 Great it looks like we are live Awesome. Hi everyone. Welcome to another product school talk. I was very excited to be here with all of you Just want to make sure that everyone can see us and hear us I'm checking in and it looks like we're good If you can hear me type book in the comments and you're going to get a free copy of the product book So you guys can type that in and it looks like we Awesome. Hi everyone. Welcome to great Okay, so as as you guys know we teach product management coding and data there's six campuses and we host these talks every week Today's guest is going to talk to us about different challenges that are faced in product management So let me introduce you to Sanjay He was previously the VP of product at Motorola and now he's the VP of product and engineering at Y Y City Y Tri City Welcome Sanjay. How are you doing today? Awesome? Thank you. Thanks for the introduction Great now, I know you have a presentation set up So if you if you want to take a second to screen share that and just letting everybody know that following his Presentation we're going to take Q&A and you can type in your questions in the Facebook comments and we'll take them from there So Sanjay, I'll let you take it from here for now Well, thank you Cassandra. Really appreciate that and and glad to be here and thanks everyone for joining and Really, you know, what I wanted to do was Share my experiences product managing Products that had you know a component of I would say hardware software for where everything and I think It's typically a little bit different than products that are just software So let me start with a little story I used to have a partner who I used to go visit and at the reception in the soft as there used to be a little Plack with hardware is hard and this was clearly a company That was building hardware and they used to take pride in hardware is hard and I always used to think why is hardware hard hard There's no reason why hardware should be hard hardware should be well soft and easy, right? So really what I will do today is I'll talk to you about my philosophy of product management and how product management of hardware products that have a hardware component is Is a little bit different and unique and what you need to do based on my experiences and my learning My only regret today is you know, we only have 30 minutes. So really I think What we will have the opportunity to do here today is to kind of expose you to a lot of differences We're probably you're gonna say, hey, you know, you left us with a lot of questions Certainly reach out to me and we could probably have a follow-up session at a later date where we can dive into More in-depth and it's certainly a topic that we can you know go on for for hours in this so, okay An interesting story and I think you know product management is never taught in school, right? You know, you can go to the best colleges and they don't talk you how to build products So what I thought which was very interesting is I can probably start by sharing my story of how I got into product management, right and Just so you know, I started out my career as being a geek I take a lot of pride in being a geek and I had this little pet program that I was working on the side To really build a Phone that had Wi-Fi on it and could make calls over Wi-Fi using voice over IP and this is I'm talking, you know early 2000s and Today it seems like okay, we all take it for granted but in those days This was like Sanjay. It makes zero sense. Why would anybody want to do something stupid like this? it passes no common sense test and Anyway, I wasn't listening too much and I kept doing my thing and one fine day I had a little prototype that actually showed I could do this thing I filed a whole bunch of patents and said, you know what all the technical challenges that people have thrown out and all the reasons why you can't do this None of those matter. I've overcome all of them So I had a you know a senior VP and GM of the business for the GSM Smartphone business it was actually just phones in those days. He said Sanjay, you know what? I'll give you I think there's something here. Let's maybe try and create a business and So he said Sanjay here is an engineering team for you. Not just, you know, you and your five smart People that you have on your team. Let me give you a full engineering team and let me go find you a Business executive who can work with you to make this happen So I said build that's a deal done. Let's go do it. I You know, I got my team I started working on it to try make this into a product and he bill came back to me three months later and says Sanjay I've tried very hard and Really, I cannot find any Anybody who's willing to sign up to doing this and commercializing this thing that you're working on it. I just can't find it So he said Sanjay, there are only two options you have Either we shut this thing down because clearly I'm worried there is no business here. Nobody believes in this thing or I Know you are passionate about this thing. And so if you're willing to do everything, then I'm fine and have you supported so face with the very stark choice either I let my pet program be shut down or Take on something that I had never done and put my entire credibility on the line well, I chose the ladder and It's something that I really started enjoying. So, you know, what I'll do is I'm going to Stop my story for a little bit talk about product management and we'll come back to the story. So this story is a very interesting story It's really about how you bring to market disruptive products and how you manage products that are new and different But anyway, so this is how I got into product management. This was my first product trying to bring to market Industries first vice over IP phone with Wi-Fi on it, right? so Let me just start with my My theory that I've come up with myself, you know, Stu How do you do product management since certainly I did not have The benefit of the product school