 Before we start, like how many of you here are even aware of product management or you're a product? Great. So this is something that I saw or I read in CIO.com this is a story about a farmer who is farming his land one sunny fine morning and Suddenly he sees this balloon comes over from nowhere And he's like whoa, what is that and this balloon comes right up to him And then the guy in the balloon is shouting at him and telling can you help me? Do you know where I am? And the farmer says yeah, you are right above my ground 200 feet above my ground So the guy on the top says you must be 90 You gave me a technically correct answer, but it doesn't help me and The farmer then says you must be the product guy Because you don't know where you came from you don't know where you're going you're over my land You're asking me to help you Right, that's that's that's a classic situation in traditional big organizations and that's very symptomatic of I would not say failure, but very symptomatic of slow progress in general So what you do is that's the reason I think the people who raise their hands as product managers or they're working in product management I think that's a very very important job. It's like that white sky there You bridge the gap between the farmer and the balloon up there you guys are the people the conduit to talk between business and IT and This is I think most of all of us are familiar with this that product management sits in the center works with development executives Talks with marketing and sometimes if product management is marketing they talk with different customers directly and Then you report up to executives and you do your budgets and targets and stuff, right? Management this is one guy who is really talks about how to become agile in product management Rich mirror now But this is something that you guys already understand, right? Now look at these products. These are all failed products in 2011 if Any one of you do not know about anyone in particular you can tell me which one just And there is no shame in not knowing I didn't know all of them before I made this presentation So anyone in particular that draws your attention go ahead Circuit city fine anyone else anything else? Which one? The big that's not the beetle Borders, okay, so I will just touch on The fiat 500 that's not a beetle. That's a fiat 500 Borders and circuit city, right? So fiat 500 when they launched in the US they said they are going to sell 50,000 cars in one year They sold about roughly 2500 or something like that So I think it's a big failure. They didn't test the market like what they're going because in the US nobody likes small cars The last success was better and the BMW mini Borders Great bookstore Great place to go sit down have your coffee read books find books meet new people But they never capitalized on that then they never came to the point where they realized that Amazon is their real competition Or they never forged a contract with publishers to say that you have exclusive deals They never had a business plan on what to do next bonds and nobilities still surviving They're still doing better than what borders right now is completely dissolved. They have only their reader The Kobo Ebook reader is their only product right now and they have dissolved Circuit city Circuit city was mainly used by people who would do things in their home by themselves like people who would create like a Ham radio or people who would do create like a home smoke alarm kit within their by themselves Like it's like a DIY do it yourself kit per place and There is so much competition for circuit city on the internet that they cannot just have the stores across us They just need they couldn't support the whole infrastructure of doing that That's really interesting. I one of the other things that I really find interesting is that movie Mars meet needs moms That's a very interesting movie. They've spent about I Think hundred and seventy million dollars in making that movie and they made 17 million dollars And that's it. So what's wrong with these guys right like there's nothing wrong. These are these are all big corporations they really have the money and They have talented workforce Microsoft keen spend 1.2 billion on Microsoft keen and they were there for 48 days less than Kim Kardashian's marriage So like what what's wrong with them? I mean that's the question that you need to ask and But on the contrary if you look at this, I think it's a product management failure I mean what you can call it marketing failure. You can call it Execution failure, but at the end of the day, it's a product failure because your product didn't succeed in the market right But look at this So there is a huge demand for product people. This is just for us. Okay. This is not across the globe This is just for us There's a huge demand for product people who can take these ideas Really simple ideas and turn them into really good products and make good business good ecosystems like something like It's it's comes up so pretty often that it becomes like a cliche like iTunes like it's a new ecosystem Who is a product manager? Anyone how somebody who said who has five years experience? Who is a product manager? Tell me your definition of who is a product manager one one attribute other than I mean that guy has a ring And he has a receding hairline like me, but what other than that who is the product manager? Do you know an example? How does iPhone makes you successful? Okay, so it made that app developers successful and you are using those apps. That's a good definition good anyone else So you won't get so you'll get all the blame also and it fails Okay, so this is a Wikipedia definition right who investigate selects and develop one or more products But the key thing that I find important is that it generates business benefit to the organization I think that's what the key part is like so everybody then can be a product manager within the organization because I am working within an Organization to provide benefit to my organization if my organization is there my job is there if it's not there My job is not there Have you guys seen this before like this is pretty common if you Google like this is pretty common a pragmatic marketing framework This guy's at this company runs this framework and it says what are the tasks that a project manager a product manager needs to do And they divide it on a scale a continuum scale from strategic to tactical and if you can see that there are some stuff I'm sorry to pull you guys here because it's nearer to me than that one There are some stuff which seems like a development perspective like creating user personnel scenarios release milestone launch plan Success stories Innovation and then there are some stuff which are very strategic market research market sizing business case pricing Then there is like channel training collateral sales and tools and no one person can do this No one person can do all of this unless it's a very small company and you just have like a very small product So they say like divide it up into three different parts How someone who is most strategy focus? Give him the lead and then have someone who is like a development product manager Who builds the product and then there is someone in the sales and marketing channel who kind of goes and sells the product comes back With the feedback and things like that, but they all belong to the product management team So that that's a model that they provide you need not follow that but usually it works out pretty well This is pretty simple slide right which is pretty straight forward slide that it's a continuous process. You do not have One launch and you do not say that it's done. Even if you have a simple website let's say A blog even if you have your own blog and you are basically branding yourself Then you cannot say that I have published a content last month and that is the end of it Right. I need to keep myself and my content updated so that people know that I am there My brand is established people come and look at my slides. They look at my content so it's a continuous process and Monitoring and listening is one of the key things because you need to know what people are talking about. I'll give you an example Four years back we worked with a publishing