AMA: Workiva Vice President Of Product Management, Chris Omland on Managing Mature Products

I would define a mature product as one that has reached product market fit, is feature rich and integrated with an ecosystem and is stable, secure, performant in terms of its development and has broad market adoption and recognition. * Product Market Fit - A lot has been written about this but I’d look at how much market share the product has within its target market. Does it have a strong and referenceable customer base, is the value proposition well understood and is it viewed as the leading product in that space. * Software development - Generally speaking, mature products have gone through multiple iterations, the product team is highly confident in the ability to maintain, evolve and scale the product. It is also regarded as secure and likely faced a number of security reviews and penetration tests. * Feature-Rich: Typically the product will have a broad set of features that address the key jobs to be done by the target users. * Ecosystem Integration: A mature product often has an established ecosystem around it. This may include a thriving marketplace of third-party integrations, APIs, and developer resources, allowing customers to extend and customize the product to suit their unique needs. Overall, a mature product represents the culmination of extensive development efforts, market validation, and customer success. It demonstrates a strong position within its target market, it’s stable, secure, feature rich, has a high degree of customer satisfaction and is recognized as a clear leader in the marketplace.

Key success metrics for a mature product can vary depending on the specific industry, product, and business objectives. However, here are some common metrics that can be valuable indicators of success: * Revenue and profitability: I often see Product Managers focus just on revenue. It’s important to also consider the cost to serve, which will give you insight into if the product is profitable and viable for the business. * Customer Retention and Churn Rate: This is critical for SaaS business but also to consider a product mature I’d expect to see very high retention rates / low churn rate. I’d also expect the Product Manager to understand what is driving churn. Some churn is unavoidable, for example a customer could go out of business. As a Product Manager you just want to make sure you know if your products churn is truly unavoidable. * Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS: Here I look to use surveys and feedback from your customers. If buyers are different from your users make sure you are checking in with the users. If you have different types of users (e.g. high frequency users and low frequency users) it can be important to track CSAT and NPS for these different user segments. * Adoption and Usage Metrics: I think people can confuse mature with dying products. Mature products should still see adoption of enhancements and strong usage. Usage patterns may vary based on the industry and type of product so it will be important to understand the type of usage you expect your product to see and then measure that. As with any metrics and measurement it’s important to make sure the metrics align to your business and product strategy. Be honest with yourself on what data you need and if that data can provide you insights. You don’t want to be data rich but insights poor.

If you are an outcome driven product team (which I hope you are), I think this should be defined as the change in behavior you expect to see/create for users of your new feature or product. Outputs are easy, outcomes are hard. Before you ever start working on the output (e.g. building) you should clearly be able to articulate: * What is the problem we are trying to solve * What will be the change in user behavior if we solve the problem * How will we know we created that change * What are the measures we need in place to ensure we can track the change in behavior

One of the advantages you have as a Product Manager for a mature product is you will have a well defined set of users and personas. The other advantage you have with a mature product is that you will have a lot of users and usage. This gives you a great opportunity to learn from an established customer base. Having a mature product does not mean you stop doing research and understanding customer pain points. I’d focus on the following: 1. Establish a customer advisory board (CAB) - A CAB is a great way for you to share discovery efforts you have and innovations you are working on for early feedback. You may find CAB members will sign up to be early adopters or beta users. The other great thing that will happen in a CAB is your customers will start talking amongst themselves and this is an amazing opportunity for you to learn as they will likely express things they love, unique ways they are using the product, how they solve different problems and what areas give them the most pain. 2. Customer Support and Feedback Channels: Engaging with customer support teams and analyzing customer feedback channels, such as helpdesk tickets, support chats, or online forums, can provide insights into common user pain points, feature requests, and areas needing improvement. Customer support interactions can reveal firsthand user experiences and provide valuable input for prioritizing enhancements. 3. Competitive Analysis: Conducting research on competing products and monitoring industry trends can provide valuable insights into user expectations, emerging features, and areas of differentiation. Analyzing competitor offerings and user feedback on those products can inform product managers about potential gaps or opportunities to enhance their mature product.

The biggest challenge if you are not careful is you can fall into a trap of just making incremental enhancements and not staying focused on the outcomes you want to create for customers. Its always important a Product Manager is looking for new problems, defining outcomes, thinking how the world and technology changes will change consumer behavior and using all of that to have a vision for how their product will evolve over the next 12-24 months.

The thing to keep in mind with mature products is work does not stop. If you are doing a good job as a Product Manager you will continue to find new customer problems, enhancements to your existing product and ways to create more differentiation. In order to do this work you have to make sure your technology stack is in a good spot. I always say there are three aspects of good software: 1. It does what its suppose to do 2. We can maintain it 3. We can evolve it So when I am working on a mature product I am constantly asking my engineering team where is our tech debt building, what are the implications of that, what benefits do we get if we solve it. I always want to make sure I can maintain and evolve the technology that powers our products.