Product Sense Workshop | ft. Kunal Shah and Shreyas Doshi | CRED

[Music] today we are going to talk about product sense but uh more in the context of a higher level approach which is product thinking so that's going to be the theme of a conversation today so yeah the topic for today is product thinking on being strategic and creating consistent impact here's a little bit about my background i started my career as an engineer and then did product management at a number of places and now i'm basically advising startups as the next chapter in my career and i wanted to start our conversation today with this observation

i'll let you give you all a few seconds to read it and so i thought this was a really apt place to start because one of my observations is that if you look around there is so much information available about uh how to build products how to build successful products how to create great teams and even if you just took one day's worth of content on twitter or linkedin about product management and product development you'd find a lot of information about how to do these things and if you call these things best practices then why

is it the case that most teams are not successful in building great products and why is it the case that most startups still fail despite all of this knowledge being available and that's a question i've spent a good part of the last 10 years thinking about and a lot of my writing uh really gets to some ways in some angles of answering that question and one of my contentions which we're going to explore uh uh in a lot more detail today is that the reason most teams fail the reason even smart people end up building

mediocre products is because uh there are some secrets as peter thiel calls them there are some secrets uh that are not well understood uh and so in this session today uh i'm going to explore one important secret uh that is essential for product success and will enable you uh if you understand it and practice it when it will increase chances of more consistent product success but before we go there i wanted to make some observations so uh i talked to a lot of founders and ceos and product executives and when i talk to them and

talk about oh you know what are some challenges that you're facing as you grow what are some challenges that you're facing as you start creating larger teams these are the types of things i tend to hear and so it's things like our teams are not thinking big enough you know oftentimes if it's a product-focused ceo they'll mention you know we launch a lot of things but the product impact isn't there uh oftentimes they're also saying well i need to be involved in a lot of the details to make sure that we're launching the right thing

and so so that's one perspective i hear a lot of another perspective i hear as i talk to product managers and coach product leaders and designers engineers is uh these things which is well you know our management tells us that we we need to think long term but then we have all these short-term targets that we must hit and so we can't really reconcile that another common thing is well we're told that we need to ship high quality products but then we get a wrist slap if the launch is delayed by even a week or

two and so i just don't want to delay the launch i want to launch on time because that's what's going to determine my success in the organization and here you have people who all have the right intent and who all have good intent which is we want to serve our customers and we want to make a successful business and yet you have this issue and this uh sort of mismatch of expectations mismatch of intention and so why does that happen and i believe this right here is the fundamental reason that uh this happens uh and

so here you have two people andy and bobby um you know maybe bobby's managing andy uh and he's a product manager and andy is confused uh frustrated feels slowed down by some of what bobby's suggesting and you know he is speaking the project thinking language he's talking about resources he's talking about timelines he's talking about launching an mvp whereas bobby is uh making a product thinking statement bobby's thinking at the level of product thinking um and and then bobby is frustrated disappointed and feels like product is not meeting the bar and so here you have

two people who are trying to have a productive conversation but i find that often people are talking at two different levels uh somebody's talking at project thinking level another person in the same meeting in the same room is talking at the product thinking level and they can't quite reconcile um you know each other's opinions and the root cause is because they're talking at different levels but they're not talking about that they're talking about the specifics of where the button should go and how many weeks it'll take to move things around and so that is the

fundamental issue that i see on many many product teams and so our three big ideas for today first we're gonna understand what project thinking is and how it's different from product thinking and again this presentation is going to be largely about product thinking and my second message is going to be how you and your team can learn product thinking and the third is that you can apply product thinking to almost anything so let's begin with an all too familiar scenario and in this scenario you have a general manager alice who uh is just sharing that

there was an escalation to our ceo from an important customer and this customer needs audit logging and clients reporting within the next three months and it's it's a it's a red alert priority um and here you have project thinker pm bob uh who basically responds uh uh in this manner and what bob says is i had a conversation with the team about this escalation it's going to disrupt our roadmap uh but if we really want to do this um then we need to allocate half our team and it'll push our launch back by two months

and then bob asks alice what do you want to do um so over my career as a product manager i have seen this scenario dozens of times and what you see from bob is a very project thinking response even though this is considered a fairly normal response in our day-to-day work but what i'll show you later is what a product thinking response might look like in this scenario so that's one scenario let's take another scenario uh and by the way all of these are based on uh real events uh but uh you know the people

shall remain unnamed so the names are obviously sort of changed to protect the innocent uh but here the scenario is there's a product review you have a pm dan who's a project thinker not a product thinker and dan is presenting uh this proposal for onboarding premium customers onto the product and here you have ceo who says well you know can we respond to these premium customers these really important customers in 30 minutes or less and uh what you see this response you see from this project thinker dan is well it's not possible um you know

these these uh questions from customers go to carol's ops team i have talked to carol and she only has head count to promise a two-day response time and so here you have the ceo getting frustrated that well why doesn't the team get it these are really important customers we need to provide a red card corporate experience for them and a two-day response time is absolutely unacceptable and so that's another scenario now before we go into what the product thinking version of this looks like we are going to explore the differences between project thinking and product

thinking a little more so in my work i really start often start by asking questions and so if we looked at project thinking and product thinking from the lens of questions uh then uh project thinking the main questions tend to be when and who okay a project thinker will often be fixated around when does this need to happen and who does who needs to do it a product thinker is usually defaults to why is this important why are we doing this why do you need this so why is a really important question and another important

question is what what does it look like uh what what solution are we conceiving um there are also some common questions that they tend to ask which is what else and how but even those questions they tend to be different so for instance in project thinking these four questions really sum up uh the essence of project thinking when does it need to be done who will do it what else is like this notice a project thinker is trying to figure out if if something else is very much like this that we can use as a

playbook and then the last question they ask is how will we do it on this list on the other hand product thinking is about why is it important what are our goals and really understanding our goals what else could happen here what are some second order third order effects of what we're doing here and then one key difference is the how question of product thinking is how will we differentiate okay so it's different from how we will do it it's how we will differentiate we'll go to one of my favorite frameworks uh which is uh

impact execution and optics and so what this is is uh these are basically the three levels of product work in any organization uh so in any organization when you're doing product work you can focus at the impact level or you can focus at the execution level or you can focus at the optics level and interestingly these three levels map to three different kinds of thinking which is when you are thinking at the impact level that's usually product thinking when you're thinking at the execution level that's project thinking and when you're fixating on optics that's actually

political thinking and political thinking is a topic of its own and it's out of scope for today's conversation uh but today we'll focus largely on product thinking project thinking uh plus i believe most of the folks we have uh on the call today are uh at startups and so political thinking hopefully is not yet an issue for you um all right so let's just define these things now uh so project thinking is about understanding expectations formulating plans marshalling resources and coordinating actions to meet those expectations okay so that's how we define project thinking and note

these are all very important things you cannot get things done within a team within a company if you don't do project thinking it's extremely important to understand expectations formulate plans martial resources and coordinate actions okay so what how do we define product thinking product thinking is about understanding motivations conceiving solutions simulating their effects we'll talk a lot about simulation today and picking a path based on the effects you want to create and we'll talk a lot about the effects you want to create as well so as you can see here like they're fairly different you

know in terms of sort of what they are about essentially this is one of my favorite quotes and it very much applies in the context of product thinking which is uh if a man knows not to which port he sails no wind is favorable if you don't know where you want to go then regardless of tailwinds that you have you are actually not going to end up in the place you want to be and so it's important for us as as a as a product management function as product builders as founders to really remember this

all right so now that we've defined product thinking and we've kind of looked into what some of the key elements of product thinking are uh now we can look at scenario at this scenario again so remember this was the scenario where there was an escalation to our ceo and there were some really urgent customer requests and project thinker bob responded in terms of well if we want to do this this is how much the launch gets delayed by uh which for a product thinker ceo or a product thinker general manager is not a satisfactory response

so what does a satisfactory response look like in this scenario uh when you are putting the product thinking hat on well that's what this is what that looks like and so in this case what uh what is happening is uh you have the same request and uh in this case it's product thinker dave who's basically saying this that oh you know i've talked to the team and i've talked to the customer and actually there are two requests here right two different requests audit logging and compliance reports and it turns out that audit logging is actually

going to be very important to some of our largest customers [Music] and so it's great that this customer is escalating that they need audit logging in the next three months let's just build this feature for them let's build it for customer x because it's an important customer and they'll be a great kind of lighthouse customer for this feature on the other hand compliance reporting is actually not very strategic for us and there are perhaps partners that can do this so for the compliance reporting requests we're just going to do a quarterly manual data export and

we're going to give them that data export and then they can recreate reports from that and if we did this we can start working on audit logging right away and that big launch we were working on it gets pushed off by just one month uh instead of two months earlier so here you can see this thinking by dave is very nuanced and it it tries to get to different things than schedules and who has to do the work and whatnot it tries to get to uh what does the customer really need what is aligned with