and somebody telling me how to do it in a systematic way. So I learned it the hardware and So the first thing is, you know, which I want everybody to remember is hardware products are still at the end Just products, right? so All of the product management that you learn here and the wisdom that, you know, your colleagues can offer Still apply, right? So when in doubt go with your gut go based on what you know and my Product management the way I try and look at it. It has really, you know You're trying to have balance a lot of different things And there are three very fundamental things that you need to manage and everything else probably falls into one of these three buckets And since I'm an engineer, I'm a geek. So I'm gonna start with the feasibility, right? Whatever you do, it better be technically feasible if the best engineers in the organization come and say it's not feasible You can build up all the business plans and say I've got a great market It counts for nothing if it's not if you can't build it in a realistic time frame and bring it to market, right? So once you can build something or you believe you can build something it doesn't mean you go actually build it You really have to answer the question who is going to buy this product, right? So are you really satisfying a need that a customer has? Right or a consumer has you really have to dig in deep and ask and convince yourself That yes, there is a need, right? So this is really the the customer slash consumer part and Then the third part which is equally important is there's no point building something and yes I can find some customers, but if you can't make any money selling it or You know, whatever the appropriate success metric is for the business whether it's the number of subscribers make money revenue margin Whatever it may be right, you know your CFO and your CEO is going to define Hey, this is what the business objectives are for us and your For you, right? We have to make sure that we can actually satisfy Those business requirements and I kind of put them in the bucket of return, right? And it's never a process that you say I have a feasibility I verified the needs Now I can go show business and let's go build a product It's really typically what I find it being an iterative process you have a rough idea as to what you can do Then you say, okay, does it satisfy the itch for the consumer? And by the way, how much is the consumer willing to pay for a product and does it make sense here, right? So I want to go back to my voice over IP Phone story again for a second because it's very important because when I got handed over this business and this big task and I was clearly You know in deep water myself or at least felt that way to me was I have only technical feasibility and now I have no idea Well, how to go make a business and the best people in the organization. I said they don't want to touch it When I proved a little bit deeper. I found out the reason why nobody wanted to have anything to do with this was because Motorola worked with all the cellular customers And the cellular customers like T-Mobile and Verizon and AT&T And they're equivalent in those days Said we are paying money for spectrum And suddenly if You can take our services and move them to unlicensed spectrum It's not good. You're cannibalizing my business. So we are not willing to sign up for this. You guys just go away They all got thrown out of the room right So I'm scratching my head and saying, okay, if I really believe in this what am I going to do? So I said, okay, let me look at people who don't have spectrum But who still want to offer mobility, right? And I found The cable companies, right, you know, Comcast and cable vision and so on and you know, there are equivalents in Europe Who want to offer mobile services, but they have fixed line big fat pipes to your home But they really can't offer mobility And then there was an interesting upcoming operator in those days T-Mobile Who had some cellular licenses, but really did not have a lot of spectrum Right, so they said, yes, Angie, you know, we're we're willing to sign up for something like this. This is very attractive So you can see, you know, our traditional customers didn't have the needs So I really went to find the customers who would actually have a need So it's not our established customer that who were we were doing business with But I really had to go work very hard to find actually the customers who actually were be willing to pay for something Like this in the case the return the cost of the phone itself wasn't actually a big issue for us You know, they were more than happy to pay whatever I was going to ask them But talking about needs I only had one small part of the puzzle so So this phone actually my first customer was noof in France, which is channel 9 and They loved the thing and they're ready to launch in two months six weeks before the launch Suddenly it occurred to them and clearly I was kicking myself. Why did I not probe them on this was Sunday, we are a cable company. We offer video We're gonna launch this device which does voice Doesn't have any video. We need a streaming video service of this Right shame on me for not having figured this out earlier That there's a customer who is going to have a need of course, you know, that wasn't my research area That wasn't what I was working on But as a product manager, that was my job to have sorted that out so Luckily, you know, I was doing product management and also engineering if you remember earlier, I was doing the whole thing I said fine. I got my engineering team together and said guys We're going to have to build a streaming video solution in six weeks we had the video solution working on as well and we launched the device and And you know, it was actually we made a lot of money on this product and That was really the start of I probably don't want to get into the story But when you see how voice over IP and how voice is done over 4g lte today The way I