 Let me quickly do the honors of introducing Jeff. I again don't think he needs introduction but let me do my do. I'm old. I've been around too long. Young people never heard of me, I think now. Fine now. Jeff Patel. In long story short, Jeff has been one of the keynote speakers that we have invited to Agile India pretty much every alternative year. I remember him flying down to Chennai as taking an auto rickshaw, driving on the side of the road, trying to get to IIT Madras for his keynote. From those days to now, Jeff has been a very strong pillar, I think, supporter of the Agile India conference. For me, Jeff is someone who brought UX, product thinking, design, the whole user experience and many other things from product management into Agile, which was a very important missing piece. Of course, his work and the book on user story mapping, something that a lot of people today kind of take it for granted but a lot of that work was out of the very own. Mr. Jeff Patton over here. I just wanted to thank you for all the work Jeff you've done from bringing in product thinking UX into Agile and being the champion for it and continuing to be the champion. Again, really looking forward to your talk about what kind of mindset kills product thinking and something that I think many, many organizations are realizing, especially as they're going through digital transformations, that this is an important aspect. Again, without too much delay, I know it's late in the day. I want to hand it over to you, Jeff. Thanks again for doing this. All right. Thank you, Naresh. I'm hoping Naresh and I were talking before this and I'm thinking what I'd like to do is maybe end a little bit early so that Naresh and I could talk a little bit. He's in a product role. He's got to get a product organization up and running and this being product-centric isn't easy. All right. I'm hoping you can see my screen now. Yes, I'm going to end up drawing things and I should give you a minute to read that cartoon. First, yeah, I'm Jeff Patton. I'm here because I'm old. I've been building software for, I don't know how long since I was in my late 20s. It was a career change for me, but only in my late 20s. I have the pleasure of getting a very early start with Agile development. I started a job at a startup product company in San Francisco that was trying this new process called Extreme Programming. They had hired this guy Kent Beck who had written this book on Extreme Programming. While I was there in 2001, 2001, the term Agile was coined and I learned I was using an Agile process. My job title at that very first product company was product manager. So I came into Agile development with a product manager hat on and with a product centric hat on and I've looked at Agile through that lens always and I've always seen huge value in Agile thinking and Agile development and then huge weird, there's an angle that's just missing and I've been working to try and put that in, put that back in ever since I've been involved. Happily now, it's in there more and more, but let's talk about this because product thinking I've come to believe is not natural. It's not the way most people think. So let's talk about that. First off, I want to point out that this product thinking thing is a thing. It's a next thing. I just did, well actually when I put the slide together, I did a look for a couple books, but look for books or things on product thinking, on project to product conversion, on outcome centric thinking like my friend Jeff was talking about earlier today, this is a thing. So let's talk about what the thing is. First off, I want to talk about what we actually focus on when we're building successful products and then I want to talk about the alternative or what we focus on instead and why. Why are we not? If we're not focusing on successful products then I want to talk about things you can do to keep your focus on the right thing, but let's maybe not. I might talk about those things, but let's what I want to do, maybe it's talked in a rush, we'll see how this goes. Now first, I'm going to switch over to hand drawing here. One of the, well, actually let's put a slide up. Yeah, that's the question I would ask you. When I say great product, what comes to mind? Think of a product that you love. Think of something that you use. Think of something that you would recommend to someone else and if I say great product, what makes a product great? Now I'm not going to watch the chat because I normally I'll ask people to throw something into the chat, but I've done this a lot of times and I get a lot of the same answers. So you'll think of something, you're welcome to put it in the chat. If I see it, I'll write it down, but when you think of a great product, one of the first things I hear is it solves a problem. I'll hear it's easy to use and wow, look at that, my bootpan just died just as I was talking to you. I'll hear that it's, you know, things like it's delightful or fun or it makes life easier. I use it every day. Well, things like it's reliable. That's what people will say about a product. You might have you might have your own things that you say. If we flip the question and say let's say you're a company that builds a product and that's one of your company's great products or successful products, what makes it successful from your company's perspective? The first thing I'm usually going to get is it makes money or it's easy to sell. We get customers faster. Customers that pay or renew their licensing, things like that. Things like it makes us look good. We get good reviews on the product. It makes our company look good. Our company has a good reputation because of these products that we sell. Now, when I ask this question, yeah, users find value in it. I did look at the chat. Sorry, thanks, Amy. The one thing I never get is finished on time or finished under budget or stakeholders love it because that's not what makes a product great. The only good thing you can say about a product is that it was finished on time. I can promise you don't really love it. Now you're here, presumably because you