 Management has changed a lot since the, I'm going to age myself here, but since the 20 years that I've been doing it, the skills required, the kind of expectations, even the understanding, the core understanding of what a product manager does has changed in that time. So I'm really excited that we've got places like product school. As you can see, I actually also teach product management at Berkeley, which is a first for UC Berkeley to have an undergraduate level product management course, which went from a pilot of about 20 students about five years ago to one of the most popular elective courses. We actually now have to survey people and interview them before we let them take the course. So it's really great to see places like this sort of really trying to convey and educate and upskill sort of product people and to drive greater awareness of what product managers actually do. So today I'm actually going to talk a little bit about a, a little bit of a difficult topic, but it's going to kind of, a bit more of a soft topic, if you will, about what it's like to actually think like a product manager. So no, it's not about processes or development processes or analytics or anything. This is more about like getting into the right mindsets so you can apply yourself in your, in your role in many different ways to essentially make ideas within your organization more robust, solutions better, and to make sure that you're taking risk out of what, of what you're guiding your, your organization to do, as well as driving focus. So that's basically what I'm going to introduce. It's sort of my version of design thinking, if you will, product management thinking. And I'll show you a couple of frameworks that hopefully should simplify for you. And then a couple of examples of how, of actual activities that product managers do fairly broad, but we'll also try to apply some of that. And then of course I'm really interested in answering questions. And I'd love to make this interactive as well. So we'll do a couple of exercises, but I don't, don't hesitate to interrupt me if you've got a, if you've got a burning question. And the worst is I'll, I'll either say we're coming to that or I'll be able to give you an answer. But before we get too much further, can I get a show of hands? How many are actual PMs today in an organization? Actual product managers today. Nice and high. So very few. How many are aspiring product managers who wish to be product managers learning the skills? Great. Okay. That really helps. So I know what we're to target. Any others like engineers who want to figure out how to work better with product managers? Any of those? Uh-huh. Good. Designers who want to figure out? Good. Good. That's good to see. Well, let's, let's actually start. Do you know who this character is, by the way? Drupy Dog. Yeah. Drupy's going to, Drupy's going to come through with the journey with us today. He's doing my favorite activity in this. He's got a martini glass. It's drinking away. So I promise you I haven't had more than zero before coming here today. So I should be, should be in pretty good stead. So to start, let's actually take out your phone. I'm assuming you've all got smartphones. Pick your second favorite application. So your second favorite application. Ideally a niche product. So it's something that probably you don't use too often. Other people wouldn't know about or do or don't use very often. And then let's, let's get noisy. Turn to your neighbor and you can be the person in front of you, next to you, whatever. And take turns to tell your neighbor the following four things. Number one, and I'm sorry, it's a bit of an eye chart for the folks in the back. So I'll read out nice and lovely. Number one, convince them that they need to be using the application, sell it to them. Why would you, why would you do this? Why would you download this and go to the trouble of actually using the application? Secondly, identify with your neighbor a metric or a business or a user metric that you'd be curious to measure, like to learn more about whether or not this application is actually working. And then third, imagine what more you wish the app could do for you. Where is it lacking? And then finally, critique something that you really don't like about it. All right. Okay, do I need to read those again or do you want to go for it? Go. Good. Any product, any product you like. I'd like to get them all like interactive over time. Oh yeah, that's a very good way to start. You may not be working for them. You'll edit it, right? Yeah, that's fine. All right, just two more minutes. All right, one more minute, one more minute. It's okay, it's okay. So it looks like some of you really got into it and didn't give the other person a chance. So that's okay. Okay, at the back there. So in the interest of time, we'll move on. I know some of you didn't get a chance to show your stuff. But essentially, that's what product managers do, these four things. Okay, and I'm going to show you a framework that you can sort of take away and then we'll talk a little bit more in depth about what these kind of things. But what did you notice about these questions? Anybody? Anybody? Anything that stood out to you? Convincing people that they should do something is not easy. That is absolutely, absolutely the case. Even if it's in their interest. Yeah. Right. So that's showing that you've got to sometimes hold contradictory thoughts, right? So you've got to be simultaneously talking about the positives of a product, while you're also thinking about what assumptions might I be making that are wrong? What things could go wrong? What risks do I actually have? And you've got to be able to kind of cross over those different kind of mindsets pretty seamlessly. Otherwise you will end up pushing something potentially that's not going to work. Or secondly, if you only look at the negatives, of course, you won't be successful because people won't buy into your vision and join you on that journey. Like this application will save your life and then I'm immediately going to know. Yes, exactly. And it's about credibility, right? So being able to basically show that you can be objective. I can be objective. I can tell you the positives and negatives. I can look for things that I don't know. I can evangelize. I can criticize and critique my own product. And I can identify ways to discover new solutions and imagine things. So