The European Product Conference 2022

Hello everyone, welcome to the European Product Conference 2022. Just to introduce myself, my name is Adam, I'm from Startup Network Europe, from Ireland, but I'm currently in Zagreb in Croatia, and we are hosting this event with Amplitude, which we will explain in a moment. So the plan for today is very, very simple. This is a 90-minute event with 14 different speakers in those 90 minutes. We're going to have a fireside chat with Spenser Skates, who is co-founder and CEO of Amplitude. And then there's a panel discussion with 4 product experts. Then there's a presentation from Carlos Gonzalez de Villa-Umbrosia, founder and CEO of Product School. And then we'll have a presentation from John Cutler, who is a product evangelist. Then we'll have a rapid-fire talk section with 5 product experts. And then finally, another presentation, this time from Adam Greco, who is also a product evangelist. So it's a great piece of content in only 1 hour 45 minutes. So we're going to kick off now with Spenser, who is, as I mentioned, founder and CEO of Amplitude. And Spenser, how are you doing? Maybe you can explain what Amplitude is first. Awesome. No, it's fantastic to be here. So good evening to all you folks in Europe. It is early morning here in the US. It's fantastic to be here. I was just out in Europe at Dublin Tech Summit and a few other things. So it was great to meet the community. One of the things that's been really impressive is just how tech savvy a lot of the companies are out there. I think it's, it's, it's been a real sea change. So from when I was last out in Europe 3 years ago, so, so just to, just to explain a little bit about Amplitude. So what we do is product analytics. We help you understand your user journey, how people are using your product. It's like a cockpit for your website or mobile app. And we help you understand what people are doing, what they like, what they don't like, where they get stuck, what they have in common, and it's all with the idea of helping you better understand your customers so that you can build a better product. We recently launched a few new products, including an experimentation platform last year that helps you run A/B tests and experiments, as well as a CDP product that's currently in beta a few months ago. And so, yeah, really excited to be here, really excited to talk to you all in the startup community. Excited to provide advice on building a great company. Great. And Spenser, was it your first time in Dublin when you went to Dublin Tech Summit? Yes, that was the first time there. Yeah, cool. I saw you from the audience, but I didn't get to talk. So it's good to talk with you now. If you're ever at a conference where I'm at, always feel free to come by and say hi afterwards or all that. Promise I'm not scary. And I love, you know, the reason I do, you know, talks and conferences like this is just to hear directly from all of you what's top of mind. You know, one of the things I make sure I spend a lot of time from is just hearing directly from company builders, product managers, people who, you know, whether you're a current user of Amplitude or not, to see what it is that we can be doing better. Well, Spenser, there's a lot of product people in the room today. In fact, I'll do a poll to see what kind of people are here. So could you tell me what brought you into the field and how you decided that product analytics was what you wanted to focus on in terms of your business? Yeah, absolutely. So before we had started Amplitude, me and my co-founder worked on this company called Sonolight, which was a— it was like a version of Siri, like the voice recognition from— except on the Android phone. And so we had built that and we had all these questions that we really wanted to understand about how people were using the product. Like the top question that we had was, how does the accuracy of the voice recognition impact long-term customer engagement? Because we knew, you know, obviously if you're using voice recognition product, you know, the accuracy of that voice recognition is pretty important, but we wanted to quantify that. And so we spent all this time building a custom backend to help us answer that question. And one of the things that we found out was that it was actually incredibly important. I think if you had a first, successful recognition event, then you were twice as likely to stick around as a user long term. And so that was, that was a really key insight for us in building Sonalight in terms of telling us what was important in the journey. And one of the interesting things was when we showed that sort of insight to other people who were building companies, they were like, wow, this is amazing. I really want to find this out for my product. And we were like, wow, you can't figure this out? And they're like, no, you know, There's no tools that I can buy that do it. You know, I don't have the resources to build, you know, a custom analytics stack for myself. So I'd really, you know, would love to get this as a tool for myself. And so, you know, that was a really strong signal for us that there was a huge opportunity to build. And so when we looked at what was out there on the market, you know, with either Google Analytics or Adobe or some of the other tools out there, it was clear that none of those were able to solve the problem in the same way. And so we said, okay, let's, let's go ahead and build a company around that. So that was 2012. We launched Amplitude in 2014. We've been growing since. We just took the company to the public markets last year, and it's been a crazy ride since. Yeah, and I suppose years ago there was a focus on marketing, marketing, marketing. Now, thankfully, I think more people see a very good product as enough marketing. Would you agree with that or not? Yeah, well, so this is one of the biggest changes that I think we've seen directly at Amplitude, which is the product is now becoming the distribution channel. It's no longer you're convinced to buy a product through kind of a snazzy marketing campaign or through, you know, looking at some ads or reading marketing copy. It's really you're deciding whether to buy the product through trying out. You know, if you think of Spotify or you think of, you know, Netflix, or you think of you know, a B2B SaaS app, all of these products, you're actually making the decision whether to purchase through the free trial. And so now what we found is the product itself has become the distribution channel as opposed to the marketing campaign. And so that's a real sea shift in the opportunity for product leaders to become revenue generators within all these companies. And so, you know, obviously, we're one of the companies that helps you do that and drive that successfully. And so I think there's been there's a real shift from a focus on digital marketing to digital product in the industry, and we're one of the companies that wants to help everyone out there make that shift. Great. And on that, how has Amplitude grown? I mean, how many people are you? Where are you focused at the moment in terms of markets? Yeah, so we passed $200 million in revenue, which is a really exciting milestone. You know, one of the things in the early days, you're already— we were always thinking about, hey, how do we get to $100 million? Once you get to $100 million in revenue, you know, you've built a real business, you know, that has real impact, and you've solved a real problem out there. So it's really exciting. And now we're thinking about how to get to $1 billion. The— in terms of the team size, we're about 750 people here at Amplitude. We have offices around the world. So we have offices in London, in Amsterdam, and in Paris. And we have folks across Europe more broadly. We also have a team in Singapore, a team in Japan, and then obviously we have our main headquarters here in San Francisco in the United States. And so we're— I think one of the exciting things to me is, so we're very globally distributed and we have been from the start, but Europe is one of the biggest growth markets for us by far. Like the amount of tech talent that I've seen there, I think the really exciting thing to me is to see a lot of traditional businesses that have not been tech-forward really embrace technology. So when I was out there, you know, we were talking to McLaren, the car company, we were talking to Chase Bank that had just opened a consumer card in the UK. And so we've seen a lot of companies that are in the non-tech industry really often embrace technology for the first time, which is really exciting. Yeah, and I've also noticed in Europe, I think we're starting to adopt very quickly to having product managers or, or heads of product. I think in probably San Francisco, California, there's— you have more of a background, you have more people working with product titles. Would you say that's true or not? Absolutely. I think product is one of the fastest growing functions within any company. It's becoming one of the most important ones. One of the big things that we see is the rise of the Chief Product Officer, which is the newest executive to the C-suite in every single company out there. Because what's happening is you need someone who's in charge of driving revenue through digital channels. And there hasn't been an executive that's been responsible for driving that before. And so, you know, all of a sudden you have Chief Product Officers for the very first time. And so, you know, we're obviously a part of that movement. And I think you see just way more— it's, it's always so every single company I talked to is in dire need of product management. As a function. And so, you know, if you're thinking about or looking to get into product management, now is the best time more than ever. Yeah, and I've noticed for some reason in Europe we use head of product more, but you can see chief people officer, it's coming in. Yeah, you know, one of the other things I'll comment on that is that I think you see a lot of chief marketing officers or leaders in other functions who have a product background. You know, I was actually talking with one of our board members, Jim Whitehurst, the former CEO of Red Hat yesterday. And one of the things he was saying is that the most successful technology executives and CEOs in particular tend to have a product background. You know, the current CEO of Red Hat has a product background, like lots and lots, whereas like, you know, sales or other backgrounds just those functions tend not to be as successful. So really thinking about, you know, how can you build something that's setting up to win a market, you know, that's very much the place to be. And since you've set up Amplitude a few years back, what is your advice for new founders starting out, particularly people who have a product-focused business? Yeah, so I'd say a few things. So, you know, the very first, just meta advice is just if you're willing to stick with building a business for long enough, you'll end up finding success in some form or another. It may not be what you originally set out to do. It may not take the form that you expect, but just sticking at a problem long enough and outlasting everyone else in the space, there's a lot to be said for that. You know, in a lot of ways, frankly, in the product analytics space, you know, Amplitude has been the last company standing in that we've stuck it out longer. I mean, I remember there were probably a dozen companies that were doing similar things—Kissmetrics, Localytics, Keen, tons of others, Flurry. And we were the, you know, but a lot of them ended up selling their companies. They ended up pivoting to become other types of companies like Flurry turned into an ad network. And we were the only ones that decided to stick out, you know, the analytics thing for long enough. And now we've built the most successful business in the space. So, you know, number one thing is just don't quit. And if you compound that for a long enough period of time, you can do really well. The other thing I'd say is, and this goes for product people and engineers in particular, is make sure you spend at least half your time talking to customers, whether that's selling them directly, whether that's doing support for them, whether that's going out to meet them, whether it's spending time at a conference like this, taking the time to meet other folks. Like half your time building, it can be really tempting for a product person or an engineer to spend all your time building, because that's what you know how to do. You know how to solve those problems. There's always going bugs in the product you have. There's always things that could be better. It's never-ending. You know, even, you know, we're here 10 years later and there's still lots of stuff at Amplitude that I get frustrated about and I think I'd want us to improve as a product. But the biggest mistake that I've seen great product people and great engineers make is they build in a vacuum without customer feedback. And so spending, like always spending— customer feedback is not just a one-time thing. It's not like you go talk to your customers and, oh, you have the perfect vision, you're done. It's you spend half your time. So if you have— you're spending 5 days a week working, spend 2.5 of those days for every individual in the company talking to customers. We still do it today. We have— our engineers are required to spend at least one customer call a week. You know, we expect— I expect my engineering leader, Shadi, she's supposed to spend, you know, 3 customer calls a week. Our product managers spend half their time talking to customers. And so really, a deep understanding of the customer is what makes for great product, you know, what makes for a great product and product leader. Yeah. And Spenser, final question. What do you believe is most important to grow a robust company? I mean, product, you know, I think it's, you know, goes with the theme of what we've been talking about, but really understanding your customer deeply and building a product that solves their problem. If you do that, everything else takes care of itself. The, you know, retention, revenue, distribution, the excitement about what you do, your ability to sell it. If you build something where you have a deep understanding of your customer and their problem and you're able to do that, solve that problem better than anyone else, then kind of everything else takes care of itself. And so my number one thing, even look, I'm obviously at a company where our big thing is we give you insights on how your users are using your product. But even before that, I'd I always say, make sure you spend time talking to your customers, understand, you know, if you could choose between just doing analytics versus talking to your