build software products. Most of us probably do. Some people build other products. And yes, I'm going to draw the model. I draw over and over again, but I'm seeing it a bit different differently these days. We are here because we turn ideas into products, into generally software products. Now, those ideas often are for whole new products, but we build technology products. Technology products are different things. Traditional products, well, they're made out of atoms and you buy them in boxes and take them out and use them. I'm looking out into my hall and I can see a coffee machine and a stick vacuum plugged into the wall. Those are traditional products. I bought them in boxes. The manufacturers of products will work hard to come up with new technology and better products. And when they do, I will throw away that product or try and resell it and buy a new product. Traditional products replace themselves with an obsolescence model. The manufacturer, they live a lot longer in the market. We can use the same product for years. And then that product becomes obsolete and we replace it with a better one. But that's not the case with technology or software products, especially software products continuously improve. They continuously replace themselves by adding new features and new capabilities. And that's probably what you're adding to your software products. Probably existing products may not be creating whole new ones, rather you're adding features or capabilities or extending or changing those things. That's something different about software products. Those are things that we start referring to as our requirements and you're probably given lots of those. If you're giving requirements for things to build, people are going to ask you, well, how long that's going to take or people are concerned about the time? How long is it going to take to build that thing? What is it going to cost us? Cost, when we're talking about software, isn't measured in raw material or manufacturing cost. Cost is measured in people time. How many people over how much time is this going to take? And you know all this stuff is called scope. I'm sure a lot of you have heard me talk about this before. I'm going to say it again. We worry about time, cost and scope. You know that this triangle is the bad news triangle, that there's no good news here, that we want to know what we can get, how long it's going to take and what it's going to cost us. The general rule of thumb is you can only know two of these things, meaning fixed time and cost. The bad news is the scope will go down, fixed time and scope. The bad news is the cost will go up and you insist on fixing time, cost and scope. The bad news is there's actually a fourth thing here and that is quality, fixed time, cost and scope and quality squeezes out like toothpaste and a toothpaste too. We spend a lot of time worrying about this stuff, but that stuff isn't what matters. What matters ultimately is what your customers and users, well it's what they do, what they say, how they feel. If you finish your product, add a feature, add a capability, what we hope is that people see it and they choose to try it. We hope that they actually use it and we hope that they say good things about it and well the kind of good things that they say about it are well all those things that I just wrote down, that it's easy to use, that it solves a problem, that it's delightful, that's why I guarantee you are going to say those things because I asked you what makes your product great and your customer or user that product, that's what you're going to say. Now you work for a company and your company pay to make that product, your org has a different responsibility, it needs to sustain itself and it does not sustain itself with people and happiness, it sustains itself with cash. If you create a product or add a feature, add a capability and a few people use it, that's just interesting, but if lots of people use it and say good things, that's where we get things like return on investment and it was worth doing that. If lots of people say good things, that's what helps our brand and brand awareness, brand sentiment. If lots of people tell other people and it becomes easy to sell my product, that's what helps my position in the market or my market share. Now I want to grab my pen out here and highlight a few things. Your organization worries an awful lot about how much it spends and your organization must worry a lot about whether it's sustaining itself, but the thing in the middle is the thing that we have to worry about a lot, whether your organization can or can't sustain itself, is it up to you? It's up to your customers and users. If your customers don't do those things, your organization doesn't get these things. Now we often refer to all of this stuff on the outside edge as value. I want you to see there's a huge difference or a big difference between your customers and users value and your business's value. Your customers aren't worried about your ROI, but your business better be worried about your customers value because if your customers don't get what they want, your business will not get what they want. So for you listening, I want you to separate the concept of customer and user value from business value and recognize they are at odds with each other. Let me actually work backwards here. Those ideas don't come from thin air. They actually come from paying attention to customers and users and recognizing, well remember, solves are problems, recognizing what problems they have to solve, or I'm going to add here things like unmet needs or just needs in general. The products like entertainment products, games or things like Facebook or Instagram, don't solve problems. It's arguable that they create problems, but we're all built in with needs to entertain ourselves or be entertained and connect with other people and share things and if we can understand those needs and exploit them with a product or product idea, that's how this thing moves forward. If I move all the way back, let's talk about your organization one more time. Remember your