 This is the best time in history to build digital products. If you are in product, you're definitely at the right time, at the right place. I'm not saying that just because we happen to be surrounded by over a thousand product leaders in New York, and joined by many more thousands of people online. Throughout my career as a Founder and CEO of Product School for nine years, I've seen the role of product evolve from being almost non-existent, to really being at the core of companies, leading some of the most strategic decisions. Long gone are those days where the highest ranked product person on the organization would report into a chief marketing officer or a chief technology officer. I'm very, very happy to see that today, over one-third of the Fortune 100 companies already have a chief product officer. It's only getting better. We've seen this trend grow for at least the last three years, by over 41%. My estimation is that by the end of the next year, we're going to have at least 50% of Fortune 100 companies with a chief product officer. This is also trickling down to every single level of seniority in the product career, from spying product managers to senior and group level and directors. As an example, today's MBA students are choosing careers in product management over careers in consulting and finance, even in New York. That's pretty crazy. And product management is not a secret anymore. And this is not just a New York thing or Silicon Valley thing. This is a global phenomenon that is really, really happening worldwide. And the same thing goes for industries. This is not just for high-tech companies. Every company is a software company, even if they build something physical. So, how did we get here? Well, let me address the big elephant in the room for a second, because this might sell us back for a little bit. I know this crazy news out there, and I definitely want to acknowledge that. It's not all rainbows, sun shines and unicorns out there. Winter is here, and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better. The thing is, if we take a little more of perspective to see where we are coming from as an industry, you'll realize that we are still on the rise. So, if we were to use the word product 20-ish years ago, we'll probably associate that with something physical only. It was only around 2001, when the Agile Manifesto was released, when we started thinking that product could also be something digital. It was a new breath of air that introduced a concept around building something that is not physical, that could require a little bit less of planning in exchange for more testing and interaction with the customer, and we could introduce those insights into the next iteration of our product. That's not a secret anymore, either. But in 2002, we saw how Google launched the first Associate Product Management Program, which is basically an internal product school where they recognized that there is a need to have more product managers, and traditional education wasn't really creating those product managers, so they solved their own problem. They were like, okay, we're going to train some of our engineers and make them product managers. That was also really good validation for more companies to start thinking about this role. 2010 venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz released an article titled, Software is Eating the World, and this was huge because it talked about how Internet was transitioning from being a place where consumers just eat content to a place where consumers and companies can also transact and do business. Internet is here to stay, and that was a way for companies to also reach a global audience faster. Obviously, they were proven right. In 2011, we saw the rise of product tech and no code tools. What I mean by this is that now as product people, we don't need to piggyback on tools that were created for marketers or designers first. Now we have our own set of tools to create roadmaps, run experiments or A.B. testing. We can build beautiful dashboards. We can build prototypes, and these tools are also more and more visual, which is really empowering a whole new generation of builders and product people to be more self-sufficient and ship faster. If you look behind you here in the room, we have 25 of those top product management tools. Many of them started around the same time as we did, and today some of them are public companies or unicorns. She's extremely, extremely validating for us as an industry. I'm sure you've heard of their product CEOs. In 2015-14, companies like Microsoft or Google appointed the current CEOs and, surprise, surprise, they come from product backgrounds. The same way the chief product officer obviously has a seat at the table. It's not only that. Now we are seeing how many CEOs actually come from a product background, both of large and small companies. And they get it. That's huge because that sends a really powerful message for all the product leaders in the organization. Another venture capital firm called OpenView coined the term product lead growth. You've probably heard this term 25 times on the list today, and it's not enough. We're going to keep humbling on this concept that was relatively innovative in 2016. But bottom line, this is not just a set of tactics to give someone a free trial. It's definitely a company-wide strategy that is about leveraging product as an inbound growth channel. I'll unpack that in a second. 