Product Manager Productivity Hacks w/ Otter.ai’s Simon Lau🔴

2:00PM May 29, 2021

Speakers:

Shane Mac

Monica Jasuja

Keywords:

simon

question

product

product manager

terms

build

monica

otter

stage

people

management

customers

clubhouse

meetings

ai

conversations

understand

speaking

absolutely

talking

Okay, Monica, can you hear me.

Absolutely.

All right, it's working. Let me share the link with you.

Very excited because I know that we use this quite often. So, hello British.

Hi, Monica.

Hi Simon.

Hi everyone.

Hi petite.

Okay, I hear this British Is this my golden moment Simon the persons whose software you're using is actually here with us on clubhouse.

Great, I have used otter

earlier, but I'm not using it. It's an excellent.

It's an excellent app.

Okay, this is really, really amazing Simon, I cannot even tell you like. I am just reading myself and hearing myself all at the same time. This is absolutely brilliant. I am going to share a quick little snippet with everyone, but first we will get started because the magic of what I'm seeing here needs to be described to all the lovely audience who has joined us. So thank you everyone for joining us on a Saturday evening, if you're joining us from India and Asia. And if you're joining us from North America then a very, very warm. Good morning to you, I hope, first of all that you're feeling good, and thank you for making your Saturday mornings more enjoyable with this lovely conversation that we're having, having today with Simon from otter.ai. But firstly begin. Before we begin our first few things to take care of specifically in terms of housekeeping, introducing our guests and of course before my official today, we are creating digital super mobile say we talk about everything related to creation digital economy, and we have a number of shows lined up for you. It's very easy to find all the elements of what we have done earlier and what we are doing now, by simply clicking on the greenhouse icon at the top of your page, which and then you'll be able to follow our club also do follow our socials, on Twitter, LinkedIn, and a telegram group where we often share information both about the upcoming events, as well as about us, as well as about our speakers, interesting news, etc. Also, last thing. Our show will be divided into two parts. First, I will go through the list of questions, with time, and then we will actually open this up for the audience members who would be keen to ask him, both questions as well as of course clarifying their career related doubts about product management, they're more than happy to have you on stage, the way to do that would be by clicking on the handpiece icon at the bottom right of your page. So on the bottom right you would see the Henry's icon, and you would see a plus. I would request you to do both of that literally right now we have done hand raising off, I will give you an audio cue shortly when you can turn your handwriting on, and then we'll bring you in to the stage where the order with that will be used is the first in first out order to ask your questions now. Last but not the least, we would hate if you use the leave quietly button. Please don't use it but if there is something that you need to take care of. Absolutely. By all means, and my only request will be that we will keep this like a very crisp, 60 to 65 minutes. So we'd love to have you here for the entire duration, and I forgot to mention one thing, which is that please use the plus button to bring in your friends to the room. All your friends who are online will show up as a cream colored icon next to their next to their faces, and you can take them in here. I'm mushy Pritish Did I miss anything before we begin. No all good. Okay laughs

experiment.

So great, but there are a lot of party hacks today so some of you have listened to clubhouse, feel free to raise your hands as Monica said later on, and follow the speakers for knowing more about what they do afterwards so I'll hand it over back to Monica to kick start this conversation, Simon, big fan myself did using auto for a while and develop the product.

Okay, Simon, I think we have a very long list of people who actually actually completely are an offer not only the product but also the fact that this probably is my biggest moment, because I'm using your product while we're speaking that this hasn't happened before. So, without further ado, let me introduce Simon to you, Simon is a seasoned product leader with 20 plus years of experience in building innovative products at Oracle nuance and otter.ai that strike the right balance between technology and design with expertise in contact center customer engagement and productivity. He is an alum of MIT where he has done his bachelor's and master's in engineering, and he has a five dot o average Simon Welcome to the room.

Thank you Monica, welcome everyone to this room. It's a pleasure.

I use speaking on mute, just like I was earlier.

Thank you everyone. Thank you Monica Hello everyone, my name is Simon Lau. Thank you Monica and everyone inviting me to this room happy to share some insights and also take some questions afterwards.

Amazing to salmon before we begin and dive into all the great work that you're doing an otter.ai It would be, I would love to start with your journey into product management and of course, everything associated with a product management playbook that you seem to have followed in your career, which is about transitioning from engineering to product management, but before you dive into that I would love to also have you talked to us about your career, about your studies at MIT. And did you ever think you'd become a product manager.

Sure, so when I finished my master's degree at MIT with electrical engineering and computer science. I actually started my journey as a software engineer, doing coating coating for contact center applications at Oracle. I spent about seven years in my early career to climb up the engineering ladder, leading a team, both in Silicon Valley, San Francisco Bay area and also in India. So crossfire. Definitely cross geo teams. Eventually I realized that my passion is really into talking to the customer, understanding the customer pain point devising a solution and be able to drive product requirements and product strategy. So I took the leap to do a lateral shift to product management and never turned back, so that has been my journey. After my first initial seven years building up my technical background, and continue to grow as a product manager, up till fast forwarding to today. Just having, having a ton of fun, really loving the ability to build a product that hopefully people love, and add a ton of value to individuals and companies alike. And yeah, and now I just really want to be able to pay it forward and share knowledge to the next generation of product managers.

Absolutely, and Simon when, in terms of your own transition from engineering to product management, what has been something which has a mean been a mainstay for you because you come from a typical engineering background when I say typical with due respect, you know, having acquired all the technical skills going into a product management career, which is more focused on communication, collaboration, and of course, a lot of influencing what did you feel you lacked when you began your career and what is, what are some of the skills that you picked up along the way.

Yeah, that's a great question. So, let me start by answering the opposite question, the unfair advantage of transitioning from a technical background and technical career to a product management role is Steve really truly understanding the underlying technology, knowing what is feasible, and then the complementary skill set that I really needed to pick up is to be able to understand the business understand the customer more deeply, because as an engineer, it is very easy to kind of have a tunnel vision where you just being very passionate about coding and how to optimize the code and really geeked out on all the technology and how to write code, as opposed to connecting to, what are you coding for what are you building the product for. Why does it matter how does it help the user, and how does it help drive revenue to the business. So those are some of the things that I've had to really rapidly, pick up some skills to be able to communicate to the customers, communicate to the cross functional stakeholders whether it is sales or professional services marketing and engineering part that part was easier because I came from engineering. So really just being able to collaborate and be that center of communication to understand on the one hand, what other requirements from the customer side, and also from the business, you know, the cross functional leaders and and be able to distill that prioritize and translate that into an actionable roadmap and plan and lead the team to execute toward that plan and be able to ship the product and release a product, and then repeat. Right, so the cycle repeats. Once you go through one cycle of delivering one release of a product, you continue to learn. You continue to iterate and then you figure out what are the what are the next steps.

