 This is the best time in history to build digital products. I'm not saying this just because we are surrounded by 1500 product leaders in San Francisco, and being joined by many, many thousands of product leaders from all over the world online. As the founder of Product School, I've seen the role of product evolve since the last 10 years. I mean, from being almost non-existent into being the most strategic function for most companies. But why? The main fundamental shift that happened is this is the rise of the Chief Product Officer. Today, there's over one-third of the Fortune 100 companies that already have a Chief Product Officer. We estimate that we'll have over 50 CPOs in Fortune 100 by the end of 2024. Just think about it for a second. Most of the companies in Fortune 100 are not high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. We're talking about oil and gas, consumers, financial services, healthcare. They're all investing in technology. They're all becoming software companies. This is not just me saying that. This was also published in a McKinsey report this year. But how did we get here? How did we get CEOs of public companies, banks saying, we happen to be a software company that sells financial services instead of saying, we are a bank. They're saying that because it works, because it makes them more money. Why is this happening right now? How did we get? Well, there are three planes trying to land right now that is creating this momentum shift. Number one, we finally have education and product. When I started my company, I remember people coming to me 10 years ago saying, what is a product manager? Is this a project manager? How does that work? It's not just about us. We are seeing these universities trying to catch up, launching more products in product or at least adding product management as part of two-year MBA programs. There's much more education around product. We're also seeing companies that are creating their own product schools. Most of them call it APM, Associate Product Manager Program. Google was the pioneer in the 2000s. Now, there are many, many more companies trying to train and create their own product managers. So education is number one, but it's not enough because now that there is much more awareness in the market from the top as well as from the bottom, we are still lacked tools to do our job. Long gone are the days where we will have to piggyback on tools created for other professionals like Photoshop, like I remember trying to create some prototypes using Photoshop. Today, we use Figma, many others. Long gone are the days we have to learn how to use SQL to write analysis. There are a lot of tools today that are giving us insights directly without having to throw a single line of code. Same thing with websites or mobile applications. You do not need a technical background in order to become an excellent product manager. And if you look around this room, today we have 25 of the most powerful tools for product managers being represented. They are supporting this conference because they know that we as product people need our own technology to be able to make the most our job. Specific use cases such as A.B. testing or experimentation, prototyping, road mapping, user research, now we have tools that are created specifically for us. And by the way, those tools are very, very visual. Some people would call it no code or low code. They are enabling an entire generation of creators that do not need a specific technical background or other type of degree in order to start building faster and better products. And by the way, this is the first and last time I'm going to use the magic word in my presentation. Because we expect that this technology is going to accelerate how product is being built and the tools that we are using to build such products. And last but not least, ultimately, this digital transformation, these companies that are not high tech trying to act like software companies are trying it because it makes them more money. Product is now being perceived as a revenue generator, not as a cost center anymore. Long gone are the days where product is part of IT and someone in sales or marketing says something and throws the contract over the fence for product to ship something. Long gone are the days where the highest rank product person in the organization would report into a chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer. We have a seat at the table and that is huge. And why? Because we earned that seat. This wasn't just a check to look cool and look more like a startup within a startup for big companies. It's because now all of these companies can build much faster by reducing the cost of infrastructure, right? Like now you can use cloud. You don't need to build or have your own servers in your office. The same way you don't have to build a lot of things from scratch. You can leverage software as a service to get you a competitive advantage. It's obvious that internet online is giving us a global reach 24-7. What might not be always obvious is that we can now leverage our own website or mobile apps to generate revenue directly without any human interaction. And I'm not just talking about e-commerce or cheap items. I'm talking about cars, houses, complex tools. Now products are becoming much more easy and able to allow consumers to enroll, to sign up, to pay directly. And you can also layer on new, detailed services on products on top of the existing products that you might be selling. This is a huge opportunity. That's why CPOs are now having much more authority and responsibility. So I don't want to just paint a rosy picture here. Not everything is rainbows and sunshine. I want to acknowledge what we've been living, especially through the last year or year and a half. But especially in the US, there's been over a quarter of a million people laid off. And even though we are at an all-time low on a month to month basis, it's still something to recognize. But if you go deeper into these headlines, which are scary, of course, we wanted to understand what is the real impact for the product organization. And what we found out, which is not always obvious in those big headlines, is that the product team is actually