Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech / Best of LinkedIn: Digital Products & Services CW 48/ 49

Transcript

Best of LinkedIn: Digital Products & Services CW 48/ 49 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 0: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about digital products and services in calendar weeks forty-eight and forty-nine.
• 0:10
  Speaker 0: Frennis is a B-to-B market research company helping enterprises gain the market, customer, and competitive insights needed to drive customer-centric and cost-efficient product development.
• 0:21
  Speaker 0: Welcome back to the Deep Dive.
• 0:24
  Speaker 0: Today we're distilling some really critical shifts we're seeing in the world of digital products and services.
• 0:29
  Speaker 0: I mean, looking at the industry conversation over the last couple of weeks, one thing is just crystal clear.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: What's that?
• 0:35
  Speaker 0: The product discipline is, well, it's finally growing up.
• 0:38
  Speaker 0: It's moving past just shipping features for the sake of it.
• 0:41
  Speaker 0: It
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: really is.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: That's the core finding, you know.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Leaders seem to be done with the vanity metrics, the output, the feature velocity.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: The whole focus has pivoted and pretty intensely toward foundational strength.
• 0:53
  Speaker 0: Foundational strength.
• 0:54
  Speaker 0: What do you mean by that exactly?
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, defining and aligning the operating model.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: for one and prioritizing rock solid customer evidence making sure the technical platform is actually ready to scale.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: the market is demanding provable outcomes and well that's changing everything.
• 1:10
  Speaker 0: okay let's unpack that this whole mandate for outcomes.
• 1:13
  Speaker 0: we can start there with our first theme strategy roadmaps and this outcomes mandate.
• 1:18
  Speaker 0: we've all seen that classic flawed roadmap
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: right.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: oh yeah The one that's just a list of features nobody really asked for, prioritized by politics.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 1:27
  Speaker 0: And the chatter online confirms that this is a systemic problem.
• 1:30
  Speaker 0: It's a massive drag on success.
• 1:33
  Speaker 0: The real tension seems to be that most roadmaps are just designed to be reactive.
• 1:37
  Speaker 0: They
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: are.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: They serve internal stakeholders instead of driving a strategic vision.
• 1:41
  Speaker 0: There was a great post from Jasmine grew a gray on this.
• 1:44
  Speaker 0: She observed that most roadmaps fail because they are reactive.
• 1:47
  Speaker 0: The focus shifts from the product's actual direction to, and this is her quote, who you're trying to please.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: The system itself is often set up, maybe unintentionally, to pull PMs into that reactive whirlpool.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: You know, urgent fixes, sales demands.
• 2:02
  Speaker 0: So you're just stuck in that mode.
• 2:04
  Speaker 0: You're never strategic.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Never.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The conclusion is you have to retire that kind of roadmap.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: You have to set a clear North Star and then really concentrate your resources on outcome driven bets.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: Things that will actually move the needle.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: That
• 2:18
  Speaker 0: transition sounds great in theory, but it immediately brings up the question of ownership.
• 2:23
  Speaker 0: I mean, how are product leaders supposed to handle this new pressure to deliver huge business results?
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Well, that's where the scope of product leadership is expanding.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: And sometimes, frankly, unreasonably so.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Sean King highlighted this.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: He's seeing product leadership roles that are asked to own these incredibly broad business outcomes.
• 2:43
  Speaker 0: Like what, for example?
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Things like overall policyholder retention for an insurance company, or guest satisfaction across an entire hotel chain.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: But the product team's actual responsibility only covers the digital front end.
• 2:56
  Speaker 0: So just the mobile app or the checkout flow?
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: So the PMs are being held responsible for, I don't know, operational gaps or bad sales training.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Things completely outside of their control.
• 3:06
  Speaker 0: Which is not going to work.
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: No.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: He called it product management theater.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: The PM is sort of performing the role of an outcome owner, but they don't have the real levers to pull across the business.
• 3:16
  Speaker 0: So the implication is that digital is just one piece of the puzzle.
• 3:20
  Speaker 0: product teams have to collaborate way more deeply with ops, sales, support, if they actually want to influence those big results.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Precisely.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, the digital product just becomes the scapegoat when the service model itself is broken.
• 3:33
  Speaker 0: Okay, so that brings us back to strategic clarity.