Absolutely, and time when you best describe what a typical product manager does, and what the expectations are and of course, how to take to product management for those who are new to the journey, or who want to understand. A typical product manager. This is how it is, but of course we'll be diving into more details around that, but a perfect segue into my next question, which is when you became a pm yourself by transitioning, of course, having had a technical background, did you feel that there are any strong certifications that might help you. And do you actually believe that certifications can help build a product manager experience skill set, And of course the ability to do product management better.

I would say it really depends on how you learn best, so some people learn best by going through structured course coursework, whether it's taking additional classes, getting a certificate, getting certification. Other people are just better at just actually doing the work and learning from experience. So I want to really caution that there is no run one right answer for you, for, for everybody. So you really have to understand how do you learn best do you learn best by reading books do you learn best by listening to podcasts, do you learn best by attending postgraduates courseware or getting certification from the hiring manager standpoint, again I really want to be very honest and frank, at least in the US, hiring marketplace. Having certification. If you have it, it's nice to include it, but it does not just, you know, we're not going to look at the fact that you did not have experience, experience, and just have certification then bingo you instantly gets the job, there's many, there are many factors into the hiring decision so so so if you think that you learn best with certification, great do it, and then if you have done it included on the resume, but there's so many other, it really doesn't. It doesn't match the actual experience that you get from having done the work of a product manager.

Simon I'm so glad that you said this, honestly and transparently because one of the main issues or challenges that I'm seeing as a leader and somebody who has been in the product management domain for some time, is this sudden crease around product manager jobs, and it almost reminds me of the 1990s and yes that's how old I am, about a what happened when we were actually being attracted to careers in software engineering the, the entire narrative was anybody can become a software engineer and anybody can do a code in order to learn programming. The reason I say this is because there is a little bit of a danger where people don't understand, product management, and they look out for the sheen associated with the job title, of course, the CEO that that comes with it. And yes, we will demystify that in a short while, but also about the kind of authority that comes with the job, and of course the amazing salary packages that are right now on offer because of the absolute boom in the tech economy. But what people don't really understand is probably what they what it takes to be a great one, and therefore the certifications which I'm assuming by the day, tend to scare me a little bit as I see that many parents are also forcing 20 year olds to take to product management, or product management, without really understanding the nuances of whether this is a long term career options are just one of those lucrative career options. Therefore when you see, see this, I'm very heartened by the very honest peek around what you use in your hiring decisions, but timing, I have to ask you because currently are working in AI, and now there is also a great differentiation on user segmentation of product management into growth pm data PM, AI PM. Even technical VMs, non technical PMS. How do you see this role segmentation and, again, the associated not only pressure to certify yourself but to be able to be better than the others in order to make it past the key word search in your CV is to make it to the hiring table.

That's a great question. So one thing I would say assess if you are someone, if you're a candidate who did not have any product management background, and you're applying for a job in a product management role that is more generic, then just focus on the generic skill set, the general skill set. If you are making the leap and say, have your first pm job is specific to a technical pm or AI pm or growth PM. It is a higher bar, because not only do you do we as hiring managers expect the experience and skill set of a product manager, but also you need to be well versed and understand that specific that that subset of skill set that that takes you further to specialize in that, for example, AI product managers, not only do you have to be a product manager but you really need to understand the technology behind artificial intelligence for growth managers, you, the expectation is that you have gone through. Yep, you are very analytical skilled, you have done a lot of A B testing, you understand the customer journey and all the different channels that you can engage the customer to drive the growth in terms of user acquisition to growth in terms of conversion. If your other types of technical BMV size, AI, then whatever the industry, whatever the domains expertise in that you need to be very well versed and really understand the technology, even if you have not had the technical background to build using such technologies, but you, you really need to have a good understanding on why, why is that technology, the best fit for the problem, to, to deliver a product that is reliant and powered by such technologies

that absolutely right time and that is absolutely brilliant. They're almost 15 minutes into our conversation, I just wanted to give a small little reminder to the audience if you have any questions for Simon, and you wanted to come up, please hold on to your questions. We'll be opening up the hand crease option shortly, at which point in time you can definitely come. Also, this session is being recorded. So, just wanted to put that out there that whatever you say, we are taking the consent of course assignment to record this and put it into a podcast later, but please be mindful of that. And last but not least, to follow the speakers do follow the club and do follow each other, because a lot of you are new, if you like such content, and you're seeing others around you who also like such content, and it would be a good tribe to be able to build up. Now, before. So quick question back to you, Simon on this particular piece because we've talked about otter.ai So first, I forgot to actually mention this again because I'm so taken aback by seeing myself being transcribed while I'm speaking like literally this happening in front of my eyes I feel like a child but this is like magic. So for anybody who is in the audience, and if you're on Twitter, please go to Simon's profile, or go to my profile, and you will be able to see a link about otter.ai and the transcribing of this particular session which is happening in real time. And if you don't know, then the clubhouse downfalls that happens on at 9:30pm India time every week is transcribed, and we all get to beat all the main takeaways on based on this, and also club deck, which is another tool that uses clubhouse, that is used by clubhouse moderators and of course content creators, also uses otter.ai which is extremely accurate. So Simon can you tell us a little bit about otter.ai and the magic that it is

