PurePerformance - What is Data-Driven Product Management with Manav Chugh

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Building products that people want to use and activating users to try out new capabilities has to be the ultimate goal of every product manager. User and usage data is the enabler to make the right decisions. But data doesn’t come for free – and making the right decisions is something that data alone doesn’t guaranteeListen in and learn from Manav Chugh, product enthusiast, medium blogger and organizer of ProductTank Linz, what inspired him to choose the path from Zero to Data-Driven Product Manager. In our conversation we cover how to capture what data, the importance of data privacy, what we can learn from companies that do data-driven design well and why he loves organizations such as www.ecosia.org.Links from show:Manav on Linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/manavchugh/Manav's Medium Bloghttps://manav77-chugh.medium.com/ProductTank Linzhttps://www.mindtheproduct.com/producttank/linzEcosia Search Enginehttps://www.ecosia.org/

It's time for Pure Performance! Get your stopwatches ready, it's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is, can you guess, Brian Wilson. And as always, I have my co-host, can you guess? No? Is it Mr. I can't think of anything. Darn it, Andy Grabner. Hey Andy, how are you doing? I it I was going so completely completely failed attempt to be funny today

Brian that's isn't that always what it is it's always a failed attempt that's true but you know maybe they get better

who knows we should ask the audience with practice yes even though not everything even though sorry to interrupt

not everything with practice gets better because I have to make a little jab to our lovely neighbors. The Germans have been practicing playing football for a long, many, many years, but yesterday they failed miserably against England. I was going to ask how Austria did. Austria did awesome.

We lost against the Italians, but we did in a very good way because it was, I think, the best game we played. And I think Austria was celebrating the whole weekend, even though we lost. Well, that's awesome. And I know this is old news for everybody out there listening, but obviously you can tell how much I follow sports. So go sports.

Well, I'm glad your team, you had a happy loss. That's not very common. And happy losses usually come with planning, right, Andy? That's very true. You tried to do the segue today. You wanted to kind of segue over into introducing our guests. I figured I'll do a segue for you to do a segue.

Actually, I would like to introduce our guest today with a different question because it is still the EuroCup going on. And I'm not really sure if Manouf is actually I hope he's still listening in Manouf are you there yeah I'm there I'm listening to your interesting stories pretty funny but yeah now before I let you introduce yourself like what you do and who you are and why we have you on the show are you following the Eurocup of course I'm following the Euro Cup.

I'm actually playing in the sixth division here in Austria right now with the club named Union Puka now. So it's, yeah, I think football is something that I'm just brought up with. So yeah, definitely. So then let's make a prediction

because by the time this airs, the Euro Cup champion should be known. Who do you think is going to win it? Who do you think is going to win it? Who do I think is going to win it? I think the fact that England kicked out Germany. I mean,

I would say I'll go for England to be honest. Maybe today, this year, they can make it happen to be honest. Yeah.

Well, I go with Italy because if Italy wins, we as the Austrians can say, see, we lost against the champion. Of course. Otherwise, we would have made it much further. And that's what it is. I'm going to predict that this football is going to be won by the Denver Broncos. Exactly.

Hey, switching gears now. I wanted to actually give you the chance to properly introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do in your day-to-day life? Why do you think you're on the show? Hey, okay, perfect. Pretty tough questions to ask also for an interview, you know? Hey, what's your name?

Tell us about yourself. It's just like Barbara Walters. Better enough, it's not Oprah right now, but okay. Yeah, so... Wait, wait, I just have to interrupt. I have to just say, because this joke just came to me, it's not Oprah, it's Opa. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Yeah. Because that's what Charles said after that airing for the Queen and the King. But anyways. So, hey, yeah, my name is Manav. Long story short, yeah, what am I doing here? What do

I do day to day? So let's just give you a brief. I was actually born and brought up in India. My family and I immigrated to Canada. I moved to Europe to do my co-op, or that's what you call an internship back in our university in Canada. And then I moved over to Linz now, and I've been working with Dynatrace for about two and a half years.

Currently, I'm moving towards a growth PM role. So I worked my way up the ladder, I would say. So I was working as a product specialist, a customer phasing person. I moved to R&D, to software engineering, and then I moved to PM. And people might ask, hey, you have too many touch points in your career already in two years in Diretrace. And that's the case because when I moved to Diretrace, I knew that I wanted to become a PM. And somebody gave me a roadmap in our company. And that's what I stuck to. And that is something that I've been perceiving and trying to become.

