 Hi everyone, welcome to my talk called Influence Without Authority – Technology Product Management in Different Industry Verticals. My name is Manjula Ayer and I am very happy to be here today with product school to present my thoughts to you. I hope I can share some of my experiences as a product manager in different industry verticals and I sincerely hope that you will find something valuable out of this presentation for you. Thank you so much for your time attending this talk. Let us now move into the agenda for the next 30 minutes. I'd like to introduce myself, talk to you a little bit about my background first. I would then like to talk to you about what I believe the role of a product manager in an organization is. Go over some different industry verticals and the challenges associated with those industry verticals for technology product managers. Lastly, I'd like to talk to you about some influencing strategies that I believe are helpful for a product manager in any of these industry verticals. And finally, I'd like to leave you with some useful references that I have found useful in my career and I hope you will like them too. I am a product manager with multiple years of experience in the technology industry. I have launched multiple products in different industry verticals, but at the very core, what I enjoy is using technology to solve complex business problems. I am currently at Microsoft working as a product leader in Azure IoT. And in this role, I work with different teams, customers, engineering, marketing, and other teams to enable success of our products. I've worked for multiple startups in my career, a total of five, in different industry verticals, primarily in healthcare, oil and gas, as well as in the restaurants industry. In my career, I've also interacted with product managers in real estate, in finance, as well as education. And I do have a lot of experience working in different industry verticals as a technology product manager. While working in a startup environment, I've worn multiple hats that includes setting up networking cables at a conference booth at product launch. All the way to pricing products, launching cutting edge products, dealing with competition, and ensuring the success of our customers. My big company experiences include Sears Home Services and GE Healthcare, where I led digital transformation for these organizations. I have experience handling large budgets, leading geographically distributed multi-disciplinary teams, as well as growing careers of product managers. I have an academic background in computer science and have multiple publications and patents that I have authored over the years. Before I get started with how you would influence different stakeholders in the role of a product manager, I'd like to talk to you about my high level understanding of what a product manager does. In my mind, a product manager is somebody that is ultimately responsible for the business success of a product. The product manager identifies a customer need, a large business objective that a product or a future of a product will fulfill. He talks about what success might look like for the product and works with the team to turn that into a reality. A product manager can be responsible to specify the functional requirements, manage launch of features, coordinate different pieces of work with different team members and stakeholders, and ultimately, the product manager does what it takes to launch the product and get it into the hands of customers. Depending on the size of the organization, a product manager can sometimes also be responsible for marketing, technical pre-sales, pricing of the product, user experience and design, and other related functions. At the end of the day, a product manager wears multiple hats and is solely responsible for ensuring that the product is launched on time to the right set of customers. Let us now talk about some industry verticals where technology and product managers can be effective in launching products to customers. The first industry vertical is innovative technology. Broadly speaking, you are a technology company if you are in the business of selling technology, if you make money by selling software products to other companies. Companies in the technology sector engage in the research and development of technology-based products and services. The primary challenge in the technology industry is to ensure that you are always up to date on latest technological innovations and that you are constantly researching new methods to solve existing problems and new problems for customers. Let us now look at healthcare. Healthcare technology is software designed to improve hospital and administrative productivity, provide new insights into treatments, and improve the overall quality of care provided. Technology is being used in healthcare to improve two key areas, quality and efficiency. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for healthcare. Personalization is key in this industry, all the way from insurance payments to exercise routines and diets. Addressing long wait times for appointments at hospitals, issues in drug development, access to healthcare, these are just a sample of problems that technology can solve in this industry. Ease of use and reliability are two key factors for product success in healthcare. Oil and gas. Oil and gas companies do business all over the world. This decentralized nature of this industry differences in government regulations of different countries. Environmental factors such as weather and temperature make digital transformation a challenge for this industry. Distance, accessibility, availability of staff determine how quickly and efficiently upgrades can be made to systems and the infrastructure determines whether these can be done remotely. The sheer scale of digital transformation of this industry combined with difficulties around logistics make it challenging to launch products in this area. Data-driven products that meet well-defined goals are usually successful in this industry. Hospitality and restaurants. Technologies that are important to restaurants are point-of-sale