always happy to talk about altar, so otter.ai is an application that gives you the superpower of remembering more and typing less, and it's great for transcribing your meetings, interviews, lectures, virtual conferences, and now even clubhouse rooms, so that way you have a live transcript that you can share with your colleagues, and share with your audience, and everybody can collaboratively highlight the key moments, let's say there's anything that you hear, that is very valuable that you want to easily search, and listen back again later. You can easily tap on the highlight button so you can collect them. And when you are done with a recording you click on 10 highlights and you can listen back to just those portions. So let's say a 16 minute meeting, typically, turns into a digest of 10 highlights of only five to 10 minutes, and you can share it with your colleagues, you can comment, you can assign action items, and so on so forth. So, even for my product management tasks I oftentimes, you know it's it's becomes a standard that every single meetings that we conduct within otter.ai, we use it. Even when I first met Monica and have an initial meet and greet. Zoom meeting we use it and we find it so valuable, I can capture all the, all the questions for Monica and all the logistics, you know we can both refer back to it so super useful not only for your internal meetings but also for your external networking talk maybe you're talking to. You're doing user research, and you're talking to your potential customers so super valuable tool for a product manager, or even for a scrum leader. Product Engineering Manager, everyone. So I really encourage you to give it a try. He has an application that you can download for iOS, Android, and also worked on as a web, web application on the web browser. So if you're interested, go create a new account, a free account@otter.ai That's o TT er.ai

most wonderful salmon and like I said I'm smiling right now, because I feel like, like I've hit upon some magic. It's truly enticing and I must admit that it took me probably the least amount of effort that it normally takes to do my research and to remember all the, the conversation and my notes, this time around by speaking to you, because we had the transcription. So all I needed to do was go to the relevant parts actually export this and again that's a very useful option, and then these, and I was all set. So I, I don't know, I am absolute I absolutely love otter.ai Poop I use it a lot more. But before people start thinking that I'm paid to say this, I'm going to go and the reason I'm bringing this up is because it's a great segue into my next segment which is actually about what we are speaking about today, which is productivity hacks. So Simon You mentioned about transcribing meetings, etc. But before we go down that route I would love if you were to tell us what a typical day in your life is as a PM, given that you have such a distributed team and you're working across time zones and of course there are so many other product and strategy decisions as well as managing that you do on a daily basis, could you help us understand this a little better.

Sure, Monica. So, as a product manager, I think it depends on your. Whether you're a starting pot manager or senior product manager or director or leadership in product management, the day to day work kind of shifts as you continue to climb up the product management leader, I would say as a beginning or senior product manager, most of your time is focusing on really writing up product requirements. Understanding the weather, talking to customers really understanding what, what are the key requirements and translating that into something that's actionable, building up product roadmap for your respective, whether it's a component of the product that you own, or a set of products that you, as you continue to rise up to director level you would own a larger and larger piece of the product. So, writing requirements, communicating that to an engineering team driving the execution, driving to delivery, those are going to be majority of your tasks. As you build up a team and you have product managers reporting to you, then it becomes a little bit more strategic, you would talk to key accounts key customers key prospects, you would help out in some of these initial sales discussions, sometimes you might be invited to sales calls to provide some credibility to the roadmap, and really listen firsthand to the, What are some pain points or some needs of your key customers. So you would spend more time having cross functional meetings, whereas with the sales team, or the customer support team, or the, if you have a professional services department you have the PS organization you work with them and listen to their requirements in terms of what are some things that the product needs to be made more flexible, so that the PSTN can customize when they implement your product, and, and deliver it to specific customers. So, um, and also people, product managers, wear many hats you also need to work with product marketing to have a go to market messaging review, press releases, think about how to get the word out. When you launch a product. Right so, so more and more as you continue your journey as a product leader, you would find yourself being the center and the hub where of many many conversations so you have to make sure that you are always prioritizing always talking always listening, and always communicating effectively to your respective counterparts.

Absolutely. Simon I'm just going to come to my next question, but a little bit of an announcement we've turned on fundraising. So if you have any questions for Simon please do raise your hands. Now, we will be bringing you up in the order in which we are seeing these handsome faces, and once you are on the stage you will be able to speak, and ask your question to Simon. But Simon one question now when you use otter.ai at work every day. Have you been able to plug in a certain sinking hole of where your time and productivity goes and how has that experience been because the entire team I presume is eating their own dog food, and working on the product at the same time, please tell us and walk us through an experience that you might have had currently in the company.

I would say there are two things that otter add a ton of value to our, our internal productivity. As a product leader I find myself not having enough time to be able to attend to all the meetings, why I'm often double booked, triple booked on a given hour is simply not possible, so I have to prioritize my time to make sure that for the most important meetings that I can add value I can attend in person, but otherwise for other meetings I don't really need to be in. Then I can just send an order assistant to record it for me. And I can review back and my teammates can also highlight the important moments so that when I go back and review the auto conversation. I only need to listen to the five to 10 minute summary of the highlights from my team members, so it's kind of like an FYI. So that really fills that void so I'm able to be in three places at once, so to speak, right, and not a key point that key gap that it fills this. It really reduces the possibility of miscommunication. Sometimes people leave the meeting with different understanding of what was committed. So with an otter recording and transcript, it really minimizes that misunderstanding because, word for word is recorded and transcribed and people can refer back to what was committed, what are the key next steps, what were the decisions right, so we don't have to rely on people taking notes, and maybe potentially missing something, so that during the meeting, you can really just focus on the conversations, rather than focusing on taking notes,

mean, it sounds like you have a corner office, and you have an executive assistant, tell me that at least one of them is true, because you do have an assistant otter.ai

Yes. All of us have an older assistant, So, it's everybody is equal. We don't. There's no corner office, we're all working from home at this point, and we just want to empower everybody to, to be able to do the job to the best extent, right, so I think we, we have all found otter to be super useful. So it's not just because we want to dog food, our own product.

Absolutely, at least one of our aspirational goals would not be met, where I can say I have an assistant, and that is otter.ai Wonderful. We have a lot of people on stage who are want who want to ask you a question, but before we let them do that. A quick little reset of the room, because I see that a lot of new people are joining us. So we are the Asian digital super movers, this is a club that has been formed by my wonderful co founders machine and British who are on the stage, and myself, we work on providing a voice to the Asian digital economy across sectors and everything related to digital, ranging from product management to growth venture funding, startups, the Asian tech news, and even FinTech defy crypto, you name it, and we talk about it on our club. The way you can get associated with our club. It's very, very simple, all you need to do is click on the green house icon at the top of your page. It gives the club, a follow to look out for calendar notifications and events that gets scheduled, almost. I think about starting of the week, and we normally have rooms, at least four to five times a week, if not more. The way to look out for information from us is to follow us on our social, we are at Super movers, which is a for app ation D for digital super movers at Twitter, and LinkedIn. And we also have a telegram group that we do pass on this information and a lot of other news related items to our community. In the meantime, I am going to now start asking the people on stage to start asking their questions, we are going to go down the PTR order, which means. Pull to Refresh so anytime you are on stage, please do pull to refresh to see what what space and number you are in the queue. My only request to everyone on stage is to please keep your questions short, but before you ask your question to give us a few lines about yourself where you're joining us from and then proceed with your question. So thank you, Charles much for joining us. Please go ahead, ask your question. Two assignment.

