8 Trends to Track for Product Success in 2021

Welcome & Introductions

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:03:30
good morning everyone and welcome to Productside’s latest leadership webinar series my name is roger snyder and today you are attending eight trends to track for product success in 2021 thank you for joining us this morning and i especially want to thank denise hemke for joining us this morning thank you so much for joining us denise

Denise Hemke | 00:03:30–00:04:10
my pleasure roger thanks for having me

Roger Snyder | 00:04:10–00:06:00
yeah so denise joins us from workday where she is the vp of product management and strategy analytics now it says oakland california but you’re not actually in oakland are you

Denise Hemke | 00:06:00–00:06:40
no i mean we’re in this virtual working world these days so i took it as an opportunity to go run and spend a couple of months with closer to family in tampa florida

Roger Snyder | 00:06:40–00:08:00
awesome that’s fantastic well i am in scotts valley my home some of you will recognize my background from previous webinars but fortunately a couple of my daughters will be flying in to visit us for the holidays and we will take all the right covid precautions but we’re excited to have our daughters coming home so it’s great that you’re able to get out there and spend time with family

Denise Hemke | 00:08:00–00:08:30
yeah it’s been it’s been great and quarantining at the beach wasn’t too bad either

Roger Snyder | 00:08:30–00:09:30
i bet not absolutely all right well let’s move into today but we have a couple of admin things before we get going first of all we operate a great community on linkedin that i would love for all of you to join it’s a great place where not only do we share the latest in our content and activities from Productside but it’s also a place where we are offering a conversation area for folks to be able to share their own tips with each other so i’m gonna paste that okay clicked the link by accident i’m gonna try to get in here and not click the link this time but send the link to you in our chat box so that you can join the community and join the conversation be able to support each other in your growth as product managers and product professionals of various stripes

About Productside / Housekeeping

Roger Snyder | 00:09:30–00:13:40
now we often get a number of questions during the webinar and we encourage that we really want you to be engaged with us so please find the questions box on go to webinar and start typing your questions in right now so that we are able to answer your questions during the end of the webinar so accumulate questions now write them down and go ahead and put them in there and then at the end of the webinar we will be able to answer as many questions as we can but we always like to save some time where we can interact with our audience

two of the most popular questions that we receive are can you watch this webinar later and the answer is absolutely so after the webinar is over we will send all of our attendees an email with a follow-up that includes a link to the recording of this webinar so you can go back and watch it

now the other question we often get is well can i get a copy of the slides and the answer to that is no because there are copyrighted materials in the slides that we’re not at liberty to share but you can watch the webinar again and grab the information that is most important to you so look forward to you being able to follow up with us

now i’m going to go into a little bit about Productside for those of you who are not familiar with Productside we are all about product management and the product profession for product management product marketing product owners and our mission really is to empower these product professionals with the knowledge and tools to build products that matter and these are products that matter to you to your company as well as to your customers right of course it’s most important that they matter to your customers so that your customers are thrilled and excited to be using your products but we really like this phrase products that matter because it’s about what matters to all the various audiences that you’re working with

and we do this by providing a number of different services we have the optimal product process which helps product teams become more effective in the way they conduct product management we offer a number of services like consulting and contracting and of course training is at the center of what we do we believe strongly in advancing the profession of product management and that comes through being able to provide you with excellent training and we partner with aipmm so you can become a certified product manager or gain other certifications like digital product management as well to learn more go to Productside.com because i don’t want to bore you with too much of a sales pitch today

Agenda & Trends Overview

Roger Snyder | 00:13:40–00:16:30
we’re in the product management leadership series and today we’re talking about implications of change and that’s you know 2020 my goodness what a year i can’t believe what we’ve been through this year and there’s going to be more coming right so what we want to do is look at the trends both in terms of product management as well as technology that allow you or give you some ideas to improve your product management processes as well as be able to improve your products themselves so let’s dive a little further in

denise here’s a little bit about our audience today we’ve got the majority of folks are either product managers or product marketing managers but we’ve got quite a good slice over 20 percent of folks are product leaders as well so i think there’s going to be lots of good information that will work for both individual contributors as well as for product management leaders

Denise Hemke | 00:16:30–00:17:00
yeah i think there’s definitely something for everyone in what we’ve got today