organization needs to sustain itself, but that's bare minimum. It needs to pay your paycheck. Most organizations obligate themselves to grow. If your organization has shareholders or investors, investors best invest in your company, not because it's going to stay the same size or not grow, your investors want your organization to grow so they can make money. If your organization produces a roadmap or financial plan quarter over quarter, it's going to show it's growing. There are people inside the organization that are responsible for it growing. We often refer to those things, people as the business or business stakeholders. Hopefully they have some kind of vision, some strategy for growth, and if the business isn't growing, isn't sustaining itself or growing or moving toward its vision or strategy isn't working, that's a business problem. Now, I want you to separate the idea of business problems from your customers and users problems. Your customers aren't laying awake at night worrying about you and your dumb financial targets. They're not concerned with whether your stock price is going up unless they are an investor, which makes them different, but business problems are not customers' problems. Now, here's the weird trick here is we can't solve business problems. Our customers have to solve business problems, meaning if we need to grow more, we need to find customers and problems that are unsolved or we could solve better than our competitors and build a product, then they see, try, use it and say good things, and that's where the ROI comes from. Now, I draw this picture over and over because I want us to separate the idea of output, what we build from the outcome, what happens when things come out, and I get a little precise here. Some people refer to everything out here as an outcome. For me, there's a big difference between what our business gets and what our users get. I'll refer to this long-term stuff or I'll use impact to talk about our business benefits. This is the language system I want people to be clear about. We focus a lot on output, but it's outcome that drives our business's impact. I'm going to refer to all these things that we discovered about our customers as opportunities. Our business must look for opportunities, problems, unmet needs, things that we can exploit. It's the business's problem to look for those opportunities. When we're being product-centric, it's a focus on these things. If you work for a business, they can lose track of these things a lot. The stakeholders are really worried about their business and they see competitors doing things and making money. Sometimes the knee-jerk reaction is to do what your competitors do or see that there's a hole in the market. Without really understanding the problem around me, get to work building something, ship it, hope for the best, and check on the ROI. There's a lot to talk about here. I want you to see the tension between what your customers and users' problems and unmet needs and their outcomes are from what your business needs. Being product-centric is focusing on that. Let's see if I can summarize this here. Let me show you a couple of slides and let me change the subject. Outcomes are what your customers do and say and feel. They're not what you do. The business impact comes as a consequence of what those customers do and say and feel. We need to focus on delivering quality products necessary, but product success is driven by outcome and impact. There is a strong tension between outcome and impact. The customer value is not business value. They're not one and the same thing. Let me point out one other thing before I let this model go. Look, I asked everyone to look through a product lens at what they're building. Even the things we build for internal use, if we build something for internal use, we don't have to worry about whether our employees will see it, try to use it, because it's their jobs. We will fire them if they don't use it. If you've got a time tracking system or you must use JIRA as part of development, if you stop using it, people are going to be pretty mad at you. That's not okay. They cannot force you to say good things. The usage is absolutely necessary here. One of the other qualities we look at of usage are things like efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency meaning I use it and I am faster. I get more work done faster. Effectiveness means I do better work. I make fewer mistakes. I produce better quality work because if we deliver something for internal use and people use it because they have to and they aren't more efficient and more effective, you're not going to see the ROI. Even when we build things for internal use, it all comes down to the users, the usage of this thing. That's where the value comes from. I want to point that out. This is also true of business to business products. In a B2B product, the customer and user are different people or the user and chooser are different people. You use JIRA likely because on dominant market share, you may use other things, but when you use a tool, tools inside your organization, if you're not more efficient and effective, first off, you don't have to love it, but if you're not more efficient and effective, your business doesn't get value. If your business doesn't get value, it won't pay or renew, so Alasian doesn't get more money or whoever sold you the tool doesn't get more money. When you're the user, not the chooser, you don't have to love it, but it does have to help you do your job better. That's where the, again, usage is where the value comes from. Sometimes the value doesn't come to the user. It comes to the business who paid for the product. I want you to, I want to tell you this whole product thing is a pain. It sucks. Let's set it aside for a minute. I want to put you in a different kind of business. I think I want to tell a story here. Let's tell my story. It's getting old now. It'll help me point out the competing focus or what tears our focus away from thinking about outcomes or at least thinking about them the right way. This is my backyard. It says last