Thanks, thanks, Monica for running and wonderful group as well I've been, you know, coming to a lot of rooms that you are moderating it, and it has been a wonderful experience so far. Quick question, Simon, I think we interacted on Twitter as well for your launch or integration with a zoom. So I'm an on deck fellow from the podcasting ecosystem and I'm just curious, we have been using this script, as well as you know fireflies.ai And a bunch of our interactions with our guests. What advantages to otter.ai have on on against these competitors. And the last question is, do you think that at a later point in time, otter.ai might also be in the product trajectory looking into some, some integrations with clubhouse, this particular app that you were talking, and thank you.

Thank you swag. Yes, I remember you. Thank you so much for the question. So, as I alluded to earlier. Currently otter.ai is mostly focusing on the meetings, use cases, podcast, in one way you can think of it, it's, it's kind of like a meeting, but it's the workflow is a little bit different it's a content creation. So majority of our use cases are more focused on meetings meeting notes, collaboration. Having said that, as for the other products that you mentioned, we have considered as an indirect competitor, because we're not really focusing on the podcast use cases, the differentiation of otter is at the very core, regardless of what you use otter for our transcription engine is built in house, we're not relying on any third party transcription engines. As a result, we're able to fine tune for the use cases of multi, multi person conversations, which includes meetings, interviews, lectures and podcasts as well. And we are able to achieve the level of accuracy that is world leading accuracy for all. We're currently only supporting English but we're able to handle a variety of accents. So people from any countries otter is able to provide the leading accuracy for for the transcription. Also we're able to automatically distinguish speakers so after you have otter has finished transcribing it will automatically separate the speakers, and also learn their voices over time so let's say if you are a podcaster. It will absolutely recognize you and your co hosts all the time and any new guests that you add. All you have to do is just label tag the paragraphs with these new guest speakers voices and auto would learn and tack the rest. So, accuracy, speaker identification, those are a couple of key differentiations. Also on our supports custom vocabulary. So let's say if you're a podcaster that focuses on FinTech or focuses on AI or product management or whatever domain. And if there aren't specific terms and acronyms and jargon that most other services are not able to recognize accurately otter would just learn instantly the moment that you cut and paste a comma separated list of terms, words or phrases. So, that will further boost the accuracy. So you have to do less, do less work to correct them before you share it as a podcast show notes. So those are just some of the few things that are key differentiation for your specific use case. Thank you.

Thank you, Sasha, hi Gunjan welcome to the stage please ask your question. Yeah. Hi, Monica and besides him I had a quick question. I'm coming, and before that as this indicates where I'm coming from India and I've been working as a designer of, like, multiple products and now like moving into the product manager managing products to ensure so I had a question regarding the basic starting of auto lobby I like when you guys launched, like before that like what kind of tests Did you run, and when you are launching a new feature on the app itself, what toll test, do you go through like the processes that you go through,

Like, can you give me a brief.

Hi Gunjan thank you for the question so Well, honestly, essay, we wind back 344 years ago when we, When we launched otter for the first time, we were very very small team so we do the usual functional functional testing accuracy testing, just making sure everything works, and just get it out to the market and and continue so. But that's the product matures and then we have, we build out a user base. We certainly are more formalized so we have. Take for example, the most recent launch of a major feature called otter assistant for zoom, we've gone through it, even before we start, implementation, we, we have done some design work that we take it through usability testing and make sure we get some early validation before we spend time to finalize the design and pass it to engineering. And once the engineering team has already built something that we can deploy to our production environment then we invite a set of users that we, that we know that are using Zoom frequently. Then we invite a set of beta testers and have gone through beta testing with to gather really valuable feedback both in terms of the usability, and also go through the onboarding flow and listen to any concerns about, both in terms of features capability but also privacy. So, we've learned a ton and we instantly fix things that we can fix before we launch. In general, general availability, and we prioritize the remaining requirements into subsequent iterations. So, and also with on scalability testing to make sure that we allocate enough server power to handle peak usage, so that everybody would have a great experience, rather than having some of the auto system not being able to join the Zoom meeting. So those are just some of the few things I would say, it really depends on the type of product that you you host, sometimes you also want to do data checks if you're building products that really rely on the accuracy of the underlying data, or if you have, you're building an e commerce website and transaction so data testing is really, really important as well.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your question. Hi burritos. Welcome to clubhouse and welcome to the stage, please tell us a little bit about yourself and then proceed to ask your questions.

Sure, if I wanted to. So, this is my first session, level so it seemed like a boring conversation so that I'm a machine learning engineer, I'm working from last three, four years, implementing ml models. So I had a question regarding the model that Simon said, so you're saying that it's an in house model or an understand is, is there a benefit of using API's such as the NLP models vary by opening I like the GPT-3 or bird, or do you think there is, There is not specific advantage on doing that instead of putting research into your own in house monitor. That's the first question and second is that for a person like me who's in Android development. So, so, like you're talking about the AIP, aipm seen before, how, how much of a technical technological knowledge should a person have before moving into a more product management kind of an awkward one prepare for.

Hi parties. May I get a little bit more context behind both of your question. So first of all. Are you, are you a startup founder entrepreneur trying to build a product and trying to decide whether or not to build versus leverage existing API's.

Yeah, I'm not a founder, but I am looking into building a product and I'm thinking of using either on pre train model or building it on other nodes.

Yeah, I would suggest that in the early stages before you figure it out, really flesh out whether building your own model will give you the competitive advantage. I would encourage you to just start small and start simple, and leverage existing API's, first, right, just so that you get a proof of concept you get something to validate. So that's one less thing for you to worry about. So I'm not too familiar in terms of where you are in terms of figuring out the type of product you're trying to build and whether building your own AI really give you that competitive advantage. And you know, building your own AI in terms of justice speech recognition piece, because there's many, there are many other things that you can spend your AI engineering time cycle on, you know, assuming that you can use an API that gives you a certain level of accuracy and that's good enough. And then you can build on top, to do whatever other analysis that you are trying to do for your concept. And then in terms of second question, are you more, what is your background, are you an engineer or what, what have you done before, It's not much in your profile so I don't know.

