 Hello, everyone, and welcome to my webinar where I'll be sharing my strategies and technical tips to level up your product management execution skills. All right, let's go ahead and get started. So before we dive in, let me do a quick introduction. I'm Arjun Dalvani. I'm a product manager on YouTube shopping. I work with my team to launch the YouTube shopping affiliate program, which is a new way for creators to earn money in the US. So on this role, I got to do a lot of sort of one work involving heavy amounts of execution. Previously, I worked on a sustainability-related project on Google Hotels, and I did short stands at Smart Sheet in Microsoft. All right, so for today, I'm excited to share what we have in store. The first topic we're going to talk about is what is execution, then let's touch on some execution skills, how to build a reputation, and then how to scale yourself. Okay, so let's start with the basics. Let's discuss what is execution, and just make sure we are on the same page of that. To me, execution is this magical ability to get things done, all right? You kind of go make things happen. And when it comes to execution, I'm assuming your team and your leadership will have a decent vision and start a gene place, and now all you have to do is execute, right? I like to think of these in levels, and so let's go ahead and take an example. Say you're the product manager for Amazon and you're asked to launch a new sorting feature. It's a feature that allows customers to sort the results on a page by the highest quality postings, right? And high quality can be defined by more pictures, more metadata, more descriptions of our products and stuff like that. So only the highest quality postings will be displayed first, instead of the most relevant or stuff like that, right? And a level one execution, what I think is someone, the manager comes and tells you about this project, and you kind of go ahead and deliver on this as expected by your manager and by the rest of the team, right? So I think that's level one. That's what a lot of junior product managers do. In terms of when it comes to level two, I think it is more on crushing delivery, right? So you still launch the sorting feature as requested, but you do it in a much faster way, right? Or you do it with very few resources. I think that is kind of a level two product manager, and that gets you the stripes to execute really well and take part in a lot more other projects. Level three, I think, is what separates a create from a good PM, right? So in this case, you also launch the sorting feature. You deliver on it, of course, but you also wonder where else this could be useful in a manner that will drive more impact. And so you think that, oh, very expensive products might require customers to learn about it more about a product before they make a decision, which makes sense. And so you kind of run an experiment, an A-B test to make this new sorting feature a default. So every time you search for something that's really expensive, by default the results are displayed in this new sorting feature, right? And it turns out that that actually drove a lot more impact. And so you have now delivered way more than what is expected. You went above and beyond and started to find ways that this existing solution could be used in multiple different ways across the product. And I think that is the level three execution. And that's what I, at least, aspire to get to every time I'm working on a project. So let's talk about the skill set, right? When it comes to execution, getting to this level three execution level, what are the skills needed, right? And Chicago has no surprise that prioritization isn't top of that list. The second one is building momentum, third is communication, and the fourth is sales. So let's talk about prioritization. And I usually ask myself the following questions before even taking it to engineering to do cost estimation, right? So I have these four questions, I call them rules of thumbs that I like to always, always ask myself, so the first one is what does the customer value add, right? What problem are we solving? Is the problem meaningful? What value are we adding for our customers, right? It should always start with that. The second thing is, is this the most important thing to work on, right? And that depends on the third question, which is how much does this move the not-star metric for our team, right? If it's revenue, if that's what your not-star metric is, or if it's customer experience and user satisfaction or retention, always ask yourself where, how much does this move and do a kind of a back of the napkin math on the impact a feature might have on the not-star metric, right? The fourth one, which I think is often overlooked here is just how does this help the overall customer experience, right? I think that knowing the entire customer story end to end and always thinking about that and taking this big picture view is really, really key and it's what makes, what makes certain products really shine, right? Let me give you an example of why this like customer experience and story really matters. Let's say you're the PM for Spotify, right? And you are required to drive premium, more premium subscriptions, right? Now, you could start off by just saying, hey, we should drop more pop-ups and make it more disruptive and make the entire experience maybe not as great just so you can get more sign-ups for premium. That's one way to approach it, right? But the experience here is like, how can you make it as least disruptive as possible, right? While still getting as many sign-ups as you can. And so the placement of that pop-up is very, very key to this overall customer experience, right? And so I think thinking about those journeys, those user journeys makes a lot of sense and you have to spend the time really thinking about it and you want to drive not-star metric impact while at the same time making sure this experience is very seamless. And I like to think about the end-to-end use customer journey all the