our strategy and uh you know what is going to help us get better distribution for audit logging uh and so on right so it's a much more kind of nuanced approach that tries to get to what are we really trying to do here all right let's look at the other scenario where if you remember project thinker dan basically said well it's not possible to respond to these questions uh very quickly uh and so uh because we just don't have the resources and that left the ceo eve quite disappointed uh in terms of what needed to

happen and so what does the product thinking version of this look like and here you have product thinker pack exactly the same scenario and here's how pat responds right pat says oh i'm so glad you asked and actually there's a way to do this uh such that for the customers that write into us that are on sales sales teams must win list we are actually going to send them to an existing queue which is the account management queue and that queue has an sla or response time less than 10 minutes so you asked about 30

minutes we can actually make it happen in 10 minutes by routing to that queue but that's only going to be for the customers that are uh you know really important and that we really want to go after the rest of the customers will need to go to the support team and if we want to improve response times there we will need four more agents to be allocated to that team right so instead of saying well this is not possible and i already looked into this and let's just move on product thinker path is really thinking

about what is the impact of our choices here on the customer experience on the brand and on what we are really trying to achieve here over the long term for the company and for the product and again like this is a scenario that i have seen a couple of times in the past five years uh you know when product manager is presenting uh to the ceo um and as a product leader i'm gonna like observe this and i go huh it's interesting uh you know afterwards i'll give feedback to the product manager and i'll say

it's interesting you mentioned that this was not possible or your response was very much about resources tell me why uh tell me what your thought process was uh and that again those kinds of actual life scenarios became the basis of my thesis on project thinking versus product thinking okay so let's let's truly truly understand these differences between project thinking and product thinking before we move on right so uh the the core things here are uh between projecting and product thinking the most important question project thinking when product thinking why what does project thinking optimize for

it optimizes for outputs product thinking optimizes for outcomes project thinking improves efficiency product thinking improves effectiveness what is the most important capability execution for project thinking insight for product thinking the biggest differentiator is discipline versus creativity now the biggest secret is in project thinking in order to do it really well the secret is you need to exercise a lot of influence you need to have extremely influential communication uh and for product thinking it is simulation and again if you're wondering like what simulation is we'll get to that in fact we'll watch a few fun videos

on that um what is the effect on the outcome ultimately of project thinking and product thinking project thinking like i said is extremely important its effect is multiplicative uh on your output uh and your outcome whereas product thinking usually the effect is exponential and in order to explain this more uh here's a simple model this is not a mathematical formula but this model is extremely useful which is uh you know impact is execution to the power of strategy times market and uh just to kind of explore this a little more and to understand the multiplicative

versus the exponential effect uh you know execution and associated with that project thinking has a multiplicative sort of influence on your impact right so if you substitute execution equals zero in this model you actually get impact equals zero right because if you have poor execution or no execution you're not going to make an impact regardless of how amazing your strategy is and how fast growing and large the market is if execution is zero impact is zero so it's really important to kind of be execution focused and pay attention to it however right what happens if

strategy is zero right if strategy is zero you can still have some impact right because then it's basically you have equivalent impact as the market and the growth of the market um so you know you can have very little strategy and do fine you can have little product thinking and you can do fine you can basically follow the market but notice what happens if strategy is a non-zero positive number that's when you strategy starts having an exponential effect on your impact so when strategy said two three four five you are now having an exponential impact

on your execution uh and overall impact uh and so now you're beating the market right so if you want to beat the market right like uh you need to have a really thoughtful strategy and in this case you really need to have a product thinking discipline let's go back to this again the difference is the most important core value for project thinking so these are core values or operating principles that you would adopt within your organization so if you want to adopt project thinking as a discipline as a as a core value then your core

value needs to be around action something around action for many organizations it's buyers to action as an example whereas for product thinking you need to have a core value around empowerment you need empowered teams empowered people uh and people who are not who are secure in their place in the organization yeah for them to actually have the liberty to be able to engage in product thinking and so this is very important for founders to understand because sometimes founders will give conflicting messages uh and and they are not empowering people and yet they are expecting people

to do product thinking and that just cannot happen um and then last when done in excess when you do project thinking in excess you get heroic efforts but the results are lacking and when you do product thinking in excess you have amazing plans amazing strategies but they're gathering dust because you can't really make progress so hopefully this helps further clarify the differences between project thinking and product thinking all right so how should organizations function should they start with project thinking and then go on to action no um should they start with product thinking and go

on to action no does it look like this uh product thinking project thinking and then action nah not quite the reality is that it's a little bit of an iterative process that you perhaps start with product thinking and then you converge on certain hypotheses uh and then you engage in project thinking you do want to ask when you do want to ask who who is going to do it you do want to ask how will it get done you do want to sort of face the practical facts of the organization and your ability to execute

but then you want to use that insight to further refine your product thinking and then engage in project thinking again and then at some point you will have a a clearer hypothesis of what needs to be done in what order by whom by when and that's when you take action and at that point your action becomes a lot more decisive if you've done this right so notice in the previous ones we were just talking about action now we are able to take decisive action as a result of this iterative process of product thinking and project

thinking again both are really important although we are talking about product thinking today this is not to say that project thinking is not useful the main point i'm trying to make is that there are most organizations over time tend to get two project thinking biased and and that like they lose the product thinking and it's vital as you scale vital post-product market fit even uh during your like hyper growth phase to be obsessive about product okay so hopefully that's an overview of uh you know the differences in understanding what project thinking is and what product

thinking is and what it looks like in real life with real scenarios uh now let's hop to how you and your team can learn product thinking uh and so the main point i want to make is that product thinking can be learned right and again a product thinking um is a let's use a cricket analogy here uh cricket the sport that you can think about product thinking as being a set of principles for how you do batting right so now there are many elements to batting right there's so many skin skills involved in batting um

and product thinking is you can think of it as a set of principles that essentially help you do that right now notice batting is not the only part of cricket right like you need to do many other things well in order to win uh so again product thinking is not the entirety of everything in product management but it is a really important component right and then uh you can even split batting right you can split batting into all sorts of different things right like strategy you can split it into reading uh how the ball is

being bold yeah you can split it into all sorts of different shots uh that you can you can you know a hook shot is very different from a cover drive right and there's technique to each of those shots uh and so uh product thinking is at the operates at the level of batting and then you have other components like product sense that operate at the level of individual shots that you can make so that's perhaps one way to think about product thinking and how it kind of fits overall into the product sense and product management

discipline so anyway so learning more about uh product thinking the first step you need to take if you want to learn product thinking and when you want to apply product thinking in a given scenario is to suspend the project thinking mindset now i know this just seems like ah come on this is obvious like there's nothing new here but i'll tell you this is where almost everybody fails if you are a default project thinker this is going to be the hardest step for you and time and again i see people who just cannot get themselves

out of the project thinking mindset okay so it seems obvious but just because it is obvious doesn't mean it is easy you will have to try hard yourself and you will have to try hard with your team if you want to adopt more of the product thinking mindset second you need to prioritize your real goals and the way i like to do it is a framework i learned at stripe is what are you really trying to do w-a-y-r-t-t-d and keep asking yourself the question like what are you really trying to do right and another way

to do it is ask why and so what keep asking why why why and so what so what so what to every sort of uh response that you generate uh and be very intentional about the effects you want to create on your users again we're going to talk about effects because that is so important you need to obviously understand your users needs again it seems obvious but the core things are many times people do not understand the objections that your users are likely to have they just take a manual uh of like an operating manual

of we'll build this feature so people will do more of this action and they forget to ask about objections that the users are going to have what is going on in the user's mind so you really have to understand that uh again so bringing this back to the qriket analogy product thinking is uh is effectively about the principles of batting then you know this point is really about you know how you hit a straight drive right like and in this case that straight drive the analog in product management is customer empathy user empathy right that

is so important for you to really truly accurately understand what is going on through the user's mind and how can i sort of address and preempt some of those objections and friction points and and also this last point about look for unexpressed needs this is another thing that hinders uh sort of product thinking is oftentimes we are only looking for needs that are expressed their requirements right like they are customer asks and we are not looking for unexpressed needs right so you do not need to look for unexpressed needs that is super important as well

then you generate options right and in this case a project thinker needs to be aware that they should not be afraid of big ideas because project thinkers by default uh don't want to deal with big ideas because that means that they're going to have to contend with resources and timing and things they that are out of their control right and also aim for creativity and differentiation and then lastly right simulate simulate means you need to visualize really visualize how each of these options will play out and then you need to actually take those visualizations discard

the options where you think they're not going to play out well and then you keep repeating until you coalesce a set of options that make sense where your simulation suggests that the outcome is what you want right the outcome is what you defined in step two which is what are your real goals and are you meeting real needs so this is a template for product thinking again uh note that each of these steps like my goal here is to clarify the steps uh needed uh the mindsets needed in order to do better product thinking you

