 Hello, my name is Nagi Frosto. I'm a senior product manager at WeWork, and today we're going to be talking about embracing unknowns in product management. First of all, thank you so much for watching this webinar. It is always exciting to talk about our passions, and I'm very happy and excited to be here to talk about one of mine today. The goal of this webinar is to show the potential behind unknowns, and I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do. Let's begin. Embracing unknowns. Unknowns of any sort in any part of life can be fearful and intimidating and can feel risky. And people being people, we often shy away from this and default towards the behaviors or ideas that are more comfortable to us, more known to us. And the same behavior can be seen in the role of a product manager, especially as part of the job is to gather data and certain of our course of actions. I wanted to share a few ideas on how to think about unknowns and how, rather than shy away from them, we can embrace them as an opportunity. So this is our agenda for today. During this webinar, I will talk about a framework that has been around for a while, the fundamentals of which are applicable to many different situations. You may have heard it as known and unknown quadrants, or maybe risk categorization, or simply as known unknowns, unknown unknowns, unknown unknowns. I know the last one is a bit of a mouthful, but it'll get more clear soon enough. Before we get into some use cases, I'm going to dive into what each quadrant means and how we can work and transform it into our own benefit. Share how to work with the unknowns. We'll finish it off with a quick summary at the end. Okay, I'd like to start with going over the basics and talk about the known and unknown quadrants a little bit. The top left, we have known knowns. We could call it facts, things we are aware of and understand. This is the area we wanted to grow and maximize as much as possible. The top right, we have known unknowns. We could call it uncertainties, things you know that you don't know. You may have the ability to find out, but doing so requires some time and some effort, so prioritizing properly is very, very important for this project. The bottom left, we have unknown knowns. We could call it hidden facts or blind spots, things you understand, but not aware of it. In another word, ignorance. Frankly, this is a dangerous zone to be in and should be minimized as much as possible for a successful outcome. Bottom right, we have unknown unknowns. We could call it surprises, things you are not aware of nor understand. It's an unexpected discovery and uncharted territory. Throughout this webinar, to illustrate my points better, let's create an example business that has some product decisions to make. The business will be Biscuits Coffee Shop, a hip, new, popular coffee shop in the town. By the way, this is the perfect logo that we came out with and Biscuits is my dog. He actually doesn't like coffee, doesn't care about coffee, but let's pretend like he does. He's also a key investor in the shop, so we have some metrics we wanted to be able to hit for him. Okay, so let's dive in. Facts, known knowns. I would say for this, I know the problem and I know the solution. We could also call it predictables. This is a comfort zone for many of us and definitely an ideal spot to be in. In this quadrant, there is no new discoveries. It's all about generating the knowledge and feeling confident about it. It is also where a lot of our initial ideas and decisions come from. Here's an example. I know the customers of Biscuits Coffee Shop love latte and it's the most selling item every single day. I have the day to prove it. And if I order supplies for a latte ahead of time in larger quantities, I know I can reduce the cost and never run out of it. Let's move on to the next one. Uncertainties, known unknowns. I would explain it as I know the problem but not the solution. This is the area where you wanted to do the research and test and measure things. And at the end, this can become a known. Moving these uncertainties into knowns is something that we have been doing a lot as product manager. It's a part of our second nature. The goal here is to prioritize it. We cannot know everything so we have to make decisions on items we wanted to focus on here. Here's an example. I know the demographics of my customers who come to the Biscuits Coffee Shop matters a lot. It matters for the core, it matters for marketing, it matters for the time when we open it, when we close it. But we don't have that information yet. Is it a student crowd or a business crowd? We just don't know yet, but we know that we should know. Say I'm considering opening up the shop earlier, for instance. I might want to do surveys or create customer profiles to start tracking this information. Say we realize that a large portion of our sales comes from the early morning business crowd. We could use this to open it earlier and market accordingly because now it is unknown to us. The next one is hidden facts on knowns. I would say this one is I didn't think about it or I didn't realize it, but there is a clearly available data that I was ignoring or a clear solution that others already knew. We can consider this quadrant a bit of a blind spot. Others might know, but you just don't. The goal is to shrink this zone as much as possible, which is really hard to do. You have to be open to various different data points and others' ideas and inputs that may not match with your own in order to just minimize these, which is easier said than done. Without a level of open-mindedness, it can be costly in both time and resources, which is something we as product managers don't want to be facing with. More examples from the biscuits coffee shop. I think the latte orders drop during the summertime because it is too hard to drink. I decided to add lemonade to the menu since it looks like customers wanted to have refreshing drinks. On the other hand, it seems like customers were mentioning to the baristas that they want a nice latte. I didn't know that because I didn't ask for it and I personally like lemonade so I refused to think outside of myself. Let's say I ragged my investor, Mr. Biscuit, that lemonade would be the next big thing. Now I ignore anyone or any data that is telling me otherwise. It is a silly example, but in my experience, I've seen this in this project with the massive budgets just because of this specific reason they go down the wrong path. And it definitely needs to be cautious about that. The last quadrant is surprises, unknown unknowns. No idea it'll happen. It was a complete surprise. This is an exciting one because as product managers, we like to bucket things as much as possible into knowns and then shrink the rest. And we tend to think unknowns are bad. We wanted to make decisions in line with the data, but the biggest innovations and the most impressive ideas often come from this very bucket. We just don't do research and collect data without a goal