time. I think one company that does this really, really well is Airbnb. So let's walk through an example of what Airbnb does, right? So visualized here on this slide is the Airbnb customer journey for a guest and for a host, right? So like what are we seeing here? The famous story is that Brian Chesky, who's the CEO of Airbnb, was one day just reading Walt Disney's biography and he learned that storyboarding was a very effective way for Disney and their animators to come up with the overall experience of what their characters would do in a movie and how that film's narrative would be shaped, right? So Airbnb followed a similar approach where they hired some Pixar designers and storyboarded each frame of the guest and the host user journey. And the result of this is kind of this detailed understanding frame by frame of the entire customer journey, which is a very powerful way to prioritize which frame is not as well-crafted and which frame has too many resources on it already, right? So it helps you think about everything from a macro perspective. I want to talk about two examples, right? Where I think that as PMs, we don't spend a lot of time thinking about the experience. And so let's go through the first one. And so let's see how like the Airbnb homepage prioritizes certain features or others, right? I love this homepage because I think Airbnb is really leaning into their core differentiator, right? They are saying, hey, you can find unique listings, which are amazing views, amazing pools, lakefront and all these crazy things that I don't think a lot of people actually stay at. I actually did the back of the map, the napkin map here and only 3-5% of overall Airbnb's revenue comes from these unique listings, yet they get such high prominent placement on their homepage. Why is that, right? What are they prioritizing here? What they're prioritizing is their differentiator. They're prioritizing that, hey, like you can find these unique novel, one-of-a-kind listings only on Airbnb. They're educating their users about it and that is very powerful, right? So lower revenue impact but high impact on the customer experience, right? Let's talk through another example, right? This is the iPhone, which is a beloved product for so many people across the world and when it first launched, let's look at the features they prioritize, right? Here too, they prioritize building multi-touch and having keyboards that you could type on, on glass, which was never done before. But what was missing here was copy and paste. You couldn't copy and paste on the first iPhone and you had to wait two years until iPhone launched the feature where you can copy and paste and what seems like a table stick feature across the entire industry was something that the iPhone just never prioritized given their resources and given their focus on the core differential features and I think that's like a great way of showing how they thought about prioritization. So those are the two stories I just love, so I want to talk about those. Let's talk about execution scale number two and this is around building momentum. So I like to think about product management as a role that is loosely aligned with a combination of a ship navigator, right, and a ship hemsman and you're not the captain. Most importantly, the captain is probably your vice president, it is the CEO, depending on the stage of company you're in. The ship navigator, I think, points where we should go is a fair or fair the ship is going and was pointing towards where it should go next. I think of this work as strategy and the ship hemsman works with the team to physically steer the ship in the right direction, right? And as PM, you're doing a lot of this, you're doing a lot of the ship hemsman work. You have to work with the team to keep things going. You have to build the rhythm. You need cadence. You need equally sinks. You have clear deadlines of what the team needs to accomplish. And if and when you face an unexpected roadblock, you need to mitigate it. And in some cases escalate, right? And in escalating, you're kind of letting the captain know that something's wrong. So I also think as a PM, you need to fill the gaps where needed and assess your team's strengths and weaknesses and go and step into the shoes where your team is weakest, right? So you do a lot of these weird things to just keep momentum going and building that momentum and ensuring that the ship is steering that direction, okay? And the next skill that I think is really, really important is communication. I love this quote from Lenny, who is another famous PM influencer, where he says that communication is the job. That's what PMs do. It matters everywhere. It's in writing. It's in emails. It's in person. It's most importantly, I think, how you build trust in the team, especially when you have no credibility, right? If you have no launches under your belt, you are new to a team or you're going to a new team for requests to do something for you. Communication is the way all of this happens, right? And it's also how you sell ideas. It's how you explain why you should do A or B. It's how you build relationships with your team. And more importantly, it's how your reputation is built. So personally, every time I propose a new feature, right, I have, I always write up a quick draft with kind of some problem, the solution, why I think it's important and share it with a small group of trusted stakeholders, right, for early feedback. And then based on their comments, I trade the document and then share it with a wider audience. So I do the same for presentations. I want to give to leadership as well. I write a script. I share it with my manager, with my team. I refine that script over and over again. And then I go and present a leadership, right? So this is to tell you that communication is a skill that you can work on iteratively. You can collaborate with your team members to get really, really good at. It doesn't have to be, you're either great or not at it. I think it's something that you can iterate on just