will still have to do the work of getting greater customer empathy you will still have to do the work of putting yourself and your team in the creative mindset you will still have to do the work of understanding what differentiation is again taking the cricket analogy i can tell you all day long how you hit a cover drive and i can show you all the motions but you do need to do the work of practicing it you do need to do the work in the gym of kind of you know doing the right things and

building the right muscles so you can actually execute on that cover drive flawless right so again i can show you the steps it doesn't mean you get this for free you have to do the work um okay so now we're going to look into uh examples okay and we're going to look into a number of examples uh in order to sort of like really make this uh framework uh kind of more tangible because i know a lot of people are thinking well okay all of this is great but like what does this mean actually so

we're going to look at that an example of what the first two look like and in order to do that i'm going to show you the stripe check out uh page okay the the stripe has a product called checkout and we are going to look at uh you know how stripe talks about this checkout product uh on its website it's a very important product for stripe uh and we're gonna check out what it looks like uh no pun intended but before we do that uh this is really important uh to understand which is when you

are communicating about a product right so again the the problem here is how do we communicate about a product in this case stripe checkout when we are communicating about a product it is vital that we make it easy for our customers for our prospective customers to get an answer to these four questions so again this is product thinking in this case right which is okay the core questions are or our goals are to help the customer answer these questions which is what does it do is it for me how good is it and should i

act now okay so now we're going to look at stripe.com checkout and see what strike does for this product and how they applied product thinking is and particularly the first two steps this is such a suspend project thinking mindset and then really understand your goals how they did that and what the end product looked like in that case okay so you can use the qr code if you want to pull it up on the phone but i'm actually going to just uh pull it up on my screen here okay so this is stripe.com slash checkout

um and so this is the page you see right here hopefully everybody can see it uh so what what does what does stripe do right so they have some standard text and you know talk about some things and have a demo etc we'll go back to the demo afterwards but let's see what happens as we scroll this page right so they're trying to convey what stripe checkout is so notice how as they are talking about increased sales with a better payments experience you actually see that payments experience animated right next to it right now as

i scroll further designed to reduce friction notice how the address autocomplete showed up and the first point here is address autocomplete right so they're really trying to they're not just most websites most product information sites what they do is they just have a ball of text right what stripe decided to do in this case and by the way this was not me in any way right so i'm not putting my own art it was another team entirely what they decided to do is well let's make everything real right because everybody here's the mindset of a

customer that's on your website the customer that's on your website is conditioned uh to think that yeah of course they're gonna say great things about their product right but do i believe them do i trust them right so stripe and stripe team basically anticipated that and then designed this product page such that uh you don't have that concern anymore because you can actually see it as you are reading it right so it becomes much more believable plus you know visual people respond a lot better to visuals than they do to text right so here are

the visuals again optimize for any device right as soon as you see that you see how checkout is going to look on the phone as an example built for global customers all as soon as that comes up you now start seeing what it'll look like in different uh countries and uh different localization situations as an ex as an example um your brand checkout so now you know one concern that somebody might have is well i want my own brand on my checkout page i don't want it to look like a generic strike checkout page and

you know stripe again anticipated that concern and kind of like at the right point told you that oh actually yeah you can change this to your brand colors and your logo etc etc um and then now because developers are an important audience for stripe they started uh they got into the code here right like a code snippet that tells you oh it's actually very easy to do this it's very fast and quick to do this so a simple example this is just a web page about a product now for stripe it happens to be a

really important product so they decided that instead of adopting the project thinking mindset a project thinking mindset would not have led to a page like this a project thinking mindset would have led to a page that is just like any other product information page that you see uh on on the internet right and again product thinking requires understanding the user understanding your goals uh suspending the project thinking mindset uh and then actually doing the hard work right like this stuff is not easy to do cross browser uh cross device etc right like so obviously they

encountered a number of difficulties as they were trying to execute on this experience but it made sense to do it because they were primarily product thinking focused okay so remember those concerns like what is it is it for me these are the questions that you need to answer well for a checkout page it's actually very important if you can actually see it you can try it out right in order to understand is it really for me and how good is it so they they actually built a demo right and this is not like any sort

of demo video that you might see uh on any kind of sort of product information page this is actually a fairly rich demo which is oh look at this i can actually construct the checkout page right here i can do recurring payments or i can do one time payment so let's do one time payments and proceed all right so now what stripe shows is oh wait so i can change the brand colors let's let's change it blue um let's add a billing and shipping address let's add store policies and let's add support for coupons um

and so as you do that you start seeing this this page come alive this checkout page come alive uh now let's go here and let's uh oh wait let's look at this page as it's rendered so they just generated the checkout page using stripe checkout right so this page is actually a strike checkout page like using actual stripe checkout code you can look at it on a mobile phone right so again it's easy uh to get that oh you can change uh you know apple pay to uh google pay you can change the location and

again the the form will change if i change it to germany the form changes right away so again they went through the effort to basically make it clear that hey we're not selling you any bs we're not selling you some paperwhere this is actually doable you have a lot of power in terms of how you uh build your checkout page essentially um so hopefully this is a good example uh that kind of clarifies what uh you know what product thinking is about uh and like i said earlier it is not easy right it's it's not

easy to do this you have to decide when it is worth it to do it and then just go ahead and do it and that's when you have to suspend project thinking mindset that's the main point a project thinking team would have never created such an impressive page and such an impressive demo let's take another example okay so in this case consumer product likes uh so many of you may have seen on your social media feeds spotify rap come up right like this is your uh for those of you for the five of you that

maybe haven't seen it it's basically a a recap of your spotify experience and so spotify the team at spotify built this spotify rap experience and it is a phenomenally good experience right so what you are seeing here this is not my spotify wrap just to be clear my music interests are a little different but what you see here uh is uh you know they sent me an email and then when i get into the spotify wrapped uh experience it's an actual kind of story right like uh that i go through and there's all these interesting

games in there right like let's play two truths and a lie uh my top genres like it's an entire experience it's an entire product that they created uh with an emphasis on sharing right like so you see all of these kind of recaps right like oh what are my top artists top songs etc etc how many minutes did i listen and whatnot they even decided to theme it you see this is the same screen but they allowed you to create different themes so that you can share with your own personality as an example um and

then again this emphasis on sharing this right so why did spotify go through the effort of creating this kind of recap when they must be having a backlog so now again this is project thinking we have a backlog of 700 bugs and features that we need to uh provide to our users why the heck are we working on this stupid recap of the year right this is a very v like this is what a project thinker will wonder and will often ask right like this makes zero sense to me we're just building this an experience

that people are going to use once in a year right another thing a project thinker might ask is well show me the metrics right like show me the numbers that indicate that this is worth working on right whereas product thinking takes a totally different lens on this right product thinking it suspends project thinking and talks about what are we really trying to do here what are our goals right what are users thinking when you approach the end of the year everybody's just reviewing how the year went right how can we help them review how the

year went from a music perspective right how can we further the spotify name the spotify brand right by using the uh utilizing the actions that people like to take which is people like to express themselves they like to share their taste they like to share their interests in music right and how can we make it an awesome experience which then shares uh you know what people are doing and guess what happens when uh you know five of my friends are sharing their spotify lists and i'm not using spotify i'm like oh maybe i should be

using spotify right so that's the effect that they're going for that's their goal and so again it required them to suspend that project thinking mindset a team again a team that had a project thinking mindset would never develop this right you need to also adopt product thinking mindset okay so hopefully those were two useful examples of the first two uh now let's look at understanding your user needs right like this is the basics the the the bread and butter of product management understanding user names uh but what does this mean right so let's look at

another example uh for those of you who are ios users i'm sure maybe android also has such a feature uh i think almost everybody must have seen this feature which is at some point on the iphone and they launched a feature where you have to fill out all these 2fa otp things that are sent as text to you right and so what you need what you have to do is you you have this app that you're trying to use and then you get an sms and you need to go to the sms messages app and

you need to memorize the code that was sent and then you need to go back to this app that you're using and then type it in right and so what the team over there at some point decided is like why don't we make it easy by just showing oh do you want to enter this code that we just received from your messages right and you just tap that and it gets auto filled and you're done right so here's another example of the same thing where oh you can enter this code right so okay this is

interesting do you think that any user actually told them that hey i have this feature request right i was not on the team but from having had similar experiences on products i've worked on i would say no right nobody told them that oh this is the feature we need can you please add a from messages uh call to action so that i can just copy i can basically just type my otp much more easily but the team kind of understood that this is a common problem for people that are using our phone and our operating

system and there's a way we can make it easier again it turns out it's actually not that easy to build this feature because you have to figure out which sms it is your map it uh just right and so it's not an easy feature to build but they understood the onset the unmet need that was not said that was not expressed by the user and they decided to address it right so this is another example of understanding the implicit needs of users which is a key part of product thinking okay generating options right generating options