being the least affected team by layoffs. In the case of Amazon, around 3% of the people that were laid off were actually part of the product team. In the case of Meta, around 4% of the members of the team that were laid off were actually from product. And this is because product is making money. Product works. Product is building the future. You don't want to reduce your investment in something that is keeping you alive, especially now. But if you look at the other side of the coin, we did a search on LinkedIn jobs just to understand how many open roles there are today. In product management, we found over 66,000 open jobs in product today. And it's going to get bigger. So let's talk about the future, because this is the state of the art. This is what happened right now that is creating a seat at the table for chief product officers. So what I'm going to share with you today is how you can make the most out of this opportunity for you and your teams. This is based on a report that we publish every year titled The Future of Product. The number one trend is that product is accountable for growing revenue, not just adding user value. Let me repeat this one more time. Product is accountable for growing revenue, not just growing or increasing user value. CPOs are acting more like general managers and owning P&L. In some cases, even if they do not own P&L, they're still partnering with sales to be more accountable for the total revenue that is being generated, because it makes sense. Now it's not the time to only focus on long term. And the way most product leaders think about roadmap, obviously it has a diversified portfolio of bets where there's still going to be investments in the long term and increasing the overall value for the user. But now there's going to be a higher concentration in how to capture some of that value right here, right now, in order to keep the lights going. Otherwise, there might not be long term, because in times of economic uncertainty, the best products do not always win. Even the best products need incredible distribution. And you know what? Product can be distribution. Product can be distribution. And this is not in conflict with other distribution channels that might be leveraged by marketing. I mentioned before that now we can monetize directly without human interaction, directly using websites or mobile apps. It's called sales of revenue. But we can also use our product to increase adoption and this way increase retention of our existing customers. It's not just about bringing net new customers and kind of forgetting about them once they pay. There are different mechanisms to be able to leverage directly through the website, directly through the mobile app that is going to help you close new deals, increase usage that will increase retention and ultimately find opportunities to also upgrade some of your existing customers. And if you want to close the circle, hopefully you can find opportunities to leverage existing customers to bring you net new customers. When this flywheel done well, it's an extremely cost efficient distribution channel. And I don't want to scare anybody here because product and go-to-market teams can be best friends. They should be best friends. What I mean by go-to-market teams, mostly marketing, sales and customer support. Let me break it down. Product Lab is what many of us would call this strategy of leveraging product as an inbound channel. It's generating more revenue for companies that do this than for companies that don't do it. This is a report generated by venture capital firm called OpenView that show that all of their B2B SaaS companies in the portfolio were the ones that were leveraging PLG were outperforming the SaaS companies that were not doing PLG. And by the way, it's not about either or. It's not about we do PLG or we do sales. We do PLG or we do marketing. We do PLG or we do founder-led sales. It's about and it's about we do something and we can also leverage product as a revenue generating channel, as a distribution channel. Specifically in the case of marketing, I just mentioned how this can be combined with many other channels could be paid acquisition, could be organic growth. But at the end of the day, even if you decide not to monetize directly through your own products, just creating the right value for the user upfront is going to make your marketing channels more cost efficient. We're also seeing how sales teams sometimes could have some reaction or negative reaction to this. And I always try to explain that this can be an amazing opportunity for sales to actually better qualify their opportunities and increase the accounts that they should be talking to and then allowing product to take care of the lower-hand fruit as well as helping them take care of the customers that actually need human interaction because the deal is very big or because the deal requires more customization or other reasons. And last but not least, and I hate to put customer success at the end because it's always kind of the poor sibling in all of this equation. In some cases, people don't even think about customer success as part of the GTM team. Customer success is a strategic function to actually increase pretension and expansion. So leveraging product to flag certain opportunities for paid customers to actually be engaged with customer success is a win and it's not mutually exclusive with customer success also launching other initiatives to stay in touch with existing customers. And I know I talk a lot about money and this might be shocking to some. I don't want this conversation to be just around money. There's definitely more of a concentration on short-term but at the end of the day, it's not just about short-term because you cannot fake an excellent customer experience. And that's the art and the beauty of product. Product leaders, product teams need to rightly balance how much of investment, how much of the portfolio is going into the short-term and to capturing value versus adding more value that could be captured later on. The second trend that we notice is that product is not just about having a CPO in order to increase the relationships with other functions not just in GTM but others, product is becoming