Discover the Outstanding Payment Reminder Letter Format for Product Management

Outstanding payment reminder letter format for Product Management

I'm really here to redeem myself so thanks for being here to help me redeem myself because at uber we have these community service days where you can like volunteer and one of the ones a few months ago was this like career workshop for middle school students at cascade middle school and so I went to cascade middle school with a bunch of uber people and there a bunch of other professionals they're from like Boeing and other companies and it was cool because we got these little sessions with the students and you have like 30 minutes to like tell them about what you do and so if your software engineering you'd be like oh yeah I built like that favorite app you use you know like I write the software behind it and I build stuff and so I was like sitting there trying to explain myself and trying to help them understand what product management is and I just like feel like I failed miserably so I'm gonna start with the same thing that I started that presentation with hopefully this one has a better ending than that one so I want to show you a video so this is a video it's like the whole thing is like an hour long cuz it's like the keynote of when the iPhone was announced in 2007 by Steve Jobs have you had any have you seen this video it's sweet okay so I'm out like five minutes of it and and then we're gonna have some questions at the afterwards about the iPhone so here it is can we can man actually here it is but we're gonna leave it there for now before we do it let me up let me talk about a category of things that most advanced phones are called smart phones so they say and they typically comprise fall busin email capability Plus and they say from the internet so the baby internet into one device and they all have these plastic little keyboards on them and the problem is that they're not so smart and they're not so easy to use so if you kind of make a business school 101 grab a smart axis on them easy to use access follows regular cell phones kind of like they're they're not so smart so we use when smartphones are definitely a little smarter but they actually are harder to use they're really complicated just for the basic stuff and while our time figuring out how to use we want to either wonders what we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile devices have been and super easy use this is what I thought we're going to reinvent the phone now we're going to start [Music] when a revolutionary usually is the result of years of research and about medicine and of course it's an interplay of hardware so now why do we a revolution ratings are infinity here's more smartphone this right what will the cue the plastering pop trail be 62 the usual suspects and what's wrong with their user interface well the problem with them is really sort of at the bottom 40 it's this stuff right here they all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there and they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application every application wants a slightly different user interface a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it and what happens if you think the great idea is six months from now you can't run around so what do you do it doesn't work because the buttons and the controls and change it can't change for each application and they can't change now we're opening another great idea and this product well how do you solve this it turns out we have solved it we solved it in computers 20 years ago we solved it with a bitmap screen that could display anything we want put any user interface up and a pointing device we solved it with the mouse right we solved this problem so how are we gonna take this to a mobile device what we're gonna do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen we don't carry around the mouse right so what are we gonna do a stylus right we're use a stylus No who wants a stylus yeah they can we put them away losin yeah nobody wants a stylus so let's not use a stylus we're going to use the best pointing device in the world we're gonna use a point advice that were all born with one whatever these are the fingers it touches with our fingers and we have invented a new technology called multi-touch which is phenomenal it works like magic you don't be expires it's much more accurate than any touch display that's ever been shipped it or unintended touches of super smarts need to do multi-finger gestures on it and boy have we okay it's interesting because the Apple pencil is a thing now right so you know this was over ten years ago but okay so why was the iPhone so successful what do you think just go ahead and raise your hand or yell out some answers just thoughts say get app ecosystem yep yep that's good yep simple easy to use yeah your time yeah yeah yeah that's right yeah they change the design yeah yeah anyone else yeah those are all good points so here this is the framework that I want to introduce to all of you which is how I think about product management and how I think about my role and when I talked about finding balance what I'm really talking about is finding balance across all three of these dimensions so we have the needs of people so human values your end users we have the needs of the business how viable is the business can you make money and then the feasibility of the technology so how ready are we to build something when you can do all these all three of these things well that is how a product really takes off and so that's that bright red center there and so with regards to the iPhone you all have some had some really good points so here's what I have so just separating it into each of these three dimensions right like on the human needs side really natural UX like the pinch thing like I've seen I don't have you seen these videos of like babies being able to use iPads it's like very clear that the interaction model they've created is very natural to humans even just innately easy to use one-stop shop so having I don't know how many of you had like separate mp3 players from phones before when I was in high school I had an mp3 player and I had my like flip phone and that was like the cool thing to do back then and the email kind of work but didn't I didn't use it anyway on the phone and so now you have one device that is everything so simplifies everything in terms of like how your lifestyle is designed around the device on the business side like Apple does this very well premium positioning like everything costs ton