 Hello everyone. I'm going to talk about how to succeed as a product manager for almost any product. I'm Siddhartha Langevan and I'm currently a Senior Technical Product Manager for Amazon Web Services. A little disclaimer here. All opinions are my own and does not represent any of the current or previous organizations that I've worked for. About me. Who am I? I'm from a city called Chennai in South India and I did my undergraduate from College of Engineering D&D in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and I completed my MBA from Arizona State University. So during my time at ASU I co-founded the Product Management Club outside of work. I'm into photography, drawing, designing and also I love motorcycle riding. I'm a member of Iron Butt Association where you have riders all over the world doing grueling rides in their motorcycles. Let's talk about my journey into product management. I'm basically a creative person. As you could see from the previous slide I'm into drawing and designing stuff and I'm also a strong empath. According to the Myers-Brick personality types I come as an INFJ meaning somebody who's introverted, intuitive, feeling and judging personality who's strong in intuition and empathy. So these qualities kind of helped me in designing delightful user experience early on in my career. So slowly over time after designing all these user experience I now became product owner where I was not just doing customer experiences or user experience I was translating user stories into product features. Over time or after my MBA I now moved into a much bigger product management space which is defining the problem spaces and not just defining problem spaces but also prioritizing the problem space or the opportunity space and how to solve them. In today's webinar I'm going to touch upon roughly three major topics. The first thing that's the heart of the product management of any type is knowing your customer. And next we'll talk about how to break things down to a bare minimum which is also known as the first principles thinking. And finally we'll talk about how we can as a product manager you can empower and influence the internal stakeholders. Knowing your customer. So the first question when you start as a PM in any company is to ask who's your customer and what is or what are their problems. So there are various ways to do this and let me talk about the different ways that I've come I've experienced with. So the first is understanding whether your customer is an enterprise customer also known as the B2B or the business to business or whether is your customer a common person like you and me also known as a consumer or the B2C the business to consumer. So a small difference between a B2B and a B2C is a B2B or the enterprise customer typically has a sales team or a CTO or a CEO who's going to make the purchase decision. So these are your customers whereas your users are going to be the ones who actually are going to use your product. So in a B2B you can categorize your customers as who's making the purchase decision and who's going to use your product. Whereas in a consumer space your customer and the user are pretty much going to be the same. For example I'm a user of a Spotify and I also make the purchase decision of whether to upgrade to a premium subscription or not. The next thing when you come to learning about the customer is that understand what their behaviors are. Like what did they do in their day to day life. So in this space or in this part of knowing your customer I always suggest that the behavior trumps demography. So what does demography mean? Demography is roughly categorizing the user persona as somebody who's a male or a female or somebody who falls under the age category of 10 to 20 or 20 to 30 or whatever. What occupation they do, which cities they do, are they technically savvy and all those things. Those come under demography. So this is not a very strong way to segment your customers or understanding your customers because users from the same demography could have different behaviors. So that's why it's important to understand customers based on their behaviors. Like what do they do when they wake up in the morning? Or what do they do in their job? Are you dealing with a technical customer persona for a BW space? Are they, you know, for example, database administrators or is it somebody who's a developer who sits in code or are you talking about somebody who's, if it's in the consumer space, are you talking about, are you thinking about somebody who's just started out their family who has one or two kids, etc. So always knowing that behavior helps them understand the needs or the problems that they are facing. So that put that transitions us to the next thing is knowing their goals or needs. For some you for a particular person with this behavior, what are their goals or what are their needs? Understanding that is very important to know how you can solve their problems. And the next thing is also very important. Start tracking the problems. Not all problems are weighted at the same level. Different problems are of different sizes to the users. Some may be small, some may be big. So it always helps for us as a PM to understand what's their biggest problem so that we can solve that first. And the next thing is understanding whether your your solution or the problem says that you're going after is a painkiller or a vitamin. For example, a painkiller is something that the customer cannot live without the customers in pain. So they need to take this painkiller to get rid of the pain versus something as simple as vitamins. You know, they can or they might not need it, but it will be a nice to have. So what sort of a problem are you going after? Are you? Is that problem something really a pain for the user that want to solve? Or is it some sort of an experience enhancer that your customer can still live without? The next part in knowing your customer is what are your customers currently doing and what alternatives do they have? So in this slide, it's about competition. It's understanding who are your competition. For example, you might be in the food delivery space. And the first thing that you can think of competition could be like companies like Uber Eats or Dodash or it could be Swiggy or Zomato or any food delivery companies. So understanding who your competition is is a very important thing in this step. Also, the next thing is understand why your customer is using that particular competitor's product. This means that understand what are the strengths or what are the weaknesses of that competitor and why is that appealing to that particular customer persona? Another area that you can consider as a competitor is also the DIY solutions or the do it yourself. So going back to the food delivery example, you may think Uber Eats or Dodash is your competitor, but you could also include the fact that there are some people who prefer to go to the rest, walk to the restaurants by themselves and get a takeaway or a two go. So include that in your competition analysis. The next thing in knowing your customer is where or how you can learn about your customer. So we spoke about understanding your customer, their personas, their goals, needs. And then we also spoke about understanding the competition and what are the different options that they're using, et cetera, et cetera. But how do you get this information? The first thing that I like to do is check on social media, whether it is an enterprise app, or even if it's a consumer app, check on social media, such as platforms, such as Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, you find a lot of data or sentiments about what common people is talking about your product or in this problem space. So a lot of people have conversations about this feature would be nice or I still face this problem. Currently, none of the options give me this feature, et cetera. But so social media is such a great