Tips for Building a Compelling Product Vision by Amazon Sr PM
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- The key elements of a compelling product vision, what’s important and what’s not - How to come up with a compelling product vision without relying on luck or magic - How to use a product vision as a mechanism to guide your team
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Tips for Building a Compelling Product Vision by Amazon Sr PM
- 1. www.productschool.com Tips for Building a Compelling Product Vision by Amazon Sr PM
- 2. Join 40,000+ Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. CERTIFICATES Your Product Management Certificate Path Product Leadership Certificate™ Full Stack Product Management Certificate™ Product Management Certificate™ 20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS
- 4. Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 5. T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R Will Najar, Senior Product Manager - Technical at Amazon
- 6. How to create a compelling product vision Will Najar, Senior Product Manager - Technical at Amazon
- 7. Why I chose this topic What it means to be a visionary Elements of a compelling product vision Communicating your product vision From product vision to product reality Questions (up to you!)
- 8. Why I chose this topic
- 9. “I can’t come up with any good ideas for my product. I’m just not a visionary and I’m not creative either. How do you come up with your product vision? I feel like giving up as a product manager every day because of this.” -Anonymous peer
- 10. Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset “I’m not a visionary or creative thinker.” “I have a difficult time coming up with new ideas for my product.” “I don’t set the vision because I’m not in a position to be wrong.”
- 11. What it means to be a visionary
- 13. Not a real visionary: ● Comes up with crazy ideas, seemingly out of nowhere ● Can predict the future and knows how things will turn out ● Constantly disrupting something, strives to be different ● Has an eccentric personality, non-traditional hairstyle, unique fashion choices ● Waves hands around a lot in big gestures, maybe in a TED talk ● Makes big promises about the product Real-life visionary: ● Takes time to deeply understand customer needs and wants, the problem space and product constraints ● Willing to risk being (a little bit) wrong about something ● Effective and empathetic communicator
- 14. You can be a visionary (if you want). Really.
- 15. Elements of a compelling product vision
- 16. Creating your product vision in a TV show
- 18. Where we all start... “I don’t have any good ideas.” 1. You don’t deeply understand customer needs and wants 2. You don’t understand the dynamics of your problem space 3. You don’t understand your product constraints Listen to your customers! Do your homework! Solve #1, and find out what is stopping you from getting there.
- 19. “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.”
- 20. Fly solo across the Atlantic Crack in the sidewalk Weekend trip to Mars Woman on the moon ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? “When 99% of people doubt you, you’re either gravely wrong or about to make history.”
- 21. ● Why will customers love this? ● Is there a market opportunity? ● Is the amount of uncertainty I have to solve 20- 40% of the journey? ● Can I solve the unsolved product constraints? ● Has someone tried this before? ○ Yes: What do I know/have that they don’t? ○ No: (same question) ● How will I know that I am on the right track? Check your vision:
- 22. Jenn Hyman & Jenny Fleiss Product vision example #1: Rent the Runway Introducing designer dress and accessory rentals (2009) ● Customers want to wear designer labels and feel special ● Cost is a constraint ● Don’t want to wear the same dress twice, but happy to borrow one to wear ● Opportunity in multiple customers renting the same designer piece More: this is a HBS case study.
