Tips for Building a Compelling Product Vision by Amazon Sr PM

so tonight I want to tell you how to create a compelling product vision and a little bit about myself I'm a senior product manager at Amazon I am the the technical variant that just means I don't code every day I like coding sometimes but I typically work on a more technical product so for me that includes a lot of real-time systems that includes machine learning that includes a lot of algorithms and data science and also thinking about technology patterns that would scale across the world across a variety of features so that's me I also worked at Microsoft before this I worked on a thing called Hollins it's like an augmented reality helmet that you put on your head kind of cool but I was ready for something different and customer reviews is all me now all right let's get right into it now can anyone guess actually which product is reviewed right here that has 42,000 reviews and I guess is no not me I hope my rating is that good but any ideas and what this is say again it's the echo dot actually and it is one of the most reviewed but not the most reviewed product on Amazon so yeah and a pretty good start reading all right so this is what I'm going to talk about today I broke it down into five topics so here's our gonna do why I chose this topic this one's a little bit near and dear to me as well among the many other topics I could have chose I want to talk about what it means to be a visionary there's just this meme about what it means to be a visionary that I just I want to die so I'm going to talk a little bit about that I'm gonna talk more specifically about how you create a compelling product vision and what that looks like in a very step-by-step process I'm going to talk about how to communicate your product vision which a lot of people forget about but is actually really important that product vision is worth nothing if it's only in your head so talk about communication and then I'm also going to talk about how to make it a reality I'm gonna spend a little bit less time on that because today is all about the vision but if you can't execute your product vision you know you're not gonna go anywhere all righty let's do it why I chose this topic so last winter I met with one of my peers at work and I'm gonna keep the mononymously having a really tough day and I said hey welcome here Coffee I need to talk about something and I could tell something was wrong because first and like didn't look very happy and you know maybe their dog died you know maybe they had a tough conversation with their manager I really don't know but his person need to talk and we went to Starbucks below my building and this is what she said to me not the exact words but basically this she said I can't come up with any good ideas for my product I'm not a visionary and I'm not creative how do you come up with your product vision I feel like giving up as a product manager everyday because of this and I didn't really know what to say to that actually I it took me a while to think of like how do I actually do that like I knew in my head how I did it but I had a tough time really describing it's her in that moment so I decided to give this talk today because of that conversation that I had and I realized in my own career I wish someone had given this talk to me before I started because I made a lot of the mistakes that many people make when creating a product vision and these are things this is a struggle I think many product managers go through in their career and I want to help everyone here or everyone who watches online or anyone who gets exposure to this in some way not have to feel like this you know be in tears feel like they can't be a product manager so here's why I'm here when I worked at Microsoft this is a new hot thing and just to put it really simply here's how you might think about a growth mindset with respect to a product vision the fixed mindset in the other hand is like I'm born with disability or I don't have it you know I can't learn you know I'm stuck I'm not creative I'm not a visionary I'm not gonna be able to come with the right ideas I need to leave that to someone else that is the mindset that my friend had when she came to me at Starbucks and told me that she couldn't be a product manager and I think a lot of people in here would like to say that they don't have that mindset and you may have a growth mindset in other areas of your career but when it comes to being a visionary I find that many people actually have this mindset and they may not realize it I say you know I'm not a visionary I'm not going to be Steve Jobs I'm not going to be Elon and like it's good to check yourself and say do I think that way or do I think I have the potential to be a visionary on the other hand we have the growth mindset and you can guess it's the opposite of the fixed mindset basically you believe that you can overcome any challenge by working at it the potential to do something is not something you're born with you have to stick with it work at it and then you can choose whatever you want so growth mindset is a is a great way to think about any problem in your career but for being a visionary I think this is a really important concept and you should check yourself and say like which which viewpoint do I have and I think if you are here at this talk today I hope you have the second one the growth mindset because we are the first one I'm not gonna be able to help you honestly so please think about what it means to have a growth mindset does anyone you know put on their LinkedIn that there a thought leader or did anyone you know give a huge talk about what their their next big idea was anyone here who might be an aspiring visionary nobody okay I expected zero for that one - yeah so not many people would describe themselves as a visionary I think there's some very good reasons for that and part of that is because a lot of who we think is a visionary are people like this say I want to know all six people here I'm gonna guess zero people know six but some people might know five these are some things that I hear a lot about what a visionary is and I would say they're all wrong so one of them is that you know I can't say I'm a visionary because I just don't have those crazy ideas I don't know the moonshot you know I'm not making flying skateboards or self-driving cars and there's this meme out there that in order to be a visionary you have to have these wild outlandish ideas and you have to go on a long walk on the weekend by yourself and come home and like have this magical idea that you've come up with and and we just keep perpetuating that meme over and over again but in reality like coming up with the vision really doesn't work that way another