and the answer would be stop the bleeding? And that's where you're going to focus And after that you're going to say okay now that that is under control to a certain extent not necessarily fixed But under control now I can worry about the second problem And then the third problem. So anytime a company is going through some some short term tactical Emergencies that prioritization is especially important For survival as well as impact now coming to time to value Let's say I have four non urgent things But I'm working on four things. Let's say I'm trying to put together Tesla And I'm working on model For the lack of better word model s model t model v model g all of those models at the same time And I say I think I can first get the tires done for all the cars Then I can get the windshield done for all the cars and that's okay At the end you will have four cars But you know it will take you four times as much to get those four cars out of the market If you instead say let me just take one model Let me put together the basic concept send it out And collect feedback So I can then in the meantime work on the second car and learn Whatever needs to be done in the first car and iterate on it. Now you have released something out in the market You are getting valuable feedback So again going back and just saying can I get one thing done and out? It helps you with the context switching. It helps you Stay in the zone and deliver things faster get early feedback and for that reason For time to value as well as to get early feedback. I think prioritization is very very important Great great thoughts that I think you tie it all together quite well I think when when I join product management, I mean to be honest, how hard is prioritization? It's pretty straightforward. It's logic. I mean what you're talking about I'm sure everyone here in the room understands. Yes, it's about resources It's about the impact you're to create. So what's the big deal about it? Like I think and that was my same attitude towards that Like what's the big deal about it? You look at the investments and figure out the cost and do the ones with least costs and high sympathy and move on So I'll push hard and say like What do we think are the challenges when you think about prioritization based on our all of us here in the room as well On our experiences What are the key challenges that we have seen that come when we come across when you think about prioritization? Um, I haven't seen any hand raised yet folks. Come on Uh, we'll start with uh, Sumaya. Why don't you start this time? What do you think are the key challenges for? prioritization when you have you know when you Go towards towards that journey of prioritization about any product that you work on So challenges or at least the context I've worked with within So when as a product manager, uh, or an ic I loved getting You know business priorities from leadership They allowed me to at a high level for the product to design And make decisions around priorities that were grounded In outcomes that are important in the business Um, and and that part was easy The the hard part there was in determining what data Uh Do I look at and how much data do I need to look at? Uh to help me tie outcomes to bets or to Features or to products etc. So I think at that level at least on the At the ic side On the ic side the challenge was really tying data Or to outcomes On the on the leadership level When i'm looking at portfolio prioritization The challenge there is understanding our capabilities as an organization in the short term Aligning them with outcomes And being realistic about that so for example if we have Outcomes that We know we want to as a rule We want to grow revenue every year by 20 percent in existing or mature products But by 200 in brand new products So if if that's a general principle, we're going to work with then the next Set of decisions for me are around what does that mean for my whole business unit or for my organization? And I need to prioritize those outcomes So not only am I prioritizing a road map or a set of features But also i'm prioritizing outcomes for my team. I find that to be very challenging in itself Because there are a lot of external factors And other really complex systems within the organization that impact that And then and I can add more but i'll stop there I love that. I think I think two two things stand out and and we have really in the room as well really We'll get you in a bit What do you look at so you we have to prioritize so what data we should look at to figure out that you know type breaker or figure out the priorities of different Ideas future investments and the second is it's a good one. Actually, I didn't think of from that perspective is translating the organizational Priorities into your team's priorities a different lens to prioritization Okay, I love it. We'll go deeper into the data part in a bit and then come back to translation Also, I think that's a very important angle with which Andrew will get your thoughts on that Really, I'd love to open up to you and get your thoughts What problems challenges we you have seen in prioritization and funny part really is we have worked together I think in similar companies all marketplaces. I saw your profile. So welcome to the room and love to hear your thoughts Hey, thanks. Thanks. Fine. This is a very interesting topic. Uh, and yeah, I see that you here. You may have overlapped it over I guess I mean, it's nice to be here One thing I want to just kind of point out is When you prioritization also Uh, the one of the challenges with prioritization is There isn't like one pure answer Sometimes and I'll give you an example if you're thinking about like a zero to one product And let's say you're building out a marketplace. For example Uh, whether you prioritize getting supply first or you prioritize getting demand first can have two very different Go-to-market strategies and ultimately two different products. And so depending on where You are in the product life cycle And how mature the product is what I have found is Uh, your entire go-to-market and your product