 Hi, my name is Sam Heveson and I'm excited to talk today about creative execution, how to apply creativity as you build products. I am a product manager, advisor, mentor, writer and musician based in San Francisco and I'm super interested in design, technology, travel and music. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn if you want to connect and talk after this discussion if any of the topics are worth diving deeper into. I'd love to start off by giving a little bit of a background about myself and my journey. So I started out working with startups. I worked and consulted for a few venture backed startups including Time Luffin Glide and that ultimately gave me the confidence to found my own web design consultancy company, Social Focus LLC. I then went on to get really interested about product management and I decided to pursue an MBA from Cornell Tech. They had a curriculum that was focused on product management, entrepreneurship and technology and it was a really good fit for me. Following my MBA, I started my product journey as a senior PM at Amazon where I was focused on building Amazon photos experiences for Amazon Alexa devices, it was based in Seattle and it was an awesome experience working there. Flash forward to today. I am currently a senior product manager on the consumer product team at Twitter and focused on helping millions of people create and converse on Twitter every day. I've been here since 2018 and I am loving it. So let's start off by thinking about creativity and it would be really useful to start with a definition or a working understanding of where creativity comes from. Creativity is one that can be defined by many different disciplines, today we'll be thinking about creativity within the lens of product management and the product development lifecycle. So let's look at the seed or the source of creativity. I deeply believe it begins with imagination and imagination is really this act of examining the future, predicting the world beyond today. And we only know where we can go or what the future will look like by referencing the past and absorbing the present. History tells us a lot about what we know and can give us a good understanding of where we want to be. Creativity is essentially applied imagination, it's putting your imagination to work. The process of coming up with original ideas that have value is a creative act, but innovation is the process of putting those ideas into practice. And what I want to talk about a little bit in product management is how we can be creative as we are executing, as we are putting those ideas into the pipeline and bringing them ultimately to market. As we think about creativity, it's important to realize that execution is not linear. We don't start at point A and directly get to point B and straight line, rather the reality is that we are taking a lot of dips and turns and pivots and we're getting new information along the way that allows us to adjust. Creativity is how we adjust, how do we adapt, how do we come up with new ideas, how do we come up with new approaches when we are met with that new information? When insights come in, what do we do with that information? So creativity becomes really important through product development as we expect nonlinear approaches to growth. Creativity and product management can also be looked at in these four ways. The first being that product management is the ability to observe people, the ability to empathize with people and find problems and opportunities from that. Secondly, it is this ability to empower different disciplines, whether that is engineering, or design, or research, and being able to empower those people on your team by talking to them in their respective languages and understanding what is important to their discipline. Third, it's the ability to influence without authority. We are often on a team where we want to make sure that we are getting from a state of the world today to a better and more informed state of the world tomorrow. And so we need to do that by leading and defining goals. How do we actually know that we're making progress towards that world that we want to get to? I've been very fortunate to have the opportunity to be creative as a product manager at Twitter. For those of you who know Twitter, it is aiming to serve the public conversation. It is a platform focused on helping people connect to their interests and follow breaking news in addition to expressing yourself through the autumn of the tweet. It is a gift and a very large responsibility to work on the Twitter product because it has a lot of scale. It has enormous scale. And being able to service over 200 million users every single day has been one that has given me a lot of information and knowledge about working at scale. How do you introduce change knowing that that change will affect a lot of different systems and people all at once? The Twitter product team is split into three components, the revenue org, the consumer org, and the tech org. I sit on the consumer product team and I am focused on thinking about how I can help millions of people create and converse on Twitter, specifically within the creation conversation team. At Twitter, we are really fortunate to have what is called the flyway product development process. And it is made up of five different steps. And these five different steps all require different levels of creativity. And they are important because it helps standardize the process of building. So teams adopt the product development process through flyway and it makes it a lot easier to work on building when everybody is sort of in the same mindset about approach. So let's unpack this flyway development process. What does it really mean? Well, there are a few steps, beginning with incubation, then going off to definition, then to development and deploy, and then launch and evaluate, and then lastly improve. The product development life cycle is often looked at with a time and cost risk horizon where