2024 trends: product strategy
Every year, I spend November, December, and a bit of January analyzing where product managers need to be headed (and sometimes where not to). This year, my trends are simplified to: GenAI, economic cooling, adapting sustainability, and the changing workplace. I have a bonus section on design innovation.
AI and specifically generative AI
GenAI is capable of many things and also some hallucinations. And it’s here to stay as it augments the capabilities of product managers. I’ll leave the avalanche of general AI trends to others. Let’s focus on use cases for product managers.
Takeaway 1: Gen AI tools that matter to product managers
- WriterAI — content creation
- Fathom — meeting note taker
- Glean — internal data search
- Grammarly — writing
- Notion — multiple uses
- Microsoft Copilot
- Figma — design and video generation
- Amplitude — customer insights
- Enterprise ChatGPT*
Use cases: I’m anticipating these use cases for product managers: market research, persona development, competitive analysis, feature prioritization, ideation, critiques, enablement content creation, and more.
Takeaway 2: AI as part of product experiences
Product managers also need to plan for:
- Developing products that are powered by AI. A word of caution: do not just sprinkle AI onto a product or feature. Instead, it’s always about understanding your customers’ needs and then determining how AI could improve their outcomes.
- Governing ethical and regulatory use of AI in their products. Here’s where product managers must be ready with transparency: explainability of the AI, source of its foundation models, unbiased data, governance models, and quality expectations (accuracy and hallucination issues).
- Structuring a user journey that is augmented by AI. Customer Support, Sales, and Marketing will now include AI touch points. For example, your Marketing page could include a SalesBot to answer a buyer’s question, prepare a quote, and then close that sale with a credit card. But what if that same buyer wants a complex contract that requires a human seller to work through details with the corporate attorney? In that situation, your lucrative customer could get stuck in bot loop with no one to speak to. And so, your user journey must ensure that users don’t get skipped or dropped along the way.
Geo-political instability paired with end of “free money” environment
“Free money” is a reference to the historically low interest rates that allowed borrowers to invest in areas with returns higher than the artificially low rates. In other words, there will be less investment than in prior years now that interest rates have soared. So that equates to 1) smaller budgets to buy enterprise products and 2) smaller budgets to develop products. Geo-political instability also has put many companies into a risk-averse mode, which is on top of the reduction in available capital.
Takeaway: Belt-tightening in product management
As product managers, we’re often fired up with new product ideas and our roadmap. Unfortunately, the Finance side of the house will carefully control how to spend company dollars. Product managers will do well by embracing cost-saving measures, easy paths to profitability, and cheaper routes to market. We should even retire products that don’t have a clear growth trajectory. I recently mentioned to a colleague that it’s a real art to successfully retiring a product. Don’t overlook that tool in your toolbelt when evaluating your portfolio.
Sustainability and adaptability
Climate change and its associated threats have launched a substantial market. According to Statista, “In 2022, the size of this market amounted to roughly 13.76 billion U.S. dollars. By 2030, it is expected to peak at almost 62 billion U.S. dollars, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 20.8% from 2023 to 2030.” Most folks consider sustainability about being a threat, but I like to think of it as an opportunity to grow your market.
Takeaway: Products that adapt to a changing environment
Adaptability means that product managers can quickly include simple steps to developing sustainable products. First off, conscious consumers are hungry to pay for products that truly reduce impact to the environment or support diversity measures. For example, you might reduce your product’s footprint, trace the providers in the supply chain, or improve the environment (such as carbon capture). Secondly, your product roadmap can deliver incremental sustainability instead of a big bang release. Large enterprises often adopt features in a staggered systemic manner. But don’t forget to include measurements that your customers can turn around and report to their internal and external stakeholders. Finally, government agencies and other regulatory organizations are issuing a slew of policies and requirements. Being aware of your industry’s challenges lets you deliver regulatory solutions before the competition.
Workplace friction
Remote workers, hybrid workplaces, and shorter work weeks. Hard to say exactly what the end of 2024 will look like. But, it won’t look like 2023 nor 2019.
Takeway: Shifting ways of working
Anyone that creates tools for work management and workplaces will need to think flexibly to address a shifting marketplace. One thing that won’t change is a focus on productivity and velocity, via automation, GenAI, or traditional tools.
The bean counters will be closely examining productivity numbers, so product managers should be surfacing ROI, cost estimation, audit reports, and velocity (for example, TTV, MTTR, or SLA) features into their products.
Design as bastion for fresh perspectives
Designers continue to be an amazing font of ideas, knowledge, and innovation. But you have to tap into that.
Takeaway: Nurturing great product design
“Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others.” -Pantone site on its color of the year. So as we product managers engage our Design teams, we must remember that they, like Pantone’s Peach Fuzz, can be just the kind of nurture our products need.
Sure, they will be augmenting their work with AI tools, such as in Canva or Figma. But what you really should ask from them is conceptual design and vision thinking. Designers are also great at systems thinking, so that your user journeys go from disjoint to cohesive. Another aspect of design’s nurture ability is to be the ethical barometer for your product. For example, they can identify a dark pattern’s impact on customer satisfaction or personalization failures due to AI biases. Finally, don’t be surprised when you hear designers speaking business language and metrics — and then apply those financial KPIs to UX outcomes.
Resources:
*Thanks to Nidhi Wadmark for her Gen AI tool list
Fortune’s CEO Daily, The Broadsheet, and Race Ahead newsletters
https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year/2024?ref=planner5d.com
