Author: AB Tasty

AB Tasty is a complete tool for website and conversion rate optimization. We serve as your digital lab, equipped with everything you need to create experiments that will help you to better understand your users and customer journeys so that you can create the clearest and most engaging user experience possible, ensuring your website performs well and yields the maximum results.

Article

May 10, 2023

11min read

Product Manager vs Product Owner: What’s the Difference?

AB Tasty

What’s the difference between a product manager and a product owner or are these roles actually one and the same?

If you’re wondering, you’re not alone. The terms are often used interchangeably and not without reason as sometimes the two roles’ responsibilities may overlap especially in small to medium-sized companies.

However, Product Manager (PM) and Product Owner (PO) are two distinct roles. Although they do share a common goal, delivering products users love, the scope of their responsibilities is actually not identical.

Generally, a product manager is responsible for the why. They shape the product roadmap based on users’ needs and desires. They are focused on business metrics and on whether the product is going in the right direction on a larger scale.

The product owner, on the other hand, is responsible for creating and managing the product backlog. They are operational and on a deadline. For them, it’s all about Scrum, back and forth with developers, and getting stuff done.

However, the lines between the two do often blur. Depending on where you work, you might be used to a variety of setups.

What are the differences in responsibilities of a product manager and a product owner?

The short answer is: it depends. Product Manager Experience

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking ‘of course! Isn’t that true for everything?’

But in this case, it really does depend on a lot of different factors. A chunk of this article will go over them in detail but first we will discuss each role to highlight the responsibilities of each one on its own to be able to then understand their differences.

The product owner role

The term “product owner” comes from Scrum- an Agile framework that helps teams structure and manage their work and solve complex problems effectively by adopting a set of values and principles. A typical Scrum team consists of Product Owner, a Scrum Master and Developers with specific accountabilities.

According to the “Scrum Guide”, the product owner is responsible for “maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team”. Consequently, this role is usually found in organizations that have adopted an Agile methodology.

Among the key responsibilities of the product owner is creating user stories for the development team to implement and ensuring that these stories meet customer requirements. In other words, the product owner advocates for customer needs and represents the voice of the customer to the development team by making sure that the right product is being built.

Some other responsibilities of the product owner include:

Manage product backlog by creating and communicating the backlog items and prioritize them accordingly to maximize value
Define and manage the product vision
Understand market and customer needs and turn them into actionable user stories
Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams such as developers to ensure that products meet customer needs and requirements. They also make sure that goals are clear and business objectives are aligned with the product vision
Act as the primary point of contact for all stakeholders and ensure they have proper buy-in on all major decisions and strategies

The product manager role

As we’ve seen, product owners are more tactical in that their focus is on maximizing value through creating and managing the product backlog. Additionally, product owners are more detail-oriented and have more of a short- to mid-term focus.

Meanwhile, product managers play a more strategic role, which means their focus is more on creating the long-term vision of a product as well as aligning the product roadmap with larger organizational goals.

They then build the product strategy in order to build a concrete product based on its overall vision that spans across the entire roadmap. Put simply, a product manager manages the entire product life cycle and oversees every aspect of its development from the early stages of user research to the moment of product launch.

The responsibilities of the product manager may vary from one organization to the next but they usually include the following tasks:

Conduct user research to determine customer needs to determine product vision
Create and align teams around the product roadmap
Decide what features to build next
Supervise teams and projects to ensure the successful launch of the product

A product manager role is usually more outward-facing in that they speak to customers to define the requirements of the product to be built while a product owner is more inward-facing as they work closely with development teams to ensure the product is being built according to these requirements.

We can look at product owners as an extension of product managers as they apply the strategies outlined by product managers and transform it into an actionable backlog.

In other words, the product manager decides what products or features to build next while the product owner oversees that developers build these products.

Do organizations need both roles?

The simple answer to this question would be it depends.

Various factors will need to be taken into account when it comes to deciding whether you need one or the other or both.

In an ideal scenario, there would be a product manager managing the product strategy and vision and a product owner responsible for executing that strategy. On the surface, it may seem that the responsibilities of the two roles may sometimes overlap as they’re working towards common goals but in reality, their day-to-day tasks differ significantly.

However, not all companies may have the sufficient resources to have two different people dedicated to each of these roles.

Indeed, many small companies may find that having two distinct roles is not necessary and the responsibilities of the product development process can be carried out solely by the product manager. However, processes may become more complex in larger companies and could require a product manager to manage the product life cycle and outline the overall strategy and a product owner overseeing the development process to ensure the tactical execution of that strategy.

It’s important to also keep in mind that the product owner role is tightly linked with the Scrum development approach. Therefore, it’s typically found in teams practicing Scrum. Product managers, for their part, exist in organizations that aren’t necessarily following a specific approach or methodology. They can operate within any framework as part of the product team while product owners in highly Agile businesses come as part of a Scrum team.

Nonetheless, many organizations struggle with the decision of whether to have one or the other or both.

The most important consideration when making this decision is focusing on outcomes and not on the titles. Organizations need to examine their objectives and any weaknesses and bottlenecks in their current processes or structures that may hinder them from achieving these objectives. Such insights are key to building your winning team.

When to consider a product manager vs product owner

Let’s not forget, there are products of all kinds: industrial products, agricultural products, services, chemical products, fashion and software products.

In the SaaS martech space, the thinking goes that all products are built the same way and that companies are all structured the same way. They tend to think there is always a Product Manager and a Product Owner behind each feature.

We’ve already mentioned some things to consider when you’re deciding whether to have both roles. In this section, we look in further detail at some of these factors that determine the right setup for your organization.

1. Momentum

The most important criteria is ‘the momentum of the company.’ What does this mean?

How new/old is the organization?

This question is an important one. It is not directly related to the size of the company or to the number of clients, either.

But rather, the right question here would be: How far or close is the company in relation to a specific “key moment”?

product owner vs product manager ab tasty

What we mean by ‘key moment’ are key phases or events in the life cycle of a company. Some examples include:

the creation of the company
its sale
new funding
tax inspection
a competitor’s release
a crisis
replacement of the CEO
… etc

All these different key stages will have an impact on how the product development is executed.

And therefore, they affect what a product manager does and what a product owner does.

For example, just after a company is founded, the CEO is presumably the best person to take care of the product roles. They are very often (at least in scalable SaaS companies) the one who wears the hat of PO, PM, QA & Support. It is not a choice or a strategy. It is just what the moment implies.

Also, in general, the way a company’s momentum is handled defines how “well” a company is doing.

Has the moment happening right now been anticipated, or is it just the consequence of the reaction of the last moment? The more a company reacts, the more “Agile” you can consider it to be. The more moments are anticipated, the more “visionary” you can consider the company. It’s challenging to be both.

2. Size matters

Size here doesn’t necessarily refer to the number of employees a company has. The size of a company could also refer to the number of:

products
models
features
scopes
price grids
or markets they address.

