Trends Shaping the Future of Product Management
As I’ve navigated the digital transformation consulting space over the last five years, helping organizations transition to product operating models, I can’t help but see threads of ideas weave together, emerge, disappear, and reappear over time. This month, Marty Cagan published Transformed, and many product people in my feed are debating the finer points of the book. The question remains: How much will the CEOs and CTOs of the legacy companies on the precipice of their transformations pay attention? And how much will these conversations stick around and evolve as they do?
We know that Transformation is about more than Technology
To that end, the trends shaping the future of product management and what it means to transform into a product operating model are rooted in how the work gets done. In other words, how teams are structured, how ideas are prioritized, and how technology-powered experiences and products are developed and delivered.
Here are some of the things I’m thinking about as we move forward into what I’m beginning to think of as the second wave of Digital Transformation, which focuses on operating models rather than on the technology we’re implementing.
Trends in Product Management That I’m Keeping My Eye On
1. Tooling is a Distraction
As more organizations adopt product management practices and principles, I’ve observed many teams overcomplicate with layers of interconnected platforms, automation, and the “next big thing” in collaboration, roadmapping, backlog management, or automation software. But you don’t need the newest, shiniest tools to practice the fundamentals.
Your team needs to be able to listen to customers, capture and share what they are telling you, and decide how that will impact what you work on next and how you do it. You can truly sit down with a pen and a stack of sticky notes and get it right – it almost feels rebellious to say it! In doing so, I don’t mean to discount the importance of finding the best tools to supplement your practice (including AI and automation to make things easier faster, and to diminish errors). I am saying: Stop wasting cycles evaluating 78 platforms to solve your latest issue. Do the essential due diligence, pick one, and move on.
2. Thinking About Product Ops in a More Expansive Way
After spending a week with Product Ops folks at the Product-Led Alliance Product Ops Summit last week, I’m buzzing thinking about POps as so much more than a driver of product practice maturity and consistency. Particularly in enterprise settings where the Product Org is sprawling and there’s a need for operational “connective tissue” in areas of product communications, go-to-market readiness, finance & cap ex management, and complex cross-product initiatives (often in highly regulated scenarios). I’m excited to see companies reimagine this role in new and exciting ways.
While I’m very happy to see this emerging trend, I’m also hoping the pendulum doesn’t swing too far and land us in an over processed, overtemplated system (like what SAFE did to AGILE). Hopefully, leaders can be mindful of this and focus on shaping what the practice looks like now that there’s growing awareness and appreciation for Product Operations as a discipline.
3. The Talent Pendulum Keeps on Swinging
I’m interested in the career path opportunities that product ops roles will create for people drawn to products but with other skills and talents outside the norm of “traditional” product management. As product manager & owner roles have exploded over recent years, so has the candidate pool (thanks to tech-sector layoffs and new b-school programs), and I’ve been concerned to see a narrowing of the standard path to product roles.
Gone are the days, it seems, of the random zig-zag path that many of us – ahem – seasoned product people took to the profession. Now it seems everyone goes from undergrad to MBA to PO to PM to PD; frankly, that’s getting a little boring.
With product ops, the skill set seems to open things back up again, and hopefully there will be downstream effects on other product roles. Product Ops roles seem to value skills from customer service, engineering, data science, and portfolio management. That last one is a hot take, I know, but there are so many insanely talented project and program managers out there who are more than capable of succeeding in a product world, and these kinds of roles give them a new entry into the model that we haven’t always had.
In Conclusion
It remains to be seen what other old ideas will be new again, or how long these trends will stick around before fading. Regardless, it’s clear that transforming organizations – and legacy companies in particular – will need to pay attention to the shifting tides and adapt accordingly to succeed in their endeavors.
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