 with all of you. So the key aspect that I want to talk about today is incubation and your role as UX professionals to influence incubation outcomes. And the changes that you can make to your design process to increase the chances for success. For me, incubation has always been a fascinating process. And one of the activities I enjoy doing outside of work is gardening. And as an amateur gardener, one thing I learned is the care and attention that goes into sprouting plants from seeds is very different from the care and attention that's required to help the plants grow and thrive. And this difference in the two stages is what I would like to talk about today. And both stages are important and I see a lot of great similarities with new product development, but let's take a look. When you think about, just to kind of give you some more context over the last six years at Google, I've worked on several incubation projects. I'm highlighting here a couple where I was working on right from inception through successful launches. There are also a couple of projects that I was a part of that did not see the light of the day. And I want to share these learnings from these experiences around creating products from zero to one. And especially when it comes to creating products for new set of customers, new set of problem space or new markets or a combination of all of them. And when you think about design process, you're assuming you're all familiar with the typical or the traditional linear waterfall model where you have a solution in mind, you go ahead and build it and then launch and then learn. And we also, I'm assuming, know the pitfalls of this approach. So for the most part, I think people have evolved into a much more leaner agile and iterative model where you've tried to figure out a minimum viable product, go about building it and then iterate and launch it and learn from it. And at Google for most projects, the typical process is very iterative. It looks something like this. So let's say building a rocket is the right solution or ideal solution for a given problem. We might start off by first creating a paper airplane, test it, learn from it. And at every stage or every evolution or iteration from there on, you try to increase the value that you're able to offer your end users. And this process works great when you know building the rocket is the right solution for that problem. However, like when you're exploring a brand new terrain or brand new problem space, this iterative process still has some shortcomings. And one of the drawbacks of this build fast approach is that in the haste of trying to do something really quick, you probably are not spending enough time to explore the space and the terrain. And probably not even questioning whether you're climbing the right mountain. And often like you might learn that you're on a wrong mountain or on a wrong expedition halfway through the process or even worse like once you finish the climb. And this ends up like resulting in a lot of churn within your team, loss of time and energy. And in many cases like you might not even have enough flexibility to take a different course or different path to correct that. And I think like as UX practitioners and leaders of innovation, we all need to help our teams search for and discover the right mountains to climb. So if there is one aspect that I wanna stress on today that our role as UX professionals to help with this. So not just executing or climbing the mountain but actually exploding the terrain. And life is too short for building something that nobody wants, right? And there are a lot of companies, teams, and startups that make this mistake of not spending time upfront to understand the problem space deeply and end up building solutions first and later struggle with it. So you need to kind of like shift that mindset from a execution first or solution first approach to a problem first and customer first approach. Now you might ask like, how might we figure out like the right products to build? I wanna talk about the two phases of incubation, right? And I think like in doing upfront visioning work can definitely help with this. And we will dive deep into both aspects of visioning and execution in this talk. Visioning a little bit deeper. Now going back to our mountaineering metaphor, as a team when you're about to start on a new expedition, like these are the three questions that I would suggest like, you're a team to ask and solve for. First is, is anyone going to care if you get to the top of the mountain? And let's dive into each of them one by one. So you can answer that question by thinking about focusing on like what your product will help people do feel and achieve once you put it out there. And you can answer that by developing deep empathy for your users and change your team's mindset around like moving away from the initial solution or initial issue at hand and thinking about the people outcomes, right? And if you explore other mountains, might you find a higher one? So this aspect is when you are exploring a new terrain, like there are a lot of possibilities, right? Which ones do you tackle first? What will give you the biggest bang for the buck? So this phase is about exploring a variety of opportunities and finding the problem solution fit. About, you know, without investing into the climb, can you check the top of the mountain? And the idea here is like with the first two phases, you have a good understanding or you develop a good understanding of the top problems that your end users or target customers might have. And then like which solutions might address those problems. The last phase is about packaging it all together and to see how this package is going to appeal to the end users, right? And it's also important to get this early feedback and you can do all of this without writing a single line of code. In some cases, you might have to prototype a few things but I'm going to show you examples of things that you can do without having to invest too much. Now, we'll dive into each of these three components in more depth and I'll show you some tips and methods that our teams have benefited from. So when it comes to developing deep empathy for users and their needs, you have to think about like answering these questions. How frequently do users have the issues that you are trying to solve for? How many people does this affect? How do they solve these needs currently and so on? And here are a few methods that can help you gain