 Hello. Thanks everyone for joining today's webinar on frameworks to Excel as a product manager. Before we jump into today's topic, a bit of a background about my journey. I started my career as a technology consultant with Accenture in 2008. During the next five years, I learned a lot about IT services, consulting, and working with clients. My next job was at Amazon in 2014. Although a short stand, I learned a lot about systems complexity and large-scale systems. I moved to the Bay Area in 2015 for Uber, and it was truly a rocket ship back then. I was fortunate enough to transition into product management, and during the four years that I was there, I got to work on different problem areas ranging from leasing and rentals, new market entry, and platform product management. Those four years were truly the most rewarding and enriching years of my career. During the COVID era, I switched a couple of jobs, and currently I'm a product lead at Stripe supporting financial data and the infrastructure team. Now let's talk about what are the traits of a successful product manager. There was a famous article published by Andreessen Horowitz back in 2015 that titled Good PM and Bad PM. It details what are the traits of a good product manager and how does it differentiate from a bad product manager. The first one being good PMs know their market product and competition really well. They take full responsibility of their deliverables and measure their own success in terms of the success of the product. Good PMs create and execute against a well-thought-out winning plan. Good product managers manage their time really well and ensure products are shipped on time. They focus their team's effort on customers and driving value in terms of market share and revenue rather than turning their team into a shift factory. Good PMs create leverageable documents, presentations, and take written positions on important issues. Lastly, they bring clarity, clearly convey their plans and follow through. I resonate a lot with these traits and let's translate them into PM skills that a PM needs to develop in order to be successful. The first one being product sense. Product sense is really the ability to navigate an ambiguous space through the lens of the user and solve their pain points. The next is execution and ability of the PMs to collaborate, communicate, and get things done. Simply said, execution is really the ability to ship products and get things done. Analytics, this is the ability to leverage data and make informed decisions. Communication is a key skill required at every level of product management. It is your ability to clearly convey and influence decisions. Leadership, a lot of PMs don't have people reporting into them while they are responsible for the overall delivery. Leadership in this context refers to the ability to influence others on your team without any authority. If you are managing other people, it also refers to the ability to coach and mentor others. The next is business acumen. This is understanding the commercial side of your product and lastly, strategy. Now, as I mentioned, these are all the PM skills that one needs to excel in their career. For today's session, we'll focus on strategy and discuss some of the frameworks required and discuss some of the frameworks that can help you get better with strategy. The future sessions of this webinar will focus on rest of the PM skills. What is strategy? Well, a strategy is a high-level plan about making explicit choices that will help you win in the marketplace. It starts with a clear vision and then goes on to define specific aspects around competition, customers, your go-to-market strategy, the markets to go after, and other aspects. So to recap, a strategy is nothing but a high-level plan about explicit choices that you would make in order to win in the marketplace. There are multiple different frameworks that one can use to define product strategies and we'll deep dive into some of them. The first one being product vision board. This was popularized by Roman Pitchler. It helps you visualize and validate your vision and define strategy. It consists of nine different aspects. The first one being vision. This is basically what is the purpose you're creating the product for? What changes would it bring about? Second, who are your target users? What are the market segments? And what is the total size of your user base? What are the problems you envision to solve with your product? And what is the unique value proposition? What is the differentiation in your product as compared to your competitors? What is the value that your product or service would bring to the company? Essentially, why should the company invest in this specific area? Who are your main competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How would you monetize your product? What are the different cost factors that may influence the pricing of your product? And lastly, what would be a go-to-market strategy for the product or service? This is product vision board is a handy tool that one can use to brainstorm with the working group and come up with the product strategy. The next one is playing to win. This was developed by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of PNG and Roger Martin. It consists of five different aspects. The first one is purpose. What is your guiding aspiration similar to the vision from previous framework? The second is strategic choices, also referred to where to compete. What are the market segments you are gonna compete in? Who are your customer groups? What geographies and product categories do you wanna go after? The third is value proposition. This is how would you win? What is it that you would build different as compared to your competitors and what unique value proposition would you offer? The fourth is capabilities