Year One Labs

Last weekend, I presented to the folks at Productcamp Montreal. I’m a product manager by trade, and the world of product management has changed dramatically in the last ten years. Coradiant began as a consulting firm, then became an MSP, then a hosted monitoring tool (called OutSight), and finally the successful web performance management vendor it is today. The process of finding product and market fit took a decade—today, iteration happens much faster.

Two major shifts have caused this acceleration.

First, there’s cloud computing. IT as a utility removes many startup obstacles: there’s no up-front investment, and parallel experiments are cheap and easy. As advisor Jeremy Edberg says, “Most investors I talk to say they won’t even consider a startup that isn’t using cloud instances to run their site.”

But clouds alone aren’t enough. The second shift is analytics. Today, nearly everything can be analyzed: purchases, invitations, design preferences, content creation, location, and more. Where clouds make experimentation possible, analytics give us accurate analysis of the results.

This slide deck looks at these two shifts, and how they change the job of product management. Skip the introductory stuff and go straight to slide 22.

As the conclusion points out:

• Getting features right matters less; knowing what’s not working, fast and getting out of the office matters more.
• “We should” matters less; “what if?” matters more.
• Your roadmap matters less; parallel experiments matter more.
• Justification beforehand & business cases matter less; realtime cost/benefit of features in production matters more.
• User groups and surveys matter less; real-world adoption & usage analysis matters more.

This is a bit controversial, since it contradicts many of the tenets of traditional product management; but there’s no doubt that a new breed of lean product managers can shake things up a bit.