 Good afternoon. Welcome to ProductCon. I'm so excited to be back in person, but I hear there's also thousands of people online. So I'm sure it's an exciting blended experience. So thank you. I'm here to talk to you about learning and innovating at every moment. Through some of what my parenting and product stories I hope to entertain you and inspire you to pick up that lifelong learning strategy and apply it and find it in your your own life as well. I'm gonna be breaking this this talk down into basically two parts. The first part will be owing over a few behaviors that I've found with my kids that we need to either encourage or control and then I'll go over the techniques in which I have channeled our curiosity, which is the first behavior I found and research have shown this is like the innate behavior for every child. And we need to really encourage this. In fact, my mother used to tell me I was like this this fountain of questions, including the annoying ones like are we there yet when we're on road trips? And thanks to COVID, I've been hearing that a lot from my kids as we had to drive a lot of places. Anyway, but questions is one of the great way for you to learn and learning is really rooted in the ability to ask questions. But unlike my mother as a parent, first-time parent, my mother would send me to the library to find the answers for myself. Because it was a great way, a great life lesson in how we research and figure out how to learn to learn, right? But as a first parent, I actually fell into the trap of another behavior that is common among product managers. Instant problem solving. This is a behavior you should, I'm sure I see a lot of nods. So I'm sure people are like that's me and that was definitely me and it's still me. So it's one of those things that I am learning to control that Hey, let's not jump to conclusions. Let's really learn together and explore together. Go back to those questions and use your problem-solving, but in a controlled way. Let's look at the third behavior that I think we should also encourage. Here's a quote from Winston Churchill. A pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity while an optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty. So guess what? The way, the way in you want to ask those questions, finding those moments, be that optimist. That's your third behavior that I would encourage you to really cultivate in yourself, in your team with your kids, in my case. This is where I really came to understanding the importance of learning at every moment. So let's break that questioning part down a little further. How can we channel that in such a way that it's not just asking all the questions all the time? I actually draw this from a journalistic approach. They call it 5Ys and an H. So in the first part of my questioning is really about establishing all of the facts. So I recently just supplied this with my daughter who's a high school senior trying to make us her selection for college. So our first set was really establishing the facts. Then the second part was looking for those insights on the answers to those facts, right? Why are we interested in those facts? What did we learn from those questions, those facts? And then finally making, turning those questions into a hypothesis that we can then test and repeat this set of questions. So let's dive into what happened with my daughter. She was going through her recent college selection. So this is the first four W's in that journalistic approach. Who are we dealing with? So it was for us going, okay, what's the list of schools that you actually got accepted to? Where are they located? When do we need to make a decision? So we kind of drew out exactly what were the facts that was driving this question, this opportunity for us to learn. The second approach part of this is really drawing the insights. And this is that fifth W on the questions. Why? Why were we interested or why would you rank the set of schools that gave you that acceptance? What were why, why was, why did you choose a school in Massachusetts versus a school in California? So we went through a lot of these questions and and this actually applies directly to some of the product work that I've been doing recently. At Salesforce, there's a thing that we have called profiles. It's been around for 20 years, but it's actually a very limited feature. So we've been trying very hard to get like it end of life, to get it moved into a new set of replacement features that we've built. But we were getting a lot of messaging from our customers that no, no, you can't take this away from us. In fact, I stood on a stage very similar to this in in a in announcing that that that eventual future and I immediately got Twitter stormed with no, you can't do this to me. So that was when I also had to really apply this why aspect of why? Why is why are you so tied so emotionally tied to this feature that's in this system? That's actually very limiting. It turned out that it had some benefits that I wasn't aware of like it it made things a lot easier for some of our administrators and we turned that into our next set of questions, the hypothesis and that's where we turned into how might we make it so that it's less emotionally attached? What if we created a bunch of new features or we turned the new features in a different way so that it solved the same set of problems that was making our administrators so connected to that feature that we think is needs needed to be replaced, right? So This is how we we