Product Management Trends That Aren’t about AI

There’s no doubt AI and automation were the headlines for tech in 2023, in close competition only with rising interest rates, layoffs, and evaporating funding.

But there were a few other things buzzing in the industry while we all tried to figure out how to pull ourselves out of the holes we’ve dug since 2020’s unexpected disruption.

So many buzz words lingered in the mist as we got comfortable — and then uncomfortable — with remote and hybrid workforces, figured out how to deliver more of our products and services online, and tried to find the most efficient ways to do things better with what we have.

For those of us who were following software more closely, there were a handful of new and evolving ideas that continue to gain real traction. Here are a few:

Agile is dead. Long Live Agility.

I follow KJ Sethna on LinkedIn for the best hot takes on this subject. He makes me laugh, and he makes me think. His strongly held belief is that Agile is useless, SCRUM has become a predatory industry, and we’ve completely lost focus on the original purpose of agile—building the right products at the right time.

It’s true. We’ve evolved Agile, and specifically SCRUM, into a methodology for development, not for proper product discovery and delivery. We use it for velocity, predictability, quality (maybe) and productivity measurement.

Engineering uses it as a shield to protect teams from constant disruption from the business.

Product owners become order takers for the business and meat-shields for the delivery teams.

The teams themselves become isolated feature factories that then have to hire big SAFe or LESS consultants to figure out how to talk to each other.

Even through my cynical language, we can see that Agile addresses some real systemic problems that tech organizations face, but these implementations do not solve the BIG problems of Discovery, Transformation, and true Agility that this philosophy was intended to address.

Agile was supposed to help us be flexible, quick on our feet, able to pivot to what our customers really need when they need it rather than waiting for next year’s big waterfall release.

We need to come back to the values and purpose and leave aside the dogma and tools. We want to deliver what our customers need, not a committed set of deliverables defined in a contract.

We’ve shoehorned Agile into a method for the latter and stopped thinking about the simple processes and systems that create transparency and engagement focused on the former.

And because of these failures, we are all looking at new ways to do this product thing…

Product Management vs. Product Mindset

I learned a new word in 2023: schismogenesis. It means “creation of division”, and it’s a beautiful thing that humans do — consciously or not — to create experiments. I learned it from David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything, a book that deserves its own separate post, and it refers to the behavior of doing the opposite of what one’s neighboring tribe or civilization is doing but with the intention of achieving a similar outcome.

An example: People in the industry sat up and took notice when AirBNB decided to do away with their Product Management titles and move to a more Product Marketing focus. Speaking as a product leader, I love it. Companies are diverging and experimenting all of the place, finally realizing that “product management” is a wide open field and does not have to be (should not be) a siloed function.

Some companies will do away with ‘product management’ and attempt to create a broader product mindset throughout the company. Some will double down on product management and start defining the roles — leader, manager, owner, designer, etc. — with a lot more clarity. Some will reduce their product managers and focus more on product leadership, empowering these leaders to dive deep into customers’ challenges and market opportunities without getting buried in things like…Jira.

The intention for all approaches, as far as I can tell, is that more parts of tech organizations will get immersed in customer problems and a product mindset. They can do this by putting more product responsibility into more functions or distributing the product roles throughout the organization or doing something in between. I, for one, am excited to see how this transformation better serves customers and users.

Digital Transformations Need a Product Operating Model

There’s another type of transformation that has become as ubiquitous and almost as useless a term as Agile in tech circles. Digital Transformation. Does it mean ‘creating a digital presence for my business’ or ‘finally replacing the mainframe’. Who knows? Maybe both.

What’s worse is that “digital transformation” gets a bad rap these days for taking longer than expected and not realizing the promise. Companies get stuck in transition and senior execs get scared off.

For example, imagine asking a CEO at a large corporation, “Would you like to move to a platform that can deliver value to your customers more quickly and consistently than the labor-intensive approach you have now?”

“Of course! Tell me more!”

“You’ll need to embark upon a digital transformation.”

“Oh no, we don’t have the time and money for that. We have problems we need to solve now.”

