 Okay, awesome. Looks like we're live. Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's product school talk. I'm Cassandra I'm here with product school. We teach product management coding and data and now Blockchain at our 14 campuses. We have a really special guest with us today. He's going to talk to us about IOT product management We have Daniel Elizalde. Hi Daniel. Welcome. Thank you so much. Hi Cassandra. Very nice to be here Hi, thanks for joining us and thanks to everyone out there It looks like we have a presentation already to go. So I'm just going to let you take it from here Sounds great. Thank you so much Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us here today Today I'm going to talk about product management for the Internet of Things. I Want to introduce myself a little bit about myself. I I'm the founder of tech product management. I help companies develop their IOT product strategy and I do that by advisory services or teaching online and I also teach at Stanford University. I teach IOT product management But I have over 18 years of experience in product roles particularly in IOT So I've been doing IOT since before it was cool or the right thing to do I've had roles from engineering manager to Manager of big data platforms to APIs to develop their tools and my last role I was head of product for a company doing IOT solutions for the energy industry So I'm very passionate about IOT and the product management profession And I'm very excited to share with you some of the trends of what IOT means for us product managers We're going to have some time at the end to some Q&A. So I look forward to your questions there So IOT as a trend is something that we hear in the news a lot But it's really catching up in a lot of different industries We have devices that are connected to the Internet in all sorts of industries from transportation to airplanes, energy, healthcare, Smart homes, smart buildings, agriculture, you name it. It's pretty much in a lot of the products that we see today and according to a recent study from Cisco about 60% of the companies they surveyed are planning to have an IOT initiative in the next Two or more years. So that means that a lot of companies are jumping into this trend because it is the next Evolution of where we are with the state of technology in fact My position is that within five to ten years most products will be connected to the Internet one way or another This is a tremendous trend and the interesting thing for us product managers is that it's an opportunity For us to jump into the next revolution of what's coming in technology But also it's a necessity because as more and more products become connected to the Internet We as a profession need to be savvy on how to manage IOT products because it turns out to be that IOT products Are much more complex than any other type of product we've managed in the past So we're running into a lot of issues with companies just stumbling and not having a solid approach To the product strategy or having the right skill set So I'd love to share with you some of my experience on how I've approached IOT product management What it means and why I teach at Stanford and other of my courses So I want to just start by talking about what is an IOT product part of the talent Is that there's not a clear definition and different companies think about different ways and Within the company itself Marketing has a different definition than sales and finance product engineering So I want to offer a definition that we can use throughout the rest of the presentation My definition for an IOT product is that it's a product that combines hardware and software It measures real-world signals and connects to the Internet to provide value to a customer And I've highlighted a few areas here of my definition To point out some of the complexities and some of the areas where the value lies So first of all the first thing you see there is that the combination of hardware and software And that's one of the things that makes it really complicated a lot of companies and even a lot of us PMs have experience either in hardware or in software and When we try to combine the two it turns out that it's a lot more complicated than we thought and so Understanding how to manage the whole life cycle of a hardware and software product It's very challenging and that's one of the things that us as a product discipline need to get better at The next concept is that it measures real-world signals. So that's one of the key attributes hardware now has sensors and can measure the environment things like temperature position Velocity humidity vibration, etc. And the key is if you have that data Contextual data around your product. What can you do with that? It's not about just reading the data But what can you do? What value can you provide if you're able to gather that data? It of course connects to the internet so it shares all that data to a centralized place And then the last part is provides value to a customer That's one of the key aspects of IOT product management IOT product management is product management first and then IOT is more a specialization As you know, one of the goals one of the key responsibilities of product management is to provide value to our customers and to our company So we need to understand how can we leverage these new tools in IOT to continue to provide value And the key here is that people don't buy IOT. They buy a solution to a problem There's a lot of companies that are struggling with the adoption of their IOT products because they are leading with a solution They have some interesting technology that they just tap into their hardware and they believe they're going to provide value So adding sensors to hardware and streaming data to the cloud to present that into a dashboard doesn't add any value at all The way I like to think about it is How can we use these concepts to provide a better faster cheaper solution to problems that our customers already have? How can we leverage this next generation of technology to provide better more cost-efficient solutions? So again, people don't buy IOT. They buy a solution to a problem And if you live with nothing else from this talk, I want you to remember this message So now as a lot of companies are starting to go into IOT and a lot of product leaders are going into IOT They struggle knowing where to start and they struggle on figuring out. What is the right strategy and what are all the different pieces? That fit into