Main takeaways: - This book and session cover over twenty years of hard-won field experience and industry knowledge into lessons that will empower new product managers to act like pros right out of the gate - Tools Product Managers everywhere use to align their teams with market needs and organizational goals - How to make not only your product succeed but achieve your own success as well

1. www.productschool.com
Webinar: The Influential Product
Manager by fmr MasterClass VP PM

2. Join 60,000+
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

7. AUTHORITY
BIAS

8. AUTHORITY BIAS
• Internal or external stakeholder, in a position of power
or expertise
• Asserts something to be true or a course of action the
correct path
• Critical assessment skipped
Too much of your roadmap is based on opinion
16

9. 2019 Technology Product Management Survey
“Strategic and prioritization decision making in your
organization”
60EXPERIENCE AUTHORITY BIAS
OFTEN OR ALWAYS – A THIRD
BELIEVE THEIR COMPANY HANDLES
IT POORLY
%
04
95HAVE FAST-TRACKED A FEATURE
BECAUSE OF WHO ASKED FOR IT –
HALF OFTEN ACCOMMODATE
AD-HOC REQUESTS (FREQUENTLY
WITHOUT BELIEVING THEM
NECESSARY)
%
TWO
IN THREE AGREED SENIOR
STAKEHOLDER OPINIONS “RULE THE
DAY” WHEN DECIDING PRODUCT
PRIORITIES

10. About 50% feel
comfortable and
empowered to challenge
a senior member of their
organization
05

11. 06
Overcoming Authority Bias – Mobile App
Situation Solution Results
Team empowered to
challenge opinion with
qual and quant data
Massively de-scoped
secondary features
Launched within three
months with revenue lift
Social Networking
Millions of DAU
90+ min
~400k
2 years
Priorities
stakeholder-driven
Excessive features
Weekly Validation
Five users
Minimal preparation
Directionally useful
Balance internal review
Three-stage Beta
1000 users
KPI benchmarks with tolerances
1. engagement
2. conversion
3. retention

12. SURVIVOR
BIAS

13. SURVIVOR BIAS
• Concentrating on most active customers
• Likely more positive about your product or simply
more vocal
• Over-represented in data
You’re only speaking to part of your market
16

14. 08
Informing Product Prioritization – Consumer
Apps

15. 09
Informing Product Prioritization – Enterprise
Products

16. 11
Overcoming Survivor Bias – SaaS Solution
Situation Solution Results
Franchisee Management
Sales-driven culture
Single- and
few-location
customers
Customer
responsiveness
Urgent > Important
New customer growth
stalled
Focus and Hard
Calls
Home-services multi-tenant market
Encourage churn for demanding
single-location customers
Metrics: multi-location adoption/usage
Portfolio
Management
Framework to prioritize investment
1. Iterative optimizations
2. Delighters
3. Core platform
Delivered home-services
roadmap and re-oriented
platform in 1Q
Beach-head, large scale,
referenceable customers
Shrunk single-location client
base
But the pivot came too late…

17. REPUTATION
RISK

18. 13
“…a shared belief that the team is
safe for interpersonal risk taking”
“…confidence that the team will
not embarrass, reject, or punish
someone for speaking up.”
– Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management,
Harvard

19. REPUTATION RISK
• Becoming personally invested in, and publicly
associated with, an idea or initiative
• Its failure is a reflection on you
• Diminished risk taking and reduced objectivity
Fear and/or ego are getting in the way
16

20. 23%
14
60%
Behaviors of Learning Teams

21. 15Overcoming Reputation Risk – CVR
Optimization
Situation Solution Results
Subscription business
High-visibility CVR OKR
Top-down, lower-trust
environment
Try only “safe” ideas:
“every idea has to work”
Marginal gains <
investment
Goals
● Deprioritized outcomes-oriented
business goal
✔ Emphasized test velocity (“at-bats”)
and “idea-mix” portfolio
Ways-of-workin
gSwitched ideation process to
go-for-volume
Learning as an outcome to be
celebrated
Product principles:
hypothesis-driven, speed & iteration,
fail ok
Built confidence and
momentum
Throughput and breadth
of ideas implemented up
CVR increased 40%
Changing the culture wasn’t
possible – the team’s
environment was
Overly sensitive to user
risk

22. 17
INCONCLUSION 1. Structure how incoming stakeholder and
customer requests are prioritized and
balanced alongside everything else
2. Identify and explicitly seek out those
under represented in your analysis and
research
3. Encourage a psychologically-safe
environment – hypothesis-led learning,
calculated risk taking and celebration

25. linkedin/in/kensandy
kenjsandy@gmail.com
www.influentialpm.co
m
Available now from Amazon and
booksellers everywhere
Or contact for a
free PDF sample:

26. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training