customers, I always say, go talk to your customers first, because you will learn so much, you know, that's what one of the things I always do, you know, one of the best practices out there. And so, you know, I would say, if you understand them better than anyone else, and you can solve a problem better than anyone else out there, then kind of everything else and the business takes care of itself. And so, you know, I know it sounds like, oh yeah, just get product-market fit and you're done. But it really does come back to that in kind of every form. You know, even today, my top thing is I'm always thinking about how do I achieve that better with what we're building here at Amplitude. And so that never changes. And, you know, the reason founder CEOs end up being so successful long-term in companies is because That's the hard part, you know, of building the company, whether you're very early stage and haven't even built anything yet, or whether you're scaled up and large like Amplitude. It's just that, you know, if you can see a little more deeply or have a little bit more insight and understanding of what your customer needs than someone else, then you can go much, much, much further. And so, you know, I cannot, you know, one, emphasize how much time you can spend on really just that deep understanding of your customer, talk to them, you know, use Amplitude to better understand them. Spend lots of different ways interfacing with and understanding your customer and their problem. And then, you know, build something to— if you build something to match that, you'll outdo everyone else out there. Brilliant. Well, Spenser, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time and really appreciate all the answers. I think the lesson that I got really is focus on the product. Marketing is good, but if you just do a good product, do a good service for your clients, and, you know, the rest will work out. You have to talk to your— so one of the things I want to just clarify, you have to talk to your customers to do that. There is no good product in a vacuum. It's like you're building the code and the product is only a side effect of solving your customer's problems. So if you focus on that, spend a lot of time talking to your customers, then you'll do great. Brilliant. Thank you, Spenser Skates. Okay, all the best from Croatia. You're in San Fran right now, right? That's right, that's right. All right, all the best. Thank you very much, appreciate it. Thank you, it's been fantastic being here. And yeah, make sure, uh, come, we come, come use Amplitude. We have a free starter package, uh, that you can track 10 million events per month for free. Uh, so we'd love to, to have you on board and get you started out. Perfect. And I'll share links about that as well in the chat box. Thank you, Spenser Skates. Fantastic. Um, and next up, folks, we have, uh, Adrian. And we actually have a panel which Adrian, um, will moderate. So Adrian, if you can quickly introduce yourself, I'm going to pin you now. Hey everyone, thanks, thanks Adam. Luckily I'm just the person hosting the panel, the guests are the best speakers you're going to learn from, but my name is Adrian Gregory, I run the customer success team at Amplitude in Europe based out of Amsterdam where I've been for the last 5 and a half years. And so I'd love of talking data and how we can help our customers through this journey. And hopefully today you're going to learn from some other digital disruptors that we have on the panel. And with that, actually, I'm going to have them kind of introduce themselves. I'm going to start with Mirella. You're the founder and managing partner of Product People. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, about Product People, and how you came to found this group? Thanks so much, Adrian. At Product People, we support clients with interim product management services via our 40 in-house product managers and product leaders. Some of our most common use cases are parental leaves, especially since most of our customer base is digital-first product companies in Europe, as well as hypergrowth, because it takes a while to hire a product manager in Europe due to longer notice periods. So this also makes most of our engagements lasting between 3 to 6 months. Of course, we have many others who end up going over for years in different areas of the organization. Our company's mission is to help companies discover and deliver great products faster through product management. And we further this mission also by sharing knowledge generously in weekly talks for our community of 14,000 product managers. And I think the other question was how I came up with this, was that seeing most of the software development agencies out there, or marketplaces for freelance talent make most of their revenue, probably 80% or so, through invoicing for developers' time. So they end up optimizing and building towards a lot of unnecessary features or products. And I think it's very valuable to have product management as a function aligned with your company's goals and interests. Most— that is better to have this in-house. Of course it's preferred, but when you don't have an option, I think it's It's then better to look at an agency that is not interested to sell you additional services or build things that are unnecessary. So this, this is how we started the idea and then it took off quite fast. In 2 years, we ended up with 40 people and working with some of the best companies in Europe. Cool. I love, I love seeing, I love, thanks for that introduction. I love seeing this community. You mentioned you serving a community of 14,000 product managers. I love how quickly this is, this is growing. And we're going to talk to some people that are doing that. Today, so thank you. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts. I want to introduce one of our customers next, Jamie, who is a Chief Growth Officer at G LUT. Can you talk to us a little bit about G LUT? We know you're a global esports platform. Who are your users that your product serves, and what does it look like? Thanks, Adrian, and a big hello from the north of Sweden, as you can see right now. So G LUT offers the ability for enthusiastic PC gamers to compete in the games like, you know, Valorant, League of Legends, AAA games and ultimately be able to compete at their skill level and on their schedule. So at heart, we're a tracker, we track stats, we offer the ability to compete from anywhere at any time. And our mission is really to kind of make esports accessible, make it an everyday experience. And we believe, you know, esports should be an everyday experience. Everyday esports is what we've coined. And ultimately, what we want you to be able to do is to build your esports profile, which is in some ways kind of bringing together all of your lifelong gaming achievements achievements. Some people have even coined it the LinkedIn of gaming. But ultimately, we want to be able to add more to the gaming experience. Today, when you spend a lot of time gaming, you invest in the game, but once you move games, you lose everything. So we want to take that time you invest and bring it out of the game into the real world. So that's just a little bit about what I do at Juul, basically. All right, thanks, Jamie. I like that, the LinkedIn of gaming. I maybe have to get to that world myself. I want to introduce our last guest, last panelist, which is Daniel, who's also a customer. He's the head of product growth at TIER Mobility and founder of the head of the product and product universe. Can you tell us a little bit about TIER Mobility and what they offer and kind of what customers' needs it addresses? Yeah, thank you so much, Adrian. It's great to be here. And TIER is a micromobility service and it provides flexibility of movement to people who are living in the urban areas, so urban citizens. And whenever you want to have something right now, for example, you want to have an entertainment right now, you go on Netflix. You want to have a taxi right now, you call Uber. You want to have food right now, you go for delivery hero, and so on. And the same when you want to get from A to B right now, you're not waiting for a bus or a metro, usually take a Tier because that's an electric scooter that stands on the street. It's available, always clean, always charged, and ready to go for you. So we provide this service of mobility for people and it's one of the biggest players in Europe right now. We have more than 200 cities now in more than 20 countries. We also acquired Spin, which is a top 3 US player right now, to increase our footprint. So you probably, if you live in Europe, definitely have seen our scooters standing on the street. And if you have any feedback on the application or anything, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. Always happy to talk to customers. Like, Spenser Skates was absolutely correct. That's the time how you can spend it as a product person. I love it. I love watching your growth. I don't, I haven't, we don't have your scooters here in Amsterdam yet because we're full of bikes, but it would be a nice benefit. I will now maybe turn to some things the audience is thinking about. I want to ask a few questions. There's a statistic out there, 90% of new products fail. Why do you think that is and what's your best advice to succeed and not to fail to those in the audience? And I'm maybe— sorry, I'll point that at Jamie to start. Sorry, cool. Wasn't sure there, keeping you on your toes. Yeah, this, this is very much like a business school question in some ways, if you've— if anyone's been to business school in the school. Um, and, and really, when I kind of— if I give this some thought, it's You know, taking an idea to making it a reality is hard, but then actually making it into something that people actually want and need or have an unmet need is even harder. So I mean, the list of factors as to why these products fail, I mean, you could go on forever. I think those on this call, I would appreciate something I really love, and that is an NPR podcast from Guy Raz. I have no affiliation with him. I just love him. And it's called How I Built This. And on this podcast, you listen from the best builders in the world, you know, the likes of founders from Instagram, Airbnb, the biggest, best companies who've come from nowhere and been disruptors. And he always asks after the story of how they formed their companies, like, what percentage was luck versus skill? And majority of them say luck. And I love hearing that because that gives me motivation every single we run into a roadblock and go, oh shit, this is not working, we need to try again. And really, luck is actually, in my opinion, grit, determination. It's always constantly trying to do more. So I'd say my key takeaway is a bit like what Spenser said. It's not just about building a kick-ass product, it's about taking it to market and trying to build traction. And you've got to try so many different ways of trying to build traction. And I think maybe that's probably why products fail is because they give up. Because like Spenser said, in the end you will succeed. Maybe it's not going to be the same level as you had hoped, but you will get there in the end. So that's kind of my takeaway is if you want to succeed, get ready to have a fun roller coaster ride and just know that the best of the best out there who built the most amazing brands, they've done the same experience. So that's why I keep on listening to NPR, How I Built This. It's a bit of therapy for me on a weekly basis. But that's my take. All right. Thanks. Thanks, Jamie. I'll have a follow-up to you for a second, but it's a great, a great take. And it is also a great podcast. Daniel, how about yourself? How would you answer that? Well, I think that success, how I would define it, is that your product gets a product market fit. And this is what also Spenser mentioned, that it's— you need to achieve that. And for me, product market fit is an equation. It's like a scale, you know, on one side you have value and values, by the way, not features, it's what we're solving for the customer, how easy and convenient it is to use. So what is that like? What people get out of using your product? That's the value scale. The other part would be the effort to get this value and the effort could be physical, like number of clicks, registration, could be mental, like you need to learn it and have a lot of thoughts in like in processes and knowledge in your head, or it could be financial because you need to pay for it, you need a credit card. So you have the scale. Scale that always balances. And when your value goes down, that's the product market fit. And it's very difficult because you can see you have many components, many variables to that equation. And the additional difficulty is that this scale is different and subjected for every single user. For some people, the value is like, oh, I need it, it's such a big pain. The value is like 10x in this perception of this person. And the effort like doesn't mean anything. But as you progress, at some point you will face, meet people and customers who are really skeptical and say, yeah, but the value, I don't know, it's nice, but I'm not sure if I like it. For them, it's like, it's very subjective. So that's why it's hard. That's why the majority of the companies and products don't really succeed in solving this equation. And it's a combination of like, you need to provide the value, the effort to this, to get this value should be relatively low. And that should hold true for a very large group of users. And you also need to know how to get in front of those users through distribution, product-led growth, marketing, or whatever. Methods you're using. So it's like so many different components and it's really, really difficult. And a big player of that, of course, is luck. But you can increase your chances if you approach it systemically and with a methodology, with grit, then you have it. But really it's just, it's really tough. That's why I think 5% only succeed. There are some common threads in what you mentioned and what Jamie mentioned. I'm going to last, I want to, I want to ask Mirella, kind of her view on this as well. Sure. So thanks, Jamie, for the takeaway on following through. I think there's this quote of overnight success takes 10 years. I was trying to Google it. I see it's attributed to Jeff Bezos. I remember seeing it somewhere on Twitter. And especially also for Daniel on the insights that to look for the value versus the effort your client or user needs to put into and feels like they're getting out of the product. Plus, of course, the luck factor. And that would be also part of my advice here. It's of course market timing, luck, and execution. You cannot change the luck part, but