so oftentimes what i find is that teams are too fixated on um on just like the obvious option right oftentimes the obvious option is not the best option so i'll give you an example so here this gmail feature now we're looking at gmail this gmail feature has saved me a ton of embarrassment over the years right and and what this gmail feature is is uh uh i think we've all been through an experience where we say oh i've attached this file or whatever but we forget to attach it right uh and then we have to

send a follow-up email saying oh i forgot or somebody tells us oh you forgot to attach it it's like oh sorry let me attach it well the team at gmail like looked at this problem again likely an express need because the user will usually blame themselves right so it's like you can say well it's your fault that you forgot but the team at gmail said oh wait what can we do here and the obvious solutions would have been oh can we ask for a confirmation after they hit send of like do you want to attach

a file or make the attachment button this is the attachment button this uh this paper clip here uh can we make the attachment but larger etc right those are the obvious solutions the gmail team decided to do something fairly non-obvious right which is they said oh they they actually parsed the text that you wrote and they look for i have attached or here's an attachment etc and then they look for whether there's an attachment on the email and they prompt you with this right so again this is not the obvious solution in fact this would

be shut down if you were doing project thinking because it's too complicated to implement and you know what if you get it wrong and like blah blah blah but again this is such a delightful surprise right gmail just saved me from looking stupid thank you gmail uh here's another example this is the onboarding flow for a for a messaging social networking app called font right and for them it is very important that it be a safe place and so instead of a standard terms and conditions page where you just click accept blindly they actually added

like a few key points and they added a signature right and that's very interesting and i found this example on twitter and we'll look very quickly why that is interesting but this is not the obvious thing that you might do for a page like this where you just need them to agree to some terms which gets us to simulate right so simulate what um what does simulate mean uh simulation essentially is about playing out how some of your choices are going to actually work out and it requires a lot of imagination and it requires you

to have a ton of user empathy all right so the point here is not that just by seeing the step you're going to get that user empathy and you're going to get that imagination but my finding is that there are teams and people who have that empathy and that imagination that often forget to simulate and then that leads to unforeseen uh problems uh for your users and for your company and so it's really important to simulate uh and so in order to sort of understand what this is i'm actually going to share a video clip

okay so uh again you can scan this qr code on your phone if you want to watch it or otherwise we're going to watch it okay so this clip is from um uh avengers infinity war uh and so just watch the clip i think most people may have seen the avengers movies but uh uh it's a 45 second or less than a minute long clip and watch what dr strange does does your friend often do that strange we all right [Music] hey what was that going forward in time to view alternate futures to see all

the possible outcomes of the coming conflict how many did you see 14 million 605 how many we win one okay so so what happened in that video is uh doctor strange was running a simulation about uh an upcoming battle they were going to have a thanos who's trying to destroy half the living beings in the universe and so he ran this simulation and in this case he simulated 14 million something possibilities and the avengers the good guys uh survive only one of them they win and only one of them so the odds are really stacked

against them what do we learn from this right uh basically my contention is that we all have to be a little bit like dr strange right we all as product people need to develop the practice of simulating possibilities right simulating how our choices will play out project thinking is all about oh we made a decision let's now just commit to the decision and go forward product thinking says wait let's simulate how this might work out let's figure out what the nth order effects are and so now let's look at this honk example again right and

why did they decide to do this why did they decide uh because user safety is very important for them but why did they decide to uh have these terms presented this way along with a signature right it is very odd because normal consumer product psychology says do not add friction in your onboarding flow the more friction you add the worse it's going to be from a sort of conversion standpoint so why did they decide to decide to do it well here's the observation right this is what they must have simulated and this is what product

housing product think or simulate what happens when you have to sign something right as human beings we've been trained to pay a lot of attention to anything any piece of text if we are going to sign now most smart people know when they see the screen that this signature has no legal bearing it doesn't mean anything and i can just wiggle anything i want that said because this looks like a sign here box i'm just going to pay a lot more attention to what they're trying to say right what they're trying to tell me about

what kind of community hog is right so this is again a product thinking choice that simulated the effects in the minds of people who are going to use this experience this is an exam a simple example of simulation there are many more complex examples that uh we can get to in the q a if necessary but this is a fairly simple example of simulation uh i encountered this a couple of days ago this twitter user mentioned how the uh you know she and her friends were uh tipping more on zomedo uh uh you know when

they ordered the sort of delivery versus the other kind of delivery services and so her observation was well actually it's happening because zuma shares all these stories about the delivery people right like about their personal stories what are they trying to do what are they trying to accomplish uh for themselves by doing this job right and so again the team that decided to do this uh perhaps and maybe somebody is on the call that worked on this but perhaps they simulated what effect this is going to have and again they they were also thinking of

differentiation well how can we differentiate our service for delivery people from the other services well maybe you get more tips on this service and we're going to create an experience for customers that kind of encourages them to tip more without telling them to do so right like just makes them so again this requires simulation again a simple example of simulation but an important one i think and that kind of really indicates what choices you make afterwards okay so these are hopefully some useful examples of how you and your team can learn product thinking now i

realize that i'm like way over time and so i'm going to go through this last part uh very quickly because i also i'm looking forward to the chat with kunal and some q a as well but i wanted to make sure that like we covered in as much detail possible first two parts which is understanding project thinking and product thinking and then uh understanding what the steps are to become a better product thinker that you can implement and your you can help your team implement as well okay so we're just going to go through quickly

which is like okay so my observation is you can apply product thinking to many different things beyond just products right you can apply to your career you can apply to uh meetings and offsets in fact i have often applied it to offsites that i've been responsible for running and as a result like you know now the last offside that i applied product thinking for at stripe uh many people came back to me it was a small offset with like 12 13 kind of senior folks within the company and many people came back to me and

said this was the best offside they've ever attended right and it just felt different and the reason it felt different is because i had applied product thinking uh in addition to project thinking to that offset project thinking will be all about what's the schedule what are the topics you want to cover product thinking in the context of offsite is what is the experience i want people to have right what are the thoughts i want them to uh sort of create in their head right so it's a very different approach when you're kind of designing an

event based on product thinking versus if you're just following project thinking uh you can even apply to hiring uh and so you know we don't have time today but check out stripe.com jobs they've done a phenomenally good job i think with like uh you know this careers page right for you to really understand what the company is about and for you to get excited uh even before you apply right so um so i think there's a lot of lessons to be learned there another thing i've done in hiring where i've applied product thinking is uh

the msn list which is a must should nice list which is an internal sort of uh set of criteria i create when i'm hiring for any role right which uh here's what it looks like it's simple but what it does is again where product thinking comes in is it forces me to understand what i really want so that's step two of product thinking if you remember what are your real goals right uh because all these job descriptions are right like they just have like paragraphs upon paragraphs of text with like 50 qualifications but what really

matters and so here's an example of uh a role just uh you know not too long ago that uh for which i created this ms and this and it really forces me to and the team the interviewing team to focus on the things that matter right and then evaluate candidates accordingly so as to have greater success of hiring uh a good candidate you know product thinking is applicable in all sorts of fields like you know avengers is the uh sort of basically the i think the most successful movie franchise of all times of all time

and the reason they've been able to produce marvel has been able to produce such awesome successful movies is because they are applying product same for this one fast and furious another one of the top 10 most successful franchises uh again product thinking right understand what customers want understand uh you know creativity differentiation and so on and it's not just related to the popular movies right quentin tarantino is my basically i love all of quentin and movies uh and it's not like you know it doesn't have mass appeal but the the movies he creates are like

you know full of examples of product thinking and again they're very differentiated and they think like it's very thoughtful about what kind of emotions they want to generate in the user's head in this case the user is the person watching the movie and so it's no no accident that uh you know most of pending tarantino's movie tend to do really well um another one of my sort of you know very sort of beloved uh sort of uh writers is larry david right like again all the success he's created with curb your enthusiasm seinfeld uh again

a great example of product thinking if you look closely um i use product thinking in my own writing right so i tweeted this out a while ago which is okay so what is content right like content has three key properties now it's novel it can be useful or it can be memorable right and and and in order to have the effect you want on your uh on your reader in this case the reader is the user you have to be conscious about what content you are conveying and how you're conveying it because and somebody made

a great visualization of this which is you know if it is novel and useful it will enlighten me right if it is novel and memorable it will engage me and if it is useful and memorable and if it's not novel but it's useful and memorable it'll empower me right and if you do all three then that's transformation right so i decide when i'm writing what i'm trying to do before i write and then that forms the basis of what i write and hopefully allows me to have the effect i want on my users in this

case it's the reader just wrapping up them so like again product thinking can be applied to many things beyond just product i would say this is art right like when you are creating art you are thinking what do i want to make and what am i good at making if you're good at making something and you want to make it you make it it's art right when does art become product right art becomes product when you add these two questions which is will what will resonate with people and how can i get it to reach