let me actually show you a very simple framework. Imagine that there's just two axes I used to do consulting. The first thing is a two by two matrix. On one end you've got like this very creative imagining possibilities like being able to suspend reality a little bit and saying there's all these different wonderful things that we could do. And it's about going for volume of ideas. It's about trying to figure out possibilities without necessarily thinking about the constraints that you have. Brainstorming is a great example of that. But on the other end of the scale you've got like inspect. This is where you actually need to look at cold hard data and say what do I need to learn? What do I need to understand about either my product or about the market? So I'm actually making better decisions. And overlay that with a fairly simple way of thinking about your thinking. Divergent thinking is I'm going big, broad, I'm thinking of lots of different paths. And convergent thinking is I'm focusing in on something. And I've picked a place to go and now I need to actually really button down and go deep on that one thing. So broad, deep, divergent, convergent. So those are obviously opposites and you need to do them all. So let's talk about what each of these quadrants might be in turn. The first is you've got this sort of explorer mindset. And your goal as a product manager at that point is to expand your solution space or the possibilities of what you could do with some creative thinking. There's plenty of different examples there. I'll share some. So for example, I like to call this as kind of the dreamer mode. One of the key things that you can do to actually enable this is to define a broad, lofty, exciting product vision. There are many different ways you can do this. You obviously can pitch, you can write something, put together a communication. One of the most powerful ways that I've found, particularly for more visual orientated people, is to actually mock up the end state of your product and show what it could be at the end of it all. Obviously it's not a design requirement, but it's sort of communicating where you could be. Another important thing that you need to do is don't lock in on one solution too early. One of the biggest rookie mistakes product managers is to come up with a solution first without really understanding a lot more about the problem space, the opportunities, and multiple potential solutions. So don't lock in too early. Candicing is, I'm using that word on purpose because your job as a product manager isn't actually necessarily to have ideas. I don't know many organizations that actually have a lack of ideas. Generally there's a lot of people in those organizations, the founders, the entrepreneurs, the creative types, the engineers, the designers, your customers all actually have ideas about where your product should go. So your job is actually to go and figure out where those ideas are, to capture them, to understand them, to communicate them, to track them. And that's why I think it's important that you spend a lot of time just sort of canvassing broadly, building relationships with people in your organization and around you to try to understand what's out there. And that is related to, don't be afraid to borrow from other products. A product manager is naturally curious about product experiences. That's one thing I kind of look for. If you're into products and you're trying to figure out how they work and you notice things like user experiences that make onboarding fun and interesting, for example. Or you notice things that just don't, that turn you off a product. Try to keep track of those sorts of things, those sort of wow factors or those sorts of things that you don't want to repeat. And don't be afraid to borrow liberally from other products. Now that includes your competitors, don't be afraid of that. And that also includes looking at adjacent products or products that may not be exactly your industry but might be, say, for example, appealing to your target audience. So they've kind of figured out things that are interesting to your target audience. Or it might even just be the same business model. And then fourth, this is always challenging. But to hold out on locking in behind one solution for as long as possible, there's a point at which you don't want to do that too long, right? And that's called when you're getting into this analysis paralysis. But essentially, trying to actually prototype out a couple of different solutions keeps you flexible, keeps you open to possibilities. And it actually takes away one of the psychologies that many product managers fall into is this notion of falling in love with a particular solution. And the team falls in love with a particular solution. And then what you're starting to do is basically ignoring the signs from customer feedback that maybe you haven't got the perfect solution yet. Whereas if you prototype out a couple of different solutions, keep it open for a little longer, you actually sometimes end up with a hybrid, like a better solution than you'd started with. So they're examples of specific behaviors that I find pretty powerful for the explorer. Okay. Get this light at the end. Absolutely, yes, no problem at all. And in fact, I'm going to also give you a URL because all of this is blogged. Okay. And at some point, there'll be a book out. Okay. So we're still in this broad, divergent thinking mode, right? And now I've gone and flipped over to the inspect mode as well. And I call this the analyst mode. And this is important to make a distinction. As an analyst, in the analyst mode as the way that I'm defining it, it's not about drilling into specific issues or metrics. It's actually about having a desire to go and discover and learn new things about your market that you may not have known before. And that's why it's divergent. So here it's all about understanding more about your customers and their unmet needs. That's your goal. You want to learn more about the market, learn more about what competitors are doing, just learn more about and appreciate your target audience more. And you don't necessarily go seeking anything specifically, but you're just wanting to find what you can find. So you develop greater empathy. So some of the actual tactics that you can use, clearly you don't know what is important until you actually figure out like how would I measure success. So as a