 Good morning. It's great to be here. As your first speaker, I'm thrilled to welcome you to what's going to be an amazing day. You're going to have some great speakers, you're going to have an opportunity to network with product managers from around the world. So I've had the fortune of working with thousands of product managers, and it turns out that with the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently say the number one skill that separates good PMs from the outstanding is effective communication. Okay. Great. So what I'd like to say that with communication, the beauty is that the sooner you start, the more you can benefit throughout your career. I've seen the communication skills just compound one after the other. So I'm going to take you through some skills and techniques. It's crazy that I'm here. That's me talking about communication. You see, I've been a nerd my whole life. I was always more confident tinkering with gadgets than interacting with people. This is me 20 years ago. I put a gadget in my car so I can listen to music way before the iPod. Because I thought building product is what it's all about, and communication is extraneous. You see, our education system, especially for those who come from tech, don't help. I studied electrical engineering and I followed up with a master's. And during those six years, I took only one communication class. It's called communication for engineers. And I was woefully unprepared for what ladies I had. Fast forward, I worked as an engineer. I earned my MBA and I got my first product job at Amazon. I joined an incredible time of growth and I helped hire hundreds of engineers. I then went to Netflix, joining a time of also significant growth. And here I am today as SVP of product at Disney, where I lead growth and commerce and experimentation for our streaming services, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu. I also am very active in the product school community and I teach a course at Stanford University on my other favorite topic with just scaling subscription businesses. Today I'm going to share with you my three pillars for up-leveling your communication. The first pillar, number one, compelling presentations. Pillar number two, crisp writing. And pillar number three, dynamic discussion. So not only am I going to walk you through these three pillars, but I'm going to give you practical tips that you can walk away from and apply to your day-to-day life. Okay, compelling presentations. Let's face it, the hallmark of an amazing PM is one that can walk on stage at a company launch event, captivate the audience. Wow, the crowd. And when I've seen that, I've always wondered, are they born with it? Good news, everyone. I'm here to tell you that nobody is born with great presentation skills. And to prove it to you, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to pull up some clips of my favorite former product manager, Satya Nadella. He was here just two weeks ago in this exact room at the OpenAI inaugural developer day. And so we can see how he is now, but how do you start? Thanks to YouTube, we can follow his progress. Okay, so I'm going to apologize in advance. This video is 30 years old. It was captured off a VHS. So the audio and video, eh, not so great. Actually, now that I say that, I probably need to say, what is the acronym VHS? Because I see some of you may not have actually used a VHS. It's not old. But let me go ahead. Let's play the tape. Add data, which happens to be on a DRDA database, on AS400, as of it were just yet another ODBC data source. So now that we have ODBC, we have in effect an ODBC data source, we can pull the data up using MS query into Excel. And once we have the data, we use OLA automation out, or rather with using OLA automation, we dry words. I think we've seen enough, I think we've seen enough. So let's roll to the next clip. Fast forward to the future, this exact room. I'm going to play Satya Nadell again. How is Microsoft thinking about the partnership currently? First. We love you guys. Look, it's been fantastic for us. In fact, I remember the first time I think you reached out and said, hey, do you have some Azure credits? We've come a long way from there. Thank you for those. Yeah, that was great. You guys have built something magical. I mean, quite frankly, there are two things for us when it comes to the partnership. Wow. Amazing. The poise, the confidence. Did you see the progress? So once again, this is a skill that can be learned and it will take time and practice, but you can all get there. Okay. Now we know it's practicable. How do we actually do it? So I've got a technique, which is called putting yourself out there. And what I encourage my PMs to do is start with the concentric circle approach. It's very simple. You start small. You present at the team meeting and then you level up. You go to the next round, which is you share a presentation with your cross-functional stakeholders. You up level it. You do a company level presentation. You gain confidence and you present at an industry conference. Finally, for the most ambitious, what do you do? Go for a TED Talk. That's what you encourage your PMs to do. So once again, you build up confidence and the skills and you just up level from there. So my next tip goes to some feedback. I've taken probably 50 courses or so on storytelling, effective communication, presentations, and I will tell you the one tip that's had the most impact. That one tip is simple. You take out your phone and you simply record yourself. That's it. Actually, maybe there's one more thing. You have to watch it. You watch yourself on video. Because here's the thing. We all know what a great presentation looks like. We all know. And when you watch yourself, you pick it up, stand straight, use nice hand gestures. Don't chew gum. Don't use your fallback words like mm and ah. So that's the number one tip that I've seen drives outside value when giving presentations. So always remember, record yourself and watch the video. Okay. Now I'm gonna shift to the second pillar of effective communication, which is crisp writing. You see, I consider this to be table stakes for every PM. So clear up the ambiguity and drive clarity. And nothing cuts through ambiguity like a crisp, clear, written narrative. You see, I'm a little biased. I started off my product career at Amazon and this one email written by Jeff Bezos in 2004 started it all. This is what banned PowerPoint. He said, the reason writing a good four page memo is harder than