year. It's actually two years ago. This is in 2020 now or 2022. I don't live in this house anymore. This is my house in Park City, Utah. Park City, Utah is high up in the mountains, just close to Salt Lake City, and we moved up there because we could get a lot more space and be out of the city. The backyard in our house was absolutely awful. It was rocky and most things died in it. The soil was terrible. In 2020, we wanted to upgrade our backyard. We hired a landscaper to come in and you tore out a lot of the soil and replaced a lot of the soil. We hauled in. We used to have a lot of decking in the back, but where we lived there, there's a lot of snow and the snow breaks down the deck. We hauled in a lot of stone and replaced a lot of the decking with stonework. The goal was to get it all finished by the end of 2020. Actually, my dates are a little bit messy, but we didn't. The point here is it snowed and we didn't finish this project on time partly because of COVID and teams getting COVID. It was a mess, but I want to talk for a minute about landscapers. That's why I'm telling this story. This guy's name is Troy. This is a YouTube video, Troy. He's talking about rock walls. Rock is his specialty. He's pointing out that if you do this stuff right, the wall he's standing in front of is hundreds of years old. You do this right and rock will outlast a lot of things. That's why we went with a lot of rock. The question I want to ask is if you had to hire a landscaper, what makes a landscaper great? Same question, but you've got to hire this person to do this work. I'm not going to wait for you to type things in, but I'll tell you these are the answers that I get. If you had to hire a landscaper, you look for someone who's reliable, who actually shows up, who does quality work, who has good expertise. We look for somebody with good ideas because they've got to, well, and somebody who listens well communicates well, and someone who can help me turn my vision into a reality, and somebody who can well improve my vision because I don't know what's possible with landscaping, things like that. Now, all that said, this person has got to be cost effective. I don't have bottomless cash here and they better actually finish or deliver on time or close to it. Those are the qualities I'm going to look for. Now, you might have hired someone to do someone around your house to do some remodeling or something like that. I'm going to draw this process, but you probably know how it works. It starts with a customer. In this case, that's me. The customer may have ideas, but, well, the customer can't do it themselves. That's me in this situation. That's why I go to someone who is a landscaper. I look for someone who has, well, this is a big job. That person has to have a team with lots of expertise, things like that. My first thing is to explain to them, this is my idea. This is what I'm thinking, and that good landscaper has to listen and try to understand and suggest. Those are things that are helpful to me. It's a back and forth conversation, but eventually, they need to figure out how they're going to do the work, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost, because this is where they give me back an estimate. Now, this is where I've done this before. I almost always throw a WTF exception. I had no idea it was going to cost so much. Even if I give a budget, they usually go a bit over the budget, and I get less than I thought I would for that budget. Well, I'm not an expert in this stuff. I don't know what it cost, and my hopes always exceed how much I can pay for this stuff. It's at this point that we go into a back and forth mode. We go into negotiation. While we're in negotiation, I'm thinking to myself, I want to save money. I want to get as much as I can. Now, while we're in negotiation, Troy, in this case, my landscaper is thinking, look, I need to make money. I have people to pay. I have equipment to maintain. I have cash flow, because I've got a violinist material, but look, I also need to keep my customer happy. So we've got different goals here while we're doing this, but we do eventually agree. At that point, I give an order and write a check, and it's up to my landscaper, Troy, in this case, to do the work. He focuses on what we agree to do, the scope. He focuses on the time frames, not just because I want my yard done, but because he's got other jobs running, other people that he's working with. He's got a complex project management thing. He's got schedules around material that's coming in. He's got schedule people around that, and he's got to worry about the cost, but it's the cost of all those people as well as materials and equipment, things like that. And I hope he is worrying about the quality somewhere in there, but here's the weird thing is, I'm not an expert. I don't know if the quality is in there. I'll be honest with you, that big stone patio, the drainage was done wrong, and the first time it rained or snowed, we got giant puddles in there and it wasn't draining, so that was a problem, by the way. But there's no way I could tell that until much later. Now, they did eventually finish the work, and there's a delivery here. Oh, that took a long time to explain, but I did this because I want you to understand this, and this process should look super familiar to you. If I call this top line requirements, and if I relabel the left side, the business, and the right side, technology, that this is different, this is tech as a service, this model should look really familiar. My gut is that if you've got a business, they give you requirements. You try and listen and understand and figure out how you give that an estimate. Your business is never happy with what you can do or what can get done in time. There's always some negotiation. We eventually agree. We agree with a business case or with a project plan, and we usually agree on that time cost and scope. You do the work, and eventually there's a delivery. Now, we know that things are going to go wrong while we're doing the work. We'll discover things and things don't go so well. If