Cutting the products in the right “dimensions” and deciding if we split per market, per range or per topic can be a lifelong job, because it changes very often and the faster the company evolves, the more it has to be changed.

Size can also be defined by the number of users, clients, partners, retailers, languages, unit systems,… But also and more frequently, a combination of all the above will tell how many PMs, POs and Heads of Product your organization will need.

For example, in many non-profits, product managers are based on the donor personas. You have a PM for small donation amounts (say $10 to $500), one for larger ones ($500 to $10,000) and one for those that are even bigger. Why? Because expectations from each persona type differ radically, and being able to cater to each will help the non-profit grow in the long run.

In short, the size of the company (its client portfolio, its product catalogue…) may define what the PM does, what the PO does, and how many of each there will be.

3. The remaining criteria

But these are not the only factors that define how many PMs, POs or any other product-facing people you will need. Many other factors can also be taken into account, including:

number of developers
number of designers
shipping velocity
technical stacks
tooling
product lifecycle
individual wishes
growth potential
existing need coverage ratio
legacy ratio
human resources policy
the market you address
the level of politics installed in the company.

There is some kind of global agreement (at least in SaaS businesses) on the fact that the split between PM and PO is based on: vision vs. operations, projection vs. immediacy, value vs. metrics. But both are sides of the same coin.

In short, no two organizations are identical. In other words, there’s no one set answer to the question of what a PM vs. PO should do. Some organizations will need many, some will need none. Enabling people to work successfully together is hard enough. Copying and pasting a method won’t help – you have to find your own.

What skills are needed to be a good product manager and/or product owner?

Both product managers and product owners need a good balance of hard and soft skills to carry out their tasks efficiently.

The necessary skills for product managers include:

Excellent communication and collaboration skills
A good amount of technical expertise
Prioritization skills
Good business acumen
Analytical skills

Meanwhile, the necessary skills for product owners include:

Problem solving
Project management skills
Great communication and strong storytelling skills
Deep understanding of user data and analytics

The skills necessary for product managers and product owners may overlap especially in smaller companies where a product manager could also be a product owner and vice versa.

What KPIs are used to measure success for product owners and product managers?

It depends and may vary from one organization to the other depending on their objectives

However, if we tie them into their individual responsibilities, we can give a general overview of the kind of KPIs that can be used to measure their performance.

A product manager, for example, has a wide range of responsibilities including the creation and prioritization of the product roadmap along with cross-team collaboration to ensure alignment around the roadmap.

In that sense, a product manager’s performance is primarily related to product success in line with the overall business goals. Thus, usually product managers’ KPIs should be based on business metrics such as growth, revenue, churn rate and costs.

Meanwhile, product owners have a narrower role and based on the responsibilities we outlined above, their success is measured using KPIs based on delivery, quality, and internal team satisfaction.

Conclusion

A product owner and manager are great assets to have but having both or two separate people taking on these roles is not a must for every organization.

At the end of the day, the question is not whether you should have both a product manager and product owner but whether having both of those roles is right for your organization. You will have to look inward to understand what your business actually needs.

How you decide to structure your teams will depend on the processes you have in place and the kind of outcomes you’re hoping to achieve based on business objectives, customer and company needs.

While we give an overall idea of each role, these responsibilities are not set in stone and they could widely vary on a case by case basis.

What really matters is that you have the right people with the right skills working towards a shared goal, which is building a product customers will love and meets their requirements and needs.

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Apr 25, 2023

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Why You Should Slot Feature Flags into Your Agile Roadmap

AB Tasty

It’s easy to lose your way when building an Agile roadmap.

If you get too detailed with your planning, you end up building a roadmap that is Agile in name alone but looks more like a traditional Waterfall roadmap. If you don’t perform enough planning, then you’ll produce a skeleton of a roadmap that sends you running in multiple directions without ever arriving anywhere meaningful.

The correct approach lies somewhere in the middle. You keep things loose, nimble, and iterative but you also set a beacon that will guide each of your sprints to an impactful destination.

From our experience, one “beacon” that will keep your Agile product roadmap grounded, and your products moving in the right direction, is a simple function— the feature flag.

It isn’t fancy. It isn’t flashy. And it doesn’t look overly strategic. If you use feature flags properly, then they will keep your Agile roadmap focused on the outcomes that matter most without forcing you down a fixed path. Here’s why.

First principles: The real benefit of Agile over Waterfall

It feels like a given these days: if you work as a Product Manager (especially in the tech sector) then you’re going to follow some kind of Agile methodology. Depending on your work history, you may never have worked with a Waterfall roadmap, let alone developed one, in your entire career.

If that’s the case, it might even feel confusing why Waterfall was ever developed. The methodology is slow. It’s rigid. It’s opaque. On the surface, it looks inferior to Agile in every way. But once you dig into it a little, there is one area where waterfall trumps Agile. Waterfall is a better fit within a traditional corporate context than Agile.

While Agile and Waterfall are popular in software development, each one is best suited for different types of projects.

For example, a Waterfall approach makes sense when a software project has clearly defined requirements with low probability that any changes will occur halfway through.

Waterfall fits really well into that broader corporate world’s standard operating procedures. It collects business requirements in a standard one-off phase and then sets them in stone with a concrete project. Waterfall adopts a more linear way of working so that development phases flow in one direction just like the flow of a waterfall, hence the name and tends to occur over a long period of time.

It breaks that project into a clear, crisply defined plan and each step must be completed before moving onto the next phase. In the end, the project’s success will be defined by how well its leaders completed the milestones in the project’s plan, and if they delivered to the project’s requirements on-time and on-budget.

Waterfall methodology isn’t really about trying to create the most effective, efficient, or accountable system. It’s about having the product developers and managers operate in a way that makes sense to a large, lumbering corporation.

A new approach—Agile— was only possible because it was developed outside of this legacy corporate context. In fact, Agile is an iterative approach that came about as a response and alternative to Waterfall’s rigid and linear structure.

And here’s what they came up with: product management would deliver a greater impact if it stopped lining up to what a corporation wanted, and if it instead lined up to what actual real-world users want.

In an Agile approach, which introduces flexibility, teams work on multiple phases at the same time with the goal to enable faster software delivery for the purpose of collecting customer feedback. It does this by breaking down the software development life cycle into sprints, which could last from one to four weeks, that include regular feedback loops.

Incremental releases means teams can build better features much quicker that offer more value and optimize and iterate these features based on the feedback received. It aligns the product not only with the product vision but also with customer needs.

This is the real innovation of an Agile roadmap over a Waterfall one. It isn’t the increased speed & efficiency that everyone fixates on. It’s the simple but powerful fact that an Agile roadmap re-aligns the product manager’s focus onto the user.

Here are some of the advantages of an Agile methodology:

Faster feedback loops
Higher customer satisfaction
Reduced time-to-market
Increased flexibility with more room for innovation
Enhanced productivity by breaking down projects into smaller, more manageable chunks

And most of Agile methodology’s core user-alignment activities occur during Feature Release Management and are brought to life by the right feature flag tool.