I'm an engineer with a start, degree and I'm looking to some I'm working on implementation of models, right now, but looking into, into production, so that it's to build something from from the existing models.

Okay, great, great, so. So first of all, I think it's fantastic that it sounds that you are, you have the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial spirit and you want to build something, and, and whether you are the founder or not. If you are part of a small team starting up, you're part of a very small early stage startup, whether you're engineer or whatnot, you're probably gonna wear many hats so, so I encourage you to pick up and learn the skill sets of what is needed to, not only do the engineering work but you know where the product manager hat as well. So I encourage you to enrich yourself and be able to potentially transition to that role as, as your startup. Continue to continue to grow if that's the path that you want to take, but this is a good opportunity for you to really learn and see what is needed in your startup and what skill sets that you can cover. And feel free to DM me, feel free to reach out to me if you have even more specific questions, happy to provide you some guidance.

Yeah, sure. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Hi Devon, please ask your question to Simon, and before you do that, Devin I just remembered for everybody else who's in the audience we turn hands using off because we've had a number of speaker requests are ready to come up onto the stage, we'll be opening it up. Shortly afterwards, after my second segment so please do hold on to your question and definitely pull you up, don't hate them.

I'm on the other side to be a part of your role. Hi Simon. I'm Devin speaking from India. I work at Deloitte as a senior consultant, and I really like the idea of the product so I immediately. Oh, I guess we can just download it and was checking out, it works out, and the tutorial, I went to a tutorial. It was really interesting how it works, especially when we are in boardrooms or intense brainstorm sessions, it's so easy to just miss a line, I just wanted to ask, are there any security concerns for big admin since two users because I have not come across this product yet, and I was wanting to reach out to my IT team and see if I can push my team to use this on an official setup so I just wanted.

Yeah, give every, all of the. So first of all otter is hosted in AWS, and all of your conversations are encrypted in transit and also data at rest, and so it follows all the highest security standards. So if you want more information and want to connect your IT department to feel free to look through all the terms of services and also privacy policy on our website. And yes So absolutely, in terms of the privacy policy in a nutshell, we do not sell your data to any third parties, everything that we do is, in terms of processing within your own otter account to derive benefit for your transcription to continue to improve the accuracy, and we do not share any information unless you explicitly as an auto user decide to share a recording with your colleagues or with your customers. So, we do provide a sharing capability within the app. And that's completely within your control.

Perfect sounds really good Simon. Thank you so much I'll reach out to you if there's anything. Thank you.

Thank you, Devin for your question. Hi finish, please go ahead and welcome to class.

Thank you so much. Hi Simon, a great session. First of all, so when a share from India. I'm actually a product manager. I've been in the show for last two years. I heard you saying that's only available in English, at this point of time. So what about the things which are offshore, you know, they might be speaking in some other language. Internally, you know, and they then send us the gist of whatever happened, but what if they, you know that things would be much easier for them. If there was a translate kind of functionality so do you have something on your roadmap for that, or are you working on something like that, just one

high finish, good question. So because we are a startup that needs to be, we are, we're laser focused on English at this time, in terms of support for other languages or support for trans translation to other languages. That's something you know longer term roadmap. The reason that we're able to achieve the world's leading most accurate transcription is because of focus. So this is not only just applicable to otter.ai, but for any of you that are working in what are working in a startup or working in a team and as a product leader as a product manager. Focus is very very important. There's always going to be a lot of requests from the customers, you want to be very clear about what are the key objectives, so that you can do something really, really well. You carve out a niche for your product for your target segment of users, and really dominate and be able to deliver an exceptional experience so focus is very important. But to answer your question, yes it is in our longer term roadmap, and thank you for your question.

Thank you. Thank you so much finish for your question. Now before we move ahead a quick room reset, as we move towards the last segment. Today we have Simon from otter.ai, who's been answering questions about rpm careers and of course productivity hacks that he uses in his everyday life@otter.ai We've spoken to him about his journey into product management and of course what skills it takes to excel in this field. We are going to be opening up countries in shorty so do keep tight with your questions and do ask us in the next couple of minutes. Simon, I think we might be going over time so if it's okay we'll probably continue are right past the hour for about 10 minutes is that fine.

Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Thank you. Also, if you haven't followed the club, please do that by clicking on the green house icon at the top of your page which is Asian digital super movers, we bring to you everything related. Every paint related to the Asian digital economy ranging from Product Management. Growth FinTech crypto Defy. And of course, of course, a lot of other topics, including some usage, conversations that we started having about trending topics and everything related to the digital arena. Also, we've our have our socials, active on Twitter, LinkedIn, and our telegram group. So if you haven't joined us already, please do that we post about all our events, as well as about our speakers who are coming up, so you'll never miss any updates. If you follow us there. Do follow all the speakers on stage the moderators and of course, Simon, so that you get into interesting rooms that they get into one clubhouse and you're able to follow interesting content. So Simon next question to you. Now, what do you think about having a personal brand, or developing your own communication style. From what I can see everything is handed to you are a great communicator, which is essential to being a great product manager as well. But how does building a personal brand, actually help with the product management career.

Hmm let me think about this, I think, whether you are product manager or your sales manager, having great communication skills will absolutely help your career, where whether you're talking to customers talking to users talking to internal teams being able to communicate effectively. In terms of building a prop personal brand. I see that as thoughts, it really adds to the credibility of your own, what you stand for, it adds it serves as part of your product brand or part of your company brand that being having a spokesperson, you know, the product manager is going out on social media, actually engaging with customers engaging with users. And at that personal touch, most companies don't really focus so much on that they hire a social media manager and handle all the tweets handle all the social posts. Yes, in one sense, It's good that you're handling this handling any customer requests and feedback, but to be able to see that wow, the product manager herself or himself is actually engaging with the customer out in these social media channels, it, It really adds to the credibility that we are listening, we are, you have a direct channel to the, to the people who are actually driving the prioritization, and the strategy of the product, so that it makes our user community feel that you are actually, you actually have an open channel of hearing feedback and input. So I think that really helps you to your company brand. If that's your personal brand so that it makes you credible thought leader in the respective domain. And it really also helps you as a product manager so that you are really in tune with your customer base with your user base, because you're feeling the user pain. The user asks the user requests directly. So that's why I would. That's why I do this a lot for myself because I gain a lot of value and insight through engaging in social media channels, and it helps me crystallize how I want to write my blog posts, so that I'm really producing content that's valuable, you know, what are some things that people really trip up on what are some tutorial and tips that people really need. And just to add to our. Just to add more content that is valuable to our user base.

