 I don't know about you, but that was more effective to wake me up than coffee this morning. All right, let's kick this off. So, dual track, discovery and delivery. This is probably familiar to many of you, the concept being dual track agile. The idea that we in product need to not only focus on how to prepare our teams for one step ahead, for what's coming next in the next sprint or the next quarter, but also keep an eye on the horizon. What's further out there that's going to affect us that we might not know how to make tangible today? And I don't know about you, but I have found myself more times than I would like to admit with a distribution that looks a little bit more like that. Not only does it not feel good, it's dangerous. And the reason can be exemplified with a simple Eisenhower matrix. For things that are urgent and important, it's not hard to get buy-in from stakeholders or to convince your team we need to work on something or for you to even figure out what has to be done. These are your incidents for which you might need a post-mortem. These are your releases that are coming up and you've got to make a deadline in order to get something through your app regression test. Not easy to get buy-in and pretty clear that that tops your priority list. For things that are urgent, but not important, this is where the classic product skill of delegation comes in. Is another team equipped to do this better than us? Doesn't their service handle something like that? We try to delegate as much as we can. For things that are neither important nor urgent, we try to get rid of them all together and we might mark them in a jury ticket as won't do and comment, please talk to me if you have any questions. But for things that are important but not urgent, we don't always take the time and carve the space to focus on them. And this is bad because when we don't know what's coming on the horizon, we might actually find ourselves working on things that are neither important nor urgent just because they're quick wins and they're easier to understand and to articulate to our teams. And so I wanna focus today on that upper right quadrant, how to carve space for things that are urgent but important but not urgent. I believe that product managers can focus on that urgent but not urgent work by carving space and using trend forecasting tools and techniques in order to future-proof their products. This is the interior of Elisaba, the Barcelona School of Design and Engineering where I studied a program on research for design and innovation. And a cornerstone of that program is in trend forecasting. And before I started that programming, I thought that trend forecasting was basically something like this. Little more than reading into a crystal ball or maybe shaking tea leaves or coffee grounds, things that you like to do on holiday because they're exotic but not necessarily a way to make a case for what you should build next. But I quieted my inner skeptic and I started to dig into the curriculum. And what I found was that the reading materials and the coursework and the projects that I was doing in that program were not on the typical product circuit. These are not books that you find tons of medium articles that the tech community talks about all the time. These are things that are a little bit more fringe in nature. And I liked what I found because I realized that trend forecasting is inherently evidence-based with a balance of quant and qual. And I thought, that's kind of like product. Maybe there's a common denominator here that I wasn't expecting. And so before we dig into trend forecasting, tools and techniques that product managers can use, I wanna share with you three things about trends. These are the three things we should know first. One, don't mistake trend with trendy. Cabbage soup diet might be something that you find on a morning talk show, but it's probably not here to stay because the next time that some other fad diet rolls in, this one will be old news. Not a trend. Fashion choices that seem like a great idea in the moment, but upon reflection a few years, maybe months later you look back at photos like, what was I thinking, why did I wear that? Not a trend. And toys that spike into popularity. Actually the fidget spinner debuted in the early 90s, but its claim to fame was in 2017 in the middle of the year around May and it didn't even make it through the holiday season because it was old news by Christmas. Not a trend. So don't mistake trend with trendy. So what is a trend then? If it's not the things that capture the headlines of best trends of 2020? Well, it's a manifestation of sustained change. And this makes sense when we consider that we would call this a trend line. A trend line moves in a clear direction and we know where it's going. It's something that articulates to us where things are headed as they impact culture and society and certain industries. And it's no surprise that we then would call fidget spinners not a trend. That doesn't look like a trend line to me. What is a trend then? Looking for a recent example to understand the local market here in the UK is the love for slurp worthy Vietnamese soup. We can see here a steady trend. Yes, there are seasonality dips from May to August. Makes sense, you don't want hot soup. But pha shows us that over the last 16 years the demand is on the rise, at least by search query, people being interested in expressing their interest. So trends are the sustained manifestation of change and we can notice trends if we look out bit more carefully for signals. A signal, it's simple. It's an indication of a situation and they can take many different formats. We'll go through some examples. Here's a way luggage. They raised 181 million bucks through their series D round so far and they came out founded in 2015. They're