one is that you know visionaries seem to know everything about the future you know they know it will happen and a hundred years from now 50 years from now even ten years from now and the reality is that humans are really really bad at making predictions about the future so most successful visionaries aren't actually that good at predicting the future because nobody is so if you thought that's what a visionary was I would encourage you to check that one up and reconsider the other one is about being a visionary as a personality attribute when I talked about being a visionary did anyone have like a you know a fictional person in their head about what a visionary look like anybody yeah what what did you think this person looked like yeah what yeah go for it what did you think what pop you like not it doesn't have to be right but what popped into your head you know those subconscious attributes that you thought about yeah I think that's very reasonable and I'm gonna go back one but like there's one thing that's in common with all these people like what do we know about this guy like he sends very strange tweets on Twitter all day and he's a very eccentric man and like I would actually say he is a visionary but he's also perpetuated this personality that people tend to attribute to visionary that might not have anything to do with whether he actually is one this dude right here he wears the same turtleneck sweater every day like he has some other weird things to her you like never put a license plate on his car like it like he really perpetuated the idea that you have to be outrageous or different or are kind of weird to be a visionary this dude right here I don't know if you can see but he's got this like little ponytail haircut thing and he he bruises strange T he makes his intern brew the strange tea for him that like gives him ideas and everything he also wears like somewhat strange clothes his wife is like very out-there again like he is fictional but we're perpetuating the idea that you have to be this crazy out there person in order to be a visionary Madeline you know I don't think she's really doing that Renee is out in the woods finding rocks actually Carly is a very normal as well but a lot of these people are perpetuating a meme or this idea that like you have to be strange to be a visionary and that is really not true and I think it's very damaging because people who have visionary ideas think they can't be won because of stuff like this so that was one of the memes about being a visionary that I really hope dies and I understand why people do it and I understand why it's in TV shows like Mozart in the jungle but it has nothing to do with being a visionary and I hope you as much as you can get that out of your brain so what really is a visionary I'm gonna propose that's that's actually only three things and I took a while to think about this but three things one is you take time to deeply understand customer needs and wants to deeply understand the problem space and to deeply understand the product constraints and notice this has nothing about like crazy flying skateboard ideas this is just do you know your customers want do you understand how the market functions do you understand what are the constraints like what is possible what is not possible this is not rocket science but it does take a little bit of work you have to like spend a lot of time listening to your customers you got to look at data you have to be really intimately involved in the problem you're trying to solve so this is number one and I'm going to spend more time on this number two is there anyone here who is who does not like taking risks it's okay if you don't like taking risks anybody okay yeah it's slowly fun I'm nervous about taking a risk sometimes too and another reason that people are really afraid of being a visionary is you know that you think you have to have that electric skateboard idea you know that flying car idea and that's scary because you can be wrong and you can be ridiculed because you're you know our idea didn't make any sense and people are scared of being a visionary because hey it's risky and I'm gonna say that being a visionary has something to do with taking a risk but you just have to take a little risk and the more you know about your customers the more you know the product space the smaller the risk is so if you're not a risk-taker I'd encourage you to think that you don't have to be a crazy risk-taker but just sign yourself up for a little bit that's all you need to be comfortable with the last one is the one I think most people forget is that if you're a visionary you're a highly effective and empathetic communicator and like I was saying before your vision is worth nothing if it's only in your head there are very few product spaces where you can do it all on your own and in order to be successful with your vision you need to take it from your head into many other people's heads and have them help you get to where you need to be so these are the three things I took a long time to think about these but that's really it and I hope you realize you can be a visionary every single person in here like those three things that I gave you are not rocket science and I think everyone here can achieve them so if you came into this you know if I asked you are you a visionary and you thought no way I'm never raising and I want to encourage you to rethink that and say hey you know I can actually achieve this like really I did not ask anything unreasonable of you like all those three things are very reasonable and I would say are actually core responsibilities of a product manager so visionary is within reach of everybody here say one seen the TV show Silicon Valley yeah good show maybe all right so this dude is one of my favorite characters I think he is a horrible role model and many of you might agree with me on that but there's is one scene where he needs a new name for the startup that he's working on called Pi Piper and he he goes out into the Mojave Desert he does some strange drugs and and like this is the the way we find our product vision and I think the show's creators got it right a little bit because when he wakes up from his vision he's passed out in a public restroom and totally out of it so it clearly didn't work but there's this other meme out there that in order to develop your product vision you need to go on this long walk and you know you know think magical thoughts or do some strange drugs or go on a Vision Quest and then you'll find out what you need to do and I think there's a reason this isn't a TV show and this is not reality because it let me tell you it is not reality so product visions don't happen this way it is very tempting to believe it works this way because