place to scout for information, to learn more about your customers. Also, comparing the B2B versus B2C space, it's easier to get face time with customers in a B2B setup than a B2C setup because in an enterprise world, you know your customers by their name, you might be having a relationship with them, the sales team, or the purchase decision maker. So for consumer apps, I would still say leverage social media to learn high level sentiments and feature requests to formulate your initial as hypothesis that, you know, these are the needs or these could be the potential solutions that you can use to solve their problems. And also, quantitative data is also equally important as qualitative data. So you might understand what you might learn what customers are talking about, what they feel, all those things are qualitative data, but quantitative data, such as funnel analysis, funnel as in right from the time where a user signs up into an app until the final purchase is done or a final order is placed that the complete funnel analysis or heat maps for conversion ratio in an e-commerce industry, etc. All these quantitative data also helps. So now that you've learned about your customer and their needs, what's the next thing? The next thing is to come up with our think of solutions to solve their problems. And one of the easiest and quickest way to do that is developing the first principles thinking. So what is the first principles thinking as a quick introduction? It's, it's something where you break down things into the bare minimum, like then there's no complex dry complex things involved in the equation is just that what does what do you need to do in order to solve your customer's problem in the most simplest manner. So some of the key areas you can focus is talking on the biggest problem or the opportunity that your customer would like to have it solve first. So your customer persona might have like different problems varying by different sizes of the problem. So as a PM, it's on us to prioritize what's the biggest problem or the opportunity you want to solve for your customer. So the next thing is prototype that minimum lovable experience you can provide for your customer to solve that problem. So by prototype with it could be something a rough sketch on a piece of paper or it could be using tools such as balsa make or envision. It's just about converting your ideas into us into a sketch so that you can convey to your different stakeholders or your even your potential customer. The next thing is probably a very important step in this solution I think which is hypothesize and validate using experiments. You improve the prototype and then repeat so that you have the continuous feedback loop to improve your solution. So you have various options and experimenting such as a test, heat maps, final analysis like I spoke on the previous slide and all that. Another thing is when you're trying to come up with prototype or when you're thinking of solutions in a very creative way, understand your constraints. For example, your engineering team might have a certain skill set. They might not have certain skillset or your teams might be working on already other priorities or your company can only focus on certain strategies that by the leadership and has decided that they might they won't do certain things. So understand your constraints and try to work around that. So now you have understood your customer. You have used first principles thinking to break things down to bare minimum. And you have a rough idea about what you need to do to address those problems. And what's the next thing that you can do to succeed as a PM for almost any product. And this is equally important as understanding your customer, which is how you can empower and influence the internal stakeholders. And when by stakeholders, I mean, your leadership, your engineering team, your designing team, your sales team, your field team, and every everyone that you work with internally in your company. First thing, product management is not something that you sit inside a cubicle or inside a room and work in silo. It's a very collaborative process. So invite your designers and engineering friends to the party. So whenever you are trying to ideate or brainstorming a solution for a problem. I invite the designers and the engineering friends to the ideation session so that you can get the best ideas out of everyone. And you can deliver the best solution possible to the customer. Of course, as a PM, you own and you facilitate those discussion, and you ensure the quality of the decision made. But it's not always necessary that you should come up with creative ideas. Ideas can come from anywhere in the company. And as a PM, you're responsible to nurture everybody comes up with ideas so that as a team, we solve the problem for the customer in the best way possible. The next thing is as a PM, it's our job to reduce ambiguity and drive clarity through strategy, setting goals, preparing the roadmap, coming up with success metrics, and also the counter metrics. So this helps in influencing the leadership and informing the your engineering counterpart and the sales team, everybody to align on your vision of what you think makes the best sense for the company to work on and also provide the best value to your customer. So the next thing is, don't forget your marketing and sales, or, you know, the field or go to market friends. So they are your proxy for the voice of the customers. Often at times, even at situations where it's difficult to directly get in touch with a customer, the sales or the marketing teams are in touch with the customers and they act as a proxy for the voice of the customer, they know what the customer needs and they might be easier to reach than the actual customer. So definitely listen and empathize with your marketing and sales team. The next thing is empathize not just with the customers, but also your internal stakeholders. And when I say that I mean, get diverse feedback from them. Like when you propose an idea, when you propose a strategy, always take the different feedback that you get from the different teams, everybody has their perspective and the engineering team will have the technical perspective, the leadership team will have the business strategic perspective. So it's very valuable to get everyone's feedback. And as a PM, you decide what feedback makes sense and what feedback you can ignore. And also understand the challenges and priorities. Like every team has got their own priorities. Every team has got their own challenges. And every team has their own goals. So understand that they already have all those things. So have empathy when you're working with them. So to summarize, whatever I spoke. The first thing is being curious and have the willingness to unlearn and learn about your customer, their problems. And what are the different ways you can solve their problems. And the next thing is developing the first principle thinking, where you break down things to absolute bare minimum, to understand what is the best way to provide, or what is the most quickest and simplest way you can provide the best experience to your customer. And next thing is empower and influence your stakeholders. Make sure you you you are the person to drive clarity in strategy, inform the engineering team, what to build, and make sure you educate the leadership about what the customer needs. And finally, have empathy towards your customer, and towards your internal stakeholders. So I would like to conclude this webinar with this code. I mean, this code is actually mine. So Rockstar product manager creates an illusion of obviousness with the leadership and team so that they continually continually know when and where to invest and what to work on so that they can deliver continuous value to customers and generate sustained profits for the company. I hope you enjoyed this webinar. Thanks for your time. And you all take care. Thank you.