 Hi good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone my name is Miguel Rios and I am a product manager at Salesforce. Today I'm here to talk to you all about challenging the status quo. Challenging the status quo I think is a very important mental trait that every current or aspiring product manager should have. Nothing great is ever achieved by doing things the way they have always been done. Every product manager should understand what it means to challenge the status quo and why it is so important. Now to begin let me talk a little bit about who I am. So as I mentioned my name is Miguel Rios. I am born and raised in Texas and started as an electrical engineer at Texas A&M University. From there I went on to work for about six years at Texas Instruments or TI. You may know TI as the calculators that you used in school during tests. However they are one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world. I worked in the battery management space as a product marketer and a product manager although my official title was product marketing engineer. I did also hold a couple of other hats such as in sales enablement and a little bit of technical support. During this broad experience is really where I got to understand product management and product marketing. Moving from there I wanted to get closer into the software space so I became a senior product marketing manager at ArmorCloud security. It is here where I really learned to start asking the question why. Why were we building what we were building. Why were we building it in that way. And it is then when it really dawned on me that product management was really where I felt my skills were more in tune with. Then I went on to become a product manager at Bluebeam software where I worked on a map based construction management software and led their iOS companion app as well. And now currently I am working as a product manager in the partner space for Salesforce which is a community platform where all Salesforce partners come together to track leads and add their apps to our App Store app exchange platform. And I am responsible for streamlining the sign up and onboarding experience for our new prospective partners. Now before I move on one thing you may notice is that I have worked in many different places on many different products. One thing that I wanted to point out about my various experiences is that usually the way I would start each place would be just in listening mode. Just have that turned on and before I start producing just absorbing everything. However what I have learned is that there is a better way to doing this. While listening is very important when someone is new however it is the best time to point out inefficiencies and provide feedback. It can really help in speeding up your learning since one's going to be asking questions and as they provide feedback. And also you're able to start making an impact much faster than the organization. With that I want to go ahead and start a little bit in terms of what I mean by status quo and why would you want to change it? So in general the status quo what it boils down to is doing the old thing in an old way. In fact there is such a thing as status quo bias which is having a preference to the current state of affairs. Following this bias is very problematic especially in business as we all know that growth requires change. I would imagine that a lot of us here have heard phrases like well that's just how we do things here or it's how we've always done it. And this is really what makes the status quo tricky because in many ways it can hide in plain sight and it can be very much part of the culture. And the longer that we are in the organization the more we can also fall victims to upholding these status quotes. To name a few types of status quotes they could be presented as resistance to change which is when people prefer to do nothing but because they prefer stability. It could be risk tolerance which in contrast to doing nothing doing something will typically pose a bigger risk. And in this type of status quo is when people prefer to defend the current status quo since they may fear for example that a new business strategy may make their job more difficult or even result in the loss of their job. Thirdly there's something called group harmony which is similar to the resistance to change except more about people tending to share the opinion of the majority so that therefore they become popular rather than being unpopular by proposing more radical ideas. And the last type is known as Rossi retrospective which is the tendency for positive memories to outlast the negative ones. Here people associate defending the status quo which attempts to roll back changes that have already occurred in order to return to a previous state meaning that perhaps changes have already happened once in a second time would be worse when sometimes you have to change things more than once to see any benefits. All these types are possible ways of identifying status quo but why is it important to challenge the status quo? Well for one challenging the status quo ignites innovation as I mentioned before growth is a product of change and to innovate we all know produces growth in an organization. Increase morale when you change things up in a team setting or listen to new ideas coming from your employees it can jump start morale for everyone as they feel involved in the company's or team's success or increase efficiencies by challenging the status quo and disrupting ourselves we can be more efficient as a team whether it be staffing appropriately or using the right people with the right skills in the right places or simply by optimizing our own internal processes. Now with all this talk about disruption and changing things am I saying that those that are seeking innovation need to reinvent themselves as in doing the new thing in a new way? Not exactly we all know that there is innovation that can