an almost might be easier like all you got to do is go take that walk in the woods you know just find some peyote to spark ideas and your minds I'm like that's honestly a little bit easier than it actually is but if you thought that's how it works I'm going to break the bad news like this is not how product visions are created so there's some gift I found on the internet and it you might think what am I doing with his monkey he's bashing the keyboard this was actually very much related to the last slide and if you think about what Erlich Bachman that guy and the last slide is doing you know he he's isolated he's in a box and he's just trying to come up with something out of nothing he's having a very hard time with that and there's a theorem does anyone know the theorem that describes this can anyone guess it exactly nailed it Infinite Monkey theorem does anyone know what this is yeah speak up exactly so a theorem says and this has been mathematically proven it is true that if you take a monkey and you get him to bang on the keyboard for an infinite amount of time he will write all the works of Shakespeare and you could write a mathematical proof of this this is real and you can think about how does this apply to a product vision if I sat here and I just banged on my macbook for an infinite amount of time I would eventually theoretically come up with an amazing product vision but here's the thing like the chance of me actually nailing that or the amount of time it would take is insane so when you think about you know Erlich Bachman in the desert doing his thing he's actually practicing Infinite Monkey theorem I think a lot of people when they're trying to come up with their product vision do this you know they they go into a conference room and you know just throw up an empty whiteboard and say all right let's think and like as much as you might hate to realize it this is Infinite Monkey theorem and this is not how you come up with a product vision you don't want to be isolated in a box trying to come up with stuff out of nowhere so if you've been in one of those white board meetings and just the ideas are not flowing you have no idea you know what's the first thing to focus on recognize if you're practicing Infinite Monkey theorem and get out of there because this is not the most productive way to do it but it's a way that a lot of people try first so you know if you're trying that this is probably the question that you've had and really this is a question that everyone has and you're wondering hey you know I need to write this document to show my leadership next week or have to pitch to investors I don't have any good ideas to impress them with and a lot of product management runs on great ideas and if you're like my friend who I talked about in the beginning like you you come to this point and you spend weeks on this point you spend months on this point and you feel stuck you feel like you can't get there so if you have thought about this for don't feel bad we all started here but I'm going to tell you how to get there so there are only three answers to this question and you might think wow that's very simple but in every product problem I've ever gone through like it really just is one of three answers and here they are number one I think more than anything it's usually this one like I'd say maybe 80% of the cases it's this you don't deeply understand your customer needs and wants and like that can be a tough pill to swallow because as a product manager this is your job you have to know what your customers really want you really want to deeply understand what their motivations are what they're looking for out of your products but when you're grasping for straws you know doing your Infinite Monkey theorem trying to come up with ideas well you're really admitting is that like you don't know where to start and I would suggest you should always start with your customers your customers will give you ideas for free there's a there's a quote that I'm going to go through later from a very famous local guy that addresses this and many companies do it this way but if you don't have any good ideas like really start with your customers number two is that you don't understand the dynamics of your problem space and this one's a little bit more difficult to grasp but I'll tell you what it means imagine you know if you went into an interview room one day for for Blue Origin Blue Origin as Jeff Bezos as rocket company and you know the interviewer said to you alright how are we gonna increase thrust by 25% and our rocket like you're not going to know the first thing about this so you can't propose a great product vision it's like you have no idea how Rockets work unless anyone here really does know how Rockets work but most of us don't know that so we we really can't propose an educated product vision for that problem because we don't know the first thing about rockets so most business problems and the people who come up with a vision for them really really intimately know the dynamics of their problem space the third one is that you don't understand your product constraints has anyone been in like a brainstorming meeting and someone propose something and you just knew right away this is completely you know out of left field and is not going to happen they wouldn't have that experience yeah do you remember what the crazy idea was all right I'll give you one like imagine if you all are my team and I come to you and say by next week you know we're gonna have people living on the moon come join me right now we're gonna go do it like what's your reaction gonna be to me like this guy is an idiot and honestly if I told you that I would be an idiot because I really don't understand what are the constraints of that problem you know how many get humans you know into space how am I going to sustain them when they're there like I have no idea the constraints in my product space so I'm proposing things that really just don't make any sense that was an extreme example but you'll often find people who propose great ideas but they don't understand what the pitfalls are and why that may or may not be a great vision so these are the three things the first one I gave another talk in this last year about how to know what your customers want but really number one if you could spend 80% of your time on one of these three things I would do this one find out what your customers want they like I said before they will literally give you ideas for free you know customers will tell you what they want they might not write it down in a PowerPoint document but they will give you the information you need to come up with your next idea and if you listen to lots of stories about entrepreneurship or you know how I can't with this