 Hi everyone, my name is Rob Hall and I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen into what I think is a really important topic to many of us that are non-traditional product management groups. But before we get into the specifics of my topic, which is instilling a product mindset across the organization, let's take a look at our agenda and how we'll spend the next 20 minutes or so. I'll give you first a little bit of background about myself, what my definition of product mindset is, and why it's important enough to me that we're talking about this today. And we'll also discuss how we can relate what we do and how we think as product managers to those of our non-product colleagues in our organization. So who am I? Like I said, my name is Rob Hall. I am currently a program strategist with Expedia. And in that role, I get to work with product managers across all of Expedia Group, really focused on highlighting the business value of our loyalty programs while helping to drive the feature and functionality prioritization with those specific teams. So along my journey, I've spent about 13 years in a product role. My start in product was likely not too dissimilar to some of you where I stumbled into it. I had been studying, I had studied banking finance as an undergrad and had planned to go work for a big bank, but I graduated in 2008 and it was not a great time to look for banking jobs. So I started a career with a company called Sterling Commerce. They were a B2B software company that was shortly after acquired by IBM, and I spent five years there. Then I headed off to the UK to get my MBA with a clear plan to change careers. I had studied marketing in school, grad school, and after being able to experience a lot of different opportunities and meet with a lot of different people, I decided that what I really loved doing was product and ended up with Expedia, where I still am today, seven years later. There's really just something about the ambiguity of the work that I love. Being able to wear a bunch of different hats in a given day is something that has always appealed to me all of these years. Now up until about four years ago, I had been on a product team. Just all product managers or product designers and we each had our own product or focus areas and that was it. But when I joined this team that I'm on now, about four years ago, I was the only person with a product background. The need to better communicate or learn to communicate with the 20 other people on my team and as I've grown my own team has made me think a lot about what it is to be a product manager and how I could instill this product mentality or product mindset across my own organization. So what is it? I'm sure each of you have found yourselves in a position where somebody has asked you what you do and they walk away confused. I think this has something to do with being in a fairly technical role while perhaps not coming from technical background that makes it tough for some folks to even hear the second sentence of your explanation of your job. So I found myself in this situation quite a lot over the years. I jumped into product without much clue what I'd gotten myself into just to get started. So I didn't know and that led me to years in B2B banking software, which is a lot more difficult to explain than travel. And now I get to discuss working with consumers, travelers, and hotels. I've often thought about this question, what do I do? And that has led me down a path with my team over the years to ask the question, how can what I do as a product person and how I do it help other people on my team? Now, not all of us work on a strictly product team. So how do we help other people in our teams understand why we think the way that we think make decisions the way we make decisions? It's this that has caused me to think about what my own personal product mindset is. If you Google product mindset, you'll find dozens of descriptions. But I want to focus on the fundamentals of my approach to product and how I have and will continue to approach my teams to help them better understand how I think. So take a minute here. Have you ever sat down to think about what it means to you to think like a product manager? Have you ever worked in an organization where you may be the only product person on your team? What makes you different than the others on your team? How do you approach things differently than your teammates? This is something that I have thought a lot about over the last four years in my role. I'm working with over 20 people in marketing operations and sales and strategy. There are only now two of us that are focused on product strategy. So I've thought about all the different characteristics that make up a good product manager and how one approaches different situations. And I want to highlight that this list by no means is exhaustive and you'll find hundreds of different ideas online or talking with your colleagues in your product organizations on what a product mindset is. But I've chosen to focus on three main points today. The first is problem focused. So over my career I've had times where I've been very solution focused and not problem focused. And I'll tell you what, it hasn't always gone great. So we'll talk a little bit about that shortly about why having a problem focused is so important. Next we'll talk about accountability over ownership. And up until a couple of years ago, I liked to say that in my product role, I'm the owner of everything and the owner of nothing. I've since pivoted that thinking slightly. Well, fairly dramatically, I guess, too, I'm accountable for everything, my team, UX, dev, product, business owners, and the owner of nothing. And I'll get more into into that in just a moment as well. The third is user focused, not self promoting. So how often have you made the wrong call in your product role by maybe focusing on something you really wanted to do, something you thought would be really cool, when in reality, your customer or end user may not. They may have needed something else other than what you created. So we're going to take all of these things in an approach to help our teams