 I'm so thrilled to be here and see you today at ProductCon. Again, I'm Lisa Yoko Yama. I'm going to talk to you today about my approach to product development. Within our team, we take products from zero to one. And I'm also going to share some of the key qualities I think are really important for product managers to have during that process. I'll share some examples about how we stay close to the customer over the course of our product development process as well. I am the the head of our product team in American Express's innovation lab. It's called AmEx Digital Labs. We focus on creating new products in the categories of payments, commerce, and lifestyle. I've been doing product for the past 12 years, which feels like a long time. But through that experience, I realized that I love the customer centricity of product and financial services. If you think about your finances, your finances are actually such an emotional thing. And doing product work every day makes me super excited to come to work. Before I get into those details, I want to talk about this, which may be surprising for a product conference. I want to talk about rice. Because rice in a solar cooker in a sunny yard in the Caribbean actually taught me the biggest product management lesson that I still think about today. So I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Haiti right after undergrad and paired with a local organization. We worked together to open a vocational school. I taught English there. I worked with veterinarians and helped give them tools and training. And there was a local U.S. organization that had donated these solar ovens. In Haiti, the primary method of cooking is using charcoal as fuel. And charcoal is made with trees, and Haiti has a problem with deforestation. So the idea is if you could replace some of that charcoal-based cooking with solar-based cooking, that would be beneficial. And of course, Haiti has a ton of sun. So I set up a demonstration. I was going to cook this rice and show my neighbors how it worked. I measured out the rice. I rinsed it. I drained that water. I put it in this pot that I had already spray-painted black because the black helps retain the heat. I put in the right amount of water. I covered the pot. I put it inside the solar oven. I closed the lid of the solar oven. If you've ever seen a solar oven, it has these mirrored panels. Kind of like the 80s where you have this aluminum foil thing tanning your face. That's what it reminds me of. So I waited the right amount of time and I invited all the neighborhood women over into my dirt yard with the grass around us. And we were sitting on straw chairs, the sun coming down. I say women because most of the cooking in rural Haiti is done by women. And I opened up the pot and it was cooked. And I was so happy. And so I started spooning rice onto their plate so they could taste it. And then the first thing they said to me was, this doesn't taste good. And I thought, well, this is where you're supposed to be impressed. I cooked rice with the sun. Like that's pretty incredible. But no, what they tasted was unflavored, bland, boring rice from their perspective. And in that moment, I realized the product I tried to launch in Haiti ultimately failed. And I dissect that experience a lot. And I think what happened, I think I failed for several reasons. One, I failed to understand what might inspire them to try solar cooking to begin with. I didn't understand the problem to solve or what challenge they might be facing. I didn't watch them make rice. Two, I didn't articulate how they make rice in the first place. So I didn't know how to replicate that when the only thing I was trying to change was the heat source. Instead, I made rice the way I grew up eating it, which I like, but also it was different than the way they grew up eating it in Haiti. And embarrassingly, I didn't ask for any more feedback after they said this doesn't taste good. I didn't say why. I didn't say, can we try again? I didn't figure out if anything was interesting. I kind of just packed things up and walked away. That's a very visceral memory for me. I did the Peace Corps so many years ago at this point. And I can still picture myself in that sun, in that heat with those women. And so that lesson is something that permeates today in my job leading the product team within labs. We are doing continuous product development, going from zero to one over and over again. I need to be good at that. You have to be good at the things that I was bad at when I was in Haiti. You have to be good at inspiration, good at articulation, good at feedback. I was bad at those things when I tried to launch the solar oven when I was in Haiti. And in order to be good at those things as a team, you need to have a set of product managers that are really great. And I say that not because PMs are the only ones that bring products to market. Of course, they're not. Within American Express and our Innovation Lab, we have such a talented set of BD counterparts, go-to-market enablement counterparts, our engineering counterparts, and a ton of stakeholders. Given the topic of this conference, I'm going to focus on product management skill sets. So to be good at product development, I actually think you need to be a great product manager, which makes sense. And at one point, I was talking to someone on my team, giving them the feedback, oh, you didn't do an A-plus job there. And I thought that was a little funny that I still care about doing an A-plus job, like I'm still a student back in university. I think it's the capricorn in me that cares about being an A-plus student. But I don't think it's fair to ask them to do an A-plus job without having articulated what it really means to be great at the work. And so our team sat down and we wrote down the key skills that are required to be great at product management in the context of the goals that we have in the company that we're in and the customer that we have as well. So I'll go through a little bit of those. But as I think about the product development process overall and the things that I messed up in Haiti, the first was inspiration. To do product development well, you need to be inspired. And that starts with that hint of an idea, that hunch that something could be different that gets you wondering, perhaps a customer experience could be improved. But sometimes it's hard to start from scratch if I say, give me all your new ideas. Maybe you have some because of the nature of this group and this community. But it's hard to generate a lot of ideas from scratch, particularly if there's very little constraints. And so what I like to do is give our team a set of questions. And usually we're in specific zones. So we know we're focused in a specific category or customer segment. And by going through these questions, it starts to create some ideas. One might be what's happening in the broader marketplace. Is there a cluster of startups that are doing certain types of work that you think is interesting? Two, perhaps there's customer trends you're not addressing. Maybe your customers are consuming content in a way that you haven't really adapted to. What's a gap in what I'm offering? If