Unexpected Lessons from ProductCon 2024: Growth, Innovation, and Connection
ProductCon 2024 was an unexpected but thrilling experience for me. I was in San Francisco for two weeks, soaking in the vibrant startup and tech atmosphere. A friend, Kunal Sanghavi, graciously gave me a ticket to ProductCon just a day before, and I decided to seize the opportunity to meet fellow product enthusiasts. Without much preparation, I knew Product School would deliver great content and excellent interactions, and they truly did. Here are my personal takeaways from this inspiring event, filled with lessons on product growth, innovation, and user-centric thinking.
TLDR: My Takeaway
Each speaker emphasized foundational elements like self-disruption, customer-centric thinking, and focus — core principles that were consistently highlighted regardless of their company size. Although every speaker came from a large enterprise or successful startup, which is not quite the stage of my current pre-seed startup at Recce, the universality of these foundations stood out to me. It’s easy to overlook these foundational elements during the hustle of startup life, but ProductCon was a good reminder of their importance.
What resonated most was starting small to scale big. Carta’s CPO, Vrushali Paunikar, talked about identifying opportunities while keeping focus, and this truly aligns with where we are at Recce right now: building our niche, and ensuring we do it well before expanding.
Watch Online and Let’s discuss
All these talks are available online with recordings and slides. The speakers made each session concise and full of insights, capturing their years of learning. I highly recommend checking out the ProductCon 2024 sessions for a deeper dive into these themes. You may have different perspectives from mine, and I welcome any discussion.
In-Person Conversations are Invaluable
The value of attending ProductCon in person cannot be overstated. Being able to discuss each session immediately with those sitting next to me, and exchanging ideas while waiting in line for lunch — these moments were priceless. ProductCon’s emphasis on encouraging us to compare notes and connect on LinkedIn helped create these opportunities.
This is my first time working on B2B products, and I happened to join a conversation about this topic. Ramon Avila from a B2B company shared his thoughts about purchase decisions with Sujoy Bhattacharjee, Riah S, and me while in line. In the B2B space, decisions are logical — your product must either 1) make money, 2) save money, 3) reduce risk, or 4) meet compliance. No company makes a purchase just because a product “feels good.” Typically, the purchase processes take 4–6 months, but the duration heavily depends on your market and product specifics. He had spent 20 months closing a retail deal with retail merchants with 1K+ stores that ultimately sustained his company’s success.
These kinds of in-person conversations are rare, which is the beauty of attending meetups — you never know whom you’ll meet, but you can be sure you’ll gain valuable insights from these quality interactions.
Session I joined
I like to briefly introduce the highlight of me in the session I joined. Hopefully, this will give you a hint to select which is most helpful to you.
How to Build AI Products Millions of People Actually Use
Noam Lovinsky, Chief Product Officer at Grammarly
The session started with a powerful question: “Have LLMs killed Grammarly?” This immediately captured everyone’s attention. The speaker explained that Generative AI is not the first threat they’ve faced — dealing with disruption is part of their daily reality. What many don’t realize is just how vast the writing market is. Grammarly understands the market deeply, which allows them to address core user needs: anxiety around writing. People often fear making mistakes in emails, messages, or documents, and Grammarly’s mission is to dismiss that anxiety and build confidence for them.
Noam believes there is still significant room for improvement. Current solutions, such as correcting users’ writing, are akin to using MapQuest for navigation — they are good, but not transformative. Grammarly is aiming for the equivalent of an autonomous car in writing assistance, fundamentally changing how users interact with their writing tools.
Ditch the Framework and Rethink Innovation
Spenser Skates CEO and Co-Founder at Amplitude
Spenser emphasized the critical importance of continuous innovation: the moment you stop innovating, you are going to be disrupted. You disrupt yourself versus someone else. This mindset is deeply ingrained at Amplitude.
Innovation effect at scaling actually looks like below. You need to try hard to have innovation as you grow.
Even it is very hard, he shared how to maintain innovation at scale:
- Structure your team: Create a bobble to protect the new team responsible for disrupting the existing product. Other teams can only disturb them at the biweekly meeting.
- Always prioritize customers: Talk with your customers 50% of your time. “What customer is going to use this?” is his mantra.
- Build the culture: Foster a culture that embraces experimentation and the inevitable failures that come with it. Encourage teams to explore new ideas, expect setbacks, share their learnings, and shift towards a collaborative mindset.
Product Leadership for Driving Turnaround Success
Donna Boyer CPO at WeightWatchers
She encourages every product leader should do at least one turnaround. Turn around is kind of like moving a boulder. Stop the boulder that running you over and push it going into another direction. The skills you learn will make you a better product leader.
She also shared a few core steps:
- Create a clear path. What would it take to get it done in the next week? Create the possibility.
- Roadmapping with focus. Make the cut fast and early.
- Make decisions fast and clear.
I feel the turnaround is as intensive challenges that compel product managers to apply their knowledge and realize their full potential. 😨 Scary but worth trying once.