can be influenced by what you prioritize first And so it's not always a clear cut answer Got it. I like that. I'm also going to list it and park it and come back for the making a list of challenges So we can then discuss solutions that can have sort of common patterns that can apply to elsewhere so that the extraction would be Prioritization frameworks could be different by stages Uh, so it might change absolutely fair Um, we'll come back to it again to figure out like I think we can do deep dive on that Can it be normalized? Can it be more deterministic? Can it be more universal? Can we go a level higher and say no, it cannot be different five stages There is a level we can think that could be same for all and then it can have its own nuances So we should definitely I love that. I love the challenge there different buy stages So again three points now adding to sumayas first to uh, andrew going over to you challenges That you have experienced in prioritization as a p.m. And she'll buy your next so we'll keep thinking Thanks Well, resin is with me is just emphasizing further on the lenses It depends on where how to use distillate where you sit within the organization So that's where some complexity can arise Um, where you have multiple lenses to go through you got the company mission vision Of course, that's the standard that everyone operates under But your organization might have one too, which is a distillation of that And then your team might have a their own distillation on what that might look like uh, imagine if you had to collaborate with other Team members within the same organization and then think about the challenges to go outside of your organization and just hope And hopefully if the organization is structured well Then the outcomes are to sumayas point the business outcomes are at least aligned So at least teams can collaborate a lot easier without saying hey Sorry, i'm on the hook for this what whatever you're trying to collaborate on We're gonna have to park it because I can't help you that doesn't help me So the distillation of many many lenses company mission vision down to organization mission vision down to your team mission vision In the teams that you have to collaborate with How do you make it all align so you guys um You can what's the adage? Move quicker alone, but go further together How can you go further together, which is exceptionally important to product strategy and heightens your chance of success So that's where I see You're going further and further into my product career, particularly as you bridge in To say product mentor senior to lead when you're at the lead level you tend to Cross collaborate beyond your own organization more often And that's a common problem a common complication that I see within our market and within our field I think organizations are getting better about but many are still not quite there yet to build that organization alignment to help everybody prioritize better and to help them ultimate align and Achieve the things that the company ultimately wants to prioritize Okay Other piece that I can't help it show, but you had a good tesla analogy And what I love about the tesla analogy is if And how public they are with their master plan if you look at it They called out what to prioritize and who to prioritize for Now their mission uh celebrate The world's transition is sustainable energy And then they happen to build some of the most amazing cars out there is very methodical Let's start with the highest margin luxury vehicle use those Profits to move it into the next tier which is upper level sedan and use that to do something mass market with the three To your point if they did if they started with the three they would have been gone They they were almost cash depleted on the s Elon had been at that so it's just like how this all comes together and what I love about them is that Outside looking in I can't confirm for sure I don't know if we have anybody from tesla within our network here in the audience to confirm But I feel like they did a great job that that master plan being out in public Uh, I imagine that rallied the entire company to look at priorities in a very similar way Where that's not always true or in many cases just not true For many many organizations So that's a complication to look out for I think that's a good cue for me to plug in guys. This is exactly what we did with product manifesto We put it out there on the website. This is our roadmap. This is our priority. This is why it's doing So if you want to learn more about product manifesto go to product manifesto.com It has our timeline our draft of first version and love to hear from you over the feedback All right coming back to andrew's point. I think it's a very important point I completely resonated that he he put in a very nice and humble way about Organizations should do a good job in creating a culture and a framework for alignment of I think the let's call the objective function of whatever goals you have and what you have to work towards The biggest challenge I have seen in my career is actually that which is primarily We are prioritizing for x. Let's take a more these examples. We are prioritizing for Let's say supply growth. So a gaze of let's say uber example would be driver growth fair Whereas the organization because we are a growth team that was our dna like traditionally. That's what we do I guess it's not my team by the way. I'm just picking up an example here But at the organizational level the goal was let's focus on a driver retention now Yes, you might be aligned a little bit You're focusing on getting more drivers on the platform But the focus was retention and because the misalignment on the On the goals here or the objective function, whatever you prioritize will not be aligned as bm It's really really important. How well you ladder up to and respond towards the uber goal of the team the organization The company or the CEO so on and so forth. So I love it. Misalignment or in goals is the problem And of course the solutions what you spoke about Andrew, you know Shared framework across different