 Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, UX design and product leadership courses online and our 16 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hello and welcome to the product development process. I'm Lucy Meadow, a senior product manager currently working at Expedia and I've been working in product management for the last 10 years. The goal of today's presentation is to provide a high-level overview of the product management development process and better understand the different roles that a product manager assumes within each step. Product management is a murky role. It varies from company to company and even from team to team. My hope is that you take away a better understanding of what it means to be a product manager and how product managers engage in cross-functional teams, especially with regards to the product development process. So what does a product manager do? Marty Kagan, who is widely recognized as the primary thought leader for technology product management, says that the role of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. Considering this definition, there are two main parts of a product manager's role. The first is knowing the customer and understanding what is valuable and usable to them. And the second is deciding what you're going to build and how, which determines what is feasible. And we certainly don't do it on our own. One of the most important jobs of a product manager is establishing relationships with the many teams that help us execute on our vision. Simply stated, it's our job to properly understand the customer problem, confirm with the business that we are meeting their needs, and then work with user experience and engineering to understand how to solve it. In order to understand what a product manager does, it's really important to understand the product development process. The first part of the process is identifying the opportunity. Product managers do so through competitive analysis, internal product tear downs, and direct customer engagement. To validate this opportunity and get the required buy-in, product managers must partner across other groups. Other groups might include stakeholders, other product managers, legal, and even finance. Product managers need alignment across all relevant teams in order to secure the help to successfully build out their product. The next part is often the hardest, thinking, and lots of it. Once product managers have validated the opportunity and gotten the necessary buy-in, they need to translate it into something that can be built. That vision or strategy needs to be shared across teams to further solidify alignment and buy-in. Product managers then work with their internal engineering teams to flush out an executable plan. This includes a backlog and roadmap consisting of engineering tasks that can be developed, tested, released to production, and then quantified and measured. As development begins, product managers will take a step back to let engineering do their thing but will be in close communication to understand progress and help unblock the team so as not to slow down development. Finally, after the process is completed and something has been shipped, product managers will need to understand the overall impact of the effort and determine next steps. Success will need to be evaluated in understanding what comes next. So that's a lot of things on a product manager's plate. But how does this boil down and what kinds of mindsets enable product managers to get this all done? One of my favorite articles on product management was sent to me by the former chief product officer at Orbitz. In the article, Matt Balaz, a product manager who has worked at Google as well as several startups, breaks down a product manager's role into different more recognizable jobs. I like using this as a framework for discussions on product management because I think it helps provide recognizable analogies to better understand the job. As I mentioned earlier, product management is a murky role, changing drastically from company to company and even between teams within the same company. My role as a product manager on a platform team varies greatly from someone who works on the mobile app. As you've probably seen from the first several slides, product managers wear many hats and there is a lot of dark art to the role. My hope is through these comparisons, you'll see that there are many different facets of product management, but they all connect together to help build a successful product. The CEO analogy is a popular one. As product management requires a lot of emotional intelligence, relationship building and using one's wits and influence to get stuff done. Those relationships are what make a CEO and product manager successful. Additionally, product managers are often the face of the product itself and are responsible for showcasing its capabilities, marketing its strengths, and road showing its functionalities to product groups. Furthermore, the buck stops with the product manager, meaning we have the final say in terms of prioritization and what features get developed. It's also a bit of an overstatement. In reality, product managers drive forward relatively small dimensions of the product with little meaningful control over resourcing, zero actual reporting authority over anyone, nor much, if any, say in the budgeting process. Our primary satisfaction comes from knowing we've created and driven a good product. Another appropriate analogy is that product managers are like coaches. Product managers, in the development sense of the word, don't really do anything. Instead, product managers like coaches know which team members to put into which situations. Product managers and product managers alike understand that teams are composed of people and the relationships between each member influence the effectiveness of the team. Product managers like coaches need to be motivational and rally their team members to find ways to inspire. This is my favorite analogy for product management because it couldn't be more true. A product manager rolls up his or her sleeves to do as much dirty work as possible so that the rest of the team can keep their heads down and focus on the end results. Some examples might be finding a meeting slot that works for 14 different people across five time zones on a Friday before a long weekend or triaging 300 low priority bugs that remain in the backlog. Product managers make a million unsexy little decisions to keep the engine running every day. Additionally, like a janitor, product managers often need to fade into the background and not interfere with the day-to-day goings-on if they aren't needed. An instrumental role of product managers is unblocking their team while remaining unseem. As I previously mentioned, one of the most important parts of a product manager's role is alignment and partnership across multiple teams. Without that alignment, we can't actually get anything done. We need to convince other people to do what we need them to do for the good of the product, sometimes forcefully, like a hammer. With hammer-like confidence sprinkled with humility, product managers need to influence, persuade, and communicate a passion for our product. To do this, we blend data with argument, fact with opinion, and logic with emotion. We are a force that makes things happen. We don't let people waver in their decisions. We make people commit to a clear position and establish a course of action. We are decisive. Finally, product