Happy New Year! The last year has seen many changes in the world of product management. Yet, with all these changes, we can all expect ever more exciting trends, processes, and, especially, products in 2012!
A Look Back
In 2011, many of the prevailing trends we experienced were…
- Increased focus on process for innovation and ideation
- API’s, relationships, modular innovation, integration. You are not a true product unless you have an API.
- Decreasing use of the free service / product business model. Growing on free is no longer the best policy. You can actually create a viable, sustainable business by charging customers money. (omg)
- The new form factor — the tablet. While it has been around for sometime, the tablet (specifically, the iPad) has had a profound affect on not just tablet design, but all product design and product-consumer expectations of interaction — more intuitive, more touchy.
The Coming Year
It’s always fun to attempt to predict the future. Based on my interactions with the product management community, the following are my predictions for the big trends of 2012.
- Offline. There will be a broad-based movement back to enabling the offline application, powered by HTML5, from document management to media consumption.
- Death of XML. XML is on the wane, and JSON’s time has come. With all of the frameworks that have been developed to extract, transform, and transport XML, there will be great entrepreneurial opportunities in 2012 tooling-up JSON.
- The number of product management roles will continue to grow. However, they will be filled by more and more junior people. These positions will also focus much more on the tactical side of product management (vs. the strategic).
- In demand skills of the product manager of 2012 (and beyond)…
- Tech / programming. There will be increasing need for technical experience or programming skills for product manager roles (even UX centric ones).
- Statistics. Establishing and gathering metrics will become increasingly central to what it means to be a product manager. You need to demonstrate your value and make smarter decisions. (One of the key drivers has been the growth of Lean Methodology.)
- Customer driven roadmapping will gain increasing momentum. And, mirroring that trend, but inward facing, more company-wide integrated product management will be taking shape.
What’s next?
What are your predictions and expected trends for product management in 2012?
Enjoy & thanks to everyone who followed, read, and participated in The Product Guy blog and The Product Group, new and old, in 2011! We are going to have a supremely awesome 2012!!! See you there!
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
The Product Guy 