 Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a PM for cloud technology? What are your little apprehensives that it might be too technical? What are you looking to transition from B2C product management to cloud technology domain? So if you're clouded about being a cloud PM, then that's exactly what I plan to cover in the next couple of minutes. Hello everyone, I'm Shrema Pathak and I'll be talking about product management in the top cloud technology. But before we get started, here's a little bit about me. I'm Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. I'm a coffee lover and love chasing sunsets and sunrise. I'm a hiking enthusiast. I also have four years of B2C product experience in matrimonial domain and digital media domain. And currently I work to build products to help customers monitor the cloud, hybrid and on-prem environments with Azure Monitor. So let's get started. In this session, I'll be focusing on the cloud as a service. We'll discuss the cloud technology landscape and the ever-growing opportunities there. And then we'll switch gears to product management side of the world and discuss how is it different from the B2C product management and how does the journey look like, like what are the various challenges and some skills to help folks who are looking to transition from B2C to cloud technology. So let's get going. All right, let's begin by understanding the cloud landscape. We are in the era of digital transformation and businesses, no matter what sector they fall into, are accelerating their digital transformation. Moving to cloud has a critical role to play here. According to various industry reports, around 70% of businesses are already using cloud technology in some capacity. Additionally, various studies have suggested that the companies that invest in cloud technologies have witnessed up to 50% faster revenue growth. And moving to cloud has really helped them increase the operational efficiency. They quickly cater to customer requirements and increase their bottom line. So there are lots of benefits of using cloud technologies and let's discuss a few of them. First and foremost, it's extremely cost-effective. Pay-as-you-go allows businesses to only avail services that they need, resulting in higher ROI. Another important aspect with growing digitization is security. Well, offering a secure system is one of the topmost priorities of cloud providers. They offer various security solutions that provide protection from data breach or third-party data violations. Next, you can say it's flexibility and scalability. You can access the data from anywhere and it also helps businesses to scale up or down depending on their requirements. Organizations also need to roll out features quickly to gain a competitive edge. So cloud services allow quicker and efficient workloads and also provides advanced technologies for analytics such as monitoring their infra and app components to drive operation decisions. Another important aspect is automatic software updates. Cloud-based applications automatically refresh and update themselves. So that saves a lot of time and money. Next would be easy manageability. It requires minimum toil to manage and maintain the infrastructure and services. They do not need to patch various tools or worry about the maintenance overhead that comes with managing on-prem server. And let me tell you, these benefits are not exhausted. There are so many advantages of using cloud services and businesses are adopting at a higher rate. So let's take a look at how do these benefits translate to cloud PM opportunities. Cloud systems are vast and there are many facets of the cloud. There are various types of cloud systems such as infrastructure as service, platform as service, software as service and there's continuous innovation happening in this domain to bring various types of virtual machine SKUs or managed services etc. to the industry. Customers, they opt for various modes of deployment depending upon their data residency requirements or infrastructure requirements, privacy requirements etc. And that leads to plenty of opportunities in public, private and hybrid clubs. Once these customers start using cloud service, it is imperative for them to ensure that the fundamental requirements are covered. And by fundamentals, I mean cloud service is secure, reliable, it provides high quality service, it's highly scalable and there's more. Also, when we talk about features, there are several features that are becoming table stakes to adopting cloud such as monitoring ease of use, cost and performance optimization and the list continues. Now these are again not the exhaustive list of areas that are other opportunities in the networking area and the AI machine learning area and a lot of other domains in cloud and these product opportunities, they will keep growing with growing cloud adoption. So I just hope it's encouraging to see there are so many opportunities in the domain but when it comes to product management in the cloud technologies, let's take a look of how it's different from a typical B2C product management. Now for every product, whether it's business to consumer, business to business or business to developer, it is imperative to understand the user persona like for whom are we building those products. And for cloud technologies, the journey of PM also begins there. For cloud domain, there could be many user personas overlapping or distinct depending upon the stage at which they are in cloud journey but here I would like to bring up DevOps persona which is kind of critical to bring all the innovation that we see around us to the industry. For application developers, the roles and responsibilities of DevOps persona will differ slightly based on what stage they are in like build, core, plan, test, release, deploy, operate or monitor stage. I am a PM for monitoring area so in the next couple of slides I'll drop in a few examples from that area on what it takes to be a PM in these cloud technologies. So now that you know that user persona is a little bit different from a typical business to consumer products let's see how does that change the product management approach or how to build the products for DevOps. A lot of product management in the cloud technology will overlap with business to consumer. So that's good news. However, there are a few areas where you would want to think a little differently so let's continue with the user persona. I work in the monitoring side of things so I'll share a few examples here and there for more context. So for user persona, let's talk about a few monitoring scenarios where we focus on DevOps user persona. We need to understand what are their business goals or monitoring goals. You will often observe that for the similar persona, the decision makers and the product users, they might be a little different. So understanding their hierarchy of needs is super important. What are they looking for in monitoring? Is it in your feature? Is it scalability? Or is it simply extending support to additional systems and so on. And then to get further more clarity, you can gather more quality to data by user research. Now unlike business to consumer where you can derive a lot of insights from telemetry, here it is important