Dots And Lines in Product Management, with AI Pencil | Çağrı Akgül

Welcome everyone. How many of you heard this one before? Please raise your hands. Quite a common one, right? Well, I'm a bit into quotes, a quote nerd. You will find it out in a bit. So how about coming up with our own quote from this room? What else is there that you can't manage if you can't? Let's try to fill in the blanks here. Just throw some ideas, suggestions. What you can see, what you can't understand. All right? I really like this one. It hits a painful place in my heart and mind as an ex-data analytics person. Yeah, we have been following Peter Drucker's mantra and have been trying to measure everything we can, right? At the same time, our capability to make sense of it, to understand all that stuff, I don't think that has been developing, and that's what I want to talk about. You can quote me on this one. "You can't manage what you can't measure and understand." We are co-quoters. But who am I? I want to tell you a bit about my background so you can understand where my perspective is coming from. Said it, software engineering. Came to Finland 20 years ago. Came for Nokia. Stayed for the weather, of course. Then I took my chances with doing a startup. The Mike Tyson connection comes from another quote. You might have heard it lately. "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face." I mean, it wasn't a bad story. A lot of learnings, which I thought I can share as a consultant, you know, workshops, lots of post-its. Then I thought, hey, let's go back to building stuff. I joined their massive digitalization effort, lots of different industrial digitalization projects. And while I was there, I thought, hey, let's build a design system, not just about UI, but also other things that the design covers. How you discover the problem, how you iterate on it, this and that. Then I joined the forest business unit running the data analytics team there. I've been churning out those dashboards you saw in the cartoon before. And then about three years ago, I joined Nest as a product manager. Working with the Nest app, serving hundreds of thousands of users in Finland and Baltics. So lots of data points. There's the user feedback, there's the transaction drop-off rates, all sorts of performance metrics, reliability metrics, service metrics, this and that, that we started to collect and a little bit started to drown in it. But after all this programming, designing, managing, and overall building products experience, I arrived at this three-leg stool for successful product management. But I want to emphasize, this is about successful product management, not about a successful product. That's a whole different story, as you know. Problem solution fit, product market fit, and mostly luck. But you also need successful product management. So yeah, three-leg stool because, you know, one or two legs can be super strong, but if one of them is weak, you might not want to sit on that stool. At any given time, you need the agreed upon expected outcome, the alignment, right? What are we aiming? What are we trying to achieve in one to three years? Next quarter, next increment, next week's release event. At any point, it needs to be clear what the outcome is you are expecting from your effort so that you can have a focused effort towards that outcome. I think we have been talking about this and doing pretty well in most product companies. But clear visibility and understanding of the current situation, we are churning out all those outputs, but where are we? I mean, we can say, yeah, we did 80% of our to-do list, backlog, whatever. But what does it mean when it comes to the outcome you are after? That's why I ran into this beautiful framework, North Star and Input Matrix, which you might be familiar with. But let's have a short refresher. The idea is you might have tons of different KPIs to look at to understand how your product, business is doing. But if you had to choose one, the...