house called Simon and Suster they are I think the second largest publishing house in the world in English and They have tremendous amount of content in their like inventory and around that time a celebrity died And they wanted to come into the content like Huffington Post was their computer So they wanted to come in come and provide some content which will drive traffic to their side And so that's what it is. They were constantly monitoring like what's the market Pulse what's the latest news that happening and they would depend on the news cycle to put their content out there So that when you do a google search on that celebrity their site will come up first and Huffington Post does it the best We'll talk about all this later All the blue things we'll talk about them Okay, so to do this you need to be this right when I take this slide where usually in us They do not understand. What does it mean? I mean, but it's a pretty it is a pretty intuitive thing Like it's a god of destruction a god of creation and a god of nurturing right So you have to do that continuously where you if you have a portfolio or multiple products or multiple features You need to kill some features You need to have new features and you need to Nurture those which are making money and progress for you or giving business benefit to the organization So you need to literally behave like a god Which is really hard work. So that was product management Uh, surprisingly agile doesn't speak anything about product management It speaks of a product owner who helps who sits down with the developer's right stories And uh helps in prioritization Right, which is which is the surprising part of agile and uh, but this guy jeff pattern Used to be my colleague but makes a lot of money more than me right now So he left the company because he makes more money independent He said and he's pretty famous that product owners are people who make decision about what the product should do while taking into account The people who make the buying decisions actually want and this kind of definition You will not find in a scrum manual or agile manual But I like his definition because I think it's not Dogmatic it's very pragmatic. He's telling actually what a product owner needs to do It's not about just sitting down with the developer writing a user story Managing a backlog. It's much more than that I'm going to ask a question to people who raised their hands when they said they are product managers Act as a customer for developer questions Uh anyone what why did I like I made that thing bold the customer? What what do you mean by a customer? As a product manager The end user The end user Who takes decision of buying great? I cannot hear you can tell me loudly Anyone who has anything to do with the product is a customer. I'll give you an example. How many of you have kids? Okay, when you buy something for your kid, who is the customer you or the kid? So my definition of customer is very simple anyone who pays the money for the service is the customer So if I am a consultant and I am going to a client side if the client pays money for my services Then they are my customer Whatever they are building and they're proof giving it to someone else. They are their customers My direct customer at any point in time is whoever is paying me the money Right, so from us like when you buy a toy for the kid You look at the age like it's for five to eight years old. It does not contain Bpa It's safe for the kid. Even if you ingest it like whatever right you look for multiple things I don't have a kid. So I don't know exactly what you look for But I hope that people would look for those things as parents the kid doesn't care about that You are the customer because you are making the decision Go ahead You are right on the money, right? So it depends on the product that you are making So if you are making a milk bottle Right that you'll use to feed your kid. You are making the decision But if you are buying a ball Then probably the kid is making the decision Rest of the stuff I think is coming from the agile world and I necessarily do not agree with all of that because I personally feel that a product owner or a product manager need not do all that stuff The team can the team can do release planning the team can Elaborate user stories if they have enough knowledge about it the team can pan iterations That it's not the product owner's responsibility to do all that but Since we are agile the expectation is that a product owner will do this I cannot necessarily Exactly, right? That's the question Why you pay money for the product owner? And if you go back to that slide where I said A product owner or a project or a product manager's Responsibility is completely different. His or her responsibility is to build a product that will give Competitive advantage to the company on a sustainable basis That's that's the core if I know how to build a product I'm I'm going to build that I'm not care about I do care about release planning, but I do not need to own it I should not be held responsible or to the gun because I didn't show up in a sprint planning meeting The business analyst should be able to do that if he or she has enough context of it There are product owners here. I know who would do the same thing. I mean, I'm looking at Jennifer So what has happened is basically with agile the expectations has been resaid about what product management people need to do And I'm not telling that these are all bad things These are actually good things But this adds on to your responsibility of what a true product management team or a manager would actually do I'm not telling that you do not need to do this if you have the time and the bandwidth to do this Do it you're more than welcome to do it. You have more ownership. You have more sense of the product You have more context of the product. So do all this do How does this work? Do like instead of review docs, do we inspect the code? I mean instead of Relying on the key way do frequent inspection. I mean do by yourself But if you do not have the time and a bandwidth to go and talk to your users and find what they want And what they do not want then This is a waste Questions No, it's not you should be able to communicate that to everyone else. Yes Yes Yes So that becomes a very good example for products that everyone uses. Let's say, uh, I'll use another bad example. It's a cliched example of facebook For facebook the people who are developing the code the engineers are actually the users of facebook So they know what features actually want and that that is the way they collectively prioritize So there is a product team who does the prioritization. There is no single person who says I want this Mark Zuckerberg doesn't say I want this feature. So it's going to be there. It's it's not like that Microsoft So that was all about product management and agile. Uh, how many of you read the What you call that the abstract that was provided in the What you call this the pamphlet that these guys gave you Like about this session and how many of you read it online because there were a lot of reviews and comments that went on the thread for this particular session And uh, one of the things that I actually said they asked me repeatedly. Who is the audience? Who is the audience? who should attend this uh session and Should establish product managers come to this session and I said if they come to the session, they will go back and resign I said like if new product owners come to this session, they will actually go back and enhance or So I just want to know like just resetting expectations that Uh I have put this pause intentionally because after this there is a whole slew of slides Which might not go well with traditional product owners or product managers So do not resign. I mean or uh, so I just want to know like just resetting expectations that uh I have put this pause intentionally because after this there is a whole slew of slides Which might not go well with traditional product owners or product managers So do not resign. I mean Okay, so what are the challenges that a product owner usually face in a in any company? It doesn't matter whether it's a startup or whether it's a big corporation So I will explain what are these but let's just have a summary