 What amazing energy, Mika. I hope I followed that up well. Good morning, everyone. And I extend a warm welcome to ProductCon 2022 for everyone attending here on site and also online. I would also like to thank ProductSchool for organizing this amazing conference where we can come, share our ideas, our experiences, and basically tick as a community. I'm incredibly grateful to be standing before you guys here today. So I can talk about something that is so close to me and close to my heart. I hope this talk finds you like a fresh cup of coffee wood this morning, because nothing about what I'm going to speak about is rocket science. Maybe you implement this with your teams already, but let's realign and refresh as we go towards an amazing day full of talks and speakers and conversations. I would like to align you guys, on board you guys, into how I communicate, because we all know communication should be done on the terms of the people receiving the communication. But however, the thousands of you guys here today, so how I basically communicate is by never getting to the point straight. And I also talk in tons of analogies, like any self-respecting South Indian woman out there. And that therein took a long journey to accept for myself to walk away from someone's idea of a corporate leader. Giving myself this kindness, breaking my own barriers, has led me to unlock magic for myself, my teams, my company, and also maybe my customers. I've recently read a book by Brené Brown called Dare to Lead, where she talks about rumbling with vulnerability, accepting who you are is the first step towards brave leadership. So accepting myself made me not zig-zag about communication and clarity to my teams and building operations around myself that I can think about details has helped me a lot. I really resonated with it. And about analogies. Today, I would like to land an analogy for our talk about a mid-afternoon snack. We used to have back home in India when the temperatures were scratching 40 to 45 degrees, way worse than whether we were having in Europe in the last few months. It's a fruit salad. You guys might have had it. It's essentially taking the seasonal fruit or imported fruit, shopping them up, putting it in a bowl. When you take a mouthful of it, it is about the amazing burst of flavors that pop in your mouth that is the magic, much like our diverse teams. Our teams come from various environments, experiences, education, location, race, gender, and equality. And they bring to us pathways of ideas, pathways that we can, from experiences of execution, pathways of problem-solving skills from various different angles. And that is how you build great product. And also, not just that, it adds a very interesting dynamic to work with, very interesting dynamic for us and our teams. And to this dynamic, I add myself, a mango, not just any mango, a very diverse Nujved Bangan Palli mango, which comes from the southern turf I come from. I have lived and worked in three countries, five cities, have had wild, wild adventures in product, delivering amazing products to customers, working in several different industries, and also building great teams, building globally diverse teams. And currently, as Mick introduced, I work for King, which is the parent company for Candy Crush, Soda Saga, and Farm Heroes, to name a few games. And I'm the head of platform for the product that enables the studios to build and serve great products back to their customers with value. And what I want to be able to talk today is about how I've been able to build great products consistently, what helped me deliver great products out there. As much as it has been about finding the right strategic investments, finding roadmaps, iterating, finding the market fit, it has been more so about an operating team. What is an operating team? It is basically a bunch of kindred spirits that all passionately try to solve the same problem. And you guys might have heard about this research product from Google called Project Aristotle, where Google wanted to find what is, how do certain teams consistently deliver great return on investment or consistently deliver great products out there? And Google loves its data and research, and what came out from the study is that it is less so about who is on the team as opposed to how this team operates. And it's quite interesting, given that Google hones its interview skills to find the best candidates out there, right? But there's a lot of research that has gone to it, from Harvard Business Schools to Deloitte's to McKinsey's, which came back to say the most effective team out there is the team that has a culture of belonging, is a team that has inclusion, a team that has diverse perspectives, a team that can handle straight talk, a team that leads from their heart, that has a culture of taking action. And if this is the right culture, how does it manifest itself, right? It manifests itself in the simplest of forms when you look at a team, a team which does not rant over reply or emails, a team that takes time to explain for the 110th time to explain where the team should be ticking, where the culture should be ticking. And if this is the team that we need to operate, how do we build a great product team? What does it take to build a great product team, right? If you type product management into the search bot, the definition it throws back at you that this is the team that add values back to the company by delivering a relevant product to your customers and building it on feasible, viable technology. And it also tells you, it also warns you that this is not for the faint of heart. This is not for people who seek clarity and structure a certain way. And if this is what it says, what is the team that we need to build? We need to build a team that is brave and takes risk. And if you, and not just for themselves to build brave and take risks, right? Also convince the leadership and the stakeholders to take the leap. And if you burden this team with perfectionism and cynicism, if you instill fear, what you get out of this team are short-term ineffective solutions which will not be scalable. Because when you take chances to build great products or solve solutions, there's always a chance of failure. There's always a chance that things won't work out. As you can see, I'm still getting to the point here. What do you give these brave teams so that they can build great products? Psychological safety. Psychological safety for the product managers to build great products. I will say that one more time. Psychological safety for the product managers to build great products. I know you might have got the typo. So psychological safety is important for everyone in every walk of life, from families to everywhere you go, but more so in companies for product teams. Let's dwell on this term psychological safety for a little bit. Psychological safety is viewed in some companies as quite a negative term. And it is not negative. There's no negative continuation to it. It's an extremely positive and kind term to give away. And for the context of this conversation today, chat today, I would like to contextualize the definition and I would like to use the definition coined by Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard where she calls it a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In simpler terms, it means that the team feels safe to take risk or be vulnerable in front of each other. And if you want to build these high performance team, what you need to walk away is from