2020, alarm, alarm, pandemic is here. And that obviously brought a lot of sad news. The silver lining is it really accelerated some of the trends that I just mentioned. Companies double down on product. PLG became more relevant than ever. A lot of companies had to leverage online channel as the only channel to survive and thrive. So as a product industry, we actually got much more exposure internally. And today, here we are, yet again with another not so great news that shows us that, yes, there's a lot of companies that are adjusting their workforce. And that's sad news, of course. The silver lining here is that if you unpack those scary headlines, you realize that the product teams are some of the least affected teams by these cats. As an example, Twitter, that laid off around 50% of their entire company, only 4% of that layoff was actually impacting the product team. Just think about it. Only 4% of the entire 50% of the company that was impacted was really around product management. Why? Well, because in the face of economic uncertainty, the best product wins. In the face of economic uncertainty, when marketing budgets are being reduced, our customers' marketing budgets are being reduced, the cost of acquiring new customers is only getting higher, best product wins. And what I mean by this is that we need to deliver an excellent experience for our users. You cannot fake that. Again, this is not about giving people a free trial and trapping them into an annual subscription that they cannot get rid of. That is not what I'm talking about here. Leading with product is about delivering, over-delivering. It's really delighting the customer. And that has two main benefits. One is if we do that, we have high chances of retaining our customers. Not only that, we can also expand the usage of that customer in the sense of an upgrade, upsells, cross-sells, who they touch on that at the first talk. But the second point is we can also leverage our existing customers to bring net new customers. That's what product let growth is all about, 101. It's really about leveraging our current product as an inbound distribution channel, which is way more cost-efficient than a lot of other outbound channels, especially in times of uncertainty. So this graph that you see here is from OpenView. They showed how B2B SaaS companies that are already embracing PLG are growing revenue by 13% faster than the B2B SaaS companies that are not embracing PLG. So all of these concepts that you are receiving today, which are probably not new to many of you, are only here to stay and get bigger, because there is no plan B. Another benefit of product-led organizations is that they are building stronger and deeper connections with way many more teams that other companies can imagine. I'm sure you're all familiar with this classic diagram that shows that product management is at the intersection of business, design, and engineering. Well, that's not enough. Now we are seeing how product is really at the core of the company, how product is also building relationships with customer success. Data says just to name a few. So if we really want to put the product at the core of the organization, if we really want to leverage our product to retain existing customers and get some net new customers, we also need to zoom in and see what type of structural changes are required in the product team. Because the product team is not just major product managers. Obviously, product managers are very important. Do not get me wrong. Those are generalists that are good enough at a lot of things, and that's really, really key. However, in order to really support deeper relationships with other roles or other functions, we are seeing the rise of new type of product roles within the product team, such as product marketing, product operations, or product growth. This is only getting bigger and bigger. It's looking like a key shape where you still have generalists, but you also have some specialist product roles. Now, this sounds great. It's like the promised land. But here's the problem. In order to really deliver an excellent product experience, we need to have an excellent product team. And acquiring talent is crazy expensive. Even now, yes, there is more talent available in the market, but that doesn't mean that that talent is getting any cheaper. We ran a survey last week that we are preparing for the next version of our report on the future of product. And we got that around 58% of the product leaders are expecting a 15 to 20%, 16 to 20% raise next year. I'm not saying they're not worth it by any means. I'm just saying that that sounds very unsustainable for a lot of companies. And even if the companies can afford those type of games, it's just still a risk because if we don't really nurture this talent, eventually, they will live for the next company that is giving them another raise. So if we're saying that hiding is not the solution, what really is the solution? Well, it's all about retention. We're talking about retaining users. We also need to look inside and retain our talent. And the best lever for retaining our talent is to invest in the learning and development. Another stat that we collected last week is that over 90% of the product leaders that we surveyed mentioned that they would consider to stay for at least 12 more months in their companies if they see real investment in the learning and development. And it's no secret that investing in learning and development is cheaper than having to replace someone probably too late. Now, here is the oxymoron. The same way a lot of companies, unfortunately, are performing layoffs, they are not cutting their education stipends because they get it. Product companies get the retention game, both for their users and their team. And they are making those stipends much more flexible. So now employees are empowered to choose the solutions that they want. It's not just about going back to school to take a long degree. That might be an option for some people, but there are definitely a lot of other alternatives that might be more cost efficient for the employee. So that sounds interesting. And of course, there are always early adopters, companies like Google that are taking this to a whole new level and building associate product management programs. That's amazing, right? Obviously, it's not for everybody. It requires a large infrastructure, but examples are Yelp, LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Intuit, Amazon, and many, many more. Did I mention that the cost of acquiring a product manager today in San Francisco, New York is on average $240,000? It's almost a quarter of a million dollars if you bake in not only the salary, but the hiding fees and the time that it takes for this person to ramp up. That's pretty insane. That's why a lot of these companies are trying to figure out, okay, how do I retain talent? How do I kind of take some people who are in adjacent roles and make them product managers? It's all good. They're very different flavors on how you want to do it. My point is that the future of product is still bright. And in summary, in order to really deliver a great product experience for our users, we first need to look inside and take care of our people. Because you know what? 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.