Review of 2020 Trends

Roger Snyder | 00:17:00–00:20:30
okay so we’re here now we are advancing the way we do this webinar the last two years we’ve kind of done it in january and this year we thought well let’s get a head start and do this in december so looking back at what we did present in january about 2020 first off i’ll say no we did not predict the pandemic so you weren’t able to get that prediction here unfortunately but we did talk about several aspects of trends in product management that were definitely valuable this year in terms of being able to get better actionable customer insights and to conduct more experiments and we’re going to double down on a couple of these denise is going to talk about more trends in product management that are rooted in these but also extend these ideas for new ideas for you to think about in 2021

and of course never forget the fundamentals you always need to be thinking about your fundamental product management skills to be able to understand your customers build a solid business case and take products to market

another aspect of this is the trends that we saw in technology and for some reason powerpoint now is slowed down you can see and hear right denise

Denise Hemke | 00:20:30–00:20:40
i can see you the webinar gods they’re much like the demo gods right every product manager prays to them

Roger Snyder | 00:20:40–00:21:30
that’s very true yes but all of a sudden my powerpoint appears to be crashed powerpoint is simply not responding all right well let’s see if i can get powerpoint to go away and i apologize to our audience for this powerpoint is restarting hang on a second

all right let’s get back into presentation mode

for those of you who were with us in january we also talked about various innovation and technology trends again we’re going to advance on a few of these because they are still extremely important in 2021 one of the trends that i did find humorous though that i did talk about in january was about toilet paper so it was about a toilet paper delivery robot of all things believe it or not but that was one of the trends that i predicted and i did not know i was predicting something that would become such an important part of everyday conversation where were you going to get your next roll of toilet paper so there you have it

Denise Hemke | 00:21:30–00:21:50
or was that in march or april right

Trend #1: Customer-Centricity

Roger Snyder | 00:21:50–00:22:20
exactly fortunately it was a prototype from charmin so it was not yet available all right well i’m going to turn it now over to you denise to talk to us about these four trends in product management

Denise Hemke | 00:22:20–00:28:40
awesome thanks so yeah i’ll get started so we’re gonna first talk about the first trend which is becoming even more customer centric

somebody may be asking what is that really about in terms of product management and it really is an approach to putting the customer first truly understanding their problem before you dive into how to solve it and building a product that not just meets their needs right but is a product that really is easy for them to use and then finally you want to really create a connection between your product and your end users

i’ll say workday for instance we strive to build products that are easy to adopt and easy to love we say and that love piece really means starting with putting your customer at the center

but why would we do this other than happy customers which we all aspire to well according to this recent deloitte study customer-centric companies are 60 percent more profitable than their peers that’s pretty incredible and i think when you see that statistic you say absolutely i should be all in on this so how do we get there

it really starts with you as a product manager when you were hired you were hired for your domain or your technical expertise and during that interview process people were trying to tease out are they good at building customer empathy do they understand their customer they’re looking at that track record of your experiences to say do they have products that really resonated did they build products that really resonated with their user base and ultimately i think what we’re looking for a lot of times when we’re trying to tease this out about an individual is this key skill of can they listen and then can they synthesize what they hear to truly understand the customer pain the customer challenge

so how do you go about listening because that’s one thing that many people ask especially earlier on in their career and it’s really about opening up all of these different channels so not just one channel that’s not good enough you really need to open up all of these different channels and that can range from customer advisory boards to research leveraging methodologies like jobs to be done it can also be on the more digital side of things looking at adoption kpis and tracking your customers’ digital exhaust really across all of the channels that they’re exposed to with your company

so it’s a combination really of this qualitative and this quantitative information together that really allows you to fully understand your customer

Roger Snyder | 00:28:40–00:29:10
i love that term exhaust i think we’re leaving it all over the internet right we should capitalize on that as product managers and really learn from that evidence that’s left behind

Denise Hemke | 00:29:10–00:31:10
right you might say hey denise like this is great but it’s not really new and i think what is new is that we see the trends using ai for even more personalization and really in the b2b space which is where i come from this is becoming more important we’ve said this for many years the consumerization of it but people have these great products you know they have these great products on their phone that they use every day and they are demanding now at work to have these great personalized experiences they want the same machine learning and intelligence that tailors the application to them that they use in their personal life they want that at work

the next area is kind of on that side of physical evidence the more tactile things around trust and safety and this is especially true during the pandemic and this can range from this upper left-hand photo of the touchless ordering that you see now at restaurants around the nation or maybe around the globe i’m not sure to really products that are very tactile like the sticker that’s indicating hey this room has been cleaned you’re safe here

and then i would say the other trend we’re seeing is these really immersive experiences this astrobot game this picture kind of towards the bottom it’s a vr game that even my four-year-old nephew had mastered i couldn’t believe it i definitely was not nearly as successful in putting it on but you know we’re spending so much time at home that these enhanced experiences about how to shop better and make sure you’re selecting that right couch or that right piece of furniture that you’re investing in or getting your great workout these have made our lives better before they made our lives easier in some ways but they’ve truly become essential now and so it’s really knowing what is essential for the customer and really tailoring the application so that it feels built for them