that you need to enable in your organizations. And lastly, processes, metrics and structures that you need to put into place to support your choices. A third model, which is popular enough is the DHM model proposed by Gibson Biddle, XVP of product and Netflix. And it focuses on three specific questions. The first one being D, how would you delight your customers? H, what will make the product hard to copy? It's a, and lastly M, what business model experiments are required to build a profitable business? The answers to these three specific questions would then in turn inform the strategies or hypotheses that you can build along these dimensions in order to test them out. And the next step, once you have these hypotheses that you've identified or your strategic choices that you've identified, you would then turn them into a product roadmap and define metrics to measure the success of each of these strategies. Sounds good? And the last one is V2MOM framework. This has been popularized by Mark Benioff, the chairman of Salesforce. Most of the aspects of this framework are very similar to the previous framework in addition to one other aspect, which is values. Values are specifically guiding principles and beliefs that would help drive decision-making and principles as you define a strategy. Now, we looked at four different frameworks. Each of them have their own flavors and nuances and there isn't one size fits all that you can use. My recommendation would be to use a framework that solves the problem for you. There are few key sections that I personally like to include in my strategy document. The first one being vision. As you would have noticed in most of the frameworks, this is a key aspect that is included in every strategy framework. A vision is nothing but a desired end state and the impact it aims to achieve. The second is opportunity size. You can define in terms of revenue or the market demand your product or service would help you capture. Third being the target customers or users of your product or service. Fourth, who are your competitors? What are their strengths and what are their weaknesses? Section five and six are really key sections which you should spend a ton of time on while drafting your product strategy. Five is value proposition and differentiation. This is where you would identify unique qualities and features that you need to build to differentiate your products as compared to the competition as well as value proposition that you would deliver to the users. It can be in terms of performance, brand, quality, experience or any other value. Section six is really, how do you take the value proposition from previous step and build a high level plan of 12 to 18 months around the big rocks and the main priorities. The next section is impact to the business. This is your case as to why the company should invest in this product strategy and proposal. How would you, the next is how would you measure the success? And lastly, call out any risk or trade-offs that you need to make in order for your product strategy to be successful. So really, nine key sections to include vision, size, users, competition, value proposition, future state, impact to business, metrics, risk and trade-off. To recap, strategy is all about making choices to focus on few areas from a wide range of possibilities. It is a team activity and you can follow these high level steps in order to come up with a product strategy. The first step is preparation. Anytime you've been tasked with the drafting of strategy for your team or your area, bring together a working group that should typically consist of engineering, product, data science, research, design and operations. You should not build your strategy in isolation. The next step is gathering insights. A lot of data and insights might already exist at your company. So as part of this step, you should extract all of the existing literature and insights that have been gathered in the company around customer competition and existing behavioral data and try to summarize them into key insights. The next step is really synthesizing the insights from the previous step and coming up with strategic options which the working group needs to align on and propose to the next group. As next step for each of these strategic choices that you've agreed upon in step three, generate high level concepts in terms of mockups or design that would help better explain what this would look like. This is a key step because the output from this step would help you get bind from leadership and cross-functional teams as your strategy is formulating. And lastly, you should finalize all of this into a crisp document with nine sections that we referred to in the previous slide and clearly call out the de-prioritized areas in the future step. Cool. How can one get better at strategy? Like any other skill, you can learn and get better at the skill. Some of the things that I propose that can help you get better at strategy are read more strategy books. Competitive strategy is one of the most respected book in this space and I would advise everyone to go through it. Read old strategy documents and presentations in your company. Build a point of view based on your reading. Listen to podcasts that are focused on strategy like Invest Like the Best and McKinsey podcast. Volunteer to help your leadership team with the next product planning cycle. This would help you get a front row seat to how your company plans and thinks through priorities and makes trade-off calls. Attend product strategy reviews and perform product hair downs with your peers. Lastly, practice drafting strategy for product areas. Pick up a product area, something that is at work or outside of work and seek feedback from mentors or colleagues you think are good with strategies. That's all for today's session. Thanks.