 Hi everyone, Myself Manshul and today we'll be talking about working backwards. Before we go on with the presentation, I would like to make a few disclaimers. The viewers in this presentation are purely mine and they don't reflect the views of my current company OptiViscope. I've worked at Amazon and before we delve into what working backwards is, I would like to talk about my journey and how I reached where I am today. I started my journey as an engineer. I built web applications and enterprise applications for the first 7-8 years of my career. It's been a while for me in the industry and currently for the past 7-8 years I am doing product management. If I call myself an engineer I heard it would not be wrong because I love building and reasoning. The immense satisfaction which I get is when I see customer happiness, when I am able to deliver a problem solution to a problem to my customer. I had the opportunity to work in various parts of the world from Vienna in Austria to New York to Los Angeles and currently I am based out of Seattle. I'm lucky to work with large companies and startups and I look forward to continue to learn and solve real-world problems. Working backward. Before we delve into the process and the mindset and what it requires to work backward, let's understand what working backward is, what are their benefits and why working backward from the customer is important as a product manager. What working backward is, it's simple. You do it every day for most of the routine and mundane tasks in your life. It's just finding a problem and then inventing a solution to address that problem or a task. In real life I can talk about let's say you are getting called for a party at 5 p.m. today. You have a problem at hand. You will go back to the navigation system, check how long will it take to reach there. You'll add some buffer and you'll start working backward from reaching at 5 p.m. You'll do your task and then you finally be able to reach at the desired time if you follow the working back pattern. We follow working backward in our real life every now and then. So why not as a product manager when we are solving customer problems? And that's the answer while working backwards from the customer because as a p.m. when you're launching products, you're solving customer problems. So your customer is the center of your thought process. Your mindset should be driven based on the customer needs. Customer sentiment is not only provides endless opportunities, but it helps you to explore these opportunities, identify the gaps and invent the solutions. It pushes you to keep yourself up to date because customer needs are constantly evolving. And it doesn't matter if you're a product manager for a B2B product, B2C product or B2B2C product. You may have different personas of customer, but it's the problem of the customers you're solving irrespective of the product. There will be an internal product, an external product. Producting often finds a vision and continue to build on to the vision without thinking what problem this vision is solving. Many products face if there are not enough thoughts or research put into what problem who is the customer is put into business. One of the largest failure of this time is Google Glasses. Amazing idea, but epic failure. And why? Because it failed to define its customer and their needs. It did not have clear path to what problem it will solve and how it will solve. It was a fancy vision. And there are many other products to take an example of. So to avoid such pitfalls, it is super important to know who your customer is and what problem you're solving with your vision. It is good to have ideas, but your idea should have realistic approach to achieve those ideas. And my last part of this slide, what are the benefits of working back for like we talked about, it gives you a realistic approach. It gives you an ability to measure the product viability, market fit. Is it even needed? Is this idea even needed in this time? Maybe in future, maybe the time has gone already. It helps you time your product. And the whole idea of working backwards from the customer is focusing on your customer, focusing on what are the benefits of your customer. It helps you avoiding after the product is built, assessing how to market this product, who my customer is. You already have this answer and then you are guiding throughout your product development based on the answers to these questions. That takes me to my next section, which is what is the process? How do I do working backwards? I understand what working backward is, why it is important as a PM to work back from the customer. And that's where we would learn. I'm moving to the next slide. A simple approach. Just following your mood and task, who is your customer, understanding your customer, understanding their pain points, their problems, which they face in their daily life. And then after you have collected and understood their pain points, you ideate. There could be one solution or many solutions or approaches to solve a customer problem or problems. And then you continue to refine which idea would work, which would not work. And how would you refine? You will continue to go back to your customer, validate your approach. You will go back to your customer based on some prototypes or visuals and just a paragraph or list of features in the working backward process. The aim is to be able to answer these five questions. Who is the customer? What is the customer problem you want to solve? What is the benefit when you solve this question problem? Is your customer in real need of it? Do you know that your customer wants this? And if you are able to answer all first four questions, then you would also be able to define what the experience would look like, what would be the customer journey. And with that experience, you go back to your customer iterate and