of that. It says fears of influence organizational model business model validation Ignorance and arrogance right, so I think many of us have seen these different circles of planning for agile projects or agile product development Right. So the interesting part is those gray circles Those gray circles are where the product owners are more effective because these are very tactical very day to day very Hands-on you are working with the development team sitting side by side looking at the backlog Telling them this is the story that you need to play Working with the ux and coming up with the design. This is very tactical. This is very fast But if you go up to those dreamer circles those are not tactical those are strategic and Again, the argument is one person May not be a good fit for doing all of this May not be a good fit. I'm not telling that you are not a good fit or I am not a good fit But it may not be a good fit. It's usually good to have two different people in two different circles because the inner core is very heavy very Interactive while the outer core the communication pattern is even different if you're talking to a cx. So you are not going to talk to a ceo level person the way you talk to your whole team because the way you talk the materials that you talk about are completely different So that's a challenge the spears of influence is a challenge and product managers or product owners who are not able to do that You can identify that easily in your organization. So these are some of the symptoms that you will see They will not show up Because they are busy talking to the ceo Or They will not talk to the ceo because they are busy with the engineering team So anyway, they are absent in some form either at the top level or at the Like at the bottom levels and there is limited interaction They have too many commitments Mismanagement of stakeholders expectations because they are not able to move along this Uh, I would say concentric circles very fast. So they are Failing to set the expectations with different people What they want or what the developers want may not be delivered on time. So let's say I have a sprint Scheduled in two weeks. So I want to do a sprint planning meeting two weeks before or one week before and but since I'm busy with talking to the Ceo or talking and identifying who my market is I'll not be able to fulfill my sprint commitments So you can identify that has anyone seen this symptom like because I have seen this, okay It's usually exists, right? Okay So I'm not trying things in the dark. Okay, good So I'm telling that he should not be the only person doing both their sides I'm telling that Instead of having that layer have two or three people in the middle Of which they form a product team one person talks only to the developers But that person is maintaining the collaboration with the product team and some person from within the product team Is communicating that to the stakeholders and other and it can be one person for a small product It can be one person But for something which has like multiple dependencies upstream downstream kind of dependencies It's just gets out of hand. The second challenge is organizational model and culture I think this is pretty obvious Companies either can be pioneers or can be followers. They cannot be both Right flip cut is a pioneer in India, but it's a follower of amazon So it That way it's it can be both, but if you look at it, it's still a follower of amazon It's not setting something up new Right and so that's there are organizations which strive on innovation They say that I'd build it break it see what happens and then we'll figure out what's the next step Because those organizations do not care about stability They care about more about outcome rather than detail. They do not care about I need to get six levels of approvals before I Allow my developer to create a directory on my machine on the machine, right? This is a real experience So I'm working with this bank for the last eight months and they give them The developers they give them a complete operating system and an environment within which they have to work They cannot download a new like a new software like let's say xml spy. They cannot download it So they have to go through like three layers of approval before they can download anything. That's stupid. I mean, they're writing your software If you do not trust them to download a piece of software They're writing the same software that thousands of other people are going to use as banks customers so Then you hire responsibly You do not hire jerks By the way, this bank Has the highest installation of open source software in the world in the banking sector. So that's not an excuse Team orientation Somebody said like the buck stops at the product manager product my right. So that's like the individual responsibility, right? You're taking on the glory as well as the failure. You're becoming the single point of failure You do not want to become that what happens tomorrow if you win a lottery I mean, I'm not telling that you can die of a truck accident, but I'm telling you can win a lottery Right, you do not want to be that person. You do not want to be that single point of failure You want whole team to be kind of thinking about the product and its success and failures There is a very good research by I think Gartner or forester. It's there in the slide somewhere Where they have surveyed bunch of organizations in retail pharma energy and some other sectors and they have actually found that they are starting to build these teams The success of the whole team depends on the success of the product So if the product is successful in the market, the whole team gets a bonus If the product doesn't is not successful in the market, nobody gets the bonus So it doesn't matter whether you're a product manager or a developer or a tester or a deployment person Like it doesn't matter It's everything is in build in there like so it's they call it a team and unless the team succeeds You do not get anything So you are kind of forced to then do that do good for the team and not download Which will screw up the team The last one is I think it's a little bit dicey Because people do not see aggressiveness as a good quality But there are corporations I know which where aggressiveness is viewed as a good quality Aggressiveness in the sense not in going out going and beating up someone but More in terms of like I want to explore new things Do I need to go through seven different layers? To get an app before I explore new things So the company that I work for There is a There is a kind of Unwritten law that You can go and do something which is reasonable to you and expect that if someone comes back to you and say that it's not in the policy You can say that sorry And you can move on you can say that i'm not going to do it again You can say sorry and move on but they do not stop you from doing it at the start You can do it and if it doesn't like if it doesn't suit the HR policies or something like that Then they will come and tell you that it's not the right thing But you can still try they will not stop you from trying it Symptoms Decisions are overridden by other departments and individuals how many people have seen it Like the decisions that the product owner takes somebody else comes in and says this is not the right decision Or some other department says this is not the right priority order Like how many people have you seen it or this is like something cooking up There is a lot of So how do you how do you how do you negotiate during those phases? Just one thing. I know there are many various ways to negotiate, but this one like Decision Okay, did you guys hear it like? Okay, so what he's telling is that as a negotiation technique He uses the concept of that if I take this decision And go let's say road x instead of taking road y Then you will get this customer value or this business value from the product and use that as a leverage To say that the other decision is not the correct decision right now given the information that I have right now And that's a good negotiation technique That's just one thing Limited on no influence on technology staffing and solution Anyone has seen that I have seen that multiple times where product management divisions