A quick caveat: Yes, business impact still matters in Agile

Before we move on, let’s make one point very clear.

When we say Waterfall aligns well to corporate context, we mean corporate operational context. But we don’t mean a Waterfall approach offers the best way to deliver results.

Most often, these big Waterfall projects deliver poor results because they can take months—or even years—between their initial requirements collection and their project’s completion. During this time, the project’s alignment, and even its viability to its users, often shifts, reducing its chances of producing any meaningful business impact.

By contrast, a properly developed and managed Agile roadmap will maintain alignment with its users throughout its entire lifecycle and deliver concrete, measurable, and accountable results.

Feature release management, and feature flags, can also drive this tight connection between user-centered development and KPI improvement. We’ll get to how in just a minute.

Feature release management: The heart of any effective Agile roadmap

From a user-alignment perspective, feature releases are the key point that differentiates an Agile roadmap from a Waterfall roadmap.

Agile looks different from Waterfall in many areas of activity.

In Waterfall, new products and features are released to all users at once, in a single big bang, after a very long development cycle. In an Agile roadmap, new products and features can be—and should be—released at a much faster rate.

This is the key functional difference that makes Agile more user-centered than Waterfall. Rapid and effective feature release management lets you:

Keep your users top-of-mind at all times.
Regularly collect your users’ data and feedback.
Use up-to-date feedback to guide your development cycles.
Repeat the cycle, to make sure you correctly incorporated user feedback in your next round of features and product updates.

If you want to keep your development user-centered then feature release management is critical to effectively incorporate into your Agile product roadmap. Here’s how.

The 5 key elements to include in your Agile release planning

Agile release planning is key to building customer-centric products by allowing you to prioritize and release product requirements as needed. In other words, it allows you to plan your product’s incremental releases- your features- and helps ensure your project is headed in the right direction and following the Agile methodology.

It differs from a product roadmap in that release planning focuses on one sprint at a time (on short-term goals) while a product roadmap looks further ahead in the future and focuses on long-term objectives.

Put simply, the goal of a release plan is to help you prioritize features of your product and focus on releasing specific features in less time to improve the customer experience. Thus, teams use this kind of planning when they’re dividing a project into short sprints or increments instead of planning for one major product release.

It is a unique approach to planning as it takes into account the flexible nature of software development by leaving room for any necessary adjustments as you go through the development lifecycle to incorporate customer (and stakeholder) feedback.

The idea is to be open to prioritizing tasks to provide improved value to your customers.

Here are the key elements to include in each of your feature releases that will turn them into a critical, recurring touchpoint between you and your users.

1. User segmentation

At a basic level, you need to carefully select which user audiences you will first release (and test) new features and products to.

At a deeper level, user segmentation can flow throughout every step of feature release management. You can personalize the experience of your new products and features to each segment you test them with. In other words, you try out different versions of each new product or feature with different segments.

During testing, you can rapidly toggle features off for segments who are not responding well to them. And you can even guide the ongoing development of your products and features depending on which user segments respond the best to them.

2. KPIs measurement

However you measure product or feature success, you must quantify it, and measure those metrics in real-time during each release.

Doing so serves two purposes: First, it gives you the ability to produce an accurate, objective measure about which products and features are succeeding with which segment (and whether or not you are actually improving their performance during each development sprint).

Second, they let you demonstrate concrete, measurable, and accountable results for your business—to both report on the success of your most recent development, and to create meaningful justifications for more robust rollouts.

3. Governance

You need some formalized way to make decisions off the data that you produce. When do you toggle a feature on or off and for who? When do you roll out the product or feature to new segments? When is a product or feature ready to deploy to your entire user community?

To make these decisions, you must have established definitions for success (see “KPIs”), and defined procedures for monitoring and acting on release performance data both in real-time and during post-release recaps.

4. A/B testing

Any time you are segmenting audiences, testing multiple variations on products and features, and collecting copious amounts of real-world user data, then you are setting the stage for multiple A/B tests.

By performing comprehensive A/B tests during each of your feature releases, you will eliminate multiple developmental dead ends and narrow the list of viable “next steps” for your next sprint.

5. Automation

If you incorporate these four elements, then your feature release management process will get pretty complex, pretty quickly. But if you select the right tool to automate as many of these elements and their internal processes,as possible, then you can let go of most operational elements. Afterwards, you would simply sit back during feature releases and focus on making informed decisions before, during, and after each of your releases.

By incorporating each of these five elements into your feature release process, you will ensure that each of these critical touch points brings you and keeps you as close as possible to your users.

And, thankfully, there is one single function that incorporates each of these elements and makes them a practical and effortless habit in your Agile roadmap— feature flags.

Bringing it all home: Feature flags

At their core, the goal of feature flags is to enable you to toggle features on or off, with a single click on your dashboard, without having to adjust your codebase.

That may seem very basic at first glance but buried in this simplicity is a lot of depth, and a lot of room to easily deliver on each of the above elements of user-centered feature release management.

With the right feature flag tool, you can:

Perform sophisticated real-time control over which user segments get new products and features.
Attach core KPIs to your releases and immediately kill products and features that are not performing well while immediately expanding the release of those that are knocking it out of the park.
Monitor your results (and take action) in real-time.
Easily manage and act on complex A/B tests.
Bundle feature flags in with a complete suite of feature release functionality to wrap the whole exercise up in a single, highly-automated platform.

We kept each of these functions in mind when we built our own Feature Flag function, and release management platform.

If you’d like to take it for a test run and see how easy you can incorporate the core actions of Feature Flagging, feature release management, and user-centered Agile product management into your roadmap, drop us a line!

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Prevent and Manage Technical Debt Using Feature Flags

AB Tasty

In modern software development, teams often have to prioritize speed and less than ideal solutions to put out products quickly to keep up with fast-changing consumer demands.

Unfortunately, taking such shortcuts could have dire consequences in the form of heavy costs or technical debt that could take a toll on your code quality and your whole software development and delivery processes if left unattended.

In this article, we’ll explore what technical debt is, the causes and different types of technical debt as well as how to manage it, largely through the use of feature flags.

What is technical debt?

The term “technical debt” was first coined by Ward Cunningham, one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, in the early 1990s. Since then, the term has gained momentum and is a serious issue that many tech teams today still struggle to manage properly.

His reason for its name is that technical debt bears direct correlations with financial debt. Software development teams can take shortcuts to satisfy immediate business requirements, but the debt plus accrued interest will have to be paid at a later stage.

Technical debt is the consequence of action taken by software development teams to expedite the delivery of a software application or specific feature which later needs to be refactored or redeveloped.

Put simply, technical debt refers to the build up of technical issues during software development due to a number of causes which we’ll discuss in the next section.

If not attended to, technical debt can spiral out of control, resulting in the total breakdown of the software development and maintenance lifecycle.

Therefore, it is critical to ensure that DevOps and software development teams pay close attention to technical debt management and technical debt reduction methods.

