 As a new decade sets in, I would like to take a close look at three fundamental trends that are shaping product management in 2020:
PMs are now strategic leaders within an organization As I have said in a previous post last year, in the past, product managers were often confused for user experience designers, senior technology leads, or even project managers. At best, teams acknowledged PMs as product owners in the agile sense, and as such their main deliverable was the product backlog. The real impact of product management was often misunderstood, and PMs did not have the software of resources to carry out their best work. In 2020, this is no longer true. PMs play an increasingly significant role that will not only impact a company’s product, but overall strategy and growth. In traditional organizations, PMs are needed to create digital product experiences that seamlessly align with existing products and services — a major challenge brought on by the age of digital transformation. In the B2B world, we are seeing a “consumerization of IT,” meaning that people want the technology they use for work to look like the elegant, well-designed tools they use personally (like the iPhone and other B2C products). Thus, PMs are crucial for creating delightful B2B products that appeal to both buyers and end-users. Finally, the convenience of modern technology has increased customer expectations. Customers want your product to solve their problems now. And if you can’t do it, someone else will. As a result, Product Managers in 2020 largely own the product strategy and vision, and play an active role in the future of organizations. More than ever, PMs use data-driven processes and systems to support their mission-critical work and their decision-making responsibilities also mean that it’s on them to act as leaders within their organizations and rally everyone around their plan. Product-led growth and growth product managers As I have said last year, Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion. The model is exploding in popularity because when executed well, a product can infiltrate the market and grow on its own — no extra work required. Growth product managers share a lot in common with traditional product managers, but instead of owning the product, the growth PM works to improve a specific set of metrics or goals. Experimentation is core to the growth PM job description, and they often use methods like A/B testing to continuously optimize their metric of focus. Some growth PMs own part of the product like onboarding, the sign-up experience, websites, monetization strategy, and email flows. Teams begin to understand the importance of transparency in product management In high-functioning organizations, everyone is invested in a common product vision and works to support the product in one way or another. To be effective, they need to know what products and features are coming up, what was launched, what is in consideration, and how everything relates to the organization’s overarching goals. It is the responsibility of product organizations to make this information accessible.
Product teams who foster this kind of transparency often use a tool or method specifically designed to openly share the product management process —a “source of truth.” This opens up the business context and user insights behind each product-related decision. When transparency is embraced by product teams, it prevents knowledge silos that can hinder communication with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders. It helps cross-functional departments understand the rationale behind tough trade-offs on what gets built next, even if they don’t personally agree with the decision. In short, transparency unites everyone behind a common goal, which, let’s admit, is simply good for business. Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader
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 1. What is Product-Led Growth? I am going to be very clear: the future is product-led (as an evolution of “sales-and-marketing-led”) But what does it actually mean to be “product-led”? Here’s my take: “Product-Led” growth is a go-to-market strategy that relies on product usage as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion, and expansion. To be honest, I have been thinking for a long time now that product-led growth flips all the elements of sales-and-marketing-led around. For example, those models create a need for the product by focusing on the promise of what the product can deliver, something like “business leader is seduced by how a product can increase their ROI, business leader schedules a demo with a sales guy, business leader signs a deal, onboarding ensues” …. Rings a bell? Product-Led growth models always start with the product. Give it to the end users. When any user sees how much the product has helped them, they will share it with their friends and their teams. Have the end users and not the decision makers fall in love with the product. And that’s how the product spreads – faster and more efficiently at every phase of the customer journey. Product-led growth has low acquisition costs Try to remember the first time you heard about Slack, Dropbox or Calendly. How did you start using them? I am almost certain that it wasn’t because of an ad or a whitepaper and that you had never heard of them before starting using their product.
Maybe someone you knew used Dropbox or Calendly. They sent you a file or an invite. You opened it. Suddenly, you are a user. How much did it cost for a product-led growth company to acquire you specifically? That’s right — exactly zero dollars. Now here’s the rub: your product has to be really, really great. And the corollary: bye bye to the stupidity of “oh I am going to dump an MVP and measure ourselves to adoption” – if you truly don’t have a product that you are sure your customers will love, don’t release it. Product-led growth is all about better user experience When your product is everything you got, your focus is 100% on making it the best it can be – and user feedback is at the center of everything you do and you are truly doing everything you can to create the best experience for your user. Product-led Growth increases retention … …. And in turn, reduces churn. Think about it: customer success teams need to know who are the users who aren’t finding value in the product and what features they might be missing on. Because product-led models focus on how users are interacting with the product, CS teams have the data on user engagement on a real-time basis – this gives them a very good perspective in helping reducing churn. 2. Product-Led Growth Metrics Even-though a lot of product managers focus a lot on conversion rates, I believe this is part of the vanity metrics that can be discarded very fast in the light of the following few. Activation rate: A measurement of how far along a user or account is in their journey toward “first value” or the “aha” moment where they realize how great your product is. Start with a list of actions a user would need to take to get set up and get value out of your product. It’ll vary based on your product. You should try to stick to 5-10. This is your Activation checklist. Activation rate is just the percent of those checklist steps that are completed. You can measure it by user, by account, or for your product as a whole. Churn Rate: the percentage of your customers who stop using your product during a given time period. Please note that usually “churn” is measured at cancellation – I think this is wrong because most of the time user churn starts way earlier than when your user cancels – it starts when they stop finding value in your product and stop using it. In fact, churn really measures how happy users are with the product in the long term. The emphasis placed on churn and retention rates is just one more way in which product-led growth puts the product front and center. You have to work to win over your customers every term or they’ll go to the competitors. That means focusing on new features, bettering the features you already have, or increasing engagement with the product. Since customers aren’t signing long-term deals, their choice to stick around shows your product is delivering them long-term value. DAU, WAU, MAU (daily, weekly, monthly active users): the number of users that are active in the product for any given time period Please note that the “AU” metrics have been largely discredited when taken “as is” because they result in having product managers obsess on them and transform them largely into vanity metrics that don’t measure a lot if your user base is small – less than a few millions – which is very predominant in the B2B world. Prefer ratios like DAU/MAU expressed as a percentage of total users for example. That said, understanding how many users are using the product actively for any given set of time is key to understanding if you’ve been successful in your mission to keep the focus in the right place and nail the user experience.
Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader  Unless you have been living in Silicon Valley and have participated to the software product revolution of the past decade (the famous “Software is eating the world” by Marc Andreesen in 2011), You probably have no idea about what product management is all about in the software industry. Even today, in many companies, product managers are confused for user experience designers, technology leads, or even more erroneously, project managers. At best, we see team acknowledging product managers as “product owners” in the agile sense, and as such their main deliverable being the product backlog. In 2019 and as we’re entering a new decade, we see a different picture emerging – digital product managers are one of the hottest and fastest growing roles in business, and product enthusiasts are eager to excel in their field. We’re entering the “Golden Age” of Product Management. As a matter of fact, in the past few years, product management roles have increased steadily in both demand and popularity in software technology development – so much so that it outpaces the average increase in demand for other roles in the US by a factor of 5. But why is product management so important today in 2019? And why are senior product leaders so desperately needed? Let’s take a look at a few technology-driven changes that are happening today across almost all industries. 1. The technology market is moving at the speed of light As an example, it took 80 years for the telephone to reach 100 million users, it took 20 years for the mobile phone to reach the same mark, it took 5 years for Facebook to reach 100 million users and it took 2 years for Instagram to reach the same number of users. In other words, today, new entrants can enter the market and immediately reach millions of users and revenue potentially in months – yes, the new scale is months, not centuries – and it’s up to modern organizations to keep up. Here’s what this means: If you snooze on the quality of your product experience – you will most likely lose – and super fast. 2. Digital Transformation Your customers increasingly have a digital life, whether it’s communicating with your grandkids on snapchat or ordering from Amazon and as a result, to keep up with increasing customer demands in the age of digital transformation, it is today absolutely critical for companies to deliver excellent digital experiences that align with their existing products and services.
At first pass, this looks very easy – but in practice and in the real world, creating a seamless experience connecting the online and offline is absolutely and exceedingly difficult. Go ask big names like GE, Procter and Gamble, Lego and even Nike, all of whom have majorly failed their digital transformation efforts. In the case of GE, it literally tanked the company.
With this in mind, organizations are increasingly turning to qualified product professionals to oversee the digital arm of the business and help succeed in overcoming the challenging of Digital Transformation. 3. Rising customer expectations There is no doubt that today we need to develop a deep understanding of our customers and know them better than family – in an ever hyper competitive climate, we, as a result, need to deliver more and more sophisticated products that meet their needs and convince almost instantly. As soon as your competition comes up with superior features and/or a better experience (it’s not an “if” today, it’s a “when”) or if you have not fostered stronger bonds with your user community, don’t count on them to be loyal to you … HipChat was awesome until Slack came up, remember?
4. An increasingly data-driven world In 2019, companies would be silly to ignore data when it comes to making product decisions and competing in markets where customers are not only very much information driven but also (and as a corollary) saturated with information. Product data today includes both qualitative data user research, notes from sales calls, user-submitted feature requests, and market/competitive analysis and other inputs that can affect the trajectory of your product and business) and quantitative data (analytics collected on how people are using your products so you can make iterative improvements).
A dedicated role to face modern challenges head-on Product managers are the professionals who are best-equipped to face the challenges unique to today. That’s why modern organizations are hiring more product professionals who can deeply understand users, collect and process data, set product vision and strategy, manage product growth and evangelize product within the company. Welcome to the golden age of product management! Let me know what you think!
DM me @philippemora on IG and Twitter My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Digital Product thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader  Over the past few months, I have been asked quite a few times about my thoughts on building a startup in the healthcare industry. It’s true that after 4 years in hardcore healthcare, I have come to a few conclusions about its dynamics, stakeholders, disruption potential (and speed at which change can happen). I feel that we’re at a crossroads and critical mass for change has been met: this time it is really different, I think. As I said before, I am at a junction right now and as I am wrapping things up, this is part two of my thoughts on healthcare and the few lessons I have learned along the way. Revolution is coming: I think we are at a moment when even all the various stakeholders themselves in the healthcare industry have understood that costs aren’t going to rise forever while outcomes remain stagnant at best without a revolt – the perfect storm is coming, it will be destructive but the realignment is necessary. As a very simple, self-experienced, example, It’s mind blowing to me that, in 2019, I can’t schedule an appointment with my ophthalmologist without having to call a number, be put on hold for 45 interminable minutes and given the run-around by front desk employees who couldn’t care less about the negative value they are bringing to the equation. The empowered customer In my personal example, I simply brought my business elsewhere: if as a provider you are not consumer-centered (read very carefully: I am using the term “consumer”, not the industry term “patient”) then you are bound to be disrupted due to two primary drivers: 1) increasing costs and 2) increasing expectations. As a business owner, your demand (the Consumer) is paying more out of their pocket than ever before. As a result of all this rising cost, individuals have now a vested interest (if not forced) to take more ownership in their healthcare decisions. This leads me to new consumer expectations: we are all increasingly looking for on-demand solutions in healthcare in the same way we use apps to order a ride, book a flight and buy food. A new kind of healthcare customer is rapidly emerging, who takes a great interest in managing their health care on a daily basis, and actively look to leverage new technologies and health information. And yes, coming back to my ophthalmologist example, we’re challenging the status quo by seeking care outside of the traditional hospital and doctor’s office. And they are already challenging the status quo by seeking care outside of a traditional hospital and doctor’s office. Changing consumer demands have created an expansion of new care delivery models centered around easier access, lower cost, and a richer experience. Already, there is a range of entirely new ways to “see your doctor”: one survey showed that 60 percent of consumers with employer-based insurance have received care in an urgent care center, 25 percent in a retail health clinic and 11 percent by video visit. New entrants capitalizing in primary care — One Medical, Forward Health, Paladina, and others — offer a range of “on-demand” online services like same day appointment booking, immediate virtual doctor visits, accessible medical records, and prescription renewals. Healthcare is already increasingly being offered at consumers’ fingertips, with consumers accessing medicine (or telemedicine) with a simple app. Tech natives are inevitably going to disrupt traditional incumbents Over the past 4 years, I have seen the fallacy of using tech to automatize inefficient and outdated care models as historically, industry incumbents are looking for ways to incorporate technology into their existing systems and workflows – resulting in poor results: this is the wrong way of looking at the problem. Successful new entrants in healthcare are increasingly being built from scratch with technology baked into the DNA of the company – and (of course!) with a consumer-centric sensibility. We are also seeing tech-natives getting into healthcare like Apple and Amazon. We’re not very far from a world were Amazon can deliver our drug prescriptions same-day via PillPack and also offer low-price telehealth services for Prime members. These new entrants are creating increased and rapidly disruptive and wide-ranging competitive pressure with an acceleration of competitive pressure on traditional providers and insurances’ margins as well as a customer base that is increasingly shopping for superior user experiences at a lower cost. Dissolving the payor/provider silo With so many different stakeholders all acting in their own silo with disconnected incentives, often not driving for value at all. But these silos are beginning to dissolve, creating a new opportunities to rethink how we deliver, pay, and experience high level care. One particular silo that is increasingly facing disruption is the payor/provider paradigm. In a traditional “fee for service” system, hospitals and clinics are incentivized for volume and not necessarily for outcomes and even less for the total cost of care. But in order to better align incentives and address the gaps and fragmentation in care, we are beginning to see the lines between payors and providers start to blur. A few weeks ago, for example, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas opened ten “advanced primary care centers” in partnership with Sanitas, a global healthcare network of hospitals and clinics. This partnership creates a new value-based care delivery model that is takes a holistic approach to improving one’s health: from primary care, urgent care, lab and diagnostic imaging services, to wellness and disease management programs, these medical centers accelerate the ability to coordinate care across one patient’s journey while reducing costs and improving outcomes. Today is (finally!) a great time for healthcare As a conclusion, it seems almost certain to me that the winners of this new world order will be those who are focused on comprehensive, end-to-end solutions that win on outcomes, cost, and experience. I think we are in the middle of major shifts in our healthcare ecosystem, all of which have the potential to completely transform both the demand and supply side of the healthcare landscape. These shifts are creating a rare and powerful window for new entrants to define that landscape in the coming years. Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader |
i blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech, Experiences and anything holistic.
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