more people and again that's another way of looking at uh product thinking is product thinking converts what could be art into a product right which is about resonant resonance with the audience uh i love this paraphrase this quote from rory sutherland who's an excellent excellent kind of author and thinker to follow but that the difference between invention just invention right some new thing you do and innovation right is customer adoption right so if you just created a new gizmo that's an invention but if you want to make it innovation then you need to think about

customer adoption okay so again it's like just it summarizes very well what i think is the main point of product thinking last thing uh which is uh we're gonna watch a tick tock app right uh and so uh here my last example here is about how tick tock and their ad agency applied product thinking to create many levels of effects on the audience around the product did you see the one with mystery apartment girl oh the mystery apartment girl and she feels a breeze coming from behind the medicine cabinet so she looks behind it and

guess what she found a whole whole what i think you know just this big hole how big was the hole medium it was a big hole it was like a human-sized hole she grabs a hammer you know for protection did you go in no don't go in there she squeezed her way through this is freaking me out tony what did she find on the other side another dimension a stack of cash a totally abandoned apartment which is actually bigger than our apartment i think i went to a party there once why would you build an

apartment behind the medicine cabinet exactly you're telling me you haven't seen this one hey you know what i'll stop talking now but you just have to see it no hidden apartment let's try the next room this i think is a phenomenally well done ad um probably among the best ones i've seen in a long time let's look at what they did here with this ad because this ad is operating at another level altogether in fact it's operating at like i think i was able to identify seven levels of effects that this ad is trying to

create okay and it's very subtle they don't tell you anything about using like go use tick tock or tick tock is amazing etc etc they basically incept you with it they they if you remember the movie inception right like where you plant a thought in somebody's head and then sort of let them sort of come to the right conclusions that's what this agency whoever created this is doing and they're doing it at many different levels so the first basic level is when somebody watches this video they're like oh you should go watch the mystery apartment

girl video right like this is the direct response equivalent which is hey go perform this action this is what the ad is about and this is what this is where most ads start and most ads stop at level one you should go do this okay but this one goes a lot further this one also gives you a reminder so because many people have tick-tock installed but maybe they are not using it regularly it reminds you to go use tick-tock because it has fun entertainment right okay so that's the next level and then you know tick

tock has a series of these and then this one there was this martha stewart at the end you saw so now they showed martha stewart at the end so you remember or it's a celebrity uh but uh in other ones they have you know other kind of allen iverson and other kind of celebrities uh sort of more i guess u.s focus but basically what they're trying to say is well even celebrities watch tick-tock videos and like guess what we want to be like celebrities and so we can be like celebrities if you watch tick-tock videos

the next level at the celebrity level is celebrities experience the same tick tock as you do right this is a lot like the coke thing which is like even if you're a billionaire it's the same coke you enjoy the same coke as a billionaire does right so okay there's something there uh the next level after that now this is where it starts getting really interesting next level after that is it is telling you that you should talk about the tick tock videos you enjoy right because the entire ad is about people speaking with each other

conversing about the tick tock video they saw that they found interesting that they enjoyed right so they're planting that they're incepting you with that part which is you should talk about the tick tock videos you enjoy they don't stop here uh they further convey to you that you can talk about tick tock videos anywhere because remember the settings in which they did it it was at a factory it was at an office it was at a dinner table uh it was on an uber ride right so what this is saying is you can talk about

tick-tock videos anywhere with anybody right and they don't even stop here the last level is what they're really trying to say is talking about tick-tock videos will make you a more interesting person right because deep down we all want to be interesting people right and by conveying this in such a beautifully executed manner this is the level seven effect they're trying to create right so again remember i said we'll talk about the effects you're trying to create this is an exceptional example of like a piece of product that creates these levels of effects in people

and these varying levels of effects but this is what product thinking looks like right and again my point is you can apply these product thinking principles to pretty much anything that you do so in closing i have a few key thoughts one internalized product thinking and project thinking and make these things part of your team's shared vocabulary shared vocabulary is extremely important right you need to create psychological safety by just saying instead of arguing the minutiae of this week next week who's going to do this oh actually bob you were talking about you're you're thinking

at the project level i am talking about the product level right so can we first get that out of the way instead of talking about all these kind of other new shapes and arguing over that again remember both are important so don't fall prey to your default like adopt each in your approach be very intentional about the effects you want to create on your users whatever those users are simulate simulation is like magic right but if you practice it frequently you can perform that magic uh and then lastly you know don't just lecture others on

this like set an example right do it yourself before you ask others to follow so that's all i had for the prepared section uh for we just went through i think 102 slides so thank you for going through all of this with me and uh hopefully this uh is helpful in how you think about products and um how you might uh perhaps uh change the your own approach or your team's approach in the foreseeable future yes this was really really good and uh made me think a lot uh made me make me wonder a lot

of things and and definitely what i could do is categorize people into these buckets as well so that was quite fascinating i discovered one more level by the way uh from your tech talk ad tick-tock is the only platform where the ratio of audience to creator is almost 6x to 7x of other platforms uh like nearly 20 percent of tick talkers have made a video of and what you what that ad did is that it said you could start a trend that people will talk about and celebrities will try to cover me so they are

very reversing the monkey psychology saying that you could be creating stuff that celebrities do versus you doing stuff that celebrities do yes and change the monkey level over there so it's a very powerful powerful ad but thank you so much for doing this uh chess and i'm so glad that you're doing this uh india is a very young product community first of all uh you are creating new vocabulary for most of us over here which we do not realize a lot of us are winging it uh many of time many of the times we do

not know what we are doing wrong a lot of these times these vocabularies create distinctions tells me who i am where am i doing whatever that thing is it's really really good so thank you so much for doing that i'll give you a couple of examples of product thinking applied to different things i should share that with you i did not realize i was doing that for example one of the most common thing in india is a lot of people take an offer and not join on the last day uh very common behavior 30 40

people just don't show up on the day that they're supposed to join and you find out they joined some other company we took that as a product problem in free charge and and continue to do it in grid where what we do is as soon as you get an offer later from grad we give you a laptop all set up with slack and you have access to the whole company it's extremely hard to then say no and return the laptop or whatever most people think that people are running with laptop people don't do that they

just feel extremely awkward to not join that company when the company trusts you this much this is just product thinking applied uh in some ways in free charge again when you want to hire a lot of engineers you were coming to bangalore for the first time what i did is i took first day first show of batman movie and invited all the engineers i wanted to hire got them over there and before the movie played we showed a trailer of how it's cool to be working at free charge uh and we converted like 10 15

of them at the movie uh uh which was the cheapest engineering acquisition uh a drive that i've ever done in my life um this is an interesting perspective uh and i i love the fact that you made that chart uh i have just i'm just gonna paste that in in the office and ask people to verify what they are a few questions from my side sure um can project thinking people become product thinking people or it's a hard one what if you are hardwired to be project thinking can you become product thinking is it innate

or not it is innate so i would say that uh it will be very hard for somebody who's innately a project thinker to become a world-class product thinker and i i want to make this distinction which we see on twitter all the time all these battles between well what is important right is execution important is strategy important blah blah it's all because it's like too binary right because people are talking about world-class founders world-class product managers right like yeah i will tell you like let's be honest if you're a project thinker you will not be

a world-class product thinker just like a sachin tendulkar is born right now it requires hard work uh on top of being born with those skills to become sachin tendulkar but a sachin tendulkar is born right serena williams is born now again it requires a lot of hard work to then become serena williams and to have that those achievements but they're just born but we're not talking about that like i i don't think everybody needs to become world-class product thinkers what we should be aiming for is a balance right we should be aiming for if i

if i'm a product manager and i'm a project thinker right my career will be better off my impact will be better off my teams will be better off if i adopt more product thinking i don't have to set my sights on being a world-class product thinker right like for instance right like let's take uh let's take a different example uh like you know the the sort of a world-class spin bowler or a world-class fast bowler right can become a better batsman right like if he practices and learns some of the principles again unlikely that he's

going to become such intentional girl but yet he's adding value to the team by becoming a better batsman right and so that's how i would encourage people to think about it the ability to be world-class is innate but the ability to inculcate some of these principles and kind of redo some of your habits you can do and all of a sudden now you are a more uh you're a more effective product person that's a great one uh what are the two or three questions that you would ask somebody who's interviewing for a product role to

determine if they have product thinking or productions or not i will typically ask basically on the product sense front because that's like one of the you know what i laid out in the product thinking is this is the approach this is the mindset this is the framework and these are the steps in the framework but then to actually exercise it you need the skills right like to anticipate what users want you need customer empathy so the way to think about it is product sense is the skill that enables you to do effective product thinking and

so the questions i ask are in basically three categories and that's based on the observation that product sense is essentially three different things combined one is it's cognitive empathy second domain expertise and third creativity right cognitive empathy is essentially a way to understand what the user really wants uh what their fears are what their hopes and aspirations are what they're really trying to achieve what what job they're trying to hire your product to do etc so that's cognitive empathy domain expertise is self-evident and the creativity part enables you to then based on the domain expertise

