 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this webinar where I'm going to talk about how to manage teams who are based out of multiple locations. Anyway, who I am, I am Tanmay Sarkar, Director of Product Clear in Uber, and I have four different teams in four different locations, and this is just the PM team reporting to me. When I include the stakeholders with whom they have to work with, it's much more spread out than four. Anyway, let's dive deep into this to make good use of our time now. Before we progress, let's talk a little bit about my introduction. Why am I qualified to talk about it? Who am I? Kind of things. Well, I, as you can see my education, I did my MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, Depper School of Business, completed in 2012. Before that, I did my BTEC in computer science from West Bengal University of Technology. I graduated in 2005. Some of my hobbies, there are many, but who I would like to talk more about is, you know, traveling. It's traveled 10 plus countries and 35 plus cities. When I was single, I traveled solo. I traveled with my wife. I currently am traveling with my kids. It's just fun. One day I can give you more tips if you have more time about how to travel with kids. Regarding cricket, this is one of the many sports that I used to play. I play this a lot once in a while now, but I follow this religiously now. Anyway, if you ask any other Indian sport to name that they play or follow, they will name cricket. So it's pretty common in India. Some of my skill sets, I would say advertising and growth marketing. This is where my last 10 plus years have been and this is where I'm pretty solid and can always consult your advice you on anything here. Do reach out if you need any help. Other than that, I would say influencing is a skill set that I'm quite known for and product strategy and execution. It's my forte. This is something that comes most of my reviews or most of my pulse survey that the team talks about. These are my strength. Below you can see that I am based out of San Francisco Bay Area and I have my email ID in case you want to reach out with any follow-up questions or any advice on anything. This is just my short work experience. As you know, I graduated from computer science PTEC in 2005, so I worked as a software engineer for five years back in India in IBM and Oracle. I supported mostly telecom clients, clients like Bharti, Airtel and Telstra. These were mostly integration project on the client side. I did a lot of work back in front and Java, J2E architecture, SQL, PL SQL, you name it. Anyway, I decided to come to US, did my MBA from Carnegie Mellon Tepper and following that, I joined Amazon as a product manager. I was one of the first PMs in their ads division. This is back in 2012 where I worked there for a few years. Mostly, Amazon was proliferating growth. I managed ad servers, targeting segmentation platform and actually grew the business by nearly a billion dollar year over year, till the time where we reached nearly five billion dollar. Following Amazon, I moved to Bay Area. I worked in Edelman Financial Engines. It's an investment tech company. This is where I managed three PMs. I grew from senior product manager to a director of product. I also managed marketing here and I was leading mostly the growth acquisition channel. I built an omnichannel marketing platform here using emails, name it as in push notification, nurture emails, connecting all of those through insights, audience data and chat and inbound and outbound calls. I grew the revenue to 80% out here year over year. Following Edelman Financial Engines, I joined DD. DD was growing rapidly in multiple areas like Latin America, Africa, Europe. These are all countries which were emerging nations and I helped drive the growth there, building their ad tech platform from scratch. This is where I managed. I hired recruited groomed six PMs. This is the experience that was exactly the same that were needed and that's why Uber called me up and I worked in Uber in exactly the same role, director of product, but the only difference is the size and the scale is different. In Uber, I currently managed 12 PMs, built the ad tech platform from grounds up, driving all marketing and advertising spending through in-house so Uber doesn't use much of agencies for their growth mostly because we built an ad tech platform from scratch. Before we proceed about how to manage teams in multiple locations, let's first try to understand the company in this case Uber and this is always the case anywhere you go. First try to understand what are the inherent complexities of that company. So in Uber, there are three main challenges or complexities you can say. First is multiple companies. Uber is just not one company. From the outside it might look like that but Uber is very much like Amazon where you have corner shop, you have postmates, you have Uber freight, you have Drizly, and then of course the matured business Uber B2B, Uber ridesharing, Uber Eats and so many and they are constantly growing. What it means is they all have their own GMs and CEOs and it's a highly matrix org. You have to influence them, you have to get buy-in from all of the cross functional stakeholders and move forward with implementation and planning and execution. The other challenge with Uber is it's spread in multiple GOs. Uber is in approximately 70 plus countries. That's immense given the size of the complexities I already spoke about. Which means you are running 10 plus businesses across 70 plus companies. So the challenge that product team faces here is how do you build something that can scale globally but at the same time can be very locally relevant. So you are embedding all of these local customizations. I'll talk more about it later but you know this adds to the complexities of the challenges. The third most important thing is government regulations. You hear it in newspaper every day something related to workforce, how Uber treats it, should we treat our drivers, permanent employee, should we give them all the benefits, minimum wage, zero emission and then name it. There are a bunch of other regulations around users data privacy laws like ATT, GDPR, CCPA. These are all things that sometimes slows us down where you know every product launch we have to make sure that we are aligned or abiding by whatever legal policies and regulations are. So we go through a highest degree of scrutiny. These are some of the challenges that my teams faced and something that I came to know when I joined. First is and these goes on the same lines that the last slides are which is you know first as I said Uber is multiple company constituted into one which means decision making sometimes is delayed not always. Also you know everything is very consensus based we have to we have to make sure that you know that everything is timely but yet consensus based and you are bringing everybody together into into the execution product execution and strategy. Sometimes it slows things down but you