 Think of a time that you were lost. As you think of that memory, I want you to focus on two things. One, how you were feeling, and two, what you were feeling. I have a very specific memory that comes to my mind. We were on a family vacation on the South Island of New Zealand a few years ago, and through a series of rather unforeseen and unfortunate set of circumstances, we found ourselves driving in the middle of the night through the most treacherous mountainous terrain you could ever imagine. We had no GPS, no directions, and not a single soul was in sight because it just so happened to be Christmas Day. What I really remember from that memory though, is the absolute fear I felt driving behind that driver's wheel, just absolutely scared to death that we weren't going to figure out how to make it to our destination. I have a confession to make. That feeling of fear felt pretty awfully familiar to me because building product is a lot like being in that driver's seat. You're trying to get to your destination like trying to find that elusive product market fit that we're all striving for, and you might be trying to do it without having all the tools in place, namely time, money, or people. I've seen my fair share of challenges in building product without having all the tools in your toolkit, whether it was when I was working at an early stage startup in my last role at Co-Edition as the head of product, or even at a more mature organization like the one I met today, which is Meetup here, headquartered here in New York City. But through it all, I found one key to navigating past that fear, and it starts when you let your customers be your guide. Everything I'm going to tell you today boils down to this key takeaway. All that fear, all that anxiety fades into the rear-view mirror when you let your customers lead the way. So what are we going to talk about today? Today, I want to share with you three key lessons that my teams and I use to keep our customers at the center of our process. What you'll find is that these three aspects we'll discuss today, highlight what I think are the biggest challenges as a product manager, which is one, identifying the right problem, two, implementing the right solution, and three, creating a process that allows your teams to do one and two over and over and over again. Along the way, I'll also share with you how letting your customers be your guide unlocks your ability to do more faster, as well as how implementing it incorrectly may sometimes lead you off course. All right, so let's get into it. One of the most challenging parts about the product development process is getting the problem right. Get it wrong, and you might be setting the entire course of your journey for the wrong destination. Luckily for us though, we don't build products in the vacuum, right? We have customers, and more often than not, they're more than willing to tell us where we should be going. But it's up to us to create the space for them to give us that feedback. So I wanna tell you all about a story. I wanna tell you about one of the first problems I had to tackle as head of product at Co-Edition. The Co-Edition was an early stage online marketplace for plus-size women's clothing. And we were struggling with an abnormally high cart abandon rate well above industry standards. So my first task in my new role, like any good PM, I dove head first into the data. And what I saw actually kind of surprised me. We actually had a pretty good top of funnel. We had some pretty healthy conversion metrics. So what that told me was, hey, she's coming to our site. She is clearly able to find the items that she's looking for because she's adding them to our cart. But somewhere along that, and before she could say yes to the dress, we were losing her. So I had narrowed the scope of the problem down to a very specific part of the experience. But I still didn't have the foggiest idea of what was happening. And more importantly, why it was happening. So using a tool called Full Story, shout out to my Full Story peeps here. Full Story, which is a tool that allows you to view and play back each customer session in real time. I immediately started noticing issues. And as it turns out, we actually had a whole slew of usability issues that were causing her to drop off in the middle of the checkout process. So we got to work on fixing them. I don't know how many of you, but like you start to get your like spidey, tingly senses going when you're like, you know what, something just doesn't add up. Yeah, these were going off in full force. And I knew that even though we had discovered these usability issues, there was still something missing, that there was still something wrong with our checkout process that we just hadn't fixed. Now on a sidebar here, I know many of you might come home from work and you might wanna decompress, put something on Netflix, just hang out and chill. I'm not gonna lie, during this time period, my source of daily entertainment became coming home. Pouring a glass of wine and binge watching full story. I'm not gonna lie, my husband's here in the audience, he can definitely attest. So on a particularly wine-feeled night, I watched as this customer came to our site, she put one, two, five, 15 items in our cart. And I watched as she proceeded to checkout, put her email address in, put her payment details in, and then just leave. And I just sat there being like, how is that possible? I swear we were gonna get this like $1,000 order. So with a little liquid courage running through me, I had this brilliant idea. I was like, wait a second, I have her email address. I just watched her enter it. I'm gonna ask her what's up. So I sent her an email and you won't believe it. Less than five minutes later, I had a response back from her. And she called out that she was just looking for shipping times. She had no idea when the delivery date was gonna be. And I realized in that moment that thanks to my Pinot Noir, I had inadvertently created a feedback loop. More drunk on my excitement than anything else, I immediately started emailing every person that started putting their email address and abandoning their cart. And guess what? The responses kept coming through. Obviously look, at some point, a wholly unsustainable, unscalable, but this whole experience taught me two things. One, it got me really critical information and data that I just hadn't gotten before. I was starting to finally figure out why she was abandoning her checkout. And two, most importantly, it validated for me that this was the right moment for intervention. Look, and when the time was right, we were able to take my very scrappy email I was sending and be able to actually automate it. Once we were able to move to a new email service provider called Klavia. And we were able to then experiment with it and figure out what the right language should be. And so that ended up working out. But between my manual emails and the automated ones that we were sending, we were able