And I achieved it this year. So I was super happy about it. Congratulations. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. And I'm here, obviously, like I know Andy pretty much well. Brian and I, we met virtually for the first time.

So everyone knows Andy, I guess, in Lintz, if not the world. And of course, I know the podcast that you guys do. And we had a pretty interesting conversation if I was interested in and bring my insights around product management and especially around data-driven product management and how is that pivotal to product innovation especially with the trends and disruptions that we are having let's say around COVID as well and what are the pitfalls of not being data-driven so that's the that's the's the theme of this talk right now. Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, and I wanted to, I mean, first of all, thank you so much. It's amazing kind of, you know, hearing where you came from and especially the roadmap that you laid out that Dynatrace gave you as a career path. I also want to highlight and we'll link to your LinkedIn profile. You are the co-organizer of Product Tank Lints, you as a career path i also want to highlight and we'll link to your linkedin profile you are the co-organizer of product tank lintz which is also pretty cool right i think you're doing a lot

of things for the community this is why it's one of the reasons why i invited you because i saw i keep seeing stuff that you post online presentations that you do um and what i find especially interesting, and this is why we really wanted to get you on the show, is the whole idea of data-driven product design, data-driven product management. Because Brian and I, we talk a lot about data. We talk a lot about performance metrics.

But I think we have not really talked about what do we do with data or what can be done with data from a product engineering, product management perspective? And this is why I thought this topic is so interesting. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm pretty young in my career. I'm only 26 years old. So sometimes when I talk to my parents or my sisters,

they call me a grandpa. So maybe I just have too much wisdom in me, but I'm pretty early in my career of product management, but you know, I've seen there's a massive shift right now in product management in the past. If you compare to back in like 2000 or like 2005 to where we are right now, like product success is, is, is not only visual thinking, but it depends on how you use data to have positive business outcomes that we want to achieve as a company together.

So think about, initially, people only used to think about what the users really want. They never really set any metrics or they never really set any business outcomes to what they were launching. They were just shipping out features, one thing after the other, not really caring what the user wants. And now people stepped in. The agile methodology came into place. User experience came into place. And things started changing.

So experience came into place in terms of what a user wants, which is being tied to a business outcome right now. And now working in, or let's say the regular apps that you use like zoom facebook instagram google hangouts i mean everything that you do now is is being tracked in terms of like events and somehow that is being tailored to you specifically or uniquely as a user to bring you always back to the app. So the main, for me as a growth PM, my main goal is obviously to look at users. How do we activate them?

How do we acquire them? And how do we monetize our products so that they can better understand licensing capabilities or get to know the value that they're buying? And in the end, how do we retain them? Because every successful product is only successful when a user comes back to the product and uses it for a purpose. So, and it can be any day-to-day regular apps that can come to your mind. So let's say WhatsApp, that's a communication mechanism that we use here, specifically in

Europe. Nobody like uses uses text messages. That's a different kind of psychology I observed when I moved here. So I need to use or I use WhatsApp to connect with my friends and family in Europe. So there is definitely some sort of psychology and data-driven capabilities that companies out there have used in B2C or B2B to make their products to have a user experience so that the users come back to it and use it on a day-to-day basis. Hey, I got a couple of questions here and I'm not sure how I should trace them in the right order but i i'll a couple

things it's always a question is every question is a good question so okay but it's like it's like different areas so first of all i want to ask you we are in software engineering we're in tooth in 2021 a lot of the topics that brian and i talked about that was touching uh devops especially in the last couple of years people people have been referring to the whole, everything we do around automation. The industry has looked a lot to the automobile industry when they started to automating the assembly lines and all of that. Now, we as a software industry, we are a very young industry when it comes to designing products and selling products.

Is there something where looking at what DevOps did in terms of looking at what the automobile industry did to optimize their production lines and pipelines, is there something where product managers like you actually look at other industries that have been around for much, much longer and learn from them? Because we are not the first ones that design and try to sell product and try to make it better and retain users. Is there something we can actually learn from other industries? I mean, of course, you know, you have your product leaders, you have your pioneers who carry the flag, who set like a vision, like this is how certain things have to be done

or they disrupt the current way of things. And then you go back and you see the historical changes that they've done. Part of being a PM is always about knowing what the market trends are and also going back in the history and seeing what things worked and what things did not work so that it prepares you better to do experiments in your day-to-day life. Talking about DevOps and automation, I mean, everything that we want now in our year 2021 is to be on our fingers. If I want something, it should be one click away from me

and no way further. So think about like no code websites that are coming up. So that's software being built. Nobody needs to write a line of code and voila, you can have a website built for yourself, for your personal portfolio or for a startup or for a company.

