 Hello everyone, welcome to this product school webinar. I'm Diana and I'll be your host today. Ready to learn more about why product management is all about people? All right, let's jump into it. We are going to start by understanding why people are at the heart of product management. Then we'll discuss why building products is a teamwork. Finally, we'll encode how to build a product your customers love. Let me start by telling you a bit of my story in product management and how the people I've worked with have shaped how I do product. In 2017, I've joined Jumia, the biggest e-commerce in Africa, to work as a junior product owner for the return management product. In e-commerce, return management is everything that the reverse flow of an order entails. From the moment a customer initiates a customer return, or there is a field delivery that triggers the reverse flow of goods to the imbalanced or return to customer vendor. It's important to notice that at the time, Jumia was a mid-sized startup at the pre-IPO stage, which means that a lot of exciting things to do in a short span of time. This is where I, a young photographer turned product owner, which was starting to learn what is product management, learn that people are at the core of product management. And why? I learned that as a product manager of a returns product, I had to be focused on the customers as this would interact with our product to initiate the return online. Basically, our B2C returns product. And as this also had an internal product scope for returns management, I had to deal with multiple stakeholders, from operations to finance to customer experience. Now, in order to build and ship the product, I had to work closely with the engineering team. But because this product was part of a whole, I had to interact with other engineering teams to seek alignment and resolve dependencies between the products. And certainly at the end of the day, I would find myself thinking that I was spending most of my day talking and listening and learning with all these different sets of people. So I realized that to thrive in this role, I had to develop three important skills. The first one is communication. And communication is the basis for LT human relationships and this key to ensure alignment across teams and manage stakeholder expectations. So I'd like to share with you three things that I've learned about communication. To start with, you need to know your audience. This means understanding the person with which you are in a dialogue with. And it's important because different people have different communication styles. Some people like a more formal conversational approach, while others look for a more easygoing interaction. For example, development teams usually are more easygoing and relaxed. They like understanding the details and discuss through the thought process while C-level stakeholders have less time and are usually looking for a more pragmatic approach to the discussion. Also remember to communicate often on the scope of the initiative you are working on, the roadmap and the release plans. This will ensure you are constantly seeking alignment across the different people involved. Remember that the people you are interacting with are not dedicated to your product and have other stuff to focus on. So it's easy to let slide the details or forget about a past discussion. It's our responsibility to keep communication lines open and in a frequent interaction with everyone to ensure that the alignment is there. And this is also important to identify any flags, blockers, issues and collect early feedback as fast as possible. Finally, make use of visuals to communicate. It can be hard for people who are not working day-to-day with your product to keep up with a given discussion and having visuals usually helps your audience to navigate through the conversation or the presentation. This can be by having supporting slides with imagery or workflows or user journeys or illustrations. Plus, it makes everything much more enjoyable. Now, the second skill that I found to be relevant when it comes to people-focused role is empathy. And empathy is fundamental for stronger human relationships, of course, but it's also key to unlock better decision-making. And why is that? How can we become more empathetic? First, we need to understand that we don't always have all the context and we can use this, for example, when making a judgment on a decision that impacts your product. This can be, for example, when another team has a set of requirements that will imply making a tactical solution on your product and in order to achieve a given outcome, this will be done in a trade-off with having a long-term solution on theirs. Remember, there might be reasons why you are not aware of the entire context, such as the time to market or legacy or others that impact that decision. And you can always ask for more context. Just remember to hold off any judgments, especially before understanding the whole picture and always be authentic, right? So we are all human and you are not an exception. Be yourself, people, value authenticity. And this helps create stronger bonds and relationships of trust. This will also enable others to be more empathetic with you, which is also needed as not all of your actions will be flawless and not all your decisions will be popular. Then enrolling to conversations that are non-work related. This means truly get to know the people you are working with. These are the people with which you spend eight hours a day, roughly five days a week. So you might as well have fun together. It's okay to be human at the workplace. Understand the person behind the professional and that will help you frame some situations and some decisions which will enable you to empathize with the human on the other end. Finally, one of the most important skills to master is influence. I like to think of influence as an approach for bringing people together for a shared purpose. And as product managers are often rules without direct authority, influence is key to move the product forward. So how can we work on having more influence? To start with, we can be very clear when explaining something. And this means understanding that not all the people have the same level of context and knowledge as we do. And dealing with different people from different backgrounds and different goals means we will have to tailor our speech to our audience in a way we can communicate clearly our topics. Actually have this annoying habit of saying, does this make sense? Whenever presenting or talking to someone. And the reason why I do that is not just so people can have fun but in how many times I will say done a presentation, but also so that I can actually have some feedback if the message is being clear for everyone. Does that make sense? And also one of my favorite parts of being a product manager and key for mastering influence is storytelling because we all love stories. So humans are wired for storytelling. It creates empathy. It enables a shared understanding. It inspires. So inspire, be a storyteller and repeat that message over and over again to different people in different contexts several times consistently. We have