The 2021 Product Awards brought together the best in digital products, highlighting the market leaders that are taking the product world by storm in this new Age of Product. Join us in The Winners Circle with product leaders from Airtable, InVision, and Userleap as we discuss how product managers can gain a competitive edge and stay ahead by building award-worthy products.
Each week we release a new podcast episode diving into the most relevant topics in product management with some of the biggest names in the field. Subscribe at the links below so you don’t miss a single episode. Now, let’s roll through the highlights.
InVision SVP on award-worthy, product-led organizations
Jeff Chow is Senior Vice President of Product at InVision. According to Chow, the culture of a company reflects in the user experience. Some companies have a serious company culture and that shows in the product and the user experience.
“You can look at products and say that’s not a fun culture, not a good culture. They’re not bringing the best out of each other. And so it feels sterile, doesn’t feel like it’s dynamic. You can sense there’s no energy there.”
“As product leaders the job is to unlock that. What are the personalities? Let’s find the uniqueness of everyone and pull them together.”
Another factor is reinforcing as a team what the group mission is. That involves a potentially annoying level of repetition. “Making sure over and over until it’s just so painful to hear—what is the purpose? What are we trying to solve? Why are we trying to solve it?”
Learn how to make market-leading digital products with world-class product design.
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Userleap CEO on product management in the Age of Product
Ryan Glasgow is CEO at Userleap. Glasgow says groundbreaking products are those that are easy to use and have a high customer job completion rate—they help the user complete the job they’ve hired the product to do.
Glasgow noted the iPhone and Google Maps as examples that have key requirements of the best products: functionality, usability, and reliability. They combine a full feature set they’re easy to use, and they work as the user expects.
“Product managers looking at those three key areas, the functionality, the usability and the reliability, but then thinking about what the customer needs to accomplish. And then thinking about how you can really get inside those customers’ heads and think about where your product is falling short. And where is it succeeding in those areas, to ultimately drive more customers to achieving that job that they’re looking to achieve.”
Creating award-worthy products must be about more than just the product, though. “There’s much more to learn about customers than I think most of us realize,” he noted. “When I think about a product manager who’s building an award-winning product, it’s really the ones that are customer-obsessed, and the ones that really focus on what their customers want. And they’re really measuring how their customers perceive their products.”
Learn ways product leaders can resolve issues during the product lifecycle.
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Airtable Product Lea on building tailored workflows
Anthony Maggio is Product Lead at Airtable. Maggio noted that the Covid pandemic caused major shifts in processes and forced companies in all sectors to adapt quickly to a new reality and new way of working.
“I think products that are really flexible and adaptable and allow teams to quickly iterate on their processes are one of the key attributes of an award-winning product. And this past year, we saw so many use cases of our customers and of nonprofits and companies coming up with really innovative ways of using our product during COVID. Everything from vaccine distribution to helping people find COVID testing appointments to organizing remote work policies to running safety check-ins from their teams. And I think that really speaks to the importance of flexibility and adaptability of a product and of a process.”
As for award-worthy attributes for PMs in the Winners Circle, Maggio noted a couple of talents he looks for. “Those are really creating clarity, caring deeply about the user needs in the product experience, and being proactive.”
Learn how product managers can gain a competitive advantage by modernizing business processes.
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