designing luggage for the modern traveler, smart design and sleek. Years later, we see a Kickstarter campaign for nomadic backpacks. It raised 44 times its intended goal, sleek on the exterior and you have no idea the functionality that's hiding within it. And Cara Sport, the pioneer of athleisure bags which are convertible to help people, mostly women, go from gym to work to dinner to drinks. Now, what do these things have in common? Well, they might seem very disconnected but if we look a little bit closer, we can tell that these three examples, although at different points in time over the last five and a half years, show us that there's huge consumer investor appetite in hyper-functional but really elegant products that you would have no idea what's inside because it looks so nice. And so, back to the great formatting, how can we use trend forecasting tools and techniques at N26 to make sure that we build important but not urgent work at N26? So I'm not gonna walk you through all of the different frameworks we use. Many of them should be familiar to you here in this room, marking jobs to be done, understanding them through hypotheses but what I will talk you through is five tools and techniques that we used in trend forecasting. And the first one is sorting out those signals. So if we receive signals from all these different places around us, if your Slack looks anything like mine and my teams, you're constantly sharing articles, things, oh hey, this is interesting, check this out, such and such just raised money or such and such just got acquired. It's hard to capture that and make sense of it and if we wanna be present in our meetings and dive into our focused work, then we can't just read everything that comes to us right away. But it's not just about what others share with you, it's also the things that you go out and find for yourself. So looking on what's up on Product Hunt, what's gaining traction there or even a more traditional publication, what's the headline news today? Oh, the markets hit a record high. These are all signals and if we aren't careful, they can become noise. So we use a pretty low tech technique here which is just creating a Trello board organized by category where we store what's going on. So in the actual Trello card, we have the links so we can go back to it and find the details but we organize them by their headlines. And this is great because we can go back at will, we don't have to scour the internet or review which Slack channel did somebody share that with me. We can just take a look here and easily organize everything. Now that we've gathered those signals and we've organized them a bit more systematically, we can identify relevant trends. I'm gonna walk you through some examples of the things that my teams and I are focusing on right now. Last fall, American Express released its new green card packed with a slew of new benefits. It's also made of recycled ocean plastic at least for the most part. And for that package of new benefits, they've raised the price 50% for the annual subscription. Month later, Bunk out of the Netherlands, they launched their own green card. 99 euros a year subscription and for every hundred bucks you spend, they planted tree. Within two months, they planted 40,000 trees. Really cool. And the most extreme example up here is a carbon control card launched by a think tank in Sweden called Dakonomy in partnership with the UN climate change secretariat and mastercard. And this is the most extreme of all three of them because it actually hits a limit on your spending and blocks you from using your card if your spending surpasses the recommendation of your carbon emissions. And this is in line with the goals that we have for 2030 globally to reduce our carbon emissions. So when we look at these three in isolation, okay, one is innovating on the materials it uses for the actual card. Two is letting you maintain your same behaviors but then doing something good in addition. And three, relinquishing control, which we all crave for the benefit of the greater good. When we think about what trend could be represented through these three, social minded consumers are looking for connections to brands and products that help them take part in the bigger picture. That there would be the trend that we focus on given the signals at hand. I'll walk you through another one that we're thinking about because it's not just about what competition is up to. If we only pay attention to what other players in the industry are doing, we're gonna chase our tails and lose sight of who we are and never be able to really differentiate ourself. So it's not just about the competitive landscape. It's also about random facts and releases of information that come out, like this one from the Pew Research Center that shows for the very first time ever more Americans are living together who are not married than who are first time. Or this one, co-living, a concept that came out 200 years ago and was pushed forward in the 60s and 70s by progressive Scandinavian architects is finding a comeback. Not really news to you here considering the largest co-living place in the world is here in London. And half of the American food budget is now spent in restaurants, pursuing experiences, not just the functional benefits of food that gives you nourishment. So when we look at these three in isolation, they might seem kind of random. Okay, people are waiting longer to get married or not marrying at all. They're living with roommates, they're living with strangers, not even Craigslist strangers, like proper strangers you didn't even meet for coffee or by hangouts. And then they're going out and spending time in restaurants pursuing those experiences. But when we look at them together, we can notice a common denominator that we're sharing experiences