we can break it down And this was also the same hypothesis Part that I applied with my daughter once we got to why was she interested in going so far away? Because you know as a mom as a parent I really wanted her to stay in state I mean I'm at some of you might might be parents and understand But she says no no no that top of my list is someplace on the other side of the country and it turned out she had Very good insight. She's like mom. I need to live outside of the state So I understand when I come back It's because I want to come back that this is the right place for me, but without having Experienced going to another state. She's like I wouldn't know I would always be questioning that that was very very Intuitive of her it was also very intuitive for of her to say well mom. I think I need to actually go visit the place so we took a trip and visit at the school and That was kind of the best Ceiling and she was she was just going through this this set of questions on her own Asking the teachers and the professors that were in the open house the same set of questions And then at the end I could see that she was applying this all on her own And I have to tell you that is like the best feeling for a parent to see the that lesson just Manifest over in in and learned So With that let's look at how we might map The same set of sequencing of questions to your product designs So and what tools you might consider and look at during each of these phases in your question phase of facts where we're trying to look at What you know what who when where? This is where you can really leverage the tools around journey mapping user research interviews and product metrics as I mentioned that big product profile End of life project that I was trying to get off the ground We ended up doing a really big journey map on what are the problems? What were the sticking points? What were those? Opportunities that we needed to go investigate and say how should we change it? we interviewed a about Probably 50 to 100 admins through different communities to say what is it that made you? So attached to that profile and what were the things that you wanted to be able to do With it or you think you can't do with the features that we've released and we also Use metrics that we put in the system to understand where were items that the the teams and these customers were using more with the new features that we we provide it and Driving into the insights and answer and the whys behind that you continue to use your testing and interviews you we Prototypes and showed prototypes of how we might change the flow and we started to incorporate some in-app feedbacks and and created in it actually led us to build a Separate application called a helper app so that we were providing analytics separately to our admins and having them be able to Provide us in-app feedback on how the analytics were driving the way that they were building the the permissioning models and and and the profiles themselves and Lastly we really just rinsed and repeat with what if we change certain things and we doubled down on our prototyping and Using of a B testing to be able to understand how these these changes will Enhance the experience for our for our customers And then for me personally in my life. It's like what if I try my new process or my my Approach with my younger daughter now. I am learning there is a lot of difference in personality between two people I know it's probably duh, but anyway My older daughter was really able to get to Self-promoting of that of those questions Whereas my younger daughter was at is actually getting a little bit more stuck in that optimism She was more on her innate personality is such that she tends to shut down on The quote when the difficulty comes in so we're working with her on building the behaviors around Finding those opportunities to improve And finding questions that make sense in those Verses it's too hard So I'm gonna close with Actually, I'm gonna also highlight a few things to look for in terms of warning signs so when I Had mentioned my first warning signed earlier. We're leaping to solutions. So when you ask questions Like I said, we all have very good problem-solving skills So we tend to lead with solutions and I've had to find partners in My collaboration and my teams to say you call me out when I'm actually not asking enough questions To get to that solution and just leaping to like just assume that we can go to one direction the second though is You can take that too far You don't want to get into analysis paralysis either So while I think you should absolutely ask as much questions as you can You have to time box that and this is where agile and lean really helps Because you can time box your discovery phases you can time box what When and how much you want to spend on these analysis phase and lastly Avoid perfectionism this is where my younger daughter is also something that we're working on She won't turn in an assignment until she feels is a hundred percent perfect But that meant she was like a week late on the assignment So we tell her you're actually leaving points on the table here. So turn in what you have, you know It's it's it's better to get it done than it is to be perfect And this goes back to ship it and ship it fast and we can iterate it So I'm gonna close with reminding you to Really stay curious And encourage and ask more questions so that you can get to that solution in a controlled way Thank you very much and hop over to Hoplind for our Q&A. So thank you