The Product Renaissance
Steven Sinofsky and Suhail Doshi in conversation
Last night,
board partner and former president of Microsoft’s Windows division joined Mixpanel CEO at Mixpanel’s Office Hours to discuss the renaissance going on in product right now.Suhail and Steven discussed which skills have remained essential to product management, how the industries of old should adapt to product management, and how product managers should adapt to the established institutions.
Midway through the talk, Suhail mentioned how, when founding Mixpanel in 2009, Silicon Valley was still looking at outdated, vanity metrics. But then startups began to wake up and track the meaningful actions associated with their products.
Now, other industries are waking up, too. Steven agreed that those mature companies would build out product management organizations, but that they’d have carefully balance what was right for customers and the established systems. He said:
They’re all worried about how their products differentiate them from existing competitors. In the banking world, for example, it turned out that having more branches was not interesting to millennials. But having an app where they can do all the same services at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday is. And having that data to drive that app well is a huge competitive advantage.
All of these companies’ existing customers want a mobile app from them. That sounds easy, but ten usually their mobile app looks exactly like their org chart. Step One is recognition of this problem. They have to bring in someone who can look holistically at the customers and the constraints that you already have internally.
Over at The Signal , we’ve compiled some of the other key insights from the night. You can jump through to the article by clicking below.