you can influence the rest with product thinking, great execution, and a big dose of pragmatism. Because I know we all talk about product-led and all the cool frameworks that are going around, but I think most of the time, if you think from first principles, you don't need many more of these others. Over to you, Adrian. All right, thank you. I like that. And I guess a follow-up question I have for maybe for Daniel and Jamie here is the first thing that came to mind. You talk about getting out there, getting in front of customers, talking with customers. How do you, you know, when you talk about about building great products, what's the role of data in all of this, your organization? Maybe I'll turn it over to Jamie first. Sure. As you can see, I have a little visitor over here who was very interested to see what I'm getting up to. So I mean, to me, data is everything, while at the same time, it in itself does not really help. Sorry. Sorry, she's off now. Hey, Jamie, no, it's okay. How about we do this? Let's go over to Daniel, and then we'll give you a second. If you'd like. Actually, it's actually— she's just— she's decided I'm not as fun anymore, so she's moved on to her cousins. The beauty of working from home. Exactly. So yeah, what I was basically saying is that data in itself is not really helpful because there's so much data everywhere. You have to make that data accessible, and I kind of— and I think that is the difficulty. People capture so much information that they get kind of get crippled by that data. So I think that's obviously Data plays a big role, but you need to set yourself up for success when using data. And when I reflect on this, I would say part of that is having the right mindset in the organization. Because a lot of time, people just want to ship stuff fast, and they don't really think. Data is always second nature. They don't think, what am I trying to impact before they ship it? They just ship it for the sake of shipping it. The other aspect is kind of the ways of working, which again is like kind of including all members of the team to actually come together and think about things before they go out the door. And the final piece I'd say is actually the right architecture and toolset. And I, and I have to say, I've used a lot of different tools over the years, and it really does come down to how do you make it accessible to everyone, but also understand not everyone is an analyst. So how do you just give enough, you know, to the right people to make them actually make use of that data in the right way? Because of course you can get the wrong insights if you don't know what you're looking at. So it obviously plays a big role, but I think at the same time, you have to just be a little bit careful. There have— again, because I love to give advice, or not advice, because I don't feel like I can give advice, but I love to give direction to great things that I've read or listened to. And another book which I, you know, building on the podcast aspect of things, is a book from Sean Ellis called Hacking Growth. Growth. It really actually, funnily enough, is how I learned about Amplitude was by reading that book. I had never heard of Amplitude previously and I read the book and was so blown away by what they achieved in this book that I was like, I need to investigate this company. And they give 3 great examples of how data has helped, you know, these great companies succeed. So, you know, maybe one of the things I can do is give one of those companies, because I'm sure you know about it, like Slack, for example, where they looked at you know, how people are conversing on Slack and noticed that once people have sent or received about 2,000 messages, you know, they were more likely to become a paying customer. And it's looking for kind of those aha moments, those nuggets that really matters, but to get there is quite difficult. So data plays a big role, but it cannot be taken for granted, I would say. You need to think from the top and make it a core part of your organization, a bit like a muscle that you need to build and grow. Grow over time. So sorry for a slightly long— No, that was great. Thanks. And thanks for that example in that book. So Sean Ellis, Hacking Growth. I haven't read it. I'm gonna go check it out afterwards. Maybe we'll give credit to him for some Amplitude referrals. But it is that delicate balance. So thanks for that example. And then Daniel, how about, how about yourself? So I think Jamie gave a wonderful answer. And really, data is invaluable, but it's just numbers, and you need to explain it. And it's like a thread when it's super dark, you don't know what to do, you can hold the thread and go and you'll reach an insight if you explain it properly. And I can maybe give you an example how to visualize it. So imagine this, when you register on Spotify or Pinterest, they ask you about your favorite topics and they do it in a grid. They show you 20 images of like select the topics that you would like to use to see in your feed because when you have a personalized experience, it gives you a much better retention. So you click on 5 topics, you click next, you get the first experience, and then you like it, you stay around, you come back. But with data, you can notice that there is around 5 to 10% of people who absolutely hate onboarding and instructions and text. And when they see this grid, they just click on the first 5 images and then click next. And of course, they don't get any personalization. They just get random topics and their personalized experience kind of sucks.. And you will never figure that out without either talking to them or witnessing that, or like if you have massive numbers in B2C, you would need data for that. So data gives you insights and that is really important to follow that because you're, you're not the customer in majority of the cases of your product. You're not like a user. First of all, you are working in technology and startups and the majority of your customers, they don't work in IT at all and they don't have— they have different level of attention and they have have different level of fluency with technology. So those insights with data, they can make your product even better for your customers and you can find new use cases or that will lead you to insights how you can improve it. So for me, data is like 50% of the success in developing products. That's good. Thanks. Thanks for that insight. I actually went through a product onboarding for a streaming service where I did just that. I just clicked the first few because I just wanted to get to the product. No personalized experience for me. Last question here, because I know we're almost at time for the panelists. You know, right now we're dealing with— a lot of companies have been dealing with massive growth over the last few years, and now we're starting to face headwinds for a lot of different reasons. We're going to hear from John Cutler later about how his thoughts— or his thoughts on this topic. But I'd love to hear from you on your thoughts on how product can be a differentiator to help companies going forward.? And I'll start maybe with, with you, Daniel, on this one as well. Yeah, I think Spenser touched a lot about it and said that the product is the main differentiator. And when you're building something, that the product itself could be a very big success factor that improves this conversion. But in general, those headwinds, they worsen your conversion when it comes to acquisition and retention, and it just goes low. And you know that companies that have solved it, you know them all. That's Netflix, that's Slack, Spotify, Miro. We named them several times already. So those companies, they're usually using product-led growth that is compensating for those tailwinds. And that means that you have several different retention mechanics, several acquisition mechanics. For example, you have user content generation, you have referral system, and you have platform and integrations like Slack. If you have 3 of them, each of those mechanics independently gives you retention, but together they also strengthen each other and they perform better and they compound over time. Compounding effect gives you much better returns. So that together creates a new system which is like a very powerful and dynamic flywheel that is ready and strong enough to battle against those tailwinds. So you cannot control everything, like you cannot control what happens in the world with politics or economical situation, but you definitely have control over your product and how you design the growth and experience there. So So, matching things together and plugging it into the system where making one component better will make the entire system even better is one of the good ways to how you can move forward and how a product in general can be a differentiator to help you moving forward. All right, thank you. I like that, controlling what you could control, which is your product. Last, Mirella, the last commentary on this question. Sure, definitely 100% on what Danil said. To optimize customer acquisition costs effectively by boosting engagement, retention through the mechanics you said earlier. We've also noticed that operational excellence has become a topic right now. So how can you minimize your internal costs, either manual or even AWS storage costs have been topics for some teams so that in general, you can make more money by spending less money. Another part we've seen is consolidating product lines, winding down unproductive product initiatives, and in some cases also being the best time to start building a good new product because there would be fewer copycats spinning up every other week. And I think this is still an opportunity within this space that The product companies which are good have now a bit more breathing room to consolidate and, and get better because there will be less funding going into a potential competitor than before. Perfect. Thank you for the insights. What I love what you just mentioned is the unproductive initiative, talking about how data could play into this. You look at the bets you're making, what are those bets that are not working out, how do you divest from them. That is how some people use Amplitude as well. So thanks for calling that out. All right, that is it for for the panelists. Thank you so much to the 3 panelists for sharing some insights in terms of things that are working for your organizations. I'm going to turn it back over to Adam so we can continue with the agenda for tonight, or this morning. Good. So this morning, this afternoon, we have people from all over the world. Okay, just give me a moment. Thank you very much, Adrian. Appreciate it. So I'm coming back, guys. I just have to remove some pins. Great, Mirella, you're the last one. Okay, here we go. Hello everyone, and before we begin, okay, I'm actually going to share a poll that I asked of you all earlier. Where is everybody here based? So it's very spread out across Europe. I think the most represented country is Germany, followed by the United Kingdom and Turkey, but really some of you are in Asia and the rest of Europe, all over the world, even Africa Africa and Oceania, so you're very welcome. And then in terms of the kinds of people attending this conference, it's really good. We have 20% founders, 27% CPOs, heads of product, and 30% of you work in product in some other way, and then 30% of you are not directly involved in product but work on something else. And I can see a lot of you come from big companies, small companies. It's, it's a very big mix. So what we have now is really one of the big highlights of the conference. We have a pre-recorded 15-minute chat from Carlos, who is the founder and CEO of Product School, which is a massive organization, as you may know. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and listen to his video, and I'm very grateful for him in advance for doing this. Good luck, guys. Hey, hey, hope you're ready for a packed day full of inspiration, insights, and learnings from some of the best product leaders in the world. I promise you, this is totally going to be worth your time. We are over 1.5 million members already, and it's still crazy to me because when I started 8 years ago, there were— there was one member, which was pretty me. And now to see how big the product community is and how many companies are actively hiring product managers, how many of you are growing your careers, I think it's a really good validation to realize that the future is product, regardless of the industry, regardless of location. Let me share a quick story about where we come from. I told you this company started 7.5, 8 years ago in San Francisco, but This is literally a picture of myself sharing a desk with two other people when I just had an idea, which was to create a school to teach product management because it's a solution to my own problem. I went to engineering school and to business school, and none of those places were really optimized for, for what we do on a daily basis. Engineering school, I found it too low level. Well, it was helpful for me to, to learn how to code and build things, it was very disconnected from the business side. So I decided to go to business school, but the surprise there was that business school was probably too high level for me. Like, there were so many subjects around like strategic communication and things that were hard to apply on a daily basis, and there wasn't a single class on product management or UX design, digital marketing, data analytics, like some of the skills that that we use on a daily basis. So I found that gap in between engineering and business schools, and that's what we try to do with Product School. It is an online school focused on helping people grow their product career, and we do it in a much more efficient way than traditional education. This is not a 2 or 4-year full-time program. This is literally a 2-month program that you can do on weeknights or weekends, completely compatible with, with work, with life, with other other things that you have going on. And then, and the common ground is that it's focused on product, and all the instructors are real-world product leaders who are actively keeping their full-time jobs. I also want to invite you to continue enjoying all of our free resources at Product School. So in addition to conferences like this one, we also have events every single day. We publish books, reports. We have a job board, a forum. There are multiple avenues for you to connect with peers and continue investing in yourself. Today I'm going to talk about the future of product management. This is a report that we put together with the hope to help the entire product management industry understand what's going to happen in the future and how we can capitalize