 Okay, let's get started. Hello, everyone. Thanks for attending this webinar through Product School. Today, I'm gonna take you through a common topic when coaching product managers. How to go from entry level to kick-ass or great product management. I'm Greg Hartrell, a product director at Google. I've led product lines on Android and Google Play for the past nine years. I've practiced product management for nearly 20 years now. My past includes being the PM lead for the backbone of Xbox Live and the Xbox 360. And I've been the PM leader on several platforms and online consumer products across startups, mid cap and big tech companies. And I was even a white hat hacker early in my career. Shout out to the reverse engineering community. Let me also quickly thank Product School for this airtime. I hope this talk can help the PM community build perspective on their career pursuits. Let's get into this core question. It comes up often. It's my most read core post and a common theme across my mentees. I've had the good fortune to have interviewed, hired and worked with hundreds of product managers. And I wanted to offer perspective on what great looks like. It's certain that the motivating factor behind this question is career growth. Though there's data that sheds light on why I believe product managers implicitly seek out answers to this question. The first is most businesses report themselves as being product led or product first. Take this recent study from Product School where over 73% of C-suite respondents describe their companies as product led now. This alludes to the increased demand for good product management across the world as consumer enterprise and platform products have to meet ever changing landscapes of technology and the increasing taste of consumers for simplicity, utility and convenience. This is all juxtaposed though with what we know about the success rate of products. Namely, a lot of products are likely to fail. There's a lot of variability in studies that I've seen out there, but here's a few sources that support this notion. Across several studies aggregated by failure, we can gather that somewhere between 40 to 75% of products fail commercially. Additionally, we know that somewhere around 90% of startups and even 75% of VC-backed startups will fail to get traction. There's a multitude of reasons for this and the top ones range from lack of product market fit to poor team dynamics and even ineffective marketing. Regardless of the reasons, every successful product boils down to you knowing how to bring people together to make a great product and then telling everybody about it. Which brings us to this question to improve the odds of making great products that help people in their everyday lives. We need great product managers. So today, I'll elaborate on the topic and hopefully I can give you some perspective on where you can grow and improve. Now, before I get into finding the next gear, we need to sense check the basics. You need to nail these basic skills down to be more effective later. Some will ignore these at their peril and in my opinion, you can't be great without this foundation. So let me start with execution excellence. In other words, going through the product development lifecycle should be second nature to you. In software, that means a mastery of the software development lifecycle, understanding the methods of agile and even waterfall. In hardware, that's all the phases and understanding the tips and traps from proof to concept, DDT, EDT, all the way into volume production. Within all this is working effectively with engineering, design and other functions to navigate all those trips and traps. A common question I get at this stage is what level of technical knowledge do I need to be great at execution? My answer is you need to have enough to be credible. An engineering background can definitely help, but I see more and more product managers to be effective drawing from design, consulting and analyst backgrounds as well. The second basic skill I'll call solution design. This is about homing your product instincts to come up with a product that delivers for and delights a customer. Skills here are building day-to-day understanding of users, market and user experience research, prototyping and just generally building empathy for any user's needs. This also means being great at conveying what the product should be to engineering and design in a way that's compatible with their methods and needs. And along the way, you have to address their concerns, harnessing their passions, hopes and dreams for the product as well. The third you see here is organizational leadership. Products are made through bringing diverse sets of people together and a product manager implicitly helps lead groups on a mission. In startups, you might get lucky that many of these types of functions will report to you. In larger organizations, you may not get this luxury. So influencing without authority is often the name of the game. You need to be great at building rapport, galvanizing groups to get buy-in and negotiating with internal and external stakeholders. And the last basic skill, we'll just call iterative growth. Getting a product out of the door is only the beginning. Once the product is in consumers' hands and showing traction, do you know how to go into growth mode? Setting the right key KPIs, understanding what impedes or unlocks business growth and building a roadmap that helps improve and drive the product to greater heights. PMs here have exposure to writing experiments, following up and iterating with existing and new customers and orchestrating the changes that achieve your desired results. Okay, so with the basics out of the way, let's talk about how you find that next year. From interviewing and hiring hundreds of product managers, designers and engineers over