I go back to that picture, the guy in the trench looks like he's putting down some sprinkler pipe there, but that is not sprinkler pipe. That is the cable that connects internet to my house. I know that because that big machine cut it in half while I was working one day, and I yelled out of my office window what's going on, and they apologized, they rushed in, and they got this thing fixed within a couple hours, and they didn't charge me for fixing it because they made the mistake. That's happened. That's covered in the profit they make, but when we started pulling in stone, we decided to go bigger, and we wanted more stone, and there are a lot of other changes along the way that happened because when we started seeing things come into place, we made decisions that changed things. We expect change to happen along the way, and it always does, and every time it does, we pop back up into negotiation and estimation and go up and down. That's where the good communication comes in. Nothing wrong. This may be the way you work with your business, but this doesn't work. I've got to tell you this does not work for your business, and here's why. First thing, let's go a couple of different things here. One of the things that happens here in this model is it separates responsibilities. The people on the left side, they are responsible for the product outcomes, and the people on the right side, they're responsible for the product output. Let me explain what I mean. In my backyard, there were a couple questionable things. This is a gas fire pit. It has gas plumbed underneath the stonework. I can turn a switch on and gas and start a fire there, and we can do that anytime summer or winter. If there's deep snow in the backyard, we can go out and roast marshmallows, and it'll be great. Except one of the things we noticed, this is a fresh snow, but snow in the backyard where I live is all over a meter tall. To actually use this thing, we got to do an awful lot of shoveling and cleaning, and in fact, we just don't do it or don't use it, and then in the summer, it gets too hot. In hindsight, we spent an awful lot of money for this thing, and I'm thinking, that was a dumb idea. I'm not sure we needed to do that. Now, I saw it, we tried it, we used it. I'm not going to say good things or keep using that thing, or at least not very much, and I'll say, okay, that wasn't a good idea. It wasn't a good thing to do. I'm not going to say Troy sucks or my landscape is bad because I hate my backyard fire pit. There are other things that weren't right, but none of them are Troy's fault. I'm responsible for the outcome as the customer, and not Troy. Troy did what he said he would, and the quality was good, and I liked it. Actually, the only thing there would be a problem is if Troy suggested something and I didn't like it, then I might blame him. So it makes it so Troy doesn't want to suggest anything because the minute he suggests, then I take him up on a suggestion, he becomes responsible for the outcome. So the person who decides, they're responsible for the outcome. This model separates that. So it makes it so teams don't have to worry about the outcomes, just to worry about making sure they build what the stakeholders ask for. If we keep this model, the same kind of thing happens when we're working in an agile context. Sometimes we call this person the product owner, and this person, these group of people, the team, and you might have a team that holds the product owner responsible for creating and prioritizing the backlog, and the team starts to be responsible for making the product owner happy. Now I've rambled a little bit too long. I want to give you two examples, and then I want to stop for a minute here. Look, when we mistake our product owner or our business for the customer, bad things can happen. Here's kind of the hyperbole of bad things. This guy is Jeff Bezos. What he's holding proudly above his head is an Amazon Firephone. You may not know what that device is, but it's easy to find news on it. It was released in 2014. It was sold for $200 US. It was meant to compete with the iPhone. They invested a lot in R&D to build this phone. Now they released the phone at $200. The reviewers hated it. The customers hated it. Nobody wanted it. They reduced the price to $0.99 US. They still couldn't sell the thing. In 2014, they marked down $170 million in unsold inventory, $170 million of phone that I don't know what happened to. What do you do with $170 million with the phone? Then I don't know how much they spent in R&D, but they had tens of millions in R&D to get this phone to market. In talking about this, there are a lot of articles that describe it, but this quote from a fast company article says, we poured surreal amounts of money into it, yet we all thought it had no value for the customer, which was the biggest irony. Whenever anyone asked why we're doing this, the answer was because Jeff wants it. No one thought the feature justified the cost of the project. No one, absolutely no one. Now this is what happens when you mistake your boss, your founder, your CEO, for the customer. Jeff Bezos has a lot of money, but he cannot use, he doesn't have enough phones to use $170 million worth of phones. Remember, that's where the value comes in. Jeff invested this money so that he could get more money, and getting more money relied on millions of people buying phones, not Jeff. So making your boss happy isn't going to make your business money. Now this tension is tough. You may know that. You may know you're building something stupid, but I want to pull back this old quote. It's difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it. You may know you're building something dumb, but sometimes it may be a career limiting move to explain to your boss that in fact you are building something dumb. I want to give a counter example. This guy's name is Daniel Eck. He's the CEO of Spotify, and some of you may use Spotify, a lot of you may use Spotify. And if you do, you're familiar with a feature in Spotify called Discovery Weekly. This is a quote also from a fast company