 Hi, it's great to be here. I'm sure that many of you here in the audience already know a lot about working with products. So you are probably wondering what does product management has to do with the Wild West and with the Shinkansen. One is the age of cowboys in around the 1800s in the US, and the other is the high-speed Japanese bullet train. Clearly, two very, very different things from each other. So during this talk around product management, we are going to explore exactly this difference, how different product management can be, and has to be, in order to build successful products from the beginning to the scale-up. But first of all, hi. My name is Sylvia, and like many of you here, I started as an entrepreneur. The very first product I built was a solution to help people with recycling. And I always care about impact. So when I moved to Sweden, I actually started my journey in FinTech largely because I thought that there were a lot of things to fix in the industry. And I've been working with Klarna as a product manager on the scale-up journey from around 500 employees to 2,500 employees. After that, I've also been working with Isattel, and Isattel is this payments-and-point-of-sale solution for small businesses. And with Isattel, it's been acquired by PayPal in 2016 for a $2.2 billion deal, one of the biggest acquisitions in the Nordics. And today, I'm working in product at Tink. And Tink is one of the fastest-growing FinTech companies in Europe. We are a large business-to-business open banking platform. At Tink is currently going through an acquisition by Visa for another amazing around $2.2 billion deal. Looking at this journey, sometimes I say that I'm the acquisition charm in Sweden. But of course, I can take credit for any of these amazing deals. What I do is I love building products. And the past 10 years have been a very exciting time in product management. First of all, the craft and the profession has been born. There wasn't really a thing as product management or the role of product before. But in the past time, there have been really a lot of focus and a lot of research going into how do we build great technology and software products. And we, in the product community, we had a lot of questions and a lot of challenges. So as sort of as a service for the community, I've been organizing Product Tank in Stockholm for many years. For those of you who don't know, Product Tank is a global community for product people. There are chapters in every major cities. And then we come together and then invite some speakers and we talk product. And it's through this community that I had the chance to meet some of the great thought-eaters of product management. Such as, for example, Marty Kagan and many more from who I learned a lot. And really today, when we talk about product management, we are standing on the shoulders of many giants. And it's quite hard to say anything radically new in this topic. But I still hope that today, you know, sharing some of these eyes, and some of my stories and experiences, I can give you something practical to think about during your own product journey. So what is this journey? From the wide vast to the valley of product to the Shinkansen. This is the story of growth and change in product management. And the idea here is that every single successful product has to go through three very different life stages. And why there are some core principles to product management that stay true along the way, like the need to be laser focused on your customers. What I feel that we don't very often talk about is there are some very unique and very important principles to each of these stages. And another thing that I think we don't often talk about is the ability to recognize when it's time to go from one stage to the other. Because when it's time to change, you have to radically shift your ways of working with your customers, with your products and with your teams. And why I chose this topic is partly because I'm coming from Tink. And Tink has just this amazing story of transformation. It started in 2012 as a consumer finance app in Sweden. It was a great app, sort of the first of its kind. And the point was that it gave some insights into people's finances. You were able to connect your bank account, you could see how much money you had on the different accounts, you could see what you spent your money for, you could set up some saving goals. It was a really nice experience. And then, fast forward a couple of years, and today Tink is a market-leading business to business platform in Europe. And we are working with some of the largest and most sophisticated FinTech customers such as PayPal and Klarna, all my previous employers, also big banks, startups, a very large community of businesses. And how does this happen, right? How does anyone go from a relatively small consumer finance app to a large global B2B-leading platform? Simply these two has not much to do with each other, but actually it does. And it's very clever. Because the story of Tink started by identifying an unmet need by the consumer. The need was that people wanted to get more transparency, more insight to their finances. But the banks had this data, and there was really no easy way to get access to this data. So on the quest for Tink to solve this problem for their users, we realized that, OK, we have to build integrations towards the banks. So Tink did exactly just that and built this beautiful app. And on the way to solve the problem for these users, Tink has realized also a couple other things, including that it wasn't only us who wanted to solve this problem for the users. It was also many others, including the banks. And during that time, the banks started to build some of their own consumer apps. And they realized that, you know, having a really nice reporting feature that was considered to be a killer feature that could bring a lot of new customers to those apps. So Tink, instead of only focusing on the app, has also decided to partner up and help those banks so that the banks can build their own reporting functions in their own apps. And we moved from being only a consumer app to building an API product that was a very simple, easy to use weeks for the banks to integrate over things and build these apps in their own apps. And there was also a very similar story with Kivra. What started out to be a payment product in the app, the feature was that you were able to move money from one bank account to another, say to a savings account, has become over time a payment product that today's power payments for Kivra. And Kivra is this large digital inbox in Sweden. They are processing invoices