systems, accounting software, credit card processors, analytics, food cost software, inventory management systems, and procurement software. Hospitality technology might include things like making it easy to check into a building or a hotel, ease of parking, customized experiences in a building, such as music and temperature. The goal of hospitality technology is to make life easier for the employees of the business and to improve the overall experience for customers. Understanding the unique requirements of the customer base is key to launching successful products in this industry. Let us now look into product managers in finance. Finance companies use technology and innovation to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of different financial services. The use of smartphones for mobile banking, investing, and borrowing services, cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin are examples of technologies aiming to make financial services more accessible to the general public. The main considerations for product managers in fintech are data security and financial regulators. Any data breach, no matter how small, can result in direct liability to a company and might even cause the company to shut down. Let us now come to real estate. I don't have a lot of experience in the real estate industry as a product manager. However, trends in the industry suggest that technology in this vertical is part of a larger ecosystem. Its presence itself affects and gets affected by four main verticals, investment and finance, planning and building, buying and selling, management and operations. I do believe that this is an area in which technology investments will continue to grow steadily over the next few years. Lastly, let us take a look at the education vertical. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated by online education should be a vital part of teaching and learning. By integrating technology into existing work streams, teachers are able to use online learning as an effective educational tool. The use of digital learning tools in classrooms can increase student engagement, help teachers improve their teaching skills and facilitate personalized learning. It also helps students build essential industry-relevant skills. Virtual classrooms, video, augmented reality, robots and other technology tools can not only make the class more lively, they can also create more inclusive learning environments that foster collaboration and inquisitiveness as well as enable teachers to collect data on student performance. There are several benefits to using technology in education, such as personalized learning, improved efficiency for teachers and school administrators, increased collaboration and increased access to educational content. The main challenge for a product manager in this area is that of adoption. There are many solutions available online, not all of which are seamlessly integrated, and this can make it a little challenging to figure out what product will drive maximum adoption. Now that we have gone through some of the industry verticals and challenges associated with them, let me try to summarize how you might think about all of these challenges. Who are your customers? Are they patients? Are they students? Are they tech enthusiasts? Are they end users or are they a large enterprise? What makes them unique? Do you understand their persona? Do you understand their comfort level using technology? Let us consider healthcare as an example. If there is a patient suffering from cancer wanting a radiology exam, they are not likely to be happy with complete automation that deprives them of any human contact in a medical facility. On the other hand, they will also not be happy if you make them repeat a test multiple times. A first grade student in remote school will have different capabilities and attention span as compared to a college student. An enterprise will have requirements around transparency in cloud costs for their customers. Understanding and accounting for this in your product plan is very important. Who are your key decision makers? When you work in an industry outside of technology as a product manager, you need to understand what motivates your decision makers. Are they SISOs or Chief Information Security Officers from other companies? Are they manufacturers? What are their expectations? How do they think about product success? Let us say you are a startup in healthcare. Will a large enterprise be willing to bet their future of their data security on your product? What happens if your startup shuts down? How do you mitigate this risk? Is this part of your product plan? These are just some of the things to think about as you think through who your customers are, who your key decision makers are, what they might be concerned about and what constraints they have. When you are new to a domain, it is almost impossible to become a subject matter expert in a matter of months. There will always be historical knowledge and context that you are missing. Get comfortable with that. Learn to leverage experts in the organization even if they are outside your product team. Attend events and conferences that are relevant to the industry you are in and meet with team members that are experts to pick their brain on a particular issue. As with all products, understand what your market penetration challenges are. They will differ based on customer, the size of your company and its reputation in the domain. You might have to build this into your plan as you work through the launch. One other important aspect I'd like to point out is getting feedback from customers. When you reach out to a customer and they take the time to provide feedback, there is an implicit expectation that you will do something with that feedback. Depending on the domain, launching an updated version takes time. Make sure that you communicate this with customers and set the right expectation. I'll leave you with the last point on software pricing. In a cloud-based environment, pricing is often subscription or usage-based. Some verticals do not like this and prefer a fixed cost so they can plan their budgets better. In