great product idea well you'll usually find is the the inventor or the founder talks about like an aha moment they had when listening to a customer so spend 80% of your I'm on this number to like let's take that rocket example again where I need to boost thrust by 25% the only way I'm going to do that is to learn about rockets so you for finding this is your problem you need to learn about rockets and a lot of problem domains you'll you'll need to spend some time learning about the dynamics of the problem space a very real example for me was when I joined hololens at Microsoft I honestly didn't know the first thing about augmented reality and a lot of my time I spent doing number two so I could understand how does our mental reality work and now I know a lot about augmented reality but before I couldn't really make any educated visions about hololens because I didn't know how it worked a number three I suggest you probably do this one last but if you're having trouble with number three I always start with number one understanding what your customers want and then for each of those things that your customers really want find out what's preventing you from getting there and then you'll know what is the constraint alright and here's that quote that I love I think I've put this in almost every presentation that i've ever gave because i like it so much but it's from this guy who some of you might know and he said customers are always beautifully wonderfully dissatisfied even when they report being happy and business is great even when they don't yet know it customers want something better and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf no customer ever asked amazon to create the prime membership program but it sure turns out they wanted it and i could give you many such examples as anyone heard this quote before and then I went to product con I think the first speaker actually mentioned this quote as well I think there's a reason a lot of people mention this quote and the first speaker was from Netflix so this is not just an Amazon concept this is a concept that applies across many companies many different businesses but you know again spend 80% of your time with your product vision on knowing what your customers want another really common question that comes up is how big does my vision need to be let's think of number one a crack in the sidewalk vision I could make a product vision that just you know really not unremarkable and not remarkable and the way I've represented this here is I have my blue bar which is the things that I already know and then I have my little red question marks which is the the uncertainty that I need to get there and you can they have a crack in the sidewalk problem as a problem space where I figured almost all of it out and I just need a tiny bit left to get there so a real example of a crack in the sidewalk product vision is hey you know I've had this button for users to sign up for my product I'm gonna increase the size by 10 pixels that's a crack in the sidewalk product vision and there's definitely a place for cracking the sidewalk product visions I'd say most of the time you're not going to be doing this second one I picked one I loved planes so at some point in time someone had a vision to fly solo across the Atlantic and I said I'm going to take a plane I'm going to get in I'm gonna fly all the way by myself across the Atlantic and this is not a crack in the sidewalk product vision anymore you know there's a there's a few more red question marks and you can see we're going here we're laying out a spectrum of how much do I need to cross to get to where I need to be in my vision so next one put a woman on the moon how many people know has there been a woman on the moon no exactly no woman has ever touched the moon I think we're gonna change that soon but this is one we have not actually solved yet and there's a few more question marks in order for us to get there and you can just imagine conceptually you know crack in the sidewalk Atlantic Ocean moon and then the last one a weekend trip to Mars you know a lot of question marks there and you can sort of line these up and evaluate your own product vision and say you know how much of a risk am I taking you know it is do I only have two question marks or do I have I don't know I think that's 19 question marks right there and evaluate you know kind of where you're landing here I would suggest for most people in this room you want to go somewhere in between this one generally the most successful product visions but 20 and 50% uncertainty and 50 and 80% certainty and you'll find as you get more senior as you understand more about your product space you can start getting to these ones you also might find that you know and you start in your first job if you come on in on your first day and you talk about going to Mars people might not believe you so you can move your way down you know the difficulty or uncertainty in your product visions as you learn more information as you earn trust as you build a track record now this last quote here I can't matter who said this but it says when 99% of people doubt you you're either gravely wrong or about to make history and yeah I I think I don't know if everyone has felt that before but a lot of time you really don't know and the way I found to know if you're either gravely wrong or about to make history is the people who are about to make history typically have answers to these question marks and the people who are gravely wrong don't have answers to those question marks and are hoping it'll just happen so this is a hard question to answer but generally that's how you know you can also evaluate other people's product visions this way you know do they know something that I don't know that they can solve these question marks or are they just hoping it'll happen and talking about a very grand result all right let's check our product vision they don't have a product vision that are doing right now actually this is the question you should answer more than any other question why will customers love this and at many companies like this is gonna be the first question that appears in any vision document and any presentation you have you really need to be able to answer this question and I think for your example the answer is customers will love this because you know it's classic recommendation scenario well will lead them to other strains that they will really love yeah curation is very hard problem you know Netflix has this amazon has this physical stores have this customers have a very difficult time choosing for many options and they love it when we just queue up great recommendations for them second one is is there a market opportunity there are some things that customers