Product Collective - ❓Do your customers know what they want?

Being Proactive vs Reactive

Should product managers respond to customer requests and market trends, or should they try to expect what customers are going to want before those customers even realize it? This week’s articles explore the various perspectives on proactive vs reactive product management and when each approach makes sense.

Meanwhile, in product news, we introduce a new tool to help you deal with data, a new advisory group for AI, a company buying a potential competitor to get them out of the way, and a quixotic attempt to 14x the global chip market.

Why product strategy is more often reactive than proactive. Have you ever started working on a new product and felt overwhelmed with everything you could do? If so, chances are you were working without the benefit of a concrete product strategy. A sound product strategy helps with feeling overwhelmed because it helps you see how your product contributes to your company’s goals, helps you get the right items on your roadmap, and guides your product decisions. Given that product strategy provides product teams with so much guidance, why does it seem like your product strategy is more reactive, and is that ok? Cameron Fitchett answers that question and more.

Product managers aren't responsible for the delivery of their products There has been a lot of talk recently about the role of product managers in companies, and the value that they bring to the table. Jason Knight describes what product managers are not for, because it’s something he’s seen often on his travels, and he thinks it’s at the root of much of the bad feeling between product managers and their teammates. To cut a long story short, product managers are not responsible for the delivery of the products they manage. What does that have to do with being reactive vs proactive? Focusing on delivery often makes a product manager reactive.

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Register this month, and you’ll be invited to Sean Flaherty’s half-day Influencing Without Authority workshop taking place the day before the conference (an extra $700 value).

Altogether, that’s $1,545 in total value for just $695. But this deal is only available to you this month.

This Week’s Video

Escaping the Build Trap. Are you building what your customers want, or are you just building? Many large companies that have been around for decades, or even newer startups that have found some stability, fall into a dangerous place called “The Build Trap” — building feature after feature, without stopping to validate it’s what customers truly want and need. In this talk from the 2019 European edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, Melissa Perri outlines how product teams can restructure their thinking to focus on finding value for the user through experimentation to achieve business goals and escape “The Build Trap.”​

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.

Did Apple just derail Meta’s product roadmap for its Quest products?

Lots of people are talking about the release of the Apple Vision Pro. In fact, today, we’ll be releasing an episode on Rocketship.FM all about the launch. But one thing very interesting came out of Apple’s launch – it may have just influenced Meta’s roadmap.

​Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on Instagram essentially reviewing the Apple Vision Pro and comparing it to Meta’s Quest 3 VR headset. Zuckerberg's critique of the Vision Pro, highlighting aspects like weight, motion freedom, and input mechanisms, also unsurprisingly touted Meta's broader vision for VR—a vision that prioritizes accessibility and user experience over high-end specs. The Quest 3's advantages, as outlined by Zuckerberg, from its lighter weight to its cost-effectiveness, position it as a more accessible entry point into VR for the average consumer. He contended that the Quest 3 was not only a better value, but a better product overall.

This in itself wasn’t too surprising to me. But what was surprising was Zuckerberg calling out one aspect of the Apple Vision Pro, specifically – eye tracking – and noting that it will return to future Meta headsets beyond Quest Pro.

Maybe this was the plan all along. Or maybe… Zuckerberg’s experience with the Apple Vision Pro just derailed Meta’s product roadmap and is now a priority. We can’t really know for sure. But it brings up the question: when is it right to “trust the process” with your roadmap and not let a competitive product offering influence whether or not you make changes… or when is it OK to put a new product or feature at the top of your roadmap and de-prioritize what was originally on it?

Has your team ever had to deal with new requirements from executives derailing your roadmap because of a competitor’s release? If so, I want to hear about it – let me know!​

Do you like using spreadsheets but hate updating the data? A new tool called Coefficient helps your team connect all your data, automate workflows, and share live insights within the spreadsheet platform of your choice. Coefficient is a sidebar app for Google Sheets and Excel that lets you work with data from your business systems in a spreadsheet without having to import and export data repeatedly. Hopefully, this advisory group won’t have hallucinations. Over 200 companies and organizations offered to be part of an advisory group to create guidelines for ensuring the safety of AI systems. The new US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is tasked with coming up with guidelines for red-teaming AI systems, evaluating AI capacity, managing risk, ensuring safety and security, and watermarking AI-generated content. It’ll be interesting to see if AISIC uses AI to help them write the report detailing their recommendations. If you can’t beat them, buy them. Notion recently acquired Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar events, and email. Executives at Notion took notice of Skiff right away, and at some point decided Notion should buy the company, to get rid of a competitor. Skiff posted on a support forum that the product is closing down after six months. Yes, that was trillion, with a T. Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI founder is seeking funds for a gigantic venture to make microchips. He’s trying to raise as much as $7 trillion to expand global production capacity. That’s a rather notable sum, especially considering $527 billion worth of chips were sold globally last year. One reason for the enormous sum? OpenAI has struggled to secure a sufficient supply from chip designer Nvidia, which sells much of the microprocessors fueling the ongoing AI frenzy.

Be proactive, not reactive. Great product teams operate with a proactive mindset. They figure out what their team needs, and get ahead of it. They learn what customers need next. They admit when they were wrong, and change course. They find problems before they affect customers. And they look for ambiguity, with the intent to clarify. To do so, they focus on what they can control. Lane Shackleton believes the root cause of slow-moving teams is being caught in a reactive tailspin. They get pulled around by other people’s opinions and priorities instead of focusing on what they can control.

Product onboarding for customer growth: Proactive vs. reactive. More companies than ever are taking a product-led approach and wish to provide some level of self-serve onboarding. They must decide whether to implement a proactive or reactive product onboarding process — or both. Aazar Shad explains what makes the most sense for your product and tools for implementing both SaaS user onboarding strategies.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.

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