improve until you are sure that currently this is a design which is serving the top most priority, a problem statement. Let's move to the next slide. And the next few upcoming slides, you will be deep diving into each of these sections of the working back process, where how do you pass through each stage. And in the end, we will talk about how you at the end of the presentation would be able to develop a mindset and be able to build that in your everyday product management process. Next slide. Okay, so like I said, most of the time, customer is the focus of a product manager. So I'll be spending more time on the first phase of working backward process, which is customer knowing your customer. You can have multiple personas of your customer. I have often seen that product managers define customer personas based on assumptions. That may not be the right approach. The reason, unless you research and you understand, you cannot assume that these are the three types of personas or this is the one person you want to address. So first is to understand your customer using various research techniques. It could be a quantitative research or qualitative research. It could be based on customer attitude or customer behavior. As you see on the slide, divide your research mechanisms and then continue explore each quadrant. For example, if you want to collect specific data, you go with service, you have a specific question and you are asking between two options or three options, what is that from your customer point of view. That is attitudinal and quantitative. It is giving you a quantity of data and you're listening to a perspective of your customer. The other side is behavioral, where you're not listening from the customer's mouth, their perception, but you build your own perception by observing your customers, by shadowing them, observing what they're doing, what problems they are facing. And when you complete your research or when you are halfway into research, that's when you actually start to understand what are the different personas you're dealing with, who are your customers and each person may or may not have different needs. So based on your research, you define your personas. And like I talked about, you can have structure interviews, you can evolving interviews and collect as much information as possible to know your customer. Once you understand who your customer is and what are the problems they are facing, then you would definitely be able to define their ping points. So how do you define the ping points? To be able to define the ping points, you need to first map a customer journey. From this interviews and observations, you will define what customer do currently. And in that journey, you will be able to identify opportunities for changes which may delight your customer, which will make their life easier. It is super important to know what is the problem, the crux of the problem. Like in the example here, customer asking for a bandage is not a problem. So you continue to go with the why loop when customer asks for, hey, I need a bandage. Why do you need a bandage? Hey, I got hurt. Where did you get hurt? Hey, I got hurt in my thumb. Okay, now you have enough information and what the problem is to be able to provide right bandage of right size. So until you know the root cause of the problem, you won't be able to provide the optimum solution. So continue asking questions to define the root causes and those root causes becomes your real ping points. There is often in a famous quote from Henry Ford, a lot of product managers refer to, so I will take that question. If Henry Ford says, if I would have asked my customer what they are looking for, they would have asked for faster horses, not faster cars. Cars didn't exist that day. But the pain point was I want to reach faster, as fast as possible between one place to another. That's where the second example takes me. I need a drill bit. Why do you need a drill bit? I need to drill a hole. Where do you need to drill a hole? Is it a concrete wall or is it a wood wall? And that will define what is the solution? What kind of a drill bit? Here I end my second stage, which is defining pain points, defining a concise problem statement of the process. Once you have these two validated, then life is easier for a product than it is more on collecting, team working, creative thinking. Always remember, having a real problem statement defined is the first and half job done. Once you have a problem statement defined, you can work with your team and your customers and your stakeholders. There are various techniques to follow. I believe in divergent comparison, where we all come together, take the pain points and go out and seek solutions. And when we come back again with these solutions, each individual can have multiple solutions. Not every solutions are right in that context, but it is important to know and get creative about how you want to solve. Learn from your customers, how they think they want to solve. Involve your customer in the brainstorming in ideation phase. That's why ideation phase will bring a lot of curiosity that, hey, which one is right? Why this one is right? The brainstorming. That's what I call brainstorming. And as a product manager, you want to always emphasize on no judgment. There is no good or bad idea. There should not be any judgment on the table when your idea did. Every moonshot idea can have a chance. Similarly, once you have list of solutions from everyone, you start to converge. At that moment when you're brainstorming and converging your ideas, you need to be able to prioritize. There are many good ideas, but which one to prioritize first? There are various mechanisms in product management, which you can follow. You can follow rise. You can follow a simple business value and impact quadrant which shows on the slide to identify and prioritize which solutions