to interact with users to gather rich information. Next is customer relationship. Now customer relationship is a super important criteria everywhere. But for cloud technology, it's all about continuously staying connected with them. Maybe track the pulse of their business goals, feedback on your product and even participation in the product reviews. Because previous are a great way for cloud PM to gauge the product market fit and make iterations to make further decisions on how to scale the product and what new features that you want to add. Now, if you are in this industry, it is essential that you know the product that you're building. So it's essential to decipher what your customer is talking about. You need appropriate domain knowledge. You need to know the basics of cloud computing. And most important, cloud technologies are continuously evolving. So a PM needs to keep up with the new innovations that are coming to this industry. And it might be a little overwhelming, but of course, all this happens on the job. So no need to worry about it right away. And the last point that I would like to discuss is the nature of product release and experimentation. For instance, we do staggered release in several B2C domains and also perform AB testing experiments to depending upon your product, how the control group or the treatment group are performing and then measure the impact. But as a cloud PM, you may or may not be able to do the same depending upon what you're releasing. So one way to think about that is close previews where you interact directly with your customers. And this is where the customer relationship comes in handy because you go to them, you provide a brief overview, have them try out your product, have them share the feedback and you hydrate or sometimes you just perform a concept testing before building an MVP. So there are various ways you can do experimentation which are a little bit different from other domains. And that's where there are some skills that will come in handy and we'll talk more about that later. Now coming to typical cloud PM journey, well, it's obviously not a straightforward path. And this, yes, this happens almost everywhere. So yeah, you wouldn't want to be bogged down always by the use of feedback, right? So let's see how the journey is for a cloud PM and what are the challenges there? Now a lot of journey of a cloud PM is similar to B2C or B2B domains, but there are a few nuances. And assuming you are keeping a pulse of customer feedback on regular basis, you would first want to come up with a problem hypothesis. The goal over here is to narrow down on a particular problem statement, highlight key customer pain points and their probable unmet needs. Now this really helps creating the visibility of the problem statement among various stakeholders for a common objective or shared goal. However, like I mentioned before, it's not always a straight path. You may encounter skill challenges like there could be varied viewpoints or you might struggle to align everyone on the problem hypothesis. But well, that's a part of the process and sometimes you might end up going back and forth to get that alignment. Next would be the user research. Now I personally find jobs to be done framework quite effective to validate the problem hypothesis. It essentially enables you to deeply understand what your customer is trying to accomplish. So let's say for monitoring perspective, my hypothesis is that customers cannot figure out if their VM is healthy or not. By VM, I mean virtual machine is healthy or not. So for this, what do they do typically? So for instance, they could be checking whether their VM is available or not or they could be tracking few other performance metrics to determine the health of VM or they could be doing bunch of various tasks and you would want to understand what are the struggles that they face while accomplishing those tasks. Now there is a lot of content online where you can learn more about this particular framework and how to apply jobs to be done framework for your scenarios and identify the unmet needs of the customer. And in this step, it is super critical to be mindful of the use of cohort that you are selecting to avoid any selection bias. Now once you have visibility into the unmet needs of your customer, the next step is to envision the product feature. Here the most important thing to note is unlike business to customer, this may or may not require an actual user interface to solve customer problems. And here the hierarchy of customer's needs will come into play. However, this is never one side fits all scenario. The requirements may differ from one enterprise customer to other. So sometimes balancing out those requirements could be a challenge. And once you come up with a product concept you would want to test it out before you actually build it. Get some feedback on the solution hypothesis that you drafted in the previous steps and hydrate. And again, skies the limit here when it comes to user feedback. So yeah, a similar challenge may pose here as well. Next in this journey is typical to any PM role. You will be writing the product requirement document and collaborating with your engineering counterparts or other stakeholders for the development. And I'm sure you might not be alien to the challenges that come here no matter in what domain you are you'll always come across those typical challenges that every PM encounters on a day-to-day basis. And last but not the least is the product launch. Now, when it comes to product launch in V2C domains you might be doing AP testing by staggered rollout and measuring your control group and treatment group based on various KPIs. Here it's a little different depending upon the product feature, you may or may not be able to perform AP testing. Typically, a lot of GTM is driven by closed reviews where only a set of customers will participate maybe 10, 20, 50 depending upon your appetite and try out the product and provide feedback. You need to come up with relevant KPIs to assess the product market fit and the probable success based on the feedback that you receive from your previews. The adoption of your product will mainly kick off when the product is generally available and by generally available I mean that it's out there in the market available to all the customers to use it in their reduction environments and that's when adoption KPIs will be relevant. So it could be sometimes challenging to define the right KPIs in the previous stage to gauge the success of the product to gauge the potential of the product all to assess the right product market fit. So now that you know how a typical PM role in cloud technology looks like what's the overall journey like how the user persona is different and what are the various challenges that you might encounter in building a new product feature for the cloud technology domain. Let's talk about how to make a transition to be a PM in the cloud. And before you look for roles try and reflect what motivates you. So for instance I get really excited about building products that are empowering businesses to accelerate that growth and enable them to leapfrog. I really find it exciting to see how the customers are using various modeling features to drive data-driven