know it has its own merits too. In a company like Uber it's very much needed. The second is multiple GOs. I already talked about it in the last slide what the complexity is but you know in this case my team was co-located my PM team was co-located with the engineering. So I had I had them across five different time zones and this was challenging you know because managing work-life balance one time zone or the other you have they will be you know having late night calls or early morning calls. How do you balance all of these? Third every product launch that my team was doing had to go through a very laborious legal checks and balances and it was slowing us down sometime delaying our launches leading to a lot of questions and frustrations from the stakeholders. These are some things that you know I would like to talk about how I went about solving them. As you can see so there are my approach was fairly simple it was four pronged. First is understand I went I went in I did a series of interviews with my stakeholders a lot of one-on-ones with my teams and also the sister teams looked at their OKRs that were already set up some I noticed that you know there was no OKR at all in certain areas they were OKR but very loosely bound and loosely coupled. Second the next step after understanding things really well I went into solving them. This is where this is where I mostly came up with three main solution collaboration calendar so I looked at all my teams and who they need to collaborate with this is the meetings they need to have. I jotted down all the time zones they are working on and tried to figure out overlaps within them. In the process I spoke to a lot of these sister teams also because you know it cannot be from one side it had to be two-sided and I came up with a very complicated matrix of like what are the overlaps who will work how late and exactly trying to figure out a good engagement policy across the teams. The second was stakeholder reviews this was very useful and very helpful I'll talk more about it in the next slides I have a dedicated slide for it just because you know it worked really well in Uber and it is needed in any highly matrix or cross functional you will need a very thorough review process. This is where I looked at who to include in these review what reviews to have what should be the template of it what should be the frequency of it cadences how do you follow up these reviews turned out to be a great place where I would get very polished and very first-hand feedback from the stakeholders from the leaders and this helped the team reduce a number of these meetings or one-on-ones that would simplify their life a lot more and they would focus my team would mostly focus on execution. The third is a legal roster this is fairly straightforward I looked at all the checks that the product team had to go through and I came up with a very standardized format for most of them where you know any launch happens you go through all of these checks you don't have to always engage with legal every time I got a buy-in for this from the legal beforehand and I implemented it across the team this also was very useful the next was planning now you'll ask why planning is needed you have solved it right like look the thing is you know not all of them will work out sometimes you have to constantly tweak them and monitor them so monitoring what is going on and tweaking and is very needed and that's what I'm calling as planning this is where you know if I'm talking about reviews I needed to work with a lot of these leaders who I need who I wanted to invite in these reviews what their calendar looked like do they have schedule challenges how to remove the conflicts worked with their admin bunch of these communication plan I came up with like you know most of these solutions that I spoke about how would you communicate with whom and in which order right so this was mostly about planning last but not the least it was check you know you solved it you came up with a solution of course as I said you have to constantly iterate and we did the same we had to completely we have to actually reach out to a lot of people to understand what is working and what is not working we did it through various surveys various pulse scores were devised I also worked with stakeholders and got their feedback through my one-on-ones a lot of time these stakeholders would give feedback in the reviews itself and these were some of the checks and balances I had to constantly monitor how we are doing with these solutions last very important thing is remember I talked about okr I came up with a very thorough okr for each and every product areas and KPIs I brought it in these reviews too and got some first-hand feedback and we would constantly monitor how we are doing across the KPIs or these okr progress I mean so as I said reviews are something I have a dedicated slide because this worked really well first I came up with who to invite in these reviews right so every product reviews I divided into multiple parts based on the areas looked at the invite trying to make it small short succinct but also got a lot of people that were needed I came up with a cadence in this case as you can see there were two monthly reviews in a quarter and one quarterly roadmap review the monthly product reviews were mostly about talking about the progress of the product mostly the execution so we are talking about the okr we are talking about the okr progress what we did last month versus current month versus not next month how we are doing per our goals I color coded them here what I have is I've redacted few areas because it's confidential but I you can see the templates out here the second part was talk about roadmap as I said there will be a roadmap review once every quarter and you know we are indicating to the arc that you are open to feedback not only on the product execution but also we are willing to change the roadmap if that's needed in a company like Uber it was very important because you know things are constantly changing over although things are certain things can be slow but you have to fast you have to be fast and you have to react to what the business needs are very quickly as a result roadmap constantly can change and we are willing to change with them that's what we wanted to showcase in the roadmap review we are talking about various projects last four weeks next four weeks coming up with a solid pay payload of our roadmap below you can see some of the timeline of this review and I as I said I reiterate it worked really well and that's why I have a dedicated slide to talk more about it with that I would like to thank all of you for you know spending your valuable time with me listening to this webinar do reach out to me if you have any questions any concerns write down into the comment section out here or email me feel free to reach out I would love to connect with you also over linkedin and you know happy to answer any question you have thanks everyone have a very good day have a wonderful weekend