did this phone is actually exactly how it's done today This has now become the industry standard that I actually take a lot of pride in which is pretty awesome in terms of The legacy That is left behind But I also want to talk a little bit about you know for success in any job It's very important to know all the stuff that can be written in books and we can you know say Hey, this is the recipe you do your spreadsheets You balance your needs and technical feasibility and return for the business and you can do all all of that stuff The one thing that I have learned Is behaviors are especially in the product management context are absolutely essential for success Right and the one skill that I find myself Having used the most Is your ability to sell? right What is a product manager selling at the end a product manager is selling his vision of the product at the end Right and you have to convince all the different constituencies Right You have an engineering team. You have your cfo. You have your gm. You have to convince customers, right to everybody to sign off And agree and work to making your vision of the product happen and at the end it becomes Your ability To sell successfully, right? So if there is one skill that you need to succeed and by the way product management Is is the ability to sell your ideas your vision? It's not just reserved for the guys who have sales on their business card, right? Each one of us to succeed in a corporate career You really need to perfect the art of selling the art of influence and And I really like to say, you know, you really have to learn to sell without requiring PowerPoint At the end, you really have to be able to deliver and communicate In a very quick easy way What you're trying to get done and you know, I think Everybody should at least read the selling one-to-one Book if you haven't I think it will really help you in your in your product management roles Okay, so so let's talk a little bit about what makes hardware A little bit different and why do most people say hardware is hard, right? I think everybody by now realizes right, you know, nobody gets a product right in the first time it does take iterations The challenge when you're building hardware is each iteration takes time Right unlike software That you can build and roll out and test, you know, even potentially every day if you so desire to Hardware iterations usually take time, right? Even if you throw a lot of money at it It probably takes you A minimum of two weeks if you had everything in your own building Your by chance you're working with somebody in Asia. It may take you actually four weeks or so, right iterations take time and that limits How fast you can move in some and how you do your planning and iterations The second thing is iterations are expensive Right, not just the fact that the iterations take time. It actually costs money Right and a lot of money. It's not just hey the few engineers who have to work an extra day or so this is really about You know, your PCB is getting fabricated your parts getting shot Shot new tools may have to be defined and so on right. So all of this takes time and money And it's really the constraint is really around how many dollars is somebody willing to give you and say you can spend on building this product And then the one other thing which is not necessarily unique to building hardware But certainly in hardware it does become A lot of your challenge is the amount of regulatory safety and how long testing takes right And regulatory environment, you know, you may have to do EMI testing. You may have to make sure it doesn't You know shock something and kill it No kid is going to choke over this product There's a whole bunch of requirements that you have to satisfy which You know, it's largely software only products do not have to Deal with right and these are some of the challenges which make hardware difficult And you know, you look at these these challenges are really engineering challenges But these engineering challenges really end up impacting how you do product management and how You have to drive decisions from a product management perspective Right But let's take You know, engineering is just one part of product management. The other important aspects are You have to launch this product, right? And when you're dealing with hardware, unfortunately It gets really really challenging because unlike software that you can roll out and if you don't like it You can do an update to it, right? You know, you've seen apps that get updated literally every week even today, right? So people are Perfecting things on the fly a software app can remain in perpetual beta in some cases You really can do this with hardware, right? You know, just imagine how much money it takes to launch a hardware product Just to have one in every store so that people can touch and feel your hardware product You have to spend billions of dollars and just building that much and we're not even trying to build inventory yet, right? Uh So the amount of investment you need Is very high and for that reason your appetite to take risk goes down Now today, yes, you know, there was a time when we could not do OTA in terms of former you have that capability now But still the fundamental challenges haven't gone away that you have to be a lot more Part through and think through before you actually invest in launching from a product management perspective a product That requires you just can't sense a bit over a cable and it shows up and you say i'm happy with that, right? You know, you're literally going to have ship somebody a box Right. The other thing is and you know, you look at okay What is the cost of getting it wrong? Maybe Well, if you get it wrong you end up with a whole lot of inventory Right, and i'll tell you having worked with so many vcs. No vc likes to invest money in inventory They're very happy to have you a lot of patents. They'll invest in everything but inventory right because inventory Does not appreciate