in mind. Most often an idea and high processes is already on the table before the measurement or observation starts. By exploring with an open mind, we can recognize patterns and behaviors, then develop an insight that might bring us the new opportunities that we haven't even thought about. It is all about planning and execution within the other three quadrants that we've been talking about. You need to be flexible and ready to take action because you never know when you're going to discover something new. Time for an example. We noticed a weird trend where our sales dropped 50% the first week of every month. After asking around, one of our team members mentioned that a friend of his works in a large corporation nearby and they have a large health initiative that happens the first week of every month. Once we started doing or offering fat free lot days or skinny lot days, our sales not only reached the previous level but increased since we were not one of those few places that is around that offers the healthy drinks. This surprise led to a new opportunity for the coffee shop, health and wellness. That could be potentially the direction that we might want to pursue in the future more. Let's talk about how does it apply to product management. I've gone through the concept and what each quadrant means. I wanted to show you how we can use this product. The goal is to minimize the blind spots, the unknown notes, which is a danger zone which necessitates an open mind and track down and observe to catch the patterns and hitting behaviors for new discoveries that give us the big leap like we like. This is the unknown notes. Grow your knowns and prioritize removing some of those uncertainties. That's the idea that we wanted to have in here. Lay out your facts. Start laying out your facts. Try to answer questions like what is your product? What does it do? What value does it bring? Who are your users? What do they need? What do they like? What is your company vision? What is your product notes? The answers will give you your facts. Involve others. To minimize the blind spots, what you need to do is basically involve your teams. It could be engineers, it could be UI, UX team, it could be support team, it could be sales, it could be a marketing team. Even other teams and other product managers, don't forget the others might know something that you don't know and you don't want to miss that. Ignoring the available knowledge will take you to the unknown don't zone, which is what we try to prevent. I have learned so much new information about my users, about the product that I'm working on, by just listening what others say. I had increased knowledge and minimized my blind spots so much by just talking to engineers during sprint groomings or retros, or by just having a quick chit chat with another PM of another team while I was grabbing my morning coffee in the office. What they learned through a task, through a result of an experiment that they were running or research that was conducted would be useful to you and your product. As PMs, we love meetings. To me, throwing something in the calendar and dedicating time on that on a regular basis was an easy way of gathering what others know. I like having bi-weekly meetings or quarterly meetings, depending on the team and who I'm working with at that moment, just with various teams where we can sync our knowledge to minimize hidden facts, our unknown don'ts on both sides, by the way. It is beneficial for them and for me as well. During those meetings, I even share my early stage roadmaps and ideas that we had as a team so I can hear their insights. I also like involving the same group as I developed the products, asking what they think, why they think that, and basically constantly repeat this until I feel more and more confident about my progress. That helped me tremendously over the time. The third one that I wanted to talk about is brainstorm prioritized tests and facts. Unknown unknowns are a part of our life as PMs. I had my fair share. I had times that I wanted to improve the product that I didn't know what to focus on since I didn't know the problem areas. I didn't know what I didn't know. I pulled the data. I asked people. I tried to find out what we need to know so I can improve that, but it wasn't clear still. I conducted research to gather more data to add on top of what I know, then formed an open-minded group that includes various different teams, where we deconstructed the research and discovered things that were a complete surprise to us, the unknown territory. By the way, the variety of the group that you're forming is the key because you wanted to include as many people from the different departments just to have that good sampling of the ideas and the insights. After that, we created a list of hypothesis based on what we've learned, then prioritized them. You can use whatever method you like to prioritize it. I like to simplify version of it, which is, for me, effort and impact metrics. I placed all of my items in that matrix and focused on targeting the low-hanging fruits, which are my low effort and high impact, and then I tested those out. The tested hypothesis showed me the results, and regardless of confirming or rejecting, gave us the fact that will take us to the ideal quadrant, which is known-known. Another thing I do enjoy is including others early on as I'm shaping the ideas. I go through the problem I wanted to solve and share some of the solutions I think about. Doing this made me come up with brand-new solutions that I haven't even thought about, but realized that it could be actually a better solution for the problem. I also had instances where I have pivoted and saw another impactful and higher priority idea that I should go after instead. It saved me time and resources while giving me more successful outcome, which is pretty much all the things product managers want. There is one thing we should always keep in mind when we're building up knowledge. Always, always anchor towards the company's vision instead of trying to make blind decisions when in doubt. Whenever I learn something new from others or discover a brand-new knowledge, I always check in my head, does this align with my company vision? That approach never failed me. We also, I want to talk about a little more on this. We just don't do the research and collect data without a goal in mind. Most often an idea, hypothesis is already on the table before the measurement or observation begins. It is built on top of the previous knowledge and then leads to incremental increase in knowledge. This cannot take you or give you that big leap in discovery that you're looking for, but unknown can take you there. That's why unknowns are not something you should avoid. Instead, it should be something that you embrace. Thank you so much for watching this webinar. I really appreciate for watching this and feel free to message me on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to answer more questions later on. Hope you have a good one. Bye.