and the cognitive empathy uh generate solutions uh that are compelling and very viable all right uh and and and so so that's why creativity is a part of product sense because that's the generative part where you come up with interesting non-obvious solutions so in order to test people in an interview setting what i do is i basically break these things these things down i ask a question or two about cognitive empathy uh and a question or two on creativity uh you know at stripe we did not focus that was the last job i did before

before my new gig which is startup advising but basically uh at stripe we did not emphasize domain expertise whatsoever so you would rarely ask about domain expertise but i would ask questions about cognitive empathy and questions about creativity one or two questions each and i can pinpoint like where this person is at from a product sense perspective so uh so that's how i go about it uh the the questions i ask uh i guess i can share a couple of them because they are no longer being a couple of examples would be super helpful yes

so so one question i ask for cognitive empathy is and again this has a u.s bias but basically the question is why do so many people in the u.s dislike air travel and like to complain about it a lot okay so now this you can translate in india to air travel if that's the case or even railway travel or whatever right like so many people are doing it but they dislike it and they like to complain about it a lot right so it's not even a question about like some tech product right like it's just

like why do people dislike air travel uh and complain about it you see that all the time on twitter and so so it's an interesting question because uh you know project thinker will break this question apart into oh so and the product managers somewhere have learned that oh you should use frameworks so they present some framework which i think is good for early product managers but like not great for late later stage but whatever they'll come up with like these are the steps in the customer journey and so let me identify the problems in the

customer journey so okay fine that's a good level one right like do you identify the problems like or the food it sucks or the uh you know the the security experience is bad oh my bags get delayed right like all the seats are uncomfortable etc so that's the first level uh and if you clear the first level great but that still doesn't tell me that like you have strong cognitive empathy right and there are further levels to this uh but some product managers this is like one out of ten um we will start getting into

the most interesting level which is i will sometimes prompt them if they cannot reverse many of these levels i'll prompt them it's like hey you know i've observed that a person actually changes like their demeanor their behavior when they kind of cross that threshold into the airport they almost become like a different type of person why do you think that is right so i will prompt that question and then that can lead to an interesting conversation and like again i can give away there's no one right answer by the way right like so you don't

want questions where it's a gotcha like aha you didn't get the answer there's no one right answer but then sometimes uh again one out of ten person will tell me you know what it is is um that when you are traveling by air you have no control over the situation right like you you you go from a high control environment again very true in the western world right like you you're controlling your environment all the time um to a very low control environment and yet the stakes are very high you need to reach a certain

place right like and for whatever reason like that is important for you which is why you took on this journey and now you've lost all control right and that creates a sense of a lack of well-being a sense of uneasiness in a person right which then manifests in terms of they'll snap they'll be cranky they'll get upset when normally they wouldn't get upset they'll complain more et cetera et cetera right like again this is just one of many possible kind of responses to this but then now i know okay they get it they understand the

human condition right and and and this person i have greater confidence will be a great consumer product manager right because they'll be able to kind of simulate they'll be able to see those things that very few people see so hopefully that's helpful i love it i love it i'm gonna ask uh uh one final question and you just open it up uh and ankita you can pick the questions and ask directly to shares uh uh uh what we have uh noticed uh when people are kind of into this thing of building and and they need

the idea of like let me ship more let me ship more and something will work and they get into this trap that is just constantly just building stuff and nothing is really moving and no outcomes are being generated right and and and they are trying to achieve a release cycle that oh i need to ship something otherwise i'll never have an outcome and and suddenly there are more pms trying to do much nothing how do you in a scaled company right this seems to be a quite a common problem that people are not getting high

impact stuff what would you advise a product guy saying that hey uh do you need to ship more do you need to try more do you need to have more stuff that would be right for the first time you ship what would your general advice into a pm that seems to be in a large or struggling to get an impact full product out there yeah um so i think the advice differs based on where the pm is at in their sort of career so for early career pms uh that are great projecting girls like that's

just they're naturally great at that i would say uh just build your strengths further right like and and put on your project thinking hat don't worry about the product thinking hat just yet uh and just do repetitions right again if you're sort of like you want to become a batsman right like you just you shouldn't start bowling right um you should observe bowlers but like you should just practice your shots right um and so uh so so that is very important early career right uh and like just stay in that zone and ship more and

you'll learn more etc okay so that's early career now that changes uh once your mid-career and later career right like mid-career it is unacceptable from my perspective for mid-career pm comes in and says like oh i want to ship ship because like that's just going to reduce or limit their impact but also limit their career right a lot of people what happens is they start early career as great project thinkers and they get things done and they're so valuable for the organization that they get promoted very quickly but now trouble starts because once they get

promoted they think oh i did all of these things like to get promoted so they must be the right thing so i should continue doing those things so they actually just stick the project thinking had on their head instead of like perhaps removing it at times they're like you know no this is the way because i got promoted to director or whatever uh based on project thinking and then they push others to do the same to be like me like i made that mistake i was a product thinker by default and so i made the

mistake in the opposite direction uh but uh like they pushed that thinking on to others so one thing i would say is like to such pms is like recognize that when your mid-career you will need to be effective you'll need to actually be able to wear both hats you will need to create a team that kind of is also able to flex uh those skills and whatnot and in order to create that impact because that's what your question was about how does somebody create an impact uh you will at the mid-career level and senior level

uh you will just need to get very good at uh consumer psychology customer psychology you need to get a good at uh uh just uh you know customer empathy at creativity and you need to basically craft i think the biggest the most important thing leader can do or a senior product person can do is create strategic clarity around what do we need to focus on and how are how is that focus going to help differentiate our product because what happens when you're like scaling like crazy is there are that's when the real problems start right

like yeah you know you have organizational problems you have all sorts of problems but big problem you have is you have this like you have so many possibilities of what you could build right but you and what many people make the mistake of is they try to build everything right and like that building everything is a sign of a lack of strategy right so if you have these skills right you don't have to build everything like that's a brute force way if you have these skills you can actually get much more precise like you can

make instead of 15 bets you can make five bets and yes you are not perfect so not all five would work out but odds are high that four or five will work out or three out of five will work out right whereas when you make 15 bets still only three are working out right so you're doing all this effort which is like basically wasted so i would even contend that at most scaling companies more than half of what they're working on is useless it's not useless in the sense that it doesn't have an impact it's

useless in the sense that like in the long run it wouldn't have made a difference whether or not they worked on it right it has some immediate impact but it doesn't actually create that lasting impact that you're seeking in in that hyper growth stage and it doesn't create that customer differentiation it doesn't create that lead when you are in hyper growth all you need to be thinking about is how do i create a greater lead between me and the next threat right and so so that needs to be your focus and those three to four

things that work out need to help you create that uh so again a bunch of ideas at different levels on sort of like what i would ask people to sort of think about and focus on stress you've been awesome uh i wish i could have the same passion that you have for teaching and all that you do is super super helpful and you are you you should be like not be surprised for the amount of impact you're creating on an ecosystem by just sitting over there and tweeting away and sharing away all that you know

uh ankita over to you to ask more questions uh thanks i'm gonna um keep it uh keep the question sort of directed in three different areas is what i've been noticing people want to know mainly about the conceptual understanding the second is just building their skill in their product sense and the third is around hiring um so just jumping straight off to the first part which is um the uh one of the questions is the undercurrent of what i hear is that these modes of thinking are either or how would you recommend we merge both

these styles both as an individual pm and as a product organization um yeah so i would uh i would say that they are not either or like you need to uh you know at any given moment like at this moment right now yes they're either or right like i'm either thinking product hat or project hat so yes in that sense but over the granularity of an hour or day a week they're absolutely not either all right so again think about it metaphor to use is like you have a hat right you put on that hat

okay we're gonna team we're gonna put on the product thinking hat right which means we're going to suspend some disbelief about well we don't have well bob is uh you know out on leave and like so like this bug he like blah blah like let's leave all of that aside for a second right like yes we will come to that but like we cannot be uh thinking about when and who and oh this executive is asking for this thing blah blah blah like let's just think about what does the customer want what are their next

press needs what are some creative ways we can create differentiation and what are the effects we are trying to create on our users right like that's the product thinking ad let's put that on let's conceive solutions let's generate options let's do the simulation and let's arrive at certain hypotheses let's coalesce certain options let's come up with oh maybe we should do this okay let's put the project thinking hat on now right oh wait so actually we want to do this but it's going to take we think this is the right thing to do it's going

to take like six months to do it because somebody's on leave and the new person's joining and like 50 other issues that any organization has and so what do we do right like because we do need to deliver some impact in two three month period oh great yes let's accept it now a default product thinker who cannot operate in project thinking will try to reject that uh limitation right it's like no okay if there is a limitation there is a limitation but let's put on the product thinking hat on and let's get creative which is

oh actually we came up with a six month ideal approach but what is some creative way in which we can come up with an approach that is a two-month uh approach and so let's now do product thinking again and like oh we discovered that actually there's three steps we can take towards this vision that we'll reach in six months so let's take step one uh and then again you go to project thinking so that's kind of how uh like this works out in practice now i will tell you this presentation was very hard for me