Trend #2: Adoption, Digital Exhaust & Data

Roger Snyder | 00:31:10–00:31:50
all of these things you know covid19 has done something horrible to our society for sure but one of the silver linings has been the fact that it has put even more emphasis on how important all of these trends are that you’ve been talking about because our customers’ needs shifted a lot this year and if you weren’t tapped in and able to measure those changes it made it much harder to be able to respond and i think that’s what you’re talking about a little bit in that upper right there

Denise Hemke | 00:31:50–00:37:20
yeah absolutely i mean i think those listening channels that feedback loop has never been more important now because there’s so much change happening and things are pivoting so quickly and so you really want to start listening before you start crafting that first design before somebody starts writing that first line of code and you need to keep that listening channel ongoing

that brings us maybe to the next trend this idea of looking at our customers’ adoption and usage data and so this is yet another critical trend that continues to grow i tell this story of back in 2019 my husband and my daughter who was then two at the time we went to maine for vacation and my husband likes to go rock climbing and so we got him a guide who was an expert at this and i dropped the two of them off because i think two was probably a little young for rock climbing and so my daughter and i kind of went to the beach and i actually took the picture on the left of where they were climbing kind of at a distance and then he sent me the photo on the right so that i could kind of get a close-up experience of what he was going through maybe just in case it was the last time my kid saw him this is where he was

but what he was telling me what was really unique about climbing in acadia national park in maine is that you actually have to rappel down and you climb up which is pretty different than traditional rock climbing where you kind of look up at your enemy and climb upwards and so the guide says to him hey after you finish tying in you just lean over the edge and you just let yourself go and this is a rock that people climb daily he’s wearing safety gear that can hold the weight of a vehicle you’ve got a guy who’s out there every day and this is a rock so it probably doesn’t change that often but yet my husband looked at him and said you know what i am not comfortable doing this there has to be a better way he did not want to lean over the edge and just blindly go over even though all those things were true

but i think it’s interesting when i compare and contrast that to product management because i feel like we blindly lean over the edge a lot i talk to many product managers as i’m sure you do roger who build and launch new products or build costly features and they’re not tracking any usage data in some cases so they have no visibility to who’s using their product how they’re using their product if they’re satisfied with their experience and so that blind going over the edge is something that we all need to correct to make sure that our products really resonate

Trend #3: PM Team Health, Meetings & Diversity

Denise Hemke | 00:37:20–00:45:30
so i’ll move us on to the people side as a people leader and as a product management leader you know i can’t just talk about customers i’m also looking at trends across our organization and our role so if you say is that you dressed up as luigi with your daughter on the upper left the answer is yes you are right moustache and all

so many people went through these motions early in the pandemic we did a costume party as part of an all hands and while these fun events are fun and fun is still important we’ve learned a lot i think over the past year about how to pivot a team to a completely virtual world and so much of what i’m going to go through is applicable to any org but some of this is heightened just by the nature of the product manager’s job how high touch our job is

we start on the left hand side it was really all about optimizing what we do every day taking our job and shifting it virtually taking what we did in the office and doing it in that virtual world but these categories on the right hand side i think these were the things that we didn’t fully appreciate when we started the pandemic and they have gotten more and more important over time just as the duration has become longer

this has become our new normal and so focusing on employee health and well-being is really crucial so if you look at something like the listening channels many companies are already doing employee engagement surveys but the frequency was pretty low when i talk to a lot of my peers yeah you know we do it maybe annually and so that cycle has shortened so that you can create this ongoing listening channel because you just can’t bump into somebody and get ad hoc feedback over coffee you’ve lost those opportunities you need that data that leading indicator so that as a leader you can dive in

my pro tip here as a leader is that make sure when you action that feedback that you clearly tie for your organization here’s the feedback that i received on some survey i’ll say at workday we call it our best place to work survey with the action that you’re taking because that builds trust and transparency in your organization so that people will actually lean in and give you more feedback because they know their feedback matters you’re going to do something about it

and the other one i want to talk about is reducing meeting workloads and this is hard i like to say you know we all know we should take our vitamins every day and work out it’s good for us but who did that today did you do that roger

