 алеו, everyone, welcome to our session about co-principles in product management. So a little about me, my name is Asaf Al-Tagar I first started my professional journey as a software developer. After several years I moved into product and I've been doing product management for almost nine years now. During those years I had the privilege to work with product teams of various sizes קורס מולטיפל אינדסטריסט, כמו גיימינג, עד טק וסיברסקיוטי. עכשיו אני חלט של סלספורסט, פוקוסים על סרוויסט קלארד פרודקטים וסרוויסטים. אני כבר מנסה מה אנחנו לא מבחינים היום, אנחנו לא נדפין על סלספורסט פרודקט, ולא נדפין על הדברים שבארד פרודקטים. However, in this talk, we'll review what I consider to be the backbone of any product manager, and it is my personal belief that defining such professional principles promotes better structure, understanding of the role, and helps us be better product managers no matter the product or company. Okay, let's get started. So we are going to cover seven core principles today. The first principle is knowing you who your customer is, the point where it all starts, your goals, your efforts in your business, are arguably the most important principle. Without this, your chances of success are slim. We'll talk about various aspects of customers, and what it means to be really familiar with them. Our second principle, understand the challenge. See, you can only bring value where there is a struggle, a challenge. It can be a minor inconvenience or a real pain. Whatever it is, you need to understand what, where, and when your customers experience a challenge. We'll deep dive into two important aspects of recognizing challenges. Third is being very familiar with the market. So the market is all your customers and how they consume your service. The market are other commercial products that address the same challenge, and the market are all the other alternative solutions that your target customer can leverage. We'll discuss how this plays a role in keeping a competitive edge in the market. Number four, be a product expert. So as a product manager, you are the representative of your product in the organization, and you are expected to know your product inside and out, where it excels and where it falls short. We'll talk about what we need to pay attention to. The fifth principle is collaborating with the organization. Now, to be an effective product manager, you need to pay attention. You need to learn. Otherwise, you are risking the contribution you want to bring to the organization. So we'll cover what it means and how product managers should be playing with the team. Standing behind our plan, this is our sixth principle. So your product manager needs to maximize the impact so the organization can be successful in the market. To do that, it needs to make the people around believe that they are working on the right things. So the ability to stand behind decisions is critical to create trust. And we'll talk about the different aspects of the plan. Now, our last, but definitely not least principle is measuring progress. This is not optional. It's a must. Nobody wants to trade water. And we'll discuss what you'd want to keep track on and how to measure progress. Okay, so before we'll dive into each, I want to mention, these are not all or nothing principles. You may find that you are, that you align more or less with them. And for this talk, at least one of the main objectives is calling them out. And for you to decide where you want or need to invest your attention. Let's get started. Okay, our first principle. Know who your customer is. As a product manager, you are expected to know who is and who isn't your customer. I divided knowing customers to three aspects. First, objectives. Knowing what are the customer objectives or what is it that they are trying to do is critical if you want to plan a solution for them. Second, our customer segments. Understanding how your customers split into different groups or segments. And the third one, our customer needs, which are what the customer requires to obtain its objectives and be satisfied while doing it. I'll explain. So customer objectives. Now, what's your objective? So customer objectives. Now, what's important to keep in mind about objectives is that they can be framed at various levels. To really know your customer, to really make something they found value in, you need to get as granular as possible. And be able to flesh out exactly the thing that they are looking to accomplish. With that, different customers may have different constraints or might be making different considerations when they go after their objectives. So these groups of customers are your customer segments. Each segment is somewhat different and you'll need to make decisions as each segment will have different needs. Now customers will mostly adopt products that are giving them more value or satisfying more of their needs. These needs guide us to what we should be building. And if we want to address the right set of needs or expectations, customers will have a harder time to find value. So understanding how customers prioritize their needs and which are unmet today helps us make a better plan. Okay, knowing your customers is the first step, but there is little you can do if you don't fully understand where they are experiencing difficulties. Bring us to our second principle. As a product manager, you are expected to understand what your customers are struggling with. Two things are important to keep in mind when thinking about challenges our customers face. They always manifest in a specific situation and there are specific aspects, steps or points in that situation that creates the challenge. We call those pain points. So let's look a little closer. For example, let's say I'm hungry, but my fridge is full of food. I can take some ingredients and cook something. In this case, I might be challenged by making my cooking tasty. On another hand, let's take another situation, similar but different. I'm hungry, but my fridge is completely empty. The grocery store actually closes in five minutes and I can't go out and buy anything. That prevents me from cooking anything for myself. All of a sudden, it's a different challenge. In both situations, my objective was getting something to eat, but my challenge was different in each situation. So when thinking about your customers and the challenge that they face, think about the situations they are in. It will allow you to better identify the real pain points. Also, in case our customers have multiple challenges, we need to