a culture vulture of cynicism and blame and shame. You need to walk into accountability and building. In some organizations or in some teams, toughness, challenging aggressively or landing punches is seen as value. And if teams do not fit into it, if individuals do not feel safe in this environment, it is made to seem like there's a lack of culture fit. This is exactly the kind of toxicity we need to step away from. And if you start peeling the onion towards what does safety look like for product managers, it looks a lot like inclusion safety, learner safety and challenges safety because this is what we product people do. We get a lot of ideas, we learn how to solve the problems and also we challenge the status quo to build the right products. And let's color this in a little bit. If this is the team that takes risks and build the right solutions or solves for the right problem, then a lot of behaviors start forming in these teams around confidence, persuasion, being optimistic, being innovative and also you have a bunch of inspiring individuals. And what do we give them? How do we get them to be operative, right? As much as it is about writing your three to five year strategy, syncing your strategy every year, writing your outcomes down and also doing your measuring your okayas, there are many, many more things that we need to add as leaders to be able to build the right product teams. If this is the team in your organizations and this is the team that builds vision, strategy and also looks towards ideas, iterates them and pivot solutions, then we need to start with the why. We always need to start with giving clarity around strategy and giving clarity from the leadership perspective. Where do these amazing bunch of product people need to tick towards? Once you've done that, the next step is to be able to tell them what problems to solve. Any company out there can do one or two things well with focus. I'll say that once again. Any company out there will do one or two things well with focus. Even the Amazons or the Alphabets out there split into individual business units and they focus on solving one or two problems. If you take these high performance individuals, really brave individuals and don't tell them what to solve for, they start to solve for many, many problems and then you'll not have effective solutions out there. And once you understand what problems they are trying to solve, the next step is clarity around who are they solving these problems for? What is the customer base? Who do they need to solve these problems for? Even if you're an early stage startup, if you're looking at a new proposition, you need to be able to be clear, need to have a tacit agreement around what is the segment they need to be able to start from. And when you take all of this, you take this meaning, clarity and purpose and inject it into the teams, it starts showing up everywhere from daily stand-ups to how this team does vision votes and even prioritizing into the sprints. And that's, we're not done here. There's giving, clarity is kindness. So let's talk about structure. We know product management as a function is defined quite broadly in various different industries and companies. So understanding roles and responsibility for these teams and articulating that is very important. To be able to tell what the role these teams play, to be able to solving for the widest purpose of the organization. And don't stop there if you've done it. Look at the various levels of product managers in your teams and agree and understand and articulate how individually they add towards the purpose of the organization. What do they do in their day-to-day lives to get the organization thinking in the right direction, right? And once you've done all of the structure, the next step is to build the right relationships. We as product people work with a lot of stakeholders out there, right? And leadership needs to invest time to build all these relationships for the product teams. And one of our favorite partners to build these products are in engineering teams. We love them. We need to be able to work quite closely with them to build the right products. Leadership needs to invest a lot of time with product and engineering teams on thinking in the right direction. Make them one operating team. And once you do all of this, well, then you've already created an effective decision-making process in the team. You've already created self-organized teams. You've already created teams that can solve for the right problems with each other. And if you've done all of this, spent a lot of time, be open to adapt. Be open for change, because the teams will come back and tell you how to do this even better. And later today, my friend, Georgie, will talk about how to break this down further with diverse teams. And once you've set all of this in, the next step is to be able to agree with the team and understand how the impact that this team has over measuring ROI or cost-benefit analysis is articulating that and then measuring that with intent is very important. It is very important to recognize the team, not just ROI and cost-benefit analysis. You also need to agree on how this team and the individual footprint is towards team effectiveness. How are they working towards a culture of belonging? How are they contributing to team effectiveness? The ethos of this team, the ethos of how an individual is going to contribute to build an effective team is a very important thing, and you cannot measure an operating team without setting it first. And once you set it, then you can measure it with the office vibes of the world. And that is building and measuring individuals to not just strategically deliver, but also deliver with your teams to also build a culture of belonging. And the third thing and the last thing that this team needs is dependability. Dependability goes both ways or always. Dependability from an organizational leadership perspective that the team will consistently deliver, the team will consistently deliver high quality and also from a team or individual's perspective that the organization and the leadership will give them structure, clarity, meaning, and provide a safe environment for them to work in. And it's also dependability and trust among the team members that when they're working towards a common goal, when they're walking the path towards building the right solutions, they can depend on each other. They can build with each other to be able to deliver to that goal. And once you do that, in times of crisis, in times of conflict, in times of pivoting, in times of when you have multiple priorities to balance, this is the team that will stand with you. This is the team that will work together. This is the team that will effectively deliver great products out there. And this is not easy. This does takes more than days, months. This sometimes takes years, right? As much as leadership invests towards strategic solutions or where they want to be, ROI and all of that stuff, they also need to invest into their teams as much. If you have all of that and you don't have an effective team, you do not deliver anyway. So this is for all leadership and company to wake up all of the teams to wake up with intent and not only just invest in what they're doing, but also invest in their team, invest towards a culture of belonging. And if you do that, you have a culture of enablement. And then you have a culture where you can build great products effectively and consistently. And thank you for having me. Enjoy.