 Good morning London. Good morning product con very very excited to be here today My name is Eway and I'm the chief product officer at Taliban a food delivery and quick commerce company based out of Dubai in the UAE Today I'm going to open up with the topic that I don't usually talk about Historically I've talked about the commercialization of product how product managers can get closer to the business how to build product orgs How to do commercial validation of your new ideas? But today we're going a little bit closer to the heart and Why is it because I've been thinking long and hard about what distinguishes a great product organization from just an okay one and the heart of it as I've been thinking a lot about it is How a product organization is able to take big bold courageous bets and their ability to do that in a repeatable manner In a way that's embedded in their culture really determines if a product organization is going to be long-term successful so today We're going to talk about the topic of courage Topic of courage and how as a product manager you do the hard things the hard things to be customer-centric the hard things to To look deep into what's working and what's not working your product to be able to look at yourself and your product in the mirror Because that is the hard thing to do and that requires courage. I Started this journey about a year ago looking into the space as I reflected on my product leadership journey and the type of organization I wanted to build within Taliban and deliver a hero and The author that really inspired me to dive a little bit deeper into this is Bernay Brown How many of you guys have watched perhaps a Netflix episode or read her book dare to lead some of you have started this journey already I think it's truly amazing This quote I think really resonated with me Which is that if you're not willing to fail you can't innovate and if you're not willing to build a vulnerable culture You can't create Why are we here today? Why are we here as product managers and product leaders? Why have we jumped into head-first? Arguably one of the most difficult jobs and professions in the world With all the complexity because at the heart of it all of us see the power of technology and what we can do To solve for real problems to solve for different challenges in different industries And we truly believe that we can create the future and that's the power of product and that's the power of product management But the secret sauce and the ingredient to that there lies a fundamental layer of Vulnerability and trust that needs to be built from the ground up in order to allow for that 10x innovation to happen So over the next 20 minutes, let's dive deeper and let's look inside about how we can build that culture Now this talk is not just for the Cpo's and the VP's or products and the heads of products We're building the organization. I believe that everyone can do this from today From the ground up as individuals as aspiring product people as product managers with a squad This talk is for you and I hope to start to unpack a little bit of this Why I believe this is truly the thing that can unlock true product potential in many organizations today So what's a product talk without a pointer to our one of our favorite product authors around Marty Kagan Who is the author of inspired and empowered many of you have read this content before Great summary of the purpose of a product team a purpose of a product team is to serve customers by creating Customer products customers love yet works for the business Right in his a lot of his books. He talks about the power of prototyping and being close to customers and rapid validation All really amazing things that the best product organizations in the world do But all of you here who have attempted this Should look me in the eye and ask yourself Has it been easy doing that and why not and Why not and I'll give you my version of that why I think it's so hard because I think that most organizations actually run quite counter-cultural to this way of working that what I experience as a first-time product leader is that as a Product leader I am expected to have great clarity and conviction even in the face of deep unknowns The questions that we're trying to tackle new markets new opportunities New verticals that we want to launch into these are not easy questions to answer And as Christine talked about the answer is most oftentimes it depends Our world is complex our world is hard and when we are pushed to be able to give a quick answer It's really not the easiest thing And let me share with you a personal story about how I grew as a product leader over the last decade I call myself an exhausted product leader and how I came out of it, but I started product management about a decade ago Fresh out of university. I was very fortunate to be able to land in a tech company Microsoft at the time as a first-time product manager I Flew all the way to the west coast of the US did my on-boarding Introduced to my team and within 48 to 72 hours. I was thrown in the deep end and I was told here's your team figure it out Remember attending my first couple of stand-up meetings and like what what's a stand-up meeting? What do I do and I have engineers who have a decade more experience than I do looking at me saying so what should we do next? And what should we prioritize at the time? I learned a habit that I needed to unlearn Which is the habit that I had to fake it till I make it. I Had to put on a brave face and I had to give an answer. We work on this thing because this is We you know, I heard from the sales team. This is something that we needed to work on Did I know that that was the right answer? No, but I had to fake it till I made it and As I progressed in my career, the stakes got higher the problems got more complex And I felt this deep sense of what I guess we would call today imposter syndrome That has a head of product and as a VP a product that I had to have answers all the time And that wasn't easy and that got really heavy It wasn't till a couple years ago and being able to you know from ground from the ground up building a product Organization at alabada. I've come to be really comfortable To not know all the answers to realize that there's so much power in being able to share with everyone around you what your frustrations are what the challenges are things that