have no control on technology Please I mean it's it's interactive I would love that they had tables and they had round tables that but this is like a podium seating So if you say speak it loud that would be helpful. Have you overcome that anywhere? Okay, so I'll give you one example how I overcame this last september so There is this marketing division and they have five people and their success is measured in the same way that I'm speaking How many products are released to the market? How quick they release to the market and those products are successful or not? When it comes to the development team and the engineering team Their success is measured by of the on budget at the on time It doesn't matter what the build if they say that the budget is one million dollar and they say they will release in september Those are the two criteria that they are measured on they're not measured on the product success So when they're delivering a product, they're telling I don't care whether your product is a success or not I delivered on budget, but they do not go and take that step and tell the marketing department that Look, I cannot deliver this because your budget is a constraint or your staffing is a constraint or something like that and The biggest weight like the single most effective way to Resolve that was to make them realize that you guys are measured on different things Why don't you guys start talking and measure like start come to a common ground where you measured only one thing the success of the product and I didn't know how it worked, but it so happened that The guy who was leading the engineering team the director and the marketing director They went for a lunch. They went for a couple of drinks the next day and Then they got the budget I'm like it's marvelous that now you guys realize that you guys are measured not on two different things but just measuring on on scope on time and on budget is not going to give you the thing that you're looking for because You are not going to deliver a good product if you have time constraints If you are going to say like I need this product by september and I have only two people then I cannot deliver it But they will still say it's a success from it perspective because I have delivered something within that budget And this is the way things get done around here. I mean, that's pretty popular Because the budget has been allocated at the start of the year and you can spend only this much in new products this much for maintenance And so whenever I'm doing a new product. I have to finish. I have to be satisfied with that button in that position The amount of effort that would be needed to put that button on something else maybe cost $10,000 more, but I cannot scratch that That is how it is measured good question, right so In agile projects scope evolves everybody knows that scope will evolve And so or you always speak about minimal viable product and like first release will see how it goes and then we'll Evaluate and iterate and things like that. But when the release is gone and the money is gone Then there is no iteration That's why Always the business tries to throw everything into the kitchen sink and they want to get it done because the moment It's reprioritized their experience it will never get done Because there is no budget in it to allocate for that And that's a problem. That's a very traditional problem in big it houses Yes, exactly once the project is finished it's done Yes They do not think it as a continuous thing. They think it as an event that happens and that's it This is very interesting. I have any of you seen this before business model canvas This came out of a phd research by this guy called alexander austere walder. I think he is norwegian So he said for any new product there needs to be a business model Of how your product is going to work whether it's going to save money make money give you eyeballs raise your brand value give you security Whatever the heck it is right whatever that value proposition that you are giving that should be in the center And then all your key resources key activity partnerships that you are forming should be on the left And that will form your cost structure because these are the things which are going into your cost And on the right hand side you have delivery channels how you're delivering things to your customer How you're maintaining the relationship and then you have customers here where you have segmented them Into high priority low priority and those give you the revenues And basically you see whether your revenues could be not dollars your revenues could be number of hits I have on the website number of unicates or number of repeat visits things like that you need not be dollars And this is very interesting. This is a very simple model to do and we tried it at one of the client side And if you see this seven eight five All these things these are like The priority order ultimately they came to realize that seven need not be done I changed most of the stuff because it was confidential, but I kept one thing for It says 2017 so they can live with the product And not have that feature till 2017 still they will make money. Uh, it's it's so interesting and then they Found out that they can just address one customer segment and they will still make money In the next release which is like after six months they can go to the next market And so if you do something like this When you're starting a project when you're starting a product In the morning jennifer was speaking about what you do when you start a product how you start how you run Workshop with all your stakeholders and kind of build up a roadmap And as part of that if you do some kind of validation of whether there is a need for a product like this How you're going to know that you're going to reach a goal and you will be measured success Like if you do something like that then that's a very easy way of knowing whether your product will be successful or not Yes, but you need to know you have to you have to write this as a like we usually do this as a workshop get everyone involved and use stickies and flip charts and help them Write the things and then ask them like can you put a value on this? So it's usually missing a business model canvas Alexander austere walder So if your business model is missing, uh, have you guys heard of this company? Solindra Huh? Yeah. Yeah. So anyone from us would have heard of they have heard of this company. I'm guaranteeing like This is the company that makes thin solar panels out of non-silicon materials uh, and this company became a big controversy because Obama's government gave five hundred fifty million dollars loan guaranteed to this company and they declared bankrupt in december So basically five hundred fifty million dollars of taxpayer money went down the drain and they didn't do a business model validation because Their cost of production was twice the cost of production of all other computers in the market I mean that's just a simple thing to do Anyone who is giving you a loan is supposed to check that that what's your business model whether you're going to make money I don't care whether you make money in one year or five year, but if your cost is double that of your computers you're not going to make it and uh, so They went bust One of the reasons that they went bust. They said was that china came off very fast in manufacturing With non-silicon as well as silicon because the price of silicon went down very fast Which nobody could predict apparently, but I do not buy that nobody could predict that silicon would go down I mean But remember that these are not the same silicon that they use for computer chips These are all the scrap materials that are left after a computer chip is formed apparently the Supply of that went so high that silicon Silicon built silicon solar panels became much more cheaper and so they went down and I mean, it's a simple business model validation, but they didn't do it I think the interesting thing is a continually delayed launch dates Have you ever guys had this problem like you are near the release date and then like oh, we cannot meet this date These features are not done. Oh those features are not by the way the ceo came and said I need a forum in that website right so basically