my career, these are the areas that stick out to me that separate good from great. The four competencies I'll cover are a scaling mindset, product strategy, conflict management and visionary leadership. Let's start with that scaling mindset. Once a product shows it's viable, in other words, you found a product market fit, your early customers are satisfied, you know how to grow within those early segments. You'll suddenly find that you have a whole new set of problems. Competitors now take answers. Customers report new or previously undiscovered needs that your product has helped them with or revealed. Chances are the organization needs to grow and you need to allocate resources to both the core product and incubating new opportunities. Knowing how to scale matters because there are plenty of products that create value, have the funding to scale, but find themselves lacking the product expertise to shift into scale mode. They can find themselves stuck iterating on what made them successful so far or just missing the ingredients of what it takes to grow quickly when expanding while continuing to deliver on the original value of your customers, of course. In short, do you have the competencies to bring the initial product to new heights? So I'll tell you a story around when I worked in the skilled-based game industry for a time. I had the chance to run into several online poker industry pioneers and folks who were in there from the beginning, and each of them experienced the industry differently, but I admired how the biggest players had to adapt to scale beyond their competition. So early on, online multi-user Texas Hold'em was a novelty experience, but two things became rapidly clear. The first is it's an easy product to replicate. You could probably gather some of your colleagues right now and make a Texas Hold'em online poker product in a month or two. And the second is customers don't want the product to change. Texas Hold'em is a game of skill that hasn't changed really in decades, and people who master the game are actually allergic to the rules or new features and ultimately they expect a consistent poker experience. So this presents an interesting case study for a product manager. In that industry, the product becomes a commodity. The game itself can't change meaningfully and it doesn't help the user or your objectives to create a differentiated poker game. And then in addition to that, competing on price can only get you so far, like lower management fees or more generous first-time deposit promotions and the like. So once they found market traction, the threat of many clones came along. Scaling wasn't gonna come from new product innovation or simply promoting the product more. Unlocking scale instead came through a more interesting path, namely differentiating on customer service. Many consumer products, when we look at them, think of customer service as a cost of business. It's associated with call and chat centers, scripted responses, desires to limit the amount of time people engage in support so they can get back into the core product. But in the poker industry, they realized they needed to draw inspiration from in real life casino businesses, the ones who know how to take care of their VIPs. And there was this opportunity to care for their most valuable users. Some of those spent millions of a year on the product. These users could easily be lured away to those copycat poker products so they needed an edge that didn't involve new game features. So ultimately, they differentiated through white glove experiences, dispute resolution, make-right programs, anti-fraud protection, and VIP perks for their top customers. There was this one memorable story of a product head funding dream experiences for top customers on requests like funding a wedding or a new exotic car. This VIP treatment was highly effective at retaining customers who spent hundreds of thousands of millions at the top end. Suddenly, those product executives found themselves having to be excellent at new capabilities beyond the original core product. The mental shift was they needed to be innovators of virtual hospitality, not nearly providing customer support. So this meant creating entirely new functions in the organization to make the products successful, hiring specialized talent, making VIP tools for customer management, and special tiers and experience to deliver a tone of hospitality all to retain their highest value customers. The portfolio of the product also had to expand to account for this. VIP features had to surface in the core poker experience, new growth marketing techniques, and an entire arm of the organizations had to exist to deliver a loyalty experience. So there's an important lesson here. The way you'll grow the value proposition for the scaled version of your product and business may require a broader view of what your new customers need now that they love your product. And that might not mean new user-facing features. Their new needs may require entirely new or complimentary offerings, pushing you to manage a portfolio of offerings with different objective functions but serving the same business. So how do you build muscle in this area? I guess the first tip I have is widen your aperture on what makes your customer's journey complete. Does your definition of your product's user journey extend beyond what your user see on a screen or the APIs you provide? Be more scenario-focused and understand what new problems you can solve that your product has now revealed. A simple example was of a colleague who used a nanny payroll service that the service that actually won them over did all the government paperwork for them, whereas the others were simply satisfied being a payment processor. In that case, they won over a customer because they looked at the whole picture including the boring