people Shilpa coming to you more problems. We have nice ones here. Good list here So I'm going to repeat a little bit of what said and then try to add a couple more in there So lack of clarity on where the company is going And your misalignment it actually manifests in two different ways One is you don't know what work to prioritize on your end because you don't know where the company is going That's one part of it and the second part it is you might actually have a great project But you can't get funding because you cannot justify Because people don't understand how it ladders up to the company executive schools And so I think it's a two-way problem or there is a two-part problem when it comes to misalignment there You can't pick up the right pieces of work Or if you have picked up the right pieces you can't sell them In prioritization So that's one The second one is in my opinion competing KPIs To give you an example. I was working in a team where we had revenue And active number of active users as KPIs and they both were not stars And on surface you might say it makes sense But there were times where We had two different segments. There's upper mass market and there's a lower mass market Lower mass market lower spending power But high numbers upper mass market higher spending power lower numbers and when come the design decisions Somebody would say hey, we want to go after upper mass market because we have revenue and somebody would say But we also have net actors we want to design for elements and this happened far too many times And having a clear stack ranking of the KPIs would have helped in prioritizing the right projects And so And this not just one place. I've seen in other places also where everything is a priority Everything cannot be a priority at the same level. There has to be some stack ranking even within the KPIs. So so that is one other thing that I would like to add Number three thing in my opinion is lack of true understanding of cost and impact And yes to some extent it's because the data might not be available, but also sometimes we think the cost is just engineering weeks That is not always the cost. There is a lot of other costs that are involved I I want to do something That leverages human ranking. I have to set up a team of 80 people in in poland Who can do all that manual work? For example, that's a true cost there So a lot of times we look at the surface and we say this is a low-cost idea in terms of engineering But what we really need to be doing is understanding the true cost of not building the feature but successfully Launching it and having it produce results And that might include include human judges that might include customer service that might include Something else and so that's something that we have to factor in and so it's the impact Impact there might be some impact on revenue, but then sometimes dealing with technical is a priority Because the system is bursting at the seams so It helps to know what is the relative weightage of certain types of impacts and costs And sometime if the place the plain rice will not suffice and you might have to go for a weighted scorecard In order to justify that So that's one thing that I would say and last thing that I want to talk about is There is this all this the struggle of how do you prioritize horizon 2 and horizon 3 ideas when horizon 1 is taking up all of your efforts To be fair horizon 1 is here. It's producing results It's hard to justify investing in horizon 2 So that short term versus long term investment Is an important thing that prevents a lot of pms from bringing new thinking new ideas bigger projects to fruition Wow, the last line was i'm sure coming from google Go take big versus Only focusing on Oh man really, you know, the culture is in vibe there Amazing. I think we have a good set of Challenges that I can I see coming out from a discussion one is really understanding What you are supposed to work or what you're what you're supposed to work on in terms of what the goals are In terms of whether the goals of the organization or the goals team, etc and mismatching those goals, whether it's by organization by design or by Or by you not understanding the goal through some channel. That's up to us second is Going deep in understanding The problem collecting the right data to sumay as point Do you know how to get that data because sometimes it's sitting there? You have a list of ideas from the team because you do a brainstorming Then you don't know how to get the right data set. I think we should harp on that a little bit today And the last I I'm sure nobody's talking about communication I think the biggest challenge is communication after like let's say address the goal part of it, but for the wider team Communication is the is is key. I mean we we have to make sure We constantly communicate to have a shared understanding so when we are at the table talking about prioritization Well, it's it's very clear to know for all of us to know what we are doing and what they're doing that I'll start at one point here Is there a way we can make it simple to think about these things? Why is again like uh, as molly was saying Stages, uh, we have to think differently in different stages. I don't disagree. I agree Like it's fair that we have to respect the problem And that's what comes under the stage to your point horizon a horizon b for to molly's point supply to man for uber And so on and so forth, but let's say you are the cpo or ceo and you think about prioritization What's the most simplistic one line thinking in your mind when you're sitting at the table and and thinking about well This is how I should be This is the question I should be asking the team to get the real answer on prioritization Like is there something as simple as that that we can give our listeners today to just go and use that tomorrow as an action Yeah, go for it. Shilpa. I see by the way I have you also have a video chat going on folks so I can see people raising hands in the working group So my hours are not your only so should I let you also raise hands and just go for it What is that one line? I