 Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining today. I'm Helena, and I'm excited to be here today to talk about Zero to One Innovation, which is a topic that I'm really passionate about. In my own career, I've been fortunate to work on several Zero to One projects, and through that work, I experienced how exciting, but also challenging this type of work can be for a product team. As we all know, innovation is critical for success in today's business world. We are an entrepreneur looking to disrupt the market, or a large established business striving to remain competitive. But where does innovation come from in the first place, and how can you increase your chances of breaking new ground? In today's talk, I will share some frameworks and techniques that can help you navigate this part of the product lifecycle. I believe that innovation requires unique skillset. In fact, you might even find that some tools that prove useful when you work on a mature product can hold you back and hinder your progress when you work on innovation. But before we dive into the content, let me explain what I mean when I say Zero to One Innovation and how it's different from improvements to an existing product. You can think about Zero to One Innovation as a distinct phase in the product lifecycle. This phase is all about creating something entirely new and valuable for your customers and for your business. If you're seeing signs that customers value your product, that's when your role as product manager tends to shift. Now you will work on what we will call one-to-end product development. In this new phase, the goal is to optimize and scale something that your customers already love. And there are many strategies that you can use in this phase. For example, you can work on improving your onboarding flow to make it faster and easier for your new users to discover the value of your product. And you can personalize your product to make it feel even more special. And you can expand the core offering with new features to serve new use cases. But over time, you will often find that it becomes increasingly challenging to improve a product that is already performing well and that customers already love. And in addition, there can be external factors, for example, new cultural trends or new technologies or changes in customer's expectations that force you to reevaluate and reimagine your strategy. And that's now where zero-to-one innovation is going to come into play again. Zero-to-one innovation in this context might mean that you pivot and adopt a new strategy. It can also mean that you broaden your portfolio and move into an adjacent market, like how Apple expanded from hardware into software and services, or how Spotify expanded from music to podcasts and more recently, audiobooks. To help you remember the difference between zero-to-one innovation and one-to-end development, I want to use an analogy. Now I want you to imagine yourself exploring a new mountain range. This is the zero-to-one innovation phase, and you are discovering new terrain and trying to figure out which mountain you want to climb. Once you've found the promising mountain, that's when you transition to the one-to-end development phase. And now your goal is changing. You are no longer exploring and trying to figure out which mountain to pick. Instead, you are now looking for a path that takes you higher and higher up on this mountain and closer to the summit. Many product frameworks and techniques are the same when you work on zero-to-one innovation and one-to-end development. For example, as a product team, you always want to understand your target audience and their needs and what you can do to help your customers. But there are also a couple of things that are different, and I want you to leave this talk with three things that I believe you need to approach differently if you work on innovation. My first point relates to how you define your product vision. When you work on a mature product, you usually want to build on top of something that already exists and that is already working. That means that you often want to leverage skills and technologies that you have in your organization, and you also want to build on top of learnings from previous tests. But if you work on innovation, this approach can actually hold you back when you define your product vision. Instead, in the very early stages, you often want to set the side-existing constraints to define the bolder and less constrained vision for your innovation work. The second point relates to how you validate ideas. As an innovator, willingness to try new things is of course essential, but this means that you are going to venture into uncharted territory where data is likely to be less perfect than if you were working on a mature product. But I believe it's possible to develop a learning plan that helps you make decisions quickly, even if things are not perfect. And my third point relates to scale. If you work on a mature product, scale is most likely going to be top of mind for you. For a lot of mature products, the goal is to reach a wide audience. But when you work on innovation, you often benefit from starting very small. Focus on figuring out what is remarkable. So let's begin by exploring a couple of techniques that can help you set the vision for an innovation project. In my opinion, you can never really dream too big in the early stages of an innovation project. The boldness of your vision tends to become a ceiling for what you can achieve in later stages. It's pretty common that you later on realize that it's very hard to execute on your entire vision. But in my experience, you tend to have the flexibility to scale back during execution. It is far more challenging to go the reverse direction from a vision that is limited and not inspiring to something that you truly believe in. Dreaming big might sound easy, but in reality it's often much harder than we think. Our imagination is often constrained by things that already exist and for that reason it can be difficult to see alternative futures. One factor