really love that just don't have a market opportunity you know one of them is very interesting I arrived an electric skateboard here and like I really love this customer like this customer is loving it but when I think about my electric skateboard very critically the market opportunity is actually a little bit smaller because it's kind of hard to ride a skateboard and it's also quite dangerous and just a lot of customers aren't willing to invest that you know you may have once had a customer who really really loves this product but your market opportunity is actually you know fairly small so I would really start with will your customers love this but as you're answering that question also think is there market opportunity for this a really classic example is customers would love if you just gave them free money but there's zero market opportunity there so I would not suggest that everyone is you know again about that crack in the sidewalk to weekend on Mars example how much uncertainty do I have to solve I suggested you know twenty to forty percent is a sweet spot but think really critically about how much of a risk am I taking here we constantly evaluate at risk in other decisions we make you know how are we investing should I buy this house do I want to date this person and we were we're calculating that risk tolerance in the back of our head either consciously or subconsciously if you're creating a product vision I would encourage you to really think critically and concretely about what type of risks I'm taking and often when you present a product vision document you'll be asked to quantify this or at least detail it in very clear steps so your your leaders or your investors or the other people you need to convince know what they're up against the next one is those product constraints you know I talked about spending a weekend on Mars I honestly can't solve those product constraints right now so I would not suggest that as a product vision if you're proposing something your vision you're doing so to cross that uncertainty and if you have no plan whatsoever to cross that uncertainty not even eye yeah you know that this might rule out your product vision so let's take that recommendation example do you think you have a way to you know your recommendation algorithm like how are you thinking across the uncertainty and get customers those recommendations that are really love so you have some type of recommendation algorithm but if I had the same vision I told you I just gonna pick them out of a hat you might not believe me so you need to have some idea about how you're going to solve those product constraints the next one is has someone tried this before there's a tricky one because there's two answers to that and they both have the same answer so if someone has already tried this you want to know what do I know or have that they don't that will make my vision a little bit different than the one that's already been tried and if someone hasn't tried this before you want to know why has nobody tried this before because that that might tell you something that people have already learned and the last one if you have a vision you will frequently need to know how you're meeting that vision and then it conclude metrics it can also include milestones but you you can't just throw out a vision into thin air and then never follow up on it if you want to bring your stakeholders your investors you know the people you work for along for the journey you need to give them some way of knowing am I on the right track so we're gonna know that our recommendations algorithm is successful when customers who are recommended other products rate them very highly there you go there's how you measure your vision so I have not used Rent the Runway but if they offered a product that was for me I kind of liked it I might use their product so let's evaluate their product vision and by the way Rent the Runway is now a unicorn and it's notable because it's a female founded unicorn so Jenny and Jen their company is now worth over a billion dollars yeah it is insane but let's think about it how did they get there so if you know nothing about dresses or you know what women wear to events I really didn't know a lot about that either you have to learn a little bit about you know what are the dynamics to your product space what are the constraints what are your customers really love and these two like really nailed that so what they found is that customer really want to wear you know designer label and they want to feel special at that event they want to show up in the pictures they really want that magical going out event red carpet experience but the problem was you know those dresses or the outfit they wanted to wear the cost was absurd and you don't want to spend $6,000 on a dress that you wear once and another thing they knew is that customers didn't want to wear the same dress twice in the example that they gave I can't remember if it was generally but she watched her sister agonize over choosing a dress to attend a wedding and she had to attend to weddings back-to-back and she knew the photos would show up on Facebook and she didn't want to be caught wearing the same dress in both sets of photos but she also you know let's say the dress cost 2,000 bucks she also didn't want to spend four grand on dresses so you know she just agonized over what do i do am I willing to take the social cost of being caught wearing the same dress twice and to me that's not very intuitive I didn't understand that market but these two found that customers were having a really tough time solving that and what they realized is there's an opportunity for customers to rent the same designer piece where at once and then have someone else do the same thing and customers really didn't mind doing that they were really happy to wear it once and then have it dry cleaned professionally and then pass along someone else they even found that people are doing this among their friends they're saying you know hey I really need a dress for this event next weekend I borrow one of yours we're like the same size and people are doing that among their own friend that works so can one see where this vision is kind of coming together here this one was very unintuitive to me but if you want to read more about them they're an HBS Harvard Business School case study and there's a lot out there about these guys so they solve designer dress and accessory rentals and you know hey maybe they'll they'll entre do something for me I don't know if any of guys here like hey I got a I just had someone who said you know you need to have white tie attire for this wedding that's like one what is that you know to wear a mine and get that like three why do I want to get that if