 Hi, everyone. Welcome. So today's topic of conversation here at Product School is curiosity, the key attribute of a successful product manager. My name is Laura Soler Nieves, and I'm a senior product manager at GoPro. I'm here today talking about curiosity because I love being a product manager and I truly owe my career to curiosity. So why not share how curiosity plays an important role in being a successful product manager? In regards to my career as a product manager, I have been with GoPro for almost a year now. At GoPro, I manage the area of cross-device and platform experience within the software team. We focus on adding value to our GoPro customers by making it easy for our GoPro users to do more with their GoPro cameras and do more with their memories by having the ability for the camera to connect with other technologies, mobile devices and the GoPro ecosystem. Before GoPro, I was at AT&T for a number of years. At AT&T I was a product manager for AT&T Vrio, Latin America and Sky Brazil in the paid TV and media industry. We created products from OTT TV streaming apps to TV streaming hardware and devices similar to Roku and Apple TV as well as the ability for these software apps and devices to work with all smart TVs. The reason I owe my career to curiosity is because I actually went to cooking school after high school. I thought one day I'm going to be a famous pastry chef, but I always had this curiosity of how can I do more in my life, be more in my life. What does that look like in others who have been successful outside of hospitality? After hospitality school, I pivoted out of the hospitality industry to do my MBA. There I started falling in love with the aspect of creation, the aspect of creating a business, creating a vision. And I started to develop a skill of loving to look beyond and curiosity kept me searching for a career path where I could continue to be curious but still add value to people's lives by developing something whether that it be a service, a product that allowed me to make their lives easier or better. So my hopes with today's presentation is that I provoke a little bit more curiosity within you because I know it's a secret weapon that can generate great success, whether that may be in life or as a product manager. In today's agenda, so I'm going to start by talking what is curiosity? Why is curiosity a key attribute of a successful PM? And then we're going to dive in deeper into some areas of curiosity and how it impacts whether that may be you're becoming a product manager or ready a product manager or a product manager of a team. So what is curiosity? Curiosity as a noun is a strong desire to know or learn something. And as an adjective, it's the eagerness to know or learn something. But being curious can manifest itself in the activity of asking questions, but it can also be a position from which one approaches their life or their perspective. Being curious does not necessarily imply that one has little knowledge on a subject or that further inquiry is needed to develop an opinion. Rather, curiosity is the idea that one is simply open to learning the nuances of the unknown. And in doing so, they hope to broaden and deepen their scope of understanding. Most of the groundbreaking technology discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history from the world's first successful mortar operated airplane to the light bulb from self driving cars to even vaccine. They all have something in common. And that is the result of curiosity from inventors to billionaires from world explorers to scientists. They all have in common that they are very curious and they have that hunger to understand and explore things further. Curiosity drives innovation. It is an impulse to pursue a thought, find a solution, seek new possibilities and keep on a path to see what's around the next bend. That's why it is no surprise as to why NASA selected to name the Mars rover curiosity. So why is curiosity a key attribute of a successful product manager? People buy products and services to get a job done. Solving the wrong problem or building a product or feature that doesn't solve any problem at all can be very costly, as well as it easily becomes a useless product for the user. So successful product managers invest the time to define and create value by innovating to solve unmet user needs. Improve processes, automate and introduce innovative valuable tools that attract a new audience and or predict the future. And the way to achieve this is to be very curious about your users. Curiosity will increase the quality of the solution you generate by exposing you to more knowledge and information that will amplify your ability to first identify and understand the problem you hope to solve, as well as be able to identify an undeserved need to target in the problem space. So in summary, successful PMs solve the right problem, not the wrong problem. Albert Einstein once said, If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution. In this school, Albert Einstein asserts that the quality of the solution you generate is in direct proportion to your ability to identify and understand the problem you hope to solve. And if you are not a curious person or curious product manager, it'll be very difficult for you to truly identify and understand what is that problem for the user. So through the use of curiosity, you increase the chances of gaining clarity as to what the problem is. So to be a successful product manager, you need to be passionately curious. To be curious is about the willingness to get to the absolute root cause of a