Alright. Let's kick off. My name is Irina Wagner. I'm a product man product marketing manager at WhatsApp.And, throughout my career at Big Tech, I have overseen products launching across different stages. And I know that you probably have heard a lot about AI to then yesterday, and it's all about AA AI these these days. But I think independent of what the product is. What I would like to share with you is tips about how to grow it and scale later, and walk you through those different stages of the product. And I've built products from 0 to 1.

I have proven, the product fit, in my experience and then scale them from 1 to 100 to many, many consumers and clients out there. What is interesting about it is that the scope of work nature of it and stakeholder management is very, very different at different stages of the product development. So Today, I would like to share with you just few learnings that I had in my in my experience. It will hopefully help you navigate this process too. So in terms of what we're gonna cover today in the next 10 minutes or so, we will cover different stages of the product development from 0 to 1 finding product market fit and then learn how to scale it. And what we'll also will talk about critical parts over the different journey such as dealing with ambiguity, pro provide a proven product market fit, and communicating effectively. So let's jump right in. Phase 0 to 1. In terms of the product, at this stage, you're defining product potential in school.

There are very, very many different avenues could go and a lot of ambiguity about which one is the right one. On the this stage, strong vision and conviction in early team is an So it must, given the uncertainty and ambiguity about the 0 to 1 bet. So you really want to drive the team and have conviction about what you're about to build. In terms of leadership involvement might be very different, but in my case, no one cares. It is important to share early positive signal with leadership, though. Right? It's too early for them to know if they want to invest, or know and what they want to think about this product. So you will have very little attention and potentially very little team, which, impacts the product. Process.

So in my case, at least at least, I used to operate with a very, very small skeletal, almost team before the leadership would decide if this is worth investing resources in. So it might be tough. You might be trained on resources, but at the same time, the great thing about it It's because you are so small. You can be fast and nimble and push through with the development. The hardest part around this stage is ambiguity. Let's talk about what, you can do to, to kinda, like, you know, make it a little bit easier for you as you're dealing with, like, folk complete folk, folk, and milk in front of you. So first of all, I wanted to think, like, the most important thing is you have stay open minded and flexible. At this stage, product direction might change many, many, many times you might pivot based on the learnings and on the technical, capability, etcetera, and that's absolutely fine. Right?

So you just have to be ready for that. The second thing is you can scope some parts of ambiguity that can be sculpt. And you can do it in several ways. The first one, use market research to test hypothesis and reduce ambiguities. So if you some features of the product that you don't know will resonate will not will not test with market, get market feedback. Similarly, try to speak directly with consumers numbers, depending who your audience is, to ensure that you are actually solving the problem that exists. And then the third one, which I actually found very, very helpful in my case was do not hesitate to ask your leadership for guidance. Of course, you need to have a point of view. But sometimes instead of bringing solutions to your leaders, use them to help you. Come with active ask and options.

Let them make that decision when you feel it's just stuck as a team. Important thing to mention also, and we will talk about this a little bit later. But at this stage, you're also trying to size product potential. This one is really tricky because on one hand, you know, it's so early. You actually don't know what the product will be. But you also want your product potential to be oversized. Otherwise, you will never sell it internally. Right? It needs to be sexy. But as you get better idea of product, as you progress from kind of this very early stage and from a colleague probably over oversized estimates, you should also become more realistic and conservative with your forecast, and and I will talk a little bit later about this. So that's about ambiguity team. Once we're getting to a stage 1 ish, you know, that's all about finding product market fit.

So in terms of the product, the concept stars get in a little bit more clearer. At least you probably have 1 or maybe fewer directions in terms in terms of where you think it's going, getting and sharing product market fit signal is the ultimate goal here. In terms of the leadership involvement, so because the product is getting a little bit more sculpt and, apparently, you're still, you know, your testing progress for Alphas for beta with actual customers. You will start getting more rigorous reviews with your leadership you know, the involvement and the leadership becomes a little bit more senior. They would expect more rigor from you, high level of detail, And I think around this stage, they will start asking you, okay, what are the goals, and how they are tied to company objectives. How, you know, how realistically is this product, will will bring Samsung, meaningful for the company. In terms of the process, Right?

Now that you have a product, you know, people want to be part of it. Right? It looks like it's early, but it's a bad leadership. It still supports it. So overnight, you might move from the team of four people to fifty people where leadership says, okay, something might come out of it. Let's throw more people on this. What that means for you, bigger team, everyone wants to be part of it, too many decision makers, our stakeholders, you're not that nimble anymore as you used to be before. So the decision making process is slower, and you have less control. And that's okay. You just have to be ready for that. Tested up is critical, and communication and updates as well as the circle of stakeholder's changes. So you have to consciously acknowledge it and adjust your communication to make sure that you cover many new different groups of stakeholders to a different, level of of detail.

In terms of the testing, I just wanted to stress something here. It's really critical because the leadership is looking at you and wants to see the confidence in data and market feedback to understand if the product should be shipped, meaning should be launched, publicly. There are a lot of ways to test the product. It really depends on the audience, surfaces you're testing, etcetera. But independent of the type of testing you think is the right for you. Here are 2 main things to consider. The first thing is what is your performance expectation? What is your hypothesis as to how this product should perform? What are the benchmarks you're gonna set up for this? And how confident are you in this hypothesis? Did you do enough of data analysis to come up with this number performance conversion improvement, etcetera.

Now once you have your hypothesis, you also want to make sure that you have rigor and tools to make sure you get those answers for that performance. Make sure you also set up expectations for the test with all relevant stakeholders and align with them on the expectations. Alright. Let's move to scale. Hopefully, you've tested your pro you've proven product market fit. And then leadership says, okay. Let's ship it. It's gonna go public. So I call it phase 1 to 100. Right? It's scale. In terms of the process, scaling a product requires a very, very different set of stakeholders. As well as go to marketing partnerships and making your product operating with sales and teams and and partners. Communication and sales teams at this stage are your best friends. There should be in general, but specifically now, they are your best friends.

Especially when your product is not the largest bottom line contributor, right, and there are companies where there are 80 products 100 products that have been shipped every single month, every single week. And, you know, if you're not in top 3, you really need to make sure you have really well established written of business and plans with your go to market team. Also important to notice here that scale does take time. Especially for large B2B products created for large enterprise clients. So when you develop your go to market activations, keep in mind, a, who is your audience and how long their adoption or selling cycles take, takes. Sometimes it could be 6 months. Sometimes it could be a day. Sometimes it can be a year. B, you need to understand incentives your company puts in place for clients and partners as well as for your sales teams and understand or make sure that your product is part of those incentive schemes.

And then see effect effectiveness of marketing channels, is critical here rather than just, you know, doing a very broad blanket marketing communication. As well as opportunity to tie their impact to adoption. So can you tie your clicks and your views and your eyeballs to how much of adoption of your product is happening. That's critical in in terms of the marketing. So this is pretty much what I wanted to share with you guys. To recap, we talked about 3 key stages of product development, 0 to 1, stage, which I call scoping, what that product even gonna be, 1 ish testing and proven product market fit, and 1 to 100, which essentially is scaling. When you are launching the product to consumers, to, your customers across the world, and you scale into 1000 or 1,000,000 of them.

I really hope that those few tips have been helpful. And, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.