I'm only going to wear it for your wedding and never wear it again I think it has to do like the like long coattail or something like that you would never see me that but I need to go to this guy's wedding so yeah they have a great product vision communicating your product vision this is one that I think a lot of people didn't expect me to talk about and I almost didn't talk about this but the more I thought about it it's a really really important important part of any product vision again like I said if it's just stuck in your head and you cannot communicate this to anyone else you're not going to go anywhere and you know maybe there's a very very small subset of problem domains where you can do this one that came to mind was you know Mozart creating like a masterpiece Symphony you know maybe he could do it on his own you know he just sat in his room and composed music and you know came up with you know one of his many grand pieces but most people will not be able to achieve success without communicating their vision to other people you need them to help you build your vision you need to bring them along for the journey so they they give you support and other domains where you're not an expert and you also need to convince investors or executives who will give you funding and your large company to go execute on what you want to do I don't know this guy Paul Graham what does Paul Graham do yeah does anyone know what Y Combinator is yeah Y Combinator is a very well-known Silicon Valley startup accelerator and this is a quote that Paul Graham the guy who start one of the cofounders of this said about Airbnb you can actually listen to this on a podcast it's called how I built this but one of the founders Joe Gebbia goes into detail about how you went to this meeting with Paul Graham told him his vision about Airbnb which I suspect many of us have used before and Paul said you mean people actually use this well that's weird and then just fell flat and what this says to me you know now knowing Airbnb is a wildly successful company is communicating your vision is very difficult has anyone gone into you like a meeting or a presentation where they you know spent you know weeks months on this grand idea and then they presented it and people just looked at that I'm like has ioin been through that before I've been through that honestly so I know what it's like but at some point your career you may get that and these very successful people at Airbnb did get that and so did many other people and all that really means is you know you may or may not be on track but really communicating your vision is very hard so don't assume that just because you have the best ideas means it's all going to work out and this I hope is one reminder of that like you can say whatever you want about Airbnb but by many metrics that are very successful and they overcame a reaction like this from you know a very prominent person who you could say is a you know a do-or-die spot for many startups all right does anyone recognize that logo that is Amazon s3 simple storage service and we talk about communicating your product vision and I work in Amazon a well-known and I think highly effective way to communicate your product vision is by working backwards and what this means is you start at the end from what is the customer result you want to achieve and work backwards to tell you what exactly you need to do to get there and if you're a product manager at Amazon what you literally do is you write a six page document where the first page is the press release that you're going to send when you're done with the entire project what I have here this is from 2006 this is the act that's the beginning of the actual press release for Amazon s3 and I'll just give you a little bit to check out the bottom paragraph there but you'll notice a couple things about this it's in really plain language I think that what the word a lot of people use is no geek speek you need to be really articulate really concise and frame it to a customer out why they want to use this thing so what they say here to say we make web scale computing easier for developers it gives any developer access to the same highly scalable reliable fast and inexpensive data storage that Amazon uses and you know the first line is is really the only one you need it's storage for the internet so I'm not sure I wasn't around this time but I'm sure someone at Amazon spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly is my customer really going to love about this and how do I communicate that and what is that like four sentences to really nail home why are they're gonna love this so if you're a product manager in Amazon this is one way you do it even if you're not a product manager at Amazon this is one tool that you can use to communicate your vision and it's called the PR FAQ which stands for a press release and frequently asked questions at the beginning of your press release in the end you spend time answering frequently asked questions about how you're gonna get there you know what's the data that shows you what customers really want things like that they don't watch the crown recently yeah remember this scene so I wanted to show Queen that's queen elizabeth ii and the reason i wanted to show her is because there's this thing called a Christmas message where royalty would you know speak to their community and Queen Elizabeth took a you know a very different take and decided to use television in 1957 to communicate her her message and what I really want to get across there is use the right tool for the job and what I mean by that you know in Queen Elizabeth's case that was TV because she could reach a lot of people because people could see her and see her empathy and it was really effective but the the tool that you might use to communicate your product vision you know could be any one of things you know I just told you about the PR FAQ at Amazon but you might do a PowerPoint Amazon doesn't do that but I have communicated my vision that way and in other places you might give a speech you might need to hold a meeting with the ten different stakeholders that you need to convince sometimes you need to prepare a pitch deck for your investors you know there's many different ways you need to communicate this and you need to know which one is going to be effective there's the last term here it's called Nemo washi does anyone know what that one means so it's a Japanese concept and Japan is a relatively low conflict culture and what you do is you you meet privately with everyone else before and tell them about the idea and bring them on board address their concerns and then when you finally get to the big meeting the one that really matters everyone is on the same page so it's one