like fine wine. It's not it value is not going up inventory of product sitting in a warehouse It value only goes down every day, right? So really what it means is you as a product managed Management executive you have a lot riding on the success. You really have to be very very deliberate And part through and think through everything before you actually launch Launch the product Let me tell you about uh, I know you probably have a bunch of questions. We'll get to them in a second What have I learned? How have I learned to manage the complexity of uh, products that have a significant Hardware component and the first thing is, you know, this is something that I learned very early in my life Even before I started doing product management. We as engineers kind of learned to embrace complexity We need to do exactly the opposite learn to simplify everything There is no better friend of yours than simplicity if you think something is too complex for you to be able to explain to somebody In two or three sentences. Maybe you're doing something wrong, right just rethink Kind of taking a problem and taking a product and dividing it into its component pieces Uh, kind of modularizing the larger product actually helps Something that I typically try to do is to separate to the degree that's possible The mechanical from the electrical and hardware and the software and firmware, right because they all three of them Have their own time scales in which they need to move at Right. So what you really need to do is to work with your program manager and really understand what decisions need to be made at what time and But they all have to come together now this strategy actually Works 99 percent of the time There's only one product that I did where I actually regretted having modularized this But probably that's more of an exception rather than a rule. So I'm going to keep it aside But something that I want every product manager to think about, you know, be very deliberate think about is this problem Can I modularize it? Can I separate my mechanical design from my electrical design? From my firmware software design and to what degree can I separate them? The other thing is decision making you as a product manager are going to have to make lots and lots of decisions right You really have to understand What decisions you need to make when you don't make a decision too early or you make a decision too late You know, both of them have its challenges, right and you're going to be making a decision always with Without having all the data that you wish you had unfortunately and especially when you're launching A completely new product that is more than just an iteration of something that has been done before You really don't have a lot of data to go Make your decisions on right so you really have to Develop a level of comfort With being uncomfortable, right? So, you know, if I walk into my office in the morning And I don't have little my stomach churning a little bit. I always worried about that day. Okay. What's going on today? There's something I'm missing today, right? And then the last thing is You know as a product manager, you will always have to learn to be in the spotlight, right? You get to enjoy the spotlight But also the harsh spotlight when you make maybe sometimes, you know bad decisions and and everybody will make them There's nobody who's going to bat You know, 1000% all the time, right? You're you're going to make mistakes You really have to learn To enjoy the spotlight being on you, right? This is like the the big performer on the Broadway or the You know, you really have to enjoy the spotlight. You have to learn to perform and enjoy Right what I really enjoy about building Kazima products is you get to You know consumers are very unforgiving you get to Compete every six months launching a new product and showing that you can you still got it You can still do an awesome awesome product, right? So you really learn to enjoy and embrace it, right? Don't be shy. Don't run away from it You have to really own on the product Okay, I think we probably may have taken kassandra more time than I probably should have I know people probably have a lot of questions here Uh, so I think we'll probably take a breather and then answer any questions that the team has Sure, absolutely. Um, we can we can take a few questions here. Definitely. We've had some questions come in So but first I want to thank you for their great presentation. Um, and and really inspiring points at the end um Guys also just a reminder to if you if you typed in book earlier There was a slight delay. I feel free to type it in again and um, and we'll get that over to you So the first question comes Let's see. I'm going to scroll through here and and and pick out one. So the first one is from francisco um First he said thank you for the presentation sanjay um How do you distinguish product managers and project managers responsibilities or what advice can you give to a junior product manager? Great question francesca, right so A project manager and sometimes I also call them program managers are Folks who manage the schedule Right, they are not the people making trade-offs with features is this feature in and out What is the value proposition of the of the product? How am I going to sell it market it? Right, how do I communicate value proposition? That's not what a project manager does right a product manager is the one Who articulates at the end? What is the vision for the product? What is the product going to do and very importantly? What is the product not going to do right? If I say one of the most important decisions For a product manager is is the definition of the product, right? You let the program manager or the project manager own the schedule The engineering lead can own the schedule and his job to execute to whatever was agreed to you Right, but the most important function of a product manager is To own the feature set and the product definition Great awesome. Thank you. Um