of money people still buy it people still love it so they have a lot of margin to work with and so they're not afraid to build very good products that cost a lot to build he said the word leapfrog product how many have heard that term before good so yeah basically like he drew that access right it's like we don't want to just incrementally increase we don't want to build something that's like easier to use but not as smart or like smarter but less easy to use we want to be like something that's just like completely a different class and it worked right after the iPhone shipped like how many phones with buttons that flip or whatever have come out since then like almost all smartphones these days are our giant screen right so it worked network effects is it's around around the the point of the app store and like the ecosystem they've created around this product actually enable them make much much more money down the road even on things that are not iPhone including like accessories for the iPhone apps and the whole developer community around that right so if it made the app the device into a platform you can sell ads on it now you can build apps and make money as your own developer right so from a business perspective that was very long-term thinking and technology side and like of course lots of inventions they're like multi-touch they actually didn't invent the idea of multi-touch but they productized it and made it very very accessible and adapt a keyboard of course like and really to the next point we're like how do you distribute your next version really do that keyboard point where the device actually evolves with the use cases of the device when they use cases change over time right so those are just my thoughts any questions about about that any thoughts you see Steve Jobs is a product manager or steam or design I would say that he did I don't without having worked at Apple and like knowing the full story of what kind of culture he created and how what kind of person he was to work for I would say he did a very good job painting a vision and pushing his team to deliver against it so from that perspective I think he was a little bit of both he definitely like like had something in his head that was this product that everyone was going to use but without Johnny Ives right it's unclear where he would be as well so it's it's a I don't wanna think he's like a product manager or designer I would say he's like a visionary but something more concrete than that yeah okay cool so keep the framework in mind I'm gonna keep referring back to it so here's just kind of my first take away which is successful products balance the needs of users technology and business and it's only if you do all three of these things can you succeed because if you don't have users you'll build something that nobody wants if you don't technology you'll have a lot of ideas and not build anything and if you don't have the business side then you'll have a lot of cool tech that people love but I just lose money for a very very long time right so we need all three of these just exceed okay so coming back to this framework here are some category of things that you might have to worry about as a p.m. and I think one of the most frustrating things about p.m. is you ask the question what does it mean to be a p.m. what is the role of a p.m. what do you do every day and everyone answers a slightly different question is it in a slight different way and I think the truth of the matter is that PM roles just are different across different products different companies and it really evolves based on the needs of the specific product or the specific company so what I want to encourage you to do is think about p.m. as a set of job functions rather than a role so a set of things you do not one concrete thing that role that you sign up to do so how is this different so let me just talk about each of these dimensions like some ideas for what you might have to worry about as a p.m. depending what you're working on is like on the human side there's obviously like user research understanding the needs of your customers how they like to interact with products what their lifestyle is how your product fits into their lifestyle designing in against out those requirements how do you then like market that product and talk about it to the press and in the news and like brand like if people feel good about your product are they more likely to buy it and so on so a lot of like touchy-feely like getting to know people stuff but then also of course like talking to the business side to do something big you have to have a strategy for you have to choose your path and have a goal in mind you have to have a business model that is viable and make money over time you have to think about your unit economics how much money do you make or lose for each unit of whatever it is you're building that you sell you have to run financial models and analyses to make sure that you not gonna run a cash you know half way through a development cycle so a lot of business concerns there as well and technology so of course like engineering developing stuff maintaining stuff making sure things scale making sure things are reliable and don't break all the time how can you possibly do all these things as one person right I think I think a lot of people refer to p.m. as the CEO of the product and so if you're the CEO of the product which one of these are you accountable to like all of them but how many of them are you the expert at like personally I think none for me there are definitely people at uber who are better at any of these things like named one of them I can name somebody who's better at that specific thing than me so this is like not painting a very good picture for PM's right but I'm not done yet so there's also the don't forget about the mere existence of everything here right who drew these circles to begin with like where was the vision set who decided that this company should offer limos on demand like the vision has to be set somewhere and this is the one area where maybe I could say I am the best at for my product and it's because I am the only one who spent all my time looking at all three of these dimensions together okay so this is very abstract I will do an exercise with you very soon to make this more concrete but any questions about this as an engineer engineering discipline person who moved to PN it was very hard to let go of the fact that I have now no longer good at anything as far as on my team like design I would as liner engineering I have a team you know like anyways okay