starting point, figure out what are my most important metrics for my product. Now there is a big difference between what's called vanity metrics and what I call value metrics. Value metrics measure you actually creating value for your customer. Vanity metrics tend to be the things that feel good, that end up in board presentations, press releases, and generally have nothing to do with or not you're actually delivering value for customers. Things like mobile downloads as a vanity metric, but something like stickiness ratio, which is say daily active users divided by monthly active users, is more of a value metric. Engagement within your product basically. So trying to actually figure out what's important to measure here and starting to delve into the data to discover where are users enjoying using my product and where are they not. Are there issues? Are there ways that I can expand on what they're seeming to spend more time with? Those are the sorts of things you start doing is you actually delve into the data and that creates new hypotheses for you to go test. It's essentially what you're trying to do. Another one is just to go and look at data and look at different sources. Some ideas for where you might be able to find just data that you just want to go and sort of delve into and explore. Any ideas? Any creative ideas? Obviously you've got your product analytics. Anything else? Install attribution. What's that though? Install attribution. Good. Good trying to figure out where people are actually coming from so your different channels. What else? Competitors? Yeah, exactly. Benchmarking against competitors. Very, very powerful. One of my favorite is actually just to get my customer service or customer service department to just put 10 emails together for me each week and send them to me about my product. I'm learning what people are actually saying and I'm noticing issues or I'm noticing trends or just getting that empathy built up. One of the most important though is you as product manager cannot outsource actually going and talking to customers and I'm astounded the number of product managers that do that. They wait for the user experience group or the consumer insights group to go and give them research and give them a report on what's going on. You have to get out of the building and you have to go set this up and don't be afraid of messing it up and talking to a customer about something on your roadmap. You've got to be a little bit careful you don't make commitments but generally I think people are more scared about talking to customers than not and you might actually run into barriers because you may not have built the trust in your organization yet to get permission to do this and so generally the barriers might come from sales. Don't talk to my customers. You're going to mess this up for me or it might also happen that you actually have a consumer research group and they say their job is to do all this. Don't leverage them but don't outsource it entirely unless you're sitting there with the customers you're not going to notice the little like subtle first person things that are going to happen. You're not going to see that you will not see the body language you will not hear them say something that you actually connect and say wait that's actually about something else. If you wait till you get a report back that's all second hand and the conclusions could be wrong and you just don't have enough data I actually recommend that for consumer products and this is a really big ask but every two weeks you've actually talked to five users. It's a lot. Now there is an easy way to do this you don't need focus groups in fact I hate focus groups one of the biggest reasons is because you just get that group thing going on and you can't really trust any of the data. You don't need even really to over plan those because the idea is you're not getting statistically useful information here you're observing, you're building empathy you're getting directionally useful clues to how you might be able to improve your product and that's what that's all about so bringing five people in giving them a Starbucks card if you can then that's enough half an hour with each of those the other thing is this word here observe so that's not about like here's my product can you use it and tell me your usability issues you actually start much broader than that who are you what's important in your life how do you solve this problem today how many kids do you have like what are some of the demands on your time and money you shrink in from there to get more and more specific about the value that they find in the product and ultimately test in the product itself so you want to start very broad so it's all about that very broad understanding and trying to pick up on clues now over time if you do five every two weeks over a year you've talked to so many customers you're the expert and you're going to know so much about their world and how your product fits into it that you'll be able to make much more confident decisions what's the difference between the data you'll be gathering from existing customers or people who didn't perfect yes thank you for reminding me so there are about five different types of customers that you need to like think about here so you have your actual customers but they're actually going to break down into loyal customers as well as people who are early users of your product then you've got people who are coming to use your product for the first time first time users their expectations and how far they are down the funnel is so different that unless your product is doing a good job of communicating the value proposition and onboarding them they're not going to get any further and their needs are going to be completely different than someone has been using your product for like two years and then you've got users that stopped using your product sorry I didn't find value in it why? and that's where you're going to I think find a lot of really interesting insights then you also should talk to your competitors users so go talk to them and find out relatively why they value the competitor product over yours and sort of see if there's something that you can learn from that so they're just some examples that answer your question so it was about like the different types of customers and then finally yes very what? very very closed group so what happens if your customers