the reason this was very hard for me was all of what i described was so ingrained within me and so ingrained within the people i know that have practiced a lot of this that it was extremely difficult to extract it into these principles to extract it into these steps and the the frameworks you saw right so the reason i mentioned that is that at some point if you do this long enough it just became becomes a reflex right like for instance like again i'll use the qriket analogy if you are a good fielder right you

don't have to calculate you don't have to do the mathematics of the parabolic you know trajectory of the ball and the expected location of the ball you just follow your instinct and you're just so good at it and you you know the wind direction and you know exactly where the ball is going to be uh and you get to where the ball is and you grab the ball right like so you don't have to go through the steps that a computer would have to go through to perform the same feed and it's the same with

product thinking and project thinking that at some point like you do this long enough it will become ingrained in you so then again it's no longer an either or you just know when to put on the right hat thanks for that uh gaurav is asking um he starts off by saying that he uh quoting you uh which is you don't rise to the level of strategy or product thinking but fall to the level of execution something that he recollects you saying i have noticed managers often product thinkers disengage from execution and therefore create a riff

with the ics or the executors how do you recommend this gap be bridged uh yeah that's a big problem so like again so what that is describing is that opposite tendency like uh you know this is like oh i'm i only operate at the product level and like all of the other stuff is the details well the details are important like again if you remember the equation impact equals execution to the power of strategy times market right so if your execution is crap then your impact is going to be crap like that's guaranteed so how

does this get resolved well it is a leadership issue there is nothing an individual contributor can do really other than just give uh candid feedback uh but uh you know the main thing is senior leadership needs to ensure that uh managers are aware that their responsibility is to actually get done right so you know it is not enough to say hey we had these great plans but somehow the team messed up the execution and so here we are uh you know as you know frankly as a as a as a product leader really you're only

spending about 10 to 20 percent of your time on uh product thinking um maybe 20 at most uh the remaining you are actually spending on like project thinking like things meaning you are basically executing for 80 of your time or you're helping unblock execution as a leader you're not directly writing the code obviously but like you're helping unlock execution and you're helping unblock decisions uh that you need to make as you execute so that's what you're doing most of the time right like so the product thinking is very high leverage again it has that exponential

effect on the impact but in practice it doesn't take that much time right it may take more time early on as you're trying to understand the domain understand the customers etc but over time like in steady state it's about 20 so like managers need to recognize it and senior leadership needs to kind of uh sort of set incentives in the right way uh that's the best uh prescription i can offer i'm gonna club two questions i feel they're similar but you can you can decide one is how can early cardio pms develop their simulation skill

and judgment uh how do you maneuver the trade-off between simulation and iterating over an nvp and even possibly pivoting okay okay so um how do you develop the simulation skill uh aids like again so i'll say the people who are gift like there's some people who are just gifted in it like they just naturally do it okay and i just want to call out one of my pet peeves i see it on on twitter this is perhaps more common sort of in you know in the u.s uh where i'm based than other places but i

see this from time to time which is like oh you know anybody can be amazing at anything like i don't think that's the case right like uh there's just like you you can be good at it right like if you try but uh and again like i was saying earlier in the conversation canal you don't have to aim to be amazing at everything right so the reason i mentioned that is that uh simulation skills some people are just amazing at it like they're just like they are world class and they were just born that way

like in fact they should take no credit there's some things that i'm really like sort of very good at when it comes to product and i realized later in life that like i should take zero credit for it i should not even feel proud of it because i was just born that way i did not do anything to get that skill right for instance i have like tremendous customer empathy so you know in my case like i can figure out what the customer wants in a matter of minutes that some product managers cannot figure out

in months or years right like so it is a superpower i have i was thinking about it like i should not feel proud of it at all because like i did not do anything i was just born that way so we have to recognize that like some people are amazing at it and they're just like that's that's just how it is right like um but that doesn't mean that we need to sort of like it's either amazing or bust right like you can just try to get better at it and you can right and that

will be helpful uh and the way to do it is to basically understand the way i the way i try to get better at certain things was just i tried to understand it at its most basic principles which is what is this thing really right like so there are certain things i was uh struggling with as an early product manager so i really tried to understand like influence was one of them right influencing other people um because i was like well i know the answer but now convince all these other people that it's the right

thing and it's annoying and like i don't know how to do it right so so i try to sort of like really understand what it is it's like okay you break down influence similarly you can break down simulation right and the way you break down simulation is uh again with your product thinking hat on you say okay we are making this choice how is the user going to react to this choice let's have a conversation so it's useful to actually do it with somebody who's a little bit more skilled at simulation than you are so

if if you're trying to improve at something you you should work with somebody else right like and kind of like use other people's kind of perspective and then you might hear something and you say aha yes that makes sense or i'm not quite sure if that makes sense why do you say that and they'll tell you why they think the user is going to react in a negative way and you say ah okay i get it uh i wouldn't react that way but i can see how some other user with a different mindset can react

negatively to this okay now i understand so it's just about going through that exercise at the basics of like this happens what are the likely what is the universe of reactions possible uh from the user which reactions are going to be the most uh sort of uh you know negative reactions and how do we account for that as we design the product uh you can do those kinds of exercises for a specific product problem you're trying to solve designers tend to be actually very good at this already so work with your designer right like designers

just like they have to understand this stuff uh to be an effective designer uh and so so that's another kind of just tactical tip uh on that uh you can also do it for hypothetical scenarios right like so you can also look at um just uh you know certain world events and say okay you know this information was known at this point and then this decision was made and then these were the second order third order effects of this decision how did that happen right like let's look at that so you can practice that uh

i know some pms have even done some sort of like group uh you know some pm's on twitter had once gotten together and uh back then self-driving cars were like a big new thing and so they said like what are all the second-order effects of self-driving cars this is now i believe as an interview question in some places for pms but anyway so like that's an interesting exercise to go through right because there's so many second third order effects of self-driving cars that you can kind of like practice that muscle for uh so those would

be some of my tips on kind of the simulation stuff uh you know the other question of sort of like how do you balance simulation with mvp i didn't follow exactly the intent of the question but if i were to just make an assumption uh about the intent uh you know simulation and going for an mvp are not usually exclusive uh basically you know mvp is just a concept meaning it is not right or wrong in and of itself right you can have an mvp that is amazing that was the absolute right choice to make

or you can have a terrible mvp so the mbp either becomes awesome or it becomes terrible based on the choices you make about what goes into that mvp right and in order to figure that out simulation can be one of the techniques you use right which is oh we cannot launch the 16 features that we really want we can only launch three in this mvp for which three okay let's use simulation to figure out which ones will have the effect speed first of all let's clarify what effects we want that's where many people make a

mistake like simulation is a second order concern first order concern is do you even know what effects you want right which is an earlier step in the model uh so first figure that out and then simulate and see if you will likely get those effects last thing i'll say is watching users helps right watching users go through your product although very painful and embarrassing really helps because it helps you understand oh what are all the blind spots you had around as you were simulating possibilities uh and now that becomes part of yours so i'll pause

there a related question since you we were speaking of mvp or harvinder uh solanki is asking do you think product thinking somehow takes towards perfection how do you decide the quality bar of the first version of the product yeah i think it's uh again related to the uh to what i mentioned just now which is uh before you even go to the quality bar why are you launching this first version what are you aiming to get out of it uh and be clear on that is it so let let's make it concrete right are you

going for uh adoption as a as your first goal uh because remember this is step two understand your goals and prioritize your goals you cannot have all goals at equal priority right this is where many product teams make mistakes so like understand your primary goal what is the main thing you're trying to do are you going for adoption are you going for learning are you going for just a viability or are you going for a team level milestone right like and what i mean by that last one is sometimes it's the right call to just

launch something so you can prove to yourself and the team that you can launch something it's fine to actually do that especially if the team has suffered a lot the team has had a lot of attrition there are new leaders on the team the team's self-confidence is low right and so maybe your primary goal is just to ship the darn thing because that sets you up for future because your team is in such terrible shape right like which and manage such things like and it's fine right like it's not a bad choice uh so you

can have so many different goals uh for your mbp so are you clear on what your primary goal is right once you're clear on what your primary goal is it to most smart people it becomes really obvious like what then needs to go into the mvp to achieve the goal right and what you need to remove um and uh but the problem is that people talk about well i want this feature and they argue no but i want feature a i want feature b they're arguing with each other but actually the problem is they're not

talking about the same goal one has one goal in mind the other has the other goal in mind but they never talk about that they talk about the features right and they try to look smart by citing numbers and user feedback and all that it's like first of all you need to get aligned about your goals and have a conversation at that level again this is the responsibility of product leaders i don't expect every engineer every tech lead every early career product manager to like have this sense of insight and maturity but when you and

