 Hi, everyone. My name is Kaman Subnani. I'm a product manager at Mixpanel, and I'm here to talk to you today about how to build cross-functional alignment as a product leader using data. So, in your product management career, have you ever shipped a feature that didn't have the impact that you expected? It happens too often, right? For those of you nodding like, you know the pain, you spend a lot of time researching your customer segment, defining a feature that will address a pain point that they have, you work with your engineering and design team to build it, you release it, and there's no major impact to show for it. So, let me actually tell you a couple stories that are real-life experiences from earlier in my career, where something similar happened to me, and some perhaps unexpected tactics I took to overcome them. So, the first story was in my last job when I was working at Uber. Specifically, I was leading a product called Uber Help, which is a solution for healthcare organizations to call rides for patients to go to and from the doctor's office. The challenge that we faced with this product was that the person calling the ride isn't actually the one taking the ride. Then on top of that, the riders who are often sick because they're going to the doctor's office are actually less tech savvy because in order to qualify for this benefit, most commonly, you have to be on either Medicare or Medicaid, which are government-sponsored insurance programs, and those are benefits for the lower income or the elderly. So, as a result of all of this, pick up rendezvous are hard. So, what I mean by pick up rendezvous is just the act of the rider and driver finding each other to start the ride. This is reflected by this metric called driver cancellation rate. So, what happens is driver goes to the pickup point, it wait five minutes, nobody gets in the car, they click cancel and they move along with their day. They collect the cancellation fee and it's quite painful all around. The org who called the ride has to pay that fee. The patient is left stranded and confused and it's quite a hassle to have them get a ride set up for them again. So, in trying to solve this problem, we shipped a few software changes on the product team. Some were successful and some were not. So, on the screen you see a couple examples of features that showed positive impact in our AB test rollout period and a couple of features that did not show an impact. Despite the features that did show an impact, our top line number of that driver cancellation rate wasn't really improving. So, what did work? Actually, a customer education change and specifically, a change for a few of our high volume organizations that had especially high driver cancellation rates. Switching gears, moving to another company a little bit earlier in my career, I worked for this podcast company called Luminary. So, my role was, I was leading our engagement team effort. So, we had growth and engagement. It's basically thinking about how can we drive more podcast content consumption in our mobile app. So, some context there. So, the mobile app that we had had both exclusive Luminary podcast content. So, podcasts that you can only get on Luminary and open RSS content. So, podcasts that you can get anywhere, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. So, the issue that we were seeing there is that, our exclusive podcast was really our only differentiator versus other podcast platforms. So, as a team and honestly as a company, we had a goal to increase our exclusive podcast listen time. So, similarly, shipped a few features. In this case, they didn't really show even AB test positive impact. We shipped one feature to two different redesigns essentially. One was a new tab in the app to host exclusively Luminary content called Originals. Then we also redesigned our promotional widget at the top of the home screen to highlight our in-house content a bit better. But again, minimal impact from both of those to our top line goal of driving exclusive listen time. So, what did work here? One was actually a marketing campaign driven by a marketing team that sent alerts to users who had started episodes of exclusive podcasts, but didn't finish them. Another was a change that our content programming team made around when to release the episodes. So, when we initially were looking at this situation, we had episodes drop around the same time of the week. So, we decided to spread them out. Our content programming team made a change to spread them out a bit, which triggered more spread out alerts for our users. We actually did see an uptick in exclusive podcast listen time. So, why did I tell you this? What's common in both of these scenarios? Number one, the impactful solution was actually outside of the product. So, on Uber Health, it was a customer education change. It was a script improvement where the front desk coordinators actually reeducated or had a new script to educate their writers about what to expect given that they're less tech-savvy and perhaps not as familiar with how rideshare work. Then, at Luminary, it was a marketing CRM campaign and a cadence episode release cadence change. Second attribute of both of those is that the product team, myself included, we collaborated with multiple non-tech stakeholders to execute the change. So, at Uber, it was our account management team and our business ops team that actually worked with a couple of these strategic accounts that were high volume that had particularly bad cancellation rates to do a retraining on customer education, which led to positive impact. At Luminary, it was a collaboration with our marketing team and the content programming team that led to the solution that ultimately drove impact on our listen time. And finally, all stakeholders were aligned on a common measurable goal. So, at Uber helped the entire team, not just the product and energy team, but the entire cross-functional team was aligned on reducing driver cancellation rate. At Luminary, similarly, cross-functional team was aligned on driving in-house content listen time. And so, again, why did I tell you this? Why is that important? Sometimes as a PM, especially earlier in your career, you can get focused on only software-based solutions that you and your tech team can build. We as PMs, again, very early in our career, can get caught up in, what can I control? Or perhaps even, how can I make a change that is attributed to me so I can prove my impact? However, as a product leader, especially as you go around seniority, you're