are prisoners or a very very close group or are hard to reach group or conversely in enterprise it's often much more complicated to set up interviews with the very stakeholders in the enterprise they're very busy and there's a lot less of them that you can go to so a couple of things to do if your product is for example prisoners then you will need to go to extra lengths to get access to those but it's going to be totally worth it and maybe they're not going to come and visit you but more realistically what I think you find is if you go to them okay you're not going to do five every two weeks but every product manager like how many of the people who are product managers who want to admit this have actually visited a customer in the last month yeah one one person okay so that that would be that would freak me out as VP a product anywhere okay I would want every product manager on my team to be visiting at least one every month sometimes you can do them in a little bit of a group but that constant cadence is is super important and you just got to break down the barriers to reach them then another technique is to go virtual so it's okay to do things like user testing dot com or to video conference or something like that right so I would I would break down the barriers the key is make it simple so you're not spending so much time planning that it becomes so overwhelming that you stop doing it that's what that's the cycle the vicious cycle I'm trying to break here so the more simple you can make it even if you're worried that maybe I'm not getting the most detailed data back it's okay it's more important to talk to them because you will get to know them pretty well in enterprise by the way another really great technique is to put together a product council or a customer council more accurately and these are 20 or so companies that are somewhat friendlies but they also understand that in exchange for things like early releases, betas those sorts of things they have to be open and frank with you about what's working and they need to give you access and you can negotiate that it might take a little bit of finesse but generally sales organizations will be thrilled because it sets up another layer of a relationship that that a competitor for example doesn't have and that gives you then access to go and actually show them new things and get them very excited and generally that works very well for an organization and the reason why I picked 20 is because you don't want to go back to the well over and over again so you go and talk to three every month or so and so over a course of a year you've talked to maybe them once or twice each. Sound good? One last question. Are there any tools to know what was the last interaction with your product before a person deletes the app or something? Not off the top of my head did I know of but I'm sure there is a community. So does anyone know of any tools that does that? Cool. But again I don't over complicate it like that could be useful statistically but I think you could easily talk to six people and get a sense for what was the last thing that happened. I had a case like this for a mobile messaging product that was actually predates what's app but it was doing basically the same thing and we had this really great loyal user base and then suddenly they would just stop using the product talk to them and very quickly realize that for some reason we're losing or failing to deliver one in like 400 messages but it just has to happen once and then you destroy all the trust and so as we talk through what we thought was a pretty good success rate for a product that was actually really quite difficult to get working pre-iPhone and Android that was enough to destroy trust and they would just turn off and actually stop, not even tell their friends about it. So we learned that without having to have too much of the analytics but we did not know that we did not know that for like six months at least until we noticed the trend because we went to the analysts and started to notice this trend and then went and talked to them. The very final thing on this one and I'm mindful of time, so please keep me where are you? Oh, we'll keep on going while you're enjoying it is again don't outsource all of your analytics. Sorry if you Google analytics fan boy or girl. The canned reports are useless, they don't tell you anything about your product really. They give you some highlights and they can be pretty engaging but unless you equip yourself to dig into the data Dyson slice raw data if you have to learn basics of Excel learn how to do your own basic SQL commands ask for access to raw data or work and make a friend with people in data analytics the reason is is that you don't really have to ask the perfectly right question up front and so you go up to another team and say can you make me a report that gives me the answer to this and guaranteed they'll get it to you like two weeks later instead of like the two hours that it can take you to build something quick and dirty and they've got lots of demands on their time finance want this so that suddenly go into this queue and it all slows it down and you cannot iterate around that data it's like oh the report came back but now I have four more questions that came from that so you don't want to get into that cycle you really want to get access and sort of this quant kind of ability to dig in there and answer a lot of your own questions now obviously before you make life changing decisions that bet the company on something you want much more rigorous analysis but generally 80-20 kind of analysis quick and dirty analysis will tell you a lot and you can learn so much quicker and sort of test hypotheses and sort of see what's going on all right Challenger mode now we're flipping to Convergent so I'm focusing and we're still on kind of that InSpec mode I like the Challenger mode because basically this is all about fighting and combating your own cognitive biases you you're being your own devil's advocate okay now what you're really trying to do is to find flaws, risks assumptions so you can de-risk your project and make it stronger so I'm not saying this is not necessarily how it kills an idea it's how it makes it stronger because you preempt a lot of those issues that might come up later but yes it can also kill off ideas so the Challenger mode is really about trying to make sure you're not falling into the trap