AMA: ATG Group Product Manager, James Heimbuck on Managing Mature Products

The good news? It's the same way you do with any product—talk to people. The challenge is mature products don't always make this easy. If you are lucky enough to have built-in analytics, use them. If your product was built before modern analytics existed or runs on technology that doesn't support current tracking tools, you might be digging into databases to understand how often things happen and reverse-engineering user flows from there. For qualitative data, customer support and sales teams ar ...Read More

I really like this question because when I dug into it, I realized it is less about "outdated" and more about resource constraints. Outdated technology usually falls into one of three buckets; We lack expertise to maintain it We can not invest right now in migrating away from it We can not invest in improving it Your approach depends entirely on your product goals. If you are in maintenance mode then you are looking for the cheapest way to keep the lights on—minimal patching and bug fixes. If th ...Read More

I've run into the same three challenges in managing mature products: managing a large feature set, tech limitations, and migrating users or data. Mature products accumulate features—sometimes customized for specific customers—and they're rarely fully documented. Making changes can have unintended consequences. I've learned to update documentation as I go when it does not exist or is out of date. This helps both my team and whoever inherits the product next. Without instrumentation, you're flying ...Read More

There are a few ways I think about what makes a product "mature," and it is usually a combination of these rather than just one. Market fit is the first signal—the product does the job customers hired it to do. You will see this in a large, stable customer base with slow growth in new customers and low churn. The product has found its place in the market and customers do not "fire" it often. Feature set is another marker. Mature products often have a lot of features, sometimes even multiple ways ...Read More

As often as it needs to be, but understanding why it needs attention is the real answer. Mature products accumulate technical and product debt just from years of decisions, tradeoffs, and "we'll fix it later" moments that never got prioritized. In the past I have worked with my technical lead to identify known technical debt and understand the cost/benefit of fixing it. Some things have real due dates, others can limp along indefinitely as is. A next step is to look for the unknown unknowns—area ...Read More