on the opportunities ahead of us. My name is Carlos and I'm the founder and CEO of Product School. I created this report in collaboration with over 1,500 product leaders across industries, geographies, and levels of seniority. We believe product management is here to stay, and this is not just for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. We also did this in collaboration with 7 incredible companies who are shaping the future of product management, such as Heap, Pendo, Mural, Mixpanel, Chartio, Miro, and Amplitude. Let's dive in. These are the top 5 trends that we noticed in our report. Number 1: Number 1 is that product management is more in demand than ever and salaries are rising. I'll explain that in a second. Number 2 is that the product management career paths are widening and there are more opportunities even within the product team. Number 3 is that companies as a whole are becoming more product-led, and this is not just for the product team, this is for the entire organization. Number 4 is that tools specifically specifically tools for product managers, are becoming more visual and no-code, which is empowering all of us creators to build something regardless of our professional background before we broke into product. Last but not least, lifelong learning is a must. Product managers are hungry and curious, and they want to continue investing in themselves. And this doesn't just apply to the entry-level PMs. This applies to every single step in the career ladder. So let's start from the beginning. What's going on? Why are salaries rising? Why are more and more companies hiring PMs? Well, the oxymoron is that even some companies who might be downsizing due to pandemic and external circumstances, they're still investing in product because more and more businesses are moving online. And more and more teams are working remotely, which means that as a product person, we have a huge opportunity to shape how those companies are going to offer those services online. Design, how teams are going to collaborate, we are at the forefront of innovation. This is happening at high-tech companies, of course, although this is not a secret, but this has been extremely accelerated at other organizations that are going through digital transformation processes in finance, in health tech, in healthcare, insurance, and many other industries. So $159,000 is the median salary for a product manager in San Francisco. Obviously San Francisco is one of the most in-demand markets for product managers. Salaries are also very high, cost of living is also very high, but I think it's a good baseline for all of us to realize that this is happening and that there's a big opportunity. Again, I'm not claiming that this would be the salary in other regions, but I think it's a really good benchmark for all of us. Now if you just look at the US alone, you'll see that the PM salary is around 3x more than the median salary, and that we are at the top 22 in terms of total options or jobs in the US, and there are over 1,000 options, which is something incredible considering that this role of product manager didn't really exist so long ago, or at least it didn't have the same recognition that it has today. Now let's talk about career paths. I think there's a lot of discussion around how to break into product management, which obviously is very important, but I also want to focus the conversation around what's next and how can you continue growing in your career. Well, I like to break this down into 3 main areas. One is entrepreneurship, which is an outlier, and I explain that. And then the other 2 are more traditional within an organization. Common ground is that as a product person, you start as an individual contributor. Some companies offer the associate product manager role, which is fantastic. Other companies don't have that option, in which case the entry-level position would be called product manager. But both associate PM, PM, and senior PM are individual contributor roles, which means is that you are going to be working directly with engineers, with designers, and with business folks to build products. Now here is the key part. At some point you have to decide, do you want to continue growing as an individual contributor, or do you want to become a people manager? There's no right or wrong answer. I think it's just important to understand your options. So if you decide to grow as an individual contributor, that title is typically called Principal Product Manager. Obviously, you will be rewarded, you will have more responsibilities, and you in general will continue growing, but you are going to continue being at the forefront of the action. You're still going to be interacting with designers, engineers, and business folks directly. However, if you choose the people manager path, that next title is typically called Group Product Manager or Director of Product, and at that point you are managing product managers, which is also very intriguing because you might not be as close to the action as you used to be, but you are going to be shaping recruiting, culture, certain processes that will apply across the entire product organization, across your entire portfolio of products. So for people who choose the people manager path, then you can continue growing as a VP of Product and eventually as a Chief Product Officer. Then I put entrepreneurship because there are no rules here. You can become a founder and CEO whenever you want. A lot of— there's a lot of overlap between being a founder and CEO and being a product manager, especially at the early stages of a company. I've seen so many PMs that decide to become founders. I've seen a lot of founders who eventually join large inside your organizations as PMs. So I just wanted to put it out there because that mindset of how to build something, how to put together a team, how to get feedback from a user can apply very well to whatever you decide to do with your career at some point. And by the way, there's no— you are not stuck whatever you choose next. You can always reassess your options. And I think that's the beauty of the product management career. This data is very refreshing. Surgeon because 1 out of 3 companies that we surveyed mentioned that they have a Chief Product Officer. This is fantastic. Back in the day, product, the highest-ranked person in the product team, used to report to the Chief Marketing Officer or to the Chief Technology Officer. That is not true anymore. Now there's a Chief Product Officer that sits at the table with other executives with direct report to the CEO. That ultimately is creating a product culture because it's recognizing that what you are doing is not a sub-team anymore. It's definitely one of the key teams that are shaping the organization. And ultimately, there are a lot of CEOs that actually come from a product background, which I think is the ultimate validation. I love this quote from Elon Musk that says that CEOs should focus more on their products and that the financials come as a result. I believe that's true. I believe that the more CEOs focus on the user first and the long-term success of the user, then the more chances is for a return on investment. But I love that now more CEOs are focusing on the long-term vision of their products and leading with the product and making sure they add value to the user instead of just trying to squish the last penny in the short term. And this correlates to the product-led culture that I've seen in many more organizations. What is product-led? Well, let's start with what is not. A lot of traditional organizations would take more of a sales-led approach, which means that usually users— so there's a big difference between the user, the person who's going to be using the product, and the person who's going to be paying for the product, right? Think of the traditional B2B SaaS model where maybe a CFO would sign the check, but then a different part of the organization is going to use the product that the CFO purchased. Well, in those type of models, there's a lot of interaction between the sales team and the decision maker. And then once it is closed, then the users get imposed a certain tool. Well, that is just not true anymore, and that doesn't scale. We're seeing a new, new breed of companies that are becoming product-led, which means that they are putting the products out there. They're using the product as their forefront. They're letting the users use the product for free. They're letting the users be the growth engine. And of course, eventually that will lead to having conversations with decision makers about upgrading certain tools. But we believe that if you take that bottom-up approach, you let people try and even not just try but use your product, that would lead to just less risky conversations because at the end of the day, if you purchase something for your organization, the worst thing that can happen is that then people don't use it. I will give you an example, Slack, it's ultimately paving the way here. They offer an incredible product that it's free in many cases and allows people to collaborate and be more productive. Eventually, if you feel like you need certain premium features, you will want to upgrade. And obviously, if you have half of the organization or more already using Slack, it's a no-brainer that you eventually will want to upgrade. And Slack is just one example out of many. This is not just for B2B SaaS organizations. They can be applied to so many others. So I like this visual because it puts the user in the middle. Being product-led is not— it's the same as being user-focused. It's not that you have to either put the product or the user. The user is in the middle and the user is getting value through your product. And then the product is powering the rest of the organization, the rest of the teams in your organization. So that means that if you are in a product-led organization working in product,, you're obviously going to have much more decision-making power because what you are doing is ultimately impacting many other business functions. So we surveyed the product leaders in our report and we found out that around 3/4 are either product-led already or moving in that direction. So can't claim that product-led is for everybody, but it's definitely a really valid strategy that is here to stay. And it's already paving the way and showing results. So another trend that is supporting this product-led growth trend is that tools are more no-code than ever. Now anyone can be a creator. You don't need to have a product manager title to build a digital product. Back in the day, if you wanted to use data, for example, you pretty much had to use SQL programming language or had to have a technical background or you had to have to have a good relationship with engineers in order to get what you wanted. Now PMs are creators, are more self-sufficient than ever. They can use tools, they can build something. And of course, eventually you also want to collaborate with other team members, but democratizing access to data, democratizing access to creating things, it's ultimately empowering more and more people to build something and build faster, which is also a competitive advantage in many cases. And last but not least, let's talk about training, lifelong learning specifically. So we realized that almost 80% of the PMs that we surveyed mentioned that learning and development opportunities was their number one perk, even over equity, which is huge. But we also asked them about if their companies actually invested in themselves, and we realized that around around 40% of the companies actually have an education stipend or some sort of investment in their own learning and development. There's a huge disconnection here because if you want to retain talent, if you want to continue growing as a PM, you definitely need to invest. We cannot say, oh, product-led growth, product is the engine of growth for your organization, PMs are paving the way, they are the forefront of innovation, but then at the same time not invest in themselves. So put it differently, no great product manager is ever going to stay in an organization that is not investing in themselves. So that's just some food for thought there. Summary, these are the 5 trends that I highlighted. So salaries and jobs are rising, career paths are widening, businesses are becoming more product-led, tools are becoming more no-code, and lifelong learning is becoming more relevant than ever. I love to say that this is the best time in history to build digital products. I think we have big responsibility now to continue leading innovation at our organizations. And if you enjoyed this presentation and want to download the full report, just scan this QR code or use the URL productschool.com/report and you'll be able to get a free copy. Thank you so much. Okay, Carlos, muchas gracias, really appreciate that. And many people may not know this, but Carlos, I believe, is originally from Spain, so there's a big big European connection to Product School. So folks, next up we have John Cutler. John, are you there? Yes, I am. Can you hear me? I see you now. All good. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, John, yeah, really good. We've talked a few times before online. I suppose my question is maybe introduce yourself and tell us what you're going to talk about today. Sure. My name is John Cutler. I'm a product evangelist at Amplitude. I have a background in product management and UX research and business analyst roles. Sales after a life as a musician in my 20s. What I'm going to talk about today are 6 clear things you can do to reset your product strategy and your roadmap given the change that's happening at the moment in the world. You know, it's a very hectic time, so I'm going to try to give 6 actionable steps leaders can take to just revisit what they're doing, and I'll give you some actionable models. We'll try to share out some of these templates later for folks if they're interested as well. All right, let's jump in. Hopefully you can see my screen at the moment. Yeah, great. So, 6 steps to reset your product strategy and roadmap in 2022, 15 minutes. So my goal today is to give you the advice I'm giving a lot of product leaders in our workshop sessions, but in 15 minutes. So you're going to get just the important details for you to use in your environment. So no fluff in this talk, we're going to get straight to it. The first thing that you're gonna need to do is revisit and clarify strategic assumptions. This is extremely important because many of the things that we thought were unique and specific to our companies, for example, growth opportunities, might not be as special as we thought they were. And many of the things that we thought were ubiquitous and common among our competitors are not. So you can see an activity we do with our customers where on one side we ask them to fill in blanks like blank has been become a commodity muscle, or blank is a generic strategy in this space. Like everyone is riding the shift from coding to low/no-code. Is that good? We could discuss that. And then on the other side, clarifying the things that are unique. So our ability to blank is difficult to copy. So for example, our ability to adapt to different business processes is difficult to copy. And my favorite, it is controversial, but we see blank in the next 3 to 5 years. So the first thing you need to do right now is the assumptions you had last year might, may no longer remain true. And you can assume that your coworkers or your other fellow product leaders get this, but it's good to have a reset on strategic assumptions as soon as possible. As part of that, one thing that you will discover on your team is that things that you agreed to agree on, for example, some part of your value prop, are actually not helpful to agree on anymore. So you can see in this particular chart, we describe whether there's a lot of convergence around the agreement and whether it's important to maintain that or disrupt that. So one thing you're seeing in the marketplace right now is a lot of the things that people people needed to agree on, they actually need to shift down into benefiting from healthy disagreement. You can't hold on to your strong beliefs in 2022. You need to shake up what you believe in. And some of the things that you are benefiting from healthy disagreement on, you have to learn and reduce uncertainty right away. So this is an extension of the beliefs, but one thing you can do on your team right now is really work to understand where you benefit from agreement and where you benefit from continued disagreement and work to try to resolve the gap where it matters. You certainly can't do that across everything you're doing. Okay, number 2, once you've looked at your strategic assumptions, you need to revisit your map, what I call our map from something like your North Star through your inputs to your opportunities. So this is a real-world example from a company. They're in the workflow automation space. They believe their North Star are these effectively, you know, run automations, which is ironic because most people want people to use your product more. This company wants them to use their product less because they're running automations for people. But when I say create the map and revisit the map, start with your idea of what predicts long-term sustainable growth, something like this healthy completed workflows, and then progressively break that down into parts of the puzzle, the breadth, the completion of those workflows, the speed of those workflows. And then you can see that this map is pretty deep. We go all the way down to things like a good example is speed is a function of the duration of completed workflows, which is a function of response times. And then importantly, the stuff you want to build or think you need to build is right there. That's the leaves of your map. So make sure that you've clarified the stable things in your product strategy of how you view the world before you jump down into thinking about your particular roadmap. So number 2, create a map from your North Star through the various inputs that you have down to these opportunities that you have. Simple map like this can do wonders for realigning and aligning your team during a period of uncertainty. Number 2. Oh, actually, I, I use the Amplitude example all the time for our map. You know, at Amplitude, our unique strategic idea is that we're here to help product teams, collaborative product teams learn quickly, deliver with confidence, you know, improve the business prospects of their company. Our North Star is weekly learning users, and we are able to break that down into things like activating accounts, broadcasting learnings to other users. So Adam and I are on the same team. I send Adam a dashboard, he checks it out. That would be a broadcasted learning. And consumption of learnings would be Adam shares it with his team and they view it every day thereafter for the year. Those are consumption of learnings. So you can see it's a map, but clarifying this, whether you download our North Star playbook or use whatever method you want, can go an extremely long way. Number 3, consider the shape of your bets. Now, this will seem like an, you know, if you're used to the idea of effort versus value, one of the most important things you need to think about for product is that it's just not that simple. And let me explain. There are times when you have a very valuable opportunity, you know that there's a lot of value. So this, let's say our confidence is right here. We have a lot of opportunity. And we know that we can experiment. So there's a lot of opportunities to experiment. So maybe it's very friendly to experiment. And frankly, at this point, we're not quite sure how long it will take. So you can imagine there's a pretty wide band right here. But we are fairly confident that a solution exists. But we have no idea how to solve it right now. So the important part thinking about the things that are on your roadmap is not everything needs to be 100% certain about what you're doing. You need to consider the shape of the particular bets that you're thinking about. So for example, at Amplitude, we might have a bet around presenting interesting charts immediately during the onboarding flow. That's a known opportunity. It's fairly experimentation-friendly. We can back out of it if we need to. We know that there's opportunities there. We're going to approach that in a very different way than something where we have— is not experimentation-friendly, and we're not really quite sure the opportunity size. So the next thing you need to do is consider the shape of the work that you have on your roadmap and think about how those shapes complement. Complement each other. A useful technique too is to think about the risks that are involved. So everyone says, well, what's the risk with product? Well, maybe people don't use it. It's actually more interesting and complex than that. We might pick the wrong persona. We might pick the wrong user objective. We might design the wrong thing. We might not be able to produce the thing that we designed. We might produce the perfect thing, but no one can see it. We might produce the perfect thing, but it doesn't actually create the impact we expected, the business impact we expected. It works, but it doesn't cohere with other things we've built into the product. That's cohesion risk. It works, but we can't scale it. That's scalability risk. It works theoretically, but we can't measure to know if it works. Well, that's problematic. It works, but it ruins the team's morale. Well, that's a big risk. We don't want that to happen. And maybe it works, but frankly, there were better things to work on. So we'll share this list afterwards with you all. But once you thought about the different, the sort of shape of the bets that you have, it's important to think about what risks might be involved. So you can see right here, you know, I mentioned the amplitude map. We're able to fit map bets into our map. So here we have a bet, present interesting charts immediately during onboarding flow. Our target inputs are activating accounts, ease of ingestion, time to first insight, and this— we've sort of set this bet up in a way that we can have a set of OKRs related to it. Okay, great. You've revisited your strategic assumptions, you've considered the shapes of the bets, you've created a map, you've fit your bets into your map in a way that makes sense, But here's one of the critical things to think about as we progress through this year. And this is the step of rebalancing your portfolio of bets. So I've basically done a lot of this talk to set up the concepts here, but hopefully you'll understand. So if you imagine a range of bets, and so A are things that there's an uncertain opportunity, there's uncertain solutions, there's no clear place to start. If you're a startup, startup, this is your world. Actually, in the A world at the moment, if you're a very early startup. Well, B is uncertain opportunity with potential, certain places to start learning. So you can see how our confidence levels creep up. C, there's a big certain opportunity, we can see it, but we have no idea how to solve it, but we can take repeated attempts to solve it. Going down, man, there's kind of pretty good opportunity, We're kind of sure of the solutions. We know of low-hanging fruit. Okay, you can see how confidence is going up. Finally, down at the bottom, you have these high certainty, small opportunities. Everyone generally knows how to solve them, but you think you're nearing a local maximum. So what's happened with the economic situation at the moment, and as we progress down into the pandemic, is that a lot of companies were actually functioning in many ways, they had these uncertain bets or there's so much pressure to just keep growing and keep growing and keep going up into the right, that they're sort of all over the map. They weren't really considering how they were balancing their profile. So what you got is you got a lot of poor focus. They had a lot of question marks about the risk exposure because frankly, Honestly, lots of things were working during the pandemic. So one thing to think about as you've sort of done these other steps is what is the right balance for your portfolio at the moment? So for example, I would say that for early-stage startups, if we consider a line here, a lot of the stuff you're doing is up in this category, up in this area here. Now, as you're progressing, one thing that you saw with companies that didn't really take any calculated risks during the pandemic is that everything they were doing was kind of middling. It was sort of like this. They weren't really taking any big bets. They weren't really kind of eking things out. They were just chasing their tail. So if you are more of a later middle or later stage startup at this point, you could think about, you wanna balance this bet where you basically have a little bit more exposure across the different bet types, um, as you're balancing it. So maybe for example, 20% up here at the top and then maybe 80% down at the bottom. That's pretty classic, but you can kind of mix it that way. So finally, you've rebalanced your portfolio of bets, and you noticed how I use the different shapes of bets that we had. I have about a minute left, so I'll just finish. The final thing you need to do is get moving. A lot of companies right now are paralyzed into inaction. They have these interim product strategies. They're so worried about what's going to happen that they're just not really getting the engine And so I just put this at the end that you got to get those teams here. Our team is the Hex Pistols. They have a mission matching first-time users with their first project. They have a clear target input called project matching success rate, and they're just moving work across the board, right? They're trying things, they're reviewing what they're trying. They have a balanced portfolio of bets. And of course, hopefully they're using Amplitude or something. My preference is that you use amplitude to understand the impact of what you're doing. So hopefully in 15 minutes I've given you— let me give you the overview very, very quickly. What you need to do right now is revisit your strategic assumptions. Let go, because 2021 and before is gone. Challenge the beliefs that you need to challenge. 2, 3, Map out world the way that you see it, going from, you know, the North Star things you have down to the leaves, the actions or the opportunities that you have. Finally, consider the shape of your bets differently than just effort versus value. Where are there opportunities that are big, that are experimentation-friendly, that you can pivot when you need to, that will allow— that you don't need to know how to solve everything. But if you can line up those teams on those big opportunities that are experimentation-friendly, you'll do great. Next, consider it— this is a messy drawing, but rebalance or at least think about the balance of your portfolio of bets. A lot of companies, just everything, they say, "Well, everything's certain. We wouldn't be working on it if it wasn't certain." Well, if you take no risks, you'll have no upside. And if you don't build your base of these D, E, and F work, you'll be flailing around all the time in uncertainty. So at least At least be intentional about the balancing of the portfolio bets and then get teams moving. Okay, thank you. That was really cool. Thank you. And, uh, that was my— the first time I saw miro.com. That was really— that's a really cool— oh, I'm— I, I like Live and Die by Miro. I mean, that's— we use that in all our workshops. I even did a North Star workshop for Varun and team. So yeah, they're right. Yeah, we love them. Yeah, I'm gonna check it out. They're coming up at After our next speaker, we have someone from Europe, but yeah, really cool. Nice. So thank you, John, really appreciate it. And next up, we have Clement from Product Teacher. And Clement, I'll just introduce you. You're the founder of Product Teacher, a PM education firm that's providing product management coaching for startups, scale-ups, and established companies. What's one learning you found in your coaching practice that would be valuable for the European audience? Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me. Super, super glad to be here. And yeah, it's just been really amazing to see product management continue to grow as a profession, both here in the United States as well as in Europe. Just really thinking about all of the different engagements that I've had in terms of working alongside different product teams, one really key learning that I want to share with all of you is really the importance of context for your product processes. And so you might be asking, wait a second, process, but product managers are building products, right? Like, what about— what's this about processes? Well, really, the key thing to remember, right, is product managers, we're not just building products, we're actually shipping processes and cultures. And it's these processes and cultures that actually enable companies to build winning products, right? It's exactly like what John was going through, right? Kind of by really understanding, well, how are we thinking about our strategies and our bets? That's what actually builds a company and builds a product. And so a regular mistake that I see from different product teams is that is that sometimes they'll import in a process from elsewhere, but not really fine-tune it to their specific context. And that just creates a world of hurt, right? I've seen, you know, really, really small startups try to import in these really large spec reviews, right? Maybe from Google or Facebook or Amazon. And it works for a really big company, but just doesn't really work for a really small startup. Or I'll see, you know, really large organizations try to build a roadmap the way that a startup might build it, but it also doesn't work in that context, right? And so, Gwen, We're using the wrong processes for the wrong context. It creates a lot of friction, right? The process winds up not working. It slows down the product team. It hurts trust, right? Product managers just don't get the momentum that they need. Stakeholders are wondering, well, why are we doing this stuff, right? Like, it just doesn't really work for us. And so we need to make sure that when we're thinking about, well, what processes are we going to be implementing, it needs to work for our context, right? And what I'm not saying— I'm not saying that you need to go and reinvent the wheel, right? I'm not saying that, hey, you need to come up with your own way of your own way of doing a spec review or your own way of coming up with a roadmap. Not at all. We should take inspiration from existing processes. But really, the key for all of our product leaders here today is to treat our designers, engineers, our product managers as customers of the product process. Because we can't build winning products without designers, engineers, and product managers. And so our processes need to empower them to do their best work. And so what that means is that anytime we're looking anytime we're trying to adopt a new tool, or even if we're looking at an existing tool or process, right, we should be conducting customer interviews with design, engineering, and product. And by doing so, that's how we're going to really understand, well, what are their pain points? What are their frictions, their goals, their motivations? We can incorporate these different insights into a process that's going to work for our specific context as an organization. And really, that just applies all across different product processes. Right? We're doing sprint planning, retrospectives, user research, data analytics, strategic planning. All these things and more will all benefit from us having more empathy for design, engineering, and product. And so it's exactly like what Spenser mentioned at the start. By focusing on solving the pains of our customers— where here I'm redefining customer not just as our product's external users, but also our internal colleagues, right? By solving these pains, that's how we strengthen our products, and that's how we strengthen our company. So as your product function continues to grow and mature, you want to just make sure that you're revisiting those processes and tools, right? You want to look at, well, okay, I've got these different tools that I'm using, I've got these different processes in place. Well, how can I maximize their effectiveness more, right? If we're targeting a totally different audience, right? We were originally B2C and now we're B2B, right? Or whether we were SMB and now we're going to enterprise. Well, in this new context, in this new world, right, maybe we've gone through mergers and acquisitions, maybe we've got these different partners, What are the things that we might need to tweak a little bit so that way it really works for our team? And we also want to think about, well, how does the product org engage with other functions— sales, marketing, customer success— because that way, that's how we're going to build trust. That's how we're going to build deep collaboration and enable us to all build the best results. So to be clear, I'm not saying, right, like, go and take months and months and months of time to document all of your different processes and tools, right? Like, that's not helpful. That's not where the return on investment is. Is, just a quick informal review of, well, hey, you know, here are the things that we're currently using, and I think these different pieces could be improved. That's going to really help for organizations of honestly any size, whether you're a one-person startup or whether you've got thousands of employees, right? Really, just to bring up Jamie's previous example, just because you have enough tools to capture data, you know, that's not enough on its own. We need to think about, well, as a product leader, we need to help other people succeed, and that means that we need to make our processes accessible. Accessible and valuable, right? So how do they actually take these insights that they're getting from the data and use that to make good decisions, right? How do they collaborate? How do they learn together? And so it's really all about, well, we've got these different tools, we've got these different processes, but do they really work for our internal colleagues, right? Does it really work for us as an organization? So if you're not sure, you know, how to get started on this kind of review, well, you're not alone. There are lots of external experts, right? You know, Jon included. Who can really help to fine-tune processes, really help you to think about, well, what are the tools and the processes and the context that we're working in, so that way we can really maximize the impact of our work. So just for everyone here today, you're going to be learning some really amazing things about the conference. You've already learned about product analytics, product market fit, product strategy. You'll be learning about product-led growth. As you do all of this, just really keep in mind, how are you going to bring these insights back to your organization for your specific context? Context. Because by making sure that you're fine-tuning it for your context, you're really going to maximize the chances that your team's going to successfully use these insights and build lasting winning products that really empower your customers and your company to succeed. So that's my 5-minute talk. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you, Clement. That's really, really good. Thanks so much. Right on time as well. And next up, folks, we're going to have Puket Agarwal, a co-founder and CEO of Chameleon. Hi everyone, great to, great to see you. I'd love to share my screen. I don't know if I can do that, Adam. Yeah, I've just made you a co-host. Okay, fantastic. So I'm going to talk about some user onboarding mistakes. It's a topic I love talking about. At Chameleon, we've helped companies build lots of user onboarding tools. We've seen good things and bad things. And so let's talk a little bit about about what goes wrong. So here are the top mistakes that I've seen. First one is that you interrupt users, and often it's like immediately interruptive. A user starts or signs up for a product, and before they're able to even get context, they get hit with a welcome tool. And we did a webinar, we asked folks how many people exit those welcome tours, and it was a shocking 91% of people. So beware, don't hit people with welcome tours immediately as they start with a product because they need to get a sense of, get some familiarity with the product. It's kind of like showing, hitting them with a manual for a toy before they get to see the toy. So beware of interrupting users and try to find more subtle ways to let them choose to start a tour or give, you know, give them options to join. Another mistake that people make a lot is showing and telling. Like you're like, okay, I'm gonna show you everything in the product. There's all these different features and you go through a long process to show people. But actually when you're showing people all these things, they're having to almost remember that in their temporary memory and they're having to remember all these different things that increases anxiety. And so avoid Avoid showing a lot of stuff and focus on how do we get people to take key actions and how do we help them bridge the problems that they might have to take that action. So avoid showing lots of things, focus on clear signposting to an action. Another common mistake is that you as a product team or we as a product people guess at what the problem is in the onboarding. And so you throw paint against the wall. So you're like, okay, well, people aren't finding value. And there's drop-off. So let me just show you everything where there's value. Or like, hey, here are all the valuable things. I think I'm just going to show you it all. And that's not very sophisticated. What you really want to do is figure out, okay, well, people are dropping off because they're not finding value, but why are they coming in and what's the gap to finding that value? Is it that they don't understand a key term? Is it that they have to make a decision that's hard for them to make? Is it that they think the investment cost is too high? And then speak to those specific frictions. So instead of guessing like, oh, people aren't finding value, let me show you everything, focus on finding the specific frictions and speak to those. Another mistake is explaining obvious UI. I see this often as well. It's like there's a big button on the— in your page which is Get Started, and people are highlighting that button. It's like, click here to get started. Or you have a form field which is like, put in your name and so on, and then you have a little tooltip. This is where you enter your name. Like all of that is detracting from your efforts to onboard people because it's gonna frustrate a user. The reason that they're not putting their name in is not because they don't know to put their name in, it's because there's some other friction where they don't, they're not committed or they're not motivated. So don't try to brute force progress and engagement by re-explaining stuff that should be obvious in your UI. I always use any supplemental information by in helping show show tips, advice, guidance, things that aren't obvious from the UI. Often user onboarding, there isn't any component of self-service. So it's like you get hit with a tour or you get hit with guidance, then you finish it or it goes away and then you're done. You can't get it back, you can't decide when you want to learn, you can't, you know, there's no options. So find ways to let people opt back into it either at a later stage or from the beginning. Another mistake is that because we're putting, we're creating user onboarding with our product hats, we're often focus on the how, like how should someone solve this? How should they do it? And actually, because people spend less and less time on marketing websites and they're in the product really quickly, they're trying to evaluate and assess, we have to put our marketing hats on a little bit and explain benefits and really focus on the copy. Anything that you're building around your user onboarding, like get your copywriters, your marketers to review it because focusing on benefits and copy is key. Another mistake I see is like onboarding that isn't very bold or exciting or bright. Now, if you look at examples from Slack they have really bright colors, they really bring it to the forefront, grab attention. So people know, okay, this is what I need to look at or look for. And I'm excited and interested in looking at this. But if you have like white tooltips on a white background app, people miss it. No one really cares. It doesn't look good. So make it bright and exciting. And then the last one, of course, for any process is set and forget. You build it and then you let it go and then you come back to it in 9 months, but really should be an iterative process of try to learn from it and try to improve it. So that's the end of the talk. Happy to take any questions. Brilliant, thank you very much, Pulkit, really appreciate it. And yes, if you have any questions, folks, you can ask them in the chat box. So next up we have Shipra Kayan, Product Evangelist at Miro. And perhaps you can let us know what you're gonna talk about first. Thank you. Sure, hi everyone. It was so fun to see Jon Cutler using Miro his presentation, I will do it as well. I'm going to talk a little bit about alignment and collaboration that you're supposed to drive as a product manager and some of the pitfalls and how we do it today. So I spent a lot of time looking at job descriptions for product managers, and there's always words like this. Your job is to align, to collaborate, to bring people together. But a lot of times we end up building presentations, right? Instead of facilitating the meeting, we have our great idea, we make our prioritization, we make all the decisions, and we build a presentation to influence and convince others to follow us. Tell me, like, I'd love a show of hands in the chat if you guys want to talk about, you know, like, do you do this? How many presentations have you built in the last month? That would be lovely. Like 5, 6, I don't know. I know when I was a product manager, I was building a lot of presentations. So what I'd like to talk to you about is, yes, many, is another way to approach collaboration and alignment, which of course at Miro we follow, is using facilitation. So this means instead of, trying to have all the answers and sort of influencing others, you try and bring about an outcome. You facilitate the decision-making with key stakeholders in your group. Now, I'll very quickly go through an anatomy of a well-facilitated meeting. So this looks very different from a presentation and then asking for feedback, right? So you start If you want, let's say next time you have a product review or something like that, you want to start with what is the conclusion you want to drive towards and how are you going to get there, right? So let's say the conclusion is that you've identified all the risks and dependencies. How do you get there? You start with context, ideally a pre-read, ideally a pre-read. Put that presentation together, send it out as a pre-read, or spend the first 5 minutes of a meeting having everyone read You don't have to walk through it. And then the majority of the meeting is a diverge-converge cycle. You've gathered these people together hopefully because they have, they're gonna have an impact on your product decision-making. What is the one question you wanna ask them to diverge? So it shouldn't be, what do you think, right? Like, what do you think? Do you have any feedback? Those questions aren't very specific. Vague, they don't tell the listener what kind of feedback you want. Do you see any unforeseen dependencies? That's a really nice, compact, specific question. So I spend a lot of time thinking about the question I'm going to ask in a meeting, and then I give the team— I want to give the team some time to diverge, to generate unforeseen dependencies