Config 2024: How to bring the craft back to product management (Peter Yang, Product Lead, Roblox)

[Music] I'm excited to kick off the product management track today you know something

happened you know something happened to the PM career if you're like me you became a PM to crab products that customers love but somewhere on the way

things change for many of us today pushing metrics growing head count and trying to climb the corporate ladder have overshadowed the joy of building something

meaningful that's why I think it's time that we bring the craft back to product management to me PM craft means focusing on delighting customers caring about the

details and ultimately giving a damn about the product delivering to the world thank you so I've been a PM for over a decade and

I've interviewed many top product Le leaders today I want to share 10 practical tactics to help you craft products that you can be proud

of all right so let's start with three tactics to understand customer and business needs you know something that I really really believe in is to build with your customer

Community our product team PM designers and Engineers talk to each other throughout the day building with your community means doing the same thing with your customers so here's how I do

it set up a community it can be a Discord a slack group or even just a DM thread build in public ask customers about their problems and share updates

and Designs often and finally make time to hang out don't just talk about your product make time to post memes hang out build relationships so that customers feel comfortable sharing the honest

truth with you the faster you can go through this feedback loop with your community I promise you the faster your product will improve so at ROBLOX I built a community

with hundreds of top creators I talk to them throughout the day just as much as I talk to internal stakeholders and so does everybody else on my team the feedback has been incredible creators

feel heard spread the word with other creators and tell Roblox leaders about my product and my team every chance that they get so build a community to build better

products focus on your customer in some of the internal Shenanigans and don't let anyone or any process gain a away of talking to your customers every single

day now talking to your customers is isn't enough to truly build empathy you have to feel the customer's pain yourself so here's how I do it watch

customers struggle ask them to show you how they solve problems and use your problem product if you start cringing a little bit that you're on the right track keeper fiction log for love of God

dog food your own product I'm surprised by how many PMS don't even do this and write down all the little points of friction it's especially important to do this from a new user's perspective if a

new user experiences friction in your product they're not going to complain they're just going to leave and as a result your product will not grow and finally observe how customers are

hacking your product to do their job from my experience this is one of the best ways to extend your product to an adjacent use case as we saw from figma slides

yesterday at twitch we noticed that streamers were send their viewers to another Channel at the end of their stream they will manually copy and paste these links in chat for the community to join the other channel and support the

other streamer so we built raids to make this process more fun and more safe the product quickly took off and brought joy to sell thousands of

communities now customer empathy is key but it's also important to take a step back sometimes to look up and around I love this framework from shashir the CEO

of Koda about growing a PM career any career when you're just getting started you're given the problem and solution and you just have to execute as you level up you're given the problem and

you got to identify the right product solution and at the highest levels you got to figure out if you're even solving the right customer problem in the first place well I'm here to tell you that you

don't have to be a VP or a director to think at a higher level right now I learned this lesson the hard way at Reddit I let the team that build

Reddit talk our live audio product we scale talk to millions of users and hundreds of communities people love talking about everything from telling dad jokes to sharing relationship advice

to hosting amas in year one our CEO told me that had built by far the best user experience at Reddit in years but a year later the product was

cancelled so what happened I understood the customer problem identified how to grow the product and execute it on my plan but I didn't spend enough time understanding the business problem the

fact is talk wasn't the best bet to make to grow overall R users especially after covid so next time you're given a product area take a step back to look up

and around speak up if you think you're solving the wrong customer problem to bring the company forward all right now let's talk about three tactics to help you craft the

right product solution starting with strategy equals Focus you know there's so much nonsense out there about product strategy it's become a term that people use to sound

smart create slides of thing air and gatekeep others for not being strategic enough I believe that the best strategies explain in plain English a diagnosis of

the major challenges a guiding policy to overcome those challenges and a set of actions to achieve the policy Above All Else the best strategies are focused let

me give you an example back in 2011 Roblox users were growing like crazy but we couldn't figure out the right business model the team came up with 50 different

optimizations to grow Revenue but none of them were really working meanwhile our virtual currency robu was piling up in our creator wallets they had millions

of Robux but no easy way to spend them so that's the diagnosis now one day someone the team had a b idea hey what if let creators

cash out their Robo for real money it would impact our margins but maybe it will let creators get paid enough to build Roblox games fulltime so our guiding policy became to drop everything

else and focus all of our energy on building a system to let creators exchange their Robux for real world currency amazingly it worked creators

got paid and reinvested most of the robu into improving their games we knew that we had nailed it when Creator told us you know I was making minimum wage making P pzas but I just

cash out $10,000 for my Robux so now I'm going to work on my game full time focusing on the right things is what matters which brings me to my next

tactic quality and speed over scope I got this advice from Dan soker the CEO of Limitless Ai and optimized lead here's Quick Clip from Dan I would

encourage you to really pick just quality and time in fact put a date out there as a clarifying function for you and your team to say hey on this date we are going to have a high quality product and we will make it available to the

world and the thing be really ruthless in cutting is scope especially if you're a smart technologist you will find all the clever cool things you could build that probably don't matter the vast majority of users will probably not use

that feature you're probably wrong that the problem it's trying to solve is even meaningful and so you're much much better off starting with something just very very Bare Bones that's high quality and building from there then assuming

you need to do all the scope you can imagine from day one let's just take the AI wearable space as an example you can be a wearable that plays music makes calls

reads messages pictures answers questions and projects a display or you can focus on just solving one or two customer problems really well like taking pictures or looking fashionable or remembering what you say throughout

the day I love this refrain from Frank slutman the ex CEO of snowflake narrow the focus up the quality and increase

speed I repeat narrow the focus up the quality and increase the speed that's how you build a product that people love now when I'm talking about up INE

quality I'm referring to crafting beautiful products not beautiful internal documents we all know PMS who spend all their time making beautiful PRD strategy

decks and emails while ignoring the actual product that their customers actually use please please please don't confuse the work behind the work with the actual

work the actual work is understanding customer problems identifying the right product Solutions and executing to deliver your product to the market the work behind the work

includes things like making pretty slides doing premiums to get buying and trying to look smart and get green checks from execs in a product review look I get it the work behind the

work is sometime necessary but it shouldn't occupy most of your time take Shopify for example they have a product review process that's literally called

get done and sometimes they get done without having a single meeting at all here's Meek dad exhe head of AI at Shopify talking about how this

process works this project was a very fast Cadence so what we tried to do was we had a Channel with all of our stakeholders in slack and a lot of the conversation goes back and forth of

here's the work here's what's happening and we let them be in on the public channel so like they could just watch the work as it goes and if they want to interrupt they can interrupt and ask questions and and then every couple days we would just make a demo video and just

post it in the channel and just ask for feedback VP especially Glenn my boss he makes a friction log and his friction log is like walking through the video or walking through the product and giving feedback on what he thinks is good or

bad and we usually like turn it around in a couple days but yeah it's a very like Fast cycle I don't think there was many if any synchronous reviews on this it was all async as we went so by all

means do you want you to do to get leadership buying but please stay focused fused on the actual product that your customers actually use all right now let's talk about three

tactics to help you execute you know to bring the craft back to product management you really have to protect your craft time for many of us a calendar like this

is sadly all too common now here's my calendar on a good week even for PMS craft time is a precious resource for to think deeply

about problems and actually get done to protect your Craft Time become great at asynchronous communication and running better meetings simple tactics

can make all the difference like discussing ASN first instead of defaulting to meetings or using a single project Channel instead of playing DM telephone or actually taking notes live in a meeting and share them right after

instead of pretending that the meeting never happened so next time someone send you a meeting invite With No Agenda and no notes don't just accept the invite ask them can we discuss ASN first or do

you have some notes that I can read first to protect your craft time you know all of us you know when we're growing up probably dreams of becoming astronauts PMS or

designers maybe but I'm pretty sure that none of us dreamed about sitting in back toback meetings all day so you have to carve out time to actually think all right protecting your craft

time goes hand in hand with setting the quality bar every company has that one or two teams that's known for setting the bar on quality aspire to be that

team at your company here's how roll out your product in phases it's almost always a bad idea to launch a product to everyone at once without a single

customer using it or playing it beforehand instead make time for staff alphas and customer betas to get feedback and raise the quality bar each

time hire people who care about quality look for signals like when they share their biggest accomplishment do they mention quality and user Delight or do they only focus on growing metrics or

growing their team head count as Josh Miller from the browser company describes hire people who have a burning desire to leave their mark on something that they make look for those hires when

you're trying to hire someone and finally make quality a team value and make sure and be willing to make the difficult tradeoffs to live by

that value for example if during beta users and your designer are telling you that your product isn't good enough be willing to

email your the exact or your boss and tell them hey I'm going to miss the launch date this quarter I'm going to miss my okr because I want to make my product truly

great quality is even more important when it comes to AI products with AI your job is not just to Def find a happy path you must be paranoid about all the

edge cases to avoid suggestions like adding glue to get CH to stick to Pizza at ROBLOX at ROBLOX we built an AI assistant to help creators build grow

and monetize their experiences now build in AI product sounds really cool but what really mattered was the manual Pace thinkinking effort that we took to evaluate answers I'm talking about our

hours days and weeks staring at spreadsheets and going crazy try to figure out how to improve ai's output now speaking of AI you should be using AI every day to

save time and focus on what matters personally I love using AI tools like clae and chat GPT to do three things extracting takeaways from raw

customer interview notes or long slack threads that alone probably saves me 32 minutes to an hour every every day making my writing more clear and

concise with AI there's no excuse to be too verbos or too woring in your in your writing all you got to do is like prompt it to say hey make this more clear and concise give me three variations and

then take the best of AI out output and finally getting a second opinion on everything from product strategy to making difficult trade-offs if you give

AI the right context you'll be surprised at how helpful it can be think of AI as a super helpful intern for some reason knows everything about the world and

will never give up but you just have to give it clear directions So speaking of clear directions here are five things I always

like to include in my AI prompts assign a goal share examples proceed step by step ask for variations and add constraints so for example here I'm

asking AI to edit my writing I broke it down to Two Steps step one understand and share my writing style back to me based on my best writing examples I past it like a whole list and step two I'm

going to give you I'm going to give you a draft and then you edit my writing based on my writing examples and of course you want to create three variations that are about a page each so I would then take ai's output and

manually edit my own writing try to include all these steps in your prompts to make AI a lot more

useful all right so let's recap here's how we can bring the craft back to product management first understand the customer Problem by building with your

community feeling the customer's pain yourself and taking a step back to look up and around to make sure that you're solving the right customer problem to grow the business second identify the

right Solution by focusing your strategy prioritizing quality and speed over scope and crafting beautiful products not beautiful internal documents and

finally execute by protecting your Craft Time setting the quality bar and using AI to focus on what matters last but not

least remember why you gun just feel in the first place your end goal is not to hit some okr grow your headcount or check some boxes in a career ladder

customers don't care about any of that your end goal should be to go above and beyond for customers obsessed about the details and give a damn about the product that you're delivering into the world join companies who share these

goals and build that culture yourself that's how we can all bring the craft back to product management and perhaps one day win the respect of our designer

qualities thank you so much [Music]