Here are some warning signs to look out for:

Buggy, difficult to maintain code
Unstable production environments
Bug fixes introduce more bugs
Data inconsistency
Decreased development pace and bottlenecks

What causes technical debt?

We can deduce that technical debt comes mainly as a result of delivering a release quickly at the expense of “perfect” code.

In other words, it often comes as a consequence of ineffective and inadequate practices to build software for a short-term benefit in the interest of saving time.

That is one major cause but it’s also more complex than that as technical debt can be due to a number of other reasons.

Some causes behind technical debt include:

Time pressure: Teams today are under great pressure to deliver releases quicker than ever before to remain competitive and meet consumer demands fast.
Poor code: This could be due to a number of reasons including use of tools without proper documentation or training.
Insufficient software testing: Lack of QA support or automated testing means a lot of bugs could remain in the code undetected which gives rise to technical debt.
Outdated technology: Over time, many technologies become obsolete and are no longer supported and could become a source of debt.
Lack of skill: Teams can sometimes unknowingly incur debt because they lack the skills to write better code. For example, having junior developers working on building complex software beyond their skill and experience level is a sure way to accumulate debt fast.

Over time, all these factors could result in accumulation of debt that will need to be addressed. The real danger is not actually having the debt in the first place- as often that’s inevitable- but it’s allowing this debt to build up with no plan or strategy to pay it off in the future.

Types of technical debt

There are many ways to classify technical debt. One of the most popular ways comes from Martin Fowler’s technical debt quadrant.

The quadrant is based on the idea of not whether something should be considered debt per se but rather whether this debt can be considered prudent.

What does this mean exactly? Think of it as a way of answering the question of whether all technical debt is bad and the answer, according to the quadrant, would be “it depends.”

Martin Fowler’s technical debt quadrant seeks to categorize the types of technical debt according to intent and context.

Generally speaking, there are two overarching types of technical debt: intentional and unintentional (deliberate vs inadvertent).

Intentional technical debt occurs when software development teams choose to leave their code as it is, without refactoring or improving it, to reduce the time-to-market metrics. In other words, they choose to incur technical debt.

Unintentional technical debt, for its part, occurs when poor code is written and so the code quality will need to be improved over time.

Suffice to say, as soon as these technical debt-causing issues are highlighted, it is imperative to fix them as quickly as possible.

Let’s take a closer look at the 4 main types of technical debt, according to Martin Fowler:

Reckless/deliberate: Teams possess the knowledge to carry out the task but decide to go for a “quick and poor quality” solution to save time and for quick implementation.
Prudent/deliberate: Teams are aware of the debt they’re taking on but decide that the payoff for an earlier release exceeds the costs. However, in this scenario unlike the above, teams have a plan on how to deal with the repercussions of taking on this debt.
Reckless/inadvertent: This is arguably the least desired form of debt where teams don’t have enough experience and blindly implement a solution without applying best practices. As a result, they’re unconscious of the fact that technical debt is being accumulated. Thus, no real plan to address this debt can be formulated.
Prudent/inadvertent: This occurs when teams apply best practices during software development but still accumulate debt due to unexpected coding mistakes. Thus, this type of debt is unintentional. Teams have the necessary skill and knowledge to identify and pay off the debt but the experience serves as a learning opportunity for developers to optimize and improve the code for future projects.

When it comes down to it, deciding what to classify as technical debt is not always black or white. It requires putting things into context first. This is especially important when you think of the pressure on teams to put out products quickly to meet consumer and market demands.

This means that they will constantly have to deal with the dilemma between taking on technical debt or delaying a release. However, it’s more of a matter of how to deal with and manage this debt rather than avoiding it completely- which may not always be possible- to minimize negative impact as much as possible.

Types of technical debt to avoid

At this juncture, it is reasonable to conclude that teams should avoid technical debt. Additionally, it is imperative to minimize and eliminate tech debt, particularly reckless and deliberate code debt.

Over time, technical debt could become too expensive to fix the longer it remains unfixed as “interest” builds up the same way that financial debt accrues interest. Eventually, technical debt can lead to a code becoming harder to maintain as the foundation of the codebase deteriorates. This will ultimately result in lower-quality products with the company reputation taking a major hit.

Prudent tech debt is the partial exception to this rule. This form of code debt can benefit software development organizations as part of the reducing time-to-value methodology.

In other words, the advantages of delivering a product to market as soon as possible can outweigh the cost incurred by technical debt. However, it is critical to monitor the tech debt to ensure that its value does not spiral out of control, negating the benefits of the reduced time-to-value exercise.

How feature flags can help with technical debt

Feature flags can help reduce the technical debt accumulated during the development, testing, and deployment of a software application.

However, if feature flags are not monitored and maintained, they can increase the application’s technical debt.

Before we look at how feature flags reduce technical debt, let’s take a quick look at what a feature flag is:

“Feature toggles [feature flags] are among the most powerful methods to support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)… [They] are a method for modifying features at runtime without modifying code.”

One of the most common sources of technical debt is the pressure to release a version of the software application.

The business demands that the software be deployed, and they don’t care how the developers make it happen. Feature flags are a valuable tool to help manage the “pressure-cooker” release environment.

There are several benefits to the use of feature flags as a software release and deployment aid, including:

The risk of deploying a bug-ridden application is substantially reduced. Developers can simply switch off features that are not yet complete or thoroughly tested.
By implementing a CI/CD methodology (continuous integration/continuous delivery), developers can often use feature flags to deploy new features without waiting for the next release to be deployed. In summary, this functionality reduces the time-to-value and increases customer satisfaction: A win-win for all.
Implementing feature flags is also a means to negotiate with management about which functionality to complete before specified deadline dates, increasing the flexibility to develop and test features thoroughly before deploying them.

In summary, feature flags help manage and reduce technical debt by helping software development teams manage the development/testing/deployment lifecycle more effectively.

Feature flags are useful for dark launching, a practice of releasing specific features to a subset of your user base to determine what the response is to a new feature or set of new features. As an aside, this is also known as a canary deployment or canary testing.

Testing in production is another form of dark launching. By utilizing this option, you can assess the application’s health, collect real-world app usage metrics, and validate that the software application delivers what your customers want.

Feature flags can also create technical debt. While they play a significant role in mitigating technical debt in all other areas of the software development lifecycle, implementing them is usually via a set of complex if-else statements.

Therefore, in practice, a feature flag is an if statement defining the path between at least two different code paths depending on one or more conditions.

The following simple scenario describes how to implement feature flags.

Let’s assume that an e-commerce site offers free shipping for all customers that spend more than a specified minimum amount at one time.