managers are the product's most experienced and avid user. We use our tools daily and often are its most prolific bug reporters. Think about it. How can you build a valuable, usable, and feasible product if you don't know that product inside and out? Not only must product managers know everything there is to know about their product, but they also need to work closely with users and stakeholders to understand how they use the product and what their pain points are. But at the end of the day, you're the product itself. The product your team builds and ships is the most faithful representation of your success as a product manager. It is the sum product of all your effort. Your success in making your product greatly hinges on your ability to be, at every moment in time, the most valuable thing your team needs you to be at that very moment. So that's all fine and good, but how does that help to better understand the product development process? My hope is that by better understanding what it needs to be a product manager, we can overlay the new understanding onto the product development process and understand how these roles can enable product managers to be their most successful. The first step in the product development process is identifying the opportunity. This involves working closely with stakeholders to identify customer needs and business opportunities. The main point here is that at this stage, it is important to understand opportunity across all groups using established relationships. Here the product manager operates as a CEO using emotional intelligence across these relationships as well as instincts and energy to make sure no stone is unturned. At Expedia, this can take the form of competitive analysis, internal product and workflow teardowns and direct customer engagement, often spearheaded by UX. At this stage, a product manager operating like a CEO takes a leadership role to drive the process. The next step is to validate the opportunity, which involves engaging the partner teams to size, validate and refine the opportunity. This part of the process is difficult because we mostly rely on theoretical validations rather than analyzing something in production. We sometimes write code first and then use it to validate the original hypothesis when ideally we should validate the opportunity prior to development efforts. This can be done with smoke testing or other projections. As an example, we sometimes use at Expedia is including a link to an in-development page for a new feature or functionality to measure click-through and understand and customer interest. In this part of the process, product managers should act like a hammer with CEO tendencies, working his or her relationships to help validate across various teams. This means beginning to persuade and convince partners to take the opportunity seriously. In parallel, the product manager will market and showcase the opportunity and how it can benefit the product and company as a whole. Next in the process is getting the required buy-in and support, which involves identifying engaging and influencing key stakeholders and sponsors. Product managers need to be a hammer and convince them it is valuable to invest in solving the customer problem. For this part in the process, there is no handbook or framework. While requiring a lot of data to support the opportunity, it also requires a ton of emotional intelligence. This is where a product manager's role as a hammer comes into play. In this phase, product managers need to be convincing to make sure everyone is in alignment. We have to be persuasive in getting that alignment and drive other people to do what we need them to do for the good of the product. Sponsorship and support across all stakeholders is required for a successful product. This is the turning point in the process, as without this required buy-in, there is no way to eventual success. Once the required buy-in is achieved, the product manager can move forward with building out a strategy. This will need to be shared with key stakeholders to obtain feedback. This strategy will need to be buildable and contain a cohesive roadmap and backlog that the engineering team will be able to execute on. At this part in the process, a product manager acts mainly as an expert user, understanding their product more than anyone else. They use this expertise to filter the ideas and requests coming in from various sources into a realistic plan. They also need to consider technical impacts so that they can create a plan that enables them to understand value quickly, sometimes in the form of quick smoke tests. As the process reaches the execution phase, the product manager builds the roadmap and prioritizes the backlog to identify when key results will be delivered. They set expectations on timelines and create a workflow with the core working teams. In my experience, this has manifested as bi-weekly planning sessions with engineers as well as syncs with stakeholders to update them on progress. Additionally, we hold envisionings to flesh out requirements prior to the beginning of a sprint and retrospectives at the end to improve efficiency. Product managers also make any trade-offs in terms of features and prioritization to always build towards value and solving the customer problem. After completing this, the product manager's role is mostly hands-off as the engineering team takes over to execute on the plan. Acting like a coach, the product manager rallies their team and finds ways to inspire and motivate. This might be with positive feedback or even donuts or snacks after a particularly grueling sprint. Additionally, it is crucial that the product manager works to unblock the team so that they have as few distractions as possible. Like a janitor, the product manager works behind the scenes to make sure everything runs smoothly. Finally, once the product has been shipped, the product manager steps back into their CEO role in order to assess performance and decide on next steps, often using analytics along with customer and stakeholder feedback. As the CEO, the product manager is on the hook for the success of the product. In reality, we often get none of the glory if the product is a success with that rightfully going to the team that actually built it, and all of the blame if it doesn't perform as expected, since it was our job to validate the opportunity in the first place. We do, however, get satisfaction from knowing we've created and driven a good product. And with that, we will need to assess the performance as what has been shipped and determine the next steps. Do we iterate? Are we done? And how do you know if you're done? That is a great and difficult question. It is difficult to know when to sunset a product and let it go into maintenance mode, enabling us to move on to a different problem. The biggest question a product manager needs to ask as or herself at the end of each product development cycle is what's the next big thing? Should I continue investing in this product because there's still impact or move on to something else? This definitely differs from product to product and team to team. There are some forms at Expedia we use to identify where we are. There are internal product reviews done on a team level as well as larger portfolio reviews that happen at a leadership level, but it is definitely important for a product manager to be constantly asking themselves if the product needs continue investment or not, and that is not always an easy question to answer. Thank you.