 Hey folks, my name is Aaron Rapolo. Thank you for joining me today. I'm excited to speak on behalf of the product school and share a little bit about the power of soft power. When this event was listed, I was still the head of mobile product with Amazon or I guess with Alexa Auto, but now I'm the head of mobile product over at Love Every. You can reach me at my LinkedIn here, but I'd love to share a little bit more about myself before kind of diving into how I can help you through building relationships, repairing them and kind of putting some of that on automation. So very quickly we've all done the tell me about yourself in an interview and this is mine. I was born and raised in Miami in Fort Lauderdale across a couple of homes and stayed in Florida for a good period of time. And I went to the University of Central Florida and I earned a bachelor's and master's degree in exercise science and coaching. So very atypical background for a product manager, but as I came to find, it was a lot of the same skill sets about being able to empathize with your users, about being able to lead without authority, being able to form really solid relationships and oftentimes being able to manage both up and down. So through about a six year career, I was able to found two new recreation centers and turn some defunct recreation centers around for a variety of colleges, such as the University of Central Florida. I also did it for Red Rock Community College and probably my favorite work was with the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I got to build one from the ground up and ended up training, hiring and developing a staff of just under 30 folks. So really cool there. And I've had over 50 direct reports in my time and have helped many of these leaders grow and become managers now themselves. But like many folks who are career switchers, clearly I'm in tech now. I got a little bored. Education and recreation don't necessarily move all that fast. I wanted greater reach to be able to help more people. I've always been a geek and I found the opportunity to pivot into tech through the MBA with Duke's Fuqua School of Business. Is able to secure an internship with T-Mobile where I got to launch the T-Mobile Trucks Program. Think of retail stores on wheels, kind of like an ice cream truck that show up to music venues, show up to farmers markets and help folks out with their service plans or get them enrolled in a new one. So launched about 26 of those trucks nationwide during my internship. Heck of a good time. And taught me a lot about working in a Fortune 100 company, which I was able to parlay into working retail with Amazon Business International. I was solving the exciting problems of tax and invoicing customer experience for our international customers. As you can imagine, things like VAT and GST if not refunded properly account for massive expenses for a company. So it was my job to make sure we did that. And I pulled together a cross team coalition of about eight different product leaders. Got all of the directors and the requisite VP's on board was able to push a significant project into several roadmaps over the course of 2020 and 2021. Sorry, 2019 and 2020. We're joining Alexa Auto where I got to work directly on consumer-pacing goods which is more my passion. During my time there, I launched Auto Mode and started a massive mobile program, my first direct hires. And then shortly left to work on something near and dear to my heart. I've got a two-year-old toddler here at home and being able to work with a mobile app program being able to lead a mobile app program that's going to aid parents like myself and help them to work with their children between ages zero to four is something that I felt very strong about. I'm able to take those skills that I learned at Amazon and at Duke and work on a project that resonates with me. But that's not what you're here for. You're here to hear more about why relationships matter, how to build them, how to repair a relationship that maybe you broke or maybe you're not at fault but is a broken regardless. And then for me to share a couple of tools with you to simplify your relationship workflow because this, fitting this into your existing nine to five or eight to six or from any of us, especially at larger companies, the seven to tens as they end up being, can be very onerous. So I'm looking kind of massage that into your existing workflows or at least make it a little more automatic. The first, why do relationships matter? Especially for a PM. We've all heard this phrase, leadership without authority. I get tired of hearing it, but it's very true. As a product manager, you're often trying to convince folks in UX, folks in QA, your developers, you're trying to convince other product teams to do what it is that you believe is right for your customers, what you think is important and what your roadmap needs to succeed. And oftentimes we don't manage any of those folks. So it is in essence, your ability to cultivate relationships with all of these various leaders and their cross-functional verticals that is the currency that gets this work done. But in addition to that, there are some other perks. First and foremost is stakeholders will defend your interests when you're not in the real. I like to say that they're covering your ass for you. Excuse