of confirmation bias is one confirmation bias where you only look for data that confirms your opinion and I've got five biases that product managers fall into confirmation bias the second is known as reputation bias you fall in love with an idea you've been promoting that idea and now your personal reputation is on the line for the success of that idea that's bad because you're going to do whatever it takes to get the product out or the idea out and you're going to look at metrics that support your success so you want to fight against that too authority bias the CEO said we need to build this therefore we're building up we jump and all through the hoops and we don't actually go and challenge the idea you've got to fight against that that requires tact and some high emotional intelligence the third is group think so as your team get into the product you start feeding off each other so you have to come in with like what if we're wrong and actually get other people to think about it and the final is sunk cost fallacy sunk cost fallacy sunk cost fallacy is we've been working on this project for six months and it's not seeming to work that great but we're going to keep on going anyway because we've already invested six months of our time in it okay cut your losses if something doesn't look like it's going to work don't be afraid to cut your losses so they're the five I do have a slide in this in the appendix to take that away so one of the great ways to fight against these psychologists start with assuming that everything you're doing is a hypothesis and it requires validation you do not know I have an opinion and I have a hypothesis that obviously requires testing and validation one of my favorite it's really hard to do everyone has an engineer on their team that is this person or someone in marketing or it's sometimes even a customer who just always finds the problems with everything alright always like brings me down every time I'm talking talking to them fight against that go and embrace them they're a fantastic resource they'll find and they'll pick the problems you know the problem finders they're not problem solvers they're problem finders right and we hate that but go and embrace them because they're going to help you find those little things that can bring your product down okay equally the things that are concerning you negative outcomes tests that failed metrics that are off and finally don't forget your job isn't to decide just on what to do your job is to also decide on what not to do use the challenger mode to cut things out put them into an idea backlog is fine say you're going to go get to them later put them on the roadmap 18 months from now they're all good ways of making sure they will never get done so don't be afraid you gotta focus prioritize cut because your job here is to get your team laser focused on the highest potential value ideas that you can deliver for your customers and finally evangelist yes your job is to be an evangelist this terrifies me believe it or not I'm actually pretty terrified of public speaking I I've done pretty hostile audiences in my own companies announcing changes in the product roadmap to 400 people and like they're literally I'm expecting tomatoes at me so really the evangelist mindset is something that your job is to build momentum so we're back to the possibilities imagining big delivering on that vision but now we're focused so you have to be laser focused on what is the thing that we want to achieve how do I motivate the team to get there how do I build support broadly within my organization to get there some of the tactics buy in don't ever underestimate it communicate regularly emails weekly go meet with lots of different stakeholders even after your project has been approved you want to make sure they know where it is at what the value and why you are doing it as a company and continue to sort of get that not over the line but even once it's in market it's actually particularly important if you need support from marketing and sales once you've launched something so you want to really get out there and don't underestimate that and you can't do it at the end happy hours are great happy hours great one-on-one meetings great people have different preferences in their communication style so some people just want updates over the water cooler some people just want updates when things are not going according to plan so they're not surprised others want kind of an email like little like summary executive summary some people want reports some people want you to come and meet with them like for you know 30 minutes so you have to kind of like be a little sensitive to different different communication styles one of the other things about this is you are often you are often further ahead of your team than others are like so you're sorry you're further ahead of your team so you've already come to conclusions about why a customer needs something why that feature is a higher probability priority than the other feature or why this particular solution is the one that we're going to use because it tested well okay so don't forget to let your team catch up to you share the data spend the time talking to them about your decision making process not just prescribe them the decision you've made because if they can look at the same kind of body of work that you've been looking at and arrive at the same decision then that's going to save you a lot of heartache in the long run because they're very much bought into it but if you try to sprint out ahead of them they can actually get quite resistant because they don't have the context anymore they don't understand where your head's at and you get very very frustrated so that's why context is really really key don't prescribe a solution I mean obviously you influence the solution obviously you have a big say in what how you're going to solve a problem for the customer but balance that out with sharing data sharing company goals reminding people of the company goals reminding of them how they fit into the company goals this project is doing this and our goals this quarter were that that's how that maps back so don't overlook that one of my other favorite techniques take them along with you for customer interviews take your team they build they build the same empathy they see the same problems they often want to come back and fix them immediately so that's just some examples there's