So definitely as a product manager, the best thing is like we get to do experiments and we get to be wrong at a lot of experiments that we do because we are hypothesizing. We are having evidence to support our hypothesis,

but maybe that's why I say data is sometimes ludicrous. It's volatile. Maybe you're trying to perceive a meaning out of it, which might not be supported by the others or your other stakeholders. So you need to kind of provide a story as to why this data would meet your decision-making process and how it supports you in this process.

So as a PM, definitely you look at the historical data, you try to see how other people were successful. And in our current time, what can be learned from them, what can be derived from their learnings and better implement them or iterate on those learnings to fit our product, our culture, to better serve our customers. Now, are there other companies you refer to and you look up to in terms of what they've

done? Again, if I come back to the DevOps stories, people always talk about Toyota and what they did in terms of uh you know pipeline automation uh we often refer to uh you know companies like facebook and twitter and google and how great they are in terms of automation are there especially in the area that you work in as a product manager and thinking about data different product management are there these let's say unicorns that are doing a great job where we where you all look up to and say, hey, we need to become like them? Yeah, definitely.

I mean, we recently had for the community that I run, Product Tank Lens, we celebrated the World Product Day, which is a celebration for all product leaders and product pioneers around the world. And we actually were joined by the guest speaker, Gibson Biddle. He was the VP or the CPO for Czech or the VP for Netflix. And that is one company that I definitely look up to. And when I say when I look up to somebody, I look up to the way they think and I look up to the way they implement the product strategy. Because the product can be anything. It's all about optimizing and bringing across a user experience

that optimizes your business results, but also makes the user come back to their product on a day-to-day basis. So Netflix is definitely one that I look up to in terms of product strategy. I don't use that much social media, so I'm off Facebook and Instagram. So I'm one of those... Congratulations. I'm one of those users that try to stay away.

Well, because I think they're making money off our data, so I kind of don't want to give them my data. So I stay away from them. But think about Ecosia. I don't know if you guys have heard about Ecosia. Ecosia is a, so we have Google Chrome, or Google, which is a search engine. Ecosia is also a search engine built by a startup in Berlin.

But for every search that you do, basically monetizes into planting a tree around a specific geolocation in the world. So whatever, let's say I use Ecosia as a default search engine on my daily basis. So when I'm working in Diretrace, you would never see me having did, like, I don't know, like max has been like 2200 searches or unique searches that I've done. And those were translated into number of trees that are being planted in some part of the world. So that is an amazing product because I believe I'm a bit towards a climate perspective person. And I believe this is a really good social cause that they're doing.

And obviously, think about search engine as they compare to Google. They still have to optimize a lot. They need to still use a lot of data from their current user base to see, OK, what are they missing? What can they include in their current optimization strategy to make better experience? Because some of the searches that you do, you would never get a result on a close. I mean, it's just not there because it's like, imagine AI or ML algorithm that is running in behind, which basically correlates that if this person searches this, when they come back,

they would have more results for it. But that's not the case right now because maybe somebody has never searched that keyword in Ecosia right now. So that is definitely a company that I look up to in terms of like the product innovation,

what they're trying to do. And the good thing also about them is that they're really transparent. So at the good thing also about them is that they're really transparent so at the end of the month they always come out with their financial earnings and what they've planted in terms of the trees for that specific geolocation so it's really clean it's really green and i mean it makes me happy when i do a we do a search and it translates into planting a tree somewhere. Sure, you know, I want to be part of that social cause. So that is one of the products that I use on a day-to-day basis that as a product manager,

I really get inspired from them in terms of product strategy and innovation. Great. It's funny you mentioned the browser bit. I know this is a little off topic, but for similar reasons of privacy and data selling, I a long time ago switched over to DuckDuckGo. I've never heard of Ecosia before, so I'll have to check it out. But anytime I have to search anything related to code, I always find myself having to switch back to Google.

Certain things you start getting results from, like, okay, these results aren't hidden, so I've got to switch back to Google for certain things. But it's very few and far between. But it is interesting that the different search engines have different result sets and what those reasons are and all. It's a whole new thing. But anyway, it's a little bit off topic I think, but just something

for people using alternative search engines that might be the reason. Let's bring back AltaVista. I'll say that. Edio, sorry, go on. I got to say that Ecosia, now that I look at the logo, Gabi is using it on her phone all the time. And I guess the name didn't ring a bell. Maybe you brought it up with her,

but she also knew about it or she's using it. Hey, but I wanted to ask you something. And now, because you said, you know, you don't want to use services like Facebook and Instagram because they're exploiting and selling our data. But on the other side, it is also the data that you need as a product manager to make the product better. So isn't that also a little challenge? Like on the one side, we want to give everybody the privacy that they need.