to clearly see what the problems actually were. And as it turns out, a lot of them ended up being operationally related. Like when should we expect to, do we have expedited delivery options or do we have a better returns process? All of these things ended up becoming our top product and our company priorities in the following months and quarters ahead. And through a series of optimizations we were able to make, we were able to reduce our cart abandoned checkout percentage by 20% points and more than double our conversion in the same time period. You don't have to take my word for it. There are plenty of smarter people out there that have also employed this very scrappy customer mindset to help their businesses scale. Take for example, Rakesh Tandon, the CEO of online retailer LaTote. LaTote back in 2019 acquired Lord and Taylor for those of you who know kind of like his big behemoth big department store. Rakesh credits his early customer obsession as the reason that they were able to acquire a 193 year old big box brand. His secret, he wrote his personal phone number on every single box of LaTote that went out in the early days. He also was regularly answering customer service phone calls, answering emails. He was so customer obsessed and he realized that he looked nothing like his customer who was a woman. So much so that every customer service email he signed, he signed it as Chloe, his customer service alter ego. If you wanna make sure you're solving the right problem you need to experiment with new ways of making sure that your customers feel seen and hurt. Your customers don't expect you to get it right every single time, but by building a high quality feedback loop, you can ensure that their concerns are being addressed much faster. Okay, so let's say we've identified the correct problem because correct problems to solve because we've got these really great feedback loops that you are now all gonna be building. But now the next problem is, well, what's the right solution? Getting this wrong means that you could be spinning for weeks, months, maybe even years at a time. I know because of how did it happen to me. So going back to co-edition, things were going well, we fixed our current bin and problem, things are looking up for me, but over time, we were also growing. We started onboarding more brands, we had a really robust selection of items in our marketplace, and we thought, hey, like, this is gonna be great. Our customer is gonna love the fact that she has all these options. Well, as it turns out during customer interviews that we were doing in home, we learned from her that actually our site had become this overwhelming experience. It was so difficult to navigate and really hard to find the items that she was looking for. So in our minds, we're like, all right, problem seems pretty clearly defined. You know, what could go wrong? I will tell you, that's gonna go wrong. Our biggest miss, we optimized our very scrappy solution for what we could build, not what we should have built. Let me tell you a little bit more about that. But we were a small scrappy startup. We didn't really have a lot of data or engineering resources. We also had minimal limited time, limited people to help out with this. And we let those factors determine what our solution was going to be. We thought with given those constraints, the best thing that we could build was this like desktop experience that was a style quiz. You might have seen it on other e-commerce websites that customers would enter their information, you know, list out their preferences, and then we would email them with a list of suggestions. Anybody here wanna take a gamble as to how many conversions we got off this thing? Anybody? Shout out. Seven? Anybody else? It's very ambitious. I really like it. Zero, thank you. We got zero conversions off this thing. What a bummer, right? Had we led with the insights that we had gained from our customer research, what we should have built was a much more mobile friendly solution because as it turns out, she shops on her phone. We should have built something that actually ran during the weekends and weeknights, not during the weekdays when our customer service agents were available but around the times that she actually shopped. And we should have built something that was a lot more real time and not when our customer service agents were in between their calls and answering emails because she doesn't have a lot of time. She's quickly shopping and then leaving. We shouldn't have tried to change her behavior but we should have changed ours to what she was already doing. Instead of optimizing for what we should have built, instead of optimizing for what we could have built, we should have optimized for what we should have built. So, okay, armed with that knowledge, I unlocked a really powerful insight in Merola Meetup. You can drive future adoption much faster if you know how your customers have adapted your product for their needs and built for that. So let me just back up. Meetup is a marketplace for events in communities. We have 50 million users worldwide. Our customers are event organizers who pay us a monthly subscription fee. And for that, we bring them members who are interested in their events and their groups. So during the COVID-19 pandemic, as I'm sure a lot of you had experienced, we had to make a lot of different changes to kind of shift to the new normal. One of the things that really changed for us is prior to March 7th, 2020, we were an in-person company, right? The whole premise of a meetup was you're actually meeting up in-person. But once that sort of was taken away from us, we had to introduce the concept of online events, which was completely new for us. And what ended up happening is, as you can imagine, our users started using products in ways that we never imagined. Let me give you an example. So just to kind of talk a little bit about the in-person versus online events. In-person, we really prioritized location, where you actually were when we gave you recommendations, right? For an in-person event, you're not gonna be traveling thousands of miles to attend an in-person event. It's gonna be where you are physically located. But in the world of online events, where you're physically located doesn't matter, right? You can attend an event anywhere. I could be hosting an event here in New York City, and I could have anybody from around the world, like this product conference, come and attend virtually. So something really interesting started happening. We introduced online events, and we started seeing the same online event be duplicated in our data over and over again. And at first, I thought we got it wrong. I thought we were like, wait, did we just implement this incorrectly? And like, there's some weird cron job running that's like duplicating these events. As it turns out, no, it was our organizers, specifically those that had multiple groups that were manually copying and pasting a single online event to each