so where does PM actually fit in all this stuff so I am going to say that PM is actually like one of the most transferable skills a human can possibly ever learn and and to prove this point to you I'm going to use an example that is not at all software related and walk you through kind of how I feel the role of p.m. actually maps to that world so I'm a tennis player so the first question is ask yourself what does your product need to succeed so you have to first decide what product you're building of course but once you decide what product you're building what does your product need to see so let's say today that I am going to build the best tennis resort on the planet okay it's gonna look something like that probably because you know it's Seattle and they yell out Sun over there right so I have this picture on the side to help remind us bring us back to that framework so Tennis Club do I look like someone who can remotely like do anything about starting a Tennis Club like I don't like I don't like I played tennis for fun but that's about it and I know nothing about hospitality I know nothing about architecture design construction I don't know any pro tennis players except for my friend Roger like this is this is crazy right I wanna start a Tennis Club so so what so but then that leads to my second question which is what are the strains of your team members okay so now the things look a little bit better right if I have Roger Federer on my team and I'm building a Tennis Club that's pretty good but why does that feel better to you that I have Roger Federer on my team all of them like why is why is this picture a lot like riskier than this picture all of a sudden you think he's more desirable than I don't know my friend exactly that's he's the expert right he's like in my opinion the best tennis player to I've ever lived so he would know all about tennis and he also has money right the guy is worth like half five hundred million dollars right you don't need to worry about VC's right like he's got the network of pros right he could probably find you a coach just like that right he's probably been in a few five-star hotels in his life he probably knows what good hospitality looks like he might know how to run the business but he knows what experience feels like right so this feels better because I have a very very strong X for my team now like in my dreams I have him on my team but I can I can dream about it here so think about what the strengths of your team members are and if you have a really good team it's actually a really good problem to have if they are all really good at what they do and you don't have to do any of what they do like if you have a really good designer you don't actually have to spend how much time designing the user experience if you have a really good team of engineers you don't have to write any code or design any architecture or databases they have a really good user user experience researcher you don't have to spend your time doing so much somebody usability tests right these are all things that you should think about when you build your team and they help make you scale as a p.m. who's supposed to be driving the thing forward right again the drawing of the circles like step above and think about what your team is good at and let them be the experts okay okay so think about all the strings for team members so now now you have a team you know what they're good at where are the gaps okay so if go ahead [Music] okay organisation we're gonna give that just the u.s. researcher also yeah it's good question the question was should the PM shouldn't the PM do a lot more UX researcher to understand the customers right and I think my bias personally is yes but that's just me there's no there's no requirement saying like if you had the best user researcher in the world and they wrote really good reports and recorded videos that that you personally have to be doing the research yourself right and in fact like user research this entire discipline there are people who go to school to be trained professional user researchers and I do these like one-way mirror rooms and stuff and so if you have someone who's really good it's crazy if I hire this person I go do the research research myself right I should I can go and watch and I can go learn and stuff but like but if you had a million other things to do then you can prioritize and say do I really need to spend time on the user research or do I just trust this person to give me all the insights I need and inform the designs right that's the decision you can make for me on your day to day science your question good question any other questions okay so once you have your team let's say my team is just Roger and I so here are some ideas of like what the two of us together it might still struggle at or need to do so Roger probably doesn't know about running operations he's not he's probably never like made a bed at a hotel but he's probably been at very many nice hotels so hospitality operations wouldn't probably be something that he would do project management of course a lot of people working together we got to coordinate the efforts and make sure we're all aligned on schedule everything for a club to look like that you got to design it it's got to have a useful full plan all of that how many courts do you have all that stuff things gotta look nice construction management actually building the facilities hiring and training your staff I mean even within each discipline listed here different training and different hiring skills are required facilities management once you actually established a club who's gonna run it how are you gonna run it from day to day how many people do you need how much do you pay them all that stuff and of course a little bit of web and app development on the side maybe you want like a portal for scheduling course or booking a training session or something but the point is like software is actually the least of your worries here right it's not a software product but now that I know what my team is good at and where the gaps are I can actually go and do a few things like maybe I should say my strengths here are the things that I think I should do like maybe I'm a PM so I can do some product for product management maybe I can do some interviews and hire some people and maybe I can do some software diploma because I went to school for this even though I haven't written a line of code since 2010 and what about the rest you can hire somebody to do it so build your team or get an expert to really build out your operations or maybe architecture