What is a good product?
A good product has at least two very important characteristics: The first one is that it has to create or serve a customer need that’s already there but in a differentiated way, ideally while delighting the users that actually use it. So, there’s a customer who gets the product and then there are the users that are delighted.
If you’ve ever used great products, you know that these are wholesome in their entire experience, from the moment you first touch them to using them in your daily life. Every step of the way is a relevant element to create a great product - differentiated and with a delightful experience.
The second one is an internal one: The product needs to be sustainable for the organization that creates it. And I mean this in every sense of the word: Obviously, built in a way that is economically viable and allows for distribution, but at the same time ethically and socially responsible. All of those things are core elements of a good product.
Ultimately, if you build something that’s great for the users but you end up bankrupting your company, you haven’t really created a great product after all.
What was your path to product?
I started my career in product and engineering - there was less distinction back then. After a while, I’ve decided to experiment with other functions, leaving product to explore functions that gave me different customer-related viewpoints.
I did professional services, customer experience, customer success and community management. These were all very important experiences for my growth as a product manager, because they allowed me to see product from multiple angles – from the customer's and from the company's point of view.
Eventually, after a few years, I returned to product management. And I do think I had a renewed appreciation of what it took to have a successful product out there in the market across all these functions and customer touchpoints.
Why is the product function important for your organization?
In my specific organization, the product function plays a very critical role as it serves as our guiding vision for the future. We essentially have one product. We sell one product. It would be easy to have a lot of short-term focuses and chase every single individual customer. Therefore, we as product function help keep the strategic long-term intents of our company in mind. For example, we evaluate which markets we want to operate in, what customers’ needs we’ll serve or what ecosystems or other organizations we’ll have to build around this.
We end up acting as proxies, not only for existing customers, but also for our future customers and in how we want to participate in that future world.
In my organization, company strategy and product strategy are very tightly integrated, and they overlap significantly. I would say having a team, an organization and a function that owns, communicates, and updates that vision and connects all of your customer segments is absolutely critical.
What is your single most important KPI?
I’m not sure I have an answer that stands the test of time. Our top-level business KPIs vary and reflect what we’re trying to do as an organization at any given moment in time.
These KPIs include customer acquisition rate, customer retention and net retention revenue. As a product organization, we are deeply attuned to these business oriented KPIs, because they reflect how we prioritize in shorter horizons what we’re doing on our products. Right now, we’re very deeply focused on customer retention.
As part of our product development effort, what we plan to do is to translate these business KPIs into product north stars. These are more related to product usage, product adoption, and to the product itself and not primarily focused on their financial or business outcome.
Though, they are highly context dependent. For example, they might include the amount of software that our customers produce or the number of active developers that we have on the platform. We put a lot of effort in mapping them.
In the end, we decided for a specific strategy which includes north star product metrics. By pursuing those metrics, we will be directly contributing to the top-level business KPIs.
To sum it up: It actually depends - which is the typical answer from a product manager. It is dependent on your objectives and your context. And it can also change. Actually, it changes quite frequently if you’re being responsive to your customer needs.
What is the future of the product function?
The majority of practitioners adopts product management and product accelerating functions. It’s great to see that the level of sophistication we have is really growing by leaps and bounds. We have more and more people with experience building diverse products in the context of B2C and B2B.
However, in my view, the function and the people tend to focus too heavily on product management for the sake of it. We’re professionalizing it and also preaching it. We say things like, “You’re not doing product right.” For me, this is dangerous because we forget about the complexities of the operating environments. We forget that this is a function which did not exist 20 years ago. We’re also just at the beginning of figuring out what product actually means – and even that is constantly changing.
We often also are not very empathic towards our colleagues and product managers when we tell them, “You’re not doing your job right.”
My hope is that product management will continue to evolve as a discipline in terms of sophistication but with a little less, if you will, focus on the rituals and more focus on the business outcomes.
I do also think that product management will have a stronger mix of product understanding and data-driven approaches. Product needs people that are very data savvy but at the same time have developed this idea of product sense and good intuitions through experiences and coaching.
More and more, product teams will collaborate and overlap with other organizations. I’m obviously thinking about go-to-market or engineering teams. Product reaches into and meshes with these disciplines.
The final thought from me in terms of the future of product management is the tremendous opportunity that’s coming with artificial intelligence. I think it will change how we do product management, how we analyze customer feedback, how we think about different horizons and how we generate hypotheses. At the same time, it will also generate new types of products that are yet to be built.
It is a great time to be a product manager if you can take advantage of all these trends. It will be absolutely great in the next 10 years.
“Product management is…”
… the art and science of building the right product while managing shared disappointment.
