[MUSIC] Hello, everyone, that's too loud, I'm going to have to speak softly into this like microphone. Question for you guys, how many of you guys lead teams lead teams, lead teams? And how many of you guys lead teams in terms of the thought leadership right writing specs, writing requirements, getting teams aligned, negotiating and managing when people disagree all that kind of stuff. Every hand should be up come on people we're product people, right? We all do this, this is the core of what we do. And so one of the things that this talk is about is really how to manage across all of that tumultuousness that we feel as product managers. This person thinks that the designer thinks this. The engineer thinks this your boss thinks that and then the executive comes in and swoops in and changes everything and does it sound familiar? >> Yeah. >> So what are some of the principles that we use as product leaders to manage through all this tumultuousness? So we're all builders, when we think of teams building together, we often have this picture, and that picture is a bunch of very happy people, they're all in the same room. All the pieces fit together, one person's like, I'm going to put this over here, the other one's like yeah, and I'm going to put this over here. This has not been my experience of building technology products. >> [LAUGH] >> My experience has been more like being in the middle [LAUGH] of a really crazy set of incoming requests and questions and demands, and feeling like I'm in the center of this just crazy dynamic with no idea where to turn, yes sounds familiar anyone? Okay, so, a couple of just notes about where I'm coming from, so I worked at IDEO, right down the street over here for many years, seven and a half years. And every single time we had to create these teams to solve problems from financial services, to how to launch new pharmaceutical products to how to do agriculture, texting platforms for market prices in Ethiopia so all these different teams working on lots of different projects all over the world. And then I worked at Salesforce where we redesigned the light though, the core CRM product with Lightning Experience and Meredith and I worked on that together as well. And so we had to bring together all of these functions and all of these people from all over the organization, to work toward this common, big, hairy, audacious goal, right? And so, could have been chaos, and many many times it was. And then we built the IoT cloud at Salesforce and I was the head of the product experience and we're building from the ground up, trying to get to these crazy deadlines, mostly around Dreamforce or other demos that Marc Benioff wanted to present. And again, try to build a team trying to build a product, all at the same time. And again, doing that with AWS, going into AWS into a completely different culture, and again, building our software product, building a brand new team of designers, product managers, front end developers, and trying to do all this simultaneously at the same time while traveling up to Seattle, okay? So, what managing product teams has always felt like to me, is something like going out onto this grand voyage, to this grand expedition. And it's like the leader of your country tells you, okay, we need to get to the North Pole before anybody else, so pick your boat, staff your boat with the best people, and get there. You're like okay, okay everybody, onto the boat, you get the best engineers, you get the best weather people, and the best sailors in the world and off you go. And just a couple of days into the journey, somebody runs up from the engine room, and they say, "Captain, I have bad news for you, we just found out that the engine is terribly unstable. We have to stop the boat, rebuild the engine, and then we'll take a little while to test it, and then we can start on our journey again. But whatever you do, do not speed up the boat until we rebuild the engine, okay?" And then somebody comes in from the weather station and they say, "Captain, we have just spotted a huge storm to our east, we have to tack the boat to the west, and run away from the storm as fast as possible, right? Because the storm is really big the waves are going to be enormous, it's going to be really bad, this is the only thing we can do." And then somebody comes in from the lookout station and they say, "Captain, I've just spotted pirates, they're coming from the west, we have to attack the ship to the East, and run away from the pirates as quickly as possible because the pirates are really really fast. They've got really really fast boats." sound familiar to anyone this story? Yeah, all right, and then just as that person leaves the Admiral calls, and he says, "Captain, I have news for you..." >> She says! >> Usually come on, let's get real. [LAUGH] The CEO calls and he says so anyway, so then the Admiral calls and he says, "Captain, I have some news for you, your supplies for the trip back home are coming two weeks early, going to be the North Pole two weeks early. So you better speed up the boat and go straight to the North Pole, do not slow down for anything, get your goal as quickly as possible, and you gotta to get there early." So you got to do, so, the problem with the story if you are the captain of the ship, is not that any of the people are wrong, the problem is that they are all right. From their perspective, right? They are all telling you the best things based on what they know. And they are all earnest, and they all believe the things that they're saying because it's based on the data that they see, right? If you were in the weather station, you only look at the weather, if you're the lookout you only, look for pirates, right? Based on what the partial knowledge is that your job as a product leader is to integrate all these points of view, and actually set the direction, and make decisions in this incredible landscape of uncertainty, ambiguity and partial knowledge all around, right?