You're not talking with your stakeholders. You're not talking about your business model. You're not balancing your stakeholders Expectations and that is a typical you have an untrusted product team because nobody trusts them now This is arrogant product owner right like Anyone who says that the buck stops at me kidding man Too much of hand waving instead of reality check So these are all the anti patterns All the challenges that I told you like if you are a product owner Or if you are becoming a product owner in a big organization, you are going to see this You're going to face these problems One or many of these problems How to get over this that's the next part of the slide Well then Go ahead. I agree to that. Yes. I'll come to that point. Definitely that there is a Decision by committee right like where everybody has their vote and then you decide on a thing which is not actually value So then your product is not successful, but there is a way to manage that. I'll show you there's a way to manage that. Definitely So if you look at those things right usually it's the organization that holds you back It's not you I mean those product managers if you put them in a startup environment if you put them with a couple of developers and a designer I was talking with one of my ex-colleagues that we should leave company and we should start a service where We do a part time gig we go We get one ux guy three developers Two mbs like me and we can help clients make products 15 days come out of it Done make some money and we can do that repeatedly year after year and we can still have our own jobs I mean it's it's in a small scale. We can do that. Uh the moment it becomes large. It's about expectations It's about hierarchies. It's about layers approvals and nobody wants to get into that You cannot develop good products like that Uh, that's that's just doesn't happen. I mean You saw all the list of product all the lists of companies or products that failed in the second slide And I think day before yesterday Fast company came up with a list of 50 companies across the world whom they rank as innovative companies And they're just small companies none of them are big I was like looking at it and all of them were startups or all of them are like five years old The biggest that I saw in there was uh Debbie shetty's hospital chain narana Narayana That that that was one of the most innovative companies. I mean so Other than that all the companies were small So this is all about the culture, right? So I think it's pretty how many of you have read this book rework 123 if you have not read it buy it and read it I'm serious This is one of the best books and a very fast read It has every like it has advice for teams and product management and project managers everyone just One page everything is just one page and this is written by the guy jason fright afraid Uh, who prayed yeah, he he's the man. He's the owner of 37 signals the guy who created the base camp So it's their book It's really cool. Uh, so when you talk about culture, right? We talk about this company's facebook 37 signals picks our Zappos Zappos actually gives $ to anyone who wants to leave zappos Like that's the kind of culture you're speaking about right like if you do not want to work here You're more than welcome to go. I'll pay you money go I do not want someone who doesn't want to work here Right who is not vested to the cause Uh, zappos has a story where uh, the delivered shoes actually like a some woman was uh Pregnant and she was online and she wanted to buy some shoes and the size didn't fit She wanted to return it since she was pregnant. She couldn't go out and return it They actually send a customer service guy to her house to pick it up I mean, that's the kind of culture you speak of like when you're speaking of customer service Here I rang up bsnl three times. They never said thank you to me They never said thank you to me So that's the difference between product owners in large corporations and startup and that's not my take This guy steve blank. He's a university of california barkley professor So he says about all these things that usually product owners in large corporations Are risk-avers. They do not want to take risk because they do not want to piece of people They do not want to jeopardize their position. So they do not take risk On the other hand companies like at lesion would be uh, not risk-avers. They actually give 20 of their time to build something new, right? You want to speak about it? I mean, I know you're from adulation Go ahead when speak about it Google works like the same way google actually even has an internal marketplace So let's say you are working on gmail or you're working on google health or you're working on picas or something You can give your time to that and then they put it up in a sandbox And everybody within google who is interested gets to use it and depending on the volume of interest that they have They fund the project So that's that's like your internal marketplace like where you want to go and that's a good way like if I have Too many people telling that I want that feature. I want that feature Usually there is a good way to put value on that and see what is the volume of that value And then agree on something I will actually have a example here where I talk of a company where there are no managers 700 million dollar company So it's obvious that we have to think differently, right? Look at that. I took this picture. I I think from What is the developer side that everybody goes stack overflow? There's this guy is telling that a miracle occurs Right and you get the right equation or whatever, right? So I'm telling that a miracle cannot happen You need to think differently. I mean, you should be more explicit here in step two the miracle occurs, right? So that was your question, right? Like it's all negative negative negative. How do I overcome this? I mean, I cannot say just you just do a miracle and it's going to go away And most big big corporations know that Most large corporations are aware of the fact that they have the talent They have the brand value. They have the infrastructure But for god's sake, they cannot produce a new product like in Six months one year when there are startups who are producing products like in one week Twitter was produced in one week So what they do? So here here here is all the good things that you have to think about, right? There is this book by Jim Collins called good to great. He studied 15 companies over six years Sadly circuit city was one of the company. He said good to great at that time. It was great But within after five years of that, I think circuit city went down So he says like What you are deeply passionate about What drives your dollar economy engine and what you can be the best in the world at And the solution is do not be at the edges because if you're at the edges Your success rate is probably going to be the probability of getting a success is probably low But if you are somewhere like in the middle of these vain diagrams Then probably your success is higher and if you can actually nail it in the center Then you got a winner. You surely got a winner You have to be passionate about what you're building and it needs to give you some money And you need to have some people who are best in that How many of the companies can claim that? How many of the big companies can claim that? I don't think most of them care about like, okay We have like a we can drive our economic engine and we can be the best in world at So like let's say our Tata motors would be somewhere here They're good in making cars Right. So they bought Rolls Royce Jaguars and other stuff. So so they think about that But I'm not sure or maybe they're here because they are deeply passionate about cars But I do not know because Tata is such a big entity by itself. I do not know how much passionate they are just about making cars Rather BMW just make cars They're really passionate about that So first and foremost if you are Thinking of making a great product you have to kind of Work around this and see where you fit in it's very easy to do You can put this on a flip charts and then put in stickies and see what makes things work As a result of this most corporations have started financing incubators And