 Hello, thank you for joining me in my presentation on five product points, where I'll share with you guys five product ideas which I formulated over the last five years of my tenure at Amazon. So just a little bit about myself. The best way to describe my product management career is through the journeys which I've had. Five years ago, someone asked me, what type of product manager did I want it to become? And at that point of time, I actually did not know that product management came in different flavors. So I did research and found this article by Kid Ulrich, which does a wonderful job of describing different product management types. So over the last five years, I took a conscious decision to shape my career in such a way that I get to have a taste of each of these product management types at least once. I started my journey as a detective product manager in customer service where me and my team were responsible for finding small opportunities to improve customers experience. I worked as a platform product manager in Amazon business, where we were working on a platform which could be leverageable by other teams. In my current role, I'm working as a mobile product manager at Whole Foods Market, where me and my team, we are responsible for improving the experience and the features for the shoppers who are picking the orders for customers who place them online. As you may have guessed, my last role will be as a growth hacker product manager, which I'll be starting pretty soon and I'm super excited about. So you might as well say that I'm fairly confused about my product management career, but actually that's not the case. Most of my decisions in my career have been pretty deliberate and very well thought through. So before we begin, let's quickly go over some housekeeping items. The five points I'll share with you shortly were all formulated from the product experiences I had at Amazon. These points worked for me and continue to help me as I go along on my journey, but depending upon your specific product role, position, or charter may or may not work for you. You can expect a lot of silly analogies and self-point terms as I go along on those points and I'll hopefully share a write up on these points sometime in the future. So why should you listen when there is a dirt of product management, material, guidance, videos out there? Well, for one, most of the point which I'm going to talk about are actually fairly unconventional and unwritten. You won't find them discussed or talked about in a lot of product areas. They're also based upon questions which a lot of my mentees have asked me over the last few years. So I thought I might as well then shape them into some of the points which other people like yourself would find helpful. And last but not the least, and this is the worst case scenario, you'll have fun. So let's get to them. Point number one, develop a strong sense of product as a product manager. Now this is kind of a cliche, right? Because product sense has been quite written and talked about. But the sense here I'm referring to is more on the artistic side and not on the metrics, mission statements, and success criteria type. Those are very important, but the artistic sense is equally important. So what is product sense? Well, product sense is about understanding all the possibilities and not finding one correct answer. So let's take an example. What is the first thing which comes to your mind when I show you this picture? A person opening a restroom door. Well, as you may have already guessed it, the person on the other side doesn't really know that someone is about to open a door. And this could be a hazard or a risk for them. Now I imagine if you as a product manager are tasked to solve this problem, how would you go about it? Well, clearly bumping this door into the person is the biggest issue you are solving for, right? So let's see. You might come up with a solution like a planam glass, which you would replace this glass door with and then so that the person on the other side can actually know that someone is going to come and open. Fair enough. Okay. How about this? A solution something like solution number two, which you might have already seen at the airport. Well, this seems pretty cool, right? Someone can enter from one side and exit from the other side completely avoiding the bumping problem. What about solution number three, which seems a little more compact, but solve the same purpose as solution number two. So which one of them is right? They all have their pros and cons. The first one has a very, very solid pro in terms of fitting a door in a small space that you are solving the problem for. It absolutely solves the bumping problem, but what it does is that it creates a privacy problem. The person on the inside doesn't necessarily feel comfortable knowing that the person on the outside can actually see some of the things happening inside. Solution number two, well, it absolutely solves the privacy problem and the bumping problem, but as you may have guessed it, it requires a lot of space. And also there could be an entry confusion for someone who is not familiar with the country's nomenclature of which side to enter from and which side to come out from. Solution number three actually solves the privacy and the space constraint, but because of the narrow passageway, it has a slight risk of bumping. However, there is one important thing to note here. When we started with this problem statement, you are only concerned about bumping and that's correct. That is what you were solving for as a product manager, but then suddenly while you were solutioning, you found these two equally important concerns which were attached to this problem. And this is exactly what is called having a sense for the product. If you know a product and you can identify those two or three knobs and what exactly moving those knobs are going to do to your product, you have actually got a pretty good sense for your product. Point number two, borrowed 100% from the playbook of real estate, location, location, location. My next point to you is as a product manager, observe, observe, observe. Observation is the most underutilized currency product managers have. Let me be clear. The observation I'm referring to is not the understanding of the metrics you should have and the direction your product is taking. Of course, those are important, but the observation which I'm alluding to here is the laser focus you should have to understand the finer print of your product area and things outside of them. Let me share two different examples with you. The first example is related to one of the products I worked on. In one of our feature launches, we recommended a value to the customers as opposed to them having type it out manually. We expected that the customer would simply take the value we provided and move on to the next screen. What we observed instead was that the customers were taking time to validate the value and the recommendation which we had provided. This was unexpected, but very intuitive. And hence, we created a new feature called auto