Sanjay Dholakia, CMO of Marketo, recently argued that “marketing has changed more rapidly the past five years than in the past 500 years.” A new generation of ‘marketing automation’ tools enables marketers to employ an Amazon-esque mass personalization approach to their digital marketing campaigns. As described by Sanjay’s interview with VentureBeat:

“A common theme through all those (marketing automation) tools is understanding the customer, meeting the customer where he or she is, learning what the customer wants, presenting offers to the customer at the right time in the right place and on the right device, and maintaining state on your customer or prospect’s purchase readiness for weeks or months.”

In the Internet economy, product management has gone through similar disruption in the past 5 years. Measurement of product usage has become drastically easier thanks to analytics tools that track a user’s product journey like Flurry, MixPanel, and Google Analytics. Product feedback via these analytics tools helps the product manager to quickly learn how end users are accepting new product designs and new features. The product feedback cycle now provides near real-time insight into the customers experience.

While quantitative measurement of product usage is critical, qualitative user interviews can be just as insightful to making the next set of product decisions. New services like Usertesting.com, Usabilityhub.com, and Feedbackarmy.com are incredibly valuable for quickly gathering user impressions of new features and designs.

Old school product management used to look like this: The PM reviews market share reports and secondary research reports and then sits alone in a cubicle and writes out a detailed product requirement document (PRD) that outlines, in painful detail, how a complex product should look and feel months before development ever begins. The PM then presents and discusses the PRD with her engineering team and a development plan is formulated.

New school product management is to lead the development team to a minimum viable product (MVP) and put it into the hands of target customers as quickly as possible. Instead of documenting features, the new school PM wireframes a user experience without depending on development or design resources. And bonus! The wireframe serves as a visual product spec and doubles as a proof of concept that can be used for paper tests. This agile approach to product planning disrupts the classic waterfall planning approach that spends way too much time trying to define the nitty gritty details months before any customer feedback can be gathered.

While wireframing has helped streamline the product definition phase, usability feedback tools have helped streamline the product planning and feature prioritization phase of product development.

Want to know the secret to becoming a great new school product manager?

Know more about what customers think of your product than anyone at your company. Even if the user feedback available to you is a small population sample of qualitative user tests, your insight into key usability issues is invaluable to planning and prioritizing the next release. The product manager, at her core, serves to educate the internal development team on how their work is being received in the market.