(upbeat music) - All right. Super excited today to host another awesome Now on Now webinar, speaking to you about how we speed up product management using strategic portfolio management with GenAI. My name is Alice Saiki. I'm a portfolio leader here at DT Strategy Realization Office. I'm responsible for all of our internal digital employee experience, delivering product and experiences that bring simplicity and joy, and of course with GenAI in fields. Well, I actually have another title. I'm also a Chief Internal Officer for Strategic Management, Portfolio Management Consumption. And here with me is my partner in crime, Chief Producer of SPM Laxman. Over to you. - Well, thank you Alice. Chief Producer is a new title, but I take that. So I'm Laxman Rajagopal. I'm the Director of Product and Value Management in DT Strategy Realization Office. I help teams internally adopt strategic portfolio management, and I also help DT teams define value for the large investments that they do. Great, so what are three reasons we are excited about GenAI? There are many, but the number one for me is the ability for GenAI to impact our daily lives. GenAI is real for us in ServiceNow. Two, thanks to our incredible platform deploying GenAI use cases is simply easy. Three, unlike many other technologies that we have invested are times before we are able to rapidly realize the benefits of GenAI. So these top three reasons stand out on why we are taking GenAI very seriously in product management. - Wow, exciting reasons, indeed, Laxman. Well today we are going to share with you about some real life use cases that we have challenged ourself with, you know, breaking status quo, taking a bold step to solve for our internal customer using SPM. We'll talk about some of the challenges that we have with our product managers, how we are leveraging SPM and the GenAI that is delivering great results that we have seen. But most important of all, we are excited to share with you about the opportunities ahead of us. Without further ado, let's take it. Next slide please. 100,000 stories. What are these? This is actually the amount of stories that we have delivered just last year alone, 2023. To me, they translate to tremendous value and business problems that we are solving for our internal and external customers, but to our product managers, they translate to 4,000 epic all the stories that they have to write day in and day out. For our product manager, they have to juggle demands from their demanding stakeholders, all needed yesterday's while taking in all the new ideas and urgent priorities that they have to pivot quickly and adjust. And if that's not enough, they have people like me always watching over their shoulder, making sure that they're delivering the best quality, epic and story so that we can meet our very high standard. To them, these probably feel more like never ending stories. Luckily I have my friend, Laxman, here always coming in to save the day. Laxman. - High volume of demand and you know, dynamic, fast-paced environment all the time expecting high quality of work. This is not a new business demand, right? Business always expects us to deliver this. However, our traditional approaches to stall for them. Getting product managers into a training room, training them on how to write good quality stories or building a dashboard of governance to say which product manager is doing well, what is the wall of fame, what is the of wall of shame in all of that is really not turning the needle for us. How about we solve for this with new ways of working? Let's lead with GenAI first, wherever there is a question of volume and pace at the same time. Let's without forgetting that we are solving for human needs, ensuring there is human in the loop in every step of the way. So we make the best use of a technologies but also empathize with our fellow beings to ensure the technology is relevant. Of course, we all want to continuously improve. That means trying quick, failing fast and learning from that experience to continuously build. With these three things in mind, we wanted to reach out to product managers to see what are opportunities to help them, right? We had a approach fairly new, it was very bold to lead with GenAI for product management. So we took the help of some of our product managers friends, especially Vivian, who was leading a large internal vendor platform, re-imagining the platform. So what that meant was she was already looking at vendors onboarding across the different time zones and she was burning midnight oil writing a number of stories. So the first thing that we wanted to do was help product managers write better quality stories with the help of GenAI. Let's look at the demo. So here we are as most product manager, very conveniently writing one-liner stories. As a product manager, I want to solve for this. And now we have GenAI, which within a click of a button can expand on the description of this story. Now, like we said, humans always in the loop. It allows for us to go and edit the story and make the respective changes that we need. Not just that, writing standard, industry standard acceptance criteria with the right persona, context, action and outcome is now possible with a single click of a button. Based on the description that was written, GenAI is help you write this in the given format that you need. No more is is a required for us to teach product managers how to write every single acceptance state in a standard format when GenAI can do it for us. And I was thinking all of the problems were solved for product managers when they were able to write good quality stories. Little did I know that product managers spend a lot of time trying to summarize the results that releases that they're doing. At the end of every sprint, at the end of every pi we have product managers who are writing concise information for their respective stakeholders. How come we use GenAI to summarize the sprints at the right level? So here we are, this is in SPM, my own portfolio. We had my product manager who was looking at several of his stories and writing these details, sprint notes at the end of each sprint. Now we have GenAI with a click of a button can group stories summary based on products, theme or epic, whatever is relevant for you. And we will now have all of these stories summarized for you, not just that, you can edit, make it relevant for you rather than just having to consume whatever AI provides to you. You can also provide feedback on how good the summary was and simply in a button, send that to your stakeholders after you've edited it. So we have GenAI not just create stories but also summarize release notes in a much quicker way. Isn't that exciting? Great. - Well super duper exciting. Of course, as a portfolio leader, we don't just take the verbal success from Laxman, we need to see the result in metrics. So actually within four weeks of the rolling out of these capability, we have seen 30% uptake of our product manager adopting some of these new capability. 2,000 stories were created in just two months. And of course the most important metrics for me is the quality of these stories is now 100% meeting the standards that we are setting forth to do. Thank you, Laxman. Now seeing all this success, I still remember Laxman, you and I were in a conference room brainstorming, looking through these use cases and say, hey, from the entire product delivery lifecycle, from strategy all the way through delivery, there are so many more personas, so many more business challenges we get to solve. Think about our portfolio leader, product manager, program managers, helping them with their demand generation writing business cases. And gosh, let's think about those Friday status report that our program managers have to write all afternoon just to make sure that they are providing the latest status. The possibility is truly limitless. starting with portfolio manager. For people like me, I'm being asked on a day-to-day basis, "Hey Alice, are we on track to achieve our outcomes?" Are we putting the right bet on the right priority so that we are optimizing our portfolio? Laxman? - Yeah, so we have portfolio managers losing sleep over, am I doing the right thing on the right goals? GenAI can help not just provide insights on what are those OKRs that are likely to fail, but also summarize concise actions and insights that portfolio managers need to act on. What's more, we are also exploring opportunities to provide a lot of scenarios based on finance, scope and capacity to see what could be the opportune investments that the portfolio managers could drive. All of this can be made possible with GenAI. - Thank you Laxman. For product managers, so now we solve the problems of creating stories and release note. We think to ourself, what about all those feedback and ideas that are coming in day in and day out and how can we even help them to deploy some of these features even quicker? - Yes, product managers not just summarize stories and look at writing stories all the time, but during our interviews with several product managers internally, we realized that product managers received tons of feedback. Some of them duplicative, some of them were emotional and all of it. We can have GenAI look at this large volume of feedback coming in QuickTime and provide the right sentiment analysis, which can help product managers get a summary of those feedbacks and action on the right ones, not just creating summarizing feedback. So providing that sentimental analysis to you. How about GenAI help product managers all across the value life cycle? By that we mean creation of epics and stories and also providing insights that product managers need to quickly act on from planning to deployment. - I know those feedback one, we are already having a glimpse of it and people are signing up waiting at the door. So hopefully we can deliver those capability to them soon. Well last at least, but certainly not least, our program manager. Not only do they spend every Friday making sure that timely and relevant status are being delivered to the right level of stakeholders, they also need to know if their programs are delivering the outcome that they're intending to achieve. Laxman what can you help here? - Program managers and status reporting. That's the number one ask all the time any forum that I go to, right? How about we, you know, relieve our program managers of writing status reports, and why should we only be writing status reports of one new type while we have a multiple of different stakeholders? Imagine GenAI write status reports for you based on the stakeholders with the ability for program managers to add relevant commentary on it throughout. Wouldn't that be amazing? Also, program managers do a number of other steps in ensuring teams collaborate well. So that means all of your business docs, project plans and summarizing the right level of information for different stakeholders in the team. GenAI can help do significant document generation and summarization and providing insights for you, simply ensuring better collaboration and huge productivity without having to go through a volume of documents. While these are all great use cases when I look at personas, but if I look at the bigger picture, take a step back and take a deep breath and think about how is work life for us every day? Whether you are a leader who's trying to set, what are the goals that you want to achieve for your team, right? Or you can be a product manager who is thinking about what are the right features I need to develop for my customer or someone who is always answering questions. Hey, what is the next big release? Why is this product read? When are we going to do this, right? Throughout our lifecycle, we do one of three things at work, I'm either creating content, meaning I'm creating an epic, creating a program plan, creating a request. Two, I'm always summarizing information for my stakeholders, writing a project status report, writing a release note, summarizing key information for my stakeholders, or I'm always answering questions. Why is this project read? What can we do about it? What are the risks? What are the mitigation plans? If I answer these three questions, creative of content, summarizing of information and answering questions for my stakeholders. These are the top three capabilities of GenAI. That's how the strategic portfolio management team in ServiceNow is looking at it to solve for problems. Not far from today, we would have the strategy portfolio management product solve for all of your work records by generating content, summarizing content, and helping you answer questions with the right powerful insights. I strongly believe we are stepping into a new era of work where no record would escape the use of GenAI and it is very, very exciting for us. - Wow, that sounds super duper amazing, Laxman. All I have to say is if you free our program manager on a Friday afternoon from writing status report, you may even get an invite to the happy hour on Friday afternoon instead. And that hopefully is good enough of an incentive to speed up some of those capability. We just can't wait. Well, before we conclude today's session, I would like to share with you a few key takeaways. First, focus on business problem and outcomes. At the end of the day, with all the magic GenAI bring to us, we can leave our eyes off of what problem we are trying to solve, for whom we are solving this for, and for what outcome we are intending to achieve from these solutions. At the end of the day, technology is here to help solve human problems, as Laxman had said. Second, just like how Laxman and I took a bold step and really challenge our status quo, don't think about incremental solution anymore. I would say revolutionize it. In our case, we didn't go for dashboard, governance or training. We have GenAI do the work for them instead. Last, but certainly not least, as an analyst, I always talked about continuous learning, continuous improvement. Don't be afraid to experiment all these different use cases, test and learn. No one has all the answers for GenAI, but just like Laxman and I, we keep dreaming, we keep trying and hopefully we keep improving. Well with that, that will conclude the presentation of today. But before we conclude, one more. Yes, I don't want anybody to miss out all the amazing resources that we have available. If you like our story today, if you go to the next slide, there's a QR code. We'll pause here for a little bit so that you can scan it to find out all the other amazing products and now stories that we have to offer. (uplifting music)