determine which we want to address. It's important that we ask the following questions. How many times are our customers finding themselves in those situations? Is it something that they run into on a regular basis? Or is it something that happens every now and then? Realizing this helps us determine if it's a challenge worth solving. Now, after we determined what are the situations our customers keep finding themselves in, we can get better understanding into why they find those situations challenging, meaning we can start identifying their pain points. Now, not all pain points are equivalent. Pain points vary in the level of discomfort that they generate for customers. And how often they appear. Also, not all customers have the same pain points. This is definitely an option where some group of customers are not satisfied because they face this and that, where another group of customers are not satisfied because they face something different. When thinking of which pain points to address, consider to which group it's an actual pain point. So definitely do your best to understand your customer's challenge. Okay. Before we move on to our next principle, it's important to remember. Product managers don't live in a vacuum and our customers are not waiting for us to address their challenges, which makes it very important to be familiar with what's already available for them. Bringing us to our third principle, which is be very familiar with the market. See, as a product manager, you are expected to know how customers are addressing their challenge today and what's available to them. Specifically, what alternative solutions they could use, which commercially available services are out there and whether customers are adopting new ways to consume services. Let's look a little closer. So what do I mean by alternative solutions? See, at first, customers will most likely look for solutions that help them achieve what they want while accepting that those may not be the best fit to what they need. At that stage, they will look for anything that helps them make progress. In the case there are no alternative solutions to their challenge or those that do exist don't actually address their top concerns or pains, they will search for other solutions, probably commercial ones. Those are your direct competitors. Now, an important thing to keep in mind about competitors is that they don't necessarily need to have a similar service as you do. It's enough that they decided to solve the same challenge you are solving and approach the same customer groups that you are targeting. In order to win customers over, making them adopt your service over alternative solutions or competitor products, product managers must find ways to differentiate their service. That differentiation can manifest by a certain capability making your service more useful than other solutions. The third piece is all about what's going on in your customer's world. Questions like how do customers interface with their services? Is addressing the challenge became harder or easier? A great example for the first question might be the shift to mobile. See, organizations that recognize that people are migrating to mobile had an opportunity to position their product within that paradigm allowing customers to leverage their service faster faster than the competition that didn't migrate to mobile. An example to the second question might be the need for restaurants to offer delivery service during the pandemic giving how customers' habits have changed restaurants needed to adopt their service. So keep an eye for changes in your market. Now, once you are familiar with your customers, their challenges, what's available out there, you are in a great spot to make better product decisions. But there is still a very, very important thing we need to master. That is the product that's already available to customers. Principle number four be an expert in your current product offering. See, as a product manager, the organization will approach you for product related questions. Those questions may come from salespeople trying to understand if the product currently supports the requirements of a prospect they are talking with. And it may come from support trying to understand if a customer claim is a product issue or working as expected. Whatever the case may be, expect questions to reach your inbox. But getting a high level understanding is just the first step. If you want to build the right thing, you will want to get closer to those pillars. So supported use cases are ways your product or service can be used to address a need a customer has. No matter the product, it has some functionality that enables the customer to do certain things. All those things can be achieved with your product. All those things are considered supported use cases. This is very significant. Eventually, customers use your service because it enables them to do something. So understand what can be achieved with the current capabilities is paramount. Also, people in the organization will probably not have the same know-how as you do as a product manager. So making sure you can answer questions regarding where and where not to use the product is very useful. Now as long customers use your product in a way but if not, the customer is witnessing a gap between what the product enables it to do and what it really needs it for. Those might be functional gaps or simply technical limitations of the service. So knowing your product is critical if you want to plan ahead and build a good roadmap for it. It's speaking about building a product plan. Let's continue to our next principle which is vital for us to have in order to build a great plan. Principle number five. Collaborating with the organization. See, as a product manager, you need to work with the organization. This can't be stressed enough. Whether you learn from or educate others, always remember you are a part of a broader team. First thing to keep in mind, your organization is leveraging multiple teams. Each is supporting customers in a different way. Each sees a different aspect of the customer journey and don't ever underestimate the knowledge collected by those teams. It's super important. Your service is a lot more than exactly what the customer can do with it. It's how you sell it. It's how you position it. It's how you support it. And it's how you are making customers successful by using it. Those people, those teams are key to make better product management decisions. Let's say you are considering developing a new product