government paperwork. My second tip here is start to adopt a general manager's mindset. The best way to grow is to find career experiences that give you exposure to every function of a running business and in different stages of the product lifecycle. Ask yourself if you could lead a deep geographic expansion, navigating what your product would need for growth, regulatory and organizational design. If you were asked to turn down a product line, where would you start? Do you understand all the sales channels available to you and if a new segment emerged, how would your product take advantage of them? Could you spin up a customer support function or lead a backend infrastructure project if required? In doing this, not asking you to aspire to become a COO. Instead, it's about getting a variety of functional and product lifecycle experiences that will make you a PM that's kind of more of a mixed martial artist, where a variety of experiences will enable you to take on any scenario in the future creatively. And some of the greatest PMs I know have swapped into different functions in their career or managed cross-functional teams to build muscle here. Consider that more organizations are scaling through growth and product ops like functions and you'll want to be better prepared to lead and design those teams when your product lines call for them. Let's get into the second major competency here, which I'll describe as just product strategy and I'll include business model design here for the sake of brevity. Beyond making useful things, can you define a new product or offering in the face of a shifting market landscape, new technologies or evolving customer tastes? An initial product may be solving a problem for real people, but there are tenacious competitors out there. In time, a long list of substitutes can emerge and pull your users away. This matters because there's loads of product managers who can bring a useful product to market with good initial results over a couple of years, but how you respond and evolve the product strategy and offering separates good from great. A couple of obvious examples in retrospect, Android entered into a mobile device ecosystem with a different business model, a free open source OS funded through services and an environment defined through licensing operating systems on a per unit basis. Another example is video on demand platforms shifting to a subscription model centered around exclusive first party content. Led by the likes of Netflix and Hulu, we now see multiple video stream providers chasing the strategy. That shift in strategy and business model created products that were better able to compete on price compared to the old rental or paid to own models. Those models were likely more profitable, but less convenient and more expensive for consumers. Now product strategy, it's a pretty vast topic and it's really beyond the scope of this talk to cover it in any depth. There's plenty of resources out there so I'll offer you a story of when I've had to completely reassess and pivot the strategy of an established product. You know, one point in my career, I became the product leader for a consumer product line that was shrinking, trying to compete with top incumbents in the market. The top incumbent had over 70% market share. Our product was low double digits in share and shrinking and we risked being a single digit player and profitability was elusive. This clearly wasn't sustainable. This product likely needed to be shut down if the trends continued. Generally, there are three generic strategies any product can follow. You can compete on price, for example, being the cheapest option, product differentiation, having unique capabilities or a brand that separates you from the competition or you can focus on customer intimacy, offering the highest level of service or catering to segments your market has better than anybody else. Facing the prospect of having to shut down the product, I sat the team down and all our cross-functional team leaders to go through a product strategy reset workshop. I generated broad steps of strategic options with the group. Each option was effectively a pair of product approaches to first, explain a market segment we could play in and second, the logic of how we'd seize the opportunity and reverse the product's decline. Each option included modeling out competitive responses as well. How likely were we able to address the competition with our own resources or by investing in new capabilities? Now without revealing the product, none of the options to compete on price played out well. All options showed a pure victory awaited us as better funded competitors could easily outlast us. And since product differentiation wasn't working for this product over the course of a few years, we arrived at competing on customer intimacy in smaller, the more lucrative niches. There were multi-billion dollar segments that were being underserved in this ecosystem and one of them was growing 400% year over year on a small base. We pivoted the product roadmap to focus on two niche segments with whole new rounds of customer research revealing geographic regions that the market leaders were not strong in. This also yielded the opportunity to partner with suppliers on offerings with better unit economics. 