article. In talking with Daniel, he said, I would have killed that feature if it was just me 100%. I never really saw the beauty of it. I questioned them, the team building it two or three times. Are you really sure you want to do this? Why are we spending all this time and energy? There's lots of things in this company that I didn't think were good ideas that turned into some of our best ideas. This is what happens when the CEO knows they're not the actual customer and when teams are responsible and accountable for the success of the product they're building. Now, this is where the tension comes in, and I think I am blowing my time. I've rambled a little bit too much. I want to give you just one thing to think about here. Your organization may be treating you like a service provider, and there may be no way around this. Let me point out one thing. By the way, the reason this works for my landscaper is because of one thing, he makes money and he makes money because he sells time and materials. If my landscaper has too much work to do or I want more work done, my landscaper celebrates because all he needs to do is hire people because every single person he hires, he marks up their time and he makes more money on them. That's not true of your business. When your business hires more people, it costs them more. Your business doesn't make money by selling your time. Your business makes money by selling their products and services. That doesn't work for your business. One of the things that my landscaper can do is raise prices. Your business can raise prices on its products, but it can't raise prices on your time. My landscaper can mark up his time and customers that can't afford him will go away. My landscaper can also say, no, not now or you can schedule us ahead of time. We actually have to wait a year to get this project done to do that. All those things work when your business is selling time and materials or selling your service. What we're trying to do is remind businesses that they're not selling your time and materials or your service. Your businesses are selling your products and stop saying go business and start saying our business and start worrying about that outcome and impact all of us, not just the stakeholders, but everyone. Now, if you must work like a service provider, the best advice I have for you is to be more like a doctor. Now, look, if there's a continuum here and I put on one side a waiter and the other side a doctor, you know how this works. You can go into a restaurant and order whatever you want and the waiter will bring you whatever you want and suggests appetizers and main courses and desserts and usually alcohol or drinks with that because that's where they make a lot of money and the happier you are at dinner, the better and the more money the restaurant makes. But try that with a doctor. Show up at a doctor's office and tell the doctor these are the prescriptions I'd like you to write and this is the operation I'd like you to schedule. Your doctor will say, that's nice. Tell me where it hurts. Despite the fact or at least in the United States, doctors are paid based upon the amount of service and customers they work with. Despite the fact that they're paid for the amount of work that they do, doctors in the US still manage to focus on outcomes. When you say outcome to a doctor, doctors with the best outcomes aren't the ones that wrote the most prescriptions the fastest. They're the ones with the healthiest patients. Medical outcomes are the health of the patient, not the speed of the service or even the quality of the service. It's your help and doctors are obligated to step back and find your problems that they can solve and doctors have a lot of built-in experimentation trying things, measuring results in order to treat something. Doctors manage to work in a very outcome-centric model despite the fact that they are a service. The habit you'll get in ideally get into you with your business is to when you're asked for things back up and try and understand what problem we're solving and then after you deliver something step forward, lean in and make sure that we're actually measuring whether we got the value out of that and we're not measuring return on investment, we're measuring use because we know that's a leading indicator to return on investment. If people don't use it, we won't get the ROI and that's why we end up focusing a lot on that. This is where I want to stop and I ended up taking my full time. There's a lot more than I could talk about as I look at a lot more ideas and things for doing that, but I sort of want to summarize here. Think about you and your job. Do you see yourself as a service provider or really as someone who's owning and working on a product? If your business sees you as a service provider, start by being a doctor. Now, there's more things we could have talked about but I'm going to stop right there with this. The biggest conflict I see in trying to act in a more product-centric way is us seeing ourselves as service providers, our business is seeing ourselves as service providers and that causes us to not need to pay attention to customers and users so much, not really need to experiment. My friend Jeff got help talk about focusing on outcomes and that gets tricky. Again, when it feels like your job is just to build more stuff faster and build what you're asked to build, it's hard to move your focus to outcomes and hard to measure those things. It's switching that focus that makes us more product-centric and recognizing when you're focusing on the wrong thing or the service provider things. All right, I'm going to stop there. It's morning for me. I didn't say things that's been sysly so let's go out on that. All right, awesome. Jeff, I honestly didn't realize we blew past 45 minutes so quickly. We did, yeah. Yep, we did. Are there questions? I've got to teach a class in exactly a half hour and stay for another 15 minutes if we've got any questions, if people want to stay. Cool. If folks have questions, you can put it in the Q&A section. We can go through a few while we wait on