For decades, the way we work stayed the same; the ways teams created products and established strategies were never challenged.

4 months into 2020, every tradition and habit we’d developed in our office spaces was no more. According to research, almost 71% of people are now working from home.

Mindblowing, right? 🤯

Things have changed for product people as well. Whether you’re a product manager, owner, or designer; it’s likely that the way you perceive the field of product has changed too.

Without going into much detail, we’ll go over 3 buzzing concepts in the product space that you should keep an eye on.

Remote Work

We’ve mentioned it above, but remote work might possibly be the new normal for some teams.

Yes, a huge number of companies went back to working from offices a while after the Covid-19 pandemic, but 16% of all companies are currently hiring exclusively remote.

And if we see more companies hit more goals with the work from home system in 2021, companies will keep hiring and supporting more remote workers.

What should you, as a product person, care about remote work?

Managing a remote product team

Whether you’re the VP of Product with the responsibility of 50 employees, or a Product Manager at a startup that manages 3 team members; people who had no idea how remote work actually worked had to manage their teams remotely.

How will you even keep the efficiency the same?

You can’t, and you won’t. If you’ve been managing a team for the last 2 years, you know that an instability when switched to remote work is inevitable but it’s not the end of the world. Every team has experienced it and most got over it by establishing the right methods for efficiency and the right tools for remote team management.

Hiring remote employees

Doesn’t hiring people you’ve never seen in person from another part of the world sound sketchy?

To some, yes, but you don’t have a choice.

Even before Covid, a small percentage of the top talent in the world would rather work from where they are. 

So, if you’re planning to expand your team with people who would outperform, you should be ready to hire remote workers.

Working from home isn’t something new nor it is exclusively an issue for product people, but great products are made by great teams that outperform; which now will have to happen from the comfort of our homes.

Product-led Growth

We’ve never seen a person oppose the value Product-led Growth offers.

PLG is a strategy that places product as the base of your growth. In short, you convince people to buy your product by not telling them your product is cool, but by letting them explore it themselves.

This has been such a huge buzz in the product communities over the last few years and with more and more businesses achieving exponential success with the strategy, the concept will keep growing even more rapidly in 2021.

Having read a ton of resources and listened to the experts on many occasions, we can easily say the most difficult task in becoming product-led is establishing a fascinating user onboarding process that will wow users.

No-code User Onboarding to take the matter into your own hands

You should take the matter into your own hands when it comes to creating and maintaining the user onboarding as the product team.

That’s where no-code User Onboarding tools such as UserGuiding come into play.

These tools enable you to create your own user onboarding experiences by yourself, without having to code. You can choose from dozens of templates or create an onboarding process from scratch.

With the product teams empowered to create the best user onboarding processes without depending on developers, product-led growth and no-code user onboarding will become even bigger.

Utilization of Even More Artificial Intelligence

With AI growing by 270% in the last 4 years, 62% of customers willing to give out their data to AI for more personalization, and a shortage of 1.5 million product and business managers experienced in data; use of AI in data analysis is expected to grow in 2021.

And product teams should adopt (and are adopting) more and more AI to get rid of repetitive tasks and ease processes. 

Perhaps we’re not close to creating the AI Uber of Cyberpunk, Delamain; but there are numerous use cases of artificial intelligence that can take a huge load of responsibilities from your shoulders.

No-code AI to effortlessly predict data

As an analytical product person, you might be knee deep in some data that will take hours, maybe even days to shape into something meaningful. This is where no-code AI can help.

With no-code AI platforms like Obviously AI, you can bend Artificial Intelligence to your will and let it make meaningful predictions and generate value from a set of data.

Where exactly can it be used?

With a no-code AI platform, you can predict churn, opportunities for up/cross-selling, or even video game ratings. The use-cases are practically unlimited, so if you have a set of data on any KPI, let AI take a look to gain real value.

Conclusion

If the last 2 years has taught us anything, it’s that we should stay on our toes.

Our lives are constantly changing and people expect that businesses and products keep up with these changes. Keep these 3 major product trends in mind as you navigate 2021.

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