a saying in Portuguese that goes like soft water in hard rock beats so hard until it breaks. And this means sometimes influencing is like listening to a commercial song. You need to make it a jingle so catchy that it keeps on playing on people's heads. Now moving on to my private journey. It was in 2020 that I joined Farfetch a place where I truly learned that building products is a teamwork. Now Farfetch is a luxury fashion and commerce. And at the time this was a large organization in a post IPO stage. I was managing the logistics products which means everything from the moment a package is shipped all the way to the moment it's delivered and also it's reverse flow. And why is building products a teamwork? As a product manager we are focused on the problem space, the priorities and how to measure the outcomes. Now realities the product manager can be very different depending on the organization you are working at. So at Jumi at the time given the context of the company being a mid-sized during a hectic pre-IPO stage company with a high pressure to ship products product owners have much more and much more active role onto not just the problem space and outcomes definition but also the solution design and execution with little to no design involved. Fast forward to Farfetch a large organization already post IPO with more people less pressure to ship and more accountability of different teams. I was lucky enough to be able to work with peers that have been my other half of product management. And so I learned that engineering based on the defined outcomes and the poem statement can and will define the best solution assess the visibility and ensure that successful delivery of the output and design will definitely make sure that the output is not just usable but also desirable. We also have stakeholders, customers and other people involved that will help you build a successful product. It's important to note that product management is a journey and it can be different depending on the company but we can and we should rely on the team to help us build products. Don't take all the responsibility on you just to ship a product because building products is truly a teamwork. And finally we arrived to the current day to my current workplace on this product journey at Temana and this is definitely the biggest challenge and learning experience I've lived so far. Temana is an early stage e-commerce startup with a small team of talented people and myself as the only product manager I have the nobilex mission of ensuring the growth and success of our PTC products, the online shop and all the internal products that sustain the business such as data, catalog management and ERP for post purchase processes. And Temana's story is one I fell in love with and one that taught me how to build a product our customers love. Temana is the online shopping destination for the entire family operating in the Gulf region. Now when I joined I was told its story so far and that taught me a very important lesson on product management and how building great products requires a focus on the customer. When Temana started three years ago it started as a web application where you could purchase fashion items focused on luxury to meet the range goods and focused on English speaking customers with a product strategy focused on trendy topics and little to no investment on mobile and Arabic. We need to understand that Temana's main market is Kuwait, which is an Arabic first mobile first country where family plays a major role on people's life. And we need to understand that it's very different building any commerce for Europe and North American customers from building any commerce for China or Africa or the Gulf region. Though people share some similarities they are also very unique in their purchasing habits their social presence, their motivations and their language for instance. So about a year ago Temana shifted its product strategy drastically. They realized that we needed to focus on a mobile first Arabic first product that would enable a unique catalog of goods that could be shopped for the entire family. So they focused on the customer not to the tech but to the customer. And because they listened to the customer they saw their sales increase 10 times more. So these were not decisions made by product managers but by the product that were the leaders that were leading the business and its growth. Lesson two teaches that building successful products does not require necessarily extensive product management experience but it does require a strong commitment to delighting the customer. And definitely that building products is not about the tech, it's about the people. So here are three actions you can start taking on today to become more customer obsessed. So we need to firstly start actively listening to the voice of the customer. This means that we will be able to know our customers and empathize with them. We can start by understanding how they perceive our product what are their main brain points, their wishes, their emotions, what motivates them, what frustrates them and what they crave for. And we can do this by collecting feedback not just from our customers directly via NPS surveys for example but also by taking your company's other departments into consideration such as sales. This is particularly important on B2B products where the sales teams have a direct link to the customer and a lot of valuable feedback to share. So we can also book interviews every week for example with anyone we can't get access to. If we can't get access to our customers then we can reach out to a friend or a colleague. Likely who this that on an online shop for example you already know someone that shops there. We don't need to be too scientific about collecting feedback is more important to actively search for feedback than to be too formal about it. Especially in an early stage startup where time to market is key. And then we need to experiment with A.B. testing if we can. If we can't we can use for example wire frames and we can showcase them to our friends, our colleagues, our family, anywhere in our network. And when we can, if we can we should definitely reach out to customers and our super users to run these experiments. The most important part is again not how scientific our experimentation is but to experiment in itself. We need to fail and fail fast, try again, fail again, try again, innovation requires experimentation. And finally the lights so that customers can truly fall in love with your product. We need to remember that simplicity is queen when building products. And if something impacts our products then it's definitely our responsibility, our job. Not everything about product management is related to product development. And lastly, I would like to highlight that in a role where people are at the core of our day to day. Dealing with so many different contexts and realities can be challenging and overwhelming at times. So remember to be kind to yourself. You are human too. All right, that is all from me. I hope you have enjoyed this webinar and find it useful. Thank you for hearing me out. Please stop by and say hi. You can find me on LinkedIn. Until next time, bye-bye.