How do you stay updated on emerging trends and technologies that could impact your industry and product?

I proactively stay up to date by immersing myself in a wide range of online resources. This includes diligently reading technical blogs, competitive marketing analysis, and staying informed through personalized RSS feeds and email subscriptions. I also engage with industry professionals and thought leaders on LinkedIn, absorbing valuable insights from their posts and discussions. Podcasts have become an integral part of my learning journey, allowing me to explore diverse perspectives.

In addition to these sources, I regularly consult analyst reports to gain deep insights into market trends, emerging technologies, and industry forecasts. These reports offer expert analysis and help me understand the broader landscape, making them a valuable resource for staying ahead of the curve.

To further expand my knowledge and connect with the latest trends, I actively participate in conferences and webinars. These events expose me to a wide array of fascinating companies and provide a firsthand look at emerging trends in our industry. Moreover, I actively contribute to these events by sharing my own expertise and experiences, enabling me to forge meaningful connections with fellow professionals.

By adopting this comprehensive approach, which includes reading analyst reports, I ensure that I am consistently well-informed about emerging trends and technologies. This empowers me to drive product innovation and maintain a competitive edge in our rapidly evolving industry.

Staying updated on emerging trends and technologies is important for ensuring that products remain competitive and relevant in the market. A caution however is to ensure that I spend more time understanding customer needs than simply focusing on the broad market trends. i.e. in a hypothetical world if I could only choose one, I would choose to focus on understanding customer needs. In reality its a 70/30 split on customer needs vs. market focus.

A simple trick that I use to do this is to have each leader on my team share a sentence or two on what is happening externally within their space - this information from my teams as part of our weekly leadership meeting allows us all to collectively get smarter about trends than we would individually.

A few different sources of information that feed the continuous learning cycle for product leaders can include

1. Market Research and Broader Tech Trends: This can include analyzing competitor products, market reports, industry publications, blogs, and customer feedback.

2. Collaboration with R&D and Innovation Teams: A lot of the best ideas often come from smart people in the organization and keeping an eye out for those and making space to be able to listen for those is important to see potential breakthroughs that could impact our products.

3. Experimentation and Piloting: I encourage a culture of experimentation within the company, allowing us to pilot new technologies or features to gauge their potential impact on our products. It helps that I now work at a company where our products themselves drive to a test and learn approach (https://www.optimizely.com/). Learn from both successes and failures.

4. Networking: Earlier in my career, I underutilized networking as a source of information to stay up to date on emerging trends. I try to connect with other product leaders and executives at our customers to understand how they run their business and what trends they are seeing. This exchange of information offers diverse perspectives and invaluable early insights into emerging trends.