your customers have the option between a competitor and you, if a competitor offers something unique, maybe they would choose that ahead of your company. Sometimes regulation changes the nature of the business. And we know this well in financial services and we like to think about that from really this growth mindset perspective where it creates a new set of opportunities. Ones that I talk to my team a lot about is really make it personal. So is there a solution that you use that's not working for you? If you go throughout your day, you'll actually be able to interrogate each of those things that you do and say, whoa, I've created a hack here. And hats are signals that the solution you're using is not actually working for you. So if you can be attuned to that in yourself and not just think about it as your normal routine, I think you'll do a better job of also considering that for your customers because where they have hacks in your solution is actually a signal to you that your product isn't working for them. And lastly, what technology might I need to better understand? Because that of course unlocks new opportunities as well. So in this phase, we have tons of ideas, which is exactly the point, but then we need to add this context around those ideas to start to differentiate interesting ideas into actual viable and unique ones. To be great at this phase, product managers need to have the curiosity, curiosity about the customer, to know how things work, to keep iterating on a solution that they're considering. But that curiosity really needs to be paired with this bias for action because sometimes ideas can sit up here. But if you have a bias for action, I think you can grab onto those and actually create the compelling vision that you're going to need to have to start to get people on board. I realized that when I started interviewing people, I was asking them, are you a dreamer or are you a driver? And I was making them choose, even though people don't like that. And I think you need to be a dreamer in many ways at this phase because you need to imagine what could be. But you also need to be a driver because you want to have that ability to get forward momentum and figure out how to create that vision just from the idea that you've come up with. And so either you have both of those things in you or yourself aware enough to know how to compliment your skill set with someone else. One of the products that we launched at American Express where I can really remember the inspiration for us was our first consumer checking account that launched last year. It's called AmEx Rewards Checking and our team built the product strategy and worked on the product as it went to market. We looked at the external marketplace. We saw customers were really interested in digital only bank accounts. They often had a traditional bank account as well as this digital bank account. They were comfortable with the fact that there weren't retail locations and they were maybe using those two bank accounts for things that were different. And then we looked internally and we looked at adjacent products. We saw customers loved our savings account probably because of the stability and security of American Express that they felt that they could trust us to keep that money safe. And then we thought, well, what would be a compelling vision for this product which admittedly is not unique in the marketplace but we thought we could deliver a lot of differentiated value. So we offer 1% right now on the 1% APY on the balance in your checking account and one membership rewards point for every $2 you spend. So we took a combination of inspiration from that broader marketplace which was one of the questions that I had, adjacent products and how they were working inside the company with that unique vision to go to market with a product that's really competitive. Now, the next phase I think about is articulation. You need to be able to articulate what your product is. So you have this idea, you're inspired. How do you talk about what it does, what it solves, who it's for, who the customer is, how it works? I realize I'm consolidating so much work into this phase but it's really the detailed point where you also then get feedback from your customer. You show them your prototypes to get their input. It's the bulk of the work to get you to market. Product managers in this articulation phase need to really be thoughtful about driving customer outcomes. So again, I work at American Express in the Innovation Lab. The context that we're working is a 170-year-old financial institution that truly has an incredible global brand to uphold. And so when we try in your product, we need to do it right. And to do it right, we center all of our dialogue on customer outcomes. So to be a great product manager at this step, you need to understand how to get to those customer outcomes but also being super realistic and clear about the business context that you're working in. To get those customer outcomes, I think you need to be truly empathetic, which is clear. You need to really listen to customers and the research that you're doing with them to really try to sit in their shoes but maybe not thought about all the time. Also be empathetic to the stakeholders in your organization, particularly in a big company like ours, there's a lot of people that we need to consider or a lot of points of feedback always to try to figure out how to get the right product to market. And then maybe because of this situation that we're in, but I think starting from scratch always feels like there's a lot of tension. And so I ask product managers to be responsible for the impossible. Sometimes it actually feels like a physical resistance. People say swimming upstream. Sometimes that feels like swimming in syrup. Sometimes it feels like swimming in mud. I don't know, but it definitely feels palpable, that resistance that you need to get through. And so that tenacity to move forward and be responsible for the impossible is very important in my mind. One of the products where we did a really good job, I think of articulating what problems we were trying to solve is a product called Amixend and Split. It's a product that was meant to help our card members do peer-to-peer payments. What we articulated well was the three problems we were going to solve. So the first was we didn't want customers to have to pay the 3% fee when they use their American Express card in Venmoor PayPal. We also wanted them to have the ability to pay that amount that they were sending their friends over time. So if you go out with your friend on a vacation and they book the flight and the hotel and pay for the activities and they tell you how much you owe at the end of that long weekend, it might be a lot. And you might not want that to come out of your checking account all at once. And so having it come from your American Express card gives you more flexibility. And then the third problem we wanted to solve is just making it super easy for our customers to put charges on their card and get paid back. Our card members love membership rewards points, cash back the miles that they earn, but it wasn't a smooth experience to split