started financing startups. I do not know how much that is prevalent in uh, India because I'm unaware of that But definitely there is a ton of that happening in us right now Where big corporations like Chevron, Google, uh Bloomberg All of them are financing startups or they have their own venture capital funds that they go and sponsor different startups So here are some examples right the I worked with them. They closed out I worked with them a little bit and Yeah, I think Bloomberg Ventures here. They are there So the interesting is that JP Morgan right JP Morgan asset management They know that they cannot do a new product or anything like that. So they invested a ton of money in Jawbone So Jawbone is a startup that makes those wireless bluetooth earplugs or what do you call that it's like the The Jabra's yeah, that's what they make Microsoft has bespark where they say like if you have a startup they will give you One year of free license for all Microsoft software Because they expect that if you are successful within one or two years Then you will continue using their product and pay the license fees But it's a way of kind of promoting because they know that they cannot build fast enough Carefully Do not hire jerks So this guy is I mean I just took their example because I was reading about them They hired their first employee after three months Because they really wanted to make sure that the first few people that they hire Believe in the core values and principles of what their organization stands for because if they do not believe in that The rest of the people that you start hiring after that They're not going to believe in any of the causes and that's very important Like whenever you are making your team you're Constituting a new product pick the people who matter hire people who are really passionate who are really charismatic Who knows what they're talking about and what they're going to build Let's see Not your cross functional teams. How many of you use xbox? To okay, so xbox is not popular in the u.s in india. How many of you use we nintendo? We okay. We is popular. Okay fine. So you can change that example to either we or xbox Usually when you think of someone who is a gamer I usually think of like dungeons Dark black colored stuff like sitting in the corner with all the lights off playing computer or and that's it, right? But when you think of xbox or when you think of we it's no more like a Gaming it's more like digital entertainment. It's no more just gaming, right? So in order to build that Both nintendo and xbox Changed their whole team structure I know specifically this case study that they have mentioned here and uh They had to get permission from bill gates and they broke few walls. They bought industrial designers. They bought Brand marketing people they bought developers and they bought everyone into that single place for eight months To fix and like to find the product like what they want to build how they want to build it What would be the color of it most often than all xbox is white? Which is very different from what a game gamer would actually want so It's it's really cool. You guys may download this case study and read about it. It's really cool that how they talk about Good things Question on hiring. Okay, fine Then you are in the wrong market man I'll give you an example, right if you want to get married, right? You go to shoddy.com Right, why do you go there? Because you can see other people who have put their ads there or their parents, right? So the market is there If you expect those guys to come here to you, that's not gonna work You have to go to the market where it's happening You have to go to the colleges. You have to go to the universities. You have to go to the meetups You have to go to the user groups. You will find them You have to find if you find them you better keep them I mean, it doesn't matter whether you have to pay money equity. It doesn't matter. You better keep them Um, I'll pick on anu anurama swami. She is work She's a x thought worker and she's working with a bunch of x thought workers And she told me her experience during just before the lunch and I thought that was really interesting Anu, if you tell it like two weeks with cv42 You have to be a little louder Just tell me about the two weeks development cycle where you were there and two developers were there and And they're the startup. They do nothing. They've done the money I was hired just about 12 Started very Awesome things to work with I went into To product redesign In two weeks from start to finish We had completed an entire product design Had a full-size study and that was because of the quality of Of engineers that had it. One of the examples I think I was giving On the phone was we would we would sketch a few things during the day We would ideate two different designs by the end of the day We would wonder is this going to work better than this Sometimes we know just with just a paper sketch Sometimes it actually takes a line software to do that And the developer would say, yeah, I'll just do this in days tomorrow. Give me a couple of hours. We'll start our session late And the first couple of hours the next day. He would actually have all the three Um, you know designs done in in real software. We would come back Evaluated go to a couple of iterations with users and by the end of the day we actually had like Like working software just be usable too because most of it was raised for that could be used And it's just the just the quality of people they had the commitment they had to quick iterations and And yes, if it started, um I haven't seen that quality of people So give me an example. It's an extreme end of the example, but I'm telling you I live in New York and I go to a lot of these type of meetings. I mentor A lot of people and uh, there's a bunch of people like who are really good. I have my own startup I failed in one startup and uh, the first thing that I did when I started my new startup was I went to pace university computer science students I'm like, you guys want to work in a startup? You can work with me. I I cannot promise equity, but we'll see what happens like And they're ready to work and they're like really good kids India is no different. This is bangalore. This is bangalore This is in Bangalore Chennai and other places or Delhi like That I do not know man. I'm not going to comment on hydroval So I think the most important important thing is like in authority with responsibility if you're giving someone the power then make him responsible for that decision making and Do not give anyone the power right if I give, uh, I still remember when I used to go to the computer lab classes in my college days, uh, there was a main switch and Someone was responsible for shutting off that switch when you leave the lab, right? And we would make we'd have fun like because we know that at that time there was no ups So if you Put it off, it's going to switch off the whole land and at those times there was only land. There was no well There's nothing and so That was not the responsible person like the monitor the class monitor was not the most responsible person to switch off that thing You choose your person wisely This is the company. I'm talking of uh 700 million dollars known as a boss Uh, they negotiate their responsibilities with their peers And everyone can spend the money Um And decide on the tools that they need Obviously everyone knows about the money that they have within their divisions if they have to hire someone Uh, they decide that there is a need to hire maybe like I'm working nine hours for last two months So that means there is a need to hire someone Uh, so they will go ahead and hire and they will interview not some hiring manager The hiring manager comes at the end to complete the process So this is this is really a cool company. This came out in the harvard business review Uh, the title was first let's fire all the managers Uh, his his reasoning was the more you have managers your decision making is slow And more often than all if the decision making is wrong The time the time taken to reverse it would be slow too Right, so it's expensive because managers usually get more paid than uh, let's say someone like me So And they even said like let's say there's a