those. Maybe, Jeff, I could start with the teaser. Yeah, before this, you were talking with me about you had a tough one. Anyway, we can talk about that too. That was interesting. So let me try and put that in, pick your brains on this. If you're building a typical marketplace for a set of users, a marketplace typically has sellers who want to sell stuff on the marketplace and then there are buyers who want to buy and this could be a B2C, this could be a B2B, different kinds of marketplaces but don't want to complicate it too much. But let's assume there is a marketplace with sellers and buyers and basically you are in the business of building this marketplace. Now, there is generally a tension, at least the tension that I've seen, where the sellers would want to prominently push their products and maybe have brand-centric view of the world in your marketplace. While buyers may have a different view of the world and they may not want a brand-centric view of the world while they may want a specific product-centric view of the world. They may want to buy certain things and they may want to see across all the different brands that are offering that same product. So now as someone driving the marketplace, you have this tension to solve and how do you go about this? So I'll separate customers and users. Customers have a value proposition. You choose something because you'll get value. Like I choose those in Spotify because the value comes from the entertainment. I get entertained. So there's a value proposition and the way you get the value proposition is through use. I get entertained in Spotify by looking up things and listening to it. So with customers, I'll look for what's the value proposition. It's often intangible and then what's the use that drives the value proposition. Like for sellers in the marketplace application, their value proposition comes from selling more products, selling more of their products and making more profit on those products. So saying that it's on a higher price and if we look at their use, their use is pretty straightforward. They have to list and price products, things like that. Now for your buyers, their value proposition comes from buying a better product and from getting a better price or saving money on that product. And we look at their use, their use is to find and buy those the things that they do. If you're running a marketplace product, it only works if there's balance between these two things and the tension you're feeling is the tension in this value proposition. The buyers do not want to buy more of any one seller's product and they don't want to pay more. The sellers do want more of their product to sell and they want to charge more. And this makes you stick to you right in the middle of this and you're almost, you're the negotiator. If you help your seller too much, then that hurts your buyer. If you help your buyer too much, that hurts your seller. Now what's interesting is if you run the marketplace, your org runs that marketplace, what's interesting is your may make money on everything it sells, but it may make extra money from those sellers because the sellers kind of want to pay you to feature their products or have their products come up high on search results and things like that. So each one of these customers and they're both customers want you to magnify their value proposition. And the tension you're dealing with is figuring out which of these do I prioritize and if you're running a marketplace product, it's like running a party. If you invite too many the wrong guests, the party goes to shit. It's terrible. You got to keep the party happy and party alive because look, if all the buyers go away, the sellers are going to leave the party too. If all the sellers go away, the buyers are going to leave the party. If they're crappy sellers, you got to keep this party bubbling and the balance is what you've got to watch. If you're a business here, the metrics you've got to come up are more about balance because you're balancing two competing value propositions here. You these aren't your you may one problem that happens with organizations sometimes look like a job website fits this pattern also job website has employers and job seekers, but for a job website, all the money comes from the employers and a job website can start to see the employers as their only customers because that's where the money comes from and they can and so they start to move their focus more to there and down to play the focus there, but a job website with well that only has crappy employers that pay a lot of money to be there. The job seekers quickly figure out that's not a good place to go find a job and they go away. I don't know if any of that helps, but it's a hard thing because it's a hard thing and it's not as simple as saying products have one customer, especially with a marketplace product like that. You've got to look at the balance and you look for metrics that indicate that we have the balance right, not metrics. What's interesting is you're looking at what your customers and users behavior and remember your customers and users are sellers and buyers and you look at their happiness and that's what drives your organization's revenue. The minute you start worrying too much about your organization's revenue and where it's coming from, that's the minute the value leaks out for them. Does any of that help in the rush? That's the... Sure, I love it the way you've tried to simplify it. Yeah, I'm simplifying it well, but it doesn't give you any answers. I think the interesting thing is about finding the metric around the balance. I think that's an interesting idea. What's the balance? How do we ensure that both sides are getting value and how do we detect when we are out of balance? How do we detect when the value is draining for these people and while it's increasing for these people and vice versa? That's the thing you look for in a market. What I'm wondering is this might sound a little bit like a lagging indicator, but is there any leading indicator for stuff like that? You don't want to realize that you're out