On the other side, we need the data in order to optimize products. So what's the balance? What's the right balance between privacy and still having enough data to optimize products? I mean, the thing about privacy is that it's really, let's say it's really political right now when we talk about privacy, right? So what privacy rules exist in the US or in Canada don't really exist in Europe

because Europe has different GDPR rules of how people can consume data and what data they can consume and then how can they use data. So there are two different target markets there are two different completely two different set of rules of how companies have to abide so let's say about like north america so let's talk about canada so like many people my my cousins my my sisters my my family, they use Facebook and they use Instagram. For me, the purpose about using a product that is not monetized,

so you don't pay anything for the product, then you basically become the product. Because how would they better their product? So how does Facebook know or Instagram know that they need to maybe have a better user experience here? This is a feature that they created, but they're having like a 30% turnout and that's not meeting their KPI. So what they do is they take in our data and they try to optimize their product

by using us as like minions, I would say, to form a better user experience. And that's why these things become really addictive. But what I see is a different trend, let's say, in Europe that way, because a lot of people, a lot of friends that I have, they don't really use social media platforms, or maybe that's just my group circle that I have. So I guess PMs have to be really careful

in terms of who they want to capture data from. And that's a big task of itself. It's, and, and that's the thing, you know, like you need to adopt like a experimental culture around product managers. So I, that's why whenever I, I'm working towards a problem and people say, okay, what's the MVP. And I usually don't call it the mbp i call it the mlp which is the minimum lovable product so that's the first thing that needs to be shipped out with the data that i have and it will always be a struggle for product managers across all products

especially if they're free of any charge or is there like a free service in terms of how they can capture data. And that's just something they have to work across in their data strategy. Would they want to make a hypothesis or would they want to make a bet that if something works for a unique user

in Toronto in Canada, would that work for this same user profile or a unique user in Linz, Austria? So there are a lot of ifs and buts. There are a lot of gray areas, especially with using data. And that's why there are big pitfalls of always using too much data as well. But I guess it's all about using, setting up a strategy, setting up a leadership in form of making informed decision and also using your own intuition as a person

if you want to go ahead with that decision as a product manager. I think you've made some good points there too. I think the whole data thing comes down to what it's being used for as well. I would take the Facebook, the social media analogy even further. Not that it's, you know, was it? Way back, where the thought process there was we're no longer a banking company. We're a software company that specializes in banking, right? With the social media companies, they're not social media companies. They're advertising companies.

We are the commodity, and the platform is just the means of delivering the advertising to their advertisers. But with that said, to your point, Andy, if you're not getting feedback, all the time in apps, I get like, hey, do you want to turn on custom advertising? I'm like, absolutely not. I would rather have meaning. I don't want custom advertising. I'm more on your side of this, Manav, I think, where when you're talking about product improvements, collecting the anonymous data to improve the product, to make a better user experience, to see how people are using the tool to enhance those areas, I think that's a great way to go with all this stuff. It's when you start trying to turn that into a commodity to either sell that data to third parties or, you know, me personally, again, I'm in a little bit more of the weird camp. I don't want a customized experience on an app because I don't want that feeling of being spied on. Now, other people might be fine with it, and I think there's a choice, but you talk about the differences between different countries. In the United States, there's almost zero privacy laws. I think they're trying to push for some in California,

which will hopefully have a ripple effect. But you have the same people who are freaking out about the vaccines going to track them, who are giving away all their data on everything else. In fact, it's really creepy what you mentioned. I was just watching the news, like our local news, like one of the Denver news stations, and downtown Denver is tracking how much downtown is coming back alive with all this COVID stuff shutting down by tracking cell phone information. And they can do it completely legally.

They're not getting personal information, but they know where you're coming from, what zip code you were coming from, and whether or not, based on, I guess, some other demographics they're capturing, whether or not you're working downtown or you're an actual visitor. So they're tracking all this stuff,

and I'm like, that's crazy. But again, we don't have anything to prevent that from being used. And anyway, it's, yeah, again, it's not data-driven product development, but it's part of what you're talking about in a way. It is data. It is definitely data-driven because one of the key pillars for being data-driven is having a consciousness or like a practical responsibility of data collection, right? So if somebody wants to collect my data, what am I exchanging?