happen by taking old things and doing them in a new way. If you think of it from a product perspective it's already been done other times before such as Uber and Lyft with ride sharing or even the smartphone which just redid what our previous means of communication were in a new inventive way. So what I mean here or what I mean to say in this talk is that when we identify a status quo or an orthodoxy we should not think that radical changes need to take place in the first place. It couldn't be as simple as just tweaking something that's already been there. Now one more thing I want to point out is that perhaps you may be thinking that I am saying that we should go out and point at every wrong thing we see in our company and that's not what I mean at all. Challenging the status quo doesn't have to be about always fixing something broken. Oftentimes things aren't really broken or we don't have data providing that something needs improvements. Sometimes challenging the status quo simply means trying out a new idea for the sake of exploration. Maybe something good can already be better. There is always room for improvement. So now what are some examples where we can start to challenge the status quo? They could be big changes such as changing the culture. Perhaps it means adopting a new process in an agile framework or a way of communicating with the broader organizations such as your stakeholders. It could be something smaller like altering workflows which could be such as how your product team does product syncs or how you all document as is flows when you take up a new initiative or you're revamping an existing business process. It could be engaging in a new market. As product leaders maybe we've identified an untapped area that is worth looking into or an area that previous individuals have deemed was was not a fruitful endeavor but you have fresh ideas on how it could be fruitful. It could be addressing a problem. So maybe you found a problem for example in how data is being managed or how your analytics engine is not set up correctly and could pose a problem down the line. This could mean that you need your company to change its processes to address a current or a future problem. Or it could be the antithesis of addressing a problem which is more about identifying some places where you could improve the process. Rather than identifying a better way of doing things it could be something as simple as maybe a slack workflow or an alternative way to existing processes such as maybe a PRD a product requirements document with adding a little bit more of information in there to be a better tool to communicate across more teams. In general there are many places where one can find opportunities to challenge the status quo. They could be big or small but valuable nonetheless. Now where where should you begin? I always believe the product managers whether they are product people managers or or not they are leaders and as leaders they should feel empowered to speak up and inspire others to do the same. They should have an open will to take risks just like they evangelize others to take risks as well. They should have an open mind to constantly learning grow. For this you know I want to say that just like I've been talking most of this time about how we can go out and challenge the status quo it very much could be that we are the ones upholding certain orthodoxies and we should be more receptive to those challenging us right so hence why we should keep an open mind and constantly learn and grow. We should be self aware of how things are actually done not how we think they are done or how we think they should be done but be more reality focused. We should always ask why do we do these things in these ways asking why is not necessarily for the sake of questioning everything in the org or in the team and becoming a point of contention but rather to identify those elements within that are preventing innovation or improvement. It is true that there are often good reasons why your org may not may be doing certain things in a particular way and therefore you don't need to change them but we'll never know without asking why. Following the mindsets that I just mentioned we should continue with developing an idea and work to get buy-in before implementing it. We should get feedback on this idea before and after deploying it and last but not least we should have patience and keep trying. A big change may take longer than expected and we should not give up should we fail. I heard this podcast episode from intercom speaking about continuous momentum and relating it to physics as in momentum equals velocity times mass and that analogy feels to be pretty applicable when it comes to challenging the status quo and trying to make change happen. If you relate velocity to be the rate of the change so the speed that the change would take to actually happen and mass being equal to the size of the change we should be more concerned about maintaining continuous momentum and not so much concerned with you know the slowness of certain big changes that we're trying to make. Really momentum is big and that is what's important. So to recap a little bit of what we talked about so the status quo is important to address as it impedes innovation or overall improvement. The status quo is not necessarily referring to a problem we can always find places of improvements bigger and small. Opportunities for challenging the status quo can be bigger small and related to our internal processes or be part of our product strategy and lastly our mindset is the first thing we need to change when it comes to figuring out how to challenge the status quo and from there we should learn to take risks be self-critical of our own orthodoxies and any idea that we have we should get feedback and keep trying to implement. Thank you so much for spending time today listening to my talk on challenging the status quo. I hope you learned something and thank you.