problem and understand the user or the situation deeply. Curiosity is about the openness to explore the unknown and the drive to explore what is known further. It's this desire to ask questions that helps us understand all about our customers and their challenges and their goals. It's this desire to want to know how something currently works that enables us to work out how we can make it better. Curiosity is critical to be a good product manager because in order to build products and features that provide the most value, that solves an impactful problem, that deliver breakthrough innovation, product managers need to care about understanding people and their problems. That's why successful product managers have a curious persistence to dig deeper to understand the problem space, question what is already known, are there ways that we can do it better, understand their users' challenges and concerns, they uncover what users are thinking and feeling, they further understand user behavior and their environment, and with all this, they get to the absolute root cause of a problem. In a field study by NC's Spencer Heronson, they asked a group of artisans selling their goods through an e-commerce website, several questions aimed at assessing the curiosity they experience at work. After that, the participant's creativity was measured by the number of items they created and listed over a two week period. One unit increase in curiosity, for instance, in a score of six rather than a five on a seven point scale was associated with 34% greater creativity. The results showed that the most curious employees stopped the most information from coworkers, and the information helped them in their job. For instance, it boosted their creativity in addressing customers' problems. When we're curious, we view tough situations more creatively. Studies have found that curiosity is associated with less defensive reactions to stress and less aggressive reactions to provocation and is associated with better job performance. So encouraging people to be more curious generates positive workplace improvements as well as increases constructive suggestions for implementing solutions as well as coming up with creative solutions as a whole. In this next section, we're going to talk about how can you ignite your curiosity. And I'm trying to kind of trigger you guys to ask yourselves a little bit. Are you guys curious enough? So be curious about how curious you are. Start with an open mind and don't be afraid to dive deep. There are many barriers that can potentially block the way, you know, you're able to ignite your curiosity or express your curiosity or go about your curiosity. So if you're experiencing any barriers to your curiosity, look around and ask yourself why. Why is this blocking my ability to be curious? Am I curious enough? If I'm not, why is that? How can it be more curious? And question that more and more. You know, one thing I definitely tell other product managers is the second you accept you don't know everything, you're going to open the door to more success. You know, recognize what you don't know and what you could do better. The second section of this is tap into your child's curiosity. Do you remember when we were kids and we constantly asked about, ask our parents about everything, you know, why this, why that? Why is this working this way? Why did you give me this and not that? Why is that guy doing that? Why is the music playing it this way? You know, an efficient way of igniting your curiosity is reconnecting with your inner child and sense of wonder and creating this child curious mindset again. Part of that is being humble and approaching the world in this with a child's curiosity. You know, apart from them always questioning why they always also view things in different ways, right? They approach situations and problems with an open childlike mind that is not confined by rigidity or preconceived notions. And so, you know, part of the process about being inquisitive and asking more questions is being able to allow yourself to dive deeper many layers down, right? And one example of that is with the five whys, right? Whenever you're trying to be more curious about something, I dare you to go five levels deep, you know, why, you know, then why that, why that? And it really will allow you to get to the root cause of what you're trying to know further. The second section, use your curiosity to amplify your success in becoming a product manager. I know that a few of you here today are on the path to becoming a product manager. A product manager's job is all about solving problems for people. A product manager is a person who identifies the customer's need and the larger business objective that a product or a future will fulfill. That person articulate what success looks like for the product as well as rally the team to turn that vision into reality. So the path to begin your career as a product manager with great success is to be very curious first about why do you want to be a product manager? About how can I learn the product management fundamentals, you know, get familiar with the product management process, the basics. Be curious to identify any gaps in knowledge and or experiences and search to gather more information. Seek for alternative sources of information. One example is product school. They have an array of information in regards to becoming product manager or improving as a product manager, becoming a product owner or a product leader. You know, the information is in LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook. I mean, regardless