perhaps, and then and then use some frameworks to converge them, to bring them towards each other into a decision, and ending with that conclusion that you wanted when you designed this meeting. So I'll kind of share some of my methods with y'all since I have 5 minutes, but I'll share this board. It has some examples of moving through this diverge-converge cycle. The way I usually will diverge and converge, context of we want to identify all the dependencies, start with a very clear question. How do you— what are the unforeseen dependencies? How might we fail? Whatever it is, give people some time to silently brainstorm. Of course, I would say use Miro, but whatever, Google Doc or Microsoft Word or whatever, any kind of shared co-authoring space, allow You want people to silently come up with the dependencies individually, right? This removes the hippo problem where the SVP says something banal and it creates a fire, you know, it creates a little firestorm, whereas, you know, perhaps the new engineer on the team really sees an important dependency. And you, as a facilitator, you want to synthesize, discuss. I use heat maps, round robin. To help with discussions. You might want to vote or prioritize. And note that voting or prioritizing using 2x2s, voting, scoring matrices, whatever you want, is not the same as decision-making. You want to keep the decision-making separate. The meeting is about getting everyone's point of view, and then you make the decision. Make it after you've slept on it if you need to. But yeah, I really would urge you all to think about facilitating a meeting instead of presenting the next time you need to make a decision. And I will pause here. I don't know how many minutes that was, Adam, but back to you. Thank you so much. I think it was just right. So folks, next up we have our last live speaker, Mike Belsito, a co-founder of Product Collective. He is also co-organizer of Industry: The Product Conference. And Mike, you'll be speaking about mistakes that product people make. Yeah, thanks very much, Adam. I really appreciate you having me here. And yeah, you know, as organizer of both the Product Collective community, which there's 40,000+ product people throughout the world, and the, I think, over a dozen conferences we put on since we founded Product Collective, I've had a chance to interview quite a few product people. And almost every single time I interview them, whether it's for our podcast or the video interviews we do, I always ask about about mistakes that either they've made or that they've seen. I know personally I've made a ton of mistakes in my product career. And so there's a few that have stood out to me. And so I'm going to share, you know, those leaders that I had a conversation with and what those mistakes were. Just a few. I think I've learned dozens of mistakes out there that I've kind of jotted down, but, but a few really came to mind. I remember one, Josh Annan. He's a product leader at Roblox.. And one of the things he brought up to me was that it's really important not to personally take anything that you do. Product managers, I like to work, you know, what we're doing. But the reality is, so does our team. So do the product designers that we're working with. So do the engineers. And if we go into a conversation with those teams thinking that we have all the answers, and if we've closed off of our— if we've closed off our mind, uh, to not be open-minded to think about answers that they might have to problems that we're dealing with, we're doing ourselves a disservice. So that mistake is being overly prescriptive. And I'd encourage everybody to try to have more open mind as working with our product teams and, and try to assume that maybe the best answer doesn't, uh, rely on you. And it doesn't need you to be the one to come up with it. So that's one mistake. A couple more that I'll share. One came from Jeff Morris Jr. Jeff is the founding partner of Chapter One, which is an early-stage investment firm. And he let me know that so many early products, they try to do so many things for so many people. So think of this in the very early stages of development for a product, or maybe even as a company, company, those early start days. Those are the days I really love actually. But oftentimes when we're launching new products at that stage, we try to feature pack it. We try to match up to those big competitors we're trying to compete with and go feature for feature. And by the way, we have one more feature. We have two extra better features than this other competitor. That's a mistake. What Jeff suggested is be the best in the world at one particular thing. Don't worry about out, going feature to feature with, with your competitor there, but really be the best in the world at, at one or two things and, and really go be a big mistake. A couple more to share. I know we only have a few minutes here. So let's see, I'm gonna go with JJ Rory. JJ is great. She actually just wrote a new book. She's the CEO of Great Product Management. And I had a conversation with her for one of our industry interview, live video chats on coaching product people. It's something we all have to do if we become product leaders. And I'm not talking about product coaches. Um, that's a cool thing too, right? I know plenty of product coaches as well. But when we become a product leader and all of a sudden we're more concerned with the teams that we're leading rather than the products that we're managing, we end up taking on a lot more responsibilities, and coaching is one of them. The mistake is assuming that what worked well for that person is going to work well for the other people that we're coaching as well. We might have a product team. Let's just say there's 10 product managers that we're trying to lead. These people are on our team. We have figured out a great way to mentor one of those product managers, to coach one of those product managers. But if we try to use that exact same way for product manager number 2, it might fall completely flat. And why is that? Because everybody's different, right? I mean, it's kind of common sense when you think about it. Everybody is so different and so they need different things. So when we're thinking about coaching people, this is true if you're a product leader or really any kind of manager, the way you coach one person, it's going to probably be different to the way you're going to coach another person as well. So, that's another mistake I'll share. I'm going to go with one more here. And it has to do with prioritization. And I'm going to share this one because I don't know about you, but for me, prioritization has never been a strong point. I try to make it a strong point. I've tried to make lists and, you know, I'll build a list up with 100 different things on that list for how I'm going to prioritize my day. Day. And then I'll do 10 of them and I'll end the day feeling bad about myself because I only got 10 things done. I had 100 things on the list. Well, Sophie Lalonde, she's the senior product manager at Productboard. And she says that what I was doing was actually a big mistake. The biggest mistake when it comes to prioritization is trying to prioritize 100 different things. You probably need to reconsider what it is that you're trying to accomplish because you're overdoing it. Instead, make that one— maybe you approach a day and say, hey, look, what's the one big thing I want to do today? If I did that one thing, would it be a win? And make that the— above everything else, that's the thing you're going to prioritize. If you could get that thing done, your day is a win. Everything else is a bonus. And so, yes, we're busy product people. We're trying to do so much. That's great. That is— that's our nature. Sure. But if we try to kid ourselves into believing we can do 100 things a day, we're going to let ourselves down day after day after day. So yeah, Adam, when you— we were talking about this topic, I was thinking mistakes product people make. There's loads of other mistakes. We talk about them all the time in our industry interviews. So I definitely invite people to, you know, get involved with Product Collective. Come to our conferences. You know, we have Industry, the product conference this September. In Cleveland, Ohio, but also next March in Dublin, Ireland. It's the return of our in-person there. And believe me, we'll talk about plenty more mistakes there. But I hope for now, I hope that this was helpful. Yeah, thank you, Mike. And what dates in March in Dublin do you know? Yeah, it's March 20th to the 21st, um, actually March 20th to the 22nd. 3 days. There's a day of pre-conference workshops and there's 2 full days in Dublin, Ireland at the historic RDS venue there. So we're excited to get back. Cool. So March 17th, come to Dublin, folks, for St. Patrick's Day, and then 2 or 3 days later we can go to the conference. Well, look, exactly. Look, Mike, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And folks, now we just have 2 more talks. One is 5 minutes long, another is 15 minutes long. Really good. They've been pre-recorded just for this conference, and I'll share them with you now. Adrienne is co-founder of Product Women, among many other initiatives, and she'll be speaking for 5 minutes, and it's a really, really good talk. I hope you all enjoy it. Thanks for having me, Adam. Here are my top 10 tips to live your product leadership skills. Good leadership is a difficult practice. Good product leadership is even more so. Good product leadership is more difficult to pursue when we couple the challenges of practicing good leadership with the challenges of practicing product management. Product leaders have to navigate both. They're on a tightrope, pedaling hard to be a good leader in the organization, carrying a deep well of practice knowledge and skills, while simultaneously protecting and empowering their team teams to be able to discover and deliver valuable products. Not only do product leaders have to lead the organization and their teams, their product leadership credibility lies in the technical product know-how and their ability to converse in the product language with authority. So here are 10 tips in no particular order to help you lift your product leadership skills. Number 1, take stock of the types of skills you use to do your job. Your job is to step out of the day-to-day and lead. That requires a whole lot of adaptive or human skills such as problem solving, communication, and empathy. If you are using more of your functional or technical skills to do your job, you'll need to change your Habits. Don't fall back into the product manager role. Tip number 2: Continue to learn about product management. That means you'll read books, attend conferences, source case studies, ask for help, and invest time networking with other product leaders. While you won't be doing hands-on product work, you'll be coaching your product team to do the work. Your credibility as a product leader lifts when you know tools that can help draw out insights and you can assess and resequence product tasks. Tip number 3: Diarize how you react and respond in conversations and to feedback. Great product leaders Leaders are self-aware. You should know and acknowledge the triggers that cause you stress or angst. Prepare a set of responses ahead of time so that you can remain calm and reply appropriately. Tip number 4, set the vision and strategy. Work with your team to set the portfolio or product vision and create a Resilient strategy. These will become the guardrails for the efforts and the outcomes that your teams will deliver over the course of the year. Tip number 5: course correct misalignment. Listen and watch for day-to-day tasks and conversations that are misaligned with the vision and the strategy. Stop the work immediately early and realign the team's efforts and behaviors. If you don't, you'll have a bigger problem to unravel later. Tip number 6: Coach and build confidence in your teams. Do this by asking questions. It isn't about telling your teams what to do, but about asking the right questions to enable team members to solve the problems themselves. Asking good questions builds the learning muscle for both you as a leader and the team. Tip number 7, speak financial and commercials. You absolutely need to know how your products and the broader business makes money. You cannot grow as a leader if you don't know how to draw insights from a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. You should be able to converse with the executive team and peers about commercial relationships and the impact it has on the business. Tip number 8: Tell a damn good story. Storytelling builds your influence, which engenders trust in your capability. Tip number 9: Work closely with your peers. Don't forget that as a product leader, the team you lead are not your peers. Your peers are leaders in other teams such as engineering, marketing, and sales. Your job as a product leader is to collaborate with your peers to drive the growth of the business. Tip number 10: Be kind to yourself. We're human, even leaders, so don't beat yourself up when you make mistakes. Take a breath and be gentle with yourself. Thanks for having me, Adam. Hi everyone, my name is Adam Greco and I'm a product evangelist at Amplitude. In this session, session called Producting. I'm going to talk a little bit about what I believe is the future of product and marketing and how product and marketing teams are going to have to change a little bit in the future. So let's kick things off with a real-world story. Back in 2010, I worked for Salesforce.com. I was in the marketing group and it was in charge of digital analytics. My team was responsible for driving people to our website and to try to get them to fill out a free trial form, which in many respects was an early version of product-led growth. Our team had a really good insight into understanding SEO, paid search, email, all the different marketing channels that we could use to get people to the website. Our North Star metric was cost per lead. However, once people filled out the form, we had no visibility visibility into what happened during the free trial. We weren't able to put our marketing analytics product within the free trial experience. Now the free trial experience was owned by the product team. The product team had their own tools to figure out the telemetry and what was happening within the product experience. Their North Star metric was to figure out how do they get the most number of people who start the free trial to become customers. So we both had our own kind of metrics and analytics, and we both had our north star metrics, but they were very separate between marketing and product. Now, as I look back on this situation over a decade later, I start to think about