 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Product School Webinar on Leveraging Creativity as a Product Manager. I'm super excited to speak about this topic today, and I hope you find the content valuable. A little bit about me before we get started. My name is Uha, and I'm a Product Manager at Microsoft. I have experience working across consumer products in Microsoft such as Xbox as well as enterprise products like Dynamics. I'm currently working on Microsoft Teams. My socials are listed here, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions or just want to chat about product management. Today, we're going to be talking about a very abstract concept, creativity, and we're going to try to distill it down into concrete actionable takeaways, much like we do in our jobs as PMs. We're going to start off with an intro that I'm very excited about, then we'll move on to some of the theoreticals where we'll define what creativity is and address some misconceptions around it. We'll switch gears and talk about how and why the skill is relevant to PMs. We'll end with some key practices to build and exercise our creative muscles. All right, let's get into it. Let's first start with a thought exercise called the Dunker's Candle Problem. Imagine you have the following objects at hand, a candle, a bunch of matches, a box containing thumbtacks or bulletin board pins, a wall, or a corkboard. All of these are placed on a table. How would you fix and light the candle on the wall using only these objects? And you should fix it in such a way that the wax from the candle does not drip onto the table below. Use the picture as reference and think about it for a few seconds. This was actually a cognitive performance test that psychologist Carl Dunker ran as part of his thesis on problem solving. Let's take a look at the solution. The best way to achieve the goal of attaching the candle to the wall such that wax won't drip on the table is by using the box itself as the foundation. So basically empty the box of the tags and then attach it to the wall to form the base where you put the candle on top of. So you use the pins to attach the box to the wall and place the candle in the box and then light it. I was not even close to the solution when I first saw this problem. I was devising a very complicated, weird solution. But the main point here is to see the box as a useful separate entity on its own. So would you say this is a creative solution? Most of us will intuitively say yes. What if the question was asked slightly differently? What if it was made obvious that the box could be used as a separate entity by removing the pins from the box beforehand? It was proved in the research that it's easier to arrive at the ideal solution in this case. But would we still classify this as a creative solution? Let's find out by defining what creativity even is. So based on the candle problem, we were intuitively able to identify that the solution was a creative one. Why? What is creativity and how should we define it? So creativity is basically the ability to use our thinking and imagination to bring forth something new and useful. Applying it to the candle problem, the solution we discussed was one, useful in solving the problem at hand. And two, in a way, new as well because we have to think differently about the box. So creativity is not just about spitting out new and revolutionary ideas. It's applying your thought process deliberately to solve a problem in a new way. Creativity is often associated with artists. If you don't paint, act, or sing, you're generally not considered creative. This isn't true, though. There are actually different types of creativity and being artistic is just one subtype. For product management, the subtypes of deliberate cognitive and spontaneous cognitive are most relevant. The deliberate cognitive is what most scientists and problems always fall under. They get to innovations or solutions by deliberately working through the problems using trial and error, much like Edison did with the light bulb. He failed several times before actually inventing it. In the world of product management, think about experimentation being a great example in this category. Now, spontaneous creativity is when you have sudden realizations about a particular problem. If you watch the show Big Bang Theory, you might remember the episode where Sheldon Cooper, one of the main characters, is stuck on a problem. And until he takes a break and goes and does something completely different like working in a cheesecake factory, the problem just doesn't get solved. So he seemingly has a magical epiphany of the solution while he's doing something else. Our brains are very powerful tools this way, and there's so much in the subconscious that's really not explained. But going back to product management, I think an example of spontaneous cognitive creativity here would look like identifying a new strategy or a new business opportunity in the product space that you've been thinking about for a while. For PMs, problem solving is an inherent part of the job. Knowing how to do it well and in a novel way, it will help PMs level up easily. Before we look into how PMs can use creativity, let's look at some of the common misconceptions around the topic. Creativity is often considered an invisible force. You're either born with it or not. But that's not true. It's a skill and like every other skill can be developed or taught. Creativity is often associated with revolutionary and groundbreaking ideas. Although true, groundbreaking ideas are just a subset of creative ideas. The candle solution we talked about earlier was neither groundbreaking nor revolutionary, but it definitely was creative. In companies, especially if there is a conception that only way to facilitate creativity is brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming sessions are useful to foster collective creativity. But often during these sessions, not all voices are heard equally. So sometimes it's better to do it in a different asynchronous fashion rather than brainstorming. It's one way to go about it, but there are definitely several, several other ways. Creativity is only needed for leaders. We often see the most creative ideas being presented by top leaders in a company. But ideas can come from anyone and anywhere irrespective of their title level or tenure. It's all about artistic expressions. Output of a creative process doesn't always have to be something artistic. It can be something like