12 months later, we turned the product around, tapping into those niche segments, satisfying a new crop of customers. We weren't shrinking any longer and we closed the gap to operating profit. All in all, we saw we had made the right decision to pivot that product strategy. So how do you build competency in this area? So challenges, you need to put the academic side of business strategy in the practice. This is hard to do since good strategy generally shouldn't change all that often. So you actually don't get a lot of real world chances to practice this. So I'll start with my first tip. If you don't hold a position where you can practice shifts in product strategy, you can practice this on your own. Pick a market you're not in, step through the business model canvas for a business you admire and do the same for their competitors. Then role play generating options and what you do differently to compete with them. Take electric vehicles as an example, list out all the competitors. What different consumer segments exist and what are their needs? Research the product strategies of each player in that ecosystem. Who's competing on price, differentiation, or customer intimacy? What do they have that tells you they can win or what are they doing that holds them back? What would they need to change to do better in their vertical? Are there new capabilities, new organizational functions, or acquisitions that you consider? And for each option, write down the logic of why those choices would be better position for them to grow and share those ideas with your colleagues for feedback. The second tip I have here is if you are in a position where you can influence strategy for your product, when was the last time you did a product strategy check-in? Consider organizing a workshop like the one I described to validate your strategies, assumptions, and alternatives. This gives you a chance to engage leaders in your organization in a discussion on comparing the current strategy to known alternatives, the competitive landscape, and responses. And you can even pull in individuals from various backgrounds across design, engineering, consulting, business development, marketing to build more perspectives. In the end, you just may be comfortable with where you're at. And at a minimum, I found this is a great team-building exercise if you need to get ambitious about pivoting to something else. Earlier, I mentioned negotiation as a baseline skill for being a great leader. That said, understanding and resolving conflicts is the next door neighbor and this next great competency I wanna talk about. It's by far the trait possessed by the most effective product leaders I've seen. Why is that? The reality is most humans are really conflict-averse and yet interpersonal conflicts are one of the key reasons why teams and products fail. If you can handle stress-filled situations and resolve the conflicts effectively, you will be a welcome contributor to your peers who will just want to get things done. Your ability to tolerate and navigate conflict as a resource is a next-level skill and this has to span your partners, your team members, and stakeholders. This is also something I had to learn really early on. Early on my career, I managed a team where one area had a product manager who was highly competent brought the team consistent results but often drowned out voices in the room. The team was getting results and benefited from a PM with great instincts. This team was also conditioned though to yield to the PM who would get worked up if people asked too many questions or otherwise wanted to get buy-in. The team had adopted a go-along-to-get-along mindset. It was unspoken that no one should engage that PM head on as the room would get uncomfortable as they would get progressively agitated or make comments that would otherwise shut down the conversation. Talking with team members one-on-one, all this had the effect of capping the upside of the team. The results were good to be sure but there were hidden ideas and issues that weren't getting surfaced or addressed. For years, the PM got by from being able to react and adapt to those issues once they were discovered instead of the team acknowledging that some of those issues could have been avoided with more discussion from the outset. A conflict-averse team allowed this to continue in the spirit of team harmony but as a result, they were only getting half of their possible impact. So recognizing this conflict, I sat the PM down respectfully confronted them on what I had learned and observed with the team. I explained they were ultimately a good product manager but they were alienating the team through their style of getting worked up when people wanted to pressure test their ideas. Ultimately, I explained they would be more effective if they found a way to harness the team's diverse perspectives and their style was impeding that and potentially holding the team back. This took several weeks of conversations to be honest. No one had ever confronted this PM on the topic and it was a surprise to them at first. However, raising it, I encouraged them to talk with others and team members were suddenly more open about what they were experiencing. And within a couple of months, the PM had course corrected. The team was happier and they were better performing as a result. So how do you build competency and conflict management? Here's four behaviors I'd advise to practice. The first is look out for your team. Always try to discover what's off or holds people back as conflict isn't always obvious until it gets really bad. Asking how people are doing, elaborating on their reservations and generally looking out for people will help you reveal any hidden conflict. The second is don't let conflict fester. For a perpetrator of conflict, they tend to have an advantage around people who are conflict diverse. They will get their way because peers will yield to not wanting to create further conflict. Ongoing conflict will make things worse and it's important to address it with those initiating it as soon as you can. The third is be a respectful broker of the peace. Great leaders are known for being able to clear the air, talking through the observations and being careful when they exercise in the judgment. There's no harm in sending individuals or groups now respectfully naming and explaining the downside of your observations and being