 Hello. Thanks for joining today's product school webinar. In this session, I will be talking about how you can level up from a tactical execution-focused product manager to a strategic product leader. I will share a couple of tips to help you incorporate strategy into your daily life as a product manager. Before getting started, a little bit about myself. I am Sharanya Ramakrishnan. I work as a senior product manager technical with Amazon Web Services. My focus area is to build enterprise-scale cloud security products, particularly in the identity world as of today. Before I started my product career, I got my master's degree in management information systems from the University of Arizona. And outside of work, I really enjoy traveling, hiking, reading, and volunteering. So what's on the agenda for today? Today, we'll first start off trying to look into why strategy is so hard, why does everyone struggle to find time to do strategy. And then we will learn an approach that you can use to basically figure out the big picture as everyone calls it. Finally, we will share a couple of practical tips that you can use to incorporate strategy and level up every day in your life as a PM. Finally, I'll go ahead and summarize the key takeaways from this presentation. So why is strategy so hard? Why does everyone struggle to find time to do any strategic work? So according to research that was done by the CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, Rich Howard, only 14% of employees actually understood what their company strategy was. You would think that maybe individual contributors don't dive into the strategic aspects and are more heads down on tactical work, but managers definitely do more strategic work, right? You're wrong. Unfortunately, 44% of managers actually spend most of their time in escalations or in a firefighting mode rather than doing deep strategic work. The fact that surprised me the most from this research was this. Leaders and executives have the core responsibility of driving thought leadership, right? Of driving strategic thinking for the organization. However, 96% of these leaders actually claimed that they don't have any time for strategy. Now, zooming all of this a little bit into the product world. So why is product strategy so hard? As a product manager, you juggle a lot of things. Whether you are a new PM who is just trying to onboard and learn about the company culture, make a mark, create an impact, and at the same time, ramp up on all of the domain and product skills. Or you're an experienced PM who has delivered multiple products or features, and you're basically living your day-to-day life as an experienced senior PM. Your typical day looks like this. You're flitting between meetings. This could be leadership meetings, deep ties with customers, or you could be having an architecture discussion with your engineering team or your design team. And then you end up in parallel answering your slack messages because there's an escalation going on and you need to put out a fire. And before you know it, it's 6 PM. It's the end of the day. You've had absolutely no time to actually synthesize all of the information that you've gotten from the meetings. You've had no time for any heads down strategic work. And all you come out of the day with is a bunch of action items, only to move into the next day where you go about finding the time to squeeze in, executing on these action items. And you're tied down to work on tactical things rather than being more strategic about your day-to-day. Another interesting aspect is this goes on. It's a loop, right? So how can you change this? What can you actually do to actually make the time to get strategic work done? Another aspect is the big picture. Now, as a product manager, you have various roles and responsibilities. You may have commonly heard people call you or use the term, yes, you are the CEO of the product. But you'll also hear people say that, hey, you need to be able to influence without any authority because you need to drive the results. You don't have any decision-making authority. You're also often asked about your product vision or you call the product visionary. And at the same time, you have to be the voice of the customer. You are the customer representative in any room that you walk into. And you need to echo their thoughts and do what's best for the customer. Now, the first time I was asked the question, hey, what's your product vision? Was very early in my career as a product manager. And I was honestly intimidated by this question. I assume that years later, I would be a lot more comfortable with the question. But even after four plus years of experience as a product manager, I have to say, if I were to start off working on a new product or explore a completely new domain and someone throws this question at me on, say, day one or week one, I would still be very intimidated. Why? Because I don't believe that a product vision or a product strategy is something that you can conjure out of thin air. It is actually the end result. And it's not an epiphany or a eureka moment per se. It is something that is the end result of a lot of things, a lot of research, a lot of information, a lot of data gathering, and diving deep. So how do you go about figuring out this big picture? How do you work on putting together a strategy? As always, as a product manager, you always start with your customer. You need to spend a lot of time trying to understand who your customer really is and why do they even use your product? What is your product doing to simplify their life? Is it saving them time? Is it saving them money? Is it making their