• 3:36
  Speaker 0: If roadmaps are just feature lists and feature lists lead to this theater, we need a whole different system for making decisions.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: We do.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: Sarah Perkins had some really sharp advice on this.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: She said, stop presenting roadmaps and start leading strategic dialogues.
• 3:51
  Speaker 0: I like that.
• 3:51
  Speaker 0: So it's not about showing a gaunt chart.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: No, it's about forcing the hard uncomfortable questions.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: The kind of questions that separate the companies that will last from the ones that, you know, won't.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: She suggested this customer trust audit.
• 4:04
  Speaker 0: Right.
• 4:05
  Speaker 0: Asking what single product failure would destroy customer trust overnight?
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: A question like that just cuts through all the tactical noise.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: It forces everyone to focus on fundamental value and risk.
• 4:17
  Speaker 0: And that focus is what leads to the organizational blueprint, right?
• 4:21
  Speaker 0: I saw Joachim Torres, a joker, he noted that when we talk about product culture and the product operating model, we're really talking about the same thing.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, essentially, it's the same critical transformation, the same mindset shift.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: you need to get that strategic alignment.
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: It's a holistic view.
• 4:37
  Speaker 0: That makes a ton of sense.
• 4:39
  Speaker 0: The culture is the mindset and the product operating model, the POM, that's the structure that makes it real.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Which is a perfect transition to our second theme, product operating models.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: The human and the technical challenge of making all this work.
• 4:52
  Speaker 0: So where do we start with the POM?
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Well, if we zoom out, the POM is where the strategy hits the technical reality.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: John Cutler might a point on this that I think is often overlooked.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: He said at any real scale all this talk of POM transformation and empowerment is and I'm quoting hollow propaganda without a serious focus on two things.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, what are they?
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: architecture and a platform strategy?
• 5:13
  Speaker 0: That's a strong statement.
• 5:15
  Speaker 0: Why is architecture so critical to the operating model?
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Because the model demands speed and autonomy.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: I mean, if every team trying to ship a feature gets stuck in dependency gridlock or tangle deployment pipelines or massive tech debt.
• 5:30
  Speaker 0: Then, empowerment is just a word on a slide.
• 5:32
  Speaker 0: It's
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: meaningless.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: The architecture has to enable independent teams.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Otherwise, the POM is just a fancy deck.
• 5:39
  Speaker 0: That really clarifies what the organization is actually creating.
• 5:42
  Speaker 0: Luca Mahoney put it well.
• 5:43
  Speaker 0: He said the core work product isn't just a piece of software.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It's the orchestration of three things.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: People.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Process.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: and technology.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: All of it designed for maximum system performance and you know the best customer experience.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: The whole system is the product.
• 5:58
  Speaker 0: Okay so the system mechanics are important but the implementation that's all human isn't it?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: A hundred percent.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Melissa Perry shared that POM implementations fail way less often because of bad frameworks and way more often because of poor change management.
• 6:11
  Speaker 0: So you can have the perfect diagram on the wall, but if you haven't won over the people who have to actually live with it.
• 6:17
  Speaker 0: It's
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: stalled out, exactly.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Transformation is a human process.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: It takes influence, stakeholder management.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: You have to navigate the politics.
• 6:25
  Speaker 0: I saw a post from Kasim Harani about that, the politics of it.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was very real about it.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: He said real world product management is knowing when to apply the framework.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: You know, when to say no, and when you just have to say yes to a high-ranking stakeholder, the hippo.
• 6:40
  Speaker 0: The highest-paid person's opinion.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: Sometimes that yes is a necessary political move.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: It buys you the capital for the long term.
• 6:48
  Speaker 0: It's a tricky balance that one strategic yes on a less-than-ideal request could buy you a dozen strategic no's down the line.
• 6:55
  Speaker 0: It's all about judgment.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: And speaking of judgment, the POM has to be designed to handle different kinds of demand.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Shrathikalapu made a great point about needing two distinct intake pathways as you scale.
• 7:08
  Speaker 0: A dual intake model.
• 7:09
  Speaker 0: Tell me more about that.
• 7:10
  Speaker 0: Sounds like a practical way to balance everything.
• 7:12
  Speaker 0: Think
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: of it like a hospital.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: You need your scheduled surgeries, but you also need a functioning ER.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: Path one is the product engine.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: It's systematic, evidence-led, driving the core roadmap.