I'm exchanging my privacy for that. So the critical element in data collection is the value in exchange for privacy for every person. So, and that shouldn't be decided by any political identity or business, but that should be a personal choice. If I'm a user for Facebook and Instagram, and I wish to give them my data,

me being the commodity, then I should be the one reaping some earnings from it. And I don't mean like investing in like stocks or something, but like Facebook or Instagram should be paying users. Hey, we use your data to optimize the user experience for yourself and for like a hundred thousand other customers, you know? So there is the price that you should get. And, and that is, that is what I say. It's a, it should be a personal choice.

And that's why I feel in Europe that way things are really strict because you, you can't just like collect data that way. You know, you have to go like to levels of like passes from the government, from the business itself, as to what type of data that you can collect. And whatever information that you do collect needs to turn into something actionable. Because like, imagine like, even for us,

like, you know, we're an enterprise right now, or there are other enterprises out there as well. Amount of data that we collect from the user base that we have is insane. So what data you need to look at, what data you think will turn into like actionable insights, what data will prove your hypothesis wrong or right, you really need to kind of correlate that and make an informed decision to move forward.

Yeah. Hey, I guess we could probably, you know, talk about data privacy and this will probably fill its own, you know, season of podcasts. I would love to bring it back a little bit to the product management, what you're doing right now,

especially, I think you mentioned you are a growth PM, so growing product usage. Now, I have another maybe interesting, tough question. On the one side, if you're a startup and if you have a small product that is doing one thing and one thing really great

and you have a clear user path, then maybe you have one product manager that understands everything end-to thing and one thing really great, and you have a clear user path, then maybe have one product manager that understands everything end-to-end, that's great and you can optimize for it. In an organization that you are working in right now, that we all work in, where we have, I don't know how many PMs we have, we probably have a large number.

A lot of PMs. Yeah. So how do you scale this? How do you make sure that from an end user perspective it doesn't it feels like you're really truly guided in through the different features in dynatrace and that you want to come back even though you know there's like 50 different product managers maybe that have contributed to the features that you're touching. Because I think this is the challenging part, especially with growth of an organization,

with growth of a product that you bring consistency in and this whole value-driven, value stream-driven development really stays there, is measurable, and in the end results in the product that people love to use. I think that's a really good question. And that's really core to what a growth product manager is. So maybe let's just define what a growth product manager in Dynatrace is. Because for me, a growth product manager is something really new in the industry.

They weren't any growth product managers. Maybe they were like growth hackers or like growth marketing experts. But like growth product management is something really different now. It's been coming up in the last, I don't know, like three, four, five years. It's really recent, but it's growing a lot. And it's growing a lot for product-led companies or for companies that own PLG

or product-led growth strategy. So growth product managers for me in our ecosystem right now are basically peers to traditional product managers. So let's say the core product managers who are working on different parts of the product. But rather than owning a specific part of that product as a growth PM, I'm focused on improving a specific business metric or a commercial goal, let's say. So what this does is that this metric or this goal basically correlates to any, should correlate to any point in that user journey for that specific problem that I'm working on. And this basically translates into the metrics that we want to improve and the growth PMs basically own these business metrics.

And the challenge of working, the amazing part about this is that I love the product that I'm working on and I want to work on all aspects of the product. So as a growth PM, I work on the whole ecosystem of the product. So cross solution, which is amazing because i get to touch upon different interesting difficult problems and that is what i like i like to solve problems it's it's it's a core nature for my character right now to solve problems and then think about a large organization where you have to say that okay we want to growth is a really important aspect how do we grow our user base or how do we tap into a new market is that it the first is the mindset the mindset needs to change if the mindset is that we only want to serve to a specific target group uh we only want to serve to

the target group which has like x amount of like accounts of accounts with us or something, then that's not a good way forward. We want to tap into the markets that we haven't tapped or we didn't even think about. Why didn't we think about that? And how do we make sure that we include growth in every product increment that we do? So let's say we create a new feature.

We do measure the success of the feature in that present time, but what are the business metrics we need to combine so that we can measure them over time to see if the users are actually using that feature on a day-to-day basis in a repeated way for the next two years for that feature to come. So how is the adoption going? So I feel that there's a lot of leadership that needs to be set up. And currently the leadership right now under who I am working for is amazing

because, as I say, it starts with the mindset. And if somebody brings in a new perspective or new idea, it kind of brings in a new, how do you say, it starts with the mindset. And if somebody brings in a new perspective or new idea, it kind of brings in a new, how do you say, a breath of fresh air inside the organization as well, especially if you are an enterprise organization and you are really growing at a really fast pace. You know, you are onboarding new employees on a day-to-day basis. You're bringing in people from like different cultures, backgrounds,

credentials, and it kind of brings people together to listen to everyone in terms of ideas and what strategy you want to have. And if that is a tone that is being set in a company, then product innovation and like product strategy are just the peak, you know, what is to come is going to blow the user's mind because being a product manager or a growth product manager, our main purpose is to solve the pain points for the customer.