continue, which would simply take the customers to the next screen for some simple use cases. Had we not observed the customers, we would have never even thought of coming up with such a feature. The second example is how I use observation for my own personal growth. In one of my previous teams, we used to have a weekly business review for all the input and output metrics which were owned by different teams. It was during one of those reviews, I noticed that a person called out that team A's metric was up while team B's metric was down. Logically, they both should have been trending in the same direction. But it was only that one person who pointed it out. And I made a mental note to myself to have a one-on-one with that person to understand what mental models do they have in place which help them figure out these kinds of discrepancies. Over the last five years, I've observed countless people and I've noticed that some people are really good at asking tech questions. Some people are really good at communication. Some people are really good some people are really good at understanding the metrics. And I have set up time with them to understand how do they develop those skills. I call this process micro mentorship. It has worked very well for me because I have had a chance to learn from these amazing people and I encourage you all to give it a shot. Point number three, influence as a service. Point number three is about using the only muscle we have as product managers and using it as if it were a technical service. PMs working in technical areas might be familiar with components of a good service. Just like a good technical service spans multiple use cases, adapts to different user types, and is intuitive for the user to use, I encourage you to shape your product management muscle, influence, to span to different people and in different situations. So how do you fine tune influence as a service? The answer I think lies in approaching situations or people with a balance of soft skill and humility. Here is a little diagram to explain this. Please note that I carefully use the word balance. If you approach every situation with 100% humility, meaning you are accepting what people say all the time, you will at some point and probably lose self-respect. On the other hand, if you tackle all situations with 100% soft skill, you might be able to resolve the situation at that moment, but I'm pretty sure you will not be able to learn anything. And as a result, it is very important to strike a balance. But irrespective of the situation, it is this balance that will help you deal with tough situations and strengthen your influence on people. So how does this balance look like in real product life? A few pointers to help you out. Learn to prioritize acceptance over judgment. This is something which I borrowed from my time in customer service. Whenever we call customer service agents, the very first thing they say is that I'm sorry. They're not judging you there, but they're accepting that you had an issue and something which needs to be resolved. I also encourage you to strike resonance with everyone you talk to. And this resonance is an important term because this means that you have to change your frequency to be able to match some other person's frequency and strike resonance with them. And lastly, have empathy. Point number four, always understand the cost of launching your products. As PMs, you're often concerned about meeting adoption or revenue metrics whenever we launch a product, but almost always those numbers come at a cost. And as PMs, it is important to understand that cost component so that we have a good view of the 360-degree picture. Let me provide two examples. In 2011, Netflix announced that they would be splitting this DVD and the streaming business. I think we all know about that. And we all also know that the streaming was extremely successful. So what cost did the streaming came at? Well, it came at the cost of 10% customers who eventually decided to turn out from the DVD business. So was it a good business decision? Absolutely, because streaming helped Netflix gain customers exponentially, many times over the cost they paid from churning the DVD business. Another example is one of the products I worked on at Amazon. I worked on a product where my success criteria was X% adoption from other feature teams. While launching the product, we made some trade-off decisions, just like any product manager would do. And as a result, the feature teams which were supposed to adopt the product had to spend some extra time integrating with that feature. We hid the adoption numbers, which we were aiming for, calling the product launch a success, but the cost at which the success came was the incremental time it took those teams, something which we did not know from the outset. So as you go along in your product journey, I encourage you to shift through both the tangible and the untangible costs on which your product success will come out at. Lastly, I want to talk about the importance of being your own kind of product manager. Apologies for the philosophical advice, but a lot of times I've noticed product managers wanting to become someone they deeply admire. Please don't get me wrong. There is no harm in learning from someone's superpowers, but there is a difference between adding a superpower to your own portfolio versus becoming a reflection of someone else's superpower. Only you as a product manager know what you're passionate about. You are the one who is in the best position to judge your own strengths and weaknesses. Your experiences will shape your path different from anyone else's. So I request you to keep admiring and learning from people, but formulate yourself as a unique combination of the skills where you are 100% true to yourself. So a quick recap before we end, we learned about how important it is for product managers to understand the intrinsic knobs for their products. Having an understanding on these knobs and how they fine tune the voice of your product is close to having a good product sense. We then talked about using a natural skill we all have, observation and amplifying it to understand the fine prints about products and finding micrometers. We then learned about how influence the only muscle product managers have could be thought of as having a service which can be fine tuned by oscillating between soft skill and humility. We then went over how important it is for product managers to understand the cost of their product in order to have a good 360 degree view. And lastly, we talked about the importance of maintaining an identity true to yourself and by being your own kind of product manager. So that's it. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this session and I hope that my experiences and learnings in some shape or form can be beneficial to you. If you have any questions or feedbacks or comments, feel free to send me a note at the email shown here. I want to leave you all with some of the lines from one of my favorite songs. Make your own kind of music and sing your own special song. Thank you.