of your social network place, product manager is sharing information. So you can easily access it anywhere as well as from other product mentors and product leaders. You know, be curious about how others solve problems. How others create innovative product and solutions. One exercise I would suggest is to do an immersive dive into the field that you like the most within product. You know, within product creation, product management, there are many fields, right? There's media, there's real estate, fintech, social network. I mean, it goes on and on. I would suggest you to download all the apps that are the most popular apps within that, let's say industry or area within product. Sign up for their newsletter, follow the leaders in that field and get inspired and try to yourself be curious about what makes those products successful. The next section is use your curiosity to solve the right problem and build great products. As I mentioned before, to be a successful product manager, you need to be passionately curious about the product's user. Curiosity is critical because in order to build products and features that provide the most value that solves an impactful problem that delivers breakthrough innovation, product managers need to care. They need to care deeply about understanding people and their problems. The only way to delve deep into problems and behaviors and develop roadmaps that can actually solve those users' needs. A good product manager starts from the user and their problem, right? And they're curious to understand what users have a problem, what their alternatives are, and what a good solution should look like. They use that knowledge to frame a solution that resonates with users. They are also curious about the tools, technologies and skills available to the engineering team to pull together the best solution for the problem. Many stakeholders will bring us solutions instead of problems to solve. But it is our responsibility to be curious and understand the problems behind it. If we accept to focus on the solution, we may face problems like creating a useless product that nobody likes, feature creep. Rather than improving the product, the extra features end up diminishing the usability or the product loses value. And so it is our responsibility to stay on the track and lead our team to solving a problem and not just developing a solution for the sake of developing a solution. So use your curiosity to solve the right problem. And I keep repeating that because that's an important aspect here. You know, part of solving the right problem is you search to gain different perspectives of how and why things work the way they work for that feature or product. You ask powerful questions that reveal available opportunities within that area or problem space. Questions that will help you see the problem area clear and allows you to reframe the problem with accuracy. Questions like how do you do that today? What do you want this product to achieve? What else could this mean to you? What would happen if we do that? Where is it happening? How is this problem happening? When is this problem happening? With whom is this problem happening? And what do you wish you could do that you can't do today? And then dive in deeper with the five-wise. A lot of product managers, in fact, a lot of the area of product managers is in fact around experimentation. You start with a thesis and you continuously validated with a little as effort as possible. Having curiosity is key to selecting the right experiences to experiment and to iterate quickly. Being curious will help you uncover the right experiment. Great experiments help solve real user problems. They have a strong well-reasoned hypothesis grounded with data and context and a good definition of success. But if you're not curious enough to identify what that data and context is, what does success really look like for the user, you will be able to be able to anchor those factors to the testing and therefore provide testing that actually helps you solve real user problems. So in a sense, it's like a scientist's love of learning. What motivates research in depth analysis and AB texting and experimentation with new ideas is not curiosity. Curiosity helps us in our decision-making. The more knowledge we procure from our curious endeavors, the more information and resources we have to tap into when we need to critically think about a problem or make an important decision, which results in fewer decision-making errors by reducing confirmation bias and broad assumptions. The fourth section is share curiosity to create meaningful relationships and visionary teams. We know that if we are able to multiply creativity as well as knowledge, different perspectives and experiences, we dramatically increase our exposure to solutions that solve the right problem in the right way. As a product manager, it's important to create space for exploration and to tap into the collective intelligence of those around you. Curiosity can also help you develop other skills such as empathy and relationship building by allowing you to understand more and more about others and how they feel or behave. So be curious to learn about your team members, your cross-functional teams and dig deeper to understand what they can do to help you improve the product. A lot of them have a lot of ideas that they've never been allowed to express. So just create a space that they feel safe, that they can express or allow themselves to be curious. Second is to be curious to question current processes and frameworks to validate how might we increase the value