at any point in time, as you are moving through these different stages of product development, cost and risk will change. So at the earliest stages of incubation, you want to keep cost and risk fairly low. You want to think about what are the cheapest methods for us to validate. And then as you start defining and building dependencies and identifying risks and going through the software development life cycle, you will find that cost and risk increases. And the product development life cycle will have different risk depending on the nature of the product you are building. We want to start out at the earliest stages by keeping that risk remarkably low. So what tools can we use to get more clear about the problem we're solving, and I'll walk through some of those right now. So incubation is the phase of going from customer problem to proposal. In this stage, we want to define what the customer problem is. At Twitter, we use a framework called jobs to be done. It's a fairly famous framework that was written by Clayton Christensen in the competing against luck book. And what it outlines is that customers essentially might need to hire a certain service or platform or product to get a job done. In some cases, they may today be firing that service platform or product for a specific job. When we can identify and examine the job that the customer is trying to achieve as relates to the problem, we can get a lot clearer about where the opportunities lies. So some questions you want to think about are, what if anything have users tried to do today to solve the problem? We want to review existing internal or external insights. We want to actively understand the customer problem by leveraging qualitative, quantitative behavioral, or competitive research. And in many cases, we want to talk to users. At Twitter, we're very fortunate to have the platform to do direct customer immersion and what that has actually looked like in practice is potentially getting on a Twitter space, which is our audio chat product and talking to customers, understanding their needs, gathering feedback about their preferences and problems. The product team and user research teams have hosted Twitter spaces directly with users to uncover needs. In addition to Twitter conversations where the product team is able to engage directly in conversation with users, whether that's asking questions, gathering feedback, replying directly to users who have shared whether that's positive or negative sentiment about an experience and trying to unpack what's happening. And lastly, with an incubation, what we're really trying to do is estimate impact. How many people does this problem affect today? Where are we looking to understand the opportunity size and estimate that impact with data? At any point in time, product managers have to assess is the problem we are going after, going to help us achieve our goals as a company. And so that's where prioritization becomes really important. Can we assess the problem and ask ourselves is the highest impact problem that we could be working on? Potentially there are a few, why this one? And also, is there any emerging market or rising competition and trend that would be advantageous for us to pursue solving this problem? So estimating impact and understanding the overall opportunity size is a really important aspect of the incubation phase. And we want to be creative within this process as we use tools to our disposal. Moving on, the product development lifecycle, we have the define phase. And this is where we're going to identify product requirements. What's really important here is that we identify requirements needed to both solve the customer problem and evaluate that we've solved it. So we're actively looking at ways to determine risks, dependencies, constraints. What is the minimum viable experience for the most simple, lovable and complete experience that we could be building and how do we make our product requirements in against that such that we can prove that we've made progress against solving the customer problem. Defining milestones is a huge component of the define period because what we want to do is understand how each milestone factors into a timeline. Setting dates and deadlines helps teams be high performing and also allows you to clarify success criteria with your team of product, engineers, designers and research. We can better understand within each milestone how we're tracking toward success. One of the most important components of the define phase is understanding the methodology you're going to use to learn. How will we test? How will we understand if we've made progress? And part of this is developing hypotheses. Good hypotheses tend to be grounded in the customer problem and they are specific and testable, meaning that we can falsify them. We can understand if it's true or not true that the change we've introduced in the world does a thing that we predicted it to do. This is where we want to select some key metrics for observation based on success outcomes. And when we're deciding how to test this experience that we want to bring to life, we can think creatively about the testing method. At Twitter, some of the methods that we use include A-B testing where you have a control treatment group where you're essentially understanding how those changes may be variable. And then we also have this concept of long-term causal holdbacks, which means you give a change to a majority of customers, but you keep a percentage with held back from that change to understand long-term causality. And that might be really helpful when you want to see a change over a longer period of time. And another method that we use at Twitter that's very popular is beta testing. This is where we identify a target segment cohort that we want to give access to, and that percentage of users will be provided access within the context of the beta. Then we move on to the development process. This is where we are building, designing, and working towards