the puzzle to be successful with IOT And there is pretty this is pretty common. I trade hundreds of Product leaders from some of the top companies and it's always about figuring out all the different pieces of how the puzzle fits together And so throughout my years of Working in the field and doing consulting and training. I've developed what I call the IOT decision framework Which is a structured approach to developing a cohesive IOT product strategy See building an IOT product is not necessarily rocket science. It's just that it has a lot of moving parts and The ability to figure out how all those parts fit together It's what's going to differentiate you as a product leader to be able to bring these solutions to market So I'm going to take a few minutes to walk you through the IOT decision framework and explain to you How all these different pieces fit together? So the IOT decision framework has two parts The first part is what I call the IOT technology stack and these are five building blocks that Existing every single IOT product regardless if it's a consumer product an industrial product Enterprise product if it is for the energy industry health care Manufacturing they all have this five abstract building blocks and the blocks are the vice hardware device software Communications cloud platforms and cloud applications One of the advantages of having an abstraction like this is that now you can Eliminate this fuzzy thing of what is IOT you can say IOT is formed by this five components And these five components form more of a solution than a standalone product So when you think about an IOT product think about a solution or a system It's a combination of parts that Together provide the value Now you can start seeing some of the challenges here You have the vice hardware the vice software communications cloud platforms and cloud applications Usually those are handled by different teams within your company different engineering teams different strategy teams different Supply chain, etc. The process for managed hardware is very different than the process for managing Embedded software to networking to cloud So the ability to Understand the end-to-end solution know the interfaces and how things fit together. That's what makes an IOT Product leader. It's not necessarily being an expert in everything It's just understanding how the pieces fit together so you can drive Cohesiveness across your organization So now that we have the IOT technology stack the next part of the IOT decision framework It's what I call the decision areas and these are six areas that I have identified that are Important areas where product leaders need to make decisions around their IOT solution and these areas are UX data business technology security and standards and regulations So this diagram forms some sort of a matrix or a checklist that you can go through with your team and make sure That you evaluate all these different points in order to create that cohesive strategy So let me walk you through each one of these decision areas to tell you the different things that you need to consider As you're planning your IOT product Remember this framework helps us with the strategy of what we're going to build And this is before you jump into the development methodology So it has nothing to do with agile or with Kanban or some of the development methodologies those come later right now. We're focusing on what is it that we're going to build? So this is going to help us inform our strategy from that strategy We can derive a roadmap and from that roadmap we can work with other teams in the company Through the development and go to market of our product So starting at the first decision area the UX decision area Here I'm not referring as UX as the Aesthetics or the visuals. I'm referring to the discipline of user experience And the goal is to understand who are my users both internal users and external users and what are their needs? IOT has the characteristic that it has a lot more users than other types of products So understanding who are they what are their needs? It's going to help you figure out your priorities in your roadmap and the idea of the framework is to Ask who are my users and what are their needs throughout the IOT technology stack Who are the users of my device hardware and what are their needs? Who are the users of my device software and what are their needs? Who are the users of my cloud platform and what are their needs for a simple consumer application? This might be Redundant, but if you think about more complex application transportation Industrial applications the person that let's say installs the hardware in the manufacturing plant It's going to be different than the technician that provides maintenance later than the analyst That's retrieving the data than the plant manager. That's looking at the dashboard for insights. So all those Users need to be identified and then you need to track their needs The next decision area is the data decision area So now that you know who are your users and their needs you can Think about what data needs to flow through the stack and you do it the same way What data needs to be acquired by the my device hardware therefore? What kind of sensors do I need? What kind of processing power do I need? What kind of local storage do I need? What data needs to be analyzed at the edge in the real-time or in batch what other data do I need from other systems Then going to the communications. What data do I need to send to the cloud? How much how often in The cloud platform what data do I need to ingest? Process analyze what apis do I need to open and then in cloud applications? What type of data do I need to display to my user in what formats in what frequency etc? Now that you understand the users and their data needs you go into the business decision area and here The goal is to understand. How are you going to monetize your solution? What are your costs and your bill versus buy decisions? And you do it the same way for example, how are you going to monetize the system as a whole or? Are you going to monetize just the device hardware? Are you going to monetize? Upgrades into the device software. Are you going to charge for bandwidth? Are you going to charge for cloud platform storage, etc? So you have to understand of those things so you can actually build the business model that can provide the right profit margins that you want The same way you can calculate your costs and Bill versus buy one of the key challenges is