you don't know and It takes courage. It takes courage to be able to unpack all of this to say Maybe I'm not the smartest person in the room Maybe I don't need to know everything And I want to showcase just the long list of examples of where as a product leader you have to be To have that courage to be able to say I don't know and that's where you start Right all of these big questions that you're unpacking. It's okay to not know the answer But it takes courage to be able to admit that to yourself and to the people around you It takes courage to do the customer-centric thing Right, many of us perhaps you know have been told. Hey, I have a big sales contract on the line And I need these features Some may say hey, I have a quarterly target. I need to hit I need these features and it's really hard for as product leaders So have the courage to sometimes say I think we should go for the long-term and build for the long run And this is what's gonna make us long-term successful Courage to be wrong the best product leaders Have high conviction They care and they know and they have strong beliefs of what they want to build But at the same time, they're willing to be wrong They're willing to let an experiment attest to say and challenge themselves to say ah Maybe that conviction was actually wrong the courage to be able to disprove yourself. It's a core product trait Courage to take an unconventional bet Something not your what your competitors aren't doing or something your CEO doesn't believe in It takes courage to do that And courage to pull the plug Right many of us are very tight and very you know have an emotional relationship to features and products that we've built in the past But perhaps it's time to pull the plug and that takes courage to be able to look at the product in the face And to be able to look the organization in the face to say maybe the time's up Maybe this is really not working anymore. We need to pull the plug and Finally the hardest thing that I think product leaders often need to do is to have the courage to say what needs to be set and leave nothing left unsaid and Courage to build it the right way you can take shortcuts left right and center and get things to market quickly But at the end of the day, it's very important to build for the long term so All of that is very important right as we think about the Experimentation culture that we want to build and being able to fail forward You see how if as product leaders were unable to do all of those things How are we going to build an organization and rally people around us to actually learn and fail? you can't and It takes a lot of I'm learning And why do I say that? Because while I am a full-time CPO and a product leader, I've been doing product for a very long time I'm also a new father and this is Olivia. She's somewhere in the back and Olivia is eight months old and For those of you who have young kids and who have been around babies know that at some point Passes six month mark their milestones and and and they they grow so much and so quickly and Olivia about two weeks ago. I took a picture of her standing up on her crib Just I walk into the room and there's Olivia standing up on her crib Proud that moment, you know, I honestly was like wow. She made it. She stood up on her own That's quite the life milestone But for everyone who's a parent and who's seen this journey You know that this doesn't come easy There's a lot of falling down and banging the head on the wall and tossing and turning and there's there's there's a lot That went into this But why is it for an eight month old? It never came across to her. Oh, man Like how do I look when I when I fall down? Am I embarrassing myself? Should I stop now and should I move on to something else? Perhaps? I'm not very good at this thing. I should go back to doing other things instead. It never occurred It doesn't even register after she falls and hits her head 30 seconds later She's up and ready to go and try again Why is it that as we grow up this concept of having to put up a brave face? Starts to sink in and sink in deep and it gets harder and harder as we Jump into the world of product and jump into the world of being a professional in the workplace that That this way of working doesn't come natural anymore So I truly believe that inside There's a lot of unlearning to do and as we unlearn as and we unpack that as an individual and then to the organization To an organization's culture. That's where magic really starts to happen So where does it start? I Think the choice that you can make today is to start with yourself Because all change that is so personal that take so much courage has to start from an individual Then it's about the people around you and your organization and finally through repetition It's your culture. It's the company's culture. So it takes time. It's a long journey, but it starts with you I believe that no matter if you're a first-time PM or your CPO or somewhere in between This is for you and there are many ways that you can do this What's the first thing that you start with you work on yourself? The next time you find yourself in fight-or-flight mode finding yourself saying the defensive thing Defending an idea or looking at an experiment result and going How do I spin this so that the experiment result works? Ask yourself. Is that just your ego talking? Because the muscle you need to build here is a muscle of vulnerability To be able to go to your squad who's worked on this for a couple weeks and say Maybe that didn't work, but here's the learning and here's how I'm going to move on from there And here's how we're going to do it together It's a muscle that needs to be built because vulnerability doesn't come natural anymore and Lastly be curious Let me ask you a question if you've hung around with happy old people Old people and happy you'll realize they share one trait They're always curious. They're curious about you. They're curious about the world They're curious about new technologies. Why? Because curiosity kills cynicism and If you're a curious product manager if you're a curious leader if you dive deep and you ask questions and you wonder Why this and not that it automatically fights your ego it automatically fights cynicism It automatically fights your need to be right all the time because as you ask questions You open up facts and the realities of the world As you work