Is the Product Development stack broken in the Post Covid world?

kush
14 replies
Until just a couple of years ago, most of the companies were marketing driven, or sales driven. Now everytime a recession (or a slowdown) hits, enterprise becomes scrappy. Sometimes, that can cause a systemic shift that stays. Like self serve restaurants (from Great Depression if 1930s). In the hyper-connected digital world of today, the thing that will get affected the most is how Software gets built. Old Way: Most teams relay on bug tracking, or task management. Specs are hardly ever written down, experimentation and A/B testing are seldom followed. While marketing and sales teams have a gazillion products to choose from to optimise their workflow. New Way: Most product teams will bother about business impact of the features they build. Even the smaller ones. Most teams will need to get organised better to ship great products. Collecting customer feedback, prioritising features, writing down the specs and measuring metrics will become as common as numbers are to Sales teams. What do you guys think? --- The Plug : I share my views to promote LightCat.io, Spec'ing and Roadmapping for product teams. It's shameless. I don't care :-)

Replies

Ralph Ngo
In my experience, the new way was there even long before Covid-19 and its effects. I've seen this since 2012 when I first started as PM. Maybe it's just minority of companies doing the "new way" during my career?
kush
@ralphilius It's true that it has been around for quite some time. "Product led Growth" has been a popular term for quite a while now. But companies that did it were indeed in the minority. I have been a scrappy (and cheap) founder (well, Indians), and have sometimes questioned if I was being theoretical and impractical in being Product Led.
Joost Okkinga
Hi Kush, I agree with you. I also checked your fremium product. Looks useful though the paid version looks steeply priced. Good luck though!
kush
@okkingaj Aha. Sent you a mail asking what ticked you off a while back :-). The pricing isn't decided yet. I wanted to put something up so that it's clear we will charge eventually - a free product seems too suspect these days. Have got this feedback from others as well - will change it soon.
Andy Dent
@okkingaj @kush_apoorva Agree strongly with "free product seems too suspect" which is why I published Touchgram's monetisation strategy even though the first thing we will charge for is a good month out.
Ronak Jain
Wonderful thought process, this is definitely a good direction, but a lot of early team lacks resources to actively measure the success of their feature.
kush
@ronak_jain Agreed Ronak. The lack of resources has two parts though - the lack knowledge on what to measure and how, and the inability to afford tools. Which one do you think is steeper and should be solved for?
Peter Pezaris
We're trying to help solve the same problems, but attacking a different part of it. I think the development process is broken: in 2020, with messaging apps for literally everything, why are developers still copying & pasting code from their IDE into slack to ask a question about how it works? I am old enough to remember when we copied and pasted text from MS Word to email to talk about it -- that sucked. CodeStream brings all of the collaboration to where it belongs, into your favorite IDE. You can talk about code, request and perform a review, and even grab a ticket or push a PR. All without leaving the environment you're used to. Oh, and we happen to have launched on PH today :) Also shameless :)
kush
@peter_pezaris Just upvoted CodeStream. Looks dope. In my teams, we don't do a lot of code review, but when we do, it's a pain. Ideally I like to sit with the dev - easier to collaborate - which is impossible in remote environs. "Meet the team" in the post - Dope ! Also shamelessness is the name of the game :-)
Andy Dent
@peter_pezaris @kush_apoorva CodeStream looks fairly impressive - have a few issues so will post more on the PH page
Nenad Golubović
Thanks for sharing your peace of mind Kush. I personally don't think it's broken (some things are though), looking at this community and around me, I think I'm seeing post-traumatic growth. So many people working on so many things, it's just amazing.