can get one line cannot be five lines. Yeah go for it So one simple principle that I follow not just for future prioritization But for any kind of prioritization in life and that is what I tell everyone is Eisenhower metrics, which is Figure out urgency and importance of something and if it's urgent and important do it now If it's urgent but not important do what's needed right now bare minimum, but figure out the right implementation later If it's important make time for it But it doesn't have to be today. And if it's not urgent and not important, please do not do it Argent and important Okay, if you're sitting in a meeting and people show you something or slide with all the priorities Which one is urgent? I'm just repeating like just to make sure it's something that's actionable What's urgent and important and based on that question you will figure out. Ah, it's the right thing. Okay. I buy that not not I think that's a pretty good idea. I like it Anyone else fun to chime in folks like please share your thoughts. It doesn't have to one line Just for Shilpa. You can just even have a paragraph for yourself. Morely go for it Yeah, sure I think one thing that might help is just to think about if you literally just had The social to do exactly one thing Yeah, different ways of asking that question one could be something like you only have one week to do it What would you do or you only have one engineer to do it or you do? Uh, it's anything about what is if you could only do one thing What would that be Well, I love that. I think there have been so many instances I have been asked this question when I have 10 things on the slide or on the document And the the motive behind that is having done your prioritization, right? Like I think that's a very good question If you have one thing to pick what that would be And it pushes all of us to rethink our prioritization rethink our investments and then pick one over the other. So, yeah So I'll paraphrase that in my language. I think Where is the biggest impact? And the same language but more like the same thing in different ways. Where is the biggest impact? And then we push to start saying that one thing which we don't which is no No and no, I think so one was let's take away that one thing Which are you like she'll pass version more least version our version biggest impact or urgency and highest impact another is Figure out where you can say no I think tendency of early pms when I was early like in my earlier career The tendency was this is so cool. I should do everything. That's the paralysis That's the challenge of prioritization. You're so in love with the product Yes, and that point about Oh, only two engineering days because we should just get it done. It's just let's stick it in and it'll be amazing It's not amazing if you do 10 things to be honest. Like it's always two plus two days It's never two days or two weeks or whatever it is. So I think Next list saying no is super important. What is it one thing you should do? What is the 10 thing you could say no to another one? Okay? I haven't gone round table andrew sumaya if you want to chime in to share some one-liners if you want to How do you think about meetings or you know approach of federation? Yeah, absolutely. I think that my one liner is The sweet spot of viability and impact. So yes, definitely impact is always number one But then I'm also realistic about The capabilities again of the organization and I'm thinking about companies of all sizes when you're a startup Or you're a large company you still have that constraint of of your organization your your vision what you want to do And so I like to think of that, uh, you know, upper right hand quadrant. That's the That's the the place where your Your highest viability and your highest impact meet together And that's what you prioritize I think I love it. I think I love it. The first verse. Where is the impact? Okay? I'm listening one two three. They just say I'm just similar to the situation here And second is ah great three things high impact love it Can we do it? Um And how much longer so again just again we'll end with frameworks at the end guys like we will get there I know like we are discussing a lot, but we'll definitely get to frameworks, but we're teasing into it So yes, I love it impact. Can we do it andrew coming to you one line is from your side All right, uh one liner for me would be Debate and prioritize your principles um the context behind that is If you can have a really good debate backed with quantitative qualitative data to suggest One principle comes before the other that can be highly impactful, especially when it's written, especially when it's publicized communicated To your point mayonk very well so um Here's a loose example High touch over price elasticity price elasticity over Price economics, so it gives you a cascade of things where we're not saying one or We don't care about one thing. We're saying that we care about one thing over the other if we had to make hard hard choices So that's going to come in handy to help you prioritize the right thing to do that's going to Hopefully go back towards your hypothesis on what's going to make your yourself successful help validate that further Hopefully, it's already validated and you're just Making sure that you're placing your becks Effectively for the things that are important That to the things that are customer centric that that solves customer problems in the most effective way for the business So I like it when you can have a healthy debate at any given point in time And sometimes even see the order shuffle because depending on how Things worked out for you with with what you shipped and what you learned This should be a constant conversation That's out there and has a written stance. That's also that's just shared by any channel any medium within the company slack Confluence whatever your wiki of choices Email whatever it might be when this occurs when this happens it can be really impactful and really powerful Um, and what I love is when this occurs and somebody says Oh, gosh, you know, I thought those two things were