in yourself at the same time you can then start to work with and for the organization and this is a long game and For the product leaders out there. I know you've been fighting a good fight You've been trying to tell your organization about the powers of dual-track agile and why it's important to do discovery and I'm adding one more to the plate But repeat after me It's okay to be imperfect because this is a really long journey But any investment that you make here will have a 10x return in the months and years to come and it takes time What are things you can do as an organization? Well as a product leader first model authentic vulnerability If you're gonna do this you have to be the first one to do it You have to bring it to the table you have to bring it to your team or your squad to be able to say This time. I really don't know and here's what I'm really frustrated about last night I stayed up till 10 30 at night because I've been trying to crack this problem I couldn't crack it and need your help and What you'll realize is that the moment you start to unpack this with people around you you extend an invitation You extend an invitation to say I Invite you to come unpack this with me because you're a team member you're a peer you're a friend and you're someone that I can trust and Just imagine an organization where you can have such a candid conversation Just imagine an organization where you're able to bring in people around you to say let's unpack this together I think that's what true and great product organizations are made of The second thing is encouraging each other to jump the analogy here is a bunch of people You know about the sky dive together and everyone's scared and we kind of have to do it scared But it's so powerful when you can bring people around you and encourage each other to jump and Look at this room What do we have? We have two thousand people here in person six thousand or seven thousand people online Who are all product enthusiasts who are all going through the same thing? And that's the beauty of something like product school is that it opens up the possibilities of you meeting other product people to share some of the challenges you're going through together so that you can Encourage each other through this journey and that's really powerful and Lastly the most important thing that you can do to build this as a as an organizational DNA is to leave nothing on set What kills this way of thinking what kills this way of working what kills vulnerability and In the culture that allows courageous decisions to be made Is when people don't trust each other and leave things unsaid things fester and that's unacceptable in an organization like this and As you do this as you start to build this muscle as you bring people along as you see different colleagues giving this a shot as Well, what you realize is that repetition matters as you try This and you see build this muscle. It's you start to gain wisdom and knowledge and and experience doing this and it becomes a norm and When this becomes a norm it becomes part of your culture and when this culture is built Work will never be the same again If you do this, I truly believe that this is what the top 5% of product organizations is made of Not only will you as product managers feel a lot more joy coming into work probably a lot less stressed It is for the founders in the room and the product leaders in the room I believe that this is probably one of the best retention tools that you can build as well Because investing in this and having an organization that feels like this will be impossible to leave It's it's it's in its truest and most authentic way a learning culture that everyone will truly be in you know enjoying to be part of and Let's bring it back to why this makes business sense In the beginning I talked a lot about Marty Kagan and you know a lot of what we believe in these days about continuous discovery and talking to users and Experimenting and learning my question to you is unless you have a culture that embraces Things to be wrong and embraces the fact that people can take big courageous leaps even if they're unsure How can you truly try new things and build new tech and change the world with Problems that you're trying to solve in different ways. I think those two concepts Require each other. They're complementary. They need to come together and first solve the culture because in solving the culture and the way of working It unlocks the ability for you to try interesting things that unlocks the ability for you to run 20 different customer tests a week It unlocks the ability for you to have 50% of your test fail and you're not taking it personally and I think it starts from within and that's where the power happens And lastly I Want to give one last piece of advice Which is as much as I felt like in many parts of my career. I have to fake it till I make it in many ways This is not a topic. You can fake it till you make it because what kills True vulnerability and a culture where people can take big bold courageous decisions is in authenticity The moment anyone smells that you're just doing a show that you're just doing a thing that this is just a cool thing to do This is where all of this falls flat on its face But it's hard. It's really hard and I see some of you feeling almost uncomfortable thinking about this already But it should feel a little bit like that that as we walk into work tomorrow That it should you embrace this journey this long journey that hey, I'm gonna work on myself I'm gonna work on people around me and I'm gonna work on an organization Because it's through embracing those very uncomfortable topics that makes the entire product journey worthwhile Lastly, I want to thank all of you for having me here today This is a very new topic for the product a community a very new topic for me But I truly believe that if more organizations embrace this deep Culture that embrace vulnerability that allowed people to take big courageous steps It unlocks so much potential for product people to do the best work So that's what I'm going to be spending my next decade doing And I'm really excited to be able to do this at Alabad and deliver hero For those of you who are here, please do stop by and say hi We'd love to hear your journey in cracking this as well Thank you for having me here today and really looking forward to meeting more of you