- 23. Communicating your product vision
- 24. "You mean people actually use this? Well that’s weird.” (on Airbnb, 2008)
- 25. March 14, 2006-- Amazon Web Services today announced "Amazon S3," a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs. Amazon S3 is available today at http://aws.amazon.com/s3. Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It's designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
- 26. Use the right tool for the job Write a document, PowerPoint, speech, meeting, nemawashi? Use data to support your vision Data + anecdotes = <3 Bring stakeholders along for the journey Listen to feedback and incorporate it. Earn their trust with each step Practice your empathy Focus on the customer problem you are solving. Frame it in terms that will resonate with your audience Queen Elizabeth II 1957 televised Christmas message
- 27. Chris Cox Product vision example #3: Facebook Launching the News Feed (2006) ● Before, Facebook was just user profiles ● “Your personalized, interactive newspaper that is published directly by the set of people you care about” ● Launched to intense user backlash More: go to YouTube -> “fMC 2012 chris cox”
- 28. From product vision to product reality
- 29. Woman on the moon ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Prototype, experiment, validate, learn, incorporate new information Set goals to measure success Quantize your product vision MVP
- 30. James Dyson Product vision example #3: Dyson The cyclonic vacuum cleaner (1979) ● Existing vacuums lost suction, infuriated customers having to buy new bags, weren’t powerful enough ● Had observed cyclonic separators in sawmills ● Saw the pores in vacuum bags were clogged, couldn’t be re- used ● Knew he could solve the unsolved product constraint using cyclones More: How I Built This - James Dyson on NPR
- 31. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management Training Courses and Corporate Training
Editor's Notes
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- Product School’s Product Management Certificate Path comprises of 3 part-time courses for professionals with strong technical or business background who want to further explore Product Management at software-based companies. During Product Management Training you will first learn Product Management fundamentals to understand the software product lifecycle and what it takes to successfully transition into a product management role. You’ll then be trained to retrieve data, understand its value and make impactful decisions with SQL, data visualization and Tableau. Learn to understand your users to deliver exceptional UX/UI design and develop a robust digital marketing plan. During the Full Stack Product Management Training, you will deep dive into the technical knowledge to enhance your ability to work with agile teams. Finally, Product Leadership Training will elevate your product knowledge to become an effective Product Leader. You'll do an in-depth analysis on how to implement best PM practices on a strategic level to significantly impact your company’s portfolio and revenue. Learn the soft skills to manage product teams and manage stakeholders to deliver performing products.
- As well as individual courses we provide corporate training across the world! If you’d like to upskill your product team this is the best option for you. We have trained employees from multiple companies such as Deloitte, Salesforce, JP Morgan, Bank of America amongst many other companies across all industries.
- Tonight's talk is “ [TITLE] ” with [NAME]. Welcome, [NAME].
- I’m a Senior Product Manager on the Customer Reviews team at Amazon That technical part just means I’m a little bit more technical, and make decisions related to deeply technical systems. For me, that means building systems that can make real-time decision based on algorithms, a lot of data science, machine learning and thinking about technology patterns that will scale well. The vision I need to come up with is: what should we do to increase trust in the customer contributions system on Amazon, especially customer reviews? This is one of the harder problems I’ve worked on. If you read customer reviews on Amazon you’ve interacted with my product vision in some way. A lot of what I do works behind the scenes so that you benefit from it as a shopper or selling partner without really knowing. You won’t see the millions of decisions we’re making every hour unless you look very, very closely or are trying to do something sketchy.
- Here’s a brief preview of what I’ll talk about today. We’ll break it down into 5 parts, and then I’ll leave time for questions. There are some parts where we’ll have a bit of a discussion, but if something pops in your head any other time while I’m talking, write it down and then ask me at the end
- Brief preview of what we’ll talk about today.
- Growth mindsets are a hot topic now. A lot of people who say they have a growth mindset curiously don’t have a growth mindset when it comes to product vision and being a visionary A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees it as a springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. CLICK: pop-in of Satya Nadella - for people who work at Microsoft, he talks about this a lot and you may have heard it before.
- DISCUSSIONS: would anyone here call themselves a visionary? Does anyone put “thought leader” in their byline on LinkedIn? (ha) Alright, let’s talk about what it means to be a visionary.
- Does anyone recognize these people? 6 people who I have heard called a visionary before (USE FIRST NAMES) Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal) Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg (the Skimm co-founders, popoular email newsletter for young professional women) Steve Jobs (Apple) Rodrigo de Souza (Disruptive conductor in the TV show Mozart in the Jungle) Madeleine Le, (My mentee, just graduated UW and got a job at LogicMonitor and is moving to Austin) Rene Redzepi (Michelin-star chef, serves rocks he foraged on a plate) I won’t comment on whether I think they are visionaries or not, but let’s dig in to 1) what might make them a visionary, what other noise are we looking at that has nothing to do with whether they are a visionary. Are these people visionaries, and how will we know?
