AMA: Oracle Product Strategy Director, Robert Wunderlich on Managing Mature Products

A mature product is one that has found product/market fit, participates in a mature market, and it reasonably meets the needs of the average customer. To understand this further, we can compare Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. ERP is a mature market with very large players who offer robust solutions that meets their customers' needs. These solutions generally evolve rather than innovate, primarily because their customers rely on consistency over change. AI on the other hand is a new market with many smaller players trying to find product/market fit. Change is rapid and constant. There will be several players who will come and go, but there will be some exciting discoveries that could disrupt some of the mature products. PMs of mature products should pay close attention to the innovation in seeming unrelated areas to discover the potential for improvement. We see this with AI features making their way into ERP solutions.

A mature product has already found product/market fit, so there is not normally new personas per se. However, market research should identify competitors and the personas they are engaging to determine if there is a different persona, or a changing need not yet identified. Since a mature product generally has a healthy user-base, engaging with your current community will help you understand their needs and what other options they may be considering, or discover how competitors are trying to win them over.

It can be difficult to win investment on mature products since engineering teams are looking to build new things. Additionally a mature product is often seen as nearing end of life so engineers would rather build their skills and resumes on other opportunities. This being said, the roadmap will be constrained based on the level of investment the business is willing to make. Ways to address this are to prioritize the features that reduce the cost of operations or entice your existing customers to either consume more or generally improve their view of your offering. They will place greater value on their relationship with you.

Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) are a valuable way to gain insight into your customer's use of your product, as well as their needs that you might not have yet imagined. Mature products have an advantage since they typically have an established customer base to work with. Having regular discussions with your customers outside of of the CAB is important to ensure you are getting timely feedback. Sales can be a valuable channel. A true sales professional will understand the customer's business, their true needs, and may have insights into the industry and competitors. I would not replace direct conversations with customers from sales, but if you have the right sales professional on the team, they can be a valuable partner. A word of caution though, if you have a sales person just asking for features, or worse a comparison of your product against a competitor's, I would avoid taking input from that person or you will end up with a feature factory and a mountain of technical debt.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be identified for every feature and those should then be monitored to determine the effect of the change. This can be the number of trouble tickets filed if fixing a problem, to the average response time (non-functional change), to the use of a particular feature. Depending on the product, blue/green deployments could be used to determine if user behavior changes such as when adding a new feature to the solution. This is not unique to a mature product per se, however a mature product normally has an established customer base which can be surveyed, but I would argue that even then, identifying a proper KPI and using that would yield more accurate results since surveys are costly, error prone and then to suffer low response rates.