AMA: Bluevine Senior Director of Product Management, Aaron Bloom on Managing Mature Products

Teams that have worked on a product for years bring deep context, but they can also become strongly entrenched in existing beliefs and decisions. Start with empathy.  Give the benefit of doubt that protectiveness comes from long term investment and pride in the product, not resistance to you personally.  Earn trust by taking the time to truly understand the product, the tech stack, the operating model, and the historical context behind past decisions. That effort goes a long way in building the ...Read More

Outdated tech isn’t automatically bad since it has carried your product to maturity, but unmanaged risk is an amplified exposure. Understand whether the issue is end of life risk, performance limits, or team velocity. Only execute on modernization if the business case and need is clear.  Once you are ready to execute, it’s like any other product build. I’ll repost what I wrote above about how to ideate solutions and execute changes on mature products: Go broad and deep on end to end dependencies ...Read More

Tech debt should be considered at every stage of a product’s lifecycle, but it becomes materially more important as a product matures. Mature products have accumulated years of iteration, and each iteration leaves new layers of tech debt.  What changes at scale is the cost of failure:  A small infrastructure issue that’s tolerable at MVP can be catastrophic in a mature product as a result of customer volume, nuanced edge cases, operational load, regulatory and reputational impact, and financial ...Read More

A product can be considered mature when it reaches a point of stability and equilibrium:  There’s a strong base of long term, loyal customers, and growth becomes relatively predictable - even without major new features or innovation.  The product is proven, the core value proposition is well understood, and most change is incremental rather than transformative.  Unit economics and general profitability will be consistently strong with a normalized go to market and sales motion.  At this stage, t ...Read More

Optimizing a mature product differs from a nascent one in a few common ways: Small tweaks can drive outsized benefits or large scale damage. Years of iteration create far more complexity, dependencies, and edge cases. Bugs and confusion get amplified across a large customer base and a business that now depends on the product financially. From an optics perspective, the customer and business are just used to the product being stable - issues have higher damage to years of trust.  Use your proven ...Read More