capability. Most chances you'd like some customer feedback before committing to something that might miss the mark without real value. So you'd want to reach out to customers. Now, most chances you don't have many active customer connections or need to approach someone that you are not in contact with. In this case, your customer success team will want to help you. After all, they are trying to bring more value to their customers. This is one way there are many that you can pull information into the product team. And there is a flip side to it. It's when you as a product manager support teams around the organization. You may want to make sales teams aware of a shiny new capability to bring up during their conversations. And it may be a new way the product can be used which is relevant to the customer success teams. Whatever the case is, you as a product manager are always working with the organization. Now we covered significant grounds. We are familiar with our customers, their struggles, the way that they are addressing it today. We know how our service works and also collected insights from people around the organization. Now we need to pave the way forward and build a plan. Principle number six. Standing behind our plans. See as a product manager you are expected to build a product plan. You should also expect your plan to be challenged. In such cases you want to make sure that the rationale you used is solid and you can communicate that to others. Make them trust your decisions. A plan may consist of many considerations. No matter which considerations you are making these three aspects of your plan should be top of mind. The value you are delivering, the business opportunity it captures and what needs to happen before what. Okay, but what do those really mean? So it all starts with what will now be possible for customers. This is a representation of the value you are about to bring to the market. If there is no customer value it will be hard to capture any business opportunity. Now there are situations where not every single customer will benefit from the functionality you are going to roll out and if I'm relying on experience this is the case most of the times. But whether the new or updated whatever the new or updated functionality may be you need to know exactly who will find it useful. Only then you can start assess the business impact that it's expected to generate. Sometimes you will try to approach a new customer segment and sometimes you will improve the benefits for an already served segment. Let's say you are approaching a new customer segment. Say a group of customers that did not find your service valuable before it can do X, Y or Z. If those were available these customers would have bought your service and could become substantial to your business. On the other hand if you improve the benefits to your existing customer base you can expect to retain customers longer and reduce churn. Now the third aspect you must pay attention to are your priorities. In most cases your team won't be able to deliver all your product requests fast enough. They will need to understand what they should work on first and you need to understand what they should you need to understand what they should work on first. It goes all the way back to the value you want to roll out to the market. So as a product manager you are building a plan and you definitely need to stand behind it. Now it's time to measure the impact that plan generated. So moving on to our last principle of the session measuring progress. It's our last but not least principle. See as a product manager you want to track how your plan improved the business. It may be because you improved the customer experience which made them use the product more. It may be because you added new functionality that made the service more useful and it may be that more customers are interested in purchasing your service because you approached a new segment. The first thing you need to establish the first thing you need to watch for are the ways customers measure value. Putting this into a form of a question. So your customer just paid $100 for a monthly subscription. Now what does it get for those $100? What is the customer's indication of value? Defining the ways customers measure value generates a virtual bullseye for product managers allowing them to know what they should improve we should watch for two main aspects of value the value gained by the one that paid for the service and the value gained by the one that actually uses the service those might be the same person let's say you are selling a product direct to an end customer in B2C products that is the case and the end user and the buyer are the same and the end user and the buyer are the same in other models like if you are selling to a business that person that paid for the service will probably not be the person that uses it and more you can find that you have multiple types of end users so be able to verify that you improve the value each of those see from your product is critical now the second thing to keep an eye for is the way customers are top to service sometimes customers may purchase the product but not engage with it maybe they installed it but are they really leveraging the value it delivers if this isn't monitored you can find yourself with a product that sells well but is not retaining customers and it's hard to grow the business when customers churn at high rates the third and last aspect of measuring progress has everything to do with business you want to keep an eye on the revenue your product reels in the amount of customers interested in acquiring the service and of course the amount of customers that stopped paying for the service when you think about measuring your progress think about those three aspects okay this was this was our last core principle so let's recap as product managers we need to know who our customers are we need to understand the challenge our customers face we need to be very familiar with what solutions they can leverage we must become an expert of our product offering of our current offering we need to collaborate with the organization we make a plan and stand behind it when it's challenged and we are measuring the progress we achieved these are my core product management principles and I hope that you will understand and I hope that they helped bringing more structure to your role as a PM this also concludes our session for today and with that I'm going to wrap up this session I want to thank you for letting me present stay safe and be well