Product Collective (A Pendo Community)

Ward Cunningham, the developer who coined the phrase Technical Debt, once said “some problems with code are like financial debt. It’s OK to borrow against the future, as long as you pay it off.” As a product person, its helpful to understand what technical debt is, what causes it, and what happens if you don’t address it. Because your decisions often play a critical role in creating and removing technical debt from your product. Meanwhile, in product news, there’s a dust up in the WordPress community, Airtable is getting into the product management tooling space for real, and a couple of tools to help you build APIs and keep track of information on Slack.

Almost every product has a group of people who don’t build or use the product but impact, or impacted by the product. We usually refer to these folks as stakeholders and they often have more influence on the success of your product than you might expect. This week, we’re sharing some tips and advice on how you can manage your relationship with stakeholders without making it feel like you’re managing the stakeholders themselves. Meanwhile, in product news, Google added tabs to Docs, Driver auto generates docs that could use tabs, Syncly organizes your customer feedback, and Jira now lets you name issues what you really call them.

Product engagement metrics serve as a compass guiding your product team toward building better, more user-centric products. These metrics help you understand how people interact with digital products, like apps, websites, and software. They show if people are sticking around, how often they're using a product, and what features they find most useful. The folks at Storyly explain how tracking the right engagement metrics help you understand how users interact with your product.

Every product’s success depends on some portion of customer attention and engagement. In conflict with that desire is the mismatch between how often customers want or need to use a product vs. how often the product provider wants them to use it, and to what depth. Simply put, there are often unfair expectations projected onto customers. Chris Stone explains how to understand what your customers are capable of, and how to scaffold them into increased, realistic product adoption that aligns with company goals.

What is product engagement? In a fiercely competitive mobile app landscape, the success of your app hinges not only on functionality and design, but also on how well it engages users. Product engagement captivates users, drives retention, and, ultimately, fosters loyalty. Tope Longe dives into the topic of product engagement—what it is and why it’s important.

Once upon a time you could ship a feature, get people to use it , and consider your job done. Now, success depends on continuous improvement, adapting to changing user needs, and creating experiences that users genuinely want to return to. You need to think long and hard about product engagement. This week we’re sharing some resources that will help you keep people coming back to your product, in a healthy way. Meanwhile, in product news, Figma, Stripe, and Spotify share what they do in various aspects of software product development so that you can determine if it’ll work for you. And a Federal Judge points out one thing Google does that you may not want to emulate.

Folks ranging from Heraclitus to David Bowie have something to say about change. As a product manager you also have a lot to say about changes since a big part of your job is introducing them to your organization and its customers. How you manage change when you introduce new features goes a long way toward determining if your customers, users, and stakeholders welcome the change with open arms or if they feel like they’re having change done to them. Here are some resources to get more of the former and less of the latter. Meanwhile, in product news, we’re starting to get some of the backstory on Sonos’ problematic app rollout. In addition, Figma and Google introduced renamed, or new uses of AI, and Hedy introduced an AI tool to help you sound way smarter in your next business meeting.

In this unique episode of Rocketship.FM, host Mike Belsito explores the cutting-edge intersection of AI and product management. The show kicks off with an introduction to Google's Notebook LM, a groundbreaking AI research assistant. Then, in a twist, we present an AI-generated summary of the most recent edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, showcasing key takeaways on team structures, customer focus, AI integration, and essential human skills in product development. The summary was generated from the INDUSTRY Notes taken by long time Product Collective curator Kent J. McDonald This episode offers a unique blend of human insight and AI capabilities, providing listeners with a forward-looking perspective on the evolving landscape of product management. https://lnkd.in/gqyH9xGq

Add Minimum Viable Product to the list of good ideas that have become buzzwords and as a result horribly misapplied. Once framed as a way to get validated learning about your product, it is now misconstrued in some circles as an excuse to build something sub-par. Have no fear, this week we’re sharing some resources to make Minimum Viable Product a MVP in your product management tool kit again. Meanwhile, in product news, see the story behind Hype and how Jira helps teams do their own thing but talk about it consistently. In addition, us AI to write your developer docs and keep track of all your tasks.

When you’re deciding what to include in, and exclude, from your product there are a variety of factors you need to consider. Hopefully, the first thing that comes to mind is customer needs. A couple other factors include your market and your competition. It’s helpful to understand what other solutions customers use to solve their problems, but you shouldn’t become infatuated with adding every single feature your competitors have. Here are some resources on the proper place that competitive analysis fits in your product discovery efforts. Meanwhile, in product news, the entire staff of a game developer quit, AI now turns academic papers into podcasts and creates A/B tests from A/B tests. And California wants you to be safe when you doing either, and anything else using AI.