• 7:22
  Speaker 0: And path two.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Path two is for strategic and urgent demand.
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: This handles the time sensitive, off the politically charged request from the CEO, or from sales, or finance.
• 7:32
  Speaker 0: And the trick isn't just having the two paths, but managing in the flow, I assume.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: That's the key.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: You have to process paths too quickly.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: We're talking rapid assessment cycles, like two to five days, not two months.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: And you offer smart options.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Like what?
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Like we can't build that full feature right now, but we can run a pilot.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Or here's a third-party tool we can use as a shortcut.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: It protects the main roadmap while still respecting that real urgency.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: It requires PMs who are commercially fluent.
• 8:00
  Speaker 0: That ability to triage and find alternatives is a perfect bridge to our third theme.
• 8:05
  Speaker 0: Customer discovery, evidence, and just building the right thing.
• 8:09
  Speaker 0: Because no matter how great your POM is, if you're building the wrong product, the whole thing fails.
• 8:13
  Speaker 0: Yeah,
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: Peter Drucker's quote, which Kimmy O'Doreen shared again recently, it still holds up.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Solving the right customer problem is so much more important than building the product right.
• 8:21
  Speaker 0: It all comes down to speed to learn, iterating until your customers make it painfully obvious that you've finally nailed it.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: But that speed is also a trap, right?
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Especially now, with AI making everything faster.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: Well, Anna Pintar put out a clear warning about this.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: AI makes prototyping incredibly fast, but that velocity can be really deceptive.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: A polished, validated prototype.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: It's not proof of demand.
• 8:47
  Speaker 0: It just proves people liked what they saw.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: It doesn't prove they'll change their behavior.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: Or, more importantly, that they will pay for it.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Her example was so good.
• 8:57
  Speaker 0: The one about the product with four hundred registered users, but only fifteen who are actually paying.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: That's the one.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: That tells you there's a massive gap between interest and realized value.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: And to close that gap, you have to do real detective work.
• 9:10
  Speaker 0: You can't just listen to the fifteen people who converted.
• 9:12
  Speaker 0: No.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: You have to talk to both.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: The converters and the non-converters.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: That's how you isolate the pattern, figure out who the product is really for and what's stopping the other three hundred and eighty-five people.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: That's modern product discovery.
• 9:24
  Speaker 0: So if discovery needs to be this continuous thing, how do the best companies actually institutionalize it?
• 9:31
  Speaker 0: How do you make it part of the daily rhythm?
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Chantelbatana's analysis of whys was a great example.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: They basically engineered a culture where empathy plus evidence isn't a poster.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: It's infrastructure.
• 9:44
  Speaker 0: So discovery isn't just a phase at the beginning.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: No, it runs in parallel with delivery from day one.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: They do a couple of things to make that happen.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: They embed design researchers to continuously test hypotheses.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: And critically, they have product compliance partners co-designing from the start.
• 10:01
  Speaker 0: So you know if an idea is safe and shippable before it even gets to the engineering backlog.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: It's continuous learning baked right into the pipeline.
• 10:09
  Speaker 0: That continuous evidence loop feels more important than ever.
• 10:11
  Speaker 0: as we get into our final theme.
• 10:13
  Speaker 0: AI's impact on design and the new PM skill set.
• 10:16
  Speaker 0: Because the speed AI brings is forcing a conversation about what quality even means anymore.
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: Richard F. voiced a concern that I think a lot of people are feeling.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: This AI hype cycle is leading to a market just flow with half baked kind of boring rushed products.
• 10:31
  Speaker 0: They lack creativity.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: And attention to detail.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: That pursuit of speed is sacrificing originality.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: My jesuit be actually called this UX convergent evolution.
• 10:41
  Speaker 0: I've seen that term.
• 10:42
  Speaker 0: It's where all the interfaces start looking the same because they're all optimizing for familiarity.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: Which, ironically, makes them totally forgettable.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: But the really radical future, which Myrick Neisenbaum envisioned, is something called generative product design.
• 10:59
  Speaker 0: Okay, what is that?
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Imagine LLM that uses your brand's personality and your design system to create a hyper-personalized product view for each user.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Instantly.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: Based on their specific context, their needs, their history, we'd move way beyond static interfaces.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 11:15
  Speaker 0: That is a massive shift.
