 This is the best time in history to build digital products. If you work in product, you are definitely at the right place at the right time. And I don't mean it just because we happen to be at the beautiful Barbican center surrounded by 2,000 product leaders from all over Europe and many thousands more joining us online. The reason why I say that is because I have been around the industry for a very long time and I've seen it evolve from being almost non-existent to now being in charge of some of the most strategic decisions for the entire company. Long gone are the days where the highest ranked product person in the organization would report to a CMO or to a CTO. Today we are experiencing firsthand the rise of the CTO, the chief product officer. Over 33% of the Fortune 100 companies already have a chief product officer. These are the 100 most powerful companies in the world that are already public. And this trend has been growing by over 40% during the last three years. To be anticipated by the end of 2023, we're going to have over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies with a chief product officer. Over 50% of the Fortune 100 companies with a chief product officer. And most of those companies are not high tech. They are building physical stuff. They are in oil and gas. They are in telecommunications. They are in many other industries where the world product wasn't so much associated with software. And this is creating a trickling effect for the entire career, rather, creating more opportunities for anyone in product, regardless of the level of seniority. So today what I'm going to be sharing with you is how to make the most out of this opportunity for you and your companies. And I know you might be thinking, okay, but this winter is out there. There's a lot of companies reducing force, unfortunately. So how is it possible that in the midst of all of this, this is the best time in history to build the products? Or this is the time where most companies are actually still hiding product people. Well, let me try to give you some perspective to see where we're coming from. Because if we were to use the word product in the year 2000, we'll probably associate that with something physical, right? In 2023, literally a month ago, McKinsey released a report that was titled, Every Company is a Software Company. They were very intentional with this, because the message that they are sending is, this is not just for London or San Francisco or New York. This is global. The same way, this is not just for high-tech companies. This is for every company, regardless of their industry. Even if their final product is something physical, they're still using software to automate processes and collaborate globally. So it's only in year 2001 when the agile manifesto was released, and they sent a message of hope. There was a new way of building software where we could take customers' input ahead of time before we go too far ahead into the planning phase, incorporate that feedback into the next iteration of the software product that we were building, and so on. So we didn't have to wait forever to plan, deliver, execute, test in order to see value. Now we can do it in a much faster way. That was a good intention. But obviously that agile manifesto was created by 14 white software engineers in the same room before social media was mainstream. So obviously a lot of things changed since then. In 2004, Google created the first associate product manager program. This was an internal program because they realized that there was a huge need for product talent, and traditional schools weren't really creating that type of talent. So they decided to train some of their engineers into product managers. Today, there are many other companies that are already creating their own schools to teach product, but that obviously is not for everybody. There was no product school back in the day, so this was kind of their own in-house solution to solve that type of talent problem for them. Then we saw in 2011, there's a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz. They released an article called, Software is Eating the World. Well, 12 years later, they were proven right, clearly, and the world has been eaten by software clearly. So at that time, they were talking about how internet was not just a place for consumption of content. It was also a place for transaction, where not only individuals but businesses could do business, could create value out of it. Then we saw how in the year 2011 or so, there were many more companies creating software for product managers. Just think about it. I'm sure that's a lot of people in the room that fell into product somehow, and you remember how back in the day, if we had to create a roadmap, for example, we would be leveraging tools that weren't created for product people. So the same applies for wireframing, data analytics, and so on. Well, today, there's an entire new category called product tech. So a bunch of tools created for product people. If you go behind this auditorium to our lobby, we have over 20 of those companies with us. Many of them are already public companies or unicorns. So there's definitely a need for technology for product people. And that technology is becoming more visual than ever. Some people will call that no code or no code, and that's huge because that is empowering a whole new generation of creators to build something with a single line of code. I come from a software engineering background and serve me well to a certain point, but the reality is there's now a huge opportunity for product people out there to build, to be more self-sufficient, regardless of their background, if it's technical or non-technical. 2014, 2015, companies like Google or Microsoft appointed their new CEOs and, surprise, surprise, those CEOs were product executives. In fact, last week, the new CEO at YouTube was appointed and he was the former CEO at YouTube. That is huge for all of us because product not only has a seat at the table. In many cases, we are seeing CEOs come from a product background. Product growth was coined in 2016 by a venture capital firm called OpenView. Francesca saved me a couple of minutes because she perfectly explained what product growth means. And then we saw how during the pandemic and now during this economic downturn, all of these trends, all of this need for product is being accelerated. Now, you cannot fake an excellent customer experience. Now, sometimes you can't even rely on offline as a channel to reach customers. So product became the paramount for many companies, not only just to survive, but also to thrive. So what's really happening today? Because I definitely do not want to diminish the current situation. There's been thousands of people affected by layoffs, especially in high-tech companies. You have scary headlines out there from Amazon, Google, Meta, Salesforce, just to name a few. There's been over 100,000 people affected by layoffs in 2023 alone. And if we unpack those headlines, we'll see two silver linings for product people. Number one, the product teams are the least affected teams by those layoffs. In case of Twitter, only 4% of the people that got affected were actually part of the product team. That's not something that is obvious when you read those headlines. There are many other teams that were heavily affected, such as talent acquisition, people operations, marketing, and so on. Product and especially engineering are holding up there. The other piece to it is that product managers are in more demand than ever. If you just do a quick search on LinkedIn today, you will find that there are over 200,000 open jobs today for product manager roles. So how is this possible? How can we see those scary news and at the same time such a huge need for product talent out there? Well, we created a report titled The Future of Product Management. We are about to release it in two weeks. And I want to highlight the three key trends that we identified already. Number one is that in times of economic uncertainty, the best products win. It's not just about distribution. It's about quality of the