a whole lot more that I can point you to some resources on context setting as a bigger part of managing through influence which I'm sure you've seen which is a total other talk and then finally this can be hard to particularly if you're kind of new at the game don't be afraid to lose ownership so you may actually step back from prescribing the solution you may let them go ahead and do things slightly different than you would have and importantly when something is success you're not the one up on stage you let your team have the glory now if somebody goes wrong you're up on stage but you have to be mature enough to let the team succeed and let them own as much as you can let them own because the momentum that they will get they will build more momentum and so what if they're occasionally wrong that's the great thing about iteration these days is you can fix that so that's basically it they're my mindsets so I will skip these because I've talked about them already but I will just pick one is discarding your intuition so whatever you do balance data with this don't say I'm only going to look at data I'm only going to look at what comes out of this so when you actually get to a point where even if the data is not really showing you conclusively that you're on the right track keep a healthy degree of your intuitional life and keep going forward and being okay with only giving up if maybe after three times you've tried and you can't make it work then give up I talked about these and then do we have time? we do good so now I would like everyone to think a little bit about applying these and I've noticed that certainly in myself that I'm going to be stronger in some of these than others okay so I'm not saying you have to be perfect with all of this for a product manager I'm actually pretty poor at this I consider myself a creative person but I always need other people around me to get the ideas really going and bouncing off each other strong at that and I've developed over time how to be more of an evangelist after some shocking product failures and realizing that it wasn't actually the product that was totally wrong it was because that I was pushing my team and telling them what to do too much and really at the end of the day we didn't have the best solution so I've learned but each of you are going to have some challenges somewhere here so what I'd love to do and the other thing is you are also you want to also be aware of the number of people around you because you have to balance here's a great textbook case working with entrepreneurs founders of companies which I have done a ton of I have discovered that they're all here they're all up there they are just idea generators and in fact if you expose that like in a short circuit to an engineering team then at any point in time you never know what the engineers have been tasked with a different priority that day and then half of them quit and some of them whatever so my deliberate strategy was to balance those people out by always making sure they are present during the kind of that explorations phase idea generating sometimes I would just go we would just whiteboard things and talk about ideas and that would be enough for them to say oh great I've communicated their idea it's done and they'll move on to the next idea it may never get built but it may whereas what I had to do was to really balance them out by putting the ideas through their paces analyzing understanding does this even fit with like a customer need and then really coming up with like ok well we heard all the reasons why this is a good idea what are the risks so balancing other people out is important too and you might find that with engineers they might be all here you might find that with with certain like a sales person or something might be all here so you want to sort of think about like ok what what does my team need so let's do one final thing and that is this exercise so I say take out a piece of paper that I've realized that we're in the 21st century now we don't need paper so on your phone maybe imagine the four quadrants they are explorer analyst challenger and evangelist pick one is your go to strength this is the thing that I'm just good at I feel natural the most natural we can always learn but it's the thing that I feel I'm going to be the most natural then identify another that you think your team member a key team member you work with or manager or if you aren't in a team like your partner I don't know but think about like what they do and then come up with a strategy just one behavior that you will do to balance out their tendencies so what will you overcompensate with and then the final thing is identify in one of the quadrants that you didn't circle as your own strength something that you learn today that you would actually like to apply to practice getting better at it do I need to repeat that or are we good okay go for it yes I will show you the quadrant do you have all this so check the check the thing you're good at identify something you want to practice in one of the other quadrants to get better and then figure out a strategy for compensating for the strength of others that might overwhelm if you weren't careful here are the quadrants again great I won't call on you like I would with my students mutual therapy I'll just give you another minute you probably know so just go with what you first came into your into your head 30 more seconds and if you're having trouble I'll be around afterwards so you can happy to chat give you some ideas okay good I'm going to finish it there I think we've asked a couple of questions as we go this is my website I've actually posted just last month very detailed breakdown that's even more detailed than these slides we will give you also the access to the slides here's my email address please don't hesitate to reach out I love networking and meeting new people and I'm happy as time allows to sort of bounce around some ideas with you and thank you very much and I don't know if we want some more question time or are we at time there any other questions although I felt some of these questions were great that came up as we go yes how do you justify your intuition when you're seeking buying from your team it's a really really great really great point so first of all if your intuition really it odds with every piece of evidence you're not going to have much luck right but your intuition needs to