get involved as a product leader when your input gets involved this is the clarity you need to create which is hey folks look my perspective is this should be our goal for the mvp so if we wanted to best achieve this goal what are the components of this mvp let's talk about that right like that's the value you are adding as a product leader okay so rishika sinha has asked a question what are the best ways of identifying unexpressed user needs because we spoke of consumer needs and and i think yeah this is related to

that to get philosophical for a moment because i think it's important the main thing you can do as a product leader to increase your long-term impact is understand human nature okay once you understand or like and nobody will have a perfect understanding of human nature but once you start getting a better understanding of human nature you will arrive based on the situation you'll arrive at these unexpressed needs fairly easily okay but it's one of those things that a lot of people don't do because a lot of people especially people with the project thinking default mindset

they will only invest in things where they get an immediate return or they see an immediate effect which is oh i did this and therefore this this other thing happened the next day therefore it was worth doing right understanding human nature is not going to give you that satisfaction you just have to trust that at some point your understanding will be at a level that you will be extremely effective and then it'll look like magic to everybody else what you're doing but it's not magic it's hard work right uh and so so again like me

saying understand human nature is actually not as helpful as me pointing out that most of you who want to do this will not do it because you're expecting a reward the next day or the next week and this is not one of those things where you get the reward the next day or the next week right so so that's the first thing now and it's the most important thing but like i know some of you must be skeptical like what is this understand human nature blah blah blah i've got a business to run i've got

a product to run blah blah blah so i'll also leave you with concrete tips okay so the way you understand unexpressed needs is you try to understand what the fears are that this person has okay and what is the greed that this person has in that order fierce first read next okay let's apply to the b2b context because it's easier it applies in consumer but let's apply it to the b2b context uh because it's much easier to explain basically most b2b products enterprise products enterprise products are purchased [Music] uh for two reasons the first reason

is fear related which is the person does not want to get fired the buyer does not want to get fired so that's why they recommend purchasing your product okay so that's fear uh the second reason that a b2b product gets purchased is that the buyer wants to get promoted so that's greed or ambition or aspiration whatever we call it um if you understand this if you understand this basic thing what i just said in the last few minutes you will be able to build a product an enterprise kind of business to business product that resonates

a lot more with the buyer the decision maker and you will position it the right way you will market it you'll talk about products in a way that makes the buyer realize that oh this is a solution to my fears or this is a solution to my ambition right so so that's those are the sort of like ways you can get to those unexpressed needs right and this is at a higher level this is at the level of product but like similar things apply at the level of features as well uh so again like this

is not rocket science right but like it's kind of like the reason why most teams don't build great products is because they say oh no all of this is right they they say oh you know i'm going to go do a systematic survey of 50 customers and i'm going to write down exactly what they said and then i'm going to put it in a spreadsheet and i'm going to create 15 categories out of it then i'm going to assign weights to each of those columns and then i'm going to create a weighted average of the

requirements and like every team does this this is why most teams are not successful because again this is a secret uh you know it's not you know people don't understand that like there are some basic things you need to get right and yeah you can go through the charade of like creating all these formal models to look smart why do people create spreadsheets and like all these like very again i have nothing against spreadsheets i've created more spreadsheets than most people but like people create spreadsheets for these things because they don't know what they are

really trying to do but they want to create a facade an illusion of uh of uh intelligence of rigor of formality and they want their colleagues to appreciate them man that spreadsheet was amazing right and so so so they're looking for those things rather than looking for real impact so anyway uh hopefully that perspective is somewhat helpful in thinking about how you think about an expression thanks thanks shreyas i will pass on two final questions one is around influence and what you said earlier about sharing your vision though has asked a question most of the

time it's hard to articulate a vision to a team given the different set of information and individuals how can one better articulate a vision and make sure that make to the team and make sure they get it so my my principles for a vision are or the characteristics i look for in a vision are it should be vivid it should be compelling or substitute that with the adjective ambitious okay but i'll just use compelling so vivid compelling and repeatable okay those are the three things you want to go for in a vision right so vivid

what does that mean the the when you write your vision and i i recommend half a page to one page kind of vision when you write that vision it needs to the words need to create an image in the reader's head of what the world will be like you know what what how users will be better off how customers will be better off how even the company will be better off right so it needs to get to that vivid detail in some ways of how life will be better right and a lot of vision statements

just fail that and like think about it vision what does it mean vision you can see it right so it needs to be vivid and again most vision statements fail that they most vision statements are written as though oh it's going to be published in the newspaper right so i want it to look good and blah blah blah right like for instance concretely uh i just for one of the one of the vision statements i wrote for a product a business i managed about a year and a half two years ago my first line was

in 10 years this business is going to be a 20 billion dollar business and it's one business within a larger company right now most people will feel embarrassed about it because like well it doesn't look good on the newspaper and whatnot but i started the vision with that statement and the reason i started with that statement is it it clarifies what is to follow which is the scale of the ambition we need to have and the scale of the impact we are going to make to the company by working on this business right and so

i'm not recommending necessarily just make up random in this case it happened to be the case that like we had that impact or the possibility to make that impact so i wanted to make that vivid and upfront right so that's an example concrete example of the vivid part so it needs to be vivid it needs to be compelling it needs to like feel like yes i would love to make this a reality i would love to make this happen for customers or for the company or whatever uh so that's the compelling part and then repeatable

is very important right so that's where you wordsmith because what you want is the vision is useless if people don't remember it and cannot share parts of it in sort of you know hiring candidates or having day-to-day conversations right so you need to instill a few phrases in your vision that are catchy that people will repeat right and so again like guess what i am doing product thinking when i'm thinking about how i'm writing my vision right because i want to figure out what effect i want to have on my users in this case the

team members uh so hopefully those are some tips on writing a useful vision i will uh actually throw two final questions sorry one is one of the top most voted questions today should companies hire and develop separate product and project management teams um oh boy well uh you know the standard answer anything related to these types of kind of product tactics or project tactics is to respond with two words which is it depends and like i think that very much applies it depends i don't know again anybody who claims that one thing is the absolute

right answer in every case either doesn't know what they're talking about or is trying to sell you that one thing so remember that right like when you see on twitter like oh x is always bad and you should always do y that person is likely like just not you know capable or that person is trying to sell you why right which is why they're saying x is terrible why it's great uh so it depends uh i will share uh again it depends is not a satisfactory answer so i will share a specific perspective and a

way of looking at things as well which is in general i have found that adding project management at earlier stages of a team and company ends up creating an entirely different type of team an entirely different type of execution sort of culture then if you don't add it okay so it is a very important decision it's not as it's not like well you know the pm is busy the em is busy with blah blah blah we need somebody to like do project management and so let's go hire a project manager like you should really think

hard about that decision uh before you make the decision okay if you want a if you want to create a team a culture a company which is product focused where like everybody is obsessed with building the right product and actually getting it shipped both parts are important right like conceiving the right product and actually getting it shipped both parts very important then i would recommend early stage do not bring in project managers because what i have noticed every single time when there is a project manager or a program manager is the more glamorous title these

days a project manager or a program manager gets involved in early stage teams and early stage companies is that it gives product managers engineering managers tech leads the sort of license to outsource all anything related to execution anything related to project like managing the actual project to the project manager to the extent that at some places i've seen that people say to the project manager oh so we need a meeting between these three groups like project manager can you go set up the meeting right like and like while it sounds like oh you know like

i'm gonna focus on the more important things like what ends up happening is that the engineering manager is no longer focused on like where are we with execution because the project manager owns it right the product manager is in some like you know some world of lego customer strategy blah blah blah here's what somebody said on twitter here's some inspirational quote blah blah blah right uh and and like nobody now like is like feeling that ownership of execution when you bring in a project manager like early in a project or in a team's life cycle

so i would say early on it's better for the engineering manager the tech lead and the product manager somehow to divvy up the project management responsibilities amongst themselves uh because you want that sense of ownership you want that sense of awareness sometimes i've seen some cases where the product manager doesn't even know the launch date because the project manager is managing the schedule and so when they when asked about the launch date they look at the project it's like what is going on like this is basic job right so um it makes sense at some

point at some point your organization becomes so complex that uh it starts to make more sense and it also makes sense in early organizations when it's a complex tech orchestration project this is where program manager becomes really vital is when you have like seven or eight different teams that need to coordinate something so across team projects i i have seen some value and success early on with program management but i would say within a given team uh you know i would usually avoid bringing in a project manager thank you thank you shreya's final question which

is sort of may sum up the session today uh to shreyas and kunal both actually shares what are your top three tips on building a product and kunal what are your top three tips on selling a product if you would like to take that i wish there were different things so i'm going to let s answer both of them i wish they were different again if i were to restrict it to three it would be one is understand user motivations two is aim for differentiation and three is break it down into manageable steps thank you

so much i we've exceeded uh the time that you you had committed so thank you so much for taking the time out uh i hope that the session was extremely extremely insightful i it was to us i hope it was to all the participants [Music] you