product and the experience. Why? Well, think about it. Marketing's budgets are being reduced. Our customers' marketing budgets are also being reduced. There are obviously layoffs happening. The cost of acquiring customers, especially through paid channels, is going up. So it's absolutely critical to invest in product because you cannot fake an excellent customer experience. That is not something that you can hack. You either have it or you don't. And now our clients are looking deeper to justify the value of their investments in our products or services. So there are two key advantages in maintaining an excellent or improving an excellent customer experience. Number one is retention. If we keep delivering value, our current customers will have more reasons to renew with us. That renewal will also lead, hopefully, to upsell opportunities. And that is a huge growth lever because it is potentially the most cost-effective channel for us retaining and upselling a customer than trying to get a net new customer. But the other benefit of improving our customer experience is that you can also leverage product as a growth lever to bring net new customers. You can leverage your existing customers to attract new ones. It's like the classic word of mouth on steroids. So that's what we call product led. And I know we spent some time in the previous talk talking about it. Product led is not just a tactic for the product team or the marketing team. It's not just about creating a free trial or a free immune version so we can trick people into staying with our product. It's really a company-wide strategy. And in this report from OpenView, we saw how, especially for SaaS products, companies that implemented some sort of product led growth motion are growing revenue at least 13% faster than similar companies that do not have a product led growth motion. So product led growth is not just trendy, it's money. And that's the right way to look at it right now because we don't have the time now to start coming up with innovative new ideas if they don't show some sort of value in a reasonable time frame. And I agree with the point that this is not just an either or decision. It's not about being product led or sales led or marketing led or engineering led. It's about leveraging our product as a growth channel to retain upsell customers as well as attract net new customers. So for the few sales, is there any sales person in the room? I don't see many. Don't be shy. Anyway, PLG can be your best friend because PLG is not here to replace a sales team. The same way AI is not here to replace product teams. Product led growth is about helping automate some of the things that can't be automated. I'm sure there's a lot of customers that can be renewed automatically or upset automatically. But the most important piece is that it can help the sales team better qualify the type of opportunities they need to engage with. That's the classic bottom sub-motion with a top-down motion. So that's number one. Second trend is about having a seat at the table. At the beginning of the presentation, I mentioned how this chief product officer is rising and a lot of companies already have this type of role at the C-suite. But it's not just that. That's creating an incredible effect across the entire career ladder from associate product managers, PM, senior PM, directors, VPs, as well as executives. Because product is at the center of everything. I'm sure you are familiar with the classic Venn diagram that shows how product is at the intersection between engineering, design, and marketing. That's not enough anymore. Product is at the intersection of everything. I'm talking customer success, data sales, in some cases, legal or finance. That's what I'm talking about. So in order to build better products, we need to have a strong product team. And surprise, surprise, the product team is not just mayor of product managers. The product team is growing across two dimensions. One is the level of seniority. So you can see how there's a career path for people and not just people that want to become managers. We're also seeing strong path for really good individual contributors that want to continue growing in their career. As well as specialist roles within product. That's what I call T-shape product team. Because traditionally, product is a generalized role. We are collaborating with so many different teams and it seems like we're not the experts at anything, right? Well, that is just not enough anymore if we really believe in having product at the center of the organization. We are seeing how new roles are emerging quickly, such as product marketing, product analytics, or product operations, just to name a few. There are over 65,000 open jobs for product marketing on LinkedIn right now. The growth of product analytics roles grew by over 20% in the last year and this is just getting started. So London, we have a problem here. Because if we believe that we need to have a better product to retain and grow our customer base and that in order to do that, we need to have a strong product team, how are we going to build that strong product team? Well, the obvious answer might be to throw money at the problem, right? To hire people and that is a time and a place for that. But that's clearly not sustainable. Even for the largest companies out there, that's just not sustainable. You can't just keep hiring people. You know why? Because in the report that we did, we surveyed over 7,000 product leaders. 60% of them said that they're willing to leave your company within the next two years. My company too. And because of acquiring a product manager all in, it's around a quarter of a million pounds. 250,000 pounds if you bake in recruiting fees and the time that it would take for this new hire to be ramped up. That's a lot of money. Even if you can afford it, it's still not sustainable. So the complementary or alternative way to build a strong product team is retention. The same way we talk about retaining our customers, it is key to retain our key players on the product team. Because the same people that said they were willing to leave within the next two years, also said 94% of them said that they would be willing to stay longer by at least an extra year had they seen opportunities for growth in different shapes or forms. So training becomes paramount. It's not a discretionary decision anymore. It's probably the most critical decision to retain and upskill our talent. And that may sound counter-intuitive in a time where companies are really looking into their budgets to see where they can reduce. Well, learning and development budgets are actually being increased. Why? Because there is still a talent war out there for key people and product team is considered key. So this is a report that was released by LinkedIn last week. They mentioned that 41% of the companies that they surveyed are looking to increase their budget, not just to keep their budget for 2023. So training is our best retention lever for our team. And by the way, it's not just about, oh, I'm just going to have a budget. I'm just going to let people learn whatever they want to learn. Those policies are also becoming much more flexible. Long gone are the days where someone would need to go to school, spend one or two years, stop their work and then come back. There's so many options out there for people to acquire skills without having to put their work on hold and show value to their employer right away. That's the future of learning. That's the future of retention for product teams. So in summary, the three key trends that we saw is number one, in times of economic uncertainty, the best products win. Number two, product has earned a seat at the table. Number three, in order to build excellent products, we need to have an excellent product team. And in order to have an excellent product team, we can't just do it by throwing money at the problem. We need to invest in retaining our key people. Because if you take care of your team, they will take care of your customers. If you take care of your team, they will take care of your customers. Thank you very much.