Roger Snyder | 00:45:30–00:46:20
you know i didn’t work out today because i had too many meetings this morning but i did yesterday morning

Denise Hemke | 00:46:20–00:48:40
good for you i did neither of those things today and so my point is really that we often have to be nudged or reminded even for the things that we know are good for us and so i’ll maybe share a quick story

there’s a people analytics team embedded in our hr team not to be confused with the product that i ship people analytics but it’s a team that’s responsible for getting insights across the organization and they used another product i’m responsible for prism analytics to marry zoom data with employee data with employee sentiment data and what they found was that people who said i’m in just the right amount of meetings to the people who said i’m in too many meetings or way too many meetings the difference at all levels in the organization so those of you that are pms to those of you that are leading product management teams the difference was about two to three hours so if we could move the needle in just two to three hours your sentiment increased you’re much happier at work

so my pro tip here is obviously ruthlessly manage your calendar block out time for work i color code and i color code and block my work time so it’s protected it is guarded because if you don’t manage your calendar then like i said this is true for every level in the organization nobody will

and relevant to pm right because i’ll tell you as compared to our peers in engineering we’re in about double the amount of meetings as reported by the data that i have just recently looked at

then i’ll talk about diversity and product management and obviously diversity has been a really big focus this year and also really beyond diversity equality

the boston consulting group did a study of about 1700 companies and they found that high diversity organizations have 19 higher revenue than their peers so again another revenue-based reason as to why we should lean into what we know is good already

in pm you know when you and i talked about this roger that diverse teams bring more perspectives they solve problems in these different ways they bring these different viewpoints and i think that you know it’s through our own diversity that we can really understand our users better

in four months we gave back a decade of job gains on the female side so that just tells you how fragile the progress that we’ve made is so we’ve really got to be intentional about diversity

i’ll just say i feel really lucky to be at workday where my chief diversity officer karen taylor is truly a visionary in this space and she has a patented methodology that goes beyond just diverse representation it’s about inclusion belonging equity so inclusion really being that healthy environment where everybody’s valued and respected and belonging everybody feels safe they feel like they’re part of the community and equity and i think this is a really key one and something that we’re hearing more and more is everybody feels like they have the opportunity to advance and succeed

we want to stop the leaky bucket don’t bring diverse talent in and have them leave and so part of that methodology is really looking at the intersectionality the segments of employees to see what kind of experiences they’re having to see where their experiences differ so it goes beyond just male–female comparisons which is i think what we’ve seen pretty typically but these really specific segments so what is the experience of a black woman versus a white woman versus maybe a white male or an asian male how do they all differ and they shouldn’t differ widely because otherwise we’re not really achieving those goals of belonging inclusion and equity

i bring this up in the context of pm for two reasons right the first one being again going back to we want diverse organizations so that we can solve these broad problems and that we can truly know and understand our users better but i think the second one is really that we interact with so many people across the organization we interact with so many people across different functions and that’s pretty unique in pm and so it’s also about the impact that we have on others each of us can impact other people’s vibe we can impact their experience so having a diverse product management team allows you to work with a more diverse entire company and help keep diverse talent at the company too by making sure that they feel included just in the way that you engage with them

Trend #4: Product-Led Growth

Roger Snyder | 00:48:40–00:55:40
well these have all been great tips thank you so much for sharing them denise and they did build on some ideas but you extended the universe of ideas for us for 2021 so i’m gonna take over now and talk a little bit about innovation and technology trends we’ve got these four trends that we want to talk to you about and the first one is product led growth

now for those of you not familiar with product led growth give me just a moment to talk about where we are starting from the traditional way of looking at the way we acquire new customers is to think about your sales funnel and this is the traditional sales funnel where there’s tons of this universe of people out there who may not even be aware of your product and they need to be brought to that level of awareness then for those that express interest they will then hopefully come and consider your product then they have an actual intent to purchase and they go ahead and purchase and there’s fewer people at the bottom of this funnel it’s called a funnel because there’s going to be fewer and fewer people as they go through it and this is this traditional sales funnel and we kind of tongue-in-cheek talk about you know i finally got to the bottom can i buy your product i use your product and i take advantage of it

and this isn’t going away i want to be clear about that but there are so many more ways now to attract the attention of users in the product itself and this is where we get to what we call now this product led growth flywheel where there’s this idea that the product itself can advocate for expanding usage of the product but also allow users to share the product with others so it’s not only about going deeper and being able to offer more capabilities for your current users it also enables your current users to send out hey i love this product i think you should join me in using it so it allows for advocating and then activating more adoption and then hopefully you get folks who adore your product and then that starts this flywheel moving of now they advocate more

this is a whole new way where the product itself and i want to say in addition to marketing and sales becomes the primary growth driver over time so this is an amazing new view of things we’ve been doing this for a number of years but in the last couple of years there’s been more techniques that have made this capability even more powerful and we even did a webinar on this earlier this year if you want to learn more about product led growth we have an entire webinar on it

the most recent example for me of product led growth was an ad that i saw just the other night on tv where if you go to the website for pizza and a lot of people have been ordering in pizza these days so you go to the pizza hut website and at the top of the website they now have an upsell so this is an example of product led growth where the product itself which you know the website’s part of that experience is now upselling this triple stack this treat box where you get a whole meal according to pizza hut now i’m not going to talk about the healthiness of that and we just talked about the importance of exercise but this is an example of product led growth where the upsell is a part of the experience and i think it’s a combination of multiple things in the whole product experience but i thought this was a brilliant example of the product is helping now with product led growth

again why should we care denise was talking about the fact that with diversity it’s not just the fact that it’s the right thing to do there are profits as well same thing with product led growth there’s a massive difference in the value here of plg-indexed companies in their growth versus the standard sas index and versus the s&p 500 considerably better growth over the course of these months in 2019

product led growth also reduces the cost of acquisition it helps you grow more efficiently it enables buyers even b2b to buy how they prefer so a lot more you know we talk a lot about the consumerization of b2b because every b2b person ultimately is a user and so you can apply these techniques not just to b2c but also to b2b and i want to make that emphasis as well

Trend #5: Seamless Experiences

Roger Snyder | 00:55:40–01:00:00
let’s move on to the next one seamless experiences and i did talk about this one for 2020 but this is just becoming even more important in 2021 and i want to run through a quick example of comparing different kinds of experiences

here i want to talk about a retail purchase so the traditional experience of going through retail and buying something is that you take out your credit card you get a printed receipt and then to actually make sure that everything turned out the way you expected to on the monthly bill you get this reconciliation of having your bill at the end of the month

well now with for example a wearable you can hold your watch now up to these point of sale terminals and make a purchase just that easily no more even reaching into your pocket for your phone we were talking about just a couple years ago about how great it was that i didn’t have to get my wallet out but you still had to get your phone out right but now your watch can and i’ve been doing this this is a picture of my watch i did cross out my number so nobody can steal my identity but this is an example of being able to pay and then both receipt and reconciliation happen immediately on my watch like 10 seconds later i get a notification back from chase that in fact this was the dollar amount that was charged to my account so it happens in two steps instead of three and it’s instantaneous this is what we’re talking about can you think about creating more seamless experiences

the other example i want to talk about is spotify and i did talk about this the last time around but i’ve changed up the examples now that you’ve got music playing on your smartphone you walk from one end of the house to the other and you can actually just immediately have it switch over to your smart speaker the other thing now that i’ve started playing with is you can use your watch to control playback on either a smart speaker or even on your smart tv because i have good speakers on the tv i actually enjoy doing that in a room

the thing that i find most impressive about spotify is it anticipates you so i go out to my car and the next song on the playlist that i was listening to in the house is now playing in the car so there are ways and spotify is a great example of creating the seamless experience where all the various digital touch points in your life work together and that is what i think you want to strive for it’s very important to think about this as you’re offering services

Denise Hemke | 01:00:00–01:01:10
yeah i mean i look at these consumer examples and i say again that’s where i aspire to get to on the b2b side but i think where we are seeing kind of seamless experiences more in the b2b space is really how do we connect kind of different tools or applications together for the end user again going back to that jobs to be done theory how do we look at what somebody is trying to do and kind of weave that for them so they don’t have to think about oh i have to go do this task over here and then i need to write this thing down and then i need to go over here and do something else

so for those of you maybe in my space right in that b2b space you may say well i’ll never get to this point of being able to play or interact maybe on my phone and or my watch in quite the same way but i think it is really just about how do i make it seamless for the user to accomplish that task and i think that that really can go very far again in making somebody truly love your product