at the intersection of everything. I'm sure many of you when starting product probably saw this Venn diagram that I am showing on the left. See that shows product as the intersection between technology, design and marketing. That doesn't do justice to all products today by any means. Product is literally at the intersection of everything including sales, customer success, data, research and others. Otherwise this whole engine cannot work. If we still coordinate product at the end there is not going to be a real long-term win for the user. So what is happening right now is that now companies are creating what they call competency model or a career ladder structure to create space for different product leaders. Product teams are not just made out of product managers and not all product managers are equal. This is a defined career ladder usually starts at the associate product manager level, goes up to product manager, senior product manager, group, director, VP and ultimately CPO. Some companies might not have all these stages and that's okay. They're all creating the right competency model for them. What's true is that they are now creating this type of ladder as well as a parallel track for individual contributors that want to continue growing as individual contributors. Long gone are the days where the only option for a good individual contributor to grow is to become a poor manager. Now, principal product managers or lead product managers can still grow and be rewarded while maintaining their passion, which is staying in touch with the user, with the engineers, with the designers and building, getting their hands dirty, building instead of having to manage others, which is also a perfectly okay path. So this type of expansion of the product team is not just vertical, it's also horizontal. We're seeing emerging product roles within the product org, including product marketing. And I know there's been a lot of controversy around this based on the comments that the CEO of Airbnb made recently at a design conference. And my take on this is in order for the product team to support the amount of relationships with other functions as well as the depth that is required with such functions, product teams are now growing. The role of the product manager is more strategic than ever. When companies are small, I understand there might not even be a product manager officially, but that doesn't mean that there is no product management being done. Product management work is probably being done by a founder of one of the early members of the team. As companies grow and there is more maturity, there is definitely space to create a product function. As those functions evolve, we're seeing that the product teams are being now expected to come up with pricing strategy, positioning, competitive intelligence, enabling revenue teams. We can decide if this is something we want to give to product managers and have them have the same title or we want to come up with other titles. The point is those responsibilities are now falling under product. And in many cases, companies are designating this to product marketing, which is a huge, very important co-pilot for the product manager to really figure out what to be next and empower existing teams to go to market and launch products faster and more successfully. And the third trend that we are seeing for 2024 is that acquiring top product talent is not getting any easier, not at all. And it's also not easy to retain this type of top talent. We're seeing that around 60% of the product managers that were surveyed by us would likely leave their companies within the next two years. Some of you might be thinking, that's not me because my company is awesome. And we have such a strong product culture that everybody's very happy and they're not going to leave us. I'm talking about non-regretable losses. And this can be very scary because the cost of acquiring product manager is very expensive. On average, $300,000 in the U.S. If you make any cost as well as the time to ramp up someone and make them productive. So even if you have the resources to throw money at the problem, it's still not a sustainable strategy unless we figure out retention of top talent. And the key to retention of top talent is training. The same people that said they were willing to leave their companies within two years said that they would be willing to stay for at least one more year if they see an investment in their learning and development. Now here's the catch 22. It's not just any kind of training. It's not training for the sake of it. It's not just videos or something boring that is imposed by your manager or human resources. It's training that brings revenue to the company that drives business outcomes. And that training tends to be specific, custom, advanced. The good news is that now world-class companies are investing more in training than ever because it's more strategic. It's not only cheaper than acquiring top talent. It's also a much better investment to retain talent. But here is how they're doing it now. They are empowering product leaders to be the decision makers. No more just give me the same type of training that you are giving to other functions. They want something that actually works for the team. We're also seeing that this type of stipends or budget, however you want to call it, is becoming more flexible. Now companies are asking for options to take their teams to places that can be more specific, practical, short-term than traditional universities. They don't want to send their employees back to school to spend a year or two full-time doing something and then coming back and then not really knowing how to apply what they learn. So in summary, the top three trends in product for 2024 that we identified are number one, product is accountable for growing revenue, not just adding user value. Number two, product is at the intersection of everything. With career ladders being created, as well as new roles within the product team, such as product marketing. And number three, top product talent still is very hard to acquire. It's still bullish in the future of products and believe that this is the best time in history to be a digital product. Thank you very much.