This code sample is an example of a feature flag. If the total amount paid is more than $50, then the shipping is free. Otherwise, the shipping amount is the amount spent multiplied by the rate (a percentage of the total amount).


def ShippingYN(amt, rate) :
  if amt > 50.0 :
    shipping = 0.0
  else :
    shipping = amount * rate

  return shipping

Best practices using feature flags to avoid technical debt

As with all aspects of software development and deployment, it is vital to observe the following feature flag best practices:

1. Feature flag management

As your organization matures in its use of feature flags as an integral part of the software development/testing/deployment lifecycle, it is vital to be mindful of the fact that some of the feature flags are short-term and should be removed; otherwise, they will add to the application’s complexity, resulting in more technical debt.

Consequently, it is imperative to have a plan in place to remove the flags before even setting them.

It is also possible, and a good idea, to track and measure different metrics for each feature flag, such as how long it has been active, its states (on/off), different configurations, and how many code iterations it has been through.

Once your feature flag has been through the required number of iterations to code and test a feature, this flag must be removed and the code merged into your code repository.

Note: Before removing a feature flag, it is a good idea to evaluate its function and purpose; otherwise, there is a risk, albeit slight, that the flag might still be needed and is erroneously removed.

A vital part of the feature flag management process is to define and implement temporary and permanent flags.

1.1 Temporary feature flags

As highlighted above, if a feature is designed to be rolled out to every application user or you are using the feature as a short-term experiment, it is critical to attach a monitoring ticket to this flag to make sure it is removed once the feature has been deployed or the experiment is concluded.

Examples of these temporary flags which can last weeks, months, or even quarters, include:

Performance experiments: A performance experiment is similar to A/B testing, where two versions of the feature are deployed with the idea of determining which one performs better. A/B testing employs the same construct in that it deploys two versions of an element to the application’s user base to select which one users prefer.

Painted-door experiments: These experiments are only used in the early phases of the software development lifecycle and are User-Interface mock-ups to determine any customer interest. Once the consumer interest has been determined, these flags can be removed.

Large-scale code refactoring: It is a good idea to deploy code refactoring changes behind a feature flag until you are positive that the functionality has not been changed or broken. Once the refactoring exercise is complete, you can remove these feature flags.

1.2 Permanent feature flags

Permanent feature flags are used to implement different features or functionality for different groups of users.

As a result, it is reasonable to assume that these flags will remain in the software application indefinitely or at least for a very long time.

Therefore, it is vital to ensure that they are monitored, documented, and reviewed regularly. As with the temporary flags, there are several different types, including:

Permission flags: These feature flags are helpful when your product has different permission levels, such as the ability to create journal entries in an online financial general ledger or whether users can view a list of these entries. A second use case for these flags is your SaaS application has different subscription models like Basic, Professional, and Enterprise.
Promotional flags: These flags help implement regular promotions. For instance, let’s assume your e-commerce store offers a Mother’s Day promotion every year where specific products bought include the shipping costs.
Configuration-based software flags: Any software driven by config files will benefit from using feature flags to implement the different possible configurations. A typical use case for config flags is the layout of the User Interface.
Operational flags: These feature flags help manage a distributed cloud-based application. For example, additional compute engines can be spun up when the workload reaches a specific level.

2. Use a central code repository

Feature flags or toggles are most commonly stored in config files.

Another option is to keep them in a database table. However, let’s look at how to manage these config files. Large systems can have many if not hundreds of feature flag settings. Apart from using a database table, the only way to manage these settings is to store them in config files.

The best way to maintain the config files is to upload these files to a feature flag library in a central code repository like Git.

Not only is Git good for keeping control of these files, but it is also a valuable version control system. Developers can use it to create feature branches of config files used during the software development process without negatively affecting the production version of these files.

Once the config files have been updated and tested, they can be merged back into the Git master branch using a merge request.

3. Adhere to naming conventions

It is absolutely critical to give your flags intuitive, easy-to-understand names, especially for long-term flags, although it is a good idea to include short-term flags in this best practice.

Naming the feature flags, flag 1, flag 2… flag 100 will not help people who have to work with these flags in the future.

A good example of wisely named feature flags can be found in the scenario highlighted above.

It is reasonable to assume that the flag, AdvancedSearchYN, is one of hundreds of flags used in our eCommerce application. Even if they are the only two flags used, it is still advisable to give them intuitive, related names.

For more details on the best way to manage feature flags to keep technical debt at bay, download our feature flag best practices e-book.

4. Use a feature management system

Using a dedicated feature flagging system is a great way to manage flags in your code so you don’t find yourself with piles of technical debt from unused or stale flags.

AB Tasty’s server-side feature enables you to remotely manage feature flags and take control over how, when and to who features are deployed to mitigate risk while optimizing user experience.

To help with technical debt management, AB Tasty provides dedicated features to keep control over your feature flags. Two of them are especially useful in this regard:

The Flag Tracking dashboard lists all flags setup in the platform, with their current values (ex: on/off) and campaigns that reference them. This way, you can easily keep track of every single flag purpose (ex: flag 1 is used in progressive rollout campaign X, while flag 2 is used in feature experiment Y). When you manage hundreds of flags, it turns out to be a real time saver.
The Code Analyzer is an advanced Git integration to see where your flags are used in your repository. In conjunction with the flag tracking dashboard, you can quickly find flags in your code that are not referenced in any campaigns. It also deeply integrates with your current CI/CD pipeline. As a CLI and a Docker image, it analyzes your codebase and detects the usage of flags everytime code is pushed to a specific branch or tag. This way, your flag dashboard is always in sync with your codebase. On one hand, you can safely remove flags if they are not referenced in campaigns, and on the other hand you make sure that flags your campaign is relying on are indeed available in your code. View code on Github.

Feature flag references in github/gitlab codebase — The Flag Tracking dashboard with flag references to the codebase

Try it for free!

Final thoughts

As described throughout this article, feature flags in DevOps and software development play a fundamental role in managing and reducing technical debt.

Consequently, it is vital to implement a feature flags framework as a foundational part of the software development lifecycle.

Cobbling it on afterward can increase the risk of incurring more technical debt, especially once the system grows in scale. Thus, these feature flags must be carefully maintained and monitored to ensure that they don’t amass additional technical debt.

Finally, it is essential to be mindful that, while technical debt is primarily seen as a negative, there are instances, as described by Martin Fowler’s technical debt quadrant, where incurring prudent and deliberate tech debt can be beneficial.

It is also worth noting that both Agile and Scrum use the concept of technical debt in a positive way to reduce the time-to-value of a new application or feature release, driving sustainable growth through customer satisfaction.

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AB Tasty User Club: Empowering Customers Through Better Feedback and Engagement

AB Tasty

At AB Tasty, we have always put client feedback at the heart of our product roadmap. Listening to our clients’ needs and helping them achieve their goals is a top priority for us. We just don’t say it, we do it:

🎁 55 new features brought to users in 2022
📣 10 market releases per year
🤝 1545 feedback requests processed

To go one step further, we have decided to launch our User Club! 🎉

The AB Tasty User Club is a new opportunity for you to share your feedback, experiences, and needs with us. Being part of the Club means you’ll have exclusive access to:

Our new features
A way to interact directly with our Product Managers and Designers
Our product related events
A real community where you can share your usage and hear best practices from other users

A successful launchpad for our User Club

As a first step, we organized our first User Games of the year in January 2023 in Paris, France on the theme of data, monitoring and performance analysis in CRO activities.