usually a standard like for every 10 people there is one manager Now let's say there are 100,000 strong organization How many managers do you think you need? He showed actually the number was 1,111 Because you need thousand 1,111 because you need 111 managers extra to manage the thousand managers that you're creating So There is a charm there, right? So he actually talked about this company so much that I was impressed. This is based out of south california There are other companies which are like this. This is just an extreme example But you can come to somewhere where there is a moderate way of doing it I mean where you have groups which decides on what to do Uh, how many of you have heard of occupy all street? Yeah, it's a movement, right? But they're very organized and they do not decide anything by one person They usually have something called a general assembly g a where uh, and there is no written documentation It's all oral and they decide on something like there is a group called alternative banking group I work with them they decide on something and like they decide to move money from banks to credit even Once they decided they decided and will go and execute They do not need uh other groups permission to do something because they within themselves Know that they have taken a decision responsibly and that's the fate and trust in the group If they fail they fail as a whole if they succeed they succeed as a whole 700 million dollars so I think about roughly about 800 people I think It's a tomato processing plant the second largest tomato processing plant in us So if I'm eating pizza or ketchup in us, I'm possibly eating their product How many of you have used legal zoom? I guess yours there's to form your own company, huh? Okay, so legal zoom everyone thinks that they provide legal services online They do not do that Uh, they basically hook you up with small time attorneys and small law officers in several parts of us and the world Depending on your need and these are really really small offices because they do not have Let's say computers or software to do calendar planning and other management stuff that they need So legal zoom provide those services to them and On the other hand they provide services to the consumer by connecting them to that And they take a small fees out of that but people just think that legal zoom is providing the service But legal zoom is not providing the service. So and they did that very successfully They are about 200 million dollars. I think right now And last year they changed their model and said we are now going to go into consulting So now they are charging $15 per month or $25 per month depending on how long you need Private consulting services. So that's a new business model They didn't come up with the business model on day one the second business They come out with they came out with something which is very basic You go and you say that I want to create a new company or I want to divorce or I want to I don't know like I want to make a will for my kid And it's very simple and you can form that and they will hook you up with someone and you'll get it That's like a primary business model But the second business model they came up with is like very new and it's making more money for them than the older model But they didn't drop it right they came up with Over a period of time or iterating over a period of time Another good example is Guardian. I know that because I worked with that project like that team They did a complete overhaul of their website and Like whenever facebook or google completely changes their layout The users don't like it. I still do not like the new look for the google email. I use the old look When at lesion changes the new look for confluence totally There are folks who do not like it because you change the whole layout at one go And that's what guardian avoided they wanted to do the whole change of the whole site But at first they just changed the sports section Because they wanted to test like what is the response from that section before they go ahead and do across all of the other sites like All of the other like news and editorial sites and things like that They chose only the sports section to change and I think that was a good example because they learned a lot from that They kept it there. They did ab testing with three different colors of blue Five different positioning of where they want to put the banner and think so they did a multivariant testing of that And those things are basically types of iteration, right? They executed on that iteratively and incrementally and then Moved on to a new product. Let me see what's going on. Yeah, I'll explain this on this side. I have never used this but One of my colleagues have told me that this is something that they have used and it has worked actually So let's say this is the value that you get out of a product and this is the cost that you have In case of projects which has already started. This is the cost remaining to finish it or enhance it or things like that So if the cost is very small and it's a quick value realization, then it's a quick win But if the cost is very high and the value is small, they are telling that these are undesirable project don't even start them This don't even start them. So this whole area Is full of projects and features you can think of projects features programs anything that you want products Which are termination candidates you do not do that and The key question that I always ask is like how do you determine the value? Because that's the key part, right? So a good way of determining value is Whether It's a legal issue Whether it's something that you have to do by a certain date because you have committed to some other companies and they're depending on that whether it's a Safety issue Safety or security issue So things like that. So if if those are like high value things that you have to do and the cost is really low So you start the project right there start the product right there If they are not they usually fall within this zone Who will say what is mvp? Okay, perfect Perfect. So this is the Lincoln mkz Lincoln mkz is one of the best cars that had that Ford ever had and Now they do not sell and they want to become like the Audi and BMW So they hired this guy called max wolf Who is a great designer and So when he saw the design Last year, this was in 2000 early 2011. I think he saw the design and he looked at it and he said like Well, this is not the right design if you put this out This is not going to beat BMW. This is not going to sell And he like scrapped it. They were supposed to announce it in the auto show in actually in the India auto show last year and they didn't announce it They stopped it because they said that this guy said actually like stop the line right there He said this cannot work because he's the product owner So he had to say and he said that this cannot work He worked on the whole design for a year We changed the whole engineering and his key signature is this whole grill, which is Apparently we'll make it more look sexy and make it pricier But the biggest thing that he did was during the whole process of developing this car He took it on Test rides He covered the whole car in like plastics or like stuff that you cannot see the link and emblem or that is Or the logo and things like that and he gave people who have oudies and bmw's to ride that car He drove with them and then he did service continuously So every time you would have a viable car that will drive and it will work Or he have added some features to that car that really makes it like a luxury car He would test it regularly And that's how he got the feedback that whether this car will work and they're releasing it in 2012 in the Detroit auto show March So mvp is that version of the new product that allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning which is feedback With the least effort all of examples Okay So all these companies changed what they started as Because the market changed The demand changed and they had to change otherwise they wouldn't survive Who can say what was youtube What was youtube as Hot or not for videos. It was basically a dating site video dating or something like that PayPal PayPal was used for financial reconciliation between