understand how we as product people approach our craft and how that helps pull back the curtain a little bit on what may intimidate them or what they may not understand about us and our product thinking. So how do we spread this across the org? Take a look at this image. What do you see when you look at this picture? Do you see the ocean in front of you? Or that we need to build a bridge to get over an obstacle? Have you ever jumped head first into solving a problem without fully understanding what that problem is? How often have you been told to slow down? Sure, we've all been there. I know that I have. I'm sure that we've all jumped into a problem or a bug and said we need to fix this ASAP as soon as possible, but acted too quickly and then perhaps more problems arose down the road. That's why I've communicated over the years the importance of the scientific method to our team. Now this has been much more widely adopted with Expedia Group over the last couple of years, but this helps beyond the product or we've been doing this for long before I ever joined Expedia, the focus on the scientific method. But this mindset really helps to better level set with our colleagues on why we make a decision. So we take a step back and look at a problem more intently. By doing so, this helps us to avoid more problems down the road. Now I know I hate going back to my product managers and my engineering teams or UX to say, hey, you know what? That work you did three months ago, it needs to be changed because we didn't think about X, Y, or Z use cases. We didn't fully understand what the problem was and I think something that resonates with, I think that is really something that resonates with somebody from a non-product background, something that they've probably lived with as well or experienced themselves. So the entire scientific method to me can be boiled down into one word, why. Ask why. Some of you may have heard of the five-wise technique and I've thought about this a lot over the last year or so. Ultimately, the goal of five-wise is to help get to the root cause of a problem or a request. This methodology is easily understood by anyone on your team and helps to engage team members or stakeholders to more fully feel like they are involved. So let's look at the issue that I started here and break it into the five-wise method. It doesn't have to always be five-wise, but doing it this way helps you get a deeper understanding into what the root cause of the problem was. So the problem, they built a bridge that can't span the body of water. The first Y didn't look at how big the body of water was. They didn't realize it was the ocean. Number two, they didn't go to the site or ask anyone that had been there. They were in a hurry to get it done because somebody had told them this has to get done as soon as possible. They started later than they expected to. And then lastly, the fifth Y, they didn't know why crossing this body of water was necessary, like what was the purpose. So I realize that's extremely elementary or rudimentary, but the root cause was really a lack of communication. The team that built the bridge didn't know why they needed to cross it. Hidden within each of those five Ys is a person or a team who was responsible for a piece of that project. There wasn't really one single owner. And without one single person responsible for delivering the end-to-end solution, the thought process of ownership is where I'm going to take us next as we talk about accountability over ownership. Without that single person, this is the reason that I think about accountability over ownership. Like I mentioned earlier, I used to say that product management was just being the, it was being the owner of nothing and the owner of everything at the same time. And over the years, I've realized that that's just wrong. Ownership is somewhat of an exclusionary term. It maintains that I am alone and responsible for the wins or the losses for everything in between. That's why I have changed the way I approach product management and have instead focused on accountability. Being accountable is about being responsible for the result. Accountable leaves the conversation more open for inclusion. You can have more people involved in what you're trying to accomplish. So when you say, I've got this, accountability means you will deliver as promised, whether it's on time, within budget or something else, because it's your reputation that's on the line. It also means that your forthcoming when you fall short, if you can't deliver on time or the results are not as strong as you'd hoped, you have to be honest and proactive with your communication. By being forthcoming, you respect the impact that you have on your teammates and being accountable is just, it's a major factor in building trust. And I know I had trust on my original slide with all of the different product mindset. I won't get into it here, but it's extremely important. So I hear what you're thinking, okay, okay, this guy I've never met thinks accountability is a more inclusive term than ownership. So what? The what is that when you're working across different teams with different strengths, it's important to consider how you come off to others. Are you confident? Or are you, do you come off as confident? Or do you come off as arrogant? Are you a bridge builder with your colleagues? Or do you row off on your own? Being accountable tells others, you can trust me to do what I say I'm going to do. And also effectively communicating what you're going to do or what you've done so that others can fully grasp what you have intended is accountability. That also means that we need to speak in a language that our audience will understand. Now I want you to think a little bit to yourself here. Have you ever lived or visited, lived in or visited a country or place where you didn't understand the language? Have you ever visited or lived in a place where you understand some of the language or and and have there been times when you feel like you're barely just catching every other word? Has there been an opportunity for where somebody has jumped in and lent a hand to you when you have