writing a 20 page PowerPoint because the narrative structure of a good memo forces thought and better understanding. Actually, I'm gonna take it one step further. I think writer Joan Didion did a better job. She was more crisp and concise when she said, I don't know what to think until I write it down. So this takes me to my very first tip, which is put it in a narrative. There's three reasons for this. When you put it into a narrative, it drives clarity of thought. Clarity of thought drives the decision and action. Second, when you're in a scaling organization, nothing is better than a memo to help bring the team and your stakeholders along the journey. And three, once you have these great memos in your repository, it's part of your team history. I tell my team, ideas don't go away. They simply get recycled. Constantly, a new stakeholder will come and ask the product team, how can we haven't built feature X? I was like, aha, I've got a memo for you. Take a look at this memo where we thought through the reasons why we haven't launched product X. The next tip is around finding your zone. We all know that writing clear and crisp memos takes time and effort and practice. But here's another secret. I picked this up during my time at Amazon. As a young PM, I was cranking out five, six memos per week. And I discovered something. I discovered that if I try to write a memo during the day, forget about it. All these notifications, all this context switching, I just couldn't finish. So what I found was my zone. My zone is you wake up early in the morning, you turn off all distraction, you put away your phone, you close your extra browser tabs and you just write. And that's the zone for me. I don't know the zone for you, but I promise you when you discover your zone, you're going to unlock so much extra productivity. So experiment, try different things, but I promise you find your zone to unlock this greatness around writing crisp memos. Finally, my last tip for you. When you write a memo, attempt to reduce the number of words you use. Actually, I think I can do better. Cut back on the copy. Actually, I can do better. Distill. So this has become a minor obsession of mine. I'll be honest, I will try to find the fewest words to write to have the same level of impact in my writing. The count word feature has become my friend and I encourage all my team members to use it. And I found that the golden number is somewhere between 150 and 200 words. It turns out even the most busy executive has time to go through 150 to 200 words. The pushback I sometimes get is like, I can't communicate this really dense topic in 200 words. Aha, and that's where the memo comes in handy. You write your crisp memo and you link to that memo if people wanna go deeper. Another thing I find is many PMs struggle with this concept. So I found a very helpful framing. And the framing is very simple. Think of your audience. Who is a specific person you are writing this for? Now frame yourself, pretend you're walking in the elevator with this individual. You've got 20 to 30 seconds as the elevator goes up and the door's open. That framing drives two things. First of all, you now think of a conversational tone. How will you talk to this person in the elevator? And number two, it enforces the PM to put the most important things at the top. You've got 20, 30 seconds of attention. What's the most important thing you wanna get out of this? So I'm gonna close with one of my favorite quotes, which is, I'm sorry, I wrote such a long letter. I did not have time to write the short one. And this was said in the 17th century about this great mathematician, Blaise Pascal, and it's so true today. You see, writing clear memos, it takes time. However, think about this. If every PM wrote concise and crisp memos that save 30 minutes of every other stakeholder, think of how more efficient we could all become. I'm on to my last and final pillar, which is around dynamic discussions. We've talked about presentations, we've talked about memos. But the interesting thing, this actually might be the most important. You see, most of the important decisions are unplanned. They happen in meetings, they happen in conversations in the hallway. Think about this. You start with a memo, it goes well. You get a presentation together, that goes well. The decision, where is it gonna be made? In a meeting. It's gonna happen in that meeting. So what do you do? So here are three tips for having dynamic discussions with your team. The first one is focus. I know, I know it's very hard to focus in meetings. We've got constant distractions and we're trying to be efficient. We're trying to multitask in meetings. But now think about this. Everybody's multitasking in this meeting. Our meeting is now half as efficient. Now we need to have a follow-up upon a follow-up. And we have more meetings. So my humble request is when we have meetings, we focus in these meetings so we can have fewer follow-ups in these meetings. The next request is around active listening. Active listening is the opposite of like listening so you can immediately talk. Here's what I mean. Active listening is actually paying attention, hearing the speaker out and being ready to display to like answer that question. What I find in most meetings, most people have something that they wanna say and they're just waiting for a lull in the audience where they can just like speak. That's not active listening and it makes the meetings less effective. My final piece of advice is fostering a collaborative environment. That's where the leaders and participants actively contribute to bringing great ideas from different sources together. Now as a teacher, I've picked up some techniques and the techniques is to really promote different parts of conversation, different points of view. And in fact, you need to go above and beyond and call on the quietest voices to make sure that they're heard in these meetings. So with that, I've concluded my three pillars and each of these pillars, I've covered in five minutes. Yet, each of these pillars easily could be a month long course. I'm gonna share a couple of books that probably have had the biggest impact on me. The first one, I won't say the name, but you know what it is. Second one, smart brevity. And the last one, think faster, talk smarter for how to think on your feet and have dynamic conversations. Thank you so much. And I'm available if you wanna connect via LinkedIn, via this QR code. Thank you everyone, have a great day. All right, thank you AJ.