palm pilots So people who had palm if they wanted to do transactions among themselves only they can do that So people was a software called confinity. It was called confinity we pro Oil and soap right it's still called waste western indian products or waste indian products or something like that That's how we we pro is Western indian products, right But you guys still have that emblem You guys still have this emblem right the sunflower the sunflower oil and the sunflower soaps. Yep, you still have that emblem Lamborghini it used to be a tractor manufacturer Lamborghini You're right youtube is to be hot or not. You're right Flickr used to be a chat site Or sorry flicker used to be a multi. I think how do they call it like mm or g or mm. Opr g multiplayer Online large games that was flicker. Yeah, that was flicker and they had a chat service through which you can exchange your photos So now flicker is just a word photo sharing Nokia used to make rubber boots That's how it started Group on used to be a fundraising site And uh group on became a huge success when there was a pizza company on their floor And they offered discounts for the pizza from their floor because they wanted discounted pizza So that's uh twitter was a podcasting company called audio odeo So basically the goal is that if you are a product owner or a product manager You just cannot say that I have released the product in and it's done You have to continuously monitor the market and change based on what's going on into the market And uh if you do not change more often than all you're probably going to die How am I doing with time? I still have 15 minutes. Good. Uh Collaborative road mapping. This is really interesting. I still do not know whether I can show it to you guys because I asked my Colleagues whether this is confidential or not, but he didn't reply yet. So I'm doing it till he says it was not and I will say sorry so This concentric circles Are months three months six months nine months 12 months 15 months? And these are the different projects in the portfolio And you have features aligned like that and anybody can see what's your roadmap looks like Anybody can see what's going on in your whole portfolio And the one which are green are the ones which are like approved or estimated or something like that So if you see the most of these in the inner circles are green and two are red So basically then you know that this two needs estimation or this two needs some kind of Touchpoint so that you can move those into green because they are really high priority You need to get them done within three months So if you do that kind of road mapping like you did you do not need to do it in concentric circles You can do it horizontally like it doesn't matter how you do it, but you need to do it and you need to do it with everyone Right. So there is one example where there is a e-commerce widget There's something which says uh, I don't know what it says But they pulled it down and it says that it should be a part of the new business and it has a lower priority than that So you need to involve your team in making sure that they understand what is the product portfolio looks like and someone said that That not only the product owner needs to understand the whole team needs to understand how the product portfolio evolves how the product evolves And this is a good example of that Which one? Okay, so this circle is anything that needs to be done within three months The biggest circle is six months. This is nine months, twelve months, fifteen months And anything other than that you probably do not need to do ever like you know So this is what something is happening right now The team is focused on this right now and then for each of these let's say this is like e-commerce This is like content management This is like new business Let's say this is video and for each of these you have a set of features that needs to get done Right, so then you put them on that axis and that way you can see the prioritization You can see what needs to be done next People can see how the product is evolving how the roadmap is going and the ones which are greens I really like have a thumbs up from let's say CEO level you have the budget approved and everything so you can go through that so The red is that it's not yet estimated the green is that they have been estimated and approved and people have their Approvals but they know that it's let's say three months down the line or eight months down the line And uh, actually if you look here, that's an interesting I think here they have the name of the people Who are working on some of this so that you know like whom to go to if like if there are multiple product lines Whom to actually go to for that Go ahead It just came from a team brainstorming session. There's no name for it. If you want to put a name, I will use it Yeah Yeah, it's a real example Because they are not estimated I mean I come up with an idea. It doesn't mean it gets estimated right there Right, so you have to get the team together and look at it elaborate it a little bit and then probably estimate How many minutes five minutes? Okay, let's go fast Servant leadership, I think everybody has heard about this But the company that's referred here. They have their Employer turnover reduced from 17 percent to 54 percent which basically means for them a saving of 20 million dollars Because for each employee they have to pay five thousand dollars to hire whenever someone goes away and This company is the largest carpet manufacturing company in us based out of georgia And all the carpet manufacturing companies are based in georgia So let's say in banglore If I leave we pro I can join IBM the next day because they're pretty much in the same vicinity, right? So you have to be really aware of that that if I'm letting my employees go, what is the cost of hiring someone? Again, because there are other IT companies in my vicinity and that is the only thing you have because In terms of technology work, I think most companies now have nailed it They know how to do the work. It's the people that matters This is how you engage your stakeholders since we are consultants. We always say this is the highest priority so people who have the highest impact on the product and People who have the highest influence on the product People who will make the biggest bang for the buck from the product and people who have the highest influence on the product They are the people whom you need to involve every day extensively when you do your stick When you do your sprint planning and things like that or release planning But the people who are not important to the product or they cannot influence your product I mean there are people who can influence your product, but they are not important So for them you have to involve them to address their concerns But for people who are not important you can just keep them informed. That's it So I'm going to rush through this because I have only like five minutes left. So let's see how it goes These are the things that we talked about not to do. These are the things that you can do if you want to This is the forestry research that I was speaking about high-performing product-centric development teams And this is from the same report. They show the trend like how depending on the company size who is doing it Who is piloting it how many how much percentage is not even interested in doing it So there is a huge percentage which are not interested in doing it for large companies if you see that So whatever I spoke of so long like it's more about people, right? It's if you look at it They look like agile principles, right They are agile principles. It's more people-centered than process-oriented customer focus Moving fast respond to feedback being self-organized So usually I try to step away from the word agile because people misuse the word agile in a different like a lot of different way They butcher the word agile But if you are a good product managers You can just follow these things within your company and for each of these things you can read and I can lecture you or you can hire anyone to consult you and they can help you with this But these are the things that you need to do if you really want to make a good product manager and a good product questions