be communicated in a way that is rational and you can be asserting an end outcome of vision you can be talking getting them excited about what what could possibly be true you could talk about the the problems that you're going to solve for the customer even though it seems like maybe sometimes you're not sure just sort of getting that message out there being clear that it's an opinion but having a very clear kind of rational particularly when you're talking to say people you're going to ask to sell it or people you're going to ask to build it still you have to have very clear ideas about why it's important but maybe you don't what I'm saying is don't not communicate that just because you don't yet have the data you will get stuck otherwise you'll get stuck in analyzing everything and you won't make make it very far a second technique is when you feel like you don't have 100% buy-in go for lower stakes so I would recommend talking to stakeholders about investing in a prototype as opposed to a whole project or running a test and getting some buy-in there and then the investment levels and what you're asking people to do they might roll eyes and say okay we'll do it but basically you've taken the high stakes stuff off the table great yes right the question is within these biases one of the things that or one of the biases that product managers fall into a lot is authority bias which is essentially someone more senior than you or someone in a position of power or a position where they're perceived as an expert quite common though they assert something as a priority or something we're going to go do and particularly if you're very junior you don't feel like you're in a place to push back or you actually just skip into implementing it because they're clearly they're clearly experts and we can skip all of this challenging and analyzing stuff but the problem is that even experts can be wrong in fact I think definition of people who are wrong are experts I'm probably one of them but what to do okay so tact is critical so the first thing I would do is great idea can we get in a room and talk about this more and get people engaged get yourself engaged in it and you might get convinced that it's a great idea or maybe during the conversations you start asking just enough questions that raise really good questions around like whether or not this is really something we want to do so collaborate is actually bizarrely the first strategy don't try to bat it away actually embrace it but try to influence what where the conversation goes and that's not that hard to do like it's really just about talking and asking questions certainly don't immediately show you're not actually on board because that will be perceived as that you're a barrier and you're not being very objective you're trying to stop something you want to actually get on the train but try to actually get the conversation going so maybe they say you know what now I'm thinking about this it doesn't quite make as much sense as we thought or they're really good questions maybe we should slow down and figure a few of those things out first that's kind of what you're looking for the second really good second technique is great idea what goal is that going for oh so what's changing our priorities then between when we set our priorities around this business goal and this idea has something changed that I'm not aware of because that goal is not what we agreed to a month ago and now you're basically asking for context if there's been a true change in priorities then that's good to know or quite often it'll be like yeah okay so you're saying that yeah you're right we did set that as a priority so maybe this should be lower in the order and then another technique is to take the idea and put it in the backlog and show where it is yes this is on the roadmap but reminding you that we have these three or four key things that we've committed to so it's here are we all on the same page there so showing that it's actually not just disappeared into thin air is important so I call this kind of saying no nicely there's of course tons of other techniques but you'll get the gist that it's about leaning in and collaborating with people as opposed to sort of trying to block it that said there are times where you actually have to just say no so you're not doing that too often and you have the organizational respect it's okay to go to the sales person for example and say yes the customer does want that and I know you've sold it but we just cannot do it and so let's think of a strategy for a workaround or going back and talking to the customer and so you do need to be strong sometimes but you kind of want to always show that you're doing it in the interest of the business great question yeah and second question is regarding of the support that so how do I know like I'm asking enough people to make a decision got it so there's a whole body of work about you know interview like best practices and I would actually look at that and I would talk to my user experience group or consumer insights group because product managers we're not really trained in that kind of the how to really ask those questions that are not going to lead people but good product managers over time kind of learn that and if you're in a very small company then probably you are in charge of talking to customers but the general rule is you want to ask open-ended questions so you're not asking a bad question if a conversation starts you could be asking something that doesn't seem even relevant and that can lead to an insight so don't be afraid of just asking nice open-ended questions and having them talk and answer you and then you probe sort of drill in on a couple of those so why is that why do you think that or why is that important to you and you might even do that a couple of times so the bad open-ended questions are like bad questions are kind of closed like they are yes or no answer or maybe answer that don't lead to a conversation and you can't probe on right so that's one of the most critical things then another really important thing is to be very very mindful of what biases you're showing them what are you fishing for in terms of an answer so for example one of the ones that would be you'd think is pretty fine to ask is what do you like about this product okay so the problem is that you're actually biasing them to like something in your product and they may actually