that goal of shipping. In this moment, this is where product managers can get very creative. And we should empower our teams to be creative as well. As oftentimes within the development process, we uncover a lot of things that are unknown. And when those known risks come up, how do we adapt? So we are consistently looking to bring a user experience to life that meets the strategic goals and product requirements and hypotheses we've set out. And we want to lean on and partner closely with our technical counterparts to make sure that that technical design is delivering against commitments. It's definitely the job of the product manager to make sure that the quality, scalability, and stability of the experience is one that meets a bar. Development milestones are very important. It keeps teams on track. And so within this approach, you may want to set up some milestones that include dog fooding or having a team, find out what's working or not working about the experience, opening an access company or employees to get more feedback, ultimately then going to a production test, giving it to real users to play with and experience, and lastly, a launch. What is that milestone around bringing this to a wider swath of customers? The evaluation component of product development is one that is really important. And this is when we come up with our launch strategy and how are we going to actually evaluate when we get to market? This assumes that we have set up a great testing methodology and experimentation framework. We've learned some things and we've assessed that we're ready to give this to more customers and that we are ready to go to market. In doing that, what we want to try to do is partner with marketing and communication teams to generate awareness and education. We want to actively communicate our launch plan and dates and track success metrics. It's very key to make sure that the success metrics you've laid out are performing relative to your stated goals. And you want to check in on those trend lines on a week over week basis, a month over month basis, and report out. The healthiest teams are ones that are doing retros and reviewing their learnings early and often. Make sure that you are empowering your teams to be conducting those retros and make sure that you're empowering your teams to review learnings. Maybe that's scheduling weekly data research and analysis reviews, sharing out learnings with stakeholders and leadership, and actively looking to record and share how's our understanding of the customer problem changed as a result of our work? This is really key in the process. And then lastly, within the Flyway product development lifecycle, we get to the state of improve. This is where we have to come to a head of a decision. Do we want to improve the experience and iterate upon it? Do we want to maintain it and make sure that it is in a healthy state but not actively invest much more resources forward? Or third, do we want to retire it? Do we want to gracefully sunset the experience? And so it's up to product managers to make sure that they're working with their teams to make a conscious decision on the product based on if the customer problem is solved. And those three paths can be taken, the first of which is to improve, meaning that you will continue working on the product because the team has gathered new insights on how to solve the customer problem and the opportunity size still remains large enough to justify that further iteration. The second step that the team could take is to maintain the product, which means that we are maintaining the change in a healthy state because it's officially solves the customer problem. But we feel that in order to invest further, it may be very expensive or we might have competing priorities. So at that point what we want to do is only invest as needed. What that means is pretty high priority customer requests, pretty high priority bugs. We'll keep it in a state that it's healthy. And then lastly, we might get to a place where we need to decide that the product needs to be gracefully retired. This because the product maybe hasn't solved the customer problem to the degree that we hoped it would. It might be too expensive to maintain. There might be a lot of dependencies. And if priorities or market dynamics have changed, we also want to look into that. So this is a stage where we really need to make conscious decisions. Running back and summarizing the flyaway process that we use at Twitter is the following. We start at incubation. We go from the customer problem to a defined proposal. We define what those product requirements are. The learning methodologies will employ and the success metrics that tell us we've made progress. Then we go to develop and deploy. This is where we're really designing, developing and deploying the experience, making sure we're building it with the quality are in mind. Third, evaluation, having a clear launch plan and how you're going to evaluate learnings. And lastly, improve making decisions on how you will iterate and improve the experience, maintain it to keep it in healthy state, or retire it. I am very grateful to be able to use the flyaway product development process and flex my creativity over a range of products at Twitter. For the last few years, I have defined, launched, and scaled products that help millions of people create and converse. I've used this product development process with my team to have a better understanding of what we're delivering. And this has ranged across products like quote sheets of media, live photos, fleets, the Twitter camera, live video broadcasting, stickers and gifts, media, and now edit tweets. I'm so thankful that you spent time with me today. And I hope that some of the material was helpful and that you can bring it back to your product development process. Remember, creative execution is super key. And it is a great opportunity for you to apply creativity as you build products and as you lead teams. Thank you.