A Shift in Product Management Paradigm with the Emergence of Cloud Tech
By: Rakshit Srivastava
Tags: Cloud Experience, Product Management, Cloud, Cloud Cost Optimization, Business

A Shift in Product Management Paradigm with the Emergence of Cloud Tech

Clairvoyant has enabled several organizations to successfully migrate their technology stack onto the cloud. Borrowing from its vast expertise working on several cloud technologies, this blog discusses how the cloud is transforming the product management space.

Cloud computing is changing how products are designed. The 2019 State of the Cloud Report found that 94% of 786 IT professionals use the Cloud. Public cloud adoption is currently at 91% while private cloud adoption is 72%. As these numbers show, cloud technology may be a necessity and not a luxury. Many companies are already leveraging the advantages that the cloud has to offer. If they haven’t already migrated to the cloud, many might do so in the near future.

How are product organizations changing?

With the advent of the cloud, information travels very fast in both directions, i.e. across computing systems having attributes like data virtualization or scaling up or down data infrastructure to handle large amounts of data workloads, or providing automated patching across hundreds of machines. This also means a more flexible work structure within the interest of products and services that are adjusted to anticipate customer needs. The new system’s important features are rapid data collection and analysis, followed by over-the-air changes to product software.

The role of Product Manager and how it is impacted by the upcoming cloud technologies

The key areas of Product management include elements of engineering, design, customer experience, business development. The product manager role demands specific skills leaning towards continuous learning, a strategic mindset, networking and problem-solving abilities, and good decision-making capabilities.

Product Management areas of responsibility.

Below are the areas where the cloud has affected the product management space:

1. Product design and customer experience

With the latest improvements in cloud technologies, it’s becoming comfortable and easy for companies to make products and services within the cloud, visualize new products, or create marketing campaigns as cloud-based software prototypes. The cloud is a standard repository (place) for analysis and gathering of data, and therefore it enables companies to perform an increasing number of AI-related data operations, such as image or speech recognition.

2. Create Decision Models for Prioritization

Cloud environments are best optimized with Dev operation practices, such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. These processes have shorter feedback loops than the traditional deployment strategies and empower product managers to make more informed decisions by iterating on product features and prioritizing backlog items and new features.

Product managers should use the knowledge available from the automation tools to assess product quality and system health. Visualizing analytics and the ability to perform A/B testing helps you capture customer feedback quickly.

3. Product Innovation

The shift to the cloud is paving the way for innovation in product management as it acts as an enabler to test feature hypothesis and validate it by performing quick tests. It has also enabled shorter customer feedback time to empower product companies to quickly act and iterate on their feature development. Design thinking is another area where it has enabled and revolutionized the process. The concept of design thinking is based on the idea to understand, ideate, prototype, and evaluate.

Product Managers can take advantage of low-cost upcoming software in the cloud through prototyping, A/B test, and create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

4. Enhance the relationship with customers:

Cloud technologies provide additional communication channels, which make customer engagement more fluid and immediate than the on-premises paradigm. The communication is more continuous in nature, and product managers can now talk to their customers and provide them solutions/resources such as user communities, self-service tools, and documentation libraries.

One of the key benefits for customers is that the cost of switching in-cloud is lower than the on-premise setup. Therefore, to provide the best user experience, product managers should constantly monitor customer expectations through continuous user feedback by analyzing usage and monitoring feedback.

5. Flexible Costs

Initially, many assumptions and considerations are made while designing a product. Any feature needs to take the infrastructure into consideration while being designed. Now gone are the times when budgets were taken on an annual basis, now they are only revisited the subsequent year. The cost of infrastructure is not calculated by treating servers as a hard and fast price asset while modeling in depreciation. Now, you’ve got more flexibility in setting budgets.

The infrastructure capacity can automatically proportion up or down supported by demand and use. If you are doing it right, your costs will scale alongside your user demands. This suggests you’ll make a smaller initial infrastructure investment to check a replacement feature or approach. It rewards incremental and valuable approaches and encourages fast delivery to customers.

Product managers should include optimization items within the backlog. This will include automated reporting on usage, employing containers and microservice architecture, and actively monitoring non-production environments.

Conclusion:

Cloud technologies have revolutionized product management across all domains and improved customer experience, innovation, delivery, and cost management. It has also paved the way for organizations to move ahead and be more dynamic and flexible in their approach to build a stronger relationship with their customer base.