of the work we do. This cultivates increased efficiency, superior team performance and more meaningful goals. But I must note that when you question current processes, never question them from the angle of this process is wrong or this is wrong. No, this is not the way to do it. And always make sure to question current ways or processes from an angle of wanting to truly understand how that process enables you or the team to create value, whether that value is for the user or for the team's performance. And then view it from different perspectives to see if there are ways we can enable more value by improving the process itself. But ultimately, these processes deal with multiple team members. So you want to model curiosity and inclusion of your colleagues in this process, as well as make them feel safe to explore and to express their ideas or their opinions and how we can improve the processes as a team. Encourage a climate of questions, a climate where you allow everyone to think out loud. Create more why or what if or how might we days. This fosters deeper engagement, more open communication and increased collaboration and better team performance. So imagine if you were to say two hours twice a week with your team, you're able to just address the question and aspects of your product and aspects of a process or a feature and just allow the team as a whole to answer how might we understand the user better? How might we analyze or how might we evaluate this aspect of the product? As a team and tapping into that collective intelligence, it really multiplies creativity and it really helps us identify either areas of opportunity or better ways to create solutions for the user. And it also increases team satisfaction and team collaboration and that ultimately leads to happier teams. I know that there are some typical barriers to curiosity. Everyone, we have some sort of fear in some area of product management, but fear in regards to curiosity appears as I'm fear of looking dumb by asking questions of feel of not being respected by the superiors if I were to ask more questions or fear of the unknown. I rather stay within my safe square because I know what's happening here. The second barrier to curiosity is expectation. My boss already expects me to know everything or assumptions. I already know what the user wants. My boss does not want me to waste time on talking to customers. Another aspect we're talking about time is people think that exploring or researching takes a long time or it's time wasted. Final but not least, barrier to curiosity is our environment or the way we grew up, our family, our society or peer influences. Sometimes being curious can go against how we grew up or family or religious views. And so it's not about you breaking the barriers in ways that causes any problem or any damage, but it's about further expose yourself to possible ways about how can you be curious within your environment, within your job, within your fear and expectation and allow yourself to do it more frequently one step at a time. Final barrier to curiosity is technology. Technology has offered us so many answers and made it so much easier to access those answers. And yet as generations become more and more technologically dependent, curiosity can actually be squelched. If computers can answer our questions, we may not see the need to discover the why behind those answers. So technology can in fact dissuade us from learning new things. So in reality, as much as we want technology to enable us to do more, we still have to see where does it fall within allowing us to be more curious? Or how does technology enable us or the team to be more curious in regards to the process of experiencing curiosity or enabling creativity? So let's break through any of these areas, right? First, be more curious. Wander about everything. Don't be afraid to research more or ask more. Dig and think deeper. Ask why more often. Look closer at the products you love and use the most and ask yourself, why is that? Why do you love this product? Why do you use this product the most? What problem is it solving for you? Another area to break through those barriers is developing empathy. It allows you to have that wander need to connect to understand and therefore it allows you to dive deeper into what you're trying to analyze. Be curious about the importance of solving problems that matter. And then lastly, model curiosity within your team or your company. Allow yourself to share that curiosity with others and develop a space of collaboration and exploration. So if you're wondering where do I start or how do I start to ignite my curiosity? Just start by asking yourself, am I curious enough? Am I curious enough in my journey to become a product manager? Are there any areas I'm afraid to learn about? What can I do to increase my success in becoming a product manager? If you're already a product manager, ask yourself, are you curious enough about your users? Are you curious enough about their needs or challenges? Are there areas that you can foster more curiosity within your team, within your colleagues? Is there a way that you can instigate more team-wide creativity? I know that spending just a little bit more time in each of those sections is going to dramatically and greatly multiply your success as a product manager. So thank you so much for being here today. I'm Laura Salerniaves and don't be afraid to reach out to me and stay high in LinkedIn. You can find me at Laura Salerniaves in LinkedIn and I'm here to help you become more successful. So thank you so much and have a great day.