Absolutely Simon and we can see that already because all our tweets are being met with a lot of positive appreciation and response for what otter.ai is doing. So while the product speaks for itself, the associated head quiet, and the brand that it has been able to develop with the connect to the customers is clearly showing. So that was a great answer. I'm now coming to the next question again related to what we've been seeing over the last year specifically about upskilling because there's a need, and there's a wave of demand for new technologies and of course emerging technologies that are not only going to threaten our jobs but going to open up a lot of new areas in tech. How do you feel about both upskilling, as well as being able to transfer skills that we have across domains, because as a product manager by, of course, we know that discipline and what it takes to be one is often required that we are that we are moving move within verticals are the even important jobs associated with completely different fields. What's your take on this.

My take on upskilling is that you'd never stop learning. Because technology, especially in the technology industry technology constantly changes, there's always going to be something, some technology that's going to be developed to apply to your existing industry that's going to disrupt the existing industry. There's always going to be new services that's going to carve out a new open up a new market. So, if so you can never stand standstill, you always have to be in tune with what are the technologies and application out there, what are the technology trends and be able to follow and see what are some things that can be instantly applicable to what you do today, and what are some things to keep an eye on. And when is the right time you want to start incorporating that into your roadmap so upskilling, both in terms of reading up. Following the technology trends, networking with people who are the expertise in those domains so that you get a, you get a, get an understanding of those technology trends so that you have that breadth of knowledge and keep yourself current I think it's super important

to Absolutely. You're absolutely right with Salman, how do you actually do that to you, are you a proponent of reading books, listening to podcasts, or how do you keep yourself current and updated.

I do at all. I would say lately. I added clubhouse to to fill my time to make sure that I can both get the concentration of information that I need and be able to talk to and meet with people from all around the world that can speak knowledgeably about all the newest technology that I've, I probably would not have come across on my own if I were to subscribe to blogs and and listen to podcasts or reading books, so clubhouse has really accelerated that, that knowledge and also be able to make good connections at the same time so. So yeah, I've been spending more and more time on clubhouse to, to add to all the other things that you mentioned.

Absolutely Simon I think it goes without saying that learning never stops however it's really critical to continue to learn and your right word clubhouse if you follow the right people, and if you follow the right conversations, it's amazing how much more you can learn. And what a treasure house is in terms of both great speakers as well as of course great topics, and if you are interested in knowing and learning about great topics and to follow. Simon, he goes into rooms which are talking about topical things, as well as of course the development that he just spoke about. It would be great if you heard him, or both speaking on the stage, as well as of course listening to these topics in the audience. I'm putting up people from the audience. Now, if you have a question that you'd like to ask me, please to go ahead and raise your hands. I'm going to be opening this up for the next maybe one or two more minutes because we have another 10 minutes before the end of the room. So in the interest of time I'm going to request everyone who's come on stage to please keep the questions short, but before to ask the question Do I tell, Simon, a little bit about who you are, where you're joining us from. And then ask your question. So Ashley, over to you please go ahead.

Thank you. I'm Ashwin from Bangalore, India, in financial services industry for 20 plus years, and is the first time I'm speaking on clubhouse. I joined, three days back. So my question to Simon is that I work on a third party product, but as a product manager so I basically look after the customizations of a product. This is ideal, we don't want to get into what space it is etc. But there are different challenges that these kinds of people or meet people face in terms of customizing third party product. There are some risk constraints, there are some restrictions, and to some extent there is some freedom on what you can do what you cannot do based on the freedom provided by the product, product or company. So do you want to throw some light on what specific challenges, those could be, and how to handle those. Thank you.

First of all Ashlyn Welcome to clubhouse. Always great to see new faces in the clubhouse community and jump up on stage and ask questions and contribute value to questions so it sounds like you are saying you're working with a third party product. So it's a completely different company. You don't really have full control of, or even influence to the roadmap of the corresponding product managers because they're not even part of the same company. So, I would say, be persistent, be able to try to do try to frame it in terms of what value would an opportunity and benefit would it add to this other company to be able to open up this capability. So, help them to do that research work. Eat whether it's sizing the market opportunity or articulate how many pull through customers, the joint customers would bring to that other company by expanding or providing that flexibility, but if you're only just asking this other company or this other product manager about, oh I wish your product can support x y and z but without the benefit from their angle. Good luck. Good luck. Being hearing receptive, yes to your answer. So, so you'll have to do a little bit more work right because at the end of the day, every company is resource and time constraint. So being able to frame your ask, in terms of potential revenue or user opportunity to this other company would would probably get you further in terms of getting a positive response to your question. Does that help.

Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot. If I may, can I ask a second question.

Ashwin, I will request you to come back maybe hold on to a place in line, and we have a lot of people on stage, and we are going running short of time. Okay, thank you, thank you I spin the Jen over to you.

Thanks, Monica and Hello Simon and everyone else here a bit about myself, I did marketing for CSP enterprise SAS and Bangalore and also post a podcast for the startup operator, where we talk to VCs founders and operators like most of us in the room here on what it takes to move the needle in startups. And yes, I think it goes without saying for any podcaster audience has really saved us hours in transcribing the conversations. So thanks Simon for such an amazing product. But a quick question I had for you, Simon that as a product manager. I'm sure that there are multiple features under the works, right, but for any dictation tool like otter the cool features would include the accuracy the variability of voice commands, or maybe that's adding a full stop or semi colon. And of course the ease of use and platform integrations, Simon, I just want to hear your thoughts on what do you think would be the biggest innovations in these areas in the coming years.