such instances, look into customer needs and figure out if a tiered pricing model will work better for your customer base. With all products, it is important to ensure that you understand the challenges associated with launching the products, understand your customers and their pain points, clearly articulate what pain point you're trying to solve with the product or the feature and also understand the business. In a new domain, it is important that you take into account the domain factors while launching the product if you want your product to succeed. Let us look at some influencing strategies. In any product team, knowledge is power and empowering everyone in an organization with the product plan is essential in building trust. The product manager's relationship with every stakeholder is built carefully on a foundation of trust. The product team needs others within the organization to trust their ability to make solid decisions and lead the product in the right direction. It is important that product managers do what they say and say what they do. Providing everyone visibility into the vision and roadmap is vital. Being transparent about the team's decision-making process and letting everyone know what the plan is and why are essential components to a product manager's success. Remember that cultivating meaningful connections with others goes a long way in breaking down barriers and strengthening relationships. Building trust takes time and intention, but in the long run, it is well worth the investment. A key responsibility of a product manager is transmitting the right information to the right people at the right time in a way that is understood. Product managers are not just gatekeepers of information or sources but new status updates. They drive enthusiasm around product strategy and align the entire organization around the product vision. They are the glue that unites the organization around a common goal. True alignment is more than just simply defining strategy. Product managers have the ability to burn down silos by helping their teams build bridges and establish cross-functional partnerships. Communication is only the beginning of a journey, but it ensures a solid foundation within the team. As a product manager, you should plan on regularly validating all assumptions with your team. For example, if your team has to include a software component in the hardware development cycle, ensure that you understand all assumptions related to deadlines and testing. These can vary by industry vertical. Share the vision of your product, your top priorities for each planning cycle and why you made a particular decision. Any information that you can share is helpful to your stakeholders. The more context that you can share about your thought process, the more you can drive your vision, you will find that the stronger your team will be able to help with execution. It is important to maintain a two-way conversation and listen to what your stakeholders have to say. Ask about their biggest challenges, what they're most excited about and how you can help them move faster. It is sometimes easy to get caught up in discussing tactical work, but ensure that you make time to ask for feedback. This will help you adapt to the team and their expectations. On a day-to-day basis, you will not interact with senior leaders outside of products. Schedule regular meetings with them. Having these regular meetings can ensure that other leaders will also be able to help with influence. Use the time that these leaders to engage in strategic discussions, evangelize your product and brainstorm for new opportunities. Remember that each teammate, stakeholder and leader plays an important role and oftentimes has a unique perspective towards your product. Invest time in building these relations. Earn trust through meaningful interactions and grow your relations over time to set yourself up for success. Lastly, I want to add that any metrics or success criteria that you use for your product should be for the entire product and not an individual team. I know this seems obvious, but I've seen it happen one too many times. Having different OKRs or objectives and key results for different teams results in siloed work where the priority of one team is not the same as the other. While it is okay for each team to have their own set of OKRs, they have to tie up to a larger product metric that is shared across different teams. I'd like to leave you with some useful references that I have found helpful over the course of my career. One of the best ways to learn how to be an effective product manager is to learn from industry experts. Product school does an excellent job with webinars and events where you can hear from product managers in the industry and learn from their experience. An excellent source of reference for not just a product manager but anybody working in a product team is called the Product Manager's Desk Reference by Stephen Haynes. Two books that I find very helpful when working in a startup environment or in agile teams in large organizations are the Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Lean Startup. These two books have a lot of words of wisdom in them for product managers that want to launch products in siloed organizations, in startup organizations and are very useful for anybody interested in becoming an effective product manager. Lastly, the Harvard Business Review is an excellent source of books and articles on a variety of topics related to product management, strategy, pricing of products, understanding the competitive landscape in a number of industry verticals. I highly recommend the Harvard Business Review for any topic that you might be interested in learning more about related to launching products. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for taking the time to attend this talk. I really appreciate it. If you have any feedback or comments for me, please feel free to get in touch with me via LinkedIn. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you once again for attending this presentation. I hope you got something useful from it. Have a very good rest of the day. Bye-bye.