transactions. So we are very clear on what we were trying to solve in this articulation point. We also articulated what we didn't want to do. We didn't want to create a new peer-to-peer network. Card numbers were already using Venmo. All of their friends were there. We wanted to find a way to connect into that platform that was already at scale. And I think all of those things helped us to define then what the experience should be, how we should talk about it, what our key points were when we go to market. And this has been a successful product for us. It's one of the top journeys in our AmEx mobile app. I'll walk you through the send experience. So here, customers open up the send account. They tap send money. They choose a contact from their phone. If they've sent money to someone before, they choose top contacts, enter in the amount notes. That does an automatic app switch to Venmo and then allows you to send money for your friends. So very similar pattern to existing peer-to-peer payments. We weren't trying to recreate a mental model for customers. The next one is split. So a card member here went to DC and went out to a restaurant with friends. She went into the mobile app. She tapped on the transaction and then you see the little split icon with the two diverging arrows. She can add more charges if they took Ubers to and from the restaurant. But in this case, decides just to split the charge for the restaurant. Again, chooses her friends from her contacts and we automatically split it four ways. You can also change that if someone ordered more than another person. From there, the request is sent to her friends via Venmo and as her friends pay her back, she gets these notifications on her phone. What's great about that is then you can see who's paid you back and who hasn't. And then as she gets paid back, it goes as a statement credit to her American Express card. I love this part, even though it seems small. Before you had to have your friends pay you back into Venmo and then you move your money from Venmo and put it in your bank account. And then you took it from your bank account and paid off your bill. And this fact that it comes directly back to you on the card, I find to be super seamless. All of these decisions that we made ensured that our product is intuitive and additive to the customer experience. Now, we experiment a lot within digital labs. We know that some things will work and other things will not. And we need to be very clear about how we're getting qualitative and quantitative customer feedback. For product managers of this phase, I want them to be obsessed over the experience. I want them to be looking at clicks where people are abandoning what people are saying on Twitter and Reddit. And then I want them to be able to take all those disparate points of feedback, which honestly might be on opposing ends. Customers will say different things about the experience, drive clarity, and then be able to prioritize a set of next steps. What's interesting about this is I realized in recent launches that I want our product managers to be so passionate. Passionate about the product, passionate about the customer, passionate about urgency of trying to get there. And then as soon as we launch, I say, well, don't be passionate anymore. Be dispassionate, because I want them to see the feedback and the results through this kind of neutral clear-eyed lens. And that's sometimes hard to do to practice moving out of these spectrums of passionate and dispassionate. But I think you can truly really just see the feedback if you are coming from more of a dispassionate place. MxSend and Split, the product that I mentioned that does peer-to-peer, is something where we get a lot of spontaneous customer input on Twitter and Reddit. Now, I've put a lot of positive quotes here just because I love that they evangelize the product. Someone said, I will never shut up about how much I love the MxSplit feature. MxSend and Split is one of the best Mx features. So we go through a lot, and this is a signal to us about what customers like and what they don't like about the product. Something else that we launched this summer is called member collectibles. Member collectibles, if you went on site to the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament or the Austin City Limits Music Festival, were these digital collectibles in the form of NFTs that card members could collect. And as they collected them and stored them in their Web3 wallet, they could connect that wallet to American Express and unlock an offer. And card numbers on site loved it because they liked this digital memento that they could keep to recall their experience later. They liked actually having people talk to them about NFTs and understand how to open up a Web3 wallet with Coinbase or Metamask. And of course, they liked the value of the offer. Now on the other side, we saw a separate set of customers who organically went into this experience through this try new features placement in our mobile app. We recently launched this section in the American Express mobile app as a place to launch our experiments and our pilots. So we have several things there today where you can test out new features from us. I compare it to the Trader Joe's end cap. So if you're a Trader Joe's fan, when you go into Trader Joe's, there'll be this end cap that has new items. And I'm always interested to go check that out. I don't always buy something from that end cap, but something about the thrill of something new means that I always go look. So this is our version of that, a place where card members can go and check out new things from American Express. And we put member collectibles there as well. So these customers found that placement, were curious enough about it to connect their Web3 wallet to American Express. They did not receive an NFT. They were not in an event. They didn't unlock an offer. And so those two quantitative data points of where are people starting helped us figure out that there's very, like two very different customer segments here who are interacting with the same product. And we're using that input to decide how to proceed and figure out our next steps. So I went through those phases quite quickly, inspiration, articulation, and feedback. What I just wanted to reinforce is there are so many different skill sets there in each of those phases that as a product manager, I feel like you need to dial up, dial down, know what's appropriate at each of those phases. Obviously the customer input of each of these phases is different as well. We talked about marketplace understanding of what customers are doing and saying, we talked about one-on-one prototyping and understanding the problems you're trying to solve. And then also this external commentary and quantitative feedback you get from customers. This zero to one product development takes energy, takes initiative, it takes love for the customer. I've learned so much in the product development process and going through it over and over again. I definitely think I'm better than when I was in Haiti trying to launch a solar oven. Thanks so much. I was so happy to share this with you today. You can find me on LinkedIn. Cheers.