 Hey everyone, I am so excited to be here with you all today. I am a long time product con fan and attendee and now second time speaker on the stage. So I'm super psyched to be here. For those of you who didn't get to attend my talk last year, my name is Penny Zito and I lead product development at Amazon's Prime Gaming Division. So I have a really fun job where I get to give anyone who is an Amazon Prime member access to a huge library of free games and game content and a monthly Twitch subscription. So if there's any game music out there come connect with me. We do have a few select roles open. Today I'm here with awesome guests to talk about a topic that really resonates with me. We're going to talk about how to break down silos between products and product-adjacent teams. For the purpose of today's talk, we define the product as the product development team. So that happy trinity of product engineering and design and product-adjacent teams are going to be those cross-functional teams across marketing, business development, finance, etc. that we really need a partner with. I think this topic is really, really important especially for PMs out there because when you first start off in your career you're really focused on launching a set of features with a core team. But as you advance and you level up you're going to be potentially overseeing an entire suite of products working on something that's increasingly complex has a higher, larger audience and at greater scales you're going to have to be managing partnerships with more and more teams. And when that happens you risk things like misalignment, miscommunication, misconception basically a lot of misses across the board. So my awesome panelists are going to help us today mitigate some of that. So with that I'm going to kick off with introductions. I'd love for you each to introduce yourselves talk to us about what products you're working on and I'll talk a little bit about why this is such an important topic and what are some of the challenges and requirements you've seen in terms of silos across products and product adjacent teams. I guess I'll go first. Hey everyone, I'm Hasthu from Mowingage. I lead the growth efforts for us in the region and at Mowingage we're essentially an intelligent customer engagement platform. I just heard myself get louder there. But what we do is we help brands like Poshmark, Ally Bank and other leading both consumer and B2B businesses better engage with their customers. So in a way break down the silos of email marketing, SMS marketing, mobile marketing, transactional and product-led communications because to the end customer it's all communications from your brand. So as a platform we're helping improve the experience that you're able to deliver to your customers and do that in a way that's very automated. Why this is a topic that we feel is really important and I feel is really important is as a customer obsessed organization as a platform and a SaaS based solution that is building to deliver more value to our customers. The silos often just lead to a loss in translation almost of what the customers are saying to the customer-facing teams and what the takeaways to the product teams are. And I think that breakdown in silos means that we're building products that don't fully solve the problems that our customers are coming to us with and we're delivering more to industry standards and lesser to innovating solutions for the unique needs of each of our customers. So I think that's why this is a really important topic to us. Awesome. Thanks Hasu. Shantaro. Yeah. Hey folks. Shantaro Matsui. Super excited to be here at my first product con. Quick background. Started my career in management consulting. Got sick of swinging PowerPoints. Then wanted to work at a company that's actually building something. So moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to join Uber Eats right before they raised their series E-Round. I think there saw firsthand how important it was to break down organizational silos. Post-IPO wanted to join a smaller company at the time, had a lot of really sharp PM friends in the Bay Area that were all using amplitude and telling me how helpful a tool is in making their day-to-day decisions. So moseyed over to their job board, saw they had an opening to build out a product operations team from scratch, which was really exciting. One, because it was really cross-functional and two, was the perfect bridge between the ops work that I love to do and then the product world. So then an amplitude for two and a half years now is really cross-functional. It's around planning, it's around launch management, it's around voice of the customer. And one of the big impacts that I see when we don't break down silos is around decreases in shipping velocity, which is something that we're pretty maniacal about at Amplitude. I'm sure a lot of us have experienced here being days away from a big launch only to have a product adjacent team, be it legal or another product team, put the emergency brakes on, really causes impacts to delays, frustration. We try our best, doesn't happen all the time to invest a lot of time up front to get everyone aligned so that way we could move really quickly and ship fast. Awesome, thanks Shintaro. Adam? Everybody, Adam Dilley. I work at Quantum Metric. I'm the Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering there at Quantum. And a little bit about what we're working on right now, what we do is basically break your applications down to say a task that can mean something like buying a product on Walmart, changing your flight on United, maybe signing up for a new account on US Bank. Basically, these are all the tasks that you create your applications to get your customers to and through in order to drive success for your business. And we basically tell you what is causing users to succeed at those tasks, what's causing users to not succeed there, and when we can tell you what we look like and try to drive more success through task completion, then we find success for the people that we're working with. This particular topic, I was really happy to see we're talking about it because it keeps me up at night from the perspective of leadership, I think about the impact that it has on our people and employee morale and kind of employee engagement. And I think that comes from sort of this environment of maybe competition instead of collaboration can detach us from our shared goals. We're all trying to drive success for the business and for our customers, but when you're sort of working in silos and all of a sudden you become detached from those common goals and one of the things I love that our customer success team does is every month they drive a monthly meeting where they talk about success that we've driven for our customers in the last 30 days. And so many times I've had engineers at that meeting and say this is the absolute best meeting that you can have me attend each month and it's because they see the things that they're working on day to day in the product driving success for the customer and when you kind of make that connection between I put my work into this saying and here's the end result of it here's something that