To me, being a Product Manager means the ability to turn my belief that scientific and technological innovation can make the world a better place, into practice. In fact, this should be every Product Manager’s responsibility.

A great Product Manager is also a “triple T-shaped person,” with an understanding of the underlying technology, a profound grasp of human behavioural psychology, and a solid business minded appreciation of the relevant industry. This is critical as meaningful innovation is often - and increasingly so - born by weaving together advancements from multiple disciplines. Take such interdisciplinary knowledge and add a strong intuition and you have got a true creative innovator.

On the other side, the breadth of skills needed by a Product Manager to actually deliver the solution and make a substantial impact are as wide as you would expect from a good CEO - unsurprisingly it is often a path there.

Throughout the early stages of a product, getting user feedback is incredibly challenging . It is the time you need it most and yet it is the time it is the hardest to come by. You will have close to nothing to offer in exchange, you might not even have an MVP to show, the product is a long way from having market fit, and the company has not yet established a solid reputation. During this period, it is far too easy to get trapped in one’s “amazing” vision and I have seen people fall into this trap many times. I am no different, having to constantly remind myself that it is simply against our nature to take our cherished ideas out for a beating.

Another interesting challenge is that of culture and teams. Many companies have a great product culture and as long as you have good soft skills, slotting in is not too difficult. Startups or fresh teams on the other hand are trickier and require substantial proactive effort in building up the community, motivation, cohesion, and good collaboration. When the culture needs to be built up from scratch, a first key step is location. Often these days we work in distributed teams which makes it all the more challenging, so making sure you spend time together as a team in the beginning and then meeting up frequently and regularly with ample time for fun and bonding is critical. If, on the other hand, you have the luxury of a completely local team, nuances like seating arrangement can matter enormously - always seat your entire cross functional team together in a joint cluster - it will make building your dream team much easier.

First, it needs to be self-explanatory. However big the pain or need you are solving is, and however good a solution you offer, unless your target audience can use it, the value it provides is zero. Of course, self-explanatory implies speed as well - even plain html can eventually be self-explanatory but applying designs and UX conventions can make it immediately intuitive.

Second and most importantly - assuming the above is trivial - the product needs to lead to the value adding result in the least amount of time. ‘Value adding result’ because that is ultimately the job the user is hiring the product to do - companies don’t hire Google Analytics to collect and show their website data, but rather to get actionable insights on what they can do better. ‘In the least amount of time’, because the faster the user achieves their goal, the more added value they gain by either being able to use the product more or by freeing up their time for other valuable activities.

Taking an airline mobile app as an example, we could improve the time component by reducing friction and automating steps, such as eliminating the tedious entering of personal and passport details for each check-in by saving and autocompleting them after the first time. Once the core value add has been optimized, we can increase the user value further by solving more pain-points including ancillary tasks. For example, the mentioned app could add the boarding pass to the phone wallet app and the flight details to the calendar automatically, right after the purchase.

“The number of users that solve their problem with my product every time” is the success metric I have set for myself. Time spent in app, frequency of usage etc. are all proxies to this, yet can be misleading and can not be used as a general metric without taking circumstances into consideration. For example, I always buy my train tickets in the UK through an app called Trainline. The central value add they provide is for me to have a train ticket and they enable me to do that in the fastest, most self-explanatory way. Yet if they would measure time spent in app or frequency of usage, it would completely misguide them. Firstly, I only use the app briefly - which is actually desirable - to find the best train times and purchase the tickets. Secondly, the frequency of my usage is dependent on my travel schedule, something entirely out of their control. Most importantly though, I solve my previously real pain point of finding and booking trains with their app 100 percent of the time - an enormous product success.

Beyond this, making a profit or at least making enough revenue to ensure self-sustenance are critical too, depending on the type and objectives of the company.

Rather than solving a widespread problem in the same way for everyone, products will become much more individualized, both in output, features, and interaction. To continue the travel example, I would expect a flight search service (like Skyscanner) to understand what kind of trip I am trying to book from the circumstances of my specific request. When showing the results for that Friday to Sunday weekend getaway, it would know my typically acceptable departure times. It would only surface flights in that range by taking into consideration the time it will take for me to get to and from the airport, from my home or office, with my preferred mode of transport. It should do so irrespective of whether I addressed it through Siri, Alexa, or Google or whether it has to read out the results or show them on an AR interface.

Such personalisation has substantial implications for Product Managers and for how we build products. We will no longer be trying to distill the few, most common problems that represent the biggest opportunities for improvement amongst our customers. Instead, the focus will shift towards being able to best complete end-to-end idiosyncratic tasks for the largest number of users. As the individual attributes taken into consideration grow and the number of adaptive components grows with it, the complexity of the system will rapidly increase. Such ‘adaptive components’ could be the filter for departure time or the components for train, bus, taxi and car services to the airport as well as the various interfaces the user could interact with and switch between. The ‘individual attributes’ range from stable information like the home address, to learnings from historic actions, like usual flight bookings and an understanding of which meetings could likely be taken on a call whilst in transit. To enable such personalization, the trinity of Product Manager, Designer, and Lead Engineer will be joined by a new member: the learning machine. It will be the machine that will have the power to understand each individual and their nuances at scale to create the best tailored solution on the fly. Two key skills stand out for Product Managers in this new paradigm: being able to think in complex, modular systems, and an ever more important understanding and intuition for human behavior.

As a long-time Apple user and fan, it is hard to admit that one of the biggest failures to meet a huge need for an enormous userbase is the Photos app. It is all the more devastating as the iPhone, the center of their ecosystem, is widely used to take pictures. In fact, it is said to be the most popular camera in the world and its photography features are a key driver for its purchase and upgrades. Yet, despite all of these clear reasons to invest in the downstream part of photography (enjoying the photos) as much as in the upstream (taking photos), they have failed to meet users’ needs. In spite of my library of 90,000+ photos, I haven’t opened my Photos app in macOS more than once in the last year and often find myself frustrated on whichever device I use it on.

First, the primary reason to take photos is to show them to someone at a later date. Yet in the Photos app on macOS, it takes about four obscure steps of removing panels and changing views until one arrives at a ‘slideshow’ view, and there isn’t any quick way of getting back either. Contrast that to iPhotos where it was just a hit of the space bar away.

Secondly, whilst iCloud library works well, it also fails to look beyond the first step of purely storing photos and onto the actual user value of showing pictures to others at any time on any device. To enable that, the user should be able to select a number of pictures and ask Photos to store a local copy temporarily or permanently so they can edit or show them on the go and when a (good) internet connection isn’t available.

Thirdly, most photos are taken during special ‘happenings’ where people are generally not alone. We all know the scene of everyone lining up to take the same photo when actually shared libraries are a beautifully simple way of pooling everyone’s holiday pictures. Yet they are also one of the most frustrating features of iCloud Photos. Saving photos into one’s own library from a shared stream will re-add existing pictures creating a host of duplicates, practically making shared libraries too tedious to be useful.

Altogether, Apple fails to serve a huge user need with how it handles photos and falls short on its own mantra of delivering outstanding user experiences that enable people to easily achieve their goals.

I am an optimist. I like to think that we can use technology for the betterment of humankind and to overcome some of the biggest challenges facing the globe. As such I envision a world where we can once again live in much closer harmony with nature.

First, by being completely sustainable and making sustainable energy accessible to everyone. Second, by living in a manner that is closer to our ‘natural’ tendencies such as small, close knit communities and thirdly, by actually physically living closer within nature.

While the first point is a necessity, the latter two are not inevitable outcomes of our current trajectory. It will be very exciting to be part of shifting the world away from urbanisation towards more rural living, thereby decreasing our environmental impact, forming smaller, closer communities, giving people more living space and allowing us to find joys in nature. This will of course require a host of new technologies, from AR and VR to autonomous flying vehicles or hyperloops that can rapidly take people into urban zones from distant places every once in a while, for cultural, intellectual, work, and social activities.