my explicit, but I think that that's the right way to look at it. We all are familiar with CYA and when you can have somebody CYA for you, that is an incredible tool. To give you an example, this happened today. I was given a company-wide presentation at Love Every. The president of the company mentioned something offhand that would require a massive amount of work on my team and it kind of went over my head. I didn't notice it at first. It was a simple request essentially that when we release something that all of the employees are going to get involved. I have to be a bit vague, but what that meant is that my head of CX, the folks who aid customers, I would say customer success, but we call it customer experience here, reached out to me individually on Slack and was like, hey, do you do realize that that's going to be XYZ for your team? Oh shoot. I was so glad to have her bring that up to me now and to find it out in three weeks later and have to do a fire drill there. So having somebody to bring that to my attention and having that level of relationship where I didn't mind being wrong was a real asset to me and it's something that you'll gain from having solid relationships with the folks around you. Next, similar to that, when you goof up and we all do, folks usually assume positive intentions if you have a good relationship with them. We've all been there where you make a mistake and immediately this becomes an escalation to your manager or to your VP and there's a correction of error that you have to write because things went wrong. We'd like to avoid that. That's a massive amount of work and ultimately the net reason as to why did something go wrong is because somebody made a mistake. Somebody omitted something, somebody forgot or we learned new information we didn't anticipate. It's always a little bit of a goof up and you can avoid a massive amount of the corrective actions and steps just by having a solid relationship in place. It's the simple, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry that I goofed but when people assume positive intentions then they start working on solutions as opposed to putting up barriers and as opposed to requiring a massive amount of reporting. Great example of this is when I was working on auto mode for the Alexa app, we missed something. This was a small back end feature that enabled communications on third party devices and it didn't come out until very late that we had missed it. Of course, somebody from that team let us know months in advance but we all didn't see that email or got lost in the shuffle and didn't make it on the backlog. And because we had a solid relationship with the 3P team and with the communications team when this came up late in the game and was a launch blocker, we were able to rally the troops and get everyone together to knock out the necessary work, communicate with our third party OEMs and get them to make the necessary firmware changes so that we could have a successful launch on our existing timeline. And this would not have happened if I didn't know that people on the 3P side and have an existing good relationship with them. And frankly, if they didn't have a good relationship with the vendors we work with. So that launch came down to the wire and it made the line because of the relationships. I think it's also important that you have good relationships not only because you'll get to enjoy your work more, frankly, but because your colleagues will feel comfortable telling you that you're wrong or telling you that they don't agree. And ultimately that leads to the better product in the end. I can think of countless times where I've had my peers across UX or engineering come to me or even maybe not peers but junior engineers come to me with a better idea than the one that I started with. I think many of you probably can too, but if you've got a strong relationship that happens a lot more often. And what you end up with is a coalition that creates product requirements and a coalition that creates a prioritization and multiple viewpoints on what it is that the customer needs where the product manager is now relying on those relationships and shepherding those relationships to create the best end product rather than it being the product manager being a bottleneck or being the only source of truth. So I think that by investing in relationships you make your job easier and you get to the right answer a lot more often. Frankly, from a self-sterving standpoint, tech is small. If you do not invest time in your relationships then they're not going to pay dividends for you later. I think of a good friend of mine, Diego Granados. He's somebody who I was able to kindle a really great relationship with and he helped me to earn an internship which I didn't take at Cisco. And then that worked the other way where I was able to help him in his interviews for Microsoft and networking within Amazon. And that's just a simple and easy one that was a friendship from class. But these are the same type of relationships that you're going to be creating with your colleagues. I mean, realistically you spend more time with your colleagues and probably any friend and probably any family member or most family members. This is worth investing in. These are the people who will come out of the woodwork for you when you lose your