struggled understanding the language by either slowing down their speech or speaking to you in your own language? I remember a time back when I had just moved to Ecuador some nearly 20 years ago, 19 years ago, and I was really struggling with the language in my first days there. But I had someone see that I was struggling and he did everything that he could to help me understand what was going on in this in this group that we were talking in. He helped to try to explain what the situation was and the context of the conversation, and he didn't change his language, but what he did was he was selective in the words that he used. He slowed down. He was more thoughtful about using words that he thought I might understand. This is what I think is extremely important as we communicate with folks on our team that may not speak our product language. I was actually just recently I had an experience on my own team where I thought I communicated something extremely well, only to find out that my toned down product speak came off as too technical for my audience. So we all have these sorts of interactions maybe every day. It could be we use jargon or technical speak that or acronyms that cause other people to scratch their heads or may not understand. As product people we need to be aware of that and we need to efficiently speak the many languages of our stakeholders, whether it's engineering or marketing or sales, or how our customers understand, how our customers speak. We need to be able to effectively deliver the same content in many different languages. So as we think about what different languages are, we need to make sure that we're communicating. Are we really communicating effectively? Have we told people why we're giving them the information we're delivering? Are we being as effective as we can as communicators? We should always include the why, always include the why. And that falls back onto my earlier comments regarding the problem in the problem focused section. But to me ultimately information it should be free and what I mean by that is is we need to be open with our communication. We need to be clear, clear as Brené Brown said is kind, unclear is unkind. So people who spend less time on guarding information or not communicating information in a way that others will understand will have better relationships and be looked at as leaders in their space. Now finally as product managers we have a lot of stakeholders. We're used to having to get people bought into our plans. How do you get people bought in? For me with people across different business units I always try to highlight a few different things. One is when I'm scheduling time with people I share what my goals or OKRs are. I strive to understand what their goals are and their priorities are. I share what my team is all about and the direction that we are heading strategically and I try to find opportunities during those conversations to align our priorities and goals. So making sure that we're all on the same level or understanding it's often challenging and time consuming but it's worth the effort. Effective communication with our colleagues leads to effective understanding of our end users. Now one of the most profound things I've ever learned is extremely simple and incredibly complex at the same time. My world is not your world. This was from a professor I had in school and I use it in just about every aspect of my life and I think you can as well. We can relate this to the communication techniques I talked about earlier as well as how we focus on our end user or customers. We need to see ourselves as different or understand that the way that we think is different than the way that other people think or our perceptions are different than the perceptions of others. Our role as product people is to solve problems, to make enhancements to our products in a way that will benefit our customers and our users. At Expedia even though I do purchase travel and I'm an Expedia customer, I can't prioritize work that will benefit me but rather I need to focus on things that will benefit our broader customer base. Being user focused is extremely important as we talk about a product mindset and how that pertains to others in our organization. So here's an example. Around marketing. So why are we working on a given marketing campaign for example? Is it to try to improve our success metrics? Could be conversion rate or click through rate or whatever? Or are we trying to use it this campaign to help our customers better identify opportunities to use our sites or widgets or tools or whatever? If we think about why, again why, we do things that while focusing on others and not ourselves. Now I'm confident that we will see better results in whatever we are doing in the future if we approach it in this regard. If we focus on others. Our role really is not to solve our own personal problems at work but rather the problems of our users or customers or our partners. Everyone regardless of whether they have ever had a single day in the shoes of a product or a product adjacent person or role can use a user focused approach to problem solving. And by doing so they will get the full view of the elephant rather than what is right in front of them. So why is this important? Why do we just spend 24 minutes talking about what a product mindset is and how it can be used regardless of whether you're a product manager or in a product organization? It's because product managers are nothing without others. We rely on so many other people as product managers to get things done. We are not the coders, we are not the oftentimes, we're not the the people that are writing marketing collateral. We all have our own jobs and responsibilities to perform and if we can do it more efficiently across our teams, I believe that we will be better able to or more clearly see rather. I believe we can will be able to more clearly see the ocean that's in front of us and more effectively help one another cross it. Thank you so much for your time today. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to comment here or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thank you so much.