So the main challenge here is for me as a growth PM is always to maybe to change mindset by influence. I don't own anybody or I don't govern any employee. That is not my role. I want to change mindsets to influence by providing them evidence as to why do we want to do things this way and how this can bring their product feature success in that specific period of time. So that is the main purpose for a growth PM, to drive growth with influence in the company

so that the business grows as well as the customer experience and the customer satisfaction grows at the same time. Very, very nice. It's amazing to hear. I mean, I'm not sure, Brian, if you were aware of this, but I guess we've been growing so fast and we're all working in our individual areas of the company that I find it fascinating that we're investing exactly in this

because I think this really ensures that we are moving into the right direction as a company, not just building features, but hopefully also investing in exactly building stuff that makes users happy, more efficient, and want to come back. Now, Manu, one question then, and without revealing too many secrets maybe,

but if you work with different PMs, then are there things you demand or you want them to do in terms of metrics? I mean, you mentioned feature usage, right? This is something we can track. Are there any other things you track and you say this is the minimum requirement if you do true data-driven product management?

These are certain data points that everybody has to have because without them you're flying blind i mean when we when we talk about data-driven product product management you need to kind of understand or let's let's actually turn the let's turn the opposite lens on that question first what it means for an organization or enterprise to be data-driven, you know, because that is a whole challenge of its own. So having data first, collection of data, having data transparency. So what data I am seeing as a product manager, other people should also be able to see that data. Marketing team should be able to see that data.

Sales team, Brian should be able to see that data as well. Why not? Like that sales team Brian should be able to see that data as well why not like he talks to customers on a day-to-day basis he should provide some insights on that data as well so Democrat or do you say making data available to market is really yeah yeah exactly yeah that's the word and yeah so I think that's the first challenge of how do you make sure that you want to be data driven? And once you have that philosophy and once you have that mindset, that's when you, for big enterprises, you bring on people on board. People like data scientists, like you would have like a data scientist department. You would have like data scientists, like you would have like a data scientist department, you would have like data analysts, you would have people, people who have specialized in like ML or AI

would kind of make these machine learning algorithms to kind of, kind of correlate data, kind of learn from the data that we're getting to turn them into like actionable insights so that they would rather rather have more questions than answers because it's all about how you perceive data also because you want to answer more answers or do you want to have more questions to answer for your evidence so on a day-to-day basis when i work with product managers the idea is that we... Obviously, there are a certain set of thresholds or baselines. We said, okay, this is a blueprint of the things that we need to think of. And then we basically sit down together and we correlate as to what is that one outcome

that we want to achieve once this feature is shipped. And that is what I was talking about in the start. When product management has evolved in the last 10 years, we are still in this circle of like learning and then we are building, we're testing, and then we are measuring and analyzing what we've built. And then we are iterating on that. So we are not just like going from like raw material

to building a motorcycle. No, we are going from raw materials to building a longboard, to a bicycle, to a motorcycle. So that should be the vision to use your data strategy in the company to use those pillars to set these business outcomes and then to ship like certain features so it's usually a conversation to be honest around product managers it's never like oh you need to have like these specific things and and that is the purpose of

like growth pms to step in to see okay if we are building this, how does this fit into our business strategy? How do we think that this feature is something that will provide amazing or increased amount of lifetime customer value? Something like the customer will use on a day-to-day basis and something that we can monetize so that we can reach our business goals as well. So, I mean, it's a two-way conversation here. So, as I said, obviously, there are blueprints in terms of what things are needed, but this is definitely a conversation that PMs and growth PMs and UX researchers, sales need to sit down with, kind of work together, intangible, intangible conversations to correlate as to why you want to run this experiment or why you're launching this feature and what possible outcomes it will have. You know, a lot of what you're saying there, there was a, I forget what video it was, I recently watched,

but I think, and I'm going to probably get a lot of terminology incorrect here, but what it's reminding me of in the complexity of what's happening in product management, I would be shocked if very soon product management as a study and as a practice does not start studying and borrowing from biological sciences. The parallel there is complex systems versus discrete systems in a broad picture. So if you think about any biological study, we can study how the heart operates. We can study how fingers move. We can study how the liver functions. We can study how the heart operates, we can study how fingers move, we can study how the liver functions, we can study how all these discrete systems move, and they're somewhat simplified. And those are basically your features. You have all these PMs now creating all these different little parts that work, but then you have the complex system.