as you iterate on with your products and projects, right? So that's skill number three, communication. The fourth one that I think is really key is sales, right? And another way to think about this is you are aligning teams. You're influencing people. You are talking to leadership. I think at the end of the day, it's all just sales, right? So during planning season, every quarter or every year, there's a lot of selling going on, right? You need to convince multiple stakeholders why your vision and solution is worth building. And this is very key during execution as well for complicated, intricate projects that are multi-quarter long. People lose faith midway through and you have to go and sell and get them to execute on it. And so I think there are four key ways to get really, really good at this. I think sales starts with relationships, right? And having strong relationships will always help the other stakeholders assume positive intent, especially when you're debating ideas. When you don't align on a certain solution and you're furiously debating if you should do X or Y, knowing that at the end of the day, this person has positive intent is really key and that starts with you having a strong relationship ideally before you and have them on your project, right? The second aspect around sales is offering a clear, clear rationale on why you think this feature or this product is important, right? This is where you do most of the work as a PM. You go and get what the customer data says, you look at what the competitive landscape looks like, right? And if you do this work, you can clear, create this narrative on like why we should work on this. And just because you have this data doesn't mean people will agree with it and not challenge you, but it does help in creating this clear rationale. And so the third skill I think that got me really good at selling is where if we have any data I like to prime my stakeholders, especially leadership with a key idea, right? And I ask for feedback or collaborate with them. So I paint the overall customer value ad and then pack it with like clear rationale a few days or weeks later. So if you want to work on a massive GenEI project, so I think talking to your leadership and collaborating with them way earlier and letting them know that this is how you're thinking about it and get their thoughts, right, is a great way to start that process. The last one, which might be very obvious to a lot of you and is to make it as relevant as possible to their goals, right? It might not always be possible, but try to frame it in a way that helps the other stakeholders in some manner. So I have a fun anecdote here where in my previous role working on Google Hotels, my manager actually had to sell me on a project and he was like, hey, can you please work on this project? And I said, no, like this is not going to move the North Star metric. And there's just not enough revenue that this feature will make. And so I don't want to work on it. But my manager actually came to me and he said that, hey, this is going to massively benefit Google, the Google brand. And that would help us build a lot of good press and you would be known across the organization all the way up to like the CEO level that you worked on the stuff. And he was able to convince me to take on this like complex nine month long project. And I'm glad I was convinced because it did reach the CEO and it was like a massive hit. And so making it relevant to the other stakeholders' goals and getting them to see the bigger picture is really, really key because you want them bottom. So I think these are the four key skills for execution. Let's talk about another topic. I think it's great to be good at execution, but what's even better is to be known in the organization for your skill set. I like to think of it as first deliver and then just notify people about the impact you have made across the org. So think about this as distribution for your work. So just as a way you think about distribution for your projects and how many customers see your features, this is thinking about distribution within your organization for the work you're done. My general rule of thumb here is a 70-30 split. I spend 70% of my time doing the execution work and 30% of it is spend on notifying people of the amazing work we did. And unfortunately, that work is very repetitive. It is. It can be quite tedious. You have to predict a lot of decks or docks and keep blowing your trumpet about it. But I think it's what helps you build that reputation in the org because people forget. A fun example here is in the New York Times. They write all these breaking stories. And to get you to read them, they have to notify you. And they're trustworthy organization, but they'll notify you everywhere they possibly can, including the Apple Watch. So how do you get good at building a reputation? So here are a few tips that have worked for me. I'll quickly walk through them. The first one here is communicate launches with impact. A lot of PMs I have noticed are so excited that something launched that they just let everyone know that, hey, we launched this massive feature. But it's always better to wait like three or four weeks. Wait for the data to come in. Wait for some feedback to come in. If you can get a press for it, even better. And then communicate launches internally only after some impact has been driven. And if it's not metric related, try to create a story around why you did this launch. So that's really key. Second is recap what you delivered every quarter with like a quarterly newsletter or a quarterly report. Remind them of how much is getting done and how much you're working on. Third point here is seek advice and opinions and the hardest challenges your team is facing from leadership and from other PMs and from other stakeholders. I love to bring hard questions that I am facing to my vice president or to my manager and be like, hey, how do you think about the trade-off between speed and quality for this feature? I'm really struggling with