with people with whom we have relationships that are less formal and more fluid. Now that we've understood some trends based on the signals that we've captured, we've synthesized and made sense of them, we can look at trend drivers. And a trend driver is an external force, sociological, geographic, that actually leads to the trend in the first place. It's like, what are the conditions that create this? And this should be comfortable territory for our product audience because the question here is why? And trend forecasters spend a lot of time looking into why these things come to be. So why, if we sum up that first example about eco cards, why are customers looking for ways to connect with the bigger picture through brands that they feel relates to them? Well, one reason is because people are expecting that their decisions are a reflection of who they are, their values and their identity. If you're unlikely to find somebody who observes a vegan diet, go buy new leather products, right? Because then what do you stand for? Another reason is because most consumers expect businesses and brands to give us options in how we respect the environment, producing and consuming is a symbiotic relationship. All of us are participating in this because it's modern life. So if consumers demand products that step up its eco consciousness, but brands don't provide it, then how do we move on, right? There's an expectation that that's their duty. And third, there's lower barrier entries to entrepreneurship generally. Not saying that entrepreneurship is easy per se, but the truth is that if you really wanted to, any of you right now could start a website and post a product and get a sale by the time my talk is done. And so with that being the reality, there's room in the market for people to respect niche options and to build for them, so you don't just have to wait around for big brands to come give you what you need, right? If somebody isn't eligible, for example, for an American Express green card, they could open up a bunk bank account and do something that feels consistent with their values. Next example about those sharing spaces and experiences. Why are people looking for that? Why are the relationships more fluid? Why do they want experiences? Well, one reason is that we don't wanna be bucketed into demographics. Like for example, I don't wanna be called woman 18 to 34 with this marital status and this disposable income. No, I want to relate to people and be seen as part of an identity of people who have common interests and principles. Not to say that I wanna spend all my time with people who look and think and act just like me, but I want some common denominator there. Another one, at least for millennials, most people are kind of averse to things that stipulate extreme future commitments, right? These are a population of people, half of us, our parents are divorced, all of us came of age during the financial crisis or the wake thereof, right? So we're not looking to sign up for things. It's okay if we have roommates 10, 15 years or 50 years beyond undergrad. It's okay if we decide not to get married right away or not to get married at all in the UK, the average couple is together 4.9 years before they get married. That's 60% longer than 25 years ago. And this one will probably not be surprising to you. It's the experience era. We're no longer trying to collect stuff. Even baby boomers are on this one. The average baby boomer is dedicating more of their budget and retirement to travel than to buying stuff for the first time ever. So we look at these things collectively. We get to understand the psyche behind why these trends come to be. The next step is to assess where that trend is. And this will probably look familiar to many of you because of that. When Jeffrey Moore wrote Crossing the Chasm, it became an instant classic in the PM Library. Talks about how hard it is to capture the market to go from early adopter to early majority to late majority. How do we discover where trends are? Because if we get in too late, it's gonna be over. Gonna miss the boat. There's a couple of resources. And I'm gonna dig in with the geekiest one. And if you really wanna take advantage, this one you have to roll up your sleeves and do some digging. The US Patent and Trade Organization has a database that's publicly available to all of us, which we couldn't query with anything. So I used this, for example, facial recognition. There's over 16,000 patents filed or applied for in this website. And you can actually download a CSV file of these so that you can dig a little deeper. And when you do, you discover that over half of those patents were filed in the last four years. You can look into the types of industries that are filing for these patents, the sizes of companies. Are they startups? Are they big brands? Are they individuals? Who's funding them? What's the frequency? How frequently are these applications being filed in the first place? One way to figure out where a trend is. Another one, back to our friend Google Trends again. This time, no fidget spinners. I thought I'd just come here and put something controversial up because London is such a fintech capital and I'm showing you blatantly that cryptocurrency by this definition doesn't recognize or observe a trend line. Now, you might say, that's crazy. I see crypto ads on the underground. I did this morning. And that's true, but it's a hot fintech market and it doesn't necessarily account for everywhere. So the purpose of this is not to show you an exact metric, just an interesting thing to color in the picture so you understand if this is a trend where you're looking or not. Where else can we find out where trends are? We can look to experts, like forecasts. This one is put out by the Future Laboratory, also based here in London