Hey Gungeon. So as I was alluding to earlier where our core use cases are meetings, interviews and lectures so for those multi party conversations, as opposed to personal dictation software so I want to make that distinction. We're focusing on these multi person conversations. And when you have a multi person conversations, you oftentimes you don't talk with dictation in mind, you don't speak to punctuations. So, so I want to make that distinction too, to explain why we're not focusing on the features that are geared more toward the dictation use case. So what we want to be able to do is automatically insert punctuations automatically understand when to capitalize terminology, words, when to capitalize words so that you can just focus on engaging on the conversation and you don't worry, you don't have to worry about taking notes, directionally speaking we want to add higher value in terms of being able to ultimately summarize the conversation so you don't have to manually highlight them. And it gives you more power to be able to continue your workflow so that you remember what was discussed and what are the next steps that you need to take, so you don't have to go dig for it. So those are the things that we're more focusing on. Hopefully that helps.

Well, Thanks a lot, Simon and AI. Summarizing will be a really strong feature so, more power to you and the team.

Thank you. Hi, Swati, welcome to the stage, please ask a question.

Thanks, Monica. Hi Simon. I'm a product manager at Oracle. My question Simon, is that what different skill sets should an AI PM, have compared to non AI product right. So is it sufficient to understand the technology jargons which engineers use along with understanding the metrics like precision and recall, Or is it necessary to be involved too deep in understanding the ML model or suggesting which model to be used. So where do you draw that line, as an AI PM.

That's a wonderful question Swathi, I would say that you would. Immerse yourself in talking to AI data engineers to understand how they built models, what are the challenges, how, what, what sort of data sources is required. What is the entire end to end process that data scientists and machine learning, engineers, require to achieve the desired output that you can incorporate it into the product. That way you as a product manager that manages an AI product has a sense of the scope of effort, even if you are not the person that have the experience to be able to build it yourself. So I think that's where I would draw the line, being able to understand step by step what a data engineer does. So just, what, what I would do is just when you add it before you join a team or once you join a team, talk to each and every data engineer, and ask them what is your workflow. How long does it take for you to do this step versus that set versus that step and post some hypothetical questions suppose I need a feature that's powered by AI. What does it take to build such a thing, so that you get a better sense and of appreciation of what are the technical challenges that are, that has to be overcome in order to build such features, and what sort of timeframe is reasonable. Does that help,

that helps Simon. Thank you. Thanks for it. Hi prodigy, welcome to the stage

please

ask your question.

Thanks Monica for bringing up assignment great to hear your insights. I am an AI practice head with experience in products in retail healthcare and an ops. My question is around product management, and first around user interviews so how do you go about selecting the appropriate users for your initial user research studies or interviews and still now as you go about developing features and what certain is what are the metrics that you track and your team track so why did you go about various feature development.

How is it, if I can ask you a question Do you have existing customers, even in your current role that you can tap into. Yeah,

I have more asking from the author's perspective how did otter go about doing it. Oh,

how did we do it specifically, well, so when we initially first launch the product, it's mostly b2c So we delivered a product, and we got, we just have a tons and tons of inbound inquiries, in terms of, Oh, can we, this is wonderful. This is amazing accuracy, how can otter be used in my respective company so just being able to keep up with all the inbound inquiries. That's enough of us source, I, so, so we have been very blessed and very lucky in terms of just getting such a huge positive response from our initial set of customers. When we launched a free product out there, so that each user can imagine how they can use it for their respective industry and company and organization, and they are bringing all the use cases to us and they are asking us. I see that otter can do X, but I want to do Y. How can we, you know, can you imagine that you can expand your roadmap to be able to address that. And then once we're able to get all these different inquiries we classify them and put them into different buckets, and, and then prioritize and then see. All right, I want to interview the educational site man. Well I want to interview the, the, these busy professionals who will have tons and tons of meetings. So you segment these users and conduct the interviews accordingly. In each segment.

Okay, so good. What about even before the free product was launched,

ie prodigy Can I request you to please ask this question to Simon on DM on Twitter. Sure, you're running very short on time. Thank you so much, and Ashwin, may I request you to do the same thing. That way you won't have to wait on stage, and you will have your query answered as Simon is very responsive and very quick. Okay, let's go on to Lin Lin I have a request to both you and Satya who are on the stage, please ask your question but keep it restricted to own one question and only about 30 seconds per question, really short of time right now, so would love to be able to wrap up on time. Oh, go ahead late.

Thank you Monica, I'll try to run through quickly. Hi Simon so this is then calling from London. I have worked at USAID financial service and consulting So I recently decided to leave like the Big Four consulting to get into product manager in edtech because I just love to work on products and making people learn better especially for adult learning so my quick one question. What would your advice be for a project that I'm getting into so I got a chance to work with a very small startup for like a 10 day basis. And, as you said, like they have good inbound sit back and I just wonder, how can I add the most value like within the 10 day basis to kind of show how I bring like a product from the prototype that has good inbound into something better. Thank you.

Hi, Lynn, so excited that you are transitioning into transitioning into product management so congratulations on being able to make that. I just want to make sure I understood your question, you're saying that your new opportunity is in at educational technology. Yeah, exactly, yeah, okay, and you already have a sufficient amount of inbound inquiries so that you can do customer interviews, right.

Yeah, yeah, so I got, I think I've been interviewing and I got a chance to work with a company like for 10 days, I think, if I can do well and I think there's opportunities to get in. And they, they currently have a prototype product that has good inbound feedback and they have like demand as well. Yeah.

I see. So it depends on how much information that company has already shared with you're able to share with you. I would encourage you to do some market analysis to see if there are similar products out there and try to form and make an informed, try to build a lean canvas so look up lean canvas. Oh, e a and CA NV link is right, um, and that would be a good framework for you to think about. All right, what is the problem. What is the customer problem that, what have you learned from, or what the company has shared with you. But what and then map it map the initial prototype to how they're attempting to solving it. What is the market sizing, what is the segment where's the target segment, what's the opportunity, what's the potential pricing, what are the key differentiations this this company that you want to join, what are their unfair advantages, just map all of that so that once you get that clear, then I think you have a good framework to continue with your interview process to add the value and see how you as a product manager would be able to take all of that input into China into a product roadmap and have a product strategy to to take the startup to the next level. So hopefully this helps.