technique of getting everyone on the same page about your vision that could be effective depending on the circumstances of of who you're working with and what you need to get across another one is like I talked about in that PR FAQ is you have to show empathy I worked on Hollande's and one way I've reflected about hololens is we framed the vision in a way that was all about how cool the technology was and you know all these wild things you could do with Holograms but one area I think we're not as effective is we didn't really frame the vision in terms of the customer problem that we're solving and if I had gone back I would have done it a little bit differently and really focus on why will customers love this when a customer sees this you know marking material or vision document or press release why are you like they gonna care about what I have to say to them and if you if you think about it in terms of how you see versus what the customer sees your vision might fall flat another one is and this is kind of related to that knee mawashi concept is you want to bring your stakeholders along for the journey I'm gonna give one example after this of a time this didn't happen but sometimes you're going to get some critical feedback you're gonna present your vision to someone and they're gonna say hey you know what that kind of sucks I don't believe you or I don't see a future for that or I don't believe your data or hey I have this other idea that I think is better than yours why don't we do that one instead and you know you could ignore those people you could shout at them loudly you could just not meet with them at all but I would suggest do as much as you can to bring them along for your journey and turn them into allies of your journey if you keep pushing people away from your journey rather than you know snowballing and making your journey stronger you're gonna have a tough time and this is a very hard skill to learn there's a temptation to say these people are wrong you know I don't need them but if you have people on your side they can help you evangelize your vision as well last one has used data I didn't really talk about data so far but when you are presenting a new idea or something you know about customers or a market opportunity if you use data to justify what you're saying people are more likely to believe you so I could give an entire different talk on this but if you use data your vision can often be much more effective I also talked about anecdotes there because anecdotes can frame data so you can have a statistic and then you know maybe give a customer quote to say you know what that statistic is really about you can say hey let's use your recommendations example again you can say you know 74 percent of customers you know made a third purchase after buying one recommended item and then you can give a quote from a customer saying hey I was paralyzed about making this decision I didn't know what to get thank you for recommending recommending this to me you know now I have four different options that I really love it just really helps frame what that data told you all right so I wouldn't use this product so so okay I think I followed a asked like five years ago there would have been a lot more yeses and there was one for me as well but I want to talk about Facebook newsfeed did anyone use newsfeed in 2006 I did awesome so I have them top left here that's what Facebook look like in 2006 there were only profiles and you could only see people in the same school as you and I was a very different website it's kind of like a directory that's where the name the Facebook came from and just completely out of nowhere they introduced this newsfeed thing and you know it said you know we'll just made friends with this person will like this person's picture and like people really didn't like it they're always news articles about how people are leaving Facebook they thought it was creepy it really didn't land very well and Facebook you know has somewhat of a history of launching new visionary things and then they're cut you know their users don't really like them but newsfeed was probably the first one and the fine thing about news and the reason why I chose it as an example is now we think of newsfeed as Facebook like some people think like newsfeed is one feature on Facebook but many people attribute that to the entire experience it's the home page it seems obvious now but I just wanted to highlight how when you introduce your vision and here is the vision your personalized interactive newspaper that is published directly by the set of people you care about may not seem obvious right away and if if you don't communicate it if you don't bring your users along for the journey they might not like what you have to offer them and you know maybe Facebook had enough momentum to get past this you know users loved other parts of the experience you know they they're a successful company in other ways that they were able to overcome this but if you just bomb a new feature on your users you don't bring them along for your journey you know you come to a you know a meeting with the critical stakeholder and you just land some new bomb on them you know it might not go as well so Facebook super successful but here's an example of a super successful company where the communication is maybe not what they would have liked you can also watch a talk from this guy Chris Cox he was a chief product officer just type in FM C 2012 Chris Cox and you can listen to him talk about this it's very interesting talk the last one from product vision to product reality so I only have spent a tiny bit of time on this one but the vision isn't everything you need to be able to execute on the vision and I'm gonna give you a few tips on how you might do that you know if you've got everything so far you know you're I would say 80% of the way there the 20% has just got to be a really crisp on the execution and here are some ways you might do that by the way I think three days from now is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing and we we still don't have a woman on the moon so this one has not been solved yet well let's break it down one strategy that I'd really suggest when you propose your vision or you need to execute your vision is to quantize it same I'm a physics nerd here quantize so for example light if we think of it as continuous but it's actually discrete units otherwise a photon so what you might think here is you know we have our our vision which spans this continuous stream of question marks that we need to solve but hey let's break it down into three parts you know first we're going to focus on the this one darker purple arrow that's our minimum viable product in our first release first step of our vision