ProductCon 2024 NYC: Takeaways

I have finally had the time to catch up on ProductCon NYC 2024.

Much like I did after attending ProductCon London earlier this year, I wanted to write my takeaways from this event.

AI might have broadened your capacity to solve age-old problems (Slack)

Jaime DeLanghe, VP of Product at Slack, opened the day with a talk on AI (what else?).

One of Jamie's core messages is to focus on building AI products (or features) that truly solve user needs. Too many product teams want to use AI for the sake of using AI.

No bueno.

Jaime DeLanghe, VP of Product @ Slack, ProductCon 2024

My favourite takeaway from Jamie's talk was an invitation to reconsider your business' age-old problems through the lens of AI. There are probably challenges your business has always been facing that, until now, couldn't be fixed.

Are they worth revisiting?

Decommissioning a product is serious business (Amex)

Purvi Shah, VP of Data Platform at American Express, shared her experience decommissioning a critical legacy system.

This talk particularly spoke to me as I've been going through similar experiences myself recently.

Three pieces of advice stood out:

1. Get buy-in and resourcing. Decommissioning a tool or a service will never sound as sexy and enticing as creating a new feature. If you are constantly competing for attention and resources, it'll never get done. Get stakeholder buy-in and assign cold-hard resources to the project.

2. Describe the upside clearly. It's easy to understand the added value of a new feature. It's not always as easy to understand the value of removing a legacy system. It's your job to make the upside clear, tangible, and relevant to everyone.

3. Make it a company-wide journey. Celebrating new features or new products with big fanfare is common. But who celebrates a decommission? Purvi argues we should. If it's a win for the business, we must celebrate it like any other big project.

Revenue is not revenue (Amplitude)

Ibrahim Bashir, VP of Product at Amplitude, gave us a framework on how to connect 'revenue' to our product work.

Ibrahim says all product work can and should be tied to the bottom line.

(This is a point of contention often brought up in the product community. Fabrice des Mazery gave a talk on a similar topic at ProductCon London earlier this year, read my recap of the event).

Ibrahim argues that product teams that struggle to associate their work with revenue don't think about revenue deeply enough.

Product teams make the mistake of thinking of 'revenue' as solely money coming into the business. This is too simplistic.

Ibrahim Bashir, VP of Product at Amplitude, ProductCon 2024: On revenue

Instead, he breaks down revenue into three categories:

• Making revenue, aka growth. Growth is the 'classic' revenue metric: customer X bought our product because we built solution Y.

• Preserving revenue, aka retention. Retention is revenue from keeping existing customers: customer X renewed their contract because we improved feature Y.

• Sustaining revenue, aka margin. Margin is revenue added to the bottom line by making the product more sustainable: our new infrastructure saves us $X per year.

Championing product initiatives that don't directly make revenue (growth) can feel challenging; even when they are absolutely needed (see Purvi's talk for a great example).

This helps us frame how initiatives/products/features contribute to the business.

There is much more I didn't cover. I strongly recommend watching the talks. Product School's next event is online, so you have no excuse not to attend: register here.