all of the things that we kind of did wrong back then. If you think about the fact that marketing and product weren't talking to each other, there were specific issues in the customer experience that were driven by this lack of collaboration. Let's go through a couple of them. First, if someone would've searched for, say, customer service on Google, we would've known from a marketing perspective what they searched on. But then when they dropped into the free trial experience, we wouldn't have put them into the customer service module at Salesforce. We would've always defaulted them to the sales module, which was our most popular module. There was no way that the product team was dynamic enough to be able to understand where they had come from, from marketing to, to customize their experience. Another thing that's interesting is I had no insight as a marketer about the people who disengage during the free trial. Let's imagine that someone started the free trial and then maybe after a week or two, they just stopped using it. The product team was really not in a position to market to that person and kind of reengage them via email or other channels because that's not really what they do, even though we could have done that in marketing, but we had no communication about the people that were disengaging. Another thing that's interesting is marketing had no insight into the product features that were being used in the free trial most often and which ones are leading to conversion. If we would've had that information, that would've been gold for us to figure figure out what features we should highlight in our marketing campaigns or what features we should highlight on the website. But we just didn't have that visibility. And lastly, what if marketing would have known which specific free trial prospects or customers turned into customers? And that would have been amazing because we would have been able to backtrack and say, if we knew that customer A or B or C came from a certain marketing campaign, we could have doubled down on that marketing campaign, but we just didn't know which people ultimately became customers. So these are just a couple examples of things that could have been improved if we would've had more collaboration between marketing and product, and if we would've actually considered the full digital experience. Now that it's a decade later and thinking about that Salesforce experience, and all the conversations that I've had with customers lately, it's become apparent to me that the old paradigm will not work in the future. Things are just moving too quickly in the digital world. Organizations have to stop thinking about acquisition being in marketing and retention and engagement being in product and having those two silos. Customers need to be put at the center in organizations need to combine acquisition, engagement, and retention. Customer-first companies are going to have to focus on engaging and really optimizing the entire customer experience. Part of this starts with just thinking about the kind of metrics that each team is working towards. In marketing, we tend to focus a lot more kind of above the line. We're looking at kind of the visits, the page views, the unique visitors. Sometimes people call these vanity metrics, but a lot of these are trying to figure out how are we acquiring people and how are they initially interacting with our digital properties. Then if you kind of think about the below the line metrics, once they're actually using your digital products, your digital properties, you're getting into more metrics metrics that the product teams care about— retention, engagement, customer lifetime value. But these have oftentimes been treated as disparate metrics. But really, the future needs to focus on all of these metrics holistically because there is interplay between the acquisition metrics and the retention metrics. And those companies that can really pull through all of these and look at them in a more holistic manner are going to be more more successful ultimately. But one of the problems that is holding organizations back is that there is just a massive lack of collaboration between product and marketing teams. I hear this over and over as I talk to organizations, that these teams are operating in silos much as they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago. A good example of this was a little experiment that one of my my colleagues and I did. John Cutler is a well-known product evangelist. He's really well known in the product world by lots of folks. I think he has something like 80,000 followers on LinkedIn. I'm somewhat well known in the digital marketing space. I have about maybe 20,000 LinkedIn followers. We both did a similar survey on LinkedIn and were amazed at how similar the results were. Basically asked product— John asked product people, I asked marketing people, you know, how often are you collaborating with the other group? And the statistics came back so interestingly similar. Over 50% of the time, marketers and product teams agreed that they had either a bad or an unhealthy relationship. Another interesting data point is when I first joined Amplitude, John and I compared our network networks and looked at how many people we had in common, and I only had 85 common LinkedIn connections with John Cutler out of 20,000 and 80,000. So clearly these two groups are living in different worlds. Now, there are a lot of reasons why product and marketing teams don't collaborate. A lot of times they're not aligned on the target personas or profiles that they're going after, and the organization sometimes puts in front of them different objectives or different KPIs. They also have their own view of the overall customer journey. You know, marketing teams are focused on the beginning of the journey. Product teams oftentimes are focused on what happens after they go through the marketing sequence. And a lot of times they don't trust each other's insights. They might be using different numbers, different analytics Analytics products and so on. But they also don't have an opportunity to work together to think holistically about where they should be using all of their talents. They have great engineers, designers, marketers, but if none of them are talking to each other, they're not really taking full advantage of the resources that they have for the organization. And ultimately it's the customer who suffers. There's usually a mid or long-term negative consequence of these teams not collaborating. What's so frustrating about this situation is that both product and marketing have the same long-term objectives. They want to get new customers. They want to make sure customers have good experiences. They want to retain customers. But the thing is, they look at it from a different lens. You know, marketers are just much more focused on certain things like the, how do I optimize my marketing spend? How do I look at what people are doing in campaigns? And then product teams are focused more on where should I be placing my bets? Where should I be investing my time on? What features? And so on. So the frustrating part is that they all have the same goals, but they just generally use different tactics. So how do we fix this? How do we get product teams and marketing teams to work together? I believe that the answer is this concept I call producting, really the merging of product and marketing teams. I think a decade from now, you're gonna see that both the CMO and the CPO are gonna ultimately report up to the CXO, kind of the customer experience officer, who sees overall experience that customers are going through. Of course, that's going to take a lot of change management. It's going to take a lot of process change, and it's going to take a lot of structural change. So I believe it's going to take kind of a decade for that to really work its way through the organization. But today I want to share with you some tips and ideas of things that I think you can do to start this process now and to try to get product and marketing get product and marketing teams to start working together. I think the first thing that you can do to get product and marketing teams to work together is to focus on a comprehensive customer journey map. A lot of times the marketing team doesn't really understand what happens after they acquire customers, and the product team doesn't understand how hard it is to acquire customers. But if you can get both teams together to go through every step that the customer is forced to go through, there may be opportunities for them to see how they could streamline that process and really just better appreciate what each team brings to bear and to start to build kind of mutual respect and trust. Along the same lines might be working towards a common KPI or North Star metric. If you can bring the product and marketing teams together, to do a workshop where they identify a metric that really helps both teams, that could be a great way for them to rally together, collaborate, and start building that kind of teamwork and collaboration that you're looking for. Another common problem that I see is that the break or silos between product and marketing leads organizations to using multiple digital analytics products. Products. This can make things even worse. For example, Walmart is using Content Square to do session replay analysis. On their website, they're using Adobe Analytics for marketing analytics. They use Amplitude to do mobile app analytics, and they use a vendor called Split to do experimentation and recommendations. When organizations use multiple analytics products, there are a ton of negative consequences. First, each customer is split up into different profiles in each analytics product. So it makes it difficult to really understand the full journey they're going through or personalizing that across different platforms. If you want to take a segment or cohort of users and analyze them, it's really difficult because they might do certain things on the website and certain things in the mobile app, and you have that split up into different products. It also means that your analysts have to learn different products, one for web, one for app, and so on. Plus, your organization is paying for multiple analytics products, which doesn't make sense. And oftentimes you have competing metrics. You might have the same metric that is on the website, in the mobile app, and now you've got product teams and marketing teams that are basically arguing over which metric is right. All of this leads leads to a lack of trust and just lots of problems. Another thing you can do to build trust and collaboration between the marketing and product teams is to identify as many joint use cases as possible. These are situations where both teams are benefiting from collaborating. Some examples I can think of off the top of my head is maybe the product team identifies certain, some churn patterns and then collaborates with marketing to resurrect users that they think are likely to churn. Another might be that marketing helps raise awareness of new product features that the product team is frustrated that people aren't taking advantage of, or the product team might identify the best users of the product and then send them to the marketing team so that they can build better audiences and better marketing campaigns. One of the biggest points of contention between product and marketing teams is the product roadmap. Everyone wants their features. Product wants certain features that are going to really help with, you know, customer satisfaction, retention. Marketing always has features that they want to try to help acquire new customers, maybe for them to help kind of beat out a competitor. But I believe that the product team should really engage the marketing team and listen listen to what they're asking for and take that into account. Maybe even allocate every development cycle a little bit of time to pound out some of the features that marketing is really clamoring for. But both teams need to kind of take a step back and acknowledge that there is tension there and that both groups are trying to be successful and that they have to work together to figure out what are the best features and things for product team to work on that will satisfy both teams. And the last piece of advice I'll give, and probably the most important one, is I think you should strongly consider cross-training and embedding marketing and product resources on each other's team. If you can take a marketer and let them work on the product team for a while, even if it's just observing what's happening during the development cycle, I think there'll be a much greater appreciation for the amount of work work that goes into building things into the product. Conversely, if you can have a product team member actually sit in with marketing and understand how difficult it is to figure out the right audience, to figure out how to acquire customers, I truly believe that you can get much more kind of mutual respect and admiration between the teams. And I think when they go back to their own respective teams, they'll always have in the back of their mind, If I'm a marketer, what would the product team think about this? And if I'm a product team member, what would the marketer think about this? Great way to just get both teams to understand and respect each other. And the good news is, is that I'm starting to see online some recognition by people on Twitter and LinkedIn that product and marketing teams will and do have to work together. So this is a trend I think is not going to go away. Something that I really think you all should think about embracing. At the end of the day, your customer doesn't care if they're interacting with the product team or the marketing team. Customers just want a holistic, meaningful digital experience. And if those customers can recognize that they're basically interacting with different teams, then instead of shipping a really great product, you're actually shipping your org chart, which is something you never want to do. So I hope this session was helpful for you to think about the producting model, bringing product and marketing together. If you have any questions or any follow-up, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn by using the QR code there. Thank you so much. Well, look, that was great. Really good two presentations. Thank you, Adrian. Adam for doing that. And yeah, everyone, folks, thank you so much for coming today. Really, really appreciate your time. We are 2 hours in and we still have 100 people connected. I think in terms of next steps, we'll email you when the video is ready. And I just want to say thank you. Feel free to connect on LinkedIn and check out Amplitude as well because they made today very possible. Thank you Thank you.