super important. I never really thought about it that way I can see why You know revenue takes a back seat here to gross margin. I get that now So like I love it when it brings that kind of sense of clarity and how it lines back up into the broader strategy Because those things aren't easy and those those discussions you could spend hours debating What tough priority that you would stack rank over another or principle that you'd stack rank over another There's multiple ways of looking at it. But I love it when it cascades and it brings more clarity into the why and uh I also see a boost in morale When that's done effectively Andrew, I love that correct. I just I just wanted to highlight the point that Andrew makes here um around that tension that happens with uh With prioritization As someone I've I've worked in so many different organizations and I can when I look back at the least healthy ones In every way, you know, we did not perform really well Etc. Um, I when I think back about the prioritization conversations At the senior level or at the, you know, at the lowest levels They were not marked by any tension. There were not robust conversations People were making decisions in silos. There wasn't transparency Uh, and so when we talk about prioritization, I think there are other elements around the the this concept when we're talking about communication and alignment of the team and who participates in the activity I think those are all elements that are so important. So I'm glad you brought that up I think these are Let's go deeper. I love this topic. The part about Prince setting the principles of prioritization and and to my as point also communicating and getting the stakeholders involved um I think most conversations where I've been and we're discussing Uh prioritization, let's say you have three features Uh, you have data to support that all three are impactful in some order Uh, but the impact is in different metrics. So one could be doing and respond like retention One could be new growth. One could be just making experience better And you can argue from a designer's perspective. They should they are focusing on the experience The growth guy or is talking about let's go launch the growth feature and then US says well I'll do the one that I believe is the coolest one because the impact is a little high for all Uh, then then it comes back to one point. It's not about debating with them It's about what was the principle of prioritization when we start So having that documented and our job is product leaders product managers is Really making sure that foundation is so strong And that principle is very clearly outlined earlier, which I would say 90 percent of time never happened It's very easy to say and it's hard to do when you are in that execution mode of Just go keep figuring out the roadmap Uh, but laying the principle or even questioning guys. Thank you so much But what was the principle of prioritization? Let's go back to it and writing it back to the whiteboard I mean, sorry whiteboard is no more thing real thing But wherever you write it down online And I got to play document or what Andrew said really puts things into perspective and people are grounded to that one anchor That we are driving towards so that brings us to an interesting topic Let's now move to us How do you do your prioritization? So we'll start with uh an example so people can chime in and share their thoughts So otherwise it should be actionable for us So an example would be um You are we are a team. Uh, we're all product managers. We are working together and the situation is We are we have been asked to come up with a roadmap to find the to uh to increase our um our retention for Let's take an example of instacard a retention of our instacard prime users Which is basically express users who subscribe by 20 percent and you have to come up with ideas And you already have a list of 20 ideas that the team came up with So you have this 20 ideas for an objective that is retention How would you go about The prioritization just say anyone can take an example and we can build on top of that The idea is just to do the whole process together because we have already Talked about multiple parts of prioritization It would be good to share a real example to people people and get their feedback also Andrew do you want to mind starting with where do you start? I have someone waiting others I'll add you and you'll join right after andrew and to go for it Great all right awesome. So um I'll bucket it in a couple scenarios excuse me, so In some scenarios you'll have A wide body of evidence qualitative quantitative data To help you furnish those 20 bets um And hopefully they're at a high probability and then you can select a framework behind it that you believe will Bring the most impact whatever it might be Just make it fit for for you and your team. What's important in those cases And what I find Compelling as a product person when you know your staff well You know, you can pick and pull from any framework that's out there that you think is going to be effective for the for the job But also think about how you might retrofit it into your team So depending on say the level of my staff Where I want to give maybe even higher level autonomy I might retrofit a given framework to solve those problems and add maybe a passion around Sorry add a an attribute within the the framework around say passion Um, so as long as things are aligned to what we're trying to achieve Which should be foundational and taken care of I feel like that is a great way to take a look at things where When the passion is there when I feel like they have a good product mindset and the discipline is scaled out effectively That they're going to work on the most passionate projects that also happen to drive have a high chance of high impact Um, you know the line is looking good the strategy isn't good the feasibility the viability is looking good Those are the ones where they spend extra time in because they can't even help themselves like I'm going to put in the extra hour Hours the the the night the weekend or whatever because