empathy and inspiration. Now I want to talk about some of these methods in the context of the two projects that I talked about. So the first example is around, so when we were trying to develop the kitchen assistant for smart displays, we visited a bunch of households and tried to look at the kitchen environments and what are the things that people do in the kitchens beyond the things that we already know. And some of the learnings we had were around, people have hacks to help with the activities that they do in the kitchen. So whether it is finding recipes or watching videos while cooking, whether it is for entertainment or actually following a recipe video, people have placeholders for their phones or tablets, some people even print out their recipes and stick it onto the cupboards. And in some cases people use refrigerators, for example, as places to invoke memories. So they put their souvenirs or their family photographs and so on. So as we were thinking about having an ambient display that's always on, this prompted us to think about how can we make this a more joyful experience where it can invoke memories in people's minds and put a smile on their faces when they're walking around. And the second method is doing, observing people, labs to these co-design sessions. Again, when it comes to the kitchen assistant, one of the things that we did is co-design sessions with members of the household. It was in a typical household, husband, wife, kids. When we did these co-design sessions, it was clear that the preferences and the needs of each household member are so different. So the need for personalization and providing assistance in a very relevant manner to each of the individuals was key. We also realized based on time of the day, if it's a morning versus an afternoon versus evening or weekday versus weekend, the interest would change. So these are all things that really helped us like understand the nuances and the context in a more deeper way. The third thing is using surveys. Again, this is a method that can help you get quantitative data for the priorities and the problems that you might want to address. And this one is like talking to experts and extremes. So when we were trying to design for kids, we all didn't have as much experience working with kids. So what we did is like talk to experts who are well versed in dealing with kids and teaching kids and promoting curiosity and creativity in kids. So the example I'm showing here is a acclimation studio where the teachers encourage kids to create this clay toys and create animation videos with them. So talking to them helped us figure out, you need certain structure and building blocks for the kids to actually build on top of them. And then existing solution analysis. So this is something that a lot of people do which is look at competitors, but then going beyond that and looking at what are the hacks that people have today, how are they solving today can certainly help. So here, as I said, when you're trying to explore a brand new space, there are a lot of possibilities that your team can work on. To give you the context of the kitchen assistant, we identified 30 different needs that people might have in their kitchen context. And one of the frameworks that we used is problem severity to frequency mapping to narrow down to four things that we as a team should solve for. Again, so with a combination of surveys, this sort of frameworks that make sense, we try to narrow it down to the essence of where we should start with. Again, in an ecosystem or some problem spaces, there could be multiple stakeholders. So in the case of on-demand deliveries in the food space, let's say you're a company trying to build solutions for the on-demand delivery companies, you could try to target end-users, you could try to target delivery partners, you could try to target merchants. But doing this mapping of the needs, the strengths and the challenges, it can help you narrow down, taking into account your company's strengths and abilities narrowed down to a specific segment of people. So this product playbook framework is also another very rigorous method to help you narrow down the top priority problems, user problems that you might want to address and taking into account how you might be able to differentiate from your customers, from your competitors, areas where you can leverage your abilities to the best. So taking all these factors into account to distill to the top things that you as a team might want to focus on. And how many of you here are familiar with design sprints? Okay, it looks like a lot of you are. For new like zero to one product development, which is combining everything that you learned from phase one and two and packaging it all together and getting feedback from your customers. So Julie Zhao, she's a VP of design at Facebook and she talks about this phase as defining the people outcomes. So if your product is launched and is widely successful, how does it change people's lives? How does your product fit into people's lives or the society at large? So this is about envisioning and imagining before your product is worked on or built. I'll talk about a few methods that we have used and found helpful. So for YouTube kids, two or three months into the product development, we created this product pitch deck and it was essentially a slide deck with a set of like benefit statements and a set of features that we walked parents across like US, like we talked 10 or so families within US and walk them through the pitch deck. And by the end of these conversations, it was clear like the set of features that we were promising and the features resonate with the family. So we could like with more confidence say and pitch internally as well. And then some teams like for example, write a hypothetical press release ahead of time, right? Like if you were to market your product when it's ready, what would your press release say? And this one is like the hypothetical like app store or play store listing. So if you're building an app for example, what would it look like? How would you describe the core features to your customers? And you can use this to get feedback, early feedback from potential target customers that and ask them, hey, if you were to see this, would you download this app yourself? And even more like you can ask like how much would you pay for it, right? And then this is I think like another interesting technique that you can use which is storytelling and something that as