 Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar by Product School. Today's topic is transitioning from a service to a product culture. My name is Srinu Esthanukula and I'm a product manager at Meta. So before we get started, let me quickly introduce myself. I've been in the product management function for almost seven years now across various industries. After obtaining a bachelor's in electronics engineering from the Perilla Institute of Technology and Science in India and a diploma in business management from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, I went into my first product man instant, building out consumer-facing mobile apps and websites for money control, India's leading investment tracking and multimedia news platform. This allowed me to work on advertising and subscription models while understanding the diverse and disruptive intake landscape. From here, I transitioned to Snapdeal, one of India's leading e-commerce platforms. Here, I built out the next generation of consumer apps with a focus on gamification, greater seller discovery, and machine learning. One of the standards from this tent was the heavy emphasis on data-driven product management, which allowed me to build rigor towards statistical analysis and experimentation. My next tent was with Stiley, an early-stage fast-fashion e-commerce venture in the Middle East. Here, I led B2B product development, building out systems that enable Stiley to procure globally from a diverse manufacturer base at scale, while integrating multiple specialized systems from warehouse management to logistics to ERP, and was my first exposure to the B2B product world. I left Stiley in 2020 to pursue an MBA at Northwestern Scalox School of Management, where I majored in strategy and management sciences, including a heavy exposure to data analysis and statistical modeling. After graduation, I took up my current stint at Facebook, now Meta, to build supply chain products. These stints have given me the opportunity to work in different firms at different stages of their maturity lifecycle, some early-stage. I've been fortunate to contribute towards org-building, and I'm glad to be here today to share from some of my experiences and my learnings. So, let's get started by setting some context as to where this conversation is applicable and relevant. Who is this webinar for? If you're looking to get into product management, this presentation will hopefully help you understand the skill sets and the areas you need to focus on as a product manager. If you're part of a team building software for clients and for users, you might already have or will be considering some of these aspects at an organizational level. In order to get a potential customer to use the product you're building, at its most fundamental level, it needs to solve the customer's problem so much better than the current process and solution that they consider the switching costs justified. Let's say that in order to achieve this, as a young startup, you offer to customize your software to this customer's exact requirements. You do it for the first and the second and the third. You need to put in the same amount of effort each time to onboard a new customer. Scalability is linear. Does this approach make sense when you're catering to 20 small customers as opposed to two large ones? A successful product should provide multiplier scalability value. What I mean by that is that you should be able to onboard more and more customers without linearly escalating costs when it comes to development and maintenance. To do this, the organizational setup as well as the skill sets it hires and the expertise it builds needs to be tailored towards building a successful product, not a service. To begin with, let's look at the resources that these different types of firms look to build. Given the different approaches to execution, service and product firms typically build up different kinds of expertise over time. Let's take a look at this against the backdrop of the different approaches service and product firms take to build products. First, let's talk about service organizations. Service organizations typically have specialized sales and consulting functions that are tailored to cater to specific industries, geographies and functions. The consultant is highly skilled at diving deep into the problem articulated by the customer and in turn working with internal teams to build solutions to cater to them. Whether you're a consultant, project manager or an engineer, you will look to tackle the customer's problem head-on in order to solve it in a highly customized and direct manner. On the other hand, a product company is building a standardized offering that can potentially be used by multiple customers. This requires, amongst other things, a well-defined target market that is ideally large enough for the company to build a sustainable and successful business. Next, defining a clear positioning for your product offerings is critical. You could be looking to provide the cheapest minimalistic offering targeted at smaller businesses. You could be the most innovative, bringing solutions to market that disrupt how the industry solves the current problem. You could be the most sophisticated, offering complex capabilities that are highly relevant only for the largest and most mature target customers. Identifying the right positioning requires market and user research functions, skilled at working with a broad base of potential customers. The intent is to drive towards structured research output. Another critical aspect is developing deep expertise and familiarity with the business model's process and challenges faced by customers in that segment, and in turn leveraging this into knowledge built up inside your organization. When you are a product company, collecting input from 20 to 30 potential customers and shaping that into a common solution is possibly one of the most critical parts of your journey. Lastly, we come to a need to have a mature cross-functional partner ecosystem with clearly defined responsibilities, from research to marketing to account management to deployment to maintenance. Given the shorter research build feedback loops when it comes to services, as compared to research, eye-trade, build, eye-trade, rollout for product development, it is critical that the right functional expertise is being leveraged to drive these various aspects. So as you can see, the combinations of skill sets and expertise required by these two firms is different. And as a product manager, you will play a critical role in identifying these skills and expertise for the organization as a whole. With this background, here's a few steps that product orgs need to take. Some are easier said than done, but a fundamental tenet for delivering successful products is the need to think long-term and deliver a clear vision that all stakeholders can drive towards. Now let's take a look at the various activities you will directly be responsible for as a product manager. The PM plays a critical role in shaping the process towards successfully delivering great products. And the nature of the role could even expect them to get involved in 20 