 Would you believe that we've practised that? No. Thank you so much, Mika. What an incredible, incredible place to be today. As we were preparing in the green room out the back, one of the things we were talking about was you can feel really nervous coming onto these stages, but there's nothing to feel nervous about because we're without people, so safe environment. So here today, I'm going to follow on from the amazing presentation by Dapika with a conversation about diversity and high-performing teams. First, a little bit about me. Yes, I'm the Chief Product Officer at Tier Mobility, and before that, I was the Chief Product Officer at N26. So scaling global products is kind of my thing. I've worked around the world. I'm an Australian. I promise I'll try not to swear. I've worked in Asia, in Hong Kong. I've worked in Germany. I've worked in Europe. And I've worked in lots of different cultures with lots of different teams and cultures in those teams, which is going to lead into a little bit what I'll talk about. I'm also an angel investor, and I'm a startup advisor, so I can't help myself, right? Once a product person, always a product person. And so to kick off the presentation and maybe to give some understanding as to why this is so important to me, I want to tell you a little bit about my journey into senior product leadership. So first thing that's important to know about me is I identify as a product manager. That is what I am. It's part of my identity. And I think I'll always be a product manager. I'm sure all of you have a canvan board at home. There's a whiteboard tucked behind the couch somewhere, post-its are always available. It's just how we think, right? And that's a good thing, because actually product management can be applied to everything. So if you're a product manager, really you're all about building products and delivering incremental value to users. And that's kind of, that's what I am. That's what I do. And that's what I love. And so as you progress in your career and you move into more senior roles, part of you is very satisfied by that. I must be good at what I do because I'm becoming more senior. But one of the things that's really interesting is it moves you further away from the products. And we all hate the senior leader that jumps into the stand-up, tells you what to do, thinks, you know, oh, is that backlog prioritised the right way? I don't know. I have been that person and I apologise to product people that are watching that have worked with me or still do. I cannot help myself. But I had to stop. I had to remove because that wasn't my job anymore. And that was a real crisis of identity for me. If I don't build products anymore, what do I do? And what is senior product leadership? And I had to rethink what I thought about my identity and my job. If we go back to who I am, I'm a product manager. So let's apply the same philosophy to the current situation that I've always done. And so I changed my mindset. I still am a product manager. My product just changed. My product is my team. And I need to make sure that I build the best product for what we're trying to achieve. As a senior product and business leader, my role is to set the direction for the teams and also to ensure that they are enabled to succeed. Sounds easy. Depending on the environment that you work up in, yeah, it's not so easy all the time. I had to setting direction sounds great, but what happens if you're pivoting all the time? What happens if you're a startup? What happens if the market changes? What happens if COVID hits? And Ben will talk a little bit about how to deal with crises as product management a bit later in the day. You should definitely tune in. So as a product manager, now this is a massive oversimplification. There are two things on the balancing scales, scope and time. If what you're trying to achieve is a huge scope and success for the product is completing that scope, time has to give. I know I'm preaching to the choir. If in fact there is a deadline, and yes, there are deadlines, trust me, going to work in hardware product, there are deadlines that you have to hit. If the deadline and the time is the hard constraint, scope has to give, right? And these are the balancing scales that product management lives with. When you're building teams, there is also a scale, right? And I'm not building just a team, I only build high-performing teams. And the scales are diversity and inclusion. Because the more or less diversity that you want in your team depends on how much you have to do on inclusion. If I want low diversity in my team, inclusion is pretty easy. We all think the same, we like each other, we actually go to the same pub after work, like it's just a coincidence, right? If you want more diversity in your team, you need to have more inclusion and put more time into the inclusion side of things. There's always a balancing act. And this is the art that is product management. Because no one is going to tell you where those scales need to sit. And not one time are those scales ever going to sit at the same point. Different product, different team, different company, you have to figure those things out. So, classic definition. Diversity is essentially the condition of having lots of stuff put together, right? It's as simple as that. And so we talk a lot about diversity and high-performing teams, but actually, diversity in relation to high-performing teams is not just diversity. If you have all lots of people with different opinions, different backgrounds, different observations, that is not a high-performing team. Diversity in relation to high-performing teams is wrapped in a circle of inclusion. And if you can't work on the inclusion side of things, do not do the diversity side of things. It's way too easy to think that you can hire a group of different people and that will work. You will fail faster than you can say something inappropriate. Not gonna swear. So then, why does it matter, right? If it's so hard, why does diversity matter? Because, I mean, really do we need it to be harder than it is? It's already really hard to build great products. And putting a lot of different people, a lot of different ideas into the same room, trying to get them to work together all the time, it's just a lot of friction, right? No one likes friction. Like, just agree with me. I'm right. And no one wants their assumptions and biases to be challenged. Don't air my dirty laundry. Like, yeah, I