This event was a great success for our Product teams and for the 5 customers who attended to discuss their data understanding and analysis needs. We welcomed participants from different industries, all interested in data analysis techniques and how to use them to improve products and services. We also invited experts in the field of data analysis to share their experience and knowledge.

AB Tasty User Club

Baptiste Deroche, Product Designer @AB Tasty:

“This event was the perfect opportunity to validate and challenge assumptions we have about the product. We learned a lot from our customers that day, and it’s a really good start to getting closer and closer to our end users.”

Stéphanie Duchemin, Product Design Team Leader @AB Tasty:
“It was a pleasure to meet our users again in a real session and not remotely, and I think that the pleasure was shared. This reinforces my conviction that feedback is not the same in a face-to-face session as in a remote one. Through our discussions we learned and discovered some pain points that were not necessarily related to the initial topic and that will feed our roadmap for at least 6 months!”

Mariza Baxevani, Web Conversion Specialist @Prestashop:

“It was a collaborative and enriching moment where each participant presented their feedback, their experimentation process and their vision of the tool. It’s really reassuring to know that AB Tasty values its users’ feedback. I will gladly participate in this type of event again!”

The AB Tasty User Club was created to offer our customers a space to discuss and share their opinions and suggestions. We have received a lot of positive feedback from participants and this gives us even more motivation to create other similar projects and events where you will be at the forefront.

Stay tuned for the upcoming events or announcements! If you are not part of the Club yet, do not hesitate to talk about it with your dedicated Customer Success Manager!

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5 Ways to Detect Personalization Opportunities

AB Tasty

You know it best: shaping the customer journey on your sites or apps from search to cart has become key for conversions. That’s why you’re using state-of-the-art tools to collect data, run campaigns as well as experiment and personalize experiences. But these are just tools that help you execute your plan. A big part of your job is to think about and play with ideas to tackle your business goals around loyalty, conversions, and turnover.
Did you know that you can rely on your stack for shaking your ideation process and detecting ROI-driven business opportunities?
If you’re using AB Tasty, enjoy now tailored sources of inspiration available for you, such as the Audience Recommendation, available for websites in English and French.

Dedicated to letting your good ideas take flight, Audience Recommendation will quickly identify segments of customers that are likely to be leveraged efficiently in your conversion strategy. Once connected to your site, it will suggest ideas of audiences based on your visitors’ interests that are likely to be converted into a thematic journey.
But that’s not the only way to quickly find opportunities and turn them into wins.
Read this article that suggests 5 ways to detect personalization journeys that will help marketers meet their business goals.

1. Engage your consumers based on the content they like

Let’s say you’re in charge of an e-commerce website: clothing, shoes or books. Think about the wide range of products or services that are available. Thousands of references. Do your buyers browse your entire catalog before adding items to the cart? We doubt it. We rather assume on the one hand you deal with bestsellers items, and on the other you have niche, premium or overstock that have trouble selling. How do you handle them today in your conversion strategy?
Our suggestion: Come play matchmaking with AB Tasty’s Content Interest. Identify key audiences that are sensitive to content found on your site – and combine topic-interested visitors with these items that make perfect sense for them. Our in-house AI suggests building segments based on browsing and transaction history thanks to Natural Language Processing. And that enables you to think about customer experience differently, aligning visitors’ interests and business needs in deeply personalized campaigns.

But even better: you will always be aware of current trends on your site – therefore able to adapt quickly to these always-changing consumers’ needs.

Let’s take a look at a typical online store such as a shopping website for shoes, on which our AI runs for content interest. You can see below an example of content segments and the volume of views and transactions it represents.
Wearers of black leather boots? Or rather low-top sneakers? Associated views and transactions help you make decisions about campaigns you could be inspired about. Of course, content-based messaging, with relevant offers such as targeted discounts, free shipping, or loyalty points, is very likely to be effective.

2. Build the journey based on visitor engagement

Looking to seduce newcomers to engage with you? Or to reward those who are loyal to your brand? But there are also those who come regularly and never shop. Do you already have a strategy in place for your different groups of visitors?
With AB Tasty you can target shoppers based upon the profile they have with your site. Here again, our AI comes into action. It will automatically allocate traffic into 4 logic groups of users: Disengaged, Wanderers, Valuable and Loyal consumers. That means you can have a dedicated strategy for each group and deploy it easily, combined with dedicated triggers to increase even more campaign success.
Like these newcomers, you don’t want to scare them right? Let them browse a bit or take action before displaying your campaign. Timing is key!
A good use case? Kiehl’s Australia decided to display a specific message for those visitors that are navigating and revisiting but not buying, these are wanderers. “Still deciding?” Discover our latest limited time offers”. Using stress marketing and acknowledging the uncertainty of these shoppers combined with deep targeting options resulted in an uplift of 2,26% in transactions for the brand.

3. Seize the low-hanging fruits

They started shopping with you but left – and are now back on your site! Within AB Tasty you can very easily build campaigns based on abandoned carts, that target – as the name already says – those who were just one step away from completing their purchase journey. You can decide to target them all, or you could do different scenarios depending on cart value or numbers of items in the shopping cart.
Our secret tip for these? Experiment! Find out whether shipping costs, promo code or components of your checkout page can be leveraged to optimize conversions and re-engage on cart abandonment. You can trust our experience there: there’s nothing like A/B testing to know best what ideas work and what ideas don’t work.
Then, only you can really define what elements contribute to retaining abandoners on your site.

4. Rely on your experimentation strategy

We just mentioned it. Seems obvious, especially if A/B testing is part of your strategy, but analyzing campaign results in depth allows you to detect…ideas.
When you test ideas, while this idea might not prove consequently winning regarding the output on the entire audience, it still might be a large win for certain audiences, e.g. for mobile users against desktop users. Or for returning visitors rather than new ones.
When reading A/B test reportings, don’t forget to filter and narrow down to detect these opportunities. Because statistics can prove that the magic you were trying to achieve for everyone is at least working for certain groups of people.

5. Use the force of your datalayer

Segment, Google Analytics 4, Tealium, Mixpanel, …. No matter what solution you use to analyze, understand and follow your customers, you might have identified already interesting audience segments from your first-party data. Why not use these to run your personalization strategy directly on AB Tasty? Once you have connected your preferred solution there, you can launch campaigns on these segments (or cohorts or traits) and couple them with further targeting and triggering options.
Example? Imagine a site offering holiday flats to rent. They know when their loyal customers usually book their holidays. That’s why they run campaigns targeting either those who enjoy Summer or on those – in the screenshot below – who like booking their vacations when Santa is around. In the same spirit, we could also couple that targeting with a weather trigger – snow or sea alternatives when it’s raining on the favorite destination.
We could even make it snow on the screen with AB Tasty’s no code snowflake widget, but that’s a question of idea.

