 Good morning, incredibly grateful to be here today to be a part of that community and talk about metrics that matter. How we all, as product leaders, managers, like better, we can be agile, can't we? Now I have two hands and I'd like to talk with my hands, but we'll make that work. So we're going to talk today about metrics that matter. How do we, as product managers, as product leaders, bridge the gap between what our users need and what our boards expect from us for success? Before I jump into the meat of the presentation, I'm going to talk a little bit about my career journey and why this is a topic I'm so passionate about. Like probably many of you, I started off my career as a software engineer. This was almost 30 years ago and a time where product management as a role was not that common. And when I think about what I loved most about my job, it was being on the whiteboard, collaborating, solving a business problem, not so much about going back to my desk and the craft of writing software. And so that began my journey into product management. And I had the good fortune of learning a lot through a lot of different types of companies. One of the companies had a successful exit to SS&C Corporation. One of them, Encino, where I was the Chief Product Officer, had a successful IPO in July 2020, which is how I ended up at Pendo as the CPO. But in addition to my role at Pendo, I sit on two boards. One is a private board company, Lendio, and another is a publicly traded SaaS company called Dochebo. And so through this set of experiences, I've been constantly thinking about what is it that I should be presenting to my board for success? And for the boards that I sit on, what are the things I'd want to see that I look to see from the product teams to ensure we're successful? And to me, it's not a whole lot of metrics. It's really one metric, right? It comes down to one thing. Are we giving our investors a return on investment? Sounds pretty simple, but pretty hard to achieve. Typically in board decks, I see this look something like one or two slides. Just a pretty simple list of products, amount invested to date, typically revenue associated with them. Maybe another slide around percentage of overall R&D by product this quarter or for the year. But some basic multi-product reporting, that's a pretty simple slide to put together. But how do we actually drive the success and get the ROI? Is what we're going to spend time on today in a couple strategies. And I think it really comes down to focusing on outcomes, not outputs. We as product people love to celebrate the launch of a new feature, of a new product. It's fun and exciting, but the real success comes not from the output, not from the launch. When we start to get revenue, when we improve retention, when we delight our users. And those outcomes are what drive ROI. Let's talk about two different products that we all know. One that focused on outputs and one that focused on outcomes. Raise your hand if you bought a Google Glass and you still use it regularly. Okay, that's what I thought, nobody. But there was a lot of fanfare and excitement if you remember around the time of Google Glass. They were very excited about the output. But I'm pretty sure that is not an example of one of the products that got a return on investment. Let's take a different product. How many of you use regularly a Roomba to clean your floors? Yeah, pretty big percentage of you. And one of the things that iRobot did with the Roomba that I think is really interesting is yes, they launched their product, they had success, they had revenue. But they focused on more than just the revenue. They had a hypothesis where they knew if they could get really great use of their mobile application, just how people interact with the Roomba, that they would get stickiness, customers for life. And so they relentlessly measured how people use that mobile app, where they were stuck. And they did it in a very engineering efficient way. They were focused on outcomes, not outputs. The other big difference in those two products is one solved real customer pain. One was a pain killer and one was a vitamin. And that's an important part of getting a return on investment. So three strategies to really focus on this return on investment. The first is getting back to basics, starting with your why. Making sure you have a business case every single time you're doing an investment. Whether this is a new feature, a major new product, you're starting a company, make a business case. Who's your target audience? Who's your ICP? What pain is it addressing? Make sure it's a pain killer, not a vitamin. And what are your desired outcomes? Be specific in your desired outcomes. Is it around revenue growth? Is it around mitigating risk? Is it around driving retention? Is it around saving costs? Know what those desired outcomes are. But you've got to have a differentiated point of view. When Henry Ford created the car, no one asked him to create a car. They were looking for faster horses. They were looking for better ways to get from point A to point B. But he came up with a car. And so you've got to have an innovative solution, a differentiated solution from other choices that your customers have to be successful. But when you innovate and you differentiate, it's easy to let your ideas get away from you. And you've got to stay close to the customer. Utilize those frameworks that we all know. Understand the job to be done. Think about what is the market? What are your customers going to say about you when you do launch through the working backwards method? But then it's great. You've got an idea. You've validated in the market. Execution comes down to ruthless prioritization. Ruthless prioritization. And that means you've got to constantly be validating your ideas at the micro level with your customers. When Henry Ford created that car, I'm pretty sure every bell and whistle was not on it the first time that he created it. I doubt there was Bluetooth. Okay, I'm just kidding, of course, there was no Bluetooth. But you get the point, right? Like you can't have every bell and whistle comes down to ruthlessly prioritizing what's really going to drive value for your users at the time. And so then second strategy, we've talked about your why you are what you measure. And so we've talked about ROI as the ultimate measure, but pretty much every single one of these measurements in orange are lagging indicators. Of course, they're an important part of that return on investment. They're an important part of your why and your desired outcome. Maybe you're trying to drive revenue growth. You're trying to improve gross margin. But it takes a while in product before you can tell if your efforts are driving those lagging indicators. So what are the leading indicators that we can all measure to stay on top of on a regular basis to see if we're driving the outcomes that we want? And so the way I tend to sort of group and think about these in an easy fashion, these items in blue around leading indicators are, am I getting more and more users? Are my users that I have coming back with frequency? Are they getting enough value from my product when they come to come back again and come back again? And with what frequency? And then are they using the features that matter? Okay, maybe that's every feature or maybe it's the features based on their persona that matter most. Are they able to get their job done? It's not about are they in your application for a really long time. Nobody wants to use software for a really long time. They want to get in, they want to get out, they want to get their job done and move on to the next thing in their day. So are they able to complete workflows and get value? Those are the leading indicators that drive the lagging indicators that drive ROI. In the end, our users are people and they have feelings. And you have to measure those too. Now, I know there's a lot of discussion in our communities around MPS and CSAT and SAS scores and whether they're valuable. I like most people don't think they're valuable on their own, but I do think people have feelings and they're an important piece of the puzzle to understand how they're impacting the product. And then I think it requires one step deeper level of inspection, being able to watch your users in action and being able to do that at scale, being able to see how they're interacting with your product, how they're using it, where they're getting stuck, getting that true empathy for how they're utilizing your product. Well, it's great. We've got quantitative data. We've got qualitative data. We've got a deeper level of empathy and inspection. But what the heck do we do with it? How do we turn this data into outcomes? Well, the first and sort of obvious action we can take from the data is to align our R&D investment, to change our roadmap, to make sure that we're building things that continue to drive our success. But the second we often forget about is product people, which is creating campaigns. It is not field of dreams. And if you build it, they will not come. You have to help them understand why they should use features, that those features are there. And so understand your outcome that you're trying to drive. For example, let's say we're trying to improve retention. Pick out which of your features you believe from a hypothesis are going to drive retention, and then which of your users you need to adopt that feature. And then take action. Is that email? Is that text? Is that in-app messaging? What are the ways you can reach your users, those users that matter for these particular features, to get adoption of them? And this requires experimentation. Nobody gets this right on the first try. You have to try things, try them again. And if you're going to be experimenting, it takes constant measurement of those leading indicators that we were talking about. What worked? What didn't work? Try it again. You use text, try email. You used in-app communication. Well, guess what? In-app messaging doesn't work if the users aren't logging in. You have to reach your users where you are. Maybe your hypothesis of which features drive retention isn't working. Pick a different feature. This experimentation and constant tracking of progress is important. And I don't think I can have a conversation with a product community right now if we don't talk about AI. So how do we think about AI in terms of helping you get a return on investment? I think about AI in two broad categories. One is how we as product managers, product teams, should incorporate AI into the features in our products. And the second is how do we use AI in our day-to-day life to improve our craft and be more productive? So either way you're thinking about it, whether you're thinking about it in terms of what you build or how you build, AI should provide an insight that would be really difficult for you to find without it. So for example, we talked about MPS, MPS verbatims. Great example of a place to use AI to summarize all of your data and see the themes. Same for your enhancement requests, right? And then the other way is to automate a workflow to save you time, right? We all as product managers are overloaded. There are too many things to do in a day. So where can you use AI to automate a workflow for you? What is some kind of suggestion that it can make to help you save time and free you up to deliver value? To get back to spending more time with your customers, to prioritizing to those business cases, to tracking your experimentation, instead of pouring through thousands and thousands of verbatims of your MPS, right? Great examples of ways to use AI for our daily lives, but put those same concepts into the features that you're trying to build to deliver to your customers. So today we've talked about three key strategies to drive ROI. We've talked about starting with your why and staying close to your customer, making sure you're driving value, making sure you're a painkiller, not a vitamin, and that you're differentiating with an innovative solution. We've talked about measuring what matters, leading indicators, not lagging indicators, and constant experimentation to drive action, right? Using that data to take action to drive your outcomes. I want to finish this morning with another story of toast. We all know toast. Very successful IPO, arguably probably one of the most successful vertical SaaS IPOs, had an IPO in 2021. And it's just another great example similar to the Roomba of a company relentlessly focused on outcomes and providing a great return on investment for their investors. So what did they do? They had a foundational product that was great. They relentlessly focused on their customers, they provided real value, and they used that first product as a platform, as a foundational layer. And they executed pretty flawlessly on this layer cake concept, the second product, third product. They had different personas for the product. They had restaurant-facing software. They had customer-facing software. And they figured out every single time, starting with the business case, starting with the why, how to continue to deliver significant value to be real painkiller. And they drove outcomes for their company. And so I think that's just a good reminder and a lesson for all of us as product leaders. So thank you all for having me today. Thank you to Product School for putting on this amazing conference. And I hope you all enjoy your day. If you have any questions for me at the breaks, I'll be back there at the Pendo booth and I'll be happy to meet up with any of you. Thank you.