 Hello everyone, my name is Alicia Goodwin and I am a Principal Product Manager at Zolando. For those that don't know what Zolando is, we are the leading e-commerce site for fashion in Europe. I lead the teams for campaigns and collections, so all of the content basically that you would see or most of the content on the homepage is often coming from campaigns and collections. And I was asked today to speak about what I think makes a great product manager. And one of the topics I wanted to cover, which always comes up in product management, is this concept of leading through influence. And especially as you start your journey into becoming a product manager before you're a people leader, usually you have to develop products and you have to convince stakeholders and teams of why your product is compelling. And that's really through leading through influence. So today, some of the discussion points and key takeaways that I wanted to touch on is first how does one manage through influence. We'll talk about having excellent communication skills, being evidence-based and being data-driven, building trust and being confident. So first let's look at what influence really means and it's the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions or behaviors, opinions, etc. of others. And so what this really means is that you need to be compelling with your stakeholders and with your team. And that often is at different levels within the business from very senior and also very diverse backgrounds. So you'll have people that have very technical backgrounds and some that are more business facing and maybe have different domain expertise. And you need to get everyone on the same page and to be able to influence them to help build the best products for your customers. So very important in this is excellent communication and a few tips and tricks that I try to impart on early product managers. And I personally work with and mentor or have mentored several product managers and in people that have shown an interest in moving from different job families into product management. One thing that is something you should always consider is the audience that you're speaking to. And this can be both from a stakeholder perspective. I mentioned before often you'll have to speak with much more senior stakeholders or sometimes you're speaking with your team. So considering your audience is really important. And why that matters is it influences the depth of the communication and understanding what is motivating these different stakeholders. And so that can come in different forms. Sometimes people are really interested in what the bottom line and financial impact of your product is going to be. So getting into a lot of technical detail is probably not the right thing for that audience. And sometimes you're speaking with much more technical stakeholders or you're working with your team that might not have the full context or the business context. And it is your responsibility as a product manager to always ask yourself who is your audience. What is the context that they have or they don't have. And how can you provide that in the most effective way. Another tip I would say is to avoid a lot of jargon. It's really easy within an organization to use a lot of acronyms and a lot of code names. And often when you're working in a specific area within the company or with specific teams, you get really used to using these short terms. But when you're speaking to a wider audience, it's not a great thing to assume that everyone knows what you're talking about. And so avoiding jargon really helps to create much more clear conversation and much more clear communication. And then also when speaking, it's important to create opportunities for active conversation and feedback. I think one example is when you are presenting. What you really want is the collective knowledge from those in the room. So when you're talking with different stakeholders, you either are looking for buy-in or feedback, hopefully both. And different ways to achieve that are by, like I said, creating opportunities for active conversations and feedback and thinking about how you phrase questions or how you address the room. So avoiding questions that have very leading answers. Sometimes that means things like asking yes or no questions. If you ask a group of people, if everyone understood, it's likely that everyone will say yes. So instead, try to ask questions that would be applicable to them, how they might apply things to the problem that they're trying to solve. Ask for things that generate conversation with your teams. And one thing that I've found in terms of helping develop product as a really strong tool are using press releases. And so even before you start getting into modes where you're presenting, a really strong press release is a great way to challenge yourself to think about the product that you're building, who you're building it for. And challenges you to be really clear in your communication. This also helps you to strip out a lot of jargon and create a very clear narrative that's easy to follow. Even for people that are not within your team or within your business unit and maybe from very different areas of the business. In theory, it should be consumable even to people outside of your organization. And I think that's a really great starting place for perfecting your communication and your thought process around your product. And press releases are something also that have been used by Amazon and have been really well adopted in Zalando as well. And it's a really strong tool. I mentioned that one of the things that I find really helpful about a press release. I think even more so than the narrative is the FAQ, and these are some high level things to answer. When you're thinking about writing your press release, who is the customer? What is the customer problem or opportunity? Is this most important benefit clear? And how do you know what customers need or want? And I would say this is really a short list of questions that you should be able to answer. But one of the things that the FAQ really helps you to do is think through all aspects of your product. And by answering a lot of these questions upfront, it creates the opportunity for you to deeply understand the customer problems. It