plus different activities at any time. This requires good PMs to be able to switch hats quickly and showcase versatility in picking up on new aspects and skills. Let's dive a little deeper into these various aspects. In order to get started with building a new product, research plays a significant role in ensuring that the right questions are being asked and answered for potential customers. A broad base of potential users being surveyed and interviewed is key. This allows PMs to accurately triangulate on the most critical pain points and dig deeper into them iteratively. It also enables PMs to identify new opportunities that can be taken up in succeeding releases and incrementally drive further value for customers, making the products stickier and the business more successful. Along with studying, mapping, and segmenting customers, understanding the lay of the land on the market side, that is the competition, is critical in ensuring that the biggest white spaces are identified and solved for. This leads into identifying the right positioning for the product, which I touched upon earlier. Once you have a good idea of why you're building a product, who you're building it for, what problem you're solving, and the manner you're solving it in, you get into execution. All the groundwork done so far feeds into executing in the right manner and bringing the product vision to reality. This requires close collaboration with research, design, data science, engineering, and sales functions to ensure that the right combination of inputs and trade-offs are being constant. Next, we come to pricing. As a product manager, you will work cross-functionally to leverage your financial modeling and competitive analysis to identify the right pricing for your product. There's more factors that go in that we won't have the time to cover today, but the right pricing is critical in ensuring that you set your product up for traction, subscription, and effective retention, ensuring that your business is viable and successful. Coming to the last point, as you go through these various activities that I've just covered as a product manager, you are uniquely positioned to have a 360-degree perspective on all of them. This gives you the ability to refine the approach inherent to these activities and set standard operating procedures that enable your org to grow and mature together, thereby building greater cohesiveness and effectiveness over time. Next, I'd like to spend a minute double-clicking into the research phase and its criticality in ensuring success. As you get into building a SaaS product, it is important that you are able to gather all the relevant insights possible across the landscape in order to ensure that you have complete visibility into deciding what to build. We can break this into three areas. The first, strategy input. Where is our product now? Where do we want it to go over the next few years? Does this direction align well with our capabilities and our key investments and access to the market? These are some of the questions that you would look to answer. The second is market research. What are our competitors doing? How are we positioned to achieve our goals as compared to the competition? How saturated are different parts of the market? Is there a segment that's undergated to? The last bucket is user research. What are potential users looking for? Are there any trends you can observe that apply to your potential customer base at large? Given today's market dynamics, do they foresee any challenges becoming more and more visible in the near future? This brings us to our last section, balancing product extensibility with customer delight. Let's say a client comes to you with a problem that needs solving. Let's say the first bar on the slide represents the client's problem. You work with the client to ask direct questions, understand their pain points, create detailed requirements for the solution, and then go and build it. When the next client comes to you, you do it again, the second bar. Note that the problem for this client is different. And again, and so on. This refers back to the service lifecycle I spoke about earlier. Another key outtake here is that this translates to a simplified interpretation of product management 101. Identify a clear customer segment and pain point and solve for that really well. However, this does not translate directly to product development for SaaS. You'd rather solve a pain point reasonably well for lots of customers. How well? As I referred to earlier, it needs to be good enough that they consider it worth the effort of onboarding onto the product beyond just paying for it. Let's look at another scenario here. Let's say you want to build a CRM that works for hospitality and for retail. Different businesses, marketing channels, partner ecosystems, unit economics. How would you do it? Will you research one hospitality provider alone or multiple hospitality and retail providers? Once you have an idea of what you want to solve for, set clear goals. What is the objective of your product? Solve a particular pain point. How do you quantify it? User acquisition, retention, churn. As you achieve success with each release of your product, you might identify opportunities to build out more modules and capabilities. However, you want to provide your customers the flexibility of picking the modules they want to use. Extensibility and modularity of these capabilities is critical to ensuring that your product can be shaped quickly to deliver the specific value a customer needs. And therefore, it gives you more flexibility when selecting the potential customers. Let's go back to that earlier CRM example. Let's say you built it out and you go to a company which has an existing CRM and is not convinced it wants to switch providers. However, your offering also provides auto management and fulfillment modules in addition to payments processing. This potential customer could purchase your OMS and payments capabilities in spite of not being interested in your core CRM offering. They could also find value in the overall seamlessness of your product portfolio and the tight integrations and swap out their current CRM and payments providers for your overall offering. Either way, the differentiated value you bring to the table gives you an edge in selling. And at the same time, it allows you to do so successfully without a proportional increase in development efforts and costs. And that leads nicely into my last point. When building out a SaaS product portfolio, building extensibility and versatility into your products is a powerful means of enabling scalability by platformizing capabilities so that different systems and modules can be set up to quickly talk to each other. Seamlessly, it has two benefits. First, it reduces barriers to onboarding for your customers. Two, it reduces the customer custom implementation efforts by your engineers and implementation partners, thereby ensuring quicker tunneling. That wraps up my talk for today. I hope all of you found it useful to attend this webinar and it gives you more perspective on what is required from successful product organizations and their product managers. Thank you.