know I've got them, yeah, that's unconscious. But challenging assumptions and biases just creates more friction, right? Questioning how people think, why they think that. And then you can get into some really chunky philosophical areas. And diversity forces people to work harder. It just does. Stuff's harder when you have to get around someone else's opinion, when you have to take other things into consideration. I know where we need to go, let's just go there. Oh, but what about this? No, no, no, ooh, that's gonna take too long. Gonna go there. I know the answer. Too hard. Why would we bother? This is a question that comes up in a lot of companies. It's not so overt, right? No one really says, yeah, I don't believe in diversity. We should just straight through. Look how fast their employee engagement goes down. So what they say is, yes, we believe in diversity. Yes, we're gonna have quotas. We're gonna hire all these different people. But what they forget is that diversity isn't the thing that creates high-performing teams. Inclusion does. And inclusion takes work. And the reason you should do this is because the challenges make us better. Friction forces us to think harder. If you're not challenged, we would still be thinking like we were when we were 18. If we didn't have to overcome things and get those experiences, whether those are that, you know, you're backpacking through Europe and all of a sudden you left your bag on the train. Okay, that's a tough experience that teaches you something and you learn from it. In the workplace, people do that to us. They challenge us. They push our boundaries. And I promise you, you've all had a job that you hated. And I promise you that you learned more in that job than you have in any other job that you've had. Don't stay in it. But take that learning and grow from it. Force you to think harder. How are you gonna do this differently in the future? The second part is that while it's difficult to have our assumptions and biases challenged, assumptions and biases kill innovation. Group think is the enemy of startups. It doesn't create pioneer products. It doesn't push the boundary. It doesn't change the way people are moving around cities in the future. It doesn't change the face of banking. It doesn't impact climate change. And building global products that need to scale across the world requires diverse thinking in the team that builds them. If you think that you're going to be a $10 billion company in five years time and you're going to have a SaaS product that everyone in the world is going to use, but three white guys are gonna build it, I think you've got a problem. So we all understand we've got these diversity and inclusion things. But what I also want to do is give you some practical things that you can take when you're building teams. Now whether you're a product manager and you're not officially building the team, or whether you're the head of product, or whether you're the director, or the CPO, or the CEO, let's hope there's some of those watching. How do you build high-performing teams? So I'm gonna get really practical. Start with your hard skills. We're talking about diversity and inclusion. We're talking about psychological safety. Those things don't build products, right? They build great products, but they're not the things that you need to build the product that you need. So when you're building a team, you think about what are the hard skills that I need in this team? I need someone who has some understanding of product management, probably a good idea. I need someone who, from a management perspective, can understand product management and really lead the team in that side of things. I need project management. We all hate it, right? It's an essential skill in product management to know how to project management things. I need someone who understands customer journey mapping because I'm a B2C product. I need someone who understands platform architecture because we have a monolith and we need to get to microservices. We need someone who understands agile methodologies so that we can move fast. We need someone who has SQL and Kotlin, and I need someone who has test automation. These are hard skills that I think I need to build the product that I want to build. Then map the skills that you need in the team. I need someone engineers can relate to in management. I need someone that can work with that stakeholder, and you all have the name in your head. Everyone has it. There's always one. And you need someone who can manage that person who can give them what they need. You need someone with an affinity for data analytics. I do, because my gap is numbers, believe it or not. I need someone who naturally pulls the team together after a team meeting and says, okay, what's the plan, guys? They're also the person that generally notices when someone is a little quieter than usual, and they give them a call and they say, hey, is everything okay? I call this the glue person. If you take one thing from this, make sure you have glue people in your team. Not everyone, because if you had the whole team of people going, are you okay? What's the plan? We have a plan? Huh? You need someone that always asks why. You also need someone who always asks why not. So now that we have these lists, right? Put them in Excel, put them on a notepad, put them on a post-it. I don't care. Write them down and build teams with intentions, right? So now I've got, now I have a team of things with hard skills, and I put them together because I worked out what I need, and I wrote the job descriptions, and I realized that actually a couple of things, these things go together, like product management, understanding, and agile technologies. Great. Bring that person together. And then you start hiring, and you've got these four roles, and you go, okay, I'm interviewing this person. They applied for the product management role. As I'm interviewing everyone, have questions that identify what team skills they fulfill. Let me tell you, no one is a unicorn. No one can do everything. Do not expect that. There are not unicorn heroes that can solve everything, even if some people think they might be. So I was interviewing this person, fantastic. I realized she's always asking why. She's challenging, she's pushing. I was like, right, I have that person, Tic. The next person I hire is the QA, right? I have a QA, I wanted a test automation, I wanted this infrastructure, I don't want to be testing, I actually want to move away from quality assurance and make sure that the engineers and the product managers are responsible for the quality of our product, so I hire someone who can enable that to happen. As I hired this person, I recognized that they seemed to be the person that would always ask why not, and challenge back. Then I hired a data analyst, right? Yes, okay, they had SQL skills. But coincidentally, my, that stakeholder, might have been someone who needed to understand data analytics in a business sense. Otherwise, she keeps pushing. I don't understand, explain it to me. And so I tick the box of someone who can manage that stakeholder and give them what they need to have confidence in the product team. They also, coincidentally the data analyst, has an affinity for deep data analytics. And the last person that I hired was the engineering manager, and this is someone that the engineers can relate to, they are very affable, they have a great career history, and the engineers would be inspired to be led by this person, brilliant. Awesome, I've hired my team, great. Oh no, I missed one. And you'll never feel everything, right? But you need to recognize that you've just built a team of high-performing individuals who are gonna challenge, someone's gonna ask why, someone's gonna ask why not, right? They're all individuals, they're gonna push each other, it's probably gonna build amazing things. But there's no glue person. So when the shit hits the fan, someone needs to fill that gap. And whether someone becomes that person or you fill that role, you need to be aware that you don't have it because it's essential to build high-performing teams to have that person. So essentially what I'm trying to say is diversity does not make a high-performing team, right? You can build great teams, you can build great products without diversity for sure. Should you? No. Can you? Yes. Does it scale? No. Do you build great global products that are gonna be $10 billion companies? Absolutely not. Diversity without inclusion is just a hot mess. So the three things, and following on a bit more practically from the great foundation that Deepika set was that there are three things that need to be in your inclusion circle. The first is environment, right? You need open and honest leadership, that's on you. Whether you're the product manager, head of product director, take that role. Set that standard, right? Leadership matters and demonstrating how you do that leadership is essential for how you want the rest of the team to behave. You need a sense of familiarity. This can be different in different teams. You might have some teams that attend each other's children's birthday parties, right? They hang out on the weekend, amazing. But you also might have other teams that just need to play cards on a Thursday afternoon in the office, and that's the level of familiarity that they need to be a high-performing team. There's no judgment, right? You just need to understand. And you also need a learning mindset, right? So challenging, safe environment, psychological safety. The second that you need to give the team to create the inclusion circle is expectations. People like to know what success looks like. They want to run in a direction, and if you hire ambitious, driven, amazing people, they want to know how they win. So you need to tell them, and you need to tell them all the same thing so that they're all running in the same direction. The classic Spotify example of autonomy without alignment is you hire great people, you don't set them in the same direction, and they're like, they're all over the place. The other part is clear vision and direction, or the why. And the other part is they have to be all in. Everyone has to be in at the same to the same extent. At school, I was a rower. I was a stroke-side rower, so my side ran out this way. The other side of the boat had the oars out this way. In product teams, if you build a team that has all the stroke-side rowers who are driven, ambitious, wanna succeed at all costs, love gonna increase the valuation of the company, gonna do this, gonna change the world, and you have some people in the team who are happy to work nine to five and really want to prioritize work-life balance for themselves, which is fine. But as a person who is building the team, you need to understand the balance, right? Because if you have this on this side and this on this side, the boat's going in a circle. You're not going anywhere. It's about balance. And the third is relationships. You need respect and partnership. And as the person that is building this, you should set out with intention to make this happen. The second time is time to build. Don't think you can just hire these people. You ticked all the boxes. You even have the glue person maybe. Awesome. Two weeks in. As the person who's building the team, if you're building, you're making sure that you have the time to build them. I see it all the time. The most high-achieving managers, like I've got this great onboarding plan for my team, I've got a 20-minute meeting with everyone that they need to meet. How do you build a relationship in a one 20-minute meeting? Pick the three or four people that they need to have a strong relationship with and book half an hour every week for the first six weeks. Because I'd promise you, at some point, they're going to need to rely on that person. It's going to be crisis. The incident channel is going to blow up. And there's not going to be any, hey, how are you, kids? Nice to see you. It's going to be, what the hell is going on? If you don't have a relationship to rely on, there's no way that's going to work. No way in hell. Make sure that you build and you put the time in to build those relationships. And in that time, understand each other's preferred style. So, do you like my take a screenshot? Not yet? Now. So, a team full of diversity does not make a high-performing team. The inclusion circle of environment, expectations, and relationships are the things that you as the person that is building this product need to make sure that you put in place. The scope of the product is important. And it's not just about hard skills. It's also about soft skills. And it's also about team skills. But you as the product manager need to make sure that you pull all of those things together. So, diversity and inclusion is an outcome that is essential to high-performing teams. Thank you.