an excellent API definition or an insightful hypothesis. And the last one is it doesn't apply to technical roles. To the earlier point on APIs, Stripe's blog post about their seven lines of code showcases how a deeply technical concept like a payments API can be the result of a creative process. I alluded to some of the reasons why PMs need creativity earlier, but let's take a deeper look. There are many ways to define a PM's role, but the most generic and applicable description is that PMs are responsible for achieving business outcomes while delivering value for customers through usable features and products. So creating value with usable and usable and feasible products and features and something new as well. Creativity is an intrinsic part of the role and I realize every other aspect like you can see in this chart. PMs who are able to problem solve for their users in novel ways help themselves and their companies reach greater heights. The relevance or value creation leads to satisfied customers resulting in a retained user base and the novelty contributes to their product strategic differentiation. And creativity is a core tenet of the elusive product sensor intuition that sets PMs apart from their peers. Let's look at some common functions or duties where creativity plays a role in making PMs more effective. Idea generation. Irrespective of the career stage, most PMs are involved in idea generation or at least with the curation of the ideas from different sources. This could be in the form of creating or envisioning a user experience, defining a prototype, wireframing can be very useful in visualizing early concepts and much more effective than writing docs. When I was working in Xbox, I was tasked with identifying improvements in the child account creation flow. In PMs, you'll often be asked how to improve a popular product. All of this requires idea generation. The obvious improvements and the obvious ideas will come easily, but to get to the truly needle-moving and impactful improvements, you need to come up with novel and relevant ideas, aka creative ideas. Another important area where creativity plays a role is data. Seems a bit counterintuitive that something as analytical and logical as data analysis requires creativity. But as PMs, we're often expected to look at data and translate these observations to insights, keeping the user front and center. This is a highly creative process and needs a great deal of deliberate thought and domain knowledge. Next is problem solving. This is the core of what we do as PMs. It all starts with defining the right problem. Framing the right problem statement is half the problem solved. Asking the right questions, starting with why and understanding the motivation behind a user goal is key to executing on a problem. Let's say you were tasked with building a modern platform and migrating users from a legacy platform to the modern one. A good PM will aim for feature parity, but a great PM who's able to think creatively will go deeper, understand the user needs better and build the modern platform with the right set of features, maybe even remove a few of the legacy ones because they don't solve the user need correctly. Now, let's say you've built the modern platform and you're seeing very few people migrate to it willingly. Getting into the root cause of why this is happening is yet another creative process. Maybe it's a discoverability issue or a perception issue or they simply don't want to spend the resources. Maybe it's a subset of customers from a specific segment that are not migrating. Precision questioning like this goes a long way in helping identify the root causes of problems that we face as PMs. Strategy and vision. This is some of the best work you can do as a PM. Laying out the product vision five years into the future, accounting for changes in the market landscape, technological advances and evolving user needs is indeed an art. And conveying all of this in a compelling way is definitely a creative art. A very well written vision statement lays out the not start to aspire towards. So storytelling is a very important skill for PMs to master. And strategy is about how to make that vision happen, what capabilities, what sets of users, what platforms and services, what distribution channels, monetization channels are needed to get to that vision. This is what strategy is all about. And how can these be done so that we maintain a competitive edge over all of our competitors in the landscape? All of this involves a lot of deliberate creative thinking, sometimes even spontaneous insights too. Across all of these PM activities, we see common patterns of deep thinking, creating value for users or solving user problems and doing so in a novel way. Novelty, relevance, imagination, ingredients for creativity. Now let's look at ways to build our creativity muscles as PMs. Creativity is a muscle just like any other muscle in our body. It needs to be exercised and used regularly to stay healthy. It needs to be practiced intentionally in order to reap the benefits. And here are three ways to do so as part of the PM role. First is framing the right questions. This is a little tricky, but if you master this art, I think it will set you apart as a PM. The key practices to employ for improving the art of framing questions is to understand the problem at a deeper level. Consider this question. How would you design a pen for astronauts? On the surface level, one might interpret it as we need to design a pen that can write upside down in zero gravity. If you think deeply though, we can reframe the question. First by asking who is the user, the astronaut? What is their problem? They want a pen, but why do they want the pen to write? So the motivation is writing. Let's reframe the problem statement by weaving the motivation in. How might we design a writing instrument that astronauts can use to write in space or zero gravity? You notice the difference here. We're focusing on the problem rather than involving the solution in the problem statement like we did before. Little tweaks like this help immensely when trying to make product decisions. Now with the problem framed this way, we can suggest using a pencil for the astronauts. Simple yet creative. Nothing new was designed, but it was a new way of thinking and a very relevant way to solve the problem. Some things we can do to get better at the framing, focus on user needs and not wants. Henry Ford had said that if I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses and he never would have invented the car which solved the user need in a new and creative way. Second is using templates to force structure in framing. Using templates like how might we do X to help Y achieve Z? These templates are effective to force our thinking in that in a particular direction or alternatively keeping the user in the forefront that using the template of as a user blank, I want to blank so that I can blank is a great technique. All of these templates are more like guidelines to help formulate your thinking around a problem in a certain structured manner. And the last thing you can use to develop your framing is frameworks. They're typically associated with product design and can be applied to come up with a set of questions. Think about the circles framework which clarifies the problem upfront and identifies the users and scopes the question down to a very well formulated framing question for the problem. The next aspect to developing creativity is to set constraints. Seems like a contradictory, doesn't it? Imagine I said design anything you want with unlimited resources and using any tech you want. Most of us will struggle with that. This is because when we have too many choices or something is too open-ended, our brains don't do well in those situations. The restrictions and constraints or requirements we place help our brains to come up with better ideas and better solutions. As an example, let's say I asked you to solve the climate crisis, you probably wouldn't know where to begin. But instead let's say I asked you to solve the recycling problem in your neighborhood. You at least have a starting point and you're able to think about more possible solutions. More restrictions equals to more opportunity to be creative. I would encourage you all to check out the Stripes API blog about how they set a bunch of restrictions and requirements while designing their payments API and how it helped push the boundaries of their thinking and create something amazing. This demonstrates that creative thinking is very, very applicable even to technical problems and it shows how engineers played an important role in brainstorming creative solutions for that API. Some common constraints that apply to PMs might be cost, engineering resources, time frames, timelines, and the target audience. As a PM, consider time boxing all ideation because it can really stretch on forever but maybe limiting it to a week or 10 days can give you a deadline that forces you to think better and faster about a particular problem. Also consider thinking about solutions by varying the restrictions along different dimensions. For example, how would we design this if we had $1,000 of budget? If we had $10,000, if we had a million dollars? So varying it along those lines will help you ideate and brainstorm better. The final aspect and probably the most important one is ideation. How to generate better ideas and in greater quality and quantity. Many times we have some preconceived notions about the product and the product space that might limit our imagination when we think about ideas. So it's important to start fresh. Some ways to force this is to start in the opposite direction. Like Airbnb did, they wanted to design the best check-in experience. Instead of starting from their current understanding of the check-in experience and adding on features, they first defined what a horrible check-in experience would look like, what an extremely excellent check-in experience would look like and then found the middle ground of what they thought would be an acceptable potential five star experience. This is a good practice to let go of some of the biases we might have being involved with the product so closely. So starting with what not to do can be a good idea sometimes. Another way to stress the limits of ideating is to think about if I had a magic wand and I could get anything I want, this is what I would do with my product. These solutions may not be realistic at first, but it's a start. You can start there and add constraints as needed to get to an acceptable solution. So we start broad and then keep scoping down. The final leverage for ideation is brainstorming collectively. This is something we can use as PMs to get diverse perspectives across design, engineering, user research and other PMs. Sometimes the different perspectives also helps set the right constraints that we might have missed. Something to keep in mind is to make sure no one person dominates the discussion, providing a structure for the brainstorming and encouraging all personality types to express in a manner that they are comfortable with is important. One practice I recommend when collectively brainstorming is yes and. When someone expresses an idea, instead of immediately agreeing or disagreeing, encourage all participants to build on top of that ideas. So this is another form of setting constraints, which basically the second idea is constrained by the first idea. So you keep building one idea on top of each other in a related manner. So you generate a unique solution collectively that no one person could have thought of. A few hacks PMs can employ to get better at problem solving ideation and setting constraints is getting really good at the domain. If you're a PM, let's say building a chat feature for gamers, look at every other possible chat product in gaming, outside gaming, anything. Become an expert in all aspects of chat. So expose yourself to different icons, fonts, placement of components, question why they did it, the way that they did it, and what capabilities they added and what they were trying to provide to the users. That way, when you come across a similar problem in your domain, your brain is able to make that connection and spark some ideas. In a way, it's sort of borrowed creativity. Another way to hack creativity is to exercise it in small doses every day. Inspiration for ideas is all around us. You just have to access it. Next time you look at a door handle, think about how would you design something to open a door that does not involve using one's hands? An organization as useless as NASA is using geckos as inspiration for building robots for spatial repairs. Think into it so can you. And lastly, don't forget to let your mind wander at times, be more mindful and observant of your surroundings and try out a new skill to stretch out your cognitive abilities. You'd never know when inspiration might strike. That's all I had for today. Thank you all so much for listening.