and then hey we'll learn and as we keep going we'll solve the other two parts this is a really effective technique because if you try to go from zero to a hundred all in one you might lose people on the way they might lose faith in you you might not be able to answer all those problems at once so typically you will break down your vision into smaller units that you can chief you know one on one as you go along and I chose you could just say you know milestones is one you hear a lot or sprints I chose quantize because a little bit weird word it helps me remember it but really all you need to know is just break it down into discrete parts that you can achieve one by one and and reach the journey another way to think about this is say you're going on a you know a road trip across Europe all the way to Asia you're probably not going to do it in one drive you're gonna break it down into smaller parts otherwise you know you'll reach exhaustion you'll get hungry your car will break down it's not going to go super well a second one is you want to set goals to measure success this could also be a completely separate talk on its own but you want to know how do I know I'm getting there you could you know put this great vision out there and then people are gonna come back to you and say are we doing it will you know how far along are we that might be our investors who come to you and say should I give you more money or your executive who says the same thing should we keep funding this product or do we want to double down on this and you just set some goals to help you measure your success and tell you if you are doing well in your vision or not so I guess let's take that recommendation example again like what does a goal you might set to know if your recommendation algorithm vision is successful or not this is actually quite hard because not only do you have to describe what your vision is you have to you know in in metrics or more specific results what it looks like when you get there and you might not have that fully conceptualize yet so you might want to do this after your vision but before you get started the last one is pretty general - like any development process we want a prototype experiment validate learn and incorporate new information there are very few product visions that you know start and finish exactly the same we can go back to that newsfeed example newsfeed today is not the original newsfeed that Chris Cox proposed in 2006 he's learned new information you know new problems have come up to Facebook we have things like fake news we have new features like marketplace we have ads on the newsfeed now you know we we have to change our vision as we go along and learn new information and one comment I have about this is people who are visionaries who have a grand vision they think that changing their vision means that they were wrong initially they're reluctant to do that but really that is not true at all all it means is that you are taking new information that challenges your assumptions and improves your vision you get zero credit for being wrong at the beginning you get all the credit for being wrong at the end or for being right at the end sorry so how you are highly invested and you know constantly listening and changing your vision as you go along you might not want to scrap your entire vision if you're doing that that you might want to go back to the drawing board but it's ok to change a few elements as you go along alright last example does anyone buy one of these I want to buy one they're very expensive I don't love that about this company yeah does anyone use any other product besides the vacuum cleaner from them yeah what product you use the fan oh the the cool fan and the air goes in the middle without a fan blade very cool yeah so this is James Dyson he's a sir actually he sir James Dyson but he invented the cyclonic vacuum cleaner and he has a very interesting story again like that same podcast how I built this you can listen to him in his own words describe how this happened but let's evaluate his vision and the reason I chose this vision is because James's vision is a little bit more about getting there it's less about I da ting it's less about knowing what your customer wants this guy went through over 5000 prototypes to get the cyclonic vacuum cleaner right so he knew what his customers wanted he knew that existing vacuums they lost suction they're bagged vacuums made by companies like Hoover one of his investors said you know you're crazy to do this because if there was any better way Hoover already would have figured it out so yeah like the the name for a vacuum cleaner is literally Hoover in some places just because they were so ubiquitous but he knew customers were pretty frustrated with that technology and they they were tired of buying new bags they're frustrated how you know after vacuuming ten times now I gotta go to the store and buy a new bag just to have it work again he was also really disappointed by the power and he had some exposure to sawmills and he saw a cyclonic separator and a sawmill which takes dust out of the air so you know I don't breathe it in or it doesn't damage machinery and he said hey you know I think actually his wife was the one who really hated the the bagged vacuums and he said you know I can do better than that I know I can use this cyclonic separator technology and come up with something better than all these other companies did I think it took him five years and he he says he made 5,000 prototypes and you know it even when he had the right product it didn't quite work out he got a actually a Japanese company to take a chance on him um and that was his first success but here's another example of what we would all say is an awesome vision now I get very hard to find a bagged vacuum cleaner anymore but hey over five sometimes to get it right so if you have your vision and you know customers want this and you have a very solid market opportunity but you're having trouble getting there think of James Dyson and know that not all is lost you can eventually get there if you want to learn more I would highly recommend the podcast for him also

Channel: Product School

Views: 16,630

Rating: 4.884892 out of 5

Keywords: Product, Product Manager, Product Management, Product School, Data Analytics, Coding for Managers, How to get a job, product manager salary, product manager resume, what is product management, what is a product manager, product management training, how to become a pm, product manager interview, machine learning, ai, Technology, Career, PM tools, software, metrics, product management basics, growth product management

Id: fW-zCm1Ig3Y

Length: 54min 23sec (3263 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 18 2019