And when you put those, you know, that's the whole human or the whole animal, whatever biological thing you're studying. And when you put those pieces together, they don't function the same as when they're functioning on their own. A great example, actually I remember the video came from, it was talking about synchronization of systems. So if you have, let's say, two metronomes on a table, and you start them at different times, they'll sync up because of the vibrations,

the oscillation that goes through the table and affects the other one, shifts its cycle enough that they eventually synchronize. So when you think about that, I'm not here to debate whether or not we're going to create or anybody else is going to create true artificial self-thinking intelligence, but we are on the drive to create more and more and more very richly complex systems. And we see that even at Dynatrace, what we're doing with a lot of the stuff going on behind the scenes. So the piece that I think that has to be there is that whole, and I think that's part of what you're touching upon doing there, is that whole, how do we make sure all these integrate

together? How does system A impact system B in ways we might not have ever thought of? How do we do that study from a product point of view of the complex system, not just of the software we're creating? But then to your point, expanding that out to the business goals and expanding that out even further

to what are the customer needs. And all these three things have to jive together. And it's really, really complex from a theoretical practice. It's crazy. I would definitely say for the product managers that I am working with, product management is a really difficult skill because product managers, from my perspective at least from startups to medium-sized companies to enterprises are wrong let's say 80 percent of the times even if they

have data to support their hypotheses or they have evidence to support their experiments because the thing is when you do run experiments you run it with a statistical audience or like a threshold. Like you're only running it with people in Linz right now or people in Austria. And then you would run another experiment against it with the same amount of population index in some other country. Let's say, I don't know, like Switzerland or something. So even though Switzerland has a low population as compared to Austria. So anyways, that's a bad example. The idea is even that, if not set right, can make your decisions wrong.

So think about products that you use on a day-to-day basis and think about the user experience that you have. And that has become really, really important for product managers to integrate because initially it was all about like, hey, you have like 10 features now, use whatever you want. But now it's all about the product experience. If you don't have a good product experience, if you don't see where the click is,

if it's not intuitive enough, if it's not beautiful enough, it really doesn't matter to the user. The user is just going to turn. The user is going to bounce. And that's the kind of data that we also give in that interest in terms of when you do real user monitoring. So when people want to monitor their websites. Coincidentally, my sister, she's a product owner and not a product manager. And she's working for J.P. Morgan in New York.

And J.P. Morgan uses Dynatrace. So she knows colleagues in her own department who use Dynatrace. And somehow, if if they have any questions really seldomly she's messaged me on whatsapp and she's asked me like hey this guy can't or my friend can't figure this thing out do you have like a couple minutes to like talk about this and they use Dynatrace in that case to monitor the mobile applications for for jb morgan, at least on the front end side, just to see how much long the app is taking to load on different geolocations. What is the performance for the application for that specific user in that geolocation?

What tags they can generate to understand which users are using their app in what condition and what geolocation. So it's really, it is definitely complex. It can make your head churn because again, there's so much data to collect. There's so much data out there, but as I said, it really has to start with the opposite lens on you as to what insights do you want to have from the data? Because a lot of times you would just say, hey, I need to have data and I will just make sense of it. But like, what kind of data do you want?

Do you want like qualitative data or do you want like quantitative data? Do you want to see like metrics, like numbers? Or do you want to like do some sort of like customer interviews? You want to get into the psychology of the user to understand why they are doing the things they're doing in our product to make it better. So, I mean,

for like big pioneers of like data-driven companies out there to become data-driven in an enterprise or in any company takes a long time. Cause as I said, it starts from leadership. It starts from a mindset starts by having people who are ready to change. And this is what starts that change in that company that, that pivot to making data driven informed decisions. But then it also, it has its subset as well, right? You can't always keep doing sports every day. Well, you're going to injure yourself. You need to like have a rest as well.

You need to like sleep for eight hours. You need to like look after your diet. So you need to do all the other things as well to make things work. So data driven product management is just like one data. It's just one part of it, how you use the data, how do you implement the data, how do you collect data, are all the things that go together to make that product

or to make that organization a success if the customers want to come back and use that product. Yeah, wow. Sounds like more testing and production, Andy. Hasi would be happy. We had a conversation with Hasi, I forget his last name, but it was about testing and production. And the same thing as you said, putting this stuff, you have to get it from the real users.

