AMA: JetBrains Head of Product, Orit Golowinski on Managing Mature Products

To gather feedback from existing customers of mature products, I usually combine several approaches: In product feedback mechanisms. Simple signals such as short surveys, thumbs up or thumbs down reactions, or quick feedback prompts inside the product help capture feedback at the moment when users experience something good or frustrating. Structured product research. I invite users from my customer base to participate in interviews or usability studies. To encourage participation, I often provid ...Read More

Some of the biggest challenges when creating a roadmap for mature products are: Legacy technology and architecture that require significant refactoring before innovation can be introduced, slowing down delivery and increasing risk. A strong "if it is not broken, do not fix it" mindset across stakeholders, which makes it harder to justify investment in foundational changes and long-term improvements. Established user habits and workflows that create resistance to change, making it difficult to in ...Read More

A mature product is one that has achieved strong product market fit, a stable and sizable user base, and predictable revenue. It is deeply embedded in customers’ workflows and considered mission critical, which means reliability, performance, and backward compatibility become just as important as innovation. Mature products typically have: A large and diverse user base with established usage patterns Stable core functionality with incremental improvements rather than disruptive change Strong exp ...Read More

For mature products, the most important metric I focus on is user retention. At this stage, the product should already have strong product-market fit, so the key question becomes: Is the product deeply embedded in users’ daily workflows and consistently delivering value over time? Retention helps answer that. I look closely at: User retention and churn trends Engagement signals, such as how frequently users return and how much time they spend in the product A decline in these metrics can be an e ...Read More

First, I spend time understanding the personas who are already using the product. The goal is to make sure they are still capturing value and that their workflows have not changed in ways that make the product less relevant. This often involves usage analysis, interviews, and feedback mechanisms such as NPS or customer surveys. Mature products can sometimes assume loyalty, but it is important to continuously validate that the product is still solving the right problems and remains well integrate ...Read More