challenges you to look at existing data. And it also helps you to think about some questions that you maybe don't have the answers for that you should get before you try to move your product to the next stage. And I think this is also another really great way to structure your approach to a product. And it really helps in the discovery phases. I mentioned also that being evidence-based, this is something that we hear all the time. Use data, use data to inform decisions. And it's really critical in doing that. If you want to be influential and you want to be able to have meaningful conversations both with your team and with stakeholders, it's a very powerful tool to be able to pull out real evidence that's based on data. And one thing that's also really important to that is using the right tools for the right jobs. And I would say also at the right times. So data can help support the entire product lifecycle at different stages. So from discovery to definition to design and delivery. So this is the 4D process that we follow. And it's a lightweight process that drives incremental evolutionary and revolutionary customer experiences and therefore business growth. So if you really focus on the customer first and you have a good framework for how you develop products, it will lead to much better results and will give people the confidence in you and the products that you're developing. So discovery is really identifying what are your customer needs. Defining is what customer need are we solving for and design. So when you're going through the process of all of the possible solutions, is the right solution, what is the right solution for your customers? And then in delivery, how do we best launch the chosen solution and measure its impact? And for each of these phases of the product development lifecycle, there are different things that you can do to support this with data and make sure that even the decisions that you've made are measurable. And you understand what the impact of those are. And when things are not going the way that you anticipate, you're able to understand why and iterate over it. So for example, during discovery, particularly when you're working on your pre FAQ on your press release, there are a lot of questions that you can ask yourself and a lot of methods that you can apply. So what do you think you know, and you can always leverage existing research and data? What do you want to know? So developing really strong hypotheses and understanding who is your target customer think often people early in their product management careers. Don't invest enough time thinking about who is their target customer because you can sometimes fall into the trap of saying customers or users and have just one group that you're considering when often you can observe different behaviors in different target groups. So really thinking about who are your customer profiles and who are you building the product for will really help you in communicating this and in getting the right data to develop your product. Another good thing to think about when you're developing your product is what KPIs you want to look at. There are a few different things, so I won't go very deep into KPIs, but I'm happy to answer questions later. But it's important to think about what is the North Star KPI that you're driving. Is it customer lifetime value? Is it something else? But that will help you keep your product and your focus clear, and it will help you to communicate. And that will help you with your teams and with your stakeholders both understanding where you're going longer term and how you're planning to get there and how you're trying to measure it. Initially, you should focus on what you can control, and these will be the KPIs that are interesting for you in developing your product. You want to look at different types of KPIs, but you want to focus on what you can control. What are the things that you can affect? So focus on those KPIs, and then there are different buckets that you can put those in that will help you understand the performance of your product and ultimately affect the outcomes. So KPIs can indicate how much new value you're creating for customers. So you can track progress to identify how well you're doubling down, and doubling down meaning you often have things that are working really well with your product and your organization, and you want to continue to do those. And you want to identify KPIs that cut defects. Those can also impact your customer experience and your product performance. Your consideration is using good proxies to measure your impact. So often the North Star can be very difficult to directly affect, but you can think about what would be good proxies to do that. An example might be looking at PC2 is a good proxy for CLP. And lagging versus leading KPIs, North Stars are often a lagging indicator, but if you've chosen the right controllable KPIs, those can be leading indicators. And if you can measure the effect of those, you can understand the impact of the things that you can affect and how they ultimately affect your North Star KPIs. So these are all good things to keep in mind when you're thinking about setting up a framework for developing your product. And these will help you have confidence as you're developing your product and communicating both with your team and stakeholders that you have a good plan in place and to have confidence in the product that you're developing. And so when we talk about leading through influence, one measure there is the confidence that people have in you and by having these good kinds of frameworks that goes a long way. And in KPIs and selecting the KPIs that you want to influence, here are some considerations. One, they should be customer centric, especially if the product is customer facing. They should be leading and not lagging, easy to understand, controllable by your team, expected to have an impact on the customer KPI. They need to be measurable and precise. And these were the three buckets that we were looking at is doubling down, cutting defects and creating value. So those are a couple of tools, I think that help you be data driven, I mentioned before, also choosing the right tools at the right time. It's also worth considering those were really looking at very data quantitative things, but