You have to get the right information. And Andy, this ties back to performance testing. This ties back to chaos testing. This ties back to just general sciences, right? As you're saying, Manav, you have to know the questions you're asking. And once you know the questions you're asking, you can start figuring out what do we need to get the answers from that. Whether or not you have to create certain conditions, what telemetry, what kind of telemetry do you need to gather for that to get these answers and then go and set it up. But it all starts with what is the question you need to find an answer to.

It's fascinating. I never thought of product management in this way before. So thank you so much. I mean, we have a lot of great product leaders and there are a lot of people that I look up to, especially in my age and the career path that I have taken. It's all about being like a sponge like taking in everything and then and kind of optimizing because obviously you know you have to use your own

learnings and you kind of have to optimize it to reap the maximum benefits out of it you know so like starting from my story you know if somebody gave me a roadmap to become a product manager in that place like I did it that way but I had to like optimize I had a product manager in that way. It's like, I did it that way, but I had to like optimize, I had to tweak things in that roadmap as well to make it work for me and the colleagues that I'm working for. So it's kind of a hand in hand process. So it works both ways, I would say. Awesome. Hey, I think just as I thought in the beginning when we started this conversation

there's a lot of stuff we can talk about and probably we could go on uh more manuva i thank you so much for this first insightful session i think we should come back and then see let's say half a year and a year from now what else is new or maybe you even before that figure out what other topics um that are coming up one one thing that i learned or that i was made aware of is uh customer empathy sessions i think this would be an interesting thing to also discuss in the future this is something that's a that's a topic of its own yeah it's a topic of its own yeah but you really have to be empathetic. Exactly. But to wrap it up here, because I think this is a nice and it was a great overview of data-driven growth,

optimized product management. Obviously, we switched from data privacy to what we can really truly do by enabling an organization to think in a data-driven, user-centric, end-user way. We have a lot of links that I collected. And as part of the conversation, we'll link to your LinkedIn, obviously, to your product tank in Lintz, to Ecosia.

Thank you so much for pointing that out. And if there's any additional links, just, you know, well, for the summary, just let us know and we'll put them in so the people that are interested in learning more can read more and get also in contact with you. Yeah, for sure. Just saying, I've also written about data-driven

product management. I have a medium blog, so maybe that is something that I can share. So that will also give some insights. And as I said, data is perceived differently. So those are just my views.

So it shouldn't be taken as something set in stone. You know, people have different arguments and everyone can have a conversation around data and how data should be perceived and used in product management. So I think that's the best part about product managers is that they can have a conversation around data to make better decisions. Excellent. Okay, perfect. I just want to say

to everyone out there listening, let Manav be an example where as you asked for, you wanted to become a product manager and you asked your management team, what's the roadmap, right? Either if your management team is not actively asking you what you want to do in your career

path and helping you get there, take it up in your own hands and say, hey, this is where I want to get to. What's the path? Who knows if I'm going to make it? Who knows if you're going to like me, but give me the path so I can work on it and see where to take it. And I think that's just another great tidbit that came out of this because that's the strongest thing, especially, you know, not to, you know, I consider myself kind of an older guy, right? And I think for someone, you said you're 26, right? I'm in my late 40s, right?

At that stage in your career, at your age to have the vision to do that. I mean, I know I wasn't thinking that way at your age. That's just fantastic. And I hope other people take that to heart because, you know, your career and your job is what you make it. So make it what you want. Anyhow, go ahead. Anyways, I'll add this in our next talks to come, but it's funny that you mentioned that because in university, if I knew if there was something as product management,

I would have done that, you know? But I did computer science and I came out as a developer and I knew that I can code. I have fun coding, but it's not my passion. Kind of my working environment, my managers, my directors kind of i fell into this because my a lot of my friends now are product managers and it just you know it

just works that way because if as you said if you if you don't have people asking you then you need to strive to ask people if you want something and then it works if you show the hard work and the perseverance to get there exactly all right well right. Well, thank you very much. We are out of time. So thanks to all our listeners. Thank you, Manav, for coming on. And Andy, thanks as always for doing this with me. This is always very fun.

If you have any questions, comments, you can tweet them at pure underscore DT or send an old-fashioned email to pureperformance at dynatrace.com. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And I don't think by next episode, we'll know who won because we're recording tomorrow, Andy. So for, for our listeners who are not paying attention and only getting their,

your, as a Europe cup news from us, you're gonna have to wait even another two weeks to find the answer. All right. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye.