Day 99 — PM series 5/5: “Future of Product Management”
As a product manager, hat is your end goal? Where do you see yourself in 5–10 years? This is an imperative question to help you determine what you want to learn & practice, and how you can find an ideal job for your own future.
This is a 5-part series of my work experience/knowledge about product management, please check out the rest of the series:
In today’s article, I’m going to share some of my observation of the future of product management in the following structure:
- Design Thinking
- Product as a Service
- Brand & Business Integration
- ROE: Return Over Experience
- Tech & Data Integration
Design Thinking
How do we come up with innovative idea? How do we make sure we’re tapping into what users want instead of guessing with Agile? Design Thinking framework have proved itself to be very beneficial to answer these questions, therefore more and more business school are teaching Design Thinking; yes, you heard me right, business schools (Cornell, Wharton, etc.)
Since the new generation of product managers will be fully capable of adopting Design Thinking framework for planning research, ideation, and testing activities, the broad adoption of Design Thinking is happening, and it will be an unstoppable trend.
Product as a Service
More and more people started to use the method of Job-to-be-Done to define product direction. If you’re not familiar with what “Job” means in this method, below is a video from Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen, author of “The Innovation Dilemma” which introduce the idea of disruptive innovation.
Since more and more people understand that user don’t need your product, instead they “hire your product to get a job done”, the traditional idea of product has been shifted to a service thinking. With the success of social economy platforms like Uber or AirBnB, the aspect of end-to-end service is becoming the dominant thinking of product and innovation.
Brand & Business Integration
We probably all remember how Uber, AirBnB, Netflix grew from product ideas to successful businesses. Product is no longer just product; in the digital age, often time your product IS your brand. If you’re in the product business, you’re in the branding business. How do we communicate with our users, what kind of message we should send, with what tone, and how to respond, what kind of image we want to create in users’ minds, these are all important branding questions we need to answer.
Especially with the agentive technology solution like Chat-Bot and Voice UI (e.g. Siri or Amazon Echo-Alexa), there’s literally a “tone” we need to define. Do we want it to be a “funny Brooklyn cat” that tells you weather? Or do you want a calm emergency bot to call for help? The product itself requires lots of brand thinking in order to get the product right.
If you’re in a startup space, your product(s) is your business; And if you’re in a non-tech large corporation, you’re probably in the process of digital transformation and looking for enterprise agility with Agile, partnership with startups, have your own innovation lab or incubation/acceleration team. No matter what that case is, there’s a big trend of product/business integration so that companies can stay lean and learn fast, learn often.
ROE or ROX: Return Over Experience
In many marketing research, it indicates that younger consumers don’t pay as much in products, instead, they pay for experiences (e.g. travel, concert). With the majority of consumer profiles shifting from Baby Boomers and Gen-X to Millennial and Gen-Z, we’re expecting users pay more attention on more than what features or functions they can have in a product, but how good the experience is during the product usage.
Tech & Data Integration
Traditionally, lots of decision making process is done by “manager’s instinct”, “group thinking”, or “sales feedback”. With the advanced technology like Big Data, AI, Machine Learning, lots of these decision making process will be driven/influenced by data.
Also, some of the traditional low tech process will be replaced by AI, robotics and automation. For example, when estimating effort level of a user story, AI can use historical data to analyze and determine the effort level, to replace those long and unproductive Sprint Planning meeting. Other usage of AI could be automatically generate research insights, breakdown feature set into user stories, meeting and logistic arrangement, and competitive analysis.
Conclusion
- With increasing focus on service and experience and Job-to-be-Done, product thinking is gradually switching to service thinking and design thinking;
- Data & technology is playing a more important role in product strategy, in the aspects of both process efficiency and efficacy.
- Since product is more than a set of functions or features to users, there’s increase emphasis on upfront branding and business thinking integrating in the product strategy.
Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts around the future for product managers? I’m eager to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