They’re probably right. Companies need to be primed and aligned to get the most out of a transformation.

I’ve seen CTOs push forth, steamrolling their paths to big changes. They have some success! Maybe they get the mainframe replaced, but they probably don’t get deep buy-in throughout the org about how to move into their new digital world effectively.

This is why a Product Operating Model is so critical. For humans to be enthusiastic about change, they need, at the very least, to understand what’s in it for them. If we go forth saying, “The company will be more efficient,” or “It’s time to make some changes,” or “We’ve been doing it wrong this whole time,” people will be defensive.

What if we said, instead, “We want to create an organization that let’s you contribute your best selves to our success,” or “We want to make your lives easier,” or “We want a shared purpose that we all know how to contribute to”?

For me, this is the core of a product operating model. Successful tech companies have been doing it intuitively for years, maybe decades. Create a vision. Create effective, cross-functional teams. Align them on a mission. Give them autonomy, data, and timely feedback. Communicate, interact, generate the best ideas within the bounds of a Product, a Platform, a Well-Defined Outcome.

CPO as a Transformational Leader

For the companies who continue to embrace Product as a function and want to stay relevant, the role of CPO is gaining traction.

On the surface, one might assume that other leaders finally understand that product leadership deserves a seat at the big table, but, in fact, CPO is not just another name for the highest ranking product leader at the company.

Priyankka Mani, CPO of Lonely Planet, articulates a beautiful vision for the CPO in this podcast. She does a lovely job of describing both the hierarchy of product responsibilities, as well as the product needs at different types of companies at different stages.

The opinion that resonates most with me is the CPO’s role in leading digital transformations. If we see how a product operating model helps make digital transformations successful, then this makes a lot of sense.

A CPO is the logical choice to lead a transformation to a product operating model. She understands the vision, the impact, and the people impacted by these changes and knows how to evangelize the vision and collaborate cross-functionally. CTOs can lead the hard technical work, but the people part is not always their specialty. CPOs have the whole picture in mind.

Product Discovery vs. ?

I love how things come back around. The fact that Product Discovery has become a buzz phrase as Agile goes the way of doublespeak hits a nerve about what we’ve fundamentally been doing wrong in tech during the extended era of cheap money: developing solutions for problems that don’t matter.

It’s the same mistake we’ve made in our approach to digital transformations. When we can’t link our work with value delivered to the customer, we will always lose traction. Developing cool technology isn’t wrong, but delivering solutions to real world problems is what the market and investors now demand of us.

So what’s the solution? Talk to customers. (Weird, I know.) Have better conversations about the users’ wants and needs. Understand the context of potential solutions. Go to the users’ worlds rather than dragging them into ours.

The irony to this approach is that it challenges traditional roles in the organization. Take sales people, for example, the people who talk to customers the most. They will be challenged to be facilitators not gate keepers. Product managers, designers, and even developers need to talk to real customers to “discover” the product that their users need.

The aforementioned move towards a company-wide product mindset will make this a lot easier. Everyone in the company will understand the value of Product Discovery, and, hopefully, incentives will be aligned across functions to encourage this collaboration.

Marty Cagan is the current guru on all these topics, but here I will show my age by recommending one of my own favorite product books (which I was recently reminded is actually an enterprise sales book), Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

Moore’s concept of the Whole Product formed my entire view of what it means to build a software product. My concept of it has probably evolved beyond recognition of his original idea, but I believe in it Whole Heartedly.

The Product is a System. We need to see it from all sides, in all the ways it is used, developed, discovered, supported, sold, upgraded, and end-of-life’d. We see all the users who touch it. We see all the places it lives. We imagine — discover — all the places it can go.

Conclusion

The evolution of the product practice is inspiring. As I develop my own consulting practice, I feel a lot of validation in my past attempts to educate and advocate for a systemic view of product and an alignment of incentives across various functions of organizations.

The shift to talking about Product as a mindset rather than Product as a function is happening, and I think product companies will finally embrace a holistic, customer-centric approach to organization and incentivization.

But, I am an optimist. Let’s see how 2024 plays out.

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