and founded by Martin Raymond, the author of one of those books that I showed you earlier. And every year, he puts out a future forecast. And I like this one this year. We're paying attention to it on 26 because, well, we work in a tech space and if you're familiar with our products, you know that we offer benefits for travel. Like foreign exchange rates that are favorable, ATM withdrawals around the world and a slew of other things. So we look at these trends, put out by the Future Laboratory to understand where things are moving. And I recognize now, standing down here, that that's way too small to read, but I'll share some highlights with you that I think are interesting. One, the new remote, not talking about remote work, but the idea of going somewhere isolated, untouched, we're kind of craving this idea that I went there first. I went there before it was cool, like I pretend about when I went to Bali 12 years ago and that just there's something gratifying about being original. Two, the idea of literary escapes popping up all over the world. The hotel that I just checked into here has a giant library in the room so I can choose my books. Not necessarily a literary escape here, but the idea is that it's providing experiences for the quiet with cerebral. And three, an overall decline in tourism. Also not super surprising when we consider the fact that people are waking up to the environmental impact of taking long-distance trips. So what can we summarize from all of these things? Well, Martin Raymond's team makes a case here in this publication of the future forecast of 2020, but if you ask me, it looks like we're gonna see a revival of the staycation. And that's interesting considering N26 puts out a product that really helps with a value proposition of going somewhere far and taking advantage of those benefits. The next one is trendhunter.com. This is a really rich catalog of tons of different signals where those signals are press releases or articles about protests or announcements of partnerships or complete changes and demonstrations. And every single article that they put out about a trend has some interesting data that we can use. They put scores. So you see there's one up here with an 8.3 and the other one with a 4.5. And those scores account for a combination of the popularity, meaning it's geographic spread, the activity, how frequently those signals are popping up that align with this, and the freshness, how recent is the distribution of those signals. So this is a great way to see where things fall here. But if we go back to the example of eco cards, considering the fact that 170 year old institution like American Express is jumping on this trend, I would put this somewhere in early majority or late majority. And if we were short-sighted in in 26, thinking about, okay, people care about the environments, they care about a connection to the big picture and we make cards so we have to make a green card, we might get caught by a surprise, which is that one, because people are not really using cards as much as they used to. Mobile payments are up 300% year over year in the most advanced markets in the world and contactless readers are installed 150% increase from 2018 to 2019. So we need to watch out for this because this very well could happen. And then if we make an eco card, we might have missed an important wave because we got in too late. So it's not to say that we don't wanna capture the consumer sentiment or care about how to help people with a bigger picture and to make that connection and to support the fact that we all have that duty to protect the environment. It just means that might not be the right avenue if we're keeping an eye on where the trends are. Now that we've understood where the trends are, we can map out some product opportunities. And I like a formula that shows us the why behind the trend, those drivers. The place on the innovation curve, is it in the early majority stage, is it still an innovator incubation, is it still being tested out? Are customers evolving jobs to be done? The product we already have and if we take that away, we can understand the product opportunities at hand. So we use a format that might look familiar to you right as regularly as we can, but especially in the wake of quarterly planning for us. And we start with our desired outcome. We keep it as simple as possible, customer lifetime value. What are all the opportunities that we have to ride those trends and to be relevant and change with our customers evolving needs? Well, if we color code these to show you which ones are on trend for the shared experiences and which ones establish a big picture connection, especially related to the environment, we can see which of the opportunities and solutions on this tree speak to those trends and contribute to that sustained manifestation of change. Cool, so we've captured signals, we've organized them, we've understood the common denominator among them and drawn our own trends. We understand the why behind them and what affects the customer psychology. We understand where the trend is by keeping an eye on the market and digging into things like the patent trade database or future laboratory forecasts or trend hunter website. And then we've mapped out those opportunities for us in a way that intersect with our customers' needs and our own business objectives. Now, it's time to get to work, trust and equip our product teams to frame their own hypotheses, figure out what to build that speaks to those things, and then go prototype, build, measure, learn, rinse, repeat over and over. So I hope that so far, sharing those tools and techniques from trend forecasting with you, that you can go from not having time to work through the things that are important, but not urgent to knowing where you're going. Thank you.