Season 02 - The Finale - A Wild Year in review

Dec 31, 2022

Friends - This finale update, year-in-reviewish newsletter is a bit more personal than usual. Professionally, I had to grow and scale in ways that even a year ago would have been unimaginable. Personally I was able to continue to curate resources for product hustle stack, completing a Reforge certification, continuing my non-fiction book reading and culminating in being accepted into Money 20/20s Amplify cohort program. And writing about 50% more newsletter than I did the previous year. With that out of the way lets talk about 2022.

This long form (you’ve been warned) is inspired by Kyla Scanlon’s 2022 was really weird and John Cutler’s weekly rants. I’ll provide some reflections on core themes I observed play out in 2022. The following set of themes are what we will hit on:

2022 was indeed an interesting year

Huge MACRO trends deeply impacted consumers and therefore the product they use.
Product management is still a young discipline just entering its adolescent phase.
- Product-specific tooling and features within development tooling became a lot more prominent
FAANG companies, the gold standard for product management and growth, stumbled hard this year and were faced with many first challenges
For Product Hustle Stack, the site, the most popular content was around Shreyas Doshi and interviewing. For the newsletter, the most popular content was about surprise, OKRs as well as where to begin your product management journey

The Macro pictures that affects product makers and consumers

If the job of a product manager is not just to find product market fit, but marry that PMF with business outcomes such as being viable, then paying attention to the macro picture is very important. In 2022, 3 major themes had major product and organizational impacts.

2022 signaled a re-opening of the world, but consumer behaviors are in-between COVID and post-COVID behaviors. While restaurants, businesses and stores have largely re-opened, response in the form of traffic to those places continues to be tepid. Coupled with continued staffing shortages, investment by retailers like Target and Walmart made in digital e-commerce and home delivery continue to pay dividends. In other word consumers like the convenience.
Consumers now live in a scarcity world. continue to live in a shortage and out of stock world. Whether it was empty car lots, or going to the store only to be faced with low inventory, little choice or outright scarcity, Prior to COVID, out of stock and the idea of scarcity was thought of as a really smart way to drive up demand. Today, because of staff shortages, supply-chain issues, a common shopping experience includes seeing a couple of items on our list not available.
Tightening fiscal policy in the form of rising interest rates coupled with a more somber economic outlook is curtailing investment in new ideas as we no longer live in a free money environment and lowering consumer confidence if not their spending.

As product managers, we must understand that these macro trends will influence see alter our organizations’ enterprise priorities and strategies. That will therefore substantially affect our roadmaps and products especially if our success metrics are tied to business outcomes.

Product Management is still in its infancy

That became crystal clear when during Amplitude’s 2022 North American conference, the headliner Hasan Minhaj kept calling us project managers instead of product managers. And to add some data to that perhaps limited experience, the Google trends data clearly shows how the product management topic compared to design, strategy or even engineering, a distant fourth. But beyond Google trends there were a few other items that reinforced that truth

The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk surfaced that as a discipline, we are divided by the role the individual hero / visionary trope plays in the success of our products. Many product leaders and experts were silent if not outright endorsing what can only be described as an unmitigated disaster. The seemingly arbitrary decisions (and walk-backs), product launch without employing second-order thinking, has created a general malaise among many of the content creators on Twitter and opened up an opportunity for alternatives like Mastodon.
We are slowly realizing that JIRA and Confluence are great delivery tools but not great product tools. And thus we are seeing the emergence of a new category of products focused on the needs of product management. While still early (most are just glorified roadmap tools), products like Productboard, Amplitude or Doubleloop, prove it’s an exciting time to be a product manager.
FAANGS, the gold standard of product management, stumbled this year. This is important not because of their vaunted places in the pantheon of product management case studies but because of their alumnus vaunted position as de-facto product experts.

As product managers, this remind us that there isn’t a single framework (at least agreed upon) that we can refer to. So as we come into contact with templates, opinions and yes more frameworks we need to try and understand the bias built into them

FAANGS stumble

2022 was revealing as we saw the mighty FAANGS stumble in the face of some major challenges and headwinds this year.

FAANGS for the first time resorted to layoffs to address slowing growth and a resource strategy that for many years meant hiring talent away from other companies to create or sustain a talent moat. In part reacting to economic realities (probably for the first time for many) or some post COVID hangover, it was clear that the FAANGs were exiting their growth and scale phased and were now squarely in the sustain part of their history. Their stocks have decreased in value between 15% (Apple) to 40% (Amazon).
Netflix, acting perhaps as the canary in the coal mind heralding the end of unfettered growth, saw its overall subscribers number decrease for the first time and by more than a million. As mentioned in the previous bullet point, for Netflix and its FAANGs counterparts it marks that perhaps their core markets have reached the point of saturation.

This might actually be a

Product Hustle Stack Most Popular

For the Substack newsletter, this year saw 50% more content than 2021. I hope to continue that trend next year. The most popular newsletters were:

Newsletter 03 --> Discipline, Focus and who gets to set OKRs | OKRs are always a popular topic as many product managers seek to leverage them to evolve from output to outcome based roadmaps
Newsletter 07 --> Micro-edition | Where to start your PM Journey | Breaking into the PM discipline is difficult if not opaque. So it’s not a surprise this newsletter rose the top of the charts
Newsletter 08 --> Micro-edition | The First 90 Days as a New PM | Enough said, your first 90 day as a PM. What to do, and what not to do

For the resource site the most popular pieces of content were:

Leverage Neutral Overheard (LNO) Effectiveness Framework | This framewok on how to prioritize your time as a product manager is one I use daily and have found to be transformational. Try it out yourself.
Decisions By Shreyas (Stack) | Another piece of content aggregating Shreyas Doshi’s thoughts on decision made it to the second spot. This one goes into prioritizing product, how to think about product, and how to communicate with leaders.
The Product Competency Framework | This rounded out the top three resources and is of great help for product managers trying to assess their strengths and opportunities

With 2022, I know many questions still remain unanswered or at the very least partially answered. What framework should we use? How should we prioritize outcomes? How do i create a good strategy? Along with what does AI mean to the discipline? What will ChatGPT mean for us? I hope you say with me as we try and tackle those and other questions in 2023

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