- There’s a meme about what it means to be a visionary “Visionary” can be a personality attribute that some people try to cultivate for themselves
- There’s nothing out of the ordinary about being a visionary - anyone can do it. You just need to practice. Traits: Takes time to deeply understand customer needs and wants, the problem space and product constraints Willing to risk being (a little bit) wrong about something Effective and empathetic communicator NEXT SLIDE: You can be a visionary if you want.
- Brief preview of what we’ll talk about today.
- DISCUSSION: there’s another meme about creating a product vision that you need to have some random moment of inspiration to get there. In the TV show Silicon Valley, the character Ehrlich Bachman goes into the Mojave desert and does a bunch of drugs to find a vision for a startup (new name for Pied Piper).
- The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey banging keys at random on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of Shakespeare. --- Doesn’t work this way in real life. If you thought it was that easy I have some bad news, but the good news is that you don’t have to rely on luck. A slightly more sophisticated version of this is to a/b test a bunch of uninformed experiences and see what sticks - seen that before, don’t do that. Recognize when you are falling victim to product vision by infinite monkey theorem.
- The first question that always comes up is, “I don’t have any good ideas.” There are three possible answers to this problem, and multiple answers might apply to you. If you don’t deeply understand needs and wants, listen to your customers! Contrary to what TV shows will tell you, you’re unlikely to get ideas out of thin air. And if you do, they aren’t likely to be good ones. A great product vision always starts from the customer and works backwards. Use your customers to your advantage, humans are wired to always be wanting the next great thing, and they will literally tell you what they want for free. They’re not going to write your product vision document for you or prepare a shiny PowerPoint deck, but they will usually give you all the clues you need to get started. If you don’t understand the dynamics of the problem space, you’re unlikely to come up with good ideas because you don’t understand how your focus area really works. How will you evaluate new ideas for a ride-sharing company if you don’t know the first thing about ride sharing? Understand how every element of the problem space works, and match that with your understanding of customer needs and wants to identify opportunities to innovate. There are new ideas hiding in the nooks and crannies of every market. Go to some really smart people in this space and find out what are going to be the hardest problems to solve, or who can tell you how the market works. If you don’t understand the product constraints, you’re unlikely to come up with a good vision because you won’t know what’s realistic and what isn’t. You also need to solve this to understand what existing constraint you might want to remove with your product vision. For example, you might see that your current efforts to detect fake accounts on Twitter are not very effective because you’re having humans manually review everything, and based on your experience elsewhere think you have a better way to do it. That gives you a vision.
- 2016 letter to shareholders
- How “big” is it? You don’t need a product vision if you only need to cross a crack in the sidewalk (low ambiguity/uncertainty/risk). You definitely need a product vision if you’re headed to colonize Mars(high ambiguity/uncertainty/risk). Remember, a visionary is willing to risk being (a little bit) wrong about something In product terms: Vision that we will change the color of the button from blue to light blue (not ambitious enough, no risk) Vision that we will have flying cars in three years (unrealistic/very risky, too ambitious) You may laugh at the examples, but it is surprisingly difficult to find a balance and make sure you vision is ambitious enough, but not unrealistic. Try to come in somewhere in between crack in the sidewalk and headed to live on mars. You might also decide based on how much funding you have, your level of ownership, other constraints. I don’t want to tell you not to shoot for the stars, because thinking big is very important, but it’s also helpful to think the right about of big. VALUE OF AN INCREMENTAL VISION Factoids: Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the atlantic. Three days from now is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. There has not yet been a woman on the moon.
- Summarize everything we’ve learned
- In 2008, Jenn Hyman, a second- year MBA student at Harvard Business School noticed her sister struggling to decide what to wear to an upcoming wedding. “Becky desperately wanted to buy a $1,500 Marchesa dress and she felt compelled to buy a new dress— because she knew photos would soon appear on Facebook and she didn’t want to be seen twice in the same outfit.” They met with Diane von Furstenberg (fashion designer) and got feedback on constraints. Would designers like this business model? Uncertainly. Initial response from designers was lukewarm.
- NEXT SECTION
- It’s unlikely you’ll be able to achieve your product vision if it’s in your head and your head alone. In order to make your vision a reality, you need to be an effective and empathetic communicator. You need to be able to articulate what hill you are climbing. HYPOTHETICAL STORY ABOUT THINKING YOU HAVE THE PERFECT VISION, TELLING IT TO SOMEONE AND IT LANDS FLAT Communicating your product vision is usually a process. It takes a while. Sometimes you need time, to earn trust, to validate assumptions. If you land your vision with your stakeholders on your first try you’re very lucky, but most of the time it won’t work that way. Quote: Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a prominent Silicon Valley startup incubator, created Hacker News SEGUE: How are we going to effectively communicate our product vision
- Talk about the PR FAQ - one Amazon way to communicate a vision following a process called “Working backwards” that literally works backwards from the customer. You write the press release before you build the product, so you have an idea of the customer result you’re aiming for as you build. "Iterating on a press release is a lot quicker and less expensive than iterating on the product itself ." This is part of the real 2006 press release for Amazon Simple Storage Service (or S3), the first generally available AWS service. Trivia: SQS was around before, but not generally available. The worst feedback a product manager at Amazon could ever receive on their PR FAQ is: “I don’t understand what customer problem you’re solving.” CONCEPTS: Use the right tool for the job Practice your empathy
- Use the right tool for the job: Leadership review Document (PR FAQ at Amazon) PowerPoint presentation Verbal persentation (Speech) Nemawashi “ informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking to the people concerned, gathering support and feedback, and so forth.” Find the mechanism that your organization uses, or that will work for your audience. Don’t be afraid to innovate or use a mechanism that you aren’t familiar with. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Practice your empathy: frame your vision in a way that focuses on the customer problem. Frame in a way that your audience will understand. It’s not about you. Communicating your vision requires you plant this vision in someone else’s head, not your own. You already have it in your head. Bring stakeholders along for the journey: communicating your vision is a process. It won’t be clear right away. You will get constructive feedback. Listen to it and incorporate it. Earn the trust of your stakeholders at each step along the journey. Use data to support your vision: great data can go a long way to convince people you have the right vision. Use data as the convincing argument, and the anecdote to frame it in terms of the customer value.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2kkaDMAJmA I could have picked an example that launched to overwhelming praise, but instead I picked a difficult one that illustrates how hard communicating your vision can be. We’ll use this example to talk abotu communicating a product vision. 2006, I was a lower (or a sophomore) in boarding school. Facebook was just user profiles, and you could only see people at your school. Back when News Feed launched, I hated it. Lots of other people at the time hated it, too. Facebook News Feed seems obvious now -- many people say this feature “is Facebook” - but at the time it was very controversial. Later on, supported by the vision: News Feed also introduced new possibilities to show targeted ads News Feed is the gateway where users discover all other content Increases user engagement on the network Exposes the social graph CONCEPTS: Bring stakeholders along for the journey, what is the importance of doing this? Resistance to change Techniques to bring people along for the journey Use data to support your vision
- Brief preview of what we’ll talk about today.
- Quantize - to subdivide (something, such as energy) into small but measurable increments Trivia: from quantum mechanics, just like a photon is a discrete unit of a beam of light
- Quote: “Don’t be so stupid -- if there was a better vacuum cleaner Hoover or electrolux would have built it” Took Dyson 5 years, and over 5,000 prototypes to perfect the now-famous vacuum cleaner Cyclonic separator in a sawmill removes sawdust from the air The hardest customer feedback to encounter is the harshly negative feedback that you know deep down is right.
- Feel free to speak with me and I can point you in the right direction (explain where to apply). Or you can visit www.productschool.com Have a good night!