I want to see it through and they have this ownership mentality Um, so that's how I like to prioritize things with the team to add another layer of autonomy inside of whatever we have As a product culture The other bucket is when there is a vast enough ambiguity We don't know How we're going to get customers into Prime and uh, it's the card prime right and the other scenario like we had we've been doing it for years We know how we split our life cycle segments. We understand how to nudge Specific segments into the other that trickles into the other into prime And in this case we have no clue we we opened up this program. It's very nascent. We're still trying things out So the 20 bets I'd find a framework. I try to identify And and still a framework that helps us Increase our learning quotient as quickly as effectively as possible So that our guesses and our bets get better over time So that ultimately it leads into the first scenario Yeah That was that was great. I think I love that So I think two points that came out and I'll other should come to you now after that Two came that really two points that came out very clearly one is set the goal. Okay. This is the goal Communicate to the team that guys through tension is the goal for us. We're going to go from a to b That's point number one second that I really connected was Around okay, you have the 20 leavers. Do we know what the impact is and spin out a work stream to understand or Measure the impact or project the impact based on previous work Or if not do some sort of understanding to figure out the impact otherwise without knowing Without the know-how of impact we cannot figure out where should we invest it We'll come back to it in a bit and then others you have thoughts you join just now go for it more You'll come back to you in a bit Yeah, thanks for giving me the chance to to be to participate in this discussion And this was very fascinating discussion And I don't want to go back to the point about principle that Mike was mentioning before And just for some context. I am a data scientist in what's up and I am I am very much interested in product management And oftentimes in those organizations that we have We have multiple teams who are working on something similar And I do completely agree that having this principle upfront helps in the case of alignment But I do have some questions and thoughts around When it comes to like practical nature of doing things as one of the things that you mentioned is that Oftentimes the teams are either in the growth mapping session or execution session. So do you have certain? thoughts about What is the ideal time that teams should think about principles? That's one and second it is useful when there are multiple teams involved and by nature The principles are somewhat philosophical in nature and if different teams are involved they have different incentives so And especially the principles are philosophical in nature Sometimes you go like round and round over some points. So how do you decide like this is it? And then third which is somewhat later is How often are what causes you to go back and revisit that? So these are some of the things that I practically like wrangle with in In day-to-day process to bring alignment when there are multiple things going on So maya, do you want to take that? Yeah, I'll take a couple So the first thing around principles if you find that you're changing your principles Often and by often I mean more than once a quarter so You know if ideally your principles are broad enough that they allow the team autonomy To make them mean whatever they need them to mean within that situation So they need to be directive enough and have enough guardrail around them For people to have certain understanding of the spirit, but not too Too restrictive. So that's at least the the first thing I think about when it comes to principles around prioritization et cetera the second Part of your question that I wanted to address Was I didn't write it down and so it's escaped. It's almost 10 p.m. Here Can you remind me what was the last part you brought up? Yeah, no worries, and I Get your first point, which is that the principle needs to be broad enough Such that it does not warranty a frequent change in those principles and then my second Point was around sometimes these principles tend to be philosophical in nature And this is most useful when we are dealing with alignment between multiple teams and by nature They have different agenda to approach this. So in such cases, how do we sort of move forward? And then the one that I asked in relation was Yes principles can be broad in natures such that it does not Often warrant, you know, like you don't want to change like every month But in what cases that you might prong to revisit them because that also I feel having that established a print Gives an additional Sort of like validity towards having the principles in the first place. Like if you get what I mean Yeah, absolutely. You start seeing it because principles start getting in the way So so, you know your One week you feel like oh this principle is is maybe Holding me back But then the second week you say that Or the second month you say that then that principle needs to go or needs to be re-looked at or re-examined So I think in general that applies to any principles or frameworks or whatever the team decides to to take on This is part of the reason why sometimes in for example when you see Startups scaling from series a to series b or c etc They they use one framework at one point and it works well when there are three people or four people But then when they're 10 they go completely different routes It's not because what they went what they're going with is a lot more effective Sometimes people just need the refresh or they need the a new baseline Mentally that allows them to think about things a little differently. So there is a psychological aspect to this that I I have a lot of appreciation for But just out of the same products principles we have around try something Doesn't work iterate gets better over time the second point you brought up