for 4 million users. That's around 40% of the population. So clearly, there is a very big transformation and a success story here. But let's start at the beginning, what I called the Wild West. And this is the stage when you, as a company founder or a product person, you found a problem and an opportunity. And your goal is to solve some of the first problems for your first customers. If you will build it, they will come. Do you guys know where this quote is from? It's a movie. No one? Well, it's a pretty old movie. It's actually from the 80s. It's called the Field of Dreams. So in this movie, there is a guy. And he has a dream that if he's going to build a baseball court in the middle of nowhere, there are going to be people who show up and going to build baseball on that field. And I'm super happy because for him, in the movie, it actually works out. So he builds a baseball court. And there are people who very randomly show up and start to play baseball there. But unfortunately, in reality, when you build product, you have to think exactly the opposite. If they come, then you will build it. Because really, if a problem or an opportunity is worth solving for, you are going to be able to find your customers and the users who are ready to commit. And if you take Think as an example, the very first business users that the company has been working with were the largest income banks. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, right? Like, you wouldn't necessarily think that the largest income banks are going to be your first business users. But they had a problem. They were quite motivated to find the solution for it. They had some cash. They had some money to invest, a new solution. So they partnered with Think. And they actually signed the contract and both products way before the API products were built. So in the Wild West, what do you need to remember? This is the stage when you are building for your very first users, users who are visionaries and early adopters. And it's great, because they are very motivated to find a solution to their problems. They are also very forgiving that we have to take an advantage of. I used to say to my teams that if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you probably release too late. This is based on the original quote from, I think, Ray Hoffman, the LinkedIn finder. I think it goes something like, if you are not embarrassed by your first product, you're launched too late. The idea is the same. And we'll see that this is extremely true in this phase. You build with your visionaries, your early adopters, and you have to try a lot of different things. Because at this point, you don't really know how your final solution and your final product will look like. So you have to experiment and build a lot of things out there. And as a team, the best thing to do is to work with a nice, generalized, creative team who are open to experiment and try out all these things. And if you do it well, what it takes you is to unlock this very first, still tiny, but existing, market share, but you want to grow. You don't want to stop there. So then it's time to head into the valley of products. And what is the valley of product? So the valley of product is this idea that when you are heading here, you build your first solutions to your customers. And you sort of have bits and pieces of the solutions. Your platform or your product, it has a lot of opportunities. And usually the way you talk about it is that you can do all this and all that. It can work for this kind of customer group or that kind of customer group, all this kind of different geographies. It's a lot of opportunities, but it's also very broad. And you haven't really found that exact combination of pieces that are going to take off. And here, the secret to go is to move away from being too broad and start to build out of the box products that are easy to scale, out of the box products that are very simple to use and very simple to understand. If we again take the thing story, the very first business product that we were talking about was an open banking API. So basically, the idea is that we build the connections over the banks and the bank's data. There is this API. You as a customer, you can integrate with our API and build all kinds of different products, as you want, on top of this data. And then we had our first customers, like, for example, the banks and the cubras. But it's very broad, right? It's very general. It's kind of hard to explain, hard to export with a customer, what do I exactly do on this platform? So we have to productify. We went through this valley. We called it productification. And we moved from an open banking API to much more concrete products, like, for example, account check, transaction, payments, personnel finances, and so on. And sometimes, you also have to go through this valley many times. That was the very first wave of productification. But now, where I work in payments, realize that even payments is way too broad. And we have to be much more specific. We have to talk about building payments for invoice use case, for commerce, for subscriptions, and so on. So when we arrive here, when we are ready to move mainstream, the secret was to start to understand how do we build these very easy to use, easy to understand products. And the secret for your company is to actually manage to get to the point that you get some of these flagship products. And it doesn't mean that you can't invest in a lot of new ideas and opportunities, but you have to make sure that you have a couple of these very concrete products to grow with. And sometimes, in practice, it means some hard decisions. Because before, you had all these opportunities, all these ideas, all these features, maybe a hundred different things. But here, the secret is to really zoom on those few that are going to make the difference that consists of that secret perfect combination for a flagship product that can grow with. And if we look at our customers, there is also big shifts here that's happening. That's quite interesting, especially as a product person. Because before, you worked with all your visionaries, people who were very motivated, very forgiving. But here, at this stage, you have to figure out what is exactly that customer segment that you are going to work with. And when you did that, you have to completely shift your focus from those little bit more comfortable, experimental customers to shifting your focus to your most demanding and least satisfied customers and building products that can live up to their highest standards. And this is also the time in your organization when it starts to make