ProductCon 2020

The future of product

Top product manager skills: AI, data, UX, leadership, communication, creativity
Shifting the focus to things that are important but not urgent
Book recommendation – the signals are talking
Trend monitoring – sustained manifestations of change
“Millennials see some long term commitments as risk for future hardship and disappointment”
Mobile payments are increasing 300% year on year

“Nokia dismissed the iPhone when it came out, but they weren’t competing with a handset, they were competing with a brand”
WhatsApp overtook Skype by removing key friction points, e.g. contact finding based on people’s device directories rather than the need to know someone’s username and have a request accepted
Skype weren’t aware enough that they were competing in the communication space rather than the desktop sharing space
“Competition isn’t always what you think it is”
“Startups don’t compete against each other, they compete against apathy”
It took Blockbuster six years to recognise Netflix as a competitor, they believed they were offering something different
To compete with AmazonPrime, Netflix paid $2m upfront for House of Cards because they watched trend data in order to confidently predict that the show would put them ahead
Read Hastings: “Think of a night you didn’t watch Netflix. We compete with drinking a bottle of wine”
“If you focus on the product, you’ll get more product, don’t make it a race to the bottom”

Product, design and engineering work together, achieving maturity by valuing and amplifying each other’s value
Psychological safety is fundamental to highly functional teams
Create team norms, hold each other accountable, ceremony, facilitation, checkins and health checks, collaboration, communication, shared learning, adjusting to feedback
Understand the customer value and work together towards it
People feel equally responsible and empowered for the team’s outcomes
Upskilling and knowledge sharing
Every balanced team will be different, because it reflects the talents and preferences of its members
Run regular customer empathy experiments

Having the right tools doesn’t mean you’re a data-driven team
Discipline and mindset
Make hypotheses not decisions
“You can always find a narrative by which something can be viewed as successful”
Duolingo: “Make incremental change with a diverse portfolio of big bets and small surefire bets”

When there’s a gap in knowledge we fill it with assumptions
“If we don’t understand why we’re building something, we’re going to build the wrong thing”
A single person can’t lift the team alone, collaboration and shared leadership is key

248m monthly active users
Prioritising scale within the company
Building trust internally and externally
“Product managers are hired to add value to the engineering teams”
Within your team, find the gap they need to be filled and fill it
Meet everyone, be clear, build together, test together, communicate, learn
Find the customer evidence to prove or disprove your assumptions
What shall we do next, are we working on the most important items for the company?
What is the cost of not doing it?
Advocate for autonomy and put systems in place to align with company direction
Focus on impact not delivery, including when pitching goals to teams
Behave and work as one team
Optimise your product for the most common use case, but make it usable for the least common

Owners of Badoo, Chappy and Bumble
App dating is the number one way people meet their partners in the US
Aim to get every user a match in 24 hours
They divide churn into good (found a partner) and bad (gave up and went to a competitor)
Good churn was a surprisingly hard sell to senior management
They had to work hard at building understanding of the core company values and mission
“True love isn’t always forever, we also want to welcome back returning good churn customers”