That's really helpful. Thank you. Oh, we're compelling cameras. Yeah, thanks, thanks Simon thanks Monica.

Thank you Lynn. Hi Stata welcome to the stage last question to you, please go ahead.

Yeah. Hi, Monica. Hi Simon. Actually I don't have any problem, or any question regarding product management, I'm a common man. I have one pain point which I when this club, many product managers are there, I want them to make a mental note, if they could saw this, like, recently, he sent a message to my line manager, and due to AutoCorrect and a spelling mistake it turned really embarrassing. Right, for example, we have this app called Grammarly, which basically reads through every text that I'm sending, but still, when I'm sending something really embarrassing. It didn't stop me, right. So if you guys could make a mental note and develop this and you know when I push this Send button and if there is an embarrassing thing that I'm sending you know it should be able to one unstopped. That, you know whatever you meant it got auto corrected or you made a spelling mistake or you made a grammatical mistake that could be perceived as a, you know, really embarrassing thing by your senior or your boss. So, that's all. I don't have any question as such. thank you,

Satya. This is such a great comment and call out so, yes, absolutely, s, s, advanced, as we think that some of these tools hat are, whether it's grammerly or otter or any other applications that attempts to catch all the grammatical and embarrassing mistakes. I will say this, just to set expectation, natural language understanding and grammar checking and all of that. It's not 100%, and it really just isn't. It's able to catch it. If it's a, if the ability to be able to warn the user means that it should have caught the mistake and corrected or provide some corrections already. So it's the same technical challenge. So the reason why Grammarly is not able to warn us because it wasn't able to type that in this. That mistake to begin with. So I would say until the AI until NLP is perfect, which won't be within the next few weeks in the next few months or maybe even the next year, everyone whether product managers on any type of external communications. We all have the responsibility to make sure that we get the message out right and not be overly relying on technology is really a combination of technology certainly helps. It's going to save, save you a ton of time, but at the end of the day, whether you're a candidate, applying for a job, you are still responsible for catching all of our grammatical mistakes on your resume on your cover letter on your portfolio. So that's what I'll have to say to that but, yes, thank you for the call out Satya.

Thanks them and I hope your NLP picks up soon, hoping for that day.

Thanks. Okay, but in the meantime you could make that an NFT and maybe make some money off of it. And if you know what details. A machine I wanted to purchase for your show next. That's it.

You know sometimes when we look at artificial intelligence and ml etc. We do believe that we can be caught into everything for us, but they're actually very simple tools that you can use which I've been using for years on Google, and now it's on Outlook, which is delay a message sending by 30 seconds right. And so you have an option to undo send, and that has saved me from many embarrassing messages, missing things that I was supposed to write, or, you know, I may have copy pasted 10 messages to different people and not change the name or something like that. So I would suggest just use that as an input and all good Mike Outlook, Gmail, all of them have that where you can delay your messages by up to 30 seconds before it goes out, and that's actually very useful. Sometimes even saves people from embarrassing mistakes in terms of when you are very, very angry and image, send out an email to somebody on impulse and then you recreate it few seconds later, that's a perfect tool for that.

Thanks for sharing. Thank you everyone. Now I am going to be closing very very soon, but before I do that. Don't go way too far because I have an extremely different show coming up, which is a room that we are going to where we are talking about actually how to build and create your own podcast. More importantly, we are talking about how three friends actually started a very professional, adventure together and have created something which has just crossed. I think 100 episodes, and given that they're individual contributors and professionals in their own field, they've actually excelled in professional adventures, but coming together to create something of value, as well as doing this on a weekly basis as a side hustle is something that I'm exploring with them. This is coming up in our new series which we are launching, which is called Let's Talk digital. So please to join us at 9pm, which is in the next 12 minutes. Now, I wanted to also say a big thank you to everybody in the audience, especially those who came up and ask questions. This is really your forum, and your, your stage, to be able to address any questions and clarifications that anybody who comes in, can do that for you. In the meantime, if there's something still left, please reach out to Simon on to. Also, I'd love to thank machine and Pritish who have been wonderful co moderators and of course to all the help that they are providing in the back channels. But before Simon go and, and family. Thank you for spending so much time with us on Saturday morning for him. I wanted to do a quick rapid fire with you assignment, I believe that it should be something that you should be ready for, and that you know that this format is something which is very popular in India. So are you prepared and can we start,

I'm ready. Let's go.

Awesome. So, first thing, podcasts or clubhouse, or house, wonderful books or Ott,

he both evenly split, it's hard to pick

berries in public. Yay or Nay.

Say it again.

Built in public, a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Built in public. You mean, open source.

No, I mean, building in public, and using customer feedback about for every iteration, to be able to build in features. Oh. Thumbs up if there's something that comes up like working from home or hated

mostly like it, but I do miss working in the office.

I think we all do technical premium growth PM, or just same simple old pm.

I would say not simple old just just PM, and be able to adapt in any situations.

Find a foot. What is your what is something that has worked to keep you sane in cross functional collaborations.

Listening openly and patiently.

I need a blog that you read that you recommend to all the people who join in autodata Yes.

Hmm I can't think of one right at the moment. Come back to me on that.

Awesome. And what is the last emoji that you used.

It's either thumbs up, or heart, because those are the default emojis for a lot of social programs, social channels and I'm very lazy I just double click on the text and Instagram it gives you a heart or LinkedIn I think the thumbs up to set default one or the Twitter's thumbs up as a default one. So, yep, either thumbs up a heart.

Wonderful. Simon, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today, and more importantly seeing otter.ai In life, while you're transcribing while I'm speaking as well as of course the many questions that came up and across a range ranging from how to start in product management, to have what it takes to succeed in AI product management, and also the future of AI. I don't think we would have covered such a breadth in such short time, but kudos to you, and thank you for spending the Saturday morning with us. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the weekend, and please to keep coming back to Asian digital super movers, I think we will have a lot more to talk about soon. But in the meantime we have fans of your product fans of you, and thank you again for coming to our show.

Thank you Monica is such a great pleasure to meet you and be able to speak in your room, and thank you everyone in the room for all the great questions that you've asked.

Thank you all. And please don't go away anywhere we are closing this room now but we're going to start another room in the next 45 minutes so please do join us, and Simon Take care, have a good rest of the day we are going to end the room in probably five to 10 seconds

now.