comfortable bringing people to the table to discuss how to fix it. At a minimum, you can position yourself as a peaceful broker that helps show people there's a neutral party who will look to, they can look to if things aren't going well. And the last tip I have here is just adopt the mindset of a human solution designer. You're a product manager because you're already good at discovering other people's requirements for something you will later build. Why not use that power to discover and resolve human conflicts too? Most conflicts are really just a function of understanding a stakeholder's personal requirements, often unarticulated, because they aren't considering their needs in the face of conflict. For most parties, when they see you're looking out for them, we'll appreciate a creative intermediary offering a path forward. I'll get to this last competency that we could describe as visionary leadership. Many product managers can get by with the mechanical aspects of the job, the basics we talked about at the beginning, looking for user requirements, moving through features through an engineering process, measuring and iterating to improve it. The step function changes though, come from imagining a new future. This is where being a visionary leader is a next level skill. Great PMs can pitch to groups of people to form teams of tens, hundreds, even thousands around a compelling vision, galvanizing everyone to rally around it and build execution plans to realize that bigger vision. My favorite example of my career was during my Xbox days and the multiplayer game vision. This is almost 20 years ago now. We lived in a world where the internet was still a lot of dial-up, games were hard to set up requiring hardware and there was a lot of cheating in multiplayer games. The best experiences required you to rent Rackspace and host Team Fortress 2 servers. The Xbox 360 team's shared vision was making that multiplayer experience as turnkey as possible. No serious technical skills required. The vision was so visceral, a story we told ourselves in the halls and over lunch. And it wasn't just about the tech of multiplayer games, it was the whole experience. Was it easy to connect to your home router, which ultimately led to people having to navigate new devices, often poor quality devices? Was there a clean way to identify friends and people who are playing the game? And that's where online presence came in. How could you get into a voice chat to talk first and decide what game to play? That became things like Xbox Live parties with audio chat. And it also justified why you had to put a cheap headset in every box. How do you report and boot cheaters off the platform? We built a reputation system, ability to report player behaviors after matches and heuristics for detecting cheating. Playing a game online with others is something we do without thinking today, but back then it wasn't coming together easily and it demanded innovation. Multiplayer gaming was an amazing PC experience if you knew how to do it, but it wasn't simple enough for a mass consumer market. The Xbox 360 team built a vision and a story about a future that could be and almost every contributor implicitly could explain that vision and tie it to their everyday work. Everyone was unable to think comprehensively about how to deliver on that vision end to end. And I daresay it worked. Since then, I've made it a priority to align my stakeholders and team on an inspirational future for any product or product line I've led. It makes the mission more real, it inspires creativity and it brings a team together in a way no mechanical project plan can. So how do you build competency in this area? The first tip I have is, I guess I'll start with describing it as a risk. When setting a vision, you could get it pointed in a direction that doesn't really exist or doesn't consider what people actually want. You know, after all a movie executive once said, television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a box every night. And similarly, none of us are watching movies and shows on 3D TVs. So trends alone can be a mirage. Hype cycles without substance can lead us astray and yet some tech predictions fail to recognize when something truly special is in front of us. So my advice is this, get better at scanning the signals of real user utility and sort through the noise. Often I find the combination of data-backed trends plus real world user utility are stronger signals to help indicate if not predict the future. And these rise above the short-lived trends and hope filled cycle, hype cycles. This sometimes means looking at the things that failed too but left behind usefulness for the users who experienced them. The second tip I have here is practice not only being a great storyteller but adapting your story to your audience. There's plenty of frameworks for telling stories but they all boil down to offering a promise explaining why that promise matters and then painting a picture of what it looks like to deliver on that promise and bring everybody around you to some upside that they can get excited about. I coach my product managers to also audition their material with smaller audiences they go. Think like a stand-up comedian. It's better to get booted the microphone in a lower stakes environment before the big show. Use this to experiment with your stories, get reactions and feedback and adapt your material to be more effective in the next telling of the story or the big moment where you need to nail the pitch. Okay, this brings us to the end of this talk. I hope you got something out of it, whatever phase in your product manager career you're in. You can find me on LinkedIn and if you wanna fill out a survey related to attitudes towards our use of technology you can check out at rich.org. With that, I wish you all the very best. Thank you.