Trend #6: Digital Transformation

Roger Snyder | 01:01:10–01:06:40
let’s talk about digital transformation and now digital transformation even though digital’s the first word of this is bringing together some of the concepts we’ve already talked about but it’s not always just about a digital experience so i’m gonna have one example where it is digital and one example where it’s not

digital transformation is where you are bringing digital to your existing service your existing product and so a couple of examples of this the first one is let’s talk about bank loans and i went through this recently so people when i was doing these slides one of my other peers said you know that’s an old example roger people don’t have that anymore i’m like it’s not though earlier this year i refinanced my house and i did have to go through this i had to receive i did get an email form so that was good but then i had to print it out and i actually had to sign it and then i had to scan it and then i had to email it back i was like really it’s 2020 why am i going even through this and yet this is happening all the time

this is an example where digital transformation has come some way at least i didn’t have to go to the loan officer’s office and go through all of that effort although later on we actually did have a notary come to the house because you needed a wet signature and a notarized signature so we still have a ways to go on this

let’s move forward to we’re seeing the ads for now being able to apply for a loan right on your phone and at least the application steps are being streamlined but there’s more to come so if you’re in a service business is there a way for you to at least reduce the number of steps that are physical or manual and automate more of those steps in a digital way that’s the first step can we then get all the way to a completely touchless completely digital experience and again in covid19 it becomes even more important to be able to enable that just for the survival of your business

second example circular saws if any of you are handy like myself and you want to use power tools that’s an example where you’re like wait what okay for all you in the audience who don’t have a digital product already and you have things like circular saws as your products there are ways to bring a digital experience to this dewalt has been doing work where they have added the ability to put tracking tags on tools so you can pick up your phone and find on a big site where did the last guy who touched the circular saw leave it so i can go find it and pick it up

but i’m taking this to the next level you could actually add a little bit of smarts to that saw so it notices when the blade is getting dull and actually sends you a notification so if you’re offering a consumer product or a physical product or an appliance there are ways to bring a digital experience to this and that’s what we’re talking about when we talk about digital transformation

and this is crucial that you be thinking about these things now

Trend #7: Pivot Power

Roger Snyder | 01:06:40–01:15:30
let’s talk about pivot power now we’ve been talking about pivots for years right so pivot is not something new to the landscape but pivot this year has been you know just a crazy necessity

2020 has been a year where pivoting has become not just a nice to have if you will in terms of capabilities in your product management tool belt but a necessity in order to be able to deal with what’s been going on

we polled our audience and many of you have changed features or benefits of your product changed delivery options changed service options or even changed payment and financing options and some of you haven’t yet pivoted your product and i want to talk about this from the perspective of multiple dimensions of being able to pivot even when your product is not a digital product

we teach this whole product concept and for those who are not familiar with it product managers tend to stay focused on the actual product they worry about features and packaging and brand that’s where they spend a lot of their time not enough time however is spent thinking about the benefits of your product which should then inform that actual product and then everything that surrounds your product in terms of how do you comply with standards what about installation do you provide different financing options how about customer care what about even delivery options so all of these things taken together are the whole product and we encourage product managers to be thinking not just about features and benefits at the core but everything

and this has been a year where a lot of these pivots have happened not in the core products i will give an example of that but they have been happening in some of the augmented areas

the first one is delivery so disney did the experiment of offering what was supposed to be an in-theater movie mulan by offering a digital family price

my favorite innovation in covid has been curbside cocktails i’ve got to admit it yeah it has been that one these are innovations that were essential for the businesses to try to be able to continue to serve their customers and also make money

another area of innovation was in services so think about wineries breweries they were suddenly not able to offer that in-person experience of wine tasting so they went to virtual wine tasting and this has been an amazing innovation i think also in terms of being able to save your business by being able to still get out in front of customers and have that experience

i actually participated in my first one of these just earlier this month and it was a charity event as well so there was another connection there where charities have seen a horrible falloff in donations this year but we went to an event that was for human trafficking awareness but it was a virtual wine tasting experience and so it served multiple benefits there so i found that to be a really really great experience

then the last one getting back to features and benefits where most of you did do things there’s a website called kidaddle and kidaddle was a website that was all about booking family and child oriented experiences well suddenly all of those experiences got cancelled and kidaddle could have gone under if they did not pivot what they did is they pivoted to offering more than 1500 resources for parents with kids stuck at home they identified quickly okay we’re not going to make money this way but also our audience is hurting how do we help them so they then put up literally 1500 different resources that are available now and they are now making money off of advertising revenue and they are making money off of commissions for purchases of kits for example like science kits that you can bring home

these are all examples of pivots the first two were not in the core product so as a product manager you’ve got to be thinking about pivoting right now

fine roger but how do i go about doing that well i’ll give you some ideas here for some capability building you need to be doing the things that denise was talking about earlier become more customer-centric but you also need to see about changing the way you make decisions inside your organization can you become more rapid just because you get fast understanding of customers now you’ve got to get the rest of the organization to be able to make decisions more effectively as well and then in terms of product capabilities leveraging agile methodology instrumenting your digital products but i’m also thinking about you non-digital folks

here’s the example of the most non-digital thing i purchased this year it was a pool spa vacuum something to use to just get the leaves out of the bottom of the pool well they sent this card with it and i thought it was brilliantly done and you can see it up here if you’re feeling good about the product here’s some digital ways to engage and share your love if you’re not feeling well well here is how you get a hold of us so that we can help make it better

even for the most physical of products you can create digital touch point opportunities so i just want to emphasize that point for our non-digital product managers out there

Summary & How to Apply These Trends

Roger Snyder | 01:15:30–01:19:30
so let’s kind of wrap up because i wanted to save time for questions here were the eight trends that we talked about today i’m not going to read them back to you hopefully you remember them but denise said it and i said it too as product management leaders we get to the point of we got to train people to think about so what all right how are you going to take this webinar and make it more effective

for product management trends pick one that your team can use and try to start applying it to grow

for the innovation trends can you step back and see about well are there some unmet needs are there some weaknesses in my user journey are there new needs that have come up that we’re not meeting where i could take advantage of one of these technology or innovation trends or is there an opportunity for me to differentiate myself from my competition by taking advantage of one of these trends

i hope that you can apply this lens to all the stuff we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes and put it to use right that’s what we’re always excited about

Q&A & Closing Remarks

Roger Snyder & Denise Hemke | 01:19:30–01:28:30
we opened a poll to measure how effective you thought this was and then we started taking some questions

one of the questions that we had was if you don’t have a customer-centric approach today or you want to learn some new tools to improve customer understanding where should you start

denise suggested starting by opening up those listening channels and making sure you’re using methods like jobs to be done or design sprints and reading up on those toolkits and i suggested that you can also use our blog resources where we talk about market research and voice of the customer

another question was okay i’m just a member of a product management team i’m not yet a leader and that was nearly half of our audience today how do i take advantage of some of these trends if i’m not the leader of the organization i suggested using some of the evidence from this webinar and building a little mini case for “hey boss i would really love for us to try this and look here are some of the benefits it might be able to bring” and denise added that every product manager is a leader you’re leading a team and it really helps to package up what you want to try what the benefits are and how you’re going to measure success

we also had a question about the best approach as a product manager to convince a stone-headed old-time ceo to divert company direction to more digital transformation and we talked about proving the value with competitive examples showing revenue growth and customer satisfaction data and tying that to specific digital capabilities that competitors are offering

another question for denise as a senior product leader was what is your ideal time split between market and customer activities team and people activities strategic planning and other product management activities she shared that she likes to spend about 20 percent of her time talking to customers and prospects about 20 percent on strategic activities like pricing and packaging and a large portion on her team hiring great people giving them context and removing obstacles so they can be successful

well folks thank you so much for coming and joining us today i hope that you enjoy the rest of the year get a break for the holiday season maybe a little bit less zoom a little bit less go to webinar in the next two weeks breathe it in spend some time and it’s important to really get a break right now because i know we’ve all been suffering from zoom fatigue and so forth

denise thank you so much for joining us today really appreciate your insights and i really hope that everybody here is able to take something from either the pm trends or the technology trends that i offered and be able to go make great products that help build products that matter

Denise Hemke | 01:28:30–01:29:10
thanks roger for having me and yes hope everybody got something useful out of this today really appreciate it

Roger Snyder | 01:29:10–01:29:30
definitely all right enjoy your day bye