life more efficient or effective? How is it helping your customer meet their goals or simplifying their day to day? Now, once you've had those conversations and gotten a clear idea about the customer aspect, you go in to understand what's going to make them continue to use your product. Why would the customer continue to use your product over the next two to three years? Or what do they expect from your product over the next few years, based on what they're seeing in the market? Or as I would like to call it, what is the customer-visualist items that they see your product delivering in the next few years? So you've gone ahead and you've developed an end-to-end perspective about your customer. You've understood their entire workflow. And you've done your research from the customer space. Next, you also need to think about and understand what the industry experts are saying. So industry experts need not necessarily be analysts. It can be anyone in the industry whom you think is a subject matter expert on your product. This could be the developer who actually has been working on your product since five years now. Or it could be the solution architect who actually goes ahead and talks to multiple customers and works with them very closely to actually go ahead and resolve issues for them in your product implementation. Or if you're talking about a customer-facing app, this could be a power user of the application who actually is within your team or your organization. And they have a very interesting perspective, both from the outside in and the inside out. So it's definitely very helpful to gather all of these insights from your customers and from your subject matter experts for the product. So you've gone ahead, gathered all of this data. What next? You go ahead and collate all of this information. You categorize it at a very high level and figure out what actually has been working well for your product. You go ahead and categorize what other big changes or gaps that your customers are calling out in your product. Throughout this entire process, you would have actually developed a lot of opinions about your product. You may have also gotten a couple of brilliant ideas related to your product. So you capture these as well, along with the questions that your customers or subject matter experts ask and any ideas that they propose as well. So you've collated all of the information. You have a bunch of interesting thoughts or suggestions. Now what next? You might have noticed that in any product interview, a key component that the interviewer is evaluating is your strategic and critical thinking abilities. They really want to see how you structure your thinking while trying to solve a problem. Why do you think they do this? This is basically so that you apply this structured thinking in your day-to-day as a product manager. So essentially, when you look at all of these ideas and insights that you have, you need to recognize patterns or the themes that naturally evolve out of all of this. So the next step is bucketing all of this information into themes and then having these patterns naturally evolve out. So you've gone ahead. You've done your customer research. You've spoken to the subject matter experts. You've gathered all of this insights, collated all of this great information. You've categorized them and you identified these themes or these big picture items. What next? Next comes the very interesting part. So strategic work does not need to be extremely effort intensive. If you want to test out an idea, all you need to do is to basically create a mock-up. Draw a block diagram on how that idea would work in your customer's workflow today. Get feedback from customers. Validate it. Do you think it makes sense to them? This approach will really help you develop a broader perspective because you're not looking at your idea in an isolated manner, but you're looking at it from a perspective of how it would work in your customer's day-to-day workflow. Now, you've scoped it out from a broader perspective, but you also need to know enough information to answer questions about your idea or your strategy. How do you go about and do this? One thing that I've realized is putting pen to paper is the best way that you can flesh out an idea and play devil's advocate. Because as you're writing out your ideas or as you're writing out your strategy, you ask yourself. You end up becoming more analytical, more critical because you're forming complete sentences and forcing your mind to make sure that there is a cohesive story that is getting being built. You're not basically just throwing out pointers on a piece of paper, but you're actually writing a narrative or a summary. It could be something that's just a page or two pages, but fleshing it out or fleshing out your idea from start to finish really pushes you to think through your strategy enough that all of the basic questions are something that you've already asked yourself and you can always follow up and dive into the answers and make sure that they're captured as well. So you've synthesized all of this information, you've gone ahead, you've developed a broader perspective, you have a deeper, more granular understanding with your strategy, what next? You, of course, go ahead and validate it and get feedback. So you can approach your customers with very raw mockups. These could be like PowerPoint slides or pen and paper sketched out block diagrams or something in like Lucidchart or Figma, whatever is the tool of your choice. And you can just get your feedback from the customer and test out this idea very quickly or your strategy very quickly. Are you directionally aligned with the customer is what you're trying to understand. Another approach that you could take is do the same thing with your leadership, take some time and spend time with your manager and you skip and show them the mockups or provide them the one page or two page summary that you've written up or maybe like throw in a three slide to five slide PowerPoint and explain your thought process or your strategy, get their feedback. So what you're basically doing is making sure that your customer and your leadership is directionally aligned with your strategy without investing months and months of work or before even building anything out. And if you're able to get your customer or your leadership excited with just these low effort, low cost mockups and a one pager, there you have it. That's a natural progression that you have by at least to go ahead and spend more time to flesh out your strategy further and then look at if resourcing is available to build out your idea. So all of this sounds great. We've spoken about why strategy is so hard is it so challenging to find the time to do strategic work. Then we've spoken about how we can go about figuring out this big picture or the strategy or your vision and what you can actually do to make this happen. But again, where's the time to do all of this? How can you incorporate this as part of your life as a product manager? To do this, I would recommend three things. A daily strategy minute, a weekly strategy hour and having all of this work towards a quarterly strategy goal. So why do I say this? I know in many discussions in where people suggest that you block time on your calendar, block an hour or two, that you invest only in strategy, learning, reading or industry research. I actually tried this out and while it was definitely helpful, I found it very hard to actually turn this into something more actionable that can help me actually factor this in to my own product and help develop the strategy for my specific product or service. So instead, I basically found this approach to be helpful where during meetings all day, you talk to a wide variety of stakeholders of your product, right from your customers to principal engineers and they share a lot of perspectives, they share a lot of opinions. So over all of these conversations or meetings, if you come across an idea, a question or a problem that stands out or seems interesting to you, chart it down. If nothing comes up at the end of the day, take a single minute to reflect on all of the meetings that you've been in, what those meetings were about at a very high level and see if anything stands out in terms of an idea or a statement that was made or a discussion topic that was proposed. Now, see you've been doing this for the week. So you've done this for five days, you have five pointers jotted down and it's time for your weekly strategy hour. You can structure your strategy hour now to be focused around these five pointers. Do you want to dive a little bit deeper into a specific idea? Go ahead that customer conversation and have a free flowing discussion and really pick their brains about it. Do you want to spend time on UX research that's centered around another idea? Watch a bunch of recordings connect with your UX research team who've been conducting user interviews over the past week, have an interesting conversation and explore the idea with them. Or you can also choose to spend this time heads down, reading up relevant reports or articles, but all of this is again tied back to your product. Another interesting thing that is very helpful is connect with people across your company. It is so helpful to actually have these free flowing conversations with other people or other employees in the company and understand what they're doing, what they're working on and basically what they're up to because you never know, they may have some very interesting perspectives to share or ways in which you can actually collaborate as well. So always be open to that and stay curious. Now you've been doing this on a daily, weekly basis and all of this is basically adding up towards your quarterly strategic goal. Now your quarterly strategic goal need not be something very effort intensive. It can be something as simple as creating a mockup and having that validated with your customer or getting customer feedback on that mockup. Or it could be maybe you review an idea or a hypothesis with your customer or leadership team and get their feedback on it. Or it can be something a little bit more concrete where you aim to produce a one page or a two page strategy document and have that reviewed with your leadership or you pitch your idea or a new product idea to your leadership as part of your quarterly goal. So wrapping up, here are a few key takeaways. Strategy is the end result of consistent curiosity. It's definitely not something you can conjure up on spot. Collating and categorizing ideas really push you to think and reflect on these ideas. And this is how patterns and themes naturally emerge. Strategy can be intimidating, but start small, validate your ideas or your hypothesis and then iterate. This will help you come up with a fully fleshed out strategy for your product. Last but not the least, strategy should not be an option. It should be a conscious choice that you make in your daily life as a product manager. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you being here and I hope this was a helpful discussion. Feel free to connect and share your feedback, recommendations and tips because I'm in this journey to improve my strategic skills as well. So looking forward to connecting and keeping in touch. Thank you.