hate your product or they may actually like your product and like certain things about your product but they're not very important to them so a better question would be what do you like or dislike about the product or what are your opinions about the product so you're trying to get a little bit more neutral and then follow up with okay so you like this this or this or you dislike this or this how important are those things can you actually rank them for me because then you'll get a sense of oh the five things I dislike are actually the most important things and the five things I like are actually I don't care right so you want to sort of get that kind of sophistication I'll stop there because I don't want to get too much into the details about interview techniques actually there is one more thing but you don't but generally look for and do some research and try to partner with somebody who's an expert in it before you do it yourself the last thing I would say is this sort of onion model imagine you're starting super broad very very generic about them and you're slowly working your way into your product not the other way around because what happens is if you introduce even what your product does then you completely change the conversation that you're going to have because they've got bias now on oh this person is wanting to speak to me about this problem and then everything they're talking about is going to be this problem rather than like more about them and their life and the opportunities and where your problem fits into or where your product fits into that how we're doing two more we'll do the two front row thank you for sitting in the front row by the way I actually have a trick that I usually leave like a row of chairs fairly close to me and people like fill up and leave the front ones and then they just take the front row away we have a front row and it looks full and everything how do you debundle what's happened imagine like Uber there is the experience you're having with the app and then the experience you're having so people who dislike Uber it can be in the app or it can be because the driver was not great so the question is about unbundling the online and offline experience and sort of how you think about that so the very first thing is the total customer experience is your problem so there is no such thing as the online experience and the offline experience it's the total customer experience it's your problem if they're having a bad experience in the cab or in the car because it's not clean or something like that you can solve that by certain online solutions and you can solve it by incentives and you can solve it by rules by how you interview drivers that's still your product and so don't ignore the offline and capture that absolutely and when you ask things like NPS you don't say how much do you like the website you ask how much do you like the product so you as a product manager need to be thinking about that total customer experience for the simple reason that your customers don't think any differently now it does mean that maybe you have to come up with non-technical solutions to it and so that's where a product manager in that world needs to have influence over things other than just like getting an engineering team to build something they need to be able to implement other kind of other kind of experiences but everything down to writing the terms of service how are we interviewing drivers what are the what's the reputation model for drivers how do we rank them and some parts of technology will come into that and other times it won't be that much technology I love the idea of the product council but I can see how it might be a problem getting buy-in both internally and externally do you have any suggestions so the question is about I kind of misspoke a little bit there customer council is kind of what I'm talking about there so the customer question is about how do you sort of build a customer council getting buy-in from people internally that can be a lot of friction so good question I've run into this every place I've gone particularly where product is a new function and sales or marketing have been typically the people that talking to users or customers and it can be a bit of a bear so the first thing is is go slow so you don't need to build a customer council overnight you don't need 20 overnight ask for one because one is better than zero and two is better than one mathematical genius so it's all about starting to build up and getting momentum and then you are absolutely actually two very critical things the first is is that you include the people who might be resistant in the engagement so you bring them along they can sit there I've had meetings where sales have been in the room and they've kind of tried to flip back into sales mode or they've tried to put me on the spot you've got to be very careful with that so that means we're going to commit to this I'm like no I didn't say that but generally having them in the room even if it's a little bit less comfortable shows that you can be responsible and be trusted and they see that first hand and then you follow up with them and say this is what I learned this is why this is important this is the changes that you've helped me generate because you've allowed me to talk to customers so again you're building very carefully and then the third thing is it's a product you've got to sell it so you evangelize the product council or the customer council like you and any other why is this important why do I need access and essentially create some rules of engagement as well so we're not going to ideally I'd like to be able to ask customers why they stopped buying the product it just may happen that the answer is oh I love the product I can't stand the sales person right so you don't want to ask that question right so you kind of like what are the rules of engagement I'm going to be tactful and I'm not going to maybe shine a light where it shouldn't be shone not because that's a bad thing in fact you want you want lights to be shone on broken things in sales and in content I had that happen at linda.com we came up with all sorts of problems in the sales team and content the reality is is that by the time we got to that point people really trusted the process and they could see it was very objective no one was getting blamed and I wasn't destroying like the entire sales pipeline great thank you