decisions and increase their operational efficiency. And once you figure that out it's all about the PM skills. Now if you have been working in B2C or B2B domain you would already be familiar with typical PM skills to succeed in your role and those hard-earned PM skills they never go waste. Now these are absolutely transferable skills you will always find yourself supplying them in your day-to-day work no matter in what domain you are. But let's also look at some of the skills that you can think about leveraging or maybe acquiring if you are thinking to make this transition to be a PM in the cloud and how they'll help them to overcome some of the challenges that we discussed before. In the previous slides I highlighted a few challenges a PM in the cloud technology may encounter during the process now again these are not the exhaustive list of challenges but those are the typical challenges that you could find yourselves encountering no matter what product you're building. So let's talk about how to overcome them and what specific skills would come handy while you face any of these. So when it comes to influencing the stakeholders and their engagement it really helps to drive clarity on what you're trying to achieve like navigating the loud voices and varied opinions in a forum could really be challenging but having a structure and clear thought process will take you a long way like really define what your goal is try that clarity and influence the stakeholders for your shared objective and coming to the next when it comes to how to identify relevant user cohort that ties to your goal it really helps that you are super clear on the overall goal of your product and you have the respective domain knowledge so when it comes to becoming a PM in the cloud technology you need to be able to speak and understand the language of cloud and say you need to be super hands on but at least the basics of the domain or the basics of the cloud technology for which you are a product manager if you're able to master that that will be super helpful and a lot of learning will happen on the job however one needs to be committed to this growth mindset and have a rhythm of continuous learning because this is a super fast growing field and every day you will see some or new path-breaking technologies coming to the market so it really helps to get yourself updated with what's coming new in the market I know we spoke a lot about the never-ending customer requirements and user feedback and how we wouldn't want to be bogged down by them so you will find yourself in the situation where a lot of user feedback will be there and it will require a lot of back and forth on what to do what not to do considering so much bandwidth you have so much engineering resources you have prioritizing aggressively is the key here think about what are the top pillars that you are going after for your product that aligns the organization strategy or the goals or overall Uber vision or strategy and try to make that connection and prioritize that actually delivers the impact now I won't elaborate a lot on the next but typically showcasing bias to action and your leadership skills will extremely be useful and I would say these are the skills that you will be using for any challenge that you face out of this list or even beyond because showcasing your leader that your team could trust in actually helps when it comes to the product management no matter if it's in cloud or by any other domain and to conclude how to measure the relevant success or how to come up with a relevant measure of success so polishing your analytical skills will be helpful here since a lot of times you will be deriving insights from the qualitative data like I mentioned earlier so simply by conducting close previews for a close set of customers and evaluating what the feedback is like and then deriving insights from that so gauging the success more from user feedback then simply quantitative metrics is the key over here and you will find yourself doing that quite often with that being said quantitative analysis is always there to measure high level adoption to keep a track of the trends of the product usage and other customer behavior so having both is super critical to success in the cloud PM role okay so now that we know what is the cloud technology domain like what are the various opportunities how does the journey look like what are the various challenges and the PM skills that you need to succeed let's talk about what's next if you want to make this transition so the first thing is really focus on 101 of cloud technologies try to understand how the entire tech stack looks like when it comes to you know deploying application what are the various components such as virtual machines communities and such so acquire some domain knowledge and you can rely on bunch of online courses that are out there there is a lot of content on the web to help you get started and even talking to peers what in that domain would really help to at least get perspective on hey where do I get started in such complex domain right so focus on how best to get some basic domain knowledge if you want to set foot in the door the next would be networking network with folks who are thought leaders in this industry or maybe PMs who have made that transition to learn more about their experiences what their day to day role looks like and like I mentioned before that you know cloud technology and cloud system is a whole lot of another universe there are so many opportunities so many segments so you know connect with PMs in various domains of C that particular domain excites you if a PM role in that particular domain would excite you or not so it would really help you align your interest in a domain that you would prefer to work in and you might excel now if you decide to transition don't worry too much about domain knowledge and obviously domain knowledge is super critical but to focus on your strength you know when you are moving to that new domain altogether a basic 101 definitely helps and you will get a lot of cloud knowledge as in when you advance in your career but to start with focus on your strength see what your previous experiences can help you leverage some of those strengths and then apply that in your new role definitely acquire new skills as in when you advance in that role last play with the cloud that's fun and the best learning experiences comes when you actually get some hands-on experience on cloud so you know try deploying VMs try playing around with Kubernetes I know these terms might be overwhelming but once you get a hang of it they are super fun to play around with and that will really help you understand some of the roles that are there out in this particular domain so that's all about this webinar I hope you have some more clarity on what does it take to be a product manager in the cloud technology and you are little less clouded over being a cloud PM so I hope this helped and thanks everyone for taking the time out to attend this webinar I would also like to thank Product School to give me this opportunity and Pasha Jain to share some insights on his PM journey when he was in the PM and cloud and helping with this presentation wish you all good luck and thank you once again