our next question is from anthony Is there any way to develop hardware in an iterative agile way or is hardware really locked into a waterfall development model? Just given all the challenges that you presented and was there ever a version 2.0 of your iPhone You know great great question. So one is I and maybe I should have clarified this Hardware I develop hardware using an iterative methodology, right? I have never advocated I never will to do anything in waterfall until unless you're building the next jumbo jet or whatever, right? Or the cost of failure is so high that That really there's no other easy way. No, I actually follow a strategy Which is build and fail fast even in hardware, right? How can you reduce the time of each iteration? Right, and this is where dollars and cents come in depending on how much budget may be at your disposal There may be ways And and we can talk offline if needed as to how you can do iterations faster, right? Really, I'm a big fan of that. The other thing which I actually do when you do any hardware product At every iteration even if the earliest iterations I actually Put it in the hands of real Consumers right be it my family be it my colleagues people who have zero hand And zero emotional attachment to the product as it is defined or as they've built it, right? So this way I can get the unadulterated feedback early in a safe and secure way Right, and then I can use that feedback to do my next iteration typically And I'm just talking typically based on my experience when I build a hardware product I usually plan for at least three iterations that I'm going to have to go through Before I can get it right. I am not expecting Anybody to get a hardware product right in the first iteration and if somebody says they can then I'm probably challenging them They're maybe doing something else which is wrong like sandbagging the schedules and a whole bunch of other stuff Okay Awesome. Well, we have we have just a couple minutes left. So I'm going to take this last question here. Um, this is from Mehmet, uh, thanks for the great presentation Sanjay again My question is what software or tools do you use for your daily work that are specific to product management? Okay, that's that's an interesting question. You know, I am a person who is very light on process personally, but that just me My own personal biases Typically, you know, when you're capturing product requirements and feature sets and so on You can use a tool built for capturing requirements even an excel spreadsheet does the trick Sometimes I've even used powerpoint to be able to communicate and get sign off so that people are in agreement, right? So I'm less about The tools per se, but what is the content of what you're trying to get done, right? I want to make sure That the tool doesn't become more important than what the tool is supposed to help you with right And what's supposed to help you what you really need is a very good shared definition Of the product that everybody can align Right and a process to make sure that as you evolve the definition of the product as time moves on Everybody has a way to make sure they can all stay aligned right every product as it changes and we talked about doing iterations Inevitably, there'll be some feedback. Hey, I need to change the color. I need to move the buttons from a to b I need to change the camera resolution. I need to do 20 other things Right there has to be a clear way when everybody's running yet supersonic speeds Everybody can stay on the same page in terms of what were the latest changes Agreed to on a product right and for that purpose. I absolutely insist on having a meeting with every stakeholder For the product to sit down and make sure we can all align in a 30 minute meeting standing only meeting that we can All agree changes made Changes suggested but rejected whatever happened, but everybody's on the same page and we can all go back to doing our work So so hopefully that helps mammoth Yeah Definitely he said so art is more important than the science exactly Great. Um, well, thank you again. Sanjay really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today I did want to ask you before before we let you go If you could offer up any advice to aspiring product managers What would you know in terms of a recipe? I did read the book Cassandra that you give out For the for the few people who followed your instructions. I would say read that book You know product management is a very very new Discipline it's not something that is taught in any school any university Trust me. I spent more years than I actually want to now in school And nobody ever told me How to build products, right? And I think this is the first time I've actually seen something That tries to boil down The folklore about product management and how to build products into something That you can learn and follow the other thing and this is you know something that I have experienced Uh Product management is a very fulfilling job, right? When you have contributed and led a product and when it starts to ship and your kids can see it on the shelf or your Family and friends can see it on the shelf and they know You led The realization of this product that is an incredible high, right? You know, there is no high that equals the pleasure that you derive from Your product being on amazon or best buy or target or wherever, right? You know that makes it all worth it in a way all the The sweat and the tears that go into building a product really worth it for me Great awesome. Thank you. Thank you again. I see we have a few more people typing book in there as well so You guys will all get a free copy and thanks to everyone for joining us and and sanjay great presentation and Thank you. Really great advice Thank you my pleasure. Thanks everyone Awesome. Well, great guys. If you want more information about us, um, you know, you can go to our website ProductSchooled.com and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day Okay