that IOT is so complicated that companies can't build everything on their own So managing an IOT product is a lot about managing an ecosystem Partner manager managing vendor management So understanding the core competencies of your company is very important So are you going to build or you're going to buy the device hardware? Are you going to build or buy the device software and so on? So with this frame where you can actually go and check all the boxes and make those decisions Together with your team not by yourself, of course Once you have who are your users? What are their needs? Data flows and business model we can go into the technology decision area And here is where you start thinking about what technology is needed to deliver that solution Notice that we're not leading with technology. We're not saying we have this technology What can we do with it? What is the experience we want? What problems we want to solve? How can we charge for it? It's the other way around That's why the framework is laid out in this way We start with the users and then once we have users and business models then we can talk about technology and This is a great way to start the conversations with your engineering teams because that way They know what the direction is what they expected in terms of cost ranges, etc And then you evaluate that in the same way as we did before what technology Do I need for my device hardware for my device software for my networking communications both local and wide area, etc Once we know that we can go into the security decision area and security is one of the biggest challenges with IOT You can't look at a news Outlet today that talks about IOT not hearing something about security So I wanted to build that Directly into the framework because you should be able to go through the framework with your teams Very quickly in a day or two before you actually go and build anything remember you're building a strategy of what to build and I want to make sure we're making security from the very beginning So now that we know what technology we're going to use we can think about how we'll secure each layer of the stack How are we going to secure the device hardware? What are the risks and how we're going to mitigate those the device software the communication gateways the cloud platform, etc And you can have a plan to mitigate Any risk that you have identified and then you can make trade-offs of whether that risk is worth investing on But at least you have a way to knowing all the different threats that could happen throughout your stack And last but not least is the standards and regulations decision area and here The the important thing is to understand what regulations apply to your particular application to your particular customer or to your industry regulations are a big thing for us Product leaders because they can make or break apart if we are in a heavily Regulated industry like healthcare or energy Then we need to be aware of that and there's our features and our roadmaps need to be cohesive with the regulations So otherwise nothing works And so by having this part of the framework you can evaluate from the very beginning What are the regulations that apply at my device hardware level at my device software level at the communications Layer in terms of data transfer data privacy, etc So as you can see with the framework you can actually have all these different things that you need to evaluate and of course The goal is not to give you the answers The goal is to give you the questions that you need to figure out together with your teams In order to create a cohesive strategy Once you go through all the decision areas The next step is to iterate and that is very important because the decisions that you make at each decision area affect your previous decisions So for example if in the UX decision area you determine that the best possible experience is to have an app with augmented reality That's great But as you continue carrying those decisions through the framework you might realize that you don't have the right data Through the stack or that you won't be able to monetize that there's not a market or the margins are too slim Or that the technology is not there or that it poses Security risks that you're not willing to take so by looping back and making sure that all your decisions are consistent After going through a couple of iterations you get to what I call a steady state and That means that all your decisions are consistent with each other and that's what makes a solid product strategy The decisions about who are your users how you're going to serve them data Monetization build versus buy technology selection everything is consistent with each other Creates a solid product strategy that supports the overarching company strategy and that as product leaders That's our ultimate goal have a way to create this strategy Communicate it with others and make sure that everybody's aligned on what is it that we're going to build and why so in summary I believe IOT offers a huge opportunity for companies to provide new value to customers in a better faster cheaper way And it also provides a lot of opportunities for us in product management To advance our career because as I mentioned before most Products aren't going to be connected. So therefore Learning the skills that are required to manage an IOT product aren't going to serve you really well as you continue to advance in your career on the flip side not Learning what it takes to manage IOT might actually set you back because all of a sudden You are going to be not qualified for a lot of roles that require this type of ability IOT products are very complex because they have a lot of different parts They have five areas of the technology stack. They have hardware. They have networking They have software and then they enable a lot of different innovative business models that I go in a lot of detail in my courses but That's what makes them hard is that there's so many moving parts and very things that are very novel. So it's interesting to have a way to Ground all these different skills that you need so that you can actually make sense of what an IOT product is and how to go about it And the last is that the IOT is your framework can help you as a step-by-step map To manage these decisions work with your steams have a way to communicate All this have a way to have a shared language within your company of what is it that you're talking about when you talk IOT? Are you discussing which