Product Success in 2020: Six Trends You Must Track

Welcome, Speakers & Housekeeping

Pamela Schure | 00:00:00–00:02:10
Hello everyone, and welcome—and good morning. In California we’re having a rainy day. I don’t know about you, David, in Portland. What’s cooking over there?

David Nash | 00:02:10–00:02:18
It’s winter, it’s gray, and it’s probably raining. We’ll go with that: probably raining.

Pamela Schure | 00:02:18–00:02:55
Okay. My name is Pamela Schure and I’m the Director of Products and Services at Productside, and I’m joined here by David Nash. We’re very excited to present our first webinar of 2020 and to kick off our Product Leadership webinar series. We thought we’d have a look both back and forward at some of the trends.

What I want to talk about is—well, actually in a few minutes David is going to be leading you through all this information about what you should be looking out for, and what you should have looked out for last year, making sure that you can build great products in 2020.

Pamela Schure | 00:02:55–00:03:45
But let’s go over a few housekeeping items. After this webinar, you can continue to stay engaged with the product management community. As product leaders, you have a lot of challenges that you face, so go ahead and get connected with some of our folks.

I’m going to click something and send you a link on how to join our LinkedIn group and make sure that you keep informed of the latest and greatest content that we have. We love interacting with you.

During this webinar, we encourage you to ask questions and get feedback. I’ve got my chat window open, so I’ll be keeping track of everything while David is leading you through most of this. We’ll make sure that at the end we have a great Q&A. All bets are off: you can ask whatever you like. If you stick to the content, that’s helpful for us, but we’re happy to go wherever you need.

Pamela Schure | 00:03:45–00:04:05
All right, so now let’s see if I can get this thing going here. If for some reason I’m not able to control it, can you click on to the next slide, please?

Pamela Schure | 00:04:05–00:04:25
All right—so that’s us. Go ahead and keep going here.

Pamela Schure | 00:04:25–00:04:40
All right, that’s the leadership group. Okay—and right, so there we go, that’s the chat window. Keep going.

About Productside & the Optimal Product Process

Pamela Schure | 00:04:40–00:06:05
All right, so let’s talk a little bit about Productside. Our mission is to empower product managers to do great product management and become product leaders. We do that with our methodology and framework, the Optimal Product Process.

This is the Optimal Product Process, and we developed it in conjunction with a lot of very experienced product managers—and guess what? It seems to work. It was interesting: we were talking with a customer yesterday who said, “Yes, I implemented it and I did it on time, on budget, and got great reviews.” Hey, we should all be so lucky.

Pamela Schure | 00:06:05–00:06:50
And just to kick off your 2020 in fine style here, we’ve actually got a code. This is kind of like when you join the gym at the beginning of the year, isn’t it, David? We’ve got a code for becoming the “new you” as a product manager.

The code NEWYOU2020 will give you a couple hundred bucks off our in-person training. So join us wherever we are. I think, David, you’re going to New York, right? I think I’m going to London this year. So go ahead and join us because we have a lot to talk about.

2020 Product Leadership Webinar Series

Pamela Schure | 00:06:50–00:07:35
Right now we’re really excited to bring you the first of our webinars in the Product Management Leader series. What I didn’t do is actually introduce David properly, so I’m going to do that and then turn it over to him.

I’m going to turn off our webcam so you can focus on what’s going on on the screen. Oh—wait, hold on, I forgot to tell you about David.

Pamela Schure | 00:07:35–00:08:20
So, I’ve been in product management for 25-plus years. David, how long have you been doing this—or is that embarrassing to admit?

David Nash | 00:08:20–00:08:28
Let’s go with “a long time.”

Pamela Schure | 00:08:28–00:09:05
Okay, a long time. He’s worked on the hardware side, he’s worked on the software side, and he comes to us with a wealth of experience on all these trends because he’s lived on the bleeding edge for many years. So let’s turn it over to David and hear what he has to say.

Audience Overview & Why This Topic Matters

David Nash | 00:09:05–00:10:10
All right, thanks, Pam—and good morning and afternoon to everybody here in “sunny” Portland, Oregon. Yeah, kind of not so much.

We’re going to get rolling here. As Pam said, this is the first in a series of webinars we’re doing this year. The series really has two goals: it’s intended to help us grow as product management practitioners and leaders. And if you’re leading a team, hopefully you can build out some new muscle and new skills on your product management or product marketing team.

David Nash | 00:10:10–00:11:05
Here’s a quick look, on the bottom half of the slide, at some of the themes we’ll carry through. The goal, as Pam said a couple of minutes ago, using the Optimal Product Process and other practices, is simply to get better at the things we do every day.