around You know conflict that comes up In prioritization between let's say two different product teams or even within the different products I recently Was part of one where my the team or the product team responsible for the onboarding experience Had some sort of conflict around the goals that is with with another team I generally speaking I I tried to let the two different the two product teams work it out And and some and what happens is at least 80 percent of the time is that they're really Looking at the same thing ultimately, but they're just using two different metrics to get there And they need to negotiate that or think through it together as a team sometimes This is actually where I think leadership management leadership Needs to get involved because they have that bigger view They they understand the whole life cycle from beginning to end and can see all the product teams Can understand where we're over optimizing where we're under optimizing where we need to unblock and and orchestrate and help and increase the the effectiveness of teams sometimes that leadership has to get involved actually to to help Deconflict that and help the team determine Which one of those priorities is actually more important or because we have one set of data from one product team Hey, now this other product team also needs to pay attention to that data because ultimately The the number one priority for us is xyz So that's a long way of saying Um, there are different nuances here for how that conflict can be resolved Yeah, so uh, thanks a lot for going into this and I do Realize part of my question was a bit like convoluted. So I do appreciably taking that question and breaking it down So this is what I took away from those reply. So principles by nature It needs to be broad enough such that it does not warrant frequent changing and second It is most useful when things are happening at scale And we should not underestimate the psychological nature of it where it's all about people So in order to facilitate that it is useful to establish the conflict and escalation channels up front In regards to the principle. So this is what I took away from this conversation All right, um, I guess add like my layer to it. Uh, so to Sumayya's point When I use the word principle in a conversation or in in prioritization It can be a different levels. I mean one. Yes, uh, there can be a Philosophical or high level broad principle, which the team's mission is what we call it For different teams and that to Sumayya's point has to evolve as you evolve the business model as you evolve the product As your users evolve and gets even fighter First you're focused on small scale. Now you do large scale medium scale, whatever and you keep evolving it I think that I'm I think I'm aligned with I think that's fair It should be broad enough and we should definitely have that when it comes to prioritization When I mean when I first introduced the word principle in today's conversation My objective was to say we need to have an anchor to start the discussion on prioritization What's your anchor and that was what I was referring to this principle that has to be very specific Otherwise the prioritization goes nowhere If our goal is to improve retention, that's the goal everything else does not matter And that's our principle of conversation if there's a combination happening Somebody's pushing about something else and you bring back home saying guys we started with the anchor has Retention improvement these ideas do not are these ideas rate very low in that prioritization principle or anchor Hence not our focus. So that's how we resolve conflicts. Uh, I would say I resolve conflicts Anyway, uh, I let Sumayya Jump in yes to clarify when you're so when you're talking about principle You're talking about the outcome the altar or like the metric Uh, that matters It could be a metric. It could be an anchor could be a metric. It could be as good as We have to improve our customers experience for Getting a ride on uber and the team can decide what the metric is and move on But again, like it's it has to be something that is an anchor that beams using to prioritize Yeah, makes sense. I I think it also shows up as okay are sometimes and The team can pick the ones that work. Yep, that's him So my before this conversation started, you were talking about the insta card example of for the tension, right and and and and just the conversation that just happened around anchors and stuff what I really want to share basically My point of view is that What you really have to prioritize Is not the feature but the problem that you're solving Or the kpi that you are optimizing for How you solve it There are n number of ideas and you have to Be agile and say, okay. What can we do fast? What will work? What are we what are the user responding to and be iterative in nature and try many things possibly And of course the better data that you have the better you can prioritize amongst those features using any method But the real prioritization has to happen around What goal what problem what kpi and then flexible about how we get there I think that makes sense. Andrew, do you mind like taking the summary of shilpa's final? She summarized quite well for us What sumaya mentioned and what we all mentioned to put it into perspective So we have like a framework that people can leave it and of course the detailed framework will be at product manifesto.com But i'll andrew share the complete summary andrew over to you All right. Thanks. Meon And thanks for sticking with us. I know you have some commitment so Really quickly the summary at the high level because we went through a lot of nuances and those will get We'll do our best to fold them in to the product manifesto high level summary Setting goals me on have a great great night with your family. Cheers All right, so set your goals communicate communicate them effectively And set identify and set your prioritization framework around Impact resourcing etc So there's tons of nuances that we went through as a community Really appreciate the conversation that we had here tonight at harsh