also a leader for your company. There are ways to influence your organization outside of the product to help achieve your company's vision and goals, or your team's vision and goals. A common PM saying is influence without authority. And you're already using these skills as a product manager with your engineering and design counterparts. And so you can apply these skills to teams outside of tech as well. So bringing it back to the two stories that I told at Uber, I set up what I called a driver cancellation task force, where I very simply just got folks from support, account management, obviously product design and end, bizops together to think about how can we as a collective group do make an impact on this common goal that we have? And actually what happened there was that our head of support called out that there was a high support ticket volume for driver cancellation refunds from a couple of these high volume organizations, which led us to shadow or led us to discuss shadowing their workflow for how are they calling rides, what does that actually look like, which identified the issue with that there was a customer education gap. And our account management team actually went and did a retraining which led to that positive impact. And at Luminary, I was actually a bit earlier in my career and I actually lucked into having a cross-functional squad that my manager, who is the CPO, set up within the company at large. And so I was already in a forum with our content programming team, our content marketing team, as well as an analyst. And collectively, we brainstormed, OK, how can we drive more exclusive podcasts listen time? And so that's where a couple of these ideas around that CRM campaign and the scheduling change, that's where those ideas came about. And we managed the execution from there. So the key takeaway from all of this is think outside of the product. Don't be pigeonholed into developing software-based solutions to accomplish your goals. Oftentimes, you can't accomplish your goals outside of the product as well. So you may be thinking, this is all great in theory, couple of great stories. How do you actually put this to practice? So here are some tips that I've learned from my previous product experiences for how I would go about executing this. And so tip number one. Identify potential cross-functional leader partners. So if you can't start to build out your cross-functional squad until you've identified who within the company can help you achieve your goals. And so when you have identified these other leaders, just set up one-on-ones with them. And in your one-on-ones with them, initially, you want to build a relationship with them. Ensure that you're aligned to the same goal and also the measure of that goal. And set up dashboards to measure that goal effectively and ensure that your cross-functional partner is comfortable with the data. Make sure that they know how to use the tool so that they can dive into the product analytics tool and derive their own insights. So as an example, break down by customer segment or geo and so that they can be a partner with you when thinking about what the next step for their team or even your team should be to help achieve the goal. And honestly, even before that, I know this is elicited towards the bottom, but in the spirit of relationship building, you really want to listen to them, listen to what's worked for them, what's worked for their org and their team, and almost as importantly, what hasn't worked, like what tactics have they tried that hasn't worked and start to brainstorm ideas from there. Talk about how your teams can collaborate going forward. And so once you've done this with a few different potential cross-functional leads, bring them all together. Set up recurring meetings where you check in on your target metric. You each share an update about how your area is pulling in that direction to drive towards your goal. You can use that forum to collaborate on how your teams can help each other, whether it's a product team getting feedback from a customer success team or a customer's success team, setting you up as a product manager with a call to hear from the customer directly about feedback. And there's so many other ideas from there. And in the same vein as that, you can set up a Slack channel so that you can collaborate async. And you can even, if you have the right product analytics tool like Mixpanel, set up automated email alerts and even automated Slack messages to keep the team up to date on performance of that metric, of that goal that you have. And once your squad, your cross-functional group, has had a couple wins, you've collaborated on some initiatives, they've had an impact, you can build momentum by sending out company-wide updates, whether that's via email or all-hands presentations. And your goal here really is to do internal marketing. You want to tell the story within your company about how this collaboration is actually yielding strong ROI. And really what that's going to do for you is get you more resources. And especially if you include data in your company-wide updates that shows the impact of the work that your team is doing. And then lastly, you are a product manager at the end of the day. So you really should be using these out-of-product wins and also equally importantly, the out-of-product losses to inform future product strategy and roadmap. So perhaps it's an education tactic or a customer success rollout plan or any number of things that have worked or not worked outside of the product. And that will help you prioritize a little bit more strategically and effectively because you have some learnings, you have some signal about what is going to work and what's not going to work. And so just to recap all of this, identify potential cross-functional partners who you can partner with. Build relationships with them. Align on specific measurable goals. Set up recurring syncs and channels for async communication. Once you've had a few wins, send regular updates to your company. And take the learnings from all of these out-of-product tactics to inform your future roadmap. And finally, shameless and perhaps not so shameless, it makes a panel plug. I truly do believe that Mixpanel is the best product analytics tool out there for PNs. It's easy to use. Anyone on the team can go into the tool and derive insights and get quick answers, which, again, helps you to work more efficiently. And everyone can be aligned with a tool like Mixpanel. Thank you for your time. That's all I have. Have a great day.