layer of the stack? Are we talking hardware? Are we talking networking? Are we talking networking security? Are we talking networking business? So that way It's gonna be a lot easier to compare your ideas and to get everybody on board because now everybody's talking about the same thing Okay So just to close I just want to thank you so much for for listening to my talk There's a lot more information on my site take product management Have a quick start guide there if you're interested you can download it and it has a lot of more information about the Decisions that you need to manage products. Of course my courses and You can still enroll for my one-day boot camp at Stanford on February 10th So with that, thank you so much and and I'm open for any questions Awesome, thank you Daniel We did have one question come through from Pratad. He wanted to know does it apply to the non IT industry? Yeah, the non IOT Yes, so you can use a similar framework. It's just that instead of having the five layers of the IOT technology stack you can just have let's say cloud and cloud applications, right? But the decision areas really those apply to any product. It's just that I Decided in a way to expand that so that you can actually include the hardware on the embedded software, etc But I've talked to people that just use a reduced version and in fact some product managers That are focused on IOT But they just manage the cloud component or they just manage the hardware component. They just look at their specific line okay Awesome, and we have time for a couple more questions. So if you guys want to type them in here and let me see we had another one come through as Well, let's see What advice would you give to somebody who's looking to break into product management? Yeah, great question. I Believe that understanding what our role is. I think it's a the key recommendation our role is to Understand what customers need and how can we provide value to them based on the strengths of the company? So it's not about learning specific technologies or specific tricks here and there. It's about having empathy to customers understanding the tools that there are available to talk to customers to gather information and so The more you can do that at your current role like let's say that you are in engineering If you can visit customers and you can understand Tag along with the product team on what is their strategy and why are we building things and understanding your market and how your company makes Money and how your service in your customers. That is what gives you the product mindset And then after that you can take some great courses like product school. Actually, I think that's a great job on training product people Awesome, and we had a couple more come in. So let's see Here this is from Igor. Are there any government regulations that will prevent from building IOT products? Great question. So I divided the in the framework the regulations are per Area of the stack so each industry will have its own government regulations and you will have to observe those Let's say that you're building smart solar panels well in the hardware side you're gonna have to deal with the building code and the Operator rules and then when you start streaming data at that point You have to deal with like wireless regulation and you have to start dealing with privacy regulation So that's why you have to look at it holistically But it's per industry. There's no one single regulation at this point but regulations could impact your product to the point that it's not economically viable so they can shut down your product if You're unable to provide the ROI right Okay, awesome. Our next question is from Kenneth. How does customer feedback and user testing differ with IOT products in your experience? Yeah, great question customer feedback is always one of the most important things that we need to do There are different Areas that you need to do customer testing here So for example, if you think about the IOT technology stack, there's gonna be customer feedback at multiple levels So for example, let's say you're working with the end user They need you need to get feedback from them on the experience of the hardware itself size noise Temperature, etc as well as the applications that you have in the different formats So you just have to test more things and they are they have to be done in a holistic way so that it actually The end-to-end solution makes sense for your customer So you can do a specific test for each layer, but at some point you have to test the overarching experience Right. Okay. Absolutely And we'll take one more question here. Let's see. We had quite a few more come in Okay, this one is from Andrew Can you describe the workflow that you follow specifically as their handoff of information or items that you found where different groups can work concurrently with in the framework that you provided Yeah, that's a very good question. The way I do it is I want to first start by Training everybody that's going to be a stakeholder in the framework itself So everybody knows the different parts and then we can start Dividing and conquering right so I can work directly with the UX team For example and the product team on understanding users and needs and then I can work with data scientists to understand What kind of data they're going to need for their algorithms and then we can start working with the Policy people to understand the regulations and so you kind of branch out and then you have Constant meetings to bring everybody together so that we can figure out what everybody has to learn and you are the The traffic cop you're the hub that's going to bring all those things together to make a cohesive decision Right. It's a it's a it's a multi-people Multi-team effort and our role as product managers for IOT is to be that that guide Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you getting to those questions We had a few more come through on Facebook. So If we have some time later, we'll hopefully get to those within the comments for you guys and We'll make sure you get the link to Yeah to download that guide as well. So thank you Daniel. I appreciate you taking the time today Thank you so much for inviting me. This has been great in this slide You can see also my email and my Twitter handles. So let me not love to hear from you. Thank you so much Awesome. Thank you again and guys you can find more information on us at product school calm. We'll see everyone next week. Thank you