Looking for further campaign inspiration? Check out the 50 tests you should know or see for yourself the AB Tasty app in action!

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5 Examples of Email Remarketing Campaigns to Get Inspiration From

AB Tasty

Have you been dreaming of an email marketing campaign to generate more revenue? If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Whether you’re in B2B or B2C marketing, it’s no secret that email marketing is a super effective way to communicate with your customers on your terms.

In fact, according to EMarketer, 80% of retail professionals quote email marketing as their greatest driver of customer retention.

However, email marketing has evolved so much over the years.

In order to connect with your customers, increase sales, onboard customers, move buyers down the purchasing funnel, or achieve other goals, you have to get personal.

Consumers want personalized content; therefore, they’re likely to react better to all personalized forms of communication – specifically, email remarketing campaigns.

In other words, email remarketing campaigns are a great resource for you to connect with your consumer and generate more revenue.

Email remarketing defined

Email remarketing consists of capturing and using information about your customers in order to achieve better marketing results through personalized email marketing campaigns.

When a visitor browses a website, marketers can access navigation information using a browser cookie. A browser cookie is a small file that tracks behavior and actions for each visit.

Similar to retargeted ads, email retargeting campaigns use behavioral and action-based information to help tailor personalized email campaigns. However, email retargeting can also be used to generate retargeted ads on social media and display networks.

Now let’s discuss why you should use email remarketing.

Why you should start email remarketing

Email remarketing campaigns allow marketers to produce highly targeted, highly converting campaigns.

Because they work on the same principles found in retargeted ads, email remarketing can achieve better marketing results compared to traditional digital advertising like Facebook Ads and Google AdWords campaigns.

Let’s see what email remarketing can do.

1. Re-engage your customers

Let’s take a look at a typical situation: Most visitors visit one or two product pages before leaving your website altogether.

So, how can you re-engage these visitors?

Email remarketing can use tracked information to display relevant ads in emails. You can re-engage visitors by showing them special offers related to the product they just saw.

If used wisely, email retargeting helps your company re-engage inactive customers and increase customer retention among active users.

2. Achieve better clickthrough rates

Email remarketing allows for personalized and relevant ads.

According to data collected by SuperOffice, emails that are segmented, or targeted to a specific group of people, perform almost 40% better than a general email.

Imagine what you could do with a 40% increase in your open rate.

3. Drive more sales

With increased clickthrough rates and more chances to convert, your retargeted customers are likely to bring in more revenue for your company.

In fact, Hal Open Science reports that email remarketing conversions can help you increase your overall conversions by 10%.

That’s because your campaigns target just the right person at the right time.

4. Reduce shopping cart abandonment

One could say that email remarketing was basically invented to reduce cart abandonment.

According to the Baymard Institute, nearly 70% of shoppers abandon their carts. Email remarketing is a huge opportunity to remind shoppers of what they’ve been browsing and to recover this “lost sale.”

At the same time as you remind your customers about their desired products, email remarketing produces a fear of missing out (FOMO) effect. Your customer will feel light pressure as this might just be their last chance to buy that product at a discounted price.

5 examples of email remarketing campaigns

1. FOODPANDA: FoodTech

FoodPanda knows that hunger cannot wait. In the image above you can see that they retarget with two magical words: “FREE+DELIVERY”

A simple free delivery offer could be all it takes to convince your customer to try a new restaurant that they’re already been looking at.

2. DUOLINGO: EducationalTech

Duolingo remarketing email

Duolingo, a language-learning app, applies a different approach in its remarketing campaign: emotion.

If you haven’t used the app recently, they let you know that you haven’t been seen in a while and that it’s time to get back on track with your learning.

They even take it to another level by mentioning that you’ve made Duo the owl, the face of their app, sad because of your absence.

This is a great way to apply human emotion to a remarketing campaign to re-engage users.

3. DEBENHAMS: Fashion

cart abandonment email example

In Debenhams’ email remarketing campaign, they point out items a customer was browsing but that they haven’t added to their cart.

This email also includes enticing CTAs for buyers: FREE next-day click & collect and fuss-free returns. What more could you ask for?

Interestingly enough, this email doesn’t mention the customer’s name, but it still feels personal as it is targeted directly at customers viewing the product.

4. NIKE: Sportswear

In a similar fashion, Nike triggers a retargeted email after you’ve left some items in your cart.

While they don’t display your abandoned items, they insist on having you talk with a sales representative over the phone or through their online chat.

Finally, they also heavily highlight their “FREE SHIPPING – FREE RETURNS” policy in order to convince undecided customers.

This is especially important to highlight considering that shipping cost is one of the main reasons for cart abandonment.

5. FRESHBOOOKS: Saas

freshbooks email remarketing example

Want to retarget your own customers to upgrade to a new plan? Take a look at FreshBooks’ email campaign as an example.

With 19 days left in a free trial, they offer 60% off any plan for your upgrade. This not only entices the user with a discount but also reminds them that this offer is time sensitive according to how much of their free trial they have used.

Email retargeting best practices

Now that you have a few examples to start your retargeting campaigns, here are some best practices to keep in mind while you set them up.

Timing is everything: The sooner you can start your campaigns, the better. If you contact website visitors shortly after they’ve clicked off your page, they’ll be more likely to return and reconsider your products/services.
Keep it relevant: To be sure you’re targeting the right users, email segmentation is the best way to go. Segmentation is the process of separating the subscribers in your email list into smaller groups. This will help you be sure that you’re sending the right emails to the right people.
A/B test your campaigns: An A/B test will compare two versions of your email to test which one produces the best results. After a few tests, your team should start to identify trends and common patterns that lead to higher open and click-through rates.

Whether you’re looking to personalize your email content to capture customer attention or A/B test your subject lines to determine the best-performing phrase, choosing the right software will help you transform your ideas into reality.

AB Tasty is the complete experience optimization platform to help you create a richer digital experience for your customers — fast. From email remarketing to A/B testing your subject lines, this solution can help you achieve personalization with ease.

Connect with your website visitors

Whether an email remarketing campaign will be a new tactic for your team or you’re looking for some best practices to employ, these campaign examples will change the way you communicate with your consumers.

Relevant and personalized content sent at just the right time is key to generating more revenue with your email campaigns.

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What Makes a Great Product Lifecycle Manager

AB Tasty

We usually only see a product or service when it’s ready for consumption.

But to get it to the shelf—both physically and virtually speaking—an all-encompassing process must take place. Even once a product or service is fit for consumption, there are a number of key considerations to make to ensure its success and market stability.

Effective product lifecycle management (PLM) is integral in almost every sector imaginable. It’s the product lifecycle manager’s job to spearhead the entire process, from development to decline.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of PLM as well as to look at the core duties of a product lifecycle manager and what skills make a great product lifecycle manager in the modern software development world.

What is product lifecycle management?

We will first start by defining what product lifecycle management is to have a better understanding of the role behind it.

Product lifecycle management or PLM refers to all the processes, methods and technologies that are used to manage a product as it moves through the typical stages of its lifecycle from development through its introduction and growth to its decline and retirement.

The image below helps to envision the different processes that occur at each stage of the product’s lifecycle.

The product lifecycle refers to the progression of a product through its typical 4 stages (introduction, growth, maturity and decline) as well as more complex processes that occur within these stages such as inception, design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing and distribution.

PLM is what helps to manage that lifecycle by aligning people, data, processes and technology to seamlessly bring the product to market.

Having a thorough understanding of the different stages of the product lifecycle is vital when it comes to developing new products as it helps answer questions such as whether it’s worth building the product and whether it would survive in the market before investing valuable resources. Afterwards, the next stage of product planning and preparing forecasts can begin.

Therefore, PLM essentially provides a framework that organizations use to manage their products through the different stages of its lifecycle.

It encompasses all aspects of a product including planning, managing, designing, and marketing through the use of dedicated software products and solutions that provide a single source of truth and visibility for all relevant stakeholders to monitor and track any changes to a product.

Why is product lifecycle management (PLM) important?

We can look at product lifecycle management as the glue that holds the entire process together, from ideation and development to production, promotion, and beyond. Without an effective PLM process, it’s unlikely that any production or service would ever see the light of day.

Above all, PLM is used as a means to develop a strategy to make better and more informed decisions to optimize every stage of the product lifecycle by aligning processes, data and technology to help businesses maximize profits.

Because many departments are involved in product development, using a dedicated PLM software offers an all-around view of a product across various cross-functional teams to help them keep track of all products and their processes by allowing information to flow seamlessly between different teams.

The purpose of such software is to shorten product development time while enhancing communication among teams through high-level visibility. An efficient PLM system will compile all your product data into a single database- a single source of truth- and manage this information flow which all relevant teams can access throughout the entire lifecycle.

In that sense, an efficient PLM system has a number of benefits including:

Higher quality products
Enhanced information transparency
Optimization of processes and workflows
Improved product reliability
Improved decision-making and forecasting
Increased productivity
Increased innovation
Reduced time to market
Reduced costs
Reduced waste
Identification of new development and market opportunities

Thus, PLM serves as a backbone of any project to help teams cope with the increasing complexity and challenges of developing new products and quickly meet consumer demands through streamlined processes.

What does the role of a product lifecycle manager entail?

As we’ve seen, when it comes to realizing a product, service, or innovation, there are several processes and entities involved. It’s the responsibility of the product lifecycle manager to bring all of these elements together and ensure that every stage of the journey is optimized for success.

The role of the product lifecycle manager is as varied as it is vital, and there are a wealth of responsibilities involved which largely depends on the lifecycle stage their product is in. This means that the skills needed and decisions made will differ from one stage to the next and so the product lifecycle manager will need to smoothly transition as the product evolves and shifts to the next stage.

Thus, the product lifecycle manager is the one who is primarily responsible for managing a product as it goes through the different stages of its lifecycle. This means that they also oversee the work of the entire project team to ensure they successfully and effectively complete each phase of the lifecycle.

What is expected from a modern product lifecycle manager?

The functions of a product lifecycle manager differ from day to day according to business and product needs. However, the core functions of a project lifecycle manager include the following:

Introduction: Adopting the role of market or subject expert to get the product or innovation fit for the market. At this stage of the journey, extensive market research is required to identify gaps in the market and consumer needs as well as competitor analysis. The product lifecycle manager also needs to ensure that every department is working together cohesively for development, production, and launch.
Growth: Once the product is fit for public consumption, the product lifecycle manager will then establish a plan to promote healthy market expansion and scalability, supporting the necessary departments or entities in optimizing sustainable growth.
Maturity: At the point where the product in question is scaling and gaining momentum, the product lifecycle manager must work with internal and external stakeholders to sustain a market share and evolve the product’s commercial journey, thus securing a sustainable return on investment (ROI).
Decline: When a product or innovation reaches its decline, a great product lifecycle manager will assume the role of a solution seeker. At this stage, it’s the lifecycle manager’s job to formulate the best strategic outcome for the product—whether it’s a case of resurrection and redevelopment or phasing out.

Product lifecycle manager: Key attributes for success

Being a product lifecycle manager is challenging to say the least, but if you have the skills and talent to be great, it is a career path that will offer endless rewards.

Do you want to know what it takes to be a great product lifecycle manager? Here are the key attributes required for PLM success:

Qualifications and credentials

While there is no clear cut path to becoming a great product lifecycle manager, you will need relevant experience and qualifications related to product management and development to perform every facet of the job effectively.

It’s also imperative that you are digitally savvy. As such, to be a great product lifecycle manager you should be certified or well-versed in the technology, tools, and platforms that are standard within the sector.

If you work in a specific product niche, conduct extensive research and gain every relevant credential possible. Not only will this make you more credible, but it will also provide you with a level of working knowledge that will give you an all-important edge on the competition—the kind of edge that will empower you to streamline and optimize every initiative you undertake.

Continual adaptability

In the age of information, technology evolves at a rapid rate. That said, every great product lifecycle manager should be completely adaptable to change—evolving with ever-changing methods, innovations, and concepts on a continual basis.

As a product lifecycle manager, it’s vital that you invest ample time in developing your skills and keeping your finger on the pulse. A lifecycle manager must be robust and innovative, and to be an ongoing success must adopt a mindset of lifelong learning.

If you read regular industry publications, attend expos and webinars, and enroll in courses that will help you refine your existing skills (or learn new competencies), you will propel yourself from good to great.

Analytical skills

We live in an age rife with digital data.

That said, to be an exceptional product lifecycle manager, it’s important to possess a sharp eye and analytical skills to match.

At every stage of the production journey, data will empower you to spot emerging trends, identify weaknesses, and make informed decisions that will accelerate the success of the process. Moreover, by harnessing data analytics to its fullest potential, you will be able to work with key performance indicators (KPIs) to set success benchmarks and foster smooth collaboration between departments.

As a guide, here are the three key metrics you should know in great detail (these are particularly pivotal during the early launch and development stages):

Traffic to product pages: An indicator of engagement and product interest
Conversion rate: The percentage of users or consumers that take the desired action
Adoption rate: The rate at which a product is acquired and used in certain marketplaces

By developing a deep understanding of essential PLM metrics and learning how to extract every last drop of value from the data while working with dynamic business intelligence (BI) tools, you will gain a level of insight that will make you an incredible product lifecycle manager.

A way with words

When it comes to product lifecycle management, this is an attribute that people often overlook. But to become great, having a confident, articulate way with words is essential.

Almost every day in the working life of a product lifecycle manager is crammed with conversations, both in person and via project management platforms, remote conferences, and email exchanges.

As a product manager, it’s your duty to share and deliver a wealth of product-related information to a variety of stakeholders, both internally and externally. That said, you need rock-solid interpersonal skