Two Decades in Product: What's Changed, What Hasn't

Global Teams

The shift from annual releases to continuous deployment changed everything. You can now test ideas in days that would have taken months. This speed creates opportunities but also risks—the temptation to ship before thinking deeply is ever-present.

We used to make decisions based on quarterly sales reports and occasional user studies. Now we have real-time analytics, A/B testing infrastructure, and more data than we can process. The challenge shifted from getting data to not drowning in it.

Users now expect consumer-grade experiences everywhere—including enterprise software. The tolerance for clunky interfaces and steep learning curves has collapsed. Design quality that was once a differentiator is now table stakes.

Building products with teams across time zones and cultures is now normal. This requires different communication patterns, different documentation standards, and different approaches to building shared understanding.

Simplicity Is Still Rare

Despite all our tools and data, the core skill remains: deeply understanding the people who use your product. What they need. What they struggle with. What they're trying to accomplish. Technology changes how we learn this, but not that we need to.

Having the right strategy doesn't guarantee success. The gap between "good idea" and "shipped product that works" is still enormous. Bridging that gap—dealing with dependencies, making tradeoffs, keeping teams aligned—is still where most efforts fail.

No matter how data-driven organizations claim to be, decisions involve people with competing interests. Navigating organizational dynamics, building alignment, managing expectations—these human skills matter as much as ever.

The pressure to add features never stops. Every stakeholder has requests. Every competitor has capabilities to match. Maintaining focus—building less, but better—remains one of the hardest disciplines in product work.

The Advice That's Lasted

The Takeaway

Product management has professionalized and matured enormously. We have better tools, better frameworks, better career paths than existed twenty years ago. But the fundamentals—understanding users, shipping quality, navigating organizations—remain the core of the work.

Master those, and the changing surface details become manageable.