sense to build your first focus product teams. So you know what is the flagship product you want to work with. You know who is the customer segment. And they get to have a very clear mission and a very clear roadmap to focus on and work with. And let's say that you succeeded here too, right? So now we have a flagship product or even multi-pro products. It started to go mainstream. We are super happy. But we don't want to stop here. We want to make a real impact in the world. We want to grow. And this is the time when it's time to go to the Shinkansen. How many of you here knew what the Shinkansen is before this talk? Some show of hands? OK, quite a few. That's great. I actually didn't know this before the summer. But what I know about the Shinkansen is, as I said, it's this very fast train. It goes with 320 kilometers per hour. It has a delay of 20 seconds on average during a whole year during the whole platform. And during its 50 years of operations and serving something like 10 billion passengers, it never had a single case of injury or accident. This is the ultimate product vision. And how I know this is, during this summer, we've been growing a lot with our products. And of course, at the beginning, you always have those small incidents, your outages, something that's quite normal on the platform. But you're not really prioritizing fixing that. But when you're working and growing with your user base, the impact of those small incidents can start to become very big. And me, I'm working with payments. Trust is extremely important. If anything goes wrong, it can seriously affect people's life. So we know that it was time to fix it. So what happened is that during the summer, our funders, they called for an all-hands. And Frederick, who is our CTO, he showed the image of the Shinkansen. He introduced the concept. And he sent us the message that now that we are at the stage of the company, that it's time to build for the product vision of the Shinkansen. So if you ever venture to a true scale-up phase, if you ever want to cross the beach from those early mainstream customers towards the majority and the late adopters, building both for speed and reliability becomes key. And for me, as a product person, honest reliability hasn't really been my focus before. And of course, we talked about it. I had my tech and engineering counterpart. We did whatever we had to do. But the focus was more on building new products. But what this meant in reality is that we had to slow down for a while. We had to really think through, what does it take to build a platform that's able to support speed? We want to build new products and feature to our users, but also support reliability. Because when you get to get to the volumes, the impact of those small edge cases and corner cases, all the things that you haven't prioritized before, it starts to have a big impact. And it makes sense for you to start to invest in it. And a large community of customers comes with large responsibilities. And building for reliability is quite expensive. I think all of us who try to build a platform with 99.9 plus type of reliability, we know that it's very expensive. But this is the secret to Unlock. A lot of those users and customers for whom reliability and trust is key. And how you do this as an organization, usually it's not a one team job. You have to work with a larger portfolio of different internal and external products. And your main challenge as an organization is to have your diverse, very specialized teams work together on a shared product mission and a shared goal for your product. So looking back at the journey, especially taking Tink as an example, no one could really see back in the days that a small consumer finance app can become a large global B2B platform. And there has been some really hard decisions on the way. We had to say no to a lot of features and opportunities. We had to leave the app behind. This very much loved app is no more. But it was necessary in order to become something bigger. And even today, we are just barely starting to make a real dent in the world economy and in the world of finance. And if I look back on my own personal journey in product management, when I took this job, I thought that over time it's going to get much easy. And part of it did. But also what I had to realize time and time again, working with these very fast-growing products and companies, is that you had to completely reinvent the way how I had to work with my customers, my teams, and my products. So yeah, the job just kept being very challenging. But it's normal. And we haven't come this far to only come this far. It's a really good reminder to just keep going and to dare to make some of those hard decisions and to dare to reinvent yourself on the way. What I would like you to take away from this talk today is, first of all, that if you're a company founder, if you're a product person, or if you're an investor, or someone mentoring others, no matter what kind of products you are working with, first of all, check in where your product is in the life stage. Remember, this talk was about products. It was not about companies. So a single company can have multiple products that are in different life stages. And it can get quite tricky to be honest with yourself. Where are you exactly in the life stage? And when you check in, then you can start to ask yourself some of the most important questions. If you are in the Wild West, are you building super close to your visionary customers? Are you trying out a lot of different things? If you are ready to go, have you went through the value of products? Did you do productification? Do you have a very easy to use, very easy to understand flagship product to work with? And if you are ready for the Shinkansen, are you building both for speed and reliability? And if you ever get stuck on this stage, it happens quite often. If things get hard, if you don't really know how to get to the next stage, if growth is not really coming so easy, then remember that going from one stage to the other, it's not about small incremental steps. You have to make huge leaps to go from one stage to another. And when you do that leap, you have to radically shift your ways of working with your customers, with your products, and with your teams. So this was the journey of growth and change in product management. And I hope that many of you here today will get the chance to work with great products, hopefully products that make something better in the world, and hopefully something that will bring a lot of impact. All the way from the Wild West to the view of the products to the Shinkansen. Thank you very much.