designers, you're like really well equipped to do so. So for YouTube kids, we developed this like product story video. It was a very cheap and dirty exercise that we did of taking like visuals, you know, photoshopping like marks in the images that we have taken of real context and created this like, you know, photo slideshow almost and added a narrative on top of it to talk about, you know, if we were to build this product, like how would it fit in like a regular households family context, right? And what we found surprisingly was this video was circulated within Google probably got like a couple of thousand of views and a lot of the conversation until that point was in documents, listing out the pros and cons and spreadsheets and all of that. And all of a sudden, you know, by creating this almost like a commercial, you shifted the conversation from, you know, documents to something more human, more relatable and everybody got what we are trying to do. So just to recap, these three components of visioning. First is about developing deep empathy for users. Second is exploring possibilities or opportunities and finding the problem solution fit and then packaging it all together to a company offering and getting early feedback from your end users. Now, action without vision is only passing time, right? Like Nelson Mandela said this and vision without action is just daydreaming. When you combine these two, you can really change the world. So I want to talk about the importance of execution, right? Like this is also a very hard part, but having spent now within execution, there are several learnings, but in the interest of time, I'll just stress on two things. First one is about how do you figure out the ideal MVP? And then second is making your hero features shine. So, you know, once you develop this ideal product vision, the phase of like figuring out the MVP is always a very contentious and, you know, discussion among your team. You'll have a lot of like perspectives and heated debates around, oh, this feature should be in, this feature should be out and so on, right? And one of the things that I've learned is there are two perspectives and frames of mind towards approaching like figuring out the MVP. First one is like, you know, a lot of the discussion happens around feasibility. What can you as a team do taking into account like your expertise and abilities that you already have? And the second frame or the other end of the spectrum is desirability, right? What's the user need and what will delight the end users and, you know, what's desired by the end user? So, that's more user centered perspective. And finding the right MVP is always along, or somewhere along the spectrum, but by spending time upfront with visioning and having validated your ideal product, ideal experience, you can shift the conversation to be more, you know, user centered, right? You can start off your conversation with, hey, this is where we want to get to. How can we, you know, work our way backwards rather than, hey, this is what's possible or what's feasible today? What can we do quickly, you know, taking into account where we are? So, with YouTube Kids as well, like there was a lot of interesting debate and discussion around where we start. And we ended up like finding more towards the ideal experience rather than what's feasible, right? And one thing to keep in mind is like a minimum viable product is the smallest solution that creates and delivers a value, meaningful value to your end users and hopefully delights them even. Now, talking about the delight aspect, right? So, one thing that's important is, you know, figuring out what are the hero features in your product experience? Even for an MVP, what are the hero moments? It could be interactions that you, you know, that as an end user would experience on a daily basis or it could be pivotal moments. So, in the case of YouTube Kids, one of our goals was we should leave a smile on Kids face every time they open the app. So, we invested in things like animations or, you know, when you open the app, a splash screen like animates and has sound effects and so on. So, something delightful and something that puts a smile on Kids faces. And there were also like pivotal moments. So, for example, we noticed, you know, parents have a hard time taking off the devices from their kids. So, we introduced this feature called time limits. So, as a parent, you can set a timer and when the timer expires, the device goes to sleep. So, this was a really interesting moment and challenging moment that we have tried to make it seamless and, you know, hopefully avoid the tantrums that that would happen. And then, as I said, like, you know, invest in interactions that the kids might do or like your end users might do on a daily basis. So, we, so we invested in things such as animating the icons, adding sound effects and so on. And then for us, parents were as important as kids in terms of who we were trying to build for. And so, we invested a lot of time and energy into educating parents around the features, the controls they might have so that they could curate the experience to their family values and their kids' abilities and needs. So, just to recap the two aspects that I talked about, first one is starting with desirability and work your way backwards to figure out the MVP. Second is identifying hero features and making them shine. And overall, you know, we talked about visioning and execution. So, just to summarize, this is, you know, a process that I found helpful in zero-to-one development. Again, by no means, this is linear in reality. It's very chaotic, but hopefully, you know, the methods and process that I shared with you today, you'll find it helpful in your own projects as well. And just to end, like, I want to talk about your role as design professionals and UX professionals on incubation projects. I just want to say, like, you know, these projects, even though they might be ambiguous and chaotic, this could be really great learning experiences for you. And, you know, these projects will challenge you in unique ways. And my hope is I've shared, like, at least some helpful tips for you to, you know, take and apply them as you mark on this Janis. And I would say, like, you know, you should be bold to initiate these because it will, you know, help you get better at solving problems. So, yeah, you know, take a leadership stance and go initiate if you have some ideas, go explore them, like, find the right team and act on those.