this. Can you please give me advice? And this just shows that you're thinking about things a lot more deeply and want to get things done, but also are very cautious about doing it the right way. The fourth point here is to present and grab opportunities to present off-site summits, all hands. These are great places to get a lot of spotlight on you. And so it's, again, not fun. I don't particularly enjoy doing them, but I do think it's really, really key in building a great reputation for yourself. I also like to sometimes set up lunch and learn sessions, which is the fifth bullet point here, is that I love to learn from other people and what they are learning in the org and at the same time teach people on what I have learned and the impact we have proven from our customers. So that's kind of setting up this lunch and learn is a fun way to build this reputation. And the last bullet point, I think, is preparing like twice as much or even 10 times more for conversations with execs. I think it's these 5% of conversations that drive like 95% of your reputation at the senior level. And so when it comes to promotions and when it comes to these high impact decisions that need to be made, knowing that you are the person and them knowing something about you will really help. And that's usually in these 30-minute conversations, once a quarter, where they kind of form a reputation with you. As really prepared for those conversations, I think it's really important to tell your story over and over again. You control the narrative. And the litmus test here is what are the first few words that come to mind when people think of you? And if that person gets stuff done, I think you are building a great reputation in execution. All right, I want to give you some examples here on the reputation certain products and companies have built. So Costco has a great reputation for things just being cheap and available at bulk. And that's always going to be the case. And they have a principle in the company where their margin is maximum of 11% for each item. That's it. And that's how they're able to sell everything for so cheap. Duolingo is another popular language learning app. And it has a reputation of just being fun, a fun way to learn languages. And that's always been the case. And that's amazing. On the contrary side, you have Wall Street Journal, which writes a lot of cool stuff. But unfortunately, their app experience is horrible. To a point where Mark Andresen, who's a famous venture capitalist, is kind of roasting them on Twitter, where he's like, hey, I have to always sign them. And somehow, Wall Street Journal just never remembers that I have a premium account. And I always have to authenticate myself. So there are these certain reputations. You as a brand and products firm, and you as a leader, as a product manager in the company, also form. And you should be aware of what that reputation is. Let's talk about scaling yourself. So as you get comfortable mastering the skills, building a reputation, it's all about scaling your impact. And you want to do more of it with a team. I like to think of this as an impact multiplier. So you start to build a team to support you. And I think of scaling yourself as taking the elevator versus going through the escalator road. And it increases your impact surface area. You own more scope. You focus on solving the most interesting problems. And as you scale, it also is a great stepping stone to management. So some tactical tips here on how to get really good at this. I think the first one is to be proactive. Propose an all-star team to work with, find problems, find solutions, outline the estimated impact, go to your manager and say, hey, I would love to work with this all-star team to drive this success. Can you please help me? And in most cases, I have found managers being like, oh, yeah, that's an interesting problem. And if you have a team that you would prefer working with, wonderful, let's go make that happen. I also have a general rule of thumb where I spend 20% of my time prioritizing a project that is slightly riskier. And it's not certain if it will be a hit or not, that if it does take off, it could be high ROI. I think a lot of PMs today are doing this with Gen AI, where they're experimenting, they're learning, they're trying to figure out, can something happen here? And if it does, will customers love it or not? And so you're seeing a lot of that. I think the third one is around delegation. I think I hate putting together docs on how to do something, but I have found that putting together those docs takes two to three hours, but then delegating it to someone saves me the time for weeks going forward. So delegate to stakeholders that you can take advantage of and you can go and pitch them and say, hey, would you mind taking care of this area for me? And in most cases, everyone is quite open to taking up more work, as long as it's outlying very clearly what they have to do. OK, the fourth bullet point is around creating self-processes. And this is where you start to bucket. What are activities that you find energy seeking? Where are activities you find energy training? I find reading emails and watching all hands to be sometimes draining because there's just so much going on. What is energy seeking is talking to customers. So try to find ways of what you enjoy, what you don't, and what you can delegate off. The last one here is obviously continue to strengthen relationships. It will help with sales. It will help with getting stuff done. It also helps with building a really strong reputation. So that's another way to kind of start scaling yourself and have good impact. OK, that's mostly what I had. So thank you so much for tuning in, for listening to some strategies and tips on how to get better on your execution skills. And please feel free to contact me for more products speaking opportunities. That's my email there. I always love giving back to the community. And I really want to thank Product School for giving me this opportunity. Thank you, everyone.