• 11:16
  Speaker 0: But to get there, the PM's own foundation has to be rock solid.
• 11:20
  Speaker 0: Dr.
• 11:21
  Speaker 0: Else Vandenberg had a really powerful take on this.
• 11:23
  Speaker 0: Oh,
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I saw that.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: She said LMS are powerful amplifiers.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: They just amplify whatever you feed them.
• 11:27
  Speaker 0: So if you feed them shallow thinking,
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: you get poor results just at a massive scale.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: You absolutely cannot skip the foundation, knowing your audience, grounding the pain points.
• 11:36
  Speaker 0: Garbage in, garbage out just faster and bigger than ever.
• 11:39
  Speaker 0: Pretty
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: much.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Akash Gupta broke this down really well.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: He argued that successful AI PMs need expertise on three different levels.
• 11:47
  Speaker 0: Which are?
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: First, the foundation so AI and ML concepts, prompt engineering.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: Second is the PM value layer, things like evaluation, cost optimization, choice analysis.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And third is strategy.
• 11:58
  Speaker 0: That PM value layer seems like the real differentiator.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: The scarcest skill in AI right now is PMs who actually understand evaluation, who know how to test, iterate and figure out if the model is truly providing customer value.
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: It's hard work.
• 12:12
  Speaker 0: Which brings us back to judgment.
• 12:14
  Speaker 0: If AI can do so much of the execution, what's left for the human PM?
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: Rochelle Valentino framed it perfectly.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: The question isn't, will AI replace me?
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: It's, how do I partner with AI to make better product decisions?
• 12:26
  Speaker 0: The AI is the co-pilot.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: But judgment is the driver.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: AI can cluster feedback.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: It can draft a spec outline.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: But it can't prioritize conflicting stakeholder needs.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: It can't read the nuance of human emotion or organizational politics.
• 12:39
  Speaker 0: So how do you operationalize that?
• 12:41
  Speaker 0: How do you pair human judgment with AI speed?
• 12:44
  Speaker 0: Harsha Sravatsa proposed a really fascinating idea, the LLM Council.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: This is such a cool concept.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: It's basically an AI board of advisors for your product.
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: You use different AI personas, maybe one inspired by Marty Kagan for strategy, another by Melissa Perry for discovery to review your PRD.
• 13:02
  Speaker 0: And the Council gives you feedback before you even start sprint planning.
• 13:05
  Speaker 0: Exactly.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: It synthesizes feedback, flags critical gaps.
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: You're institutionalizing critical thinking, but using technology to do
• 13:13
  Speaker 0: it.
• 13:14
  Speaker 0: That is a perfect way to think about how product management has to evolve.
• 13:17
  Speaker 0: It's about using sophisticated tools to enhance our own strategy and judgment, not to replace it.
• 13:23
  Speaker 0: So let's try to summarize the big shifts from the last two weeks.
• 13:25
  Speaker 0: There's a clear mandate to pivot to outcome-based product operating models, but those have to be grounded in a robust architecture and smart intake pathways.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: And we learned that deep behavioral customer evidence, not just fast prototypes, is the only real cure for that dangerous feature.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: velocity.
• 13:41
  Speaker 0: And finally, AI integration.
• 13:44
  Speaker 0: It demands that we prioritize strategic judgment and evaluation skills over just, you know, technical shortcuts.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: And if I can add one final thought, looking at the bigger picture.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: The evolution of product operations is the next strategic engine here.
• 13:58
  Speaker 0: How so?
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Well, both Graham Reed and Aidan Zipor pointed this out.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Product ops isn't just an admin afterthought anymore.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: As AI speeds up engineering and design, the bottlenecks move.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: They shift to organizational alignment, governance, process.
• 14:13
  Speaker 0: The exact problems ProductOps is designed to solve.
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: Exactly.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: It's becoming the central nervous system for the modern product org.
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: It's solving the crucial problems that, before, nobody was really solving properly.
• 14:24
  Speaker 0: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 14:27
  Speaker 0: Also check out our other editions on ICT and tech, artificial intelligence, cloud, sustainability and green ICT, defense tech and health tech.
• 14:35
  Speaker 0: Thanks for diving deep with us.
• 14:36
  Speaker 0: We'll see you next time.