it's also good to know when to do qualitative research and use those tools in your toolbox. And so one example, I would say sometimes you have loads and loads of data, but sometimes the problem is really difficult to distill from that. Especially, for example, with new customers, sometimes it's really difficult to get from the data, the questions that you want. And in some cases, it's a good idea to get more qualitative data and actually bring customers in. And if you have access to customers and you can interview them or you can observe them, that's something else that you should consider in your toolbox. And that also gives faith in your process and the customer problems that you're trying to solve. Another aspect is building trust, and this certainly helps in leading through influence, because people want to believe in you when you walk the walk and not just talk the talk. And it helps building trust with your team and with your stakeholder. So one topic that I wanted to touch on is keeping your team focused and your stakeholders close. Why I mentioned this specifically and put an emphasis on and keeping your stakeholders close. One thing that we all learn early in our product careers is that we should always keep the team very focused. And depending on how you're working, if you're doing sprints like you shouldn't break the sprint and we need to be really sharp on prioritization and not over committing or taking on too many tasks. And that's very true. But it's also equally important that you keep your stakeholders close. And what I mean by this is there are many times that you will have to say no, because inherently by saying yes to one thing, you're saying no to something else. And that's expected, but it's also important that you rationalize that you're able to rationalize that with your stakeholders and give good, clear guidance on why you choose to prioritize something over something else. And that you do it in a way that that your stakeholders continue to have trust in you and your process and the products that you're developing. To do that also creating transparency via good communication really goes a long way in this. And this is something that I've had many examples of over time but making road maps that are clear, transparent and understandable even potentially to people outside of your team and to your stakeholders. It lets stakeholders know that you're committed to developing things with them even if you're not able to do something right now or you actively choose not to do something. But that's a really important thing and bringing stakeholders along on a journey with you. And often you'll find that it can be really rewarding and not so difficult. There have been times and more recently I really shifted the direction of one of my teams and a lot of work that had been planned made an active decision to not focus on that work for an indiscriminate amount of time. But the communication was really strong with the stakeholders and it was really well rationalized and they understood why we made this big shift and it was received really well despite having to prioritize things that were seemingly very important for them. But they understood the direction they understood the vision and that went a really long way in continuing to maintain really strong relationships with them and making a lot of progress in the new direction for the new vision of the products, which ultimately resulted in a lot better customer experiences and much higher engagement. So that's an example and lastly deeply understanding your stakeholders and recognizing the value that they bring. So also as a product manager, being an excellent collaborator with your stakeholders is super important. If you're working with stakeholders from different areas of the business or even a different business, but in the same domain. One thing to not undervalue is that the people that you're working with are experts in their own right and bring a lot of valuable knowledge. And while, while you should work with them and not necessarily execute on the solutions that they might bring to the table, recognize that you can leverage the knowledge that they have by really deeply understanding them, understanding their problems, understanding and trying to get from them the collective knowledge that they have and figuring out how you can use that knowledge to improve your products. And by engaging your stakeholders in that way and having really close collaboration. It really strengthens the relationship and the products. And by having trust in you, it gives you more flexibility to do bolder things. Another area that I that I wanted to touch on and it's also very important is having confidence. And this is one of the things that I see often with with people starting in their product journey is that they don't always have any confidence. And you really need to be your products champion because if it's not you, then who is it going to be. So if you have great frameworks in place, and you've done your homework, and you've done your pre FAQs and your FAQs and you've, you've done the things that you should be doing for your product. And you should be proud, you should be confident and you should lead the process with your product and a couple of other things. And I think that that shouldn't go unsaid is one, I wouldn't be afraid to fail products fail, but as long as you have a good framework in place as long as you know what you're looking to measure, then it's better to fail and fail early, or fail often. But the second part of that, that's also very important is understanding what you will do next. So always with high risk, there can be high reward, understanding what those trade offs are and having a plan in place. I think should also give you the confidence to make bolder choices and make stuff changes in your product. The key takeaways, I think to managing through influence and to be compelling about your product and your team are really through excellent communication, being evidence based and using data, having good frameworks to measure that. Building trust, both with your team and with your stakeholders, and to really have confidence, as long as you have confidence, others will have confidence in you. So thank you and feel free to raise questions or contact me on LinkedIn.