or features you want to build first or build as primary in your MLP. That takes me to the next slide, which is building. So when I say building, it's actually continuing to refine, continuing to hone your features to the need of the customer. And how do you do that? There are various mechanisms again. Your MLP will have multiple features and each feature will have or may be solving one or more than one pinpoints. So how it is solving that pinpoint can be illustrated best using storyboarding. Another mechanism, you can use whiteboard in the virtual times. You could use your, there are various storyboard tools that you could use. I remember mural. So once you start storyboarding, okay, this feature will be used following customer will come in, log in, do take action via Z and see the value in alpha beta. It will give you clarity in your thinking. It will identify any potential gaps in your solutions. And it will create a story for your customer. When you tell that story to your customer, your customer will be able to address how customer understood it. That's the customer business where you are already thinking that knowing your product and using your product, what would be the experience of the customer and what would be the feedback in a positive sense. You will also be able to find if any potential gaps in that feedback. So having customer witness are important because knowing what feedback to expect will help you measure your product. And how do we achieve this? In Amazon world, we achieve this using PR effective. It's a press release and frequently asked question document. It's a long process which goes through 50 plus iterations with multiple stakeholders involved to come up with a PR effective to solve our customer problem. And in PR effective, we have problem statement. We have why this problem statement, why we are solving it now and how we want to solve it. And when we solve it, how customer is going to lose it, what the customer experience is going to look like. This is more like if once the product is built and you want to do a press release, what would you write in your press release? You need to know that before you get into the development. So you are always defining your north star and then you're working towards it to achieve it. You already know how would you measure the success of your product. And that takes me to the next slide, which is test and iterate. Where the focus is on continuing to test and iterate to be able to reach to that north star. Have your success metrics defined. Be able to launch your products in phases, starting with visuals, prototypes, involve your stakeholders, involve your customer at every phase to take a continuous feedback and iterate on it. So it's a continuous test and iterate, go back, refine. And when something new, it's not helping, it's not solving, come back. That's why it takes 50 iterations just for the PRFQ to be a real press release. The product is not even ready, but the PRFQ is, which will make sure the product is designed with respect to the vision it is created for. And then success metrics, unless you have a success metrics defined, you will not be able to measure your product success. So it is important to know what problem it is solving and how do you measure it. There are multiple metrics that you can define for your product. But keep one thing in mind, you can have business metrics, you can have functional metrics, you can have technical metrics. But the most important metric is how much useful your product is to the customer. What is your customer engagement? What is your customer growth rate? Because that would define if your product is accepted in the market. And here I am, my working backward process. Let's move to a mindset which we would all have developed at the end of this presentation. Here it is. When you look at a problem, you ask the five questions. You start with your customer, you identify what are the needs. You go back to your team, you can read ideas. Be it in your real life. You know you have to reach at 5 p.m. That's your problem or a task at hand. Now you think how would you be able to reach at 5 p.m. You go and I work, you work with your spouse, you work with your children. Make sure everyone is following a path to reaching at 5 p.m. at a desired location. You identify what are the opportunities, what all you can do all day long before you reach to your destination. And then you continue to build on those solutions. There are many things which you can do to solve your customer problem throughout your day. But you need to prioritize and select some which you can achieve. And for the ones which you have selected, you continue to refine. Continue to improve and build it to the need of your customer. Take a continuous feedback. Continue to reiterate on it. Then you go back to the board. You have a solution finalized, you build it and you start into operations and scaling of the product. Your product is launched. You're very confident because in the whole process of defining the vision and defining the features, you have your customer. In the process of development, you have your customer as part of you. It's a mindset. Like I said, not a process which can be optional. It's how you live your life on a daily basis and how we want to build the same mindset into your product management. I hope there are questions which I can solve. Feel free to put the questions and I would end my presentation here. Thank you very much for your time. One last tip. If you are ever interested in watching a good documentary movie, go and watch General Magic. That's the best example of when you stop to think from a customer perspective. Even the best minds in the industry would not be able to produce the best product or a successful product. It's an amazing movie. A lot of learning from General Magic. See you. Thank you very much for your time. Have a good day.