and interior design is something you do once and isn't ongoing so you don't have to hire a whole team you just contract somebody and they do it like these gaps these gaps are areas where you can identify and either outsource or hire teamm to build around it or truth to yourself depending on how much time you have but the point is to given your resource constraints like scale yourself to be able to be the person who delegates to all the experts on your team and then then make that frees you up to then think about what does the next five years look like what is the next ten years look like does that make sense okay cool so here's my second statement which is PM roles are often defined that are just confidence gaps on the team and your job is to know those gaps and in order for you to know the gaps you have to know your product and your team really really well and your job is to find the gaps and then decide to do something about it whether that is we should push for headcount in data science or we don't actually need that much data science I'm gonna write a little psycho query and just you know run it every month or we need more engineers or we need a designer so your job is find a gap didn't do something about it and because of this you are often the in the best position to drive the vision and strategy of your product because you're the only one who is looking at the entire picture and thinking about the trade-offs between each of the dimensions and thinking about where the gaps are and where you need more help and how much better the product could be if you had two more engineers or one more full-time data science or if you didn't have to do so much user research yourself does that make sense okay so let's do some practicing how we doing on time seven ten okay cool so I have two products coming up there are things that I have worked on a little bit here and there and my past and I want you to tell me what kind of product manager we need okay thinking about those that Venn diagram okay business users technology okay ready first product look familiar okay so real estate search this is ladies and gentlemen the company that invented map based real estate search redfin so the idea of putting tins on a map and having details about the homes very very user interface heavy project lots of screen real estate probably an iOS or Android app to go with that for those mobile users lots of pictures and design and stuff so let's use that framework like what are some very very heavy needs on the user circle to start like what do we need to do where is the gap what kind of team do you need to build to build this people who understand real estate very good so real estate knowledge very important for building real estate website good one what else front-end developers there's a lot of UI here right data science for the pricing so some of this some of this the data we show here we need to know what we're showing and Breton has an estimate for estimate thing too so like how do you predict a prices and stuff relevance algorithms that's great that's data science as well yep somebody said UI developers so who's gonna design this like this is easily like at least one designers worth of work for like a few months right and maybe you would have a photo designer focus on mobile separate from web and if you minimize the screen what happens is a collapse does an app go away well mobile web right so and of course with that lots of user research going into it cool what about the text side what are some of the complexities on the text side scalability yeah you might get a lot of visits geofencing yeah some data there yeah a lot of stuff yeah data science stuff you have to if somebody created the data for you to show you have to pipe it in the system and type it out on the map or the on the UI yeah okay learning okay what about on the business side how to monetize so yeah so I click-through rates and impressions and stuff like that yeah prioritizing markets that's great yeah that's that's a really good one it's not not that obvious from just looking at the screen but it's a good one yeah so really good so in general I think my assessment of this a feature like this is like it's very consumer facing right it's very very heavy on UX there's a lot of front-end this is one of those teams where you probably have a PM to a salt really small number of engineers because the PM has a lot of user experience stuff to worry about and it might be one of those teams where you think about having a user researcher doing doing usability studies for you you definitely want to have those designated designers because if the PM was doing the design that's all they would be doing there's enough design work here to warrant that and respin is a real estate brokerage so this page actually doesn't quite get at a real estate brokerage business at all yet it's mostly showing you data showing you homes trying to make a really engaging experience so I would say is actually relatively light on the business side and tech side yes there's scalability stuff there's data piping here and there but in general the idea of building a map based Qi with some UI next to it like not rocket science at this point right like a lot of websites do that so it's it's not like you know building the next version of like AWS or something like that it's not computer science and it's at its cutting edge it's applying engineering to to add it new use case right so probably most things you want to do here are feasible one way or another right does that make sense okay switching gears a little bit the second product I want to talk about and have this exercise on is the data platform at Redfin so you this is just a landing page and that's because the product itself actually has no UI I owned this for three years at Redfin and redfin actually pulls data from like over a hundred different databases every ten minutes to ensure that the homes on ref and are fresh and relevant all the time and things that we cared about our how fresh is the data like from the moment that somebody says I want to sell my house how long does that take to go from pressing the button to showing up on a map on red Finn right that is was one of our core metrics we tracked how accurate is the data how often is the data stale so that was a product I put product in quotes because product the word product can be anything so what kind of team do you need to build with a data platform at Redfin how is it different than the previous case much more focus on technology a little bit more back-end but specifically like what do you think