job suddenly from a layoff or will help you to develop as a better leader. I can think of four instances just from Amazon business. I was only there from a year, but two peers, one director and one skip level stakeholder all of which have since come out they've moved to different places and have all doubled back to me to either ask for a job or I'm sorry to ask me if I wanted a job or to ask me if I knew anyone that I would recommend. That's trust. It's an amazing currency and it's well worth your time. Even the quick coffee chats and the one-on-ones are a way to really build the same. This one sounds a little silly but your direct messages get read first if you have solid relationships. A really poignant example is the program manager I worked with for a while on one of the teams I was at at Amazon. They were very frustrated with a particular stakeholder. They couldn't get this person to respond to them. They needed to know what was going on for the weekly or the monthly report and it was a very high stress situation for this person. I was having a one-on-one with them and they're like, you know what's going on? Is this person sick? I said, give me just a moment. Ping that person on Slack. Got a response within about three minutes time answering the program manager's question. That's an amazing currency to have. What it tells me is that their relationship in some way was crossed. They had a broken relationship. They had lost that trust and it meant that the direct messages that they were sending to this other stakeholder were getting ignored. They were getting put to that three o'clock hour when you're all tired. They were simply being read and forgotten about whereas the relationship I had established with this stakeholder meant that my direct message got read immediately. They saw that it was urgent and they got me the answer I needed and that will happen with you if you're able to invest in relationships and handle them properly. Final later, I think if you are not convinced enough, great, I've got a little more reason for you and see this slide of advance. I think it's important that if you're investing in relationships with all the right folks that your engineers, your devs and your UX don't see you or themselves as a service. What that means is that you're a collaborative team and the folks work to fill in the gaps. It means that developers can and often do start to make decisions based on the customer and not just what's the fewest lines of code. UX doesn't just take your requirements, build some beautiful mocks and then throw it back over the wall. You end up with all three parties in the room at the same time, helping to groom one another's work and it again just spreads the wealth, it makes the work easier and it's important because what it means is that all of these other five benefits that we saw are things that get accrued with your devs and with your UX. And it's something that I think a lot of product managers miss and I can say very much that, especially with UX, this ends up as like a point of contention where instead these folks could end up being a very strong partner for you and someone who does defend you and someone who helps you find roles and develop later. But let's assume you're bought in. You think, yes, relationships do matter and despite having countless reports to write a massive backlog of requirements, I wanna invest in them. Great, I've got a couple of tips for you and for me, they're based in the language of Amazon. So we've all heard this idea of cross-functional stakeholder management. It's like a buzzword, it ends up just kind of compounding a lot of ideas but ultimately it is relationship building. That's what a product manager does. I think that there's two Amazon leadership principles that will really speak to building relationships and the first one is ownership. Took this directly off Amazon's website but I think it's important that we highlight this thinking long-term and not sacrificing long-term value in terms of short-term results. What that means is that you're not being brusque with your requests, you're not treating people as a service, you're treating them as humans. You are acting on behalf, sure of the entire company, but you're acting on behalf of the relationship. You're acting on behalf of the person that you're interacting with and you're also taking responsibility for the mistakes that you make. So I think ownership is a principle that weaves very strongly into your relationships. And I think that there's a couple of tools that we can tease out of here that are gonna serve you well. First is that long-term interaction, right? Take a moment to think about the words you're saying and how you're saying them, whether they're resume call or a Slack DM or even just a Jira intake and make sure that it's not speaking to something purely transactional but it's also bringing a little bit of your personality and a little bit of empathy into the situation. Next, when you're looking at your squad, so whether it's your two pizza team or your standup crew or whatever you wanna refer to you always wanna be the first to do. And what that means is that you're not requiring others to always pick up the Slack. If a one-on-one needs to get set, you pop it on the calendar. If an intake needs to get done and it could be UX or it could be PM or it could be developers, put it in there. Get it into Slack channel and show folks that it has happened so they can scratch it off there to do this just as well as you can. Sometimes it's taking and sending meeting notes out even when nobody's doing that. I think when things are ambiguous, it can cause a little bit of animosity because folks don't want to say, well, this is my job because then they get forced to do that. But if you're the first one to do especially early on in a relationship, especially when you join a new team, this shows a high degree of ownership and it helps you to earn trust without others. And that's kind of where we're heading is this other LP of earns trust. I think this last bullet point though is one that I really wanna drive home and that is ask people about their day. Hey, how are you? How was your weekend? Up to anything fun lately? What are you looking forward to? There's a lot of ways that you can foster just small bits of relationship and it's so much more important now that so many of us are working at a distance. I mean, I work from the Denver Boulder Metro right now but my developers are across Boise, Portland and the Bay. So we don't get to see one another face to face except through a camera and these little moments can easily get erased that normally they would happen automatically in a conference room scenario or in a hallway standup because you've got a little bit of downtime. Now it's something that you have to do intentionally whether it's through your email or your Slack or in the 90 seconds before standup starts. I'll be giving some examples of what these look like in a moment but I do wanna touch on the other leadership principle here that I think is important and it's simple, it's Ernst Trust. I truncated this one because it's a very long description if I'm being honest but ultimately it's this idea of being attentive. I can't tell you how many times this happens and I'm sure you've had it too where you're in a meeting with your stakeholders and you don't start listening until somebody says your name. What that tells me is like great, this person is not invested, they're not showing up, they're looking at a retail website online or they're trying to write up the report for later today, they're not attentive, they're not present. And that can be a really dangerous thing for trust. It tells me that this relationship doesn't matter and that whatever it is that's on your screen is more important than the people in front of you. Easy, easy mistake to make and I do it often and I have to catch myself, look at the camera and not at my screen and by doing that, I really have helped to build relationships fast, repair relationships and tend to get a much more attentive audience myself when I'm speaking that way. So I encourage you to do the same. I think the other is to really speak candidly. This means simply to not feel like you have to always have like the best jargon. It doesn't have to sound intelligent all the time. Sometimes it's just getting the ball rolling or getting the idea out. I think it's much better to speak naturally, to speak candidly than to either not speak at all or just speak in a very proper way. Now, everybody has a different personality and very proper maybe your thing. And if that's you being authentic, that's great. It'll probably take a little longer for folks to realize it but once they get that that is you presenting authentically, I think that that would be okay too but it's about that candid and authentic behavior that ultimately is going to lead to success. And one thing that you can do, especially if you're a very proper, very business jargon oriented individual is to take this other part and be vocally self critical when things are awkward or embarrassing. This will tell the folks that, yes, I do present as very formal but I'm also here as a human, I realize I make mistakes. And I think Amazon's jargon in here has something along the lines of, like they don't believe that their body odor smells like roses, I think it's awkward. But ultimately what we're saying is, I don't believe I'm infallible. I don't believe we as a team are infallible. And by being vocally self critical, you show folks that you're willing to be vulnerable and that is ultimately one of the keys to making a relationship work. Couple of examples here of what you can do to earn trust. I mentioned this a bit before but you can join a meeting just one or two minutes early. I think it helps to ask people about what excites them. And if you don't know, leave it open-ended. It doesn't have to be terribly personal but I think that these conversation starters are something that can really help. Now, reading anything interesting lately, doesn't pigeonhole you to books, it doesn't pigeonhole you to a blog or to a Reddit that lets folks kind of be open-ended. You could even make that broader, like consume any cool media lately. So we're going to say it, but you could say like, well, if not read then watch, listen to any cool albums and what your Spotify Discover Weekly got going for you. What you're ultimately trying to do is get them to share a little bit about themselves and then oftentimes have them open the door so that you can reciprocate. And it doesn't have to be the personal details of your relationship or where you're going with your friends this weekend. It can be as simple as like, I got a dog or yeah, I read a really cool article about park passes in Colorado. Like it doesn't have to be intimate, but it should show a little bit about you and hopefully show a little bit about them so that you have something that ultimately, like one of these areas of interest will overlap and it can become a topic of conversation before you would get into the future. Speaking of future, I think that it's really easy to just ask folks what they're excited about, what's coming down the pipeline for you and your world that you're stoked about. People love to talk about vacations or having family come in town or maybe they're going to try a new recipe. There's a lot of ways to do this, but if you don't open the door and you don't show up this one to two meeting, you don't show up to that meeting one to two minutes early, you typically will miss this opportunity, especially while we're all still working virtually. It's also very easy to show up to meetings one to two minutes late and be the person everyone's waiting for. So I think it's important to consider that doing the inverse of this is usually going to actively erode a relationship. The other here, when we talked about that, making sure that you don't feel or come off as infallible is be the first to admit that you don't understand or that you made a mistake. It's okay. You don't have to even say that you're stupid. Hey, simple question, silly question. I have a question. What's in PS? That's net promoter score. Aha, I can Google a wiki that later, but if you didn't even know what the acronym was, now you're going to go down a rabbit hole on wikis to try to find what it was. It's also okay to pause a conversation and ask somebody to explain something you're not familiar with. More often than not, somebody else in the room doesn't get that either. And by being the first to admit that you don't understand, you help to make others more comfortable when you foster an environment that people feel okay being themselves. And when folks all feel okay being themselves, just fosters better relationships. So it's like a flywheel in a way. The other thing, and I'm going to go into this deeper in a moment, is that you can do this privately too. So if you don't feel comfortable doing it publicly, you can direct message that person and ask them. At least that one individual is going to feel like, ah, Aaron is paying attention or whoever is paying attention. And they're comfortable saying, I don't get this and they want to know more about the area that I'm a content expert on or the thing that I brought up, the concept and idea. So it makes you feel invested and it helps to build that relationship stronger. This last piece, there are some automatic ways that you can share something about yourself that makes for an easy conversation starter. It can be as simple as having something in your background. Maybe you ask me about my wireless router. Cool, I am in the networking, I'm a bit of a geek. I've got a cool setup that I like to share with folks. You can wear a garment, they had a hat or a shirt, but you can essentially create your Zoom palette, as it were, to encourage folks to ask you about something. I've got a couple of friends who swap out the books that they've got on their shelves or they swap out the pieces of art, pretty routinely just to mix it up. We've got one colleague at Love Every Right Now, massive Disney fan, and they will wear a different Disney set of ears to every major event. And it's always a great conversation starter and I think it's something that stands out about them. And while it's quirky, they're showing up authentically and people connect with that. Now, while those are some of the ways to rely or piece apart Amazon leadership principles, the ownership and the arms trust to work for you and some of the things that have worked for me with examples in the past, doesn't mean it always works. Sometimes things get broken. It could be your fault, it could be the other person's fault or maybe just the system is broken. There's no mechanism to encourage this relationship to function properly. I think we've all heard the idea that product management is firefighting. You kind of go on from one fire to the next until you can get your feature out and then the next one is there. I think we have to look at relationships in a similar way and they are a fire of equal or greater priority oftentimes if we're looking in the long-term view that a product manager used to prioritize and fight. So if you take ownership and you say, I'm the firefighter in this relationship or in this situation, then by using these LPs, it means that you're gonna admit you goofed up. It's a real simple recipe. I did something wrong. I am sorry. Here's how I'm going to make it right. There aren't excuses. Of course, there are always times where you might want to explain something. Hey, my grandfather passed away. I left suddenly. My toddler was vomiting. There's a lot of things that you can add to give a personal touch, but make sure that the first three things you do is say, whoops, I'm sorry. Here's how I'll make it right. Because that tells the other person that you understand things went wrong and that you're invested in a solution rather than making excuses. And excuses often looks more like pointing to the other person or letting the other person know that your excuse is more important than their time or than their process. So it can literally read out as like, huh, well, totally misread that, my fault. And then I've already taken action to schedule a new time with you. Or it can say, it can be a report, the way that you write something in like a weekly business review or the way that you phrase something in a meeting. But if you take that ownership and say that you didn't do it, oftentimes the other party feels like they need to reciprocate. You start moving to a position that's much closer and less far apart from them. And this is like the building blocks of repairing a broken relationship also often starts with, I guess, like firing the first shot. That's not the right way to look at it. It's raising the hand and saying, I goofed. I have an interesting example of this from my recreation center days. I had asked for a specific feature in a recreation center. We wanted to have a higher ceiling clearance in the weight room, right? Like folks are getting into very dynamic movements in weight rooms, they're throwing balls in the air, the CrossFit style, they're lifting weights overhead, great. So the ceiling shouldn't be nine feet, it should be 13 feet. The architects said, great, we can make that happen. What I missed in the revised drawings that they brought, this is kind of the same as an engineer bringing a revised tech design, is that by making that ceiling taller, they moved the air conditioner unit and they put it over the climbing wall. So we made the ceiling taller in the weight room and the climbing wall like nine feet shorter. I don't know if I have any climbers out there, nine feet, that's a lot on a climbing wall. They usually average around 30 to 40 feet. So that's like a quarter or a third of your entire wall. So it could have been a catastrophe. We could have been at one another's throats, we could have talked about contractual violations, how they didn't disclose this to us. They could have pointed fingers at me for missing this detail. Instead, we were able to repair this relationship because I said, I clearly missed that. I asked for a requirement but didn't ask for the ramifications. I'm sorry, how can we make this right? Let's take some actions. I've already thought of a couple of ways that we might be able to make this climbing wall more exciting. We can work around the air ducting. We can dig the floor deeper. And what happened is as opposed to being at one another's throats or pointing the fingers of blame, we all started working in parallel to solution the issue because somebody kind of popped the blame bubble. Nobody really cared anymore. We all just wanted to get the right thing done for our customers. Lo and behold, we were able to claw back eight of those nine feet and make a climbing wall that was really cool and worked around the air conditioner feature, which I think was a unique thing. And the customers or the climbers end up liking it quite a bit. The other here looking through the lens of ownership is that you wanna create a mechanism that prevents a broken relationship from happening in the future. It's a lot to take this on mentally and have to think about it all the time and to expect your stakeholder. You've got this broken relationship but have to think of it all the time too. So it could just be as simple as making sure that they're on your lists serve, making sure that they're on your meeting invite and that they get the notes, including them as a watcher on your wiki. There's some really simple basic steps that you can take to help prevent erosion of relationships. It's oftentimes just steps that we don't do. I think one of the most powerful is just setting a genderless one-on-one on a recurring basis. And this might be every month, every other month, every quarter, or if you're in the throes of the launch or you're just forming a new relationship, you might want to do this more rapidly and then taper off as you go. But just having a little bit of open space time to discuss what's going on to get to know one another better, these one-on-ones are goal. They're really easy to want to shove off. They're really easy to want to cancel. I urge you to keep them. I think that they're one of the biggest secrets to my success at Amazon, working in a massive cross-functional org. And I think they're one of the keys to my success here. I love that for you too. So I invite you to keep those one-on-ones and to set more of them up, not fewer. The other is that you can set up new processes. Maybe you need to involve this stakeholder in some sort of a grooming process. Maybe it needs to be an FAQ in every document that you write or every deck that you build that involves their interests as well as your own and your customers. These are the type of solutions that help to not only fix the problem the next time, but they help to build trust and it becomes a little bit of a virtuous cycle, a true mechanism in a way. And of course, you're always going to want to treat this stakeholder as a customer, involve them in the solutioning and get their feedback on that MVP solution and make sure like, do we need a V1? Do we need a V2? How can we make this better? And how can we reduce the friction further? And maybe even the time needed to invest further