that might hold you back when you define your product vision is your existing product and its customers. Product managers often identify new opportunities by looking at the current experience and its shortcomings. But that approach tends to result in incremental improvements. By starting with our existing product we tend to ask questions like how can we make this better? But if you want to drive innovation, it's often helpful to explore a wider range of possibilities. What else could exist? And how can it solve a problem in an even better way? You can also be held back by organizational knowledge. In some organizations you hear things like we tried that before and it just didn't work. But here I think it's important to go back and look at the context. Maybe the timing wasn't right the last time you tested this idea or maybe the execution could have been improved. It's sometimes really valuable to revisit ideas that were unsuccessful in the past. Existing organizational processes can also hold back innovation. Many companies have scripted best practices for how things should be done. And these processes, they can of course be really valuable. They can improve efficiency and help with coordination between teams. But in some cases they can also limit creativity and hinder exploration of new ideas. And finally, you might be held back by your current skills and resources. It's quite possible that you need to learn new things to deliver on your vision. When working on innovation as I said there are many things that are likely to hold you back when you define your vision. And I therefore want to share a couple of techniques that I have used in my career that I find can help me ignite my own imagination. One approach that I use several times is one where I explore ideas in the context of effective product instead of assuming that I'm adding functionality to a product that already exists. For example at Spotify we sometimes designed ideas in an effective app where the only use case was the new idea that we wanted to explore at the time. And sometimes to further prime ourselves to think outside a box we avoided using existing components or we even changed the colors of this app from Spotify's famous black and green to for example blue and purple. Another technique that can help you reimagine your vision and make it more inspiring is to change the form factor. For example if you work on a mobile app you can sometimes find that your vision is constrained by the limited screen real estate. In this case challenge yourself and see what your vision could look like if you didn't have this limitation. For example assume that you are removing yourself from this constraint by operating in a VR environment. What could a vision look like then? Another technique is one that was initially developed by a team at Airbnb. The team noticed that they had a lot of guests at Airbnb that would raise their hosts with five stars. But when they were asked about their experience they didn't describe it as memorable or exceptional. So the team at Airbnb started to challenge themselves to envision experiences that wouldn't just be five stars but six stars or seven stars. And this technique can be pretty powerful if you want to separate between what's great and what's exceptional. Final technique that I experienced as very powerful is one where you assume that your technology can be replaced by a person. Sometimes your vision can be limited by what you can deliver with technology. For example if you work on a dating app sometimes you might find that your vision is limited by what this app can deliver. In that case challenge yourself and see what the vision might look like if you for example could give every user access to a personal matchmaker. Once you have an inspiring vision it's time to start experimenting. If you work on a mature product the goal standard is tends to be a combination of qualitative user feedback and control experimentation or AB testing where you isolate the impact of your idea in a large sample of randomly selected users. But when you work on innovation waiting for the perfect data can slow you down and even hurt your ability to drive impact. Instead I believe that you need to learn test ideas and make decisions without perfect data. The good news is that imperfect data is often not as bad as it seems. You don't really need to know everything at this stage of product development. Your primary goal working on innovation is to determine a course of action rather than fine tuning specific features or details. So when I work on innovation projects I always ask myself what I really need to know and what is nice to know. I focus my efforts on areas that would drastically change my course of action if I had more information. And for everything else I usually rely on assumptions. There are going to be a lot of things that would be nice to know but they can become distractions. So I make note of those things to ensure I remember them at the later stage. When you're trying to understand if you're moving to the right direction experimenting with concepts can often be more helpful than jumping into the full-flash product solution. You can think about the concept as a simple representation of an idea that isn't fully designed or ready for consumption or sale. A major benefit of focusing on concepts is that they are much cheaper and faster to create. In many cases you can get really meaningful learnings for example from a physical paper prototype or non-functional screenshots or interactive Figma prototypes. The example on this slide is the initial sketch of Spotify. It's in Swedish but I'm going to translate a couple of things and I believe that you will quickly recognize the value proposition of the music streaming service. So up in the top left you see search box and this search box allows you to find content from a large catalog of music. And below that you have a library of content that you have saved. And then if you look at the middle panel you see the current playlist that you are listening to. And then right above that you have