of balance too late. Like you said, if you've already invited a lot of bad people to the party then there's not much you can do. Yeah, if you invite a lot of bad people you can't stand around and wait for them to start a fight. You have to recognize that those are bad people and get them out of the party sooner or get more good people into the party to correct the balance. What we'll often look at leading indicators might be ratios of sellers to buyers. Look at ratios of top sellers to other sellers. If you've got one seller or a few sellers that are dominating that starts to imbalance the marketplace. A few guests that are dominating your party or a few buyers that are dominating your party that starts to show some imbalance. Those are just off the top of my head kinds of metrics to look at. The thing to do if I were running a marketplace would be to look at the metrics. When you think it's healthy start to look at ratios that indicate it and I think there's some magic here and I think your secret sauce is finding the leading indicators. That's what'll help you succeed with that. I bet Amazon has a few but they're not telling. One of the interesting things that complicates this equation is that your organization starts figuring out that there are these products that are being bought a lot and we're paying a big margin to the sellers or rather than the sellers are making big margins on this. If you had your own product like Amazon Basics or whatever, you could keep all that margin. You now put a third player into the mix. That's Amazon strategy. I mean pretty much all marketplaces at least in India that I know are headed down that strategy. That makes your party suck for sellers and no sellers don't want to join your party because if that seller becomes popular at your party, if they think well as soon as I become popular in that marketplace, the marketplace owner is going to duplicate my product and sell it instead of me. That starts to get scary. What's weird is Amazon again they're watching the balance of doing that. They end up doing that for sellers that my gut is they have a strategy for doing that. The hardest thing about being product-centric is making the choice about what customers and users you're going to help and what customers and users you're going to ignore or hurt. Being product-centric is a little evil. We can't service and we cannot make everybody happy. Your mother should have told you can't make everybody happy. Yeah, that's a problem. Now if your strategy as a marketplace owner is to always do that, I guarantee you at some point in time, sellers are going to start leaving the party. They're going to find another party. Right now for Amazon, they can get away with this at least in the US because there just isn't a bigger party. There's no bigger party maybe eBay, but that's still tiny by comparison. So, the Amazon's got a bit of a monopoly right now and they can run the party the way they want. If you can do that, but you can guarantee the key lesson here I guess is then you just need to focus on monopoly. Yeah, all your metrics have to be around monopoly. Really, the answer is always world domination. Narash, we know this. If you could achieve world domination, it does require being a little evil to do that. The question is will product thinking get you to world domination? Can good products get you to world domination? Does product thinking get you to world domination? Well, it's my assertion that product thinking is the only thing that gets you to, it's good product thinking that is the only thing that gets your company, gets to a company that can sustain itself, but a lot of companies survive on inertia or survive on their dominant market share. Once they've got some inertia around their product, customers and users keep buying their product, but it makes them companies that have a dominant market share are also in a vulnerable position. The more dominant they are in the market, the more they continue to make money without paying attention to customers' problems and unmet needs. They will continue to sell their product without paying attention to those needs. Finally, when those needs get great enough and some other company recognizes those needs, that's why we're having this conversation on Zoom and not WebEx. Remember when we used to talk about meeting face to face and say, I'll WebEx you or WebEx used to be used as a verb for having a conversation like this. Skype was the other thing. Skype, oh yeah, exactly. So if you stop paying attention to these things, that's when competitors do that. So yeah, world domination is great, but it's kind of hard to hang on to. We should have learned that from every James Bond movie. Cool. I think I've killed everyone's interest at this point. Maybe hopefully people are still interested. I think we lost a few people, but all right, we ought to call it. I wanted to point out, I just saw one of the last comments. I'm seeing the list that a product changes human behavior. Product changes human behavior for good is a great product. Basically, when we talk about outcomes, we're measuring behavior. We're measuring the use. The use is our evidence that people are getting value out of it. Even if our product is art, the use of art is standing and looking at it. If I look at art, I'm getting good behavior. I'm getting value out of it. That's why we end up focusing on this stuff. It's one of the easiest leading indicators that people are getting value out of our product is its frequent use. I saw that comment in there. That's it. That's a good takeaway for this. Cool. All right, Jeff, I know you're running late and you need to head off. Yeah, I'm sorry. I can't participate in discussions afterwards today. No, I think it's great. Thanks for taking your time. I know there was a last minute unexpected change on your side, but you were kind enough to wake up so early and still make it to the conference. I just want to do thank you for being with us and all these years and continuing to support this. Well, as long as I do it remotely, I can do it every year. It's the travel that made it hard.