How to Build a Suite of Products That Scale and Connect Seamlessly
Mike Cieri CPO at Gusto
What happens after your first product becomes a success? How can you leverage its momentum to build a scalable product ecosystem? Mike shared his experience at Square and Gusto, both of which started with payroll solutions and eventually evolved into comprehensive ecosystems, with payroll serving as the core foundation.
- The Importance of the First Product’s Success: The first product is crucial, ideally targeting a large, fragmented market, addressing a horizontal need, offering a significant improvement over the status quo, and enabling unique data capture.
- Leverage Your Success: Utilize the assets you already have — your existing customer base. They are reachable, prefer a unified platform over multiple ones, and you already possess valuable data integration and insights into their needs.
- Shift Your Mindset: When adding new products, think of it as expanding a stack, not just adding linearly. The impact of each addition will gradually diminish rather than grow at a steady rate.
I couldn’t help but relate this to the concept of “One dbt” announced at Coalesce this year. dbt began in 2016 by empowering data analysts to adopt software engineering practices through dbt Core, introducing the concept of Analytics Engineering. With the launch of dbt Cloud in 2020, dbt expanded to serve a broader range of customers, from startups to large enterprises. This growth led to the development of various features by the community and dbt Labs, such as dbt-power-users, dbt Cloud IDE, dbt Semantic Layer, and Advanced CI. The “One dbt” initiative aims to unify the platform for all users, whether they use dbt Core, dbt Cloud, or a hybrid approach. dbt Labs wants to connect all into one ecosystem.
Accelerating Revenue Growth through Product
The panel talks with several questions asked by the moderator. The foundations are mentioned by the panelists. There are a few I took notes:
- Build the metric before product release so you can see data flowing in after release. And using one question survey to capture quality data.
- Focus. What would be the one thing you can give to your customers in this cycle?
- Sell. What would I build so you will pay more? Push yourself to think about selling.
These are inspiring and practical questions to enable my thinking.
Next-gen Cybersecurity in the AI Era
Jeetu Patel EVP and CPO at Cisco
Jeetu Patel was absolutely amazing 🤩! His perspective on operating within a large enterprise was incredibly insightful, and the examples he provided made complex topics easy to grasp, especially for someone like me who hasn’t worked in that environment. Here are the standout points that resonated with me:
- Partner with competitors. When a partner surpasses 20% market share, refusing to partner with them mean risking that market entirely. Cisco embraced this mindset by enabling their customers to use Microsoft Team on Cisco devices. It’s all about doing what’s right for the customer, ensuring a win-win situation for both companies.
- Focus on 1% getting better everyday constantly. He draw parallels with Microsoft’s staying power and how Cisco adopts a similar approach. For example, WebEx optimized noise removal technology and for the level up, they embedded it into hardware, benefiting all users — weathers they’re on Zoom, Google Meet or WebEx. This long-term, customer-focused innovation ensures ongoing relevance.
- Simplicity is crucial for scale. In a large organization, you want to do things at speed and scale. Therefore, simplicity becomes vital. Say there are 10% of employees leave and new hires join every year. If the company rewards jargon, the new hires may feel too stupid to ask questions. After 2~3 years, this could lead to 25% of employees not fully understanding important concepts. It’s a really big cost.
- Make sure most of your time on building. Watch out for the time you spend on alignment. Most of your time should be spent on building. Cisco’s decision to consolidate three Executive VP roles into one was a strategic move to reduce alignment overhead and focus on faster execution.
Navigating the Unpredictable Path from Startup to Market Leader
Vrushali Paunikar CPO at Carta
This session resonated with me the most, and there’s so much to unpack. I’ll dedicate another article to dive deeper into her insights. Stay tuned! 🤩
Scaling Product Monetization
Ajay Arora SVP of Product, Disney
In the final session, Ajay Arora truly woke up the room with an interactive moment. He invited everyone to ask the person next to them: What subscriptions do you use, and why? The energy shifted as people started talking non-stop.
After revealing his own answer, he explained the critical difference between subscriptions and memberships:
- Subscriptions: A business model centered on utility.
- Membership: A relationship built on emotional connections with customers. The goal isn’t just utility. You should build an “Emotional Utility” where customers feel connected to the brand on a deeper level.
He also addressed two common questions I’ve had for years during my work on iCook VIP subscription.
- Spend 70% of your effort on retention versus acquisition. Even if you pour in new customer, a leaky bucket will never stay full. Retention is the foundation of sustainable growth.
- Make cancellation easy. It avoids building a bad reputation that could scare off potential customers. People are more likely to join if they know leaving won’t be a hassle.
Open Discussion
This article comes a bit late — one month after I attended ProductCon. The three weeks I spent in San Francisco gave me so much to process and reflect on. I’m deeply grateful to all the speakers who shared their wisdom and to the amazing people I had the chance to meet.
I hope the conversations sparked during the event can continue online. Let’s keep learning and building together.
🤩 I’m happy to hear how you do data or products. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn Karen Hsieh or Twitter @ijac_wei.
🙋🙋♀️ Welcome to Ask Me Anything.