are like bullet points under technology that that we have to do if he's latency reliability it's got to work databases down the math doesn't load right yeah accuracy yeah monitoring and checking the accuracy of the data and it image compression yeah image images were a big big concern so yeah so in in Real Estate's ago question in real estate there every city has these things called MLS's I don't know how people will hear oh homeowners but it stands for Multiple Listing Service so basically it's a database of homes and anytime you are real estate agent and you're helping a seller you actually go and like put that home into the database and if you are a real estate agent helping a buyer you'd go browse the database and so Redfin just integrates with those databases in every city to get all that homes for sale and it puts on one UI absolutely yeah so data normalization across hundreds of data sources not trivial yeah and there's also a lot of behind-the-scenes work where for a business to get data from another business a deal has to happen right a contract has to get signed money gets exchanged so I think I owned like easily millions of dollars worth of contracts just to get the data into Redfin right so I was part of the negotiation so lots of business development work as a p.m. you know on this product lots of sequel writing and data science stuff to measure latency and define latency even so basically no you I don't work they've definitely didn't you actually search around that one and yeah lots of scalability work and stuff like that so I wanted to use these two examples because like we often ask the question like what is the role of a p.m. what is a good p.m. engineering ratio what about p.m. the design do I have to know how to do UX to do to be at p.m. do I have to have a computer science degree to be a p.m. like like in my opinion this is like highly controversial of course within the p.m. world that like in my opinion it really just depends on what you're going to work on every product and every company requires a slightly different p.m. if you're on a team and you're working on this product and the team doesn't have a user researcher but a very strong engineer manager and a lot of engineers it might not be that important for the PM know how to code but it would be very important for the PM to be able to design a good experience because you don't have somebody to support you in that role and similarly like like in this case having a technical background might be more important because you're thinking about us of all day and your customers our other product teams building stuff on your platform you're not actually doing any consumer-facing right so all this stuff just really depends and if you go out and look for a job and you're interviewing as a p2p it become a p.m. somewhere there are different philosophies on how to hire like I think Facebook does this like this model where you actually interview to enter the company and then you change teams when you get actually get an offer you choose which team you're on and so in that philosophy it's more like a we believe there is a generic set of skills p.m. should have and and we want to vet those and then once you're vetted for those then we assign you a team other companies do more like this role requires these competencies let's hire against that and how important is a CF degree how important is you know you as user user experience design and the higher end of that so there is different different philosophies different trade-offs there but at the end of the day I think the needs of the p.m. are very different depending on which team you're on yeah these satellites that yeah good question so who owns the vision that depends highly on the culture of your company so Redfin is a fairly centralized decision-making culture so we get a lot we got a lot of direction from the executive team around like where what you should do as a team so that's as the data team we knew it was really important to the business to make things fast and reliable right so from that perspective I didn't have much wiggle room on that one but I did get to say listings should always be on reps in within 10 minutes 99 percent of the time and that was our North Star for like two years to get there when we started it was like 80% half within half an hour or something like that and so so then you you can like define what success means within those boundaries Uber's of highly decentralized culture and so uber is actually in some ways like a very fun place to be a p.m. but because I love a little autonomy you get is very high so in that case we are actually like the one saying this is what this product should look like because there's not as much like a top-down direction for better or for worse it's the answer question any questions elevations did I redeem myself did that make sense okay cool that's good I think that's it okay so I will leave you with a book so this book it's called first 90 days and the author's coming from the position of you are starting a new job whether that be you and you entering a new company or get your getting promoted into a role that's a little bit different than your current role whatever the case you are doing a new job that you didn't do before so the the book is talking about what you should do in your first 90 days on that job to set yourself up for success and so it talks about strategies for like evaluating your product and how things are going whether you're in a turnaround situation or your sustaining success or things like things like that the reason why I find it valuable it is not only because I start at Weber a year ago and I read it when I started but also just like I think it's really really important to scope out not only your product so you understand what you're building but also who is on your team because the way that your team needs you in the places where you add the most value as a product manager depends on what your team needs you to do and sometimes the same product with two different teams would need a very different PM to help them so be the book if you want to at the very least go back think about your team whether they're good at what kind of PM would they need and how is it different than maybe another team that's this next to you and what kind of p.m. they need and then if something if you realize that there's something that they really need that you're not doing think about doing that and then something that they don't need think about doing that thing less so with that thanks for listening I'll be around for questions you [Applause]