one of their groups so that they could broaden the reach of that single online event to all the groups in their different GEOs. And honestly, we got so much feedback from our organizers who were doing this and saying, hey, can you build this feature for me? It would be so helpful if we were able to have this way to like manually copy and paste. And I was like, yeah, sure. I mean, seems like a pretty good growth lover for us too. You know those like Spidey Tingley senses I was telling you about? Yeah, those started going off too. And I was like, you know what, before we start doing that, before we just go off and build what I think we should be building, we should take a step back to really understand what the context is, what are we really trying to achieve? So instead of actually going ahead and building that feature automatically, we built a scrappy intervention. We built a concierge-like service that we went back to the organizers who were doing this kind of behavior and said, hey, why don't you let us do all the legwork for you, right? We'll take on the whole manually copying and pasting each of these events. But in that process, we'll also learn. And a kid will die. We learned so much, not only just the amount of friction that that process had and how tedious it was, but we also learned all the different sort of nuances and edge cases and logic that we would have never taken into consideration having not done the job ourselves. Doing the job ourselves allowed us to uncover several other aspects of the feature that we would have most definitely missed otherwise. And by building and validating our scrappy intervention, we were able to create a solution ultimately that's scaled across organizers. It's gotten to the point where this feature, we call it network events, is one of our top features that drives so many, like a lot of upgrades to our premium product. So what can we take away from this? On its service, we built the MVP, our minimum viable product at co-edition. And it should have worked, but it failed because we built it for our convenience and not for hers. At Meetup, we not only observed our users' workarounds, but we put those workarounds through the test ourselves and it allowed us to catch flaws that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. What we built at Meetup was what I call the minimum viable experience. And what I mean by that, the biggest difference between an MVP and an MVP is that it not only considers the functional requirements, it not only considers if the job got done, but if it got done well. If you want to drive feature adoption, focus on building the MVE. So to recap so far, we talked about strategies on identifying the right problem to solve, ensuring that you're considering the best solution. But product management isn't just solving, isn't about just solving one problem, right? If that was the case, I think we would solve our problem and then we'd be like, all right, see ya, like I'm never solving another problem again. But no, our jobs as product managers and leaders is to continue to solve the next problem and the problem after that, one after that. Everything I've shared with you so far has just been about tactics. But honestly, that's kind of misleading because it's not the tactics that matter or in fact, even skills. It's the habit that you've created out of practicing those tactics that does. So now I'll give you a couple of examples of how we've actually done this and how I've done this with other product teams. At Coedition, we made it a weekly thing. Every Monday afternoon, we'd get together as a company and we would process returns together. We would read every return note and look through what people were saying and seeing if we could solve some of those problems. Every Thursday, we had a customer appreciation hour where you'd hand write thank you notes and everyone participated. Everyone from the CEO, all the way down to our operations managers, everyone was part of this process. What this allowed us to do really was for all of us to gain the level of empathy for our customers in ways that allowed us to make decisions big or small but really keeping the customer in mind. At Meetup, we've been trying a lot of different things. So I wanted to share with you a couple of different tactics that have allowed us to really succeed in this area. One of the most successful practices that we've put into place recently has been a weekly product crit, so similar to a design crit. PMs sign up for a time slot. They bring a problem that they wanna solve and all the other PMs share their feedback, share their insights that they might have gotten through user research. This has been pretty effective for us because honestly with 50 million users, you can't talk to them all, right? It's virtually impossible. So by being able to come together as a team and being able to share some of those insights, we've been able to scale our impact to a much higher degree. The other thing that's really worked for us is looking outside of the product team to say how could we bring the customer and be able to reach as many customers as possible? So we've partnered with our customer experience team, our customer support team who are on the front lines of talking to our customers every single day. We've built a process that really invites them into our product development process before, during, and after product launches and that's really helped accelerate how quickly we can get feedback from our customers. In fact, we launched something today and we had feedback coming in just hours after launch and then really helping us prioritize and iterate what we wanna build. So friendly advice, find your neighborhood-friendly customer service advocate or partner and become best friends with them. You won't regret it. So in the end, tactics don't scale, culture does. And this doesn't mean just doing tactics together as a team. It means hiring people to have that customer first mindset. The earlier that you adopt this in your company's lifecycle or in your product's lifecycle, the more you'll see a difference as your product or your company scales. So going back to my being lost analogy, if you find yourself being lost and possibly afraid because you don't know where you're going, focusing on these three key takeaways will help ensure that you're letting your customers be your guide. But I also want you to know, it's okay to be afraid, but don't be afraid of failing. Be afraid of not trying. Your customers and your users are counting on you to get it right and to be their advocates through it all. So if I can leave you with one final thought, tonight, it's this. What would you be, what would you build if you had nothing to fear? If you enjoyed today's talk and wanna learn more, please, please, please connect with me. I can't wait to hear about all the fearless things that you all build. Thank you to the Product Conference, or Product Con team for having this amazing conference. And thank you all for your time.