playback controls like pass, skip forward and skip back. At this stage the experience doesn't have to be scalable. You can work with something pretty scrappy and still get really valuable user reactions. And your goal at this stage is really to understand if you're moving into the right direction before you make more significant investments. To get as much signal as possible at this stage you often want to overemphasize the idea that you are working on when you are creating your concept. And sometimes you even want to take it so far that you have an experience that isn't really shipper ball. The worst case scenario here is that you are testing something and you don't really learn anything. If that happens you simply lost a lot of time and you need to redo your work. Even negative learnings can be a good thing because it helps you figure out what direction to avoid. You will most likely encounter a lot of unknowns and data limitations when you work on innovation. For example you will probably never have enough data to know what the perfect assignment is. I think about the sign as a problem that has so many dimensions that you can't isolate all of them in user research and experiments. It's also not really your goal. When you work on innovation you want to figure out the direction and you don't want to optimize the experience. For example is this usually not the time to test many different copy variations or many different colors for a button if you believe that all of these versions are good enough for your customers to complete the task at hand. Another common challenge when you work on innovation is the lack of historical data. There are many product categories where the value is something that you experience over a longer time. Fitness and education are two examples of the means where customers often don't experience the benefits immediately. But when you work on innovation this is something that you need to figure out how you work around. You need to find early indicators that tell you that you are on the right track for long term success. Innovation is inherently risky and for that reason there will be days when things don't go as planned. As a product manager this is the time when you need to pass and figure out what went wrong. I think at this point it's helpful to separate between the problem, the hypothesis and the solution. First of all it's important to consider if you're even working on the right problem. Have you truly understood what the audience needs and their pain points? If that is the case that's when you can move forward and take a look at your hypothesis and see if that is flawed. For example if your goal is to make grocery shopping more convenient for stressed families is your focus on an easier checkout experience really the best approach. Instead maybe you want to explore a hypothesis around home delivery. If you believe that you work on an important user problem and a valuable hypothesis that's when you want to take a look at your solutions. Is your product communicating the value in a way where users can understand it? Or are there other usability issues that explain why people are not experiencing the benefits? Finally let's talk a bit about scale. If you work on a mature product scale is most likely going to be an important focus area for you. But when you work on innovation you often want to start very small. If you are willing to sacrifice scale you can often develop a first version of your product that is much more tailored to your customers needs. And that in turn will help you learn much faster what excellence really looks like. Your first goal when you work on innovation should be to impress your initial customers. It is important to see signs that some people find your product truly remarkable. This sign is a much more solid foundation for future scaling than an experience used by a larger number of indifferent users. The reason that you need to aim for remarkable is that you are typically asking people to change their habits. For example a few years ago during user research I witnessed someone who was new to music streaming. This person quickly found their favorite artist when they tested a product and they were singing along and clearly enjoying themselves. But later on in this session the person surprised me and they explained that the product was not for them. They already owned all of the CDs by their favorite artist and therefore the person didn't need anything else. To understand how to impress your first customers it's often helpful not to worry a lot about scaling. This way you can really focus on the problems that your customers are having and how you can solve them in a better way than anything that the person uses today. It's their to one work. Your goal is to find a direction and to validate product market fit. You should be looking for positive user feedback people asking for access to your product and high engagement and retention rates once people have access. These are all signs that your product resonates with a group of customers and it's also a sign that you might be ready to transition to the next stage of product development. And this is now when you are going to shift from save to one innovation work to what we have called development work. In this new stage you will focus on growth meaning reaching a wider audience. And you are also going to focus on things like improvements to the user experience and addition of new use cases. And with that we have come to the end of today's talk. So to recap I believe that to succeed in to one innovation we have a unique set of skills. Simply applying the same approach that you have used for a mature product might actually lead to slow and incremental progress if any progress at all. To succeed in innovation you need to embrace ambiguity. You need to enjoy learning new things and you need to approach uncertainty with curiosity. As Steve Jobs famously said stay hungry, stay foolish. Don't be afraid to challenge conventional approaches and wisdom. And also make sure you have fun along the way. Thanks so much for joining us today.