Very thankful that he came on stage We had morali for a bit very thankful that he was on there as well And the loving the audience and the turnout here It really does mean a lot to all of us at the weekend product product manifesto That's how you chose to spend Part of your day part of your night wherever it might be where you are with us We're all here for each other and for the product community at large So that's that's the summary public service announcements, of course if you don't already Feel free to follow Simea, Shilpa The folks that were speaking on stage mayonk and the weekend product and follow our Scheduled programming would love to see you again. Y'all are the best Shilpa before we go to Simea for final send off Shilpa. Have any words for us? I think I had a lot of fun. I Really enjoyed the rooms with you guys and I think this is an important topic. So thank you for arranging that I think there were a lot of good discussion and if I can leave everybody with just one or two things it would be Not everything can be a priority Even when everything is important Know exactly what is the top one thing that you really really have to get done and be very focused on What problem you're solving But be flexible about how you solve it Awesome. Awesome. Shilpa. Thank you Simea parting words for our lovely audience Yeah, I I just want to put one reminder out there Because it just keeps appearing and creeping up in my conversations with different pms Um, so if your leadership is not giving you a clear set of priorities around business outcomes that matter Then that will translate to bad priorities Most likely, you know, it's like a a game of chance Uh on the product side. So it always starts with what are the business priorities for your business or for your? Uh company and then how does that tie into your product priorities? So start there and anchor a lot of your conversation Especially when you have a lot of naysayers or people trying to push you on why are you making this decision or that? This other decision You're you're making sound decisions. You're using the data. You're doing your best. You're being transparent But fundamental you need to fall back into what really matters to the business That's one two and this is something I believe in strongly If there is any one thing that you as a p.m. Own it's prioritization. You really own nothing else Everything else everyone else on the team owns But fundamentally like if you were to To like boil it down to one set of activities that you do that is written down and that you have to answer for I think prioritization is the thing. Yes, you have a ton of other things to do But really prioritization it is it Because there will be The situations, you know that 10 percent here and there Where you will have a lot of people disagree in the room and disagree with your prioritization And you'll they'll still have to You know leave the room and go with what you decide So not to go a whole into the whole authoritarian regime thing But there are situations where you're going to have to make that decision and people have to follow you there That's it back to you, Andrew Awesome. Awesome. We'll love it. Shilpa sumaya those were fantastic fantastic words of advice Reminds me a couple of things Just short little remembrances that helped me focus on the things that Y'all provided the the wisdom that y'all provided for the the audience here. So starting with you Shilpa reminds me of the things that I remind myself And my my kids. Hey, you can do Anything you want to do but you can't do everything And that's just the nature of it might want to dabble and that applies to all of us and our teammates as as we ideate Sure, there's a lot of fun cool things out there. But We got we got goals to achieve that circles back to sumaya the business outcome How you line that up And how it goes back into maybe being customer-centric. I feel like that's a word that's thrown around way too much without A good understanding of what that is It's like, hey, we got to be customer-centric. We got to solve these problems for customers This is what customers want. This would make their life so much more awesome and better without thinking wait a second Should we do it though? Yeah, I don't disagree But is that right for us? Is that right for our business? Does that tie to the things that we need to drive? Does that tie to the way that we're positioned and how it's going to help us grow as a company? Uh and what we want to achieve a short and long term That that is customer-centricity where the business outcome cannot live without the customer problem that we're trying to solve Those two live in harmony where I see um missteps out there. It's like one or the other. It's like, hey, it's not one or the other It's this unified view of it. And that's what's going to set a customer-centric company apart versus I think it it can be misconstrued but The notion of a product-centric one where you just approve the product And they will come build it and they will come approach so that that's what Squirreled up for me with The awesome awesome advice the parting words at shopa and tsumea that that y'all had for us tonight So with that just want to thank everybody here again For for being here. It's it's been wonderful seeing so many familiar faces Again chris. I see you out there sign in I mean jeff. So hell. Oh my gosh It's so wonderful to see you all again shantel And all the new faces in the room Y'all are a wonderful bunch. I can't wait to see y'all and hang out and and just collaborate and give back to the product community Have a great night y'all Yes By the way for anyone who's in the san francisco area. I'm going to be there Next week or the I guess the following week. Yeah the Monday the 27th if anyone is there for the sass conference saster Yeah, I'm excited All right. Well, it was good to see you all have a wonderful night and I look forward to seeing you again Thank you everyone and hello to all the familiar faces. I've collaborated within the past I see I see a few as well Simon, I was excited to see you. Hi And others good night All right