by streamlining us. So with streamlining in mind, you're probably thinking like, Erin, that's great. I get it, relationships are important. You've provided some good examples, Hazan, but how in the world am I going to get all this done? I like to look at relationships as a KTLO, keeping the lights on the function. It is one that isn't necessary. It's a process that must always run in my backlog, but by burning down tech debt, just like you do on your own roadmap and you're able to reduce the cost of KTLO burns every cycle. So what I'm going to do is try to give you a couple of pieces of tech debt maybe on your backlog, your relationships backlog that you want to burn down so that your KTLO is a little bit lighter. These are a couple of mechanisms that we run right now that, and that I've used in the past that I think are incredibly useful. First and foremost is something that we do here. It's not seen anywhere else, but it's a hybrid PM UX developer meeting we call design and drinks. It doesn't have to be drinks if you want to be a little more inclusive, it could be snacks, it could be design and silly hats. Whatever it is that you want as a theme is the thought here is that we have a regular recurring meeting that has some sort of a social aspect to it and involves grooming one another's designs. So I get feedback on my two pagers, on my docs, on my requirements. I'm able to give feedback on the designs for the upcoming sprints. And I'm able to try to help with tech solution and we often come up with easier ways that are less hacky or I'm able to provide a little bit of context from a roadmap item that's like 50 lines down that's going to influence the tech design today that never would have come out in a requirement sheet unless I got all the way down to like P4s or just have a running list of P1s a mile long. So this event alone has saved massive amount of time and it's why we're trending ahead a little bit in the mobile group here at Love Every and it's something I wish that we had in the groups that I ran with Amazon business international and with Alexa Auto I think that it would have overcome some friction that we had between those functionalities that has made me want to invest more day one here. The other obvious one is setup rolling one-on-ones. Is this is something that once you put it on the calendar? Sure, sometimes they get bounced around but it's important to stick to them. It's important to have a light agenda. Sometimes it's going to be more tactical than others but I think it's important to spend time building those relationships especially right now where you can't just bump into them in the lunch room and you can't bump into them in the hallway. This is going to be crucial to your success building a relationship and likely your career success and happiness as well. You can do things like set temporary one-on-one series with new stakeholders when we just have new VP of content come on board and making sure to spend a lot of one-on-one time with this person getting them up to speed making sure that I get to know them and that's going to taper off into frequency. It's not something that needs to be maintained throughout time. So don't feel like you have to stick to a hard schedule. It's something that's going to need to ebb and flow. I think one of the lowest cost and easiest ways to show up authentically at work is to just use your chat status bar right now. My status bar says like, there's a team product school webinar and I'm sharing a little bit about what I'm doing not at the job, I've done things like use the vomit emoji, toddler vomiting going, coverage on Slack will be a little spotty this afternoon, sorry. And I got a lot of empathy or a lot of sympathy from colleagues who reached out asking about my son, is he okay? And that allows me to show up a little bit just with a very low effort thing. It also helps to manage expectations so that if they are slacking me they know that I might be a little slow. It's a tool that I think is very underutilized and when folks use it this way I'm impressed and I've since adopted. We mentioned before you do wanna show up to meetings early. I can't understate the power of using video not only likely for your mental wellbeing. I think that there's been countless articles that show like if you dress up for work or you treat work as something you have to show up for even if you're on a webcam that it tends to make you more productive or help you to separate a little bit from your work in life. For me, it works wonders but I think it also works wonders for the relationship piece and I encourage you to do so when you can. And the other thing is stuff that we as PMs can easily defer, spend low effort on but it's just spending a little bit of time celebrating. We did it. We got this feature out the door. We launched the app, it's so-and-so's birthday. We went to celebrate. I mean, a two-minute silly song or a $10 gift that everybody chipped in on is something that can really make folks feel connected. And if this isn't already happening it's something I encourage you to invest that minimal effort into just to get it on the calendar and make that happen. Even just the like acknowledgement of someone's birthday I think is a powerful tool that's as simple as running a quick Slack survey having folks put them in and popping them onto the calendar. These are the type of things that really if you can knock the tech debt down by setting these up today or setting these up over the next month they will make that keeping the lights on for your relationships a much lighter lift in the future. Couple of other specific ones that I think folks miss a lot that I wanted to bring up. These are right around just how you're interacting with folks. Please use the direct message preview function of a Slack as a tool. You can always insert a pleasantry. If you don't do that, that's fine. But if you do, please I implore you to be the person on the left and not the person on the right. Pop that in there, but include your ask include the question, include the link whatever it is that you need because it allows that person to think about it and get you the answer that you need in their reply. So it saves threads where now in two messages I've been able to get you not only a reply that indicates I had a great weekend I spent it in the mountains and you wanna chat with Santiago, he's a rock star. Instead, I got a hey Aaron which is the only thing I can preview. And then I have to be willing to open up your message and the can of worms that it is. Read through several messages until I got to what it is that you want to know. And by that time I've already forgot about the great weekend comment I'm gonna tell you Santiago and I'm gonna get out the door. The two very different interactions that from just a small change in your behavior and the way that you approach asking a question can essentially treat your reader or treat your colleague as a customer and make it easier for them to give you what you want the first time. Another one, there's a couple of ways that you can do this but if you know it's past working hours because it's late in the time zone that stakeholders at or it's just late in general and you've decided that your working hours go outside the normal business hours. Do that stakeholder a favor and let them know that this isn't urgent. If I get a ping on a Monday night that says for Tuesday a.m. I'm like, ah, this person gets it. I will read that on Tuesday morning because I can take a quick look, know that it's not urgent and put my phone down and go back to dinner or take it a step further and use the schedule function. This was a feature written for a reason and it's for this exact use case. It's about not violating that trust. It's about trusting that this person will get it done when they can. Use the schedule feature and avoid sending your EU stakeholders a message while they're sleeping for instance or sending somebody a message when it's not urgent and now they're avoiding time with their family. So I think you can use the previews to your advantage or you can use the schedule feature as a way to really like take small steps that don't cost you much to not damage relationships over time. That was a lot to cover. I'd like to summarize really quickly but of course you'll have access to this presentation for later. Ultimately, I do hope these tips help. In first and foremost, I hope that you left today feeling like relationships are a P zero for you and it's something that you do need and want to invest in and that you're going to prioritize. We all know prioritization is a crummy thing. We're always going to cut features or say no to stakeholder groups that we want to say yes to. I urge you to keep relationships as a P zero and you're week to week in your month to month realizing that there will be times feature launches for instance that you'll have to have relied on the investments you made early on because you're going to need to burn down some of that relationship capital to get things over the line through ignoring and through asking favors. So invest early so you've got that capital for later. Two is that relationships are built on a currency of ownership and trust. I think it's all about showing up, being engaged, shipping in and taking ownership and about not being afraid to admit and in fact using admitting that you made a mistake or that you goofed up or that you don't understand as a tool to get things done and realizing that that's often the first step in three, fixing a broken relationship. I think the moment that you take ownership and say, whoops, I messed up, here's how I'm going to fix it but here's how we can fix it together. You flip the script and you become oriented on a solution rather than defending a position. And that's vital to fix a broken relationship. Finally, so much of this work can be put on autopilot if you just take a couple of hours to set the meetings and you take a couple of seconds every time that you're about to send a simple hi or pay air and message to write up the rest of what you want, pleasantries included or not, pick your flavor. You're going to be treating your stakeholder as a customer and doing them a solid by giving them all the context they need to answer your questions so they can noodle on it and get back to you rather than often forgetting because now they've read through too many messages. I want to thank you for your time. I know that it's difficult to find time to take out of your day, to watch a webinar but ultimately I think you're on the right track. Thank you for wanting to learn about and to invest in relationships. Hope you have a wonderful day.