We’ve got some 500-plus people who signed up for the webinar this morning, and almost 50% of them are some combination of Product Owner, Product Manager, or Product Management leader. That’s pretty representative—we see the same kind of makeup in a lot of our classes and the product camps we sponsor around the country. Good, diverse audience. We’re hoping for some good interaction.

Foundational Skills PMs Still Need Today

David Nash | 00:11:05–00:12:10
Let’s start by looking backward just a bit. If you were with us a year ago—almost to the day—we asked you, “What’s going to be important in 2019?”

The first thing we said was: we have to maintain foundational skills. Foundational skills are not trends. They don’t come and go seasonally. These are things like whole product thinking. These are things like doing real product-market fit work. These are things like being agents of change and effectively managing change management.

They’re not fashion items. They were important last year, they’re important this year, and they’ll still be important next year.

Emerging Trends: Subscriptions, AI/ML, Digital Touchpoints

David Nash | 00:12:40–00:14:25
The other things we spoke about last year were around customer journey mapping—really key. We hit this in our Agile Product Management and Product Owner class and spend a lot of time on it. It’s an important technique.

Jobs to Be Done, by the way, is hardly new. Anthony Ulwick literally wrote the book on this topic almost 15 years ago, but it’s going through a renaissance. A lot of practitioners are rediscovering Jobs to Be Done.

Internal advocacy—again, it was important last year; it’s very important moving ahead.

David Nash | 00:14:25–00:16:10
Some hot trends we saw last year are recapped here. A couple of key ones:

• Subscription services continue to explode. If you look at things we didn’t think about a few years ago—like clothing as a service—look at what happened with Stitch Fix and probably 15 other companies. Now you can subscribe to getting a box of clothes once a month. Subscription models—many of them successful, many of them being tested.
• AI and machine learning really taking off. You’ll hear me reference a couple of commercial products—I’m not trying to sell you a Tesla—but if you’re driving a Tesla, you’re seeing ML and AI exploding with real, practical applications.
• Digital touchpoints—we’ll hit those as well.

None of this was hard to predict because we read voraciously, but a lot of the forecasts from a year ago are certainly coming true and will continue to be true in the year ahead.

Trend #1: Product Operations (Product Ops)

David Nash | 00:16:10–00:18:05
Now let’s move forward to the meat and potatoes of today’s program. There are two big buckets:

1. Product management skills and methodologies
2. Technology and innovation trends

On the product side, we’ll hit:

• Product Operations (Product Ops)
• Product Experimentation
• Actionable Customer Insights

And throughout, we’ll keep tying back to those foundational things—whole product, market fit, change management—because they’re evergreen.

David Nash | 00:18:05–00:19:40
If you are in a growth company, you can probably really relate to the next slide. If you’re growing—if your product is successful—the good news is, beyond your product-market challenges, you get to solve a whole new set of problems.

If your team is struggling with anything on this slide, you’re not alone. Companies I’ve worked with, including the one I worked at here in Portland for the last few years, are going through their adolescence. They’re successful, but they’re also getting overwhelmed with internal complexity.

We call it death by 10,000 paper cuts. Your product managers—who are deeply knowledgeable about market, product, and customer needs—are in high demand for sales calls, internal questions, escalations, and “can you just…” requests.

David Nash | 00:19:40–00:21:00
The other thing that happens as your product team grows is that a lot of PMs—who are often confident and articulate spokespeople for the product—start improvising. They each do things “their way.” That may work in the moment, but it’s really hard to scale an organization that way.

Data and KPIs start to spread, multiply, and sometimes get out of control. There’s no shortage of tools, but no clear operating system.

Pamela Schure | 00:21:00–00:21:50
Yeah, David, I just want to add: although you’re talking about growth companies, if your company is struggling or getting flat growth after years of great growth, these things also happen.

For example, finance comes down hard and says, “How come you’re not meeting your KPIs?” But the KPIs for your department are different from the KPIs in another department. So it becomes really tough. These are not just scaling-up issues, although scaling absolutely makes it harder.

David Nash | 00:21:50–00:22:45
Great point, Pam, thank you.

Out of this craziness came the notion of Product Operations, or Product Ops. These are still early days. If you Google “Product Ops” or read this space—and a lot of you do—you’ll see there are many interpretations of what it means.

One working definition I’ve used over the last three years, at a company here in Portland, is: operationalizing the things product managers have to do consistently, every day. It’s about systematizing the work around product, not just the work inside individual products.

David Nash | 00:22:45–00:24:10
Product Ops is:

• Using best practices for tools
• Becoming truly data-driven and metrics-driven
• Building the infrastructure and reporting that is scalable, repeatable, and predictable

So the rest of the company—and not just your customers—know what to expect from product management.

Pam, did you want to jump in?

Pamela Schure | 00:24:10–00:25:05
I did. So when you have a Product Operations organization, do they all report into one person? Or are they still part of their original org and you’re pulling them in to work with you? Which is it?

David Nash | 00:25:05–00:26:10
Good question—and like so many things in product, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.

Generally, if you’re experiencing the problems we just spoke about, it’s wise to put together a Product Ops team. It can be small. You may draw people from across the company—which is actually great, because they bring experience and relationships you can leverage.

But usually it’s a team function, and in most cases it reports into product management leadership in some way. Mileage may vary, but that’s a common pattern.

Pamela Schure | 00:26:10–00:26:40
And the advantage is you can deliver this holistically, as opposed to cross-matrix stuff where responsibilities are divided, unclear, and things fall through the cracks. Product Ops lets you get the right team together to actually make it happen.

David Nash | 00:26:40–00:28:10
Exactly. If you look at what Product Ops is doing, it’s all the things around the perimeter of product:

• Release management, so all your products—not just one—ship through the same rigorous practices and cadence
• Publications and documentation
• UX or research sometimes rolling into Product Ops
• Executive dashboards: not just how products in the field are performing, but how pre-release products are progressing, how risks are being managed
• Customer-facing programs: beta programs, early-access programs, in-product research

If you do this well, you get terrific outcomes:

• Much more evidence-based decision-making
• Increased transparency—fewer “how’s it going?” interruptions
• A much more oiled machine

That’s Product Ops in a nutshell. If you’re at that point in your company’s lifecycle, I really recommend tuning in and investing in this space over the next year or so.

Trend #2: Product Experimentation & Pretotyping

David Nash | 00:27:30–00:29:40
The next trend in product management is the ever-necessary, absolutely essential role of product experimentation.

This is not a new concept. In fact, for those of a certain vintage—well before the iPhone—there was the Palm Pilot. If you know what this is, you’re probably smiling to yourself.

Back in 1996, a good ten years before the first iPhone, Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, actually made a block of wood in his garage—that thing depicted on the right. He walked around with this in his shirt pocket.

He was trying to figure out, long before he built the product:

• Would people use a device that could fit in a pocket?
• What would they do with it?
• Would they use it once, or over and over again?

This was essential to get those questions answered before building any real prototype.

David Nash | 00:29:40–00:31:00
If you compare pretotyping—and that’s not a typo—to prototyping:

• Prototyping asks: Can I build it cost-effectively? How can I optimize it?
• Pretotyping asks: Should I build it at all?

Pretotyping is much more effective early on, when you’re still trying to validate product-market fit.

Pamela Schure | 00:31:00–00:32:10
The kind of research David is talking about with the Palm pretotype is exactly that. Instead of building everything and showing it fully fleshed out, you build a piece and say, “What do you think about this?”

You can build little pieces and keep getting input and avoid big mistakes. It feels strange for people who want everything defined upfront, but it’s a great way to funnel your way into a really good solution for customers.

David Nash | 00:32:10–00:34:10
Exactly right, Pam. And even if you’re not doing software or consumer devices, if your products are:

• Commercial equipment
• Industrial equipment
• Lab gear
• Or other tangible, physical goods

Historically, experimentation in those domains meant substantial expense and tooling. Now, 3D printing has totally disrupted that space.

You can build non-working dummy prototypes very quickly, throw them away, and iterate at low cost.

So while experimentation isn’t new, 3D printing makes it just as effective for non-software, tangible products as it is for software.

David Nash | 00:34:10–00:35:10
On the software side, tools like Balsamiq let product managers put together very rough UI mockups—not finished design, not a finished product—but enough to show customers:

• “Is this solving the right problem?”
• “Is this actually helpful?”
• “Does this match how you think about your workflow?”

You can test assumptions before engineering invests.

Pamela Schure | 00:35:10–00:36:05
And let’s talk about user testing. You mentioned the Palm example—Jeff Hawkins carried that block of wood for four weeks. Who does anything for four weeks anymore? We want feedback tomorrow.

With services like online user testing, you send a prototype, have people try to use it, and you get feedback in a day or two. That’s powerful.

David Nash | 00:36:05–00:37:10
Yes, very key. We’re not endorsing any particular vendor, but services like usertesting.com let you recruit cohorts that map to your target personas—people who are not already customers.

It’s often hard for PMs to reach those people at scale. These services solve that.

If you’re not doing this kind of experimentation, you’re missing a huge opportunity to:

• Validate assumptions early, when change is cheap
• Avoid building the wrong thing later, when change is expensive

David Nash | 00:37:10–00:38:05
And, as you and I were discussing yesterday, Pam, there’s a great little video by Alberto Savoia on pretotyping. So, worth exploring the roots of these techniques too. This is not just a fad; it’s a discipline.

Pamela Schure | 00:38:05–00:38:35
Absolutely. It’s really worth investigating some of these core sources and techniques. If you’re not experimenting, you’re not really learning what problems you’re solving.

Trend #3: Actionable Customer Insights

David Nash | 00:38:35–00:40:05
The next area is actionable customer insight. Let me start with a slightly provocative thought.

A lot of us—especially those with strong marketing teams—are used to sophisticated pipelines and funnels for:

• Turning leads into prospects
• Prospects into customers
• Customers into repeat customers

But once we turn over the keys in a B2B product—once implementation walks away and says, “The customer is live”—we often have no clue what those users are actually doing in the product.

We don’t find out until the termination notice shows up at renewal time. That’s like flying blind.

David Nash | 00:40:05–00:41:20
There are five dimensions of user engagement that modern tools can help you see. If you use products like Pendo—and there are several others—it typically involves adding a small snippet of code (often JavaScript) into your product.

Pam, you were going to jump in on that?

Pamela Schure | 00:41:20–00:41:50
Yes. Just to clarify: Pendo is something you actually build into your software. It then gives you analytics on how people are using your software. Is that right?

David Nash | 00:41:50–00:42:40
That’s exactly right. And when I say “Pendo,” I’m using it a bit generically—there are several vendors now that provide similar value.

But conceptually, yes: you integrate the product, and then you can see these five dimensions of in-product engagement.

Five Dimensions of User Engagement

David Nash | 00:42:40–00:44:15
Let’s define those five dimensions quickly:

1. Breadth
2. Depth
3. Frequency
4. Efficiency
5. Satisfaction

Breadth is:
How many active users do we have?

Especially in B2B or enterprise products, you may sell a product that could be used by hundreds or thousands of people—but only a fraction are actually active. Breadth tells you:

• How many people could be using it
• How many are using it
• How that looks per customer and across your customer base

Breadth helps you understand what success really looks like at a deployment level.

David Nash | 00:44:15–00:45:40
The whole point is not just helping customers with internal adoption. It’s also about identifying your most successful customers and learning from them.

Your Customer Success team can then help other customers behave more like your best customers.

That’s breadth.

Depth is the second dimension. Depth is a problem that plagues a lot of software:

• Products are often needlessly complex
• There are too many features
• Many features aren’t used at all

The old 80/20 rule applies: 20% of features may deliver 80% of the value. Depth helps you see:

• How much of your product is actually used
• Which features truly matter

Then you can gamify onboarding and drive deeper engagement in the features that matter.

Pamela Schure | 00:45:40–00:46:40
I just want to highlight that. We talk to a lot of product managers, and I’ve heard more than once, “We’re going to start pulling features.”

I think that’s a question we should all be asking: how many of you have reduced feature sets, versus adding features all the time? Most of us are on the “add more” path by default.

Less can absolutely be more.

David Nash | 00:46:40–00:48:05
Exactly. What we’ve learned, especially through UX testing and in-product analytics, is that we often need one good way to do something rather than three slightly different options.

That’s a great segue into Efficiency.

But first, the third dimension: Frequency.

Frequency is pretty self-explanatory:

• How often are users logging in?
• Which users log in most frequently?
• What are they doing when they log in?

You can study the paths successful users take, and then simplify those paths for everyone else.

In B2B/enterprise software, there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same task. That makes it harder on customers. Paths analysis helps you simplify.

David Nash | 00:48:05–00:49:35
Now Efficiency:

Efficiency is: How much effort is required to get value from your product?

It has obvious UX implications—make it simple, make features discoverable—but it goes beyond that:

• How do we put information in the product, at the moment of need?
• How do we help users before they get stuck and call Support?

When we talk about outcomes, you’ll see this has very high ROI. Every support call you prevent is hard cost saved.

So:

• Make features easy to find
• Reduce friction in workflows
• Preempt “How do I…?” tickets

Pamela Schure | 00:49:35–00:50:20
Companies like Intuit—on the tax side—are really good at this. They figure out where people pause in the flow, and in the next release they add something like, “To move forward, you need to…”

They’re constantly smoothing tiny bottlenecks, not just big ones.

David Nash | 00:50:20–00:51:25
Exactly. Efficiency improvements drive depth: as people use more of your product and get more value, the product becomes stickier and harder to leave.

The fifth dimension is Satisfaction.

This is often measured by things like NPS, but the crucial idea is to measure in product—in the moment—rather than with a random email two months later.

If you do this judiciously, without interrupting the experience, there is no better time to “take your customer’s temperature” than while they’re using the product.

In-product NPS and micro-surveys can be incredibly powerful.

Pamela Schure | 00:51:25–00:51:55
I now have this image of you putting thermometers into a bunch of customers’ mouths.

David Nash | 00:51:55–00:53:40
I like it.

We’ve found that using these five dimensions of actionable insight can basically print money, in two ways.

Above the waterline, you can recover lost revenue:

• Customers call saying, “We’re not using your product; we want to buy fewer licenses.” It’s like gym memberships—“We never go.”
• With in-product analytics, we can show: actually, they are using the product—often more than they thought, especially when buyers are different from users.
• We’ve turned “churn calls” into upsell opportunities when the data shows high usage.

We’ve also found unbilled valuable features:

• Customers using analytics or modules that were never properly priced or packaged
• If they’re getting value, it’s worth formalizing and charging appropriately

So there’s a lot of previously undiscovered money sitting on the table.

David Nash | 00:53:40–00:55:15
Below the waterline, you get experience improvements:

• Instead of burying release notes and docs on a help portal, you surface them inside the product in context.
• You can gamify onboarding and usage, especially in B2B, borrowing from the consumer world.
• You drive user advancement—not just “not being stuck,” but levelling up their use of your product.

Pamela Schure | 00:55:15–00:56:10
Sometimes we feel like, “We’re a serious enterprise software company; we can’t gamify things.” But you can make things more enjoyable.

I’ve seen software with two versions of a task helper: the “official” one and a cute “bunny” one that did the same thing. Everyone chose the bunny. No one chose the guy in the suit.

So think about making your product a bit more fun and approachable—and yes, that includes removing some overly technical language and using the words your customers actually use.

David Nash | 00:56:10–00:57:05
Absolutely.

Poll #1: Which Product Management Trend Matters Most?

David Nash | 00:57:05–00:57:40
We’re going to take a moment now. Pam is opening up a poll.

Of the three product management trends we just went through:

• Product Operations (Product Ops)
• Product Experimentation
• Actionable Customer Insights

Which do you think is most relevant for your team right now?

We’ll leave this open for about a minute.

Pamela Schure | 00:57:40–00:59:10
So what do you think, David—are we going to game the system and tell people what we think?

As the numbers roll in, I can see Actionable Customer Insights is winning, but Product Ops is coming up as a strong second. Product Experimentation is also getting some love.

Okay, I’m going to give it about 10 more seconds. Still moving… still moving…

All right, I’m going to stop here and close this down.

Pamela Schure | 00:59:10–01:00:00
So what we’re seeing is:

• Actionable Customer Insights: 56%
• Product Operations: 31%
• Product Experimentation: 13%

So trying to figure out what your customers and users are doing is clearly top of mind. That thermometer metaphor definitely resonates.

David Nash | 01:00:00–01:00:20
Great. Thanks, Pam, and thanks everybody for weighing in.

Tech Trends Overview: Five Big Themes

David Nash | 01:00:20–01:02:00
Now we’re going to shift gears—from product management practices to innovation and technology trends.

We could easily spend days on this, so in the interest of time, we’re going to cherry-pick a few that we think are essential for product teams to focus on.

We said “three,” but there are so many we’ll throw in two at no extra charge. The five are:

1. Being where your customers are (digital touchpoints)
2. Digital transformation for non-digital products
3. Smart spaces
4. Privacy and digital rights
5. Autonomy

Let’s walk through them.

Being Where Your Customers Are: Digital Touchpoints

David Nash | 01:02:00–01:04:40
First: being where your customers are—even when they’re not directly using your main product.

Digital touchpoints are exploding. You can think of them in three general tiers:

1. Providing access to something when you’re not physically there
2. Providing control and insight remotely
3. Creating a seamless, end-to-end experience across devices and contexts

Examples:

• Any app on your phone that lets you reach into your home security system
• Controlling or monitoring your car from your watch or phone
• Getting proactive notifications from dumb-things-turned-smart

David Nash | 01:04:40–01:06:30
One of my favorite examples is a local “laundry place” near me. I won’t call it a laundromat because it’s so much more than that.

You can start your wash, then walk down the street for a coffee. When there are about five minutes left in your wash or rinse cycle, you get a text message.

This solves two problems:

• For the user: you don’t forget that your laundry is in the machine. You keep living your life, then come back right on time.
• For the business: machines don’t sit idle, full of someone’s clothes, preventing others from using them.

Everyone wins.

Another example: if you’re charging an EV, getting a notification when your car is done charging so you can free up the charger for the next person.

Pamela Schure | 01:06:30–01:07:20
It feels like the whole IoT wave—which originally felt like “let’s sell more chips”—is finally turning into real, day-to-day value.

We’re linking previously “stupid” devices like washing machines into real customer workflows.

Example: Spotify & Seamless Experience

David Nash | 01:07:20–01:08:45
Another great example is Spotify.

I’m a happy Spotify user. One of the things I love most in this context is that my music travels with me:

• I’m in the car listening to something
• I walk into the house
• I pick up right where I left off on another device

No disruption, no “What was that playlist again?” They’ve nailed the cross-device, continuous experience.

This is “being where your customers are”—and staying with them across contexts.

Digital Transformation for Physical Products

David Nash | 01:08:45–01:11:05
The next theme is digital transformation—especially for physical, non-digital products.

This might be the largest market opportunity for many of you. You’ve got:

• Mature, successful physical products
• A customer base that already trusts you
• New possibilities enabled by connectivity and data

Two questions to ask:

1. How can digital technologies help you reimagine your existing product?
2. Where can you fix issues, improve performance, and delight customers with digital enhancements?

David Nash | 01:11:05–01:12:40
A great example is companies like DeWalt, who make power tools and circular saws.

Historically, on a construction site:

• People use the saw until it slows down or fails
• Tools get left anywhere
• Finding “your” tool in a large project is painful

DeWalt and others now make tools with tags or embedded connectivity so you can:

• Locate tools quickly
• Understand usage patterns
• Eventually get pre-emptive maintenance notifications (“Time to replace this blade”)
• Drive consumables revenue (blades, bits, etc.) in a more proactive way

This is not about making the saw “cool.” It’s about:

• Reducing downtime
• Improving safety
• Monetizing ongoing value

Pamela Schure | 01:12:40–01:13:20
And if you’re going to sell these ideas into a traditional company—maybe a very “old school” manufacturer—this is exactly the language you want:

• Less unplanned downtime
• Better asset tracking
• Predictable consumables revenue

That’s what makes “digital transformation” real for them.

Smart Spaces & Connected Environments

David Nash | 01:13:20–01:15:40
The next notion is smart spaces.

Years ago, most of what we did was at a desktop PC. Then we went mobile; now everything is in our pockets. My own home has something like 80 IP endpoints—and I don’t even think of myself as a huge gadget person; that’s just where the world is.

Smart spaces are where all these endpoints and devices converge into a coherent environment.

Examples:

• If you’ve bought into the Nest ecosystem: the thermostat knows when you’re home or away and adjusts automatically.
• Nest cams and other devices talk to each other; when you walk in the door, the system “knows” you’re home and changes modes.

You get value—even when you’re not there.

Pamela Schure | 01:15:40–01:16:35
And if you take that beyond a home, to a building or campus, the savings can be huge. But the audiences may have less experience with this kind of tech, so UX becomes incredibly important. These systems have to feel straightforward.

David Nash | 01:16:35–01:19:00
Other examples:

• Pampers Lumi: Pampers worked with engineers and pediatricians to create a baby monitoring system combining a camera and a diaper-attached sensor. Parents can understand how their baby is sleeping and compare it to expected patterns at each developmental stage.
• At the Portland Airport, we have a parking garage with red/green lights above spaces. Without circling endlessly, you can see a green light a few cars away and know there’s an open spot. Bosch’s connected parking takes this further by helping the car itself navigate to an open spot.
• GE Kitchen Hub: Instead of random tablets stuck on fridges, this is a more integrated experience in the kitchen—video calling, entertainment, and a downward-looking camera over the stove so you can see what you’re cooking or capture it for sharing. Hands-free interactions in a space where your hands are often covered in food preparation.

For those of us in tech, we’ve had gadgets in the kitchen for years. But this is different: these devices are aware of what you’re doing, what decisions you’re making, and what you might need next.

David Nash | 01:19:00–01:20:05
As product managers and leaders, questions to ask:

• How can my product become more environment-aware and deliver more value based on context?
• How does my product get better when it moves into a smart space?
• What needs to happen at the edge vs. in the cloud to keep the experience performant and cost-effective?

Privacy, CCPA & GDPR

David Nash | 01:20:05–01:22:15
Next: privacy and digital rights.

This is not new as a topic, but the stakes are escalating as technology permeates every aspect of our lives.

Trust is more essential than ever. New laws—like CCPA, the California Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect just a couple of weeks before this webinar—are critical.

In many ways, CCPA is a US counterpart to Europe’s GDPR. And as California goes, so often goes the rest of the US.

Pamela Schure | 01:22:15–01:23:00
And I’ll tell you right now: if you aren’t following the California regulations, they will come after you. Even if you’re not in California, it’s easier to build this in now than to scramble and “retrofit compliance” later.

David Nash | 01:23:00–01:24:55
Exactly. A concrete example:

At a large B2B enterprise software company I worked with, we had architected our product over years to save everything. We wanted full audit trails:

• “What did Pamela do five years ago?”
• “What did David do?”

So the default design was: save and archive everything, forever.

That mindset is antithetical to new regimes like GDPR and CCPA. In some regions, the new default is:

• Don’t save personal data unless necessary
• Make it easy for customers to be forgotten
• Make it easy to export and delete personal data

We had to re-architect so that:

• In the US, we could still support strong archiving and compliance expectations
• In Europe, we defaulted to “right to be forgotten” and easy personal data removal

Huge implications for how you design your product and your data model.

Autonomy, EVs & Drones

David Nash | 01:24:55–01:27:00
The final tech trend we’ll touch on is autonomy.

It’s an outgrowth of AI and machine learning, and it’s accelerating faster than many of us expected.

Again, not trying to sell anyone a car, but Tesla is a very visible example. If you’re driving a Model 3 today, you’ve probably been using Enhanced Autopilot, especially on freeways. Full self-driving (under human supervision) is rolling out.

It doesn’t take control away from you—it:

• Helps you see things you might miss
• Reduces cognitive load
• Can make driving safer overall

If this is the worst it ever is, it’s already pretty amazing. Imagine where it will be in ten years.

Pamela Schure | 01:27:00–01:27:50
I don’t think it’ll just be Tesla. Many companies are moving:

• To electric
• To autonomy

Everybody knows it’s coming. The question is: who defines the standard when we get there?

David Nash | 01:27:50–01:29:30
Exactly. And beyond vehicles:

• In EVs, powertrain and battery technology are competitive advantages, but many analysts believe Tesla’s real edge is a 3-year lead in autonomy and ML data.
• In robotics and delivery, Amazon is investing heavily in last-mile solutions. Drones, sidewalk robots, autonomous vans—these aren’t sci-fi anymore.

Yes, there will be safety incidents, regulatory challenges, and scaling issues. But as product leaders, we need to be thinking now:

• What happens when autonomy becomes an assumption in our market?
• Where are the risks?
• Where are the opportunities?

Poll #2: Which Technology Trend Matters Most?

David Nash | 01:29:30–01:30:00
Those were several big technology trends. Let’s stop again for a poll.

Which of these is most on your radar?

• Being where your customers are
• Digital transformation of non-digital products
• Smart spaces
• Privacy and digital rights
• Autonomy

Pamela Schure | 01:30:00–01:31:10
The nice thing about this poll is you can pick multiple areas, because honestly you may care about more than one.

We’ve got a lot of responses coming in:

• Strong numbers for Being Where Your Customers Are
• Strong numbers for Digital Transformation
• Smart spaces, privacy, and autonomy are all getting attention too

I’ll give it another five seconds… looks like things are stabilizing.

Pamela Schure | 01:31:10–01:32:00
Okay, closing the poll. Here’s what we see:

• Being Where Your Customers Are: 55%
• Digital Transformation: 56%
• Smart Spaces: 18%
• Consumer Privacy & Digital Rights: 27%
• Autonomy: 16%

So again, strong focus on digital transformation and being where your customers are. That’s a powerful combination.

David Nash | 01:32:00–01:32:20
I agree. Thanks for the readout, Pam, and thanks everyone for the input.

Wrap-Up: What Should Be on Your Roadmap?

David Nash | 01:32:20–01:34:20
We’ve covered a lot. Let me tee up a couple of “so what?” questions.

On the product management side, we talked about:

• The emergence and explosion of Product Operations
• A new wave of Product Experimentation techniques
• Actionable Customer Insights and in-product analytics

On the technology side, we talked about:

• Being where your customers are
• Digital transformation of physical products
• Smart spaces
• Privacy and rights
• Autonomy

Questions for you:

• What are the biggest needs for your team and products out of this set?
• Which capabilities should be on your research roadmap this year?
• How could one or more of these trends help your company differentiate and delight customers, while creating new growth engines?

Poll #3: Webinar Feedback

David Nash | 01:34:20–01:34:45
Before we move into Q&A, Pam is going to open one last poll: overall, how helpful was this webinar?

Pamela Schure | 01:34:45–01:36:00
The poll should be up now. Generally, we’re seeing high marks in “helpful” and “somewhat helpful,” which is great.

While you finish voting, please also start posting your questions in the chat. We’ll leave time for Q&A.

Okay, I’ll close the poll now so we can maximize question time. Thank you—that really helps us inform what we do in future sessions.

Q&A: Tools for Experimentation & Prototyping

Pamela Schure | 01:36:00–01:36:35
David, you want to hop back on webcam? I’ll do the same and we’ll “duo” this.

All right, let’s check the questions. We’ve got a couple already.

Pamela Schure | 01:36:35–01:37:15
First question: “You mentioned a few tools—what are your favorites? Any others we didn’t talk about?” This is about prototyping and experimentation tools.

David Nash | 01:37:15–01:39:15
Great question. Some of the ones we mentioned—and that I’ve used a lot—include:

• UserTesting-type services: If you’re doing enterprise, consumer, or mobile apps and want quick, low-cost cohorts aligned with your personas, these services are fantastic. Recruiting those participants yourself is often time-consuming and expensive.
• Balsamiq: We don’t expect every PM to become a UX designer, but Balsamiq is powerful because it’s obviously not a finished UI.

1. That lowers expectations.
2. Customers feel comfortable giving “big picture” feedback.
3. It’s fast: you can assemble a working mockup in minutes.

Once you validate concepts in Balsamiq, you hand off to UX for polished design with a lot more confidence.

Q&A: Implementing In-Product Analytics

Pamela Schure | 01:39:15–01:39:55
Next question: “How long does it take to start implementing these in-product analytics tools? What overhead do they put on development?”

David Nash | 01:39:55–01:42:05
Another good one. I’ll use Pendo as an example, but it’s similar for others.

• Development effort: Often as simple as dropping in a JavaScript snippet. That can be 10 minutes of developer time.
• Architecture considerations:

If you’re using single-page apps or a lot of iframes with third-party content, the tooling may need extra configuration to know what’s being clicked where.

If your app is fairly modern and not iframe-heavy, it’s straightforward.

• Infrastructure: You may need to open firewall rules so your product can talk to the analytics service.

Then there’s product management effort:

• When you first turn it on, you’ll be overwhelmed with possible data.
• The key is to pick one to three questions you care about most and focus on those.
• That calibration—figuring out what matters for your context—can take a quarter or so.

David Nash | 01:42:05–01:43:00
You’ll probably want to designate someone—maybe one PM or an analyst—as the champion for that analytics tool, so they can:

• Learn it deeply
• Curate dashboards
• Help the rest of the team make sense of what they’re seeing

It’s not hard technically, and the benefits show up quickly if you stay focused.

Pamela Schure | 01:43:00–01:43:40
And once you do that, your execs start asking, “So… what’s on the dashboard this week?” That’s when you know you’ve won.

Q&A: Favorite Devices & Personal 2020 Goals

Pamela Schure | 01:43:40–01:44:20
One last question for fun before we wrap:

“We know you’re excited about Tesla’s self-driving. Is there anything else you’re planning to buy next year that you’re excited about?”

David Nash | 01:44:20–01:45:35
Honestly, Christmas is behind us and we’re trying not to buy too many gadgets this early in the year.

I’ve got around 80 IoT devices on my home network, and every one of them is a potential InfoSec exposure. So I’m good for now—but I’m getting tremendous value out of the devices I already have.

Pamela Schure | 01:45:35–01:46:20
For me, I’m living in a 1970s house with two-prong outlets outside the kitchen. Eventually, I’d like to move somewhere I can install Nest and actually be more comfortable at home. That’s my 2020 goal.

David Nash | 01:46:20–01:46:45
I bought into that ecosystem about a decade ago, when it was new, and I’ve never looked back.

Next Webinar & Closing

Pamela Schure | 01:46:45–01:48:40
All right, let’s talk about what’s next.

I want to invite you to the next webinar in the series:
“Diagnosing Product Management: How Do You Get to Peak Performance?”

Roger Snyder will be talking about this. He’s worked with many companies through Productside and before, and he knows what it takes to help teams really hit their maximum potential. It’s not just about working long hours; it’s about working on the right things.

Go ahead and register now—I’ve put the link in the chat.

While you’re there, you’ll also see our webinar library. These are the sessions we do directly with customers, not the AIPMM ones. You can go back and watch previous webinars as part of your ongoing learning.

Pamela Schure | 01:48:40–01:49:30
I’m going to give you about three minutes back on your hour so you can get to your next meeting or whatever else is on your long to-do list.

Hopefully we’ve given you a fresh way of thinking about 2020 and beyond.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us. Here’s to a successful year for everybody. Go get it!

Now I’ve just got to figure out how to end the webinar… here we go.

David Nash | 01:49:30–01:49:45
Thanks, everyone. Take care.