I did win for the customer that's that shared goal that shared vision that we all have to work together to be from breaking down silos. Awesome, thanks Adam. Alright, we'll jump right to it. So my first question is what are some of the best practices or mechanisms that you guys have employed to help foster more cross-functional cohesion in your teams? Yeah, I could kick off. So I don't believe in best practices I really think it really varies on the context of your organization, but something that's worked really well at Amplitude is actually embedding go to market team members be it a support agent, be it a customer success manager within product teams and have them meet with their product counterparts on a regular basis and what that's done is two things. One, it's really tightened the feedback loop between what the field is hearing on the ground and what product is building and I think most importantly it's actually shifted who is giving the product information and who is the messenger of that. So we actually have these go to market representatives actually share roadmap updates and these upcoming launches with their respective teams and when you do that and you're a customer success manager it really resonates a lot more when you have a fellow colleague in your team sharing that versus hearing it from our product manager. Fair point. Adam, did you have something to add? Yeah, kind of similar idea. One thing that we've done is shadowing at Quantum Metric and this is really to kind of drive the R&D teams knowledge about the rest of the company the customer and other departments we have our product team members our PMs, our designers, our engineers shadow customers sometimes shadow members of the customer success team basically just sit with them and do their job. They can run the gamut from something highly technical they're writing JavaScript code all the way to business consultant type of role so understanding what the success at this particular business look like what are those customers trying to do to succeed what can Quantum do to help it just drives so much deeper understanding of the customer and also really empathy for people who might struggle internally or customers with our own product because that's going to happen and when that empathy of the struggle is there then they're going to do their job better in the end. One of the things I love to see is a change that comes out of this kind of shadowing environment so when a PM or designer engineer makes a connection with something from one of those shadowing sessions and says you know I get the customer need and I can do something about it I can make a change in the product they make that change they deliver that out to the customer out to the market just as like the best indicator of success for me it's like you really get it you get the customer and you get how in your role you can do a better job to make that successful. I love that breaking down kind of the silos bringing folks closer to customers so another question I have is on the product adjacent team side if they wanted to more proactively gain a better understanding and increase their knowledge of products what are some suggestions that you have for those partners? Yeah and probably is the most product adjacent person on the panel I'll give my perspective there and it's actually to talk to something both of you said which is bring the product teams in front of the customers and I believe that's a great way of also improving the understanding that product adjacent teams have of the product because it's finally helping customer success teams and sales teams and solution consultants go beyond what the product does and really enable them to understand how it does it and I think that's why I really like having product managers and our product team on calls with customers with prospects actually solution together rather than say this is what we can do this is what we can't do so I think that's a great way of just bringing product teams into actual real life customer situations and letting customer facing teams experience that and learn a little bit more of the how and not just the what I guess we're unanimous on this but it's a common theme to embed those teams together this direction so it's kind of the outside teams outside of product getting more knowledge about the product itself two things on this one one one kind of for the masses and then one that I wish I could do for everyone but I haven't quite figured out how to make it work so it's like do for the few what you wish you could do for everyone the first one is product updates so you're all hands meetings your product monthly updates that sort of thing we do a dedicated one hour a month on the product and we try as hard as we possibly can to not skip these to not let them go to always be giving some kind of update in the all hands meeting about what we're doing when you're you're dedicated to that the rest of the company can kind of follow the story arc of these different things that you're building because you're going to give them an update one time about you know an idea we have or something that's in the product discovery phase but then you've got things in the execution phase and things that are getting close to go to market and you want their help with that go to market process and all succeed together and when you keep up that pace people are remembering okay this is I heard how this thing was generated what the problem was for the customer that we want to solve I might have even heard about an internal roadblock that we ran into and how we kind of overcame that and all of a sudden they're building up the background in their mind of how these things came to be and then the other one that that I'd love to be able to do for more folks and kind of mention this entire is we do embedding as well so we take team members from outside of R&D and we put them into our product pods so you know our small teams of folks that are working together day to day building the product and we have them even attend standouts what they're seeing the prioritization how we're kind of choosing this thing over that thing and it's back to the empathy but it's kind of the other direction now the rest of the company can understand how all of your jobs are super complex you know the work that you do is not easy there's not one code to write to solve a particular problem it's a very creative endeavor we find that that just kind of builds an understanding of this is an art more than a science product is and so it also drives a lot of value back into the product as well because you have those stakeholders from outside of R&D saying we could do this better there's a different way to solve or this would be the thing to really nail that problem for the customer so embedding and I think quite similar another thing that we do a lot of also is getting the product adjacent teams to participate even at the PRD stage getting them to write the user stories getting them to actually talk about the challenges that they're seeing out in the market and be a part of the product development roadmap itself and that's something that's helped quite a bit too so it sounds like getting folks involved a lot earlier I think that everything you're sharing we as product folks can apply as well and the other way around in terms of better understanding other functions and their roles and what they have to deal with too so I think these are the same things that we can all apply so the next question is around leadership because leadership themselves can sometimes be a silo so I'm really curious around if you guys can share any challenges that you face with leadership as a silo and what are some of the techniques that you've leveraged to kind of bring them along to ensure product success yeah absolutely and I think often the toughest silo to reach and get some time with and present your case too but we essentially see it as two key things the quantitative measure as well as the qualitative from the quantitative perspective it's periodically giving leadership a view of any new feature updates or product updates that we have their adoption their impact on everything leadership cares about which could be just usage of the solution billing anything of that sort so I think some of it's quite quantitative and fairly reasonable asked to be able to present the impact that it's had but on the qualitative front it's again talking to the customers it's taking just some of those key customer stories often in their own words and presenting the impact and with that the kind of further enhancements that we want to try so often times honestly I feel like it's the qualitative aspects that matter a little bit more than the quantitative it could just be us focusing a lot more on each of our customers but yeah those are some of the probably the two key ways we're trying to address that yeah that's great I think yeah leadership definitely a tough group to crack I think an amplitude one thing that's been really helpful for us is actually having joint rituals with different leadership groups so one example of that is we have a quarterly executive retro where we actually have go to market sales vice presidents vice presidents of pre sales post sales come to the product leadership team and present top thematics that they're hearing from customers but also we get them to create a stack rank of all of their product asks and that's important because I'm sure often times we've experienced silos and different leaderships and in terms of the priorities across go to market so that's been really helpful in terms of creating clarity around what the priorities are for go to market but also really fosters a really healthy discussion if there are tradeoffs to be made and what product will build and commit to and not I think that's interesting kind of bring those different leaders in the room and they probably each have their long list of things that they want so when they hear each other's long list they're like well actually you know this is a backlog the size of a crazy amount of course you guys can't do it all. Adam do you have anything potentially to add to this? I think what you just said is the key there it's like I can I can have blinders on about the things that I want and need in my role but all of a sudden when there's three or four other people sitting next to me giving their needs as well then you do all of a sudden realize maybe there is this other thing that's more important than mine and it's about it's again back to kind of understanding of the complexity of what we do it's really easy to kind of shoot an ask over Slack or email and be like hey by the way customer needs this go do it but when you have to get in that meeting and make tradeoffs and prioritize things and understand this job is hard there's a lot of work that goes into these things and we only have so much bandwidth and everyone's strapped for resources then it just really like breaks down the silos and it builds that more team atmosphere we're working together we should do the absolute best thing for the customer together that makes sense and I'll share my input on this so I think we talked a lot about why it's important to do this techniques in terms of bringing people in earlier some ceremonies and rituals that we can have cross functionally but one of my favorite at Amazon we had these things called leadership principles and one of my favorite ones is called learning be curious and a lot of folks think that's like okay you know continually learning in an academic sense or continuing to build subject matter expertise but the way I internalize it is just being curious about whether it's people or things and I find that it's really valuable because oftentimes silos exist again because of misunderstandings lack of knowledge if you kind of just seek to first understand why is this silo happening is there a fear in terms of territory is it just because the person just truly sees it as a black box first understanding that just kind of understanding where it's coming from talking to folks will help foster vulnerability and trust and I think that's foundational before even a lot of these techniques that we apply because once you have that and there's an equal place that you're coming from and that shared goal then the rest of this will flow really nicely so we are actually near time but I'm curious if the group has any closing dots for the audience no I really like what you just said Penny I think it really starts with personal connection first if you build that I think that that really helps break down a lot of the silos just so it's really worth investing time in building those relationships and yeah I think joint rituals clarity on roles and responsibilities and joint accountability is really important to break down silos absolutely I think something you just kind of touched on but the intent you know there's no usually no negative intent one of the things I love to live by in day to day work is like assume positive intent all the time for all the people that are around us and you know no one no one builds silo on purpose usually it just happens because we're all like heads down we've got our role we've got the things that we need to do to succeed and it doesn't you know it doesn't create a purposeful division but you do have to be purposeful to kind of bring people back together and do all the things that we're talking about here to make sure that we're staying close to one another trying to do the best thing for the customer that's company yeah and I think from from my perspective one of the most annoying things that our product team does is why why yeah why and I think it's also the most useful thing for product adjacent teams to ask why can you do this why can't you do this why is it going to take time and I think that is something that really helps build perspective really helps build an appreciation across the board and across teams for why and as annoying as that question is it's it's one of my favorite ones you know irrespective of context agree so in terms of my awesome panelists here they're going to be hanging out they all have boots on the X4 so definitely feel free to connect with any of us on LinkedIn we can jam on this some more or if you want to chat with them in person we've been hanging out backstage and they're awesome so you guys can have a chance to do that but that's all we have for you guys today thank you