 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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 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  1. Email makes you feel productive, but you are not. Just observe yourself when you check your email … you’ll probably realize that it’s happening when you’ve hit a “stuck” point on whatever you’re working on. You’re probably at that point in need of your micro-dopamine “hit” so you can get a false sense of achievement, and then you feel better and you go back to your original task. Rings a bell? This would be fine if it happened to you once an hour or more, but I guarantee you it’s happening to you many, many times in an hour. If you’ve got an iPhone, look at the “screen time” and see the number of your mail app “picks” per hour. This should shock you. And the result is that a task that should take you a certain amount of time does take you way longer because of your email “addiction” 2. Email is the most inefficient way of internal communication Email forces you to be reactive. Period. It starts with the first batch of emails you check and respond to at the beginning of your day, then emails beget more emails, as eventually you’ll end up encouraging useless email “conversations”, always ending emails with a question that needs an answer, rather than trying to bring an issue to a quick resolution. Most often this reaches a level of absurdity when you realize that your discussion involves two or more people that seat almost right next to each other in the same office. 3. The case for banning email from work We all agree that email stresses people out and it’s a colossal time suck. I will argue that face-to-face is still the best way of communicating efficiently: it’s the highest bandwidth form of communication and it includes visual sub cues that are essential for thorough understanding, from body language and facial expressions, leaving an impression; to bonding with coworkers. As such, any leader who wants to foster cultural shift from an individual mindset to that of a community will come to the same conclusion as I have: ban internal email! Replace with face-to-face and instant messaging. My experiments and research on those who have done it have experienced the following changes:
Sounds like a shoo-in to me! 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  Over the past few months, I have been asked quite a few times about two things: my thoughts on building a startup in the healthcare industry and how to approach a brand new industry from scratch. Obviously I don’t have a magic recipe however I thought I would share a little bit of my thoughts so far, after 4 years …. Why? because I feel that first, I am at a junction (I’ll elaborate in future posts) but also because
I am going to make this short: only three points. To get this started, more than ever, I am a big fan of setting clear strategies for success, in particular being absolutely intent on creating the right teams at any level, tying products to services in an efficient and value driven way and most importantly execute, execute, execute! (and be kind, compassionate and have lots of fun too). Now, here are my few points: First of all, I think healthcare SaaS will require you to build high-touch services in order to deal with extreme variability in your customer’s operational environments - for example, make sure you build across a large product surface area (if you’re “just an app” you will fail) and transactional depth (scheduling, payments) to immediately show utility, value and ROI and make a really airtight case for your risk-adverse buyers at any level. Second, about the other end of the funnel — it’s critical that the customer-facing front line is stacked not only with industry insiders who understand the culture of your users and customers, but most importantly, these insiders also must be absolutely fluent in technology and be able to understand and diagnose issues quickly and efficiently to your internal dev and product stakeholders. In other words, if your customer service folks are awesome with doctors but have no idea about the ins-and-outs of your API stack, prepare for a lot of hurt and wasted opportunities. As a result, extend your engineering and product teams to include field application engineers and run away from low quality, cheap call centers. On the engineering side, hire world class engineers and data scientists who have a deep knowledge of the latest and greatest techs but also have the patience and courage to want to deal with age-old legacy systems that you will have to — without any doubt — integrate with. And lastly, make sure you’re super specific in defining your target market segment because this will immediately define your sales and service delivery model, pricing strategy and sales team profile. But most importantly, you will have to clearly anticipate extra long sales cycles and heavy buyer education needs … As a result, you must be clear (at least in your mind) to favor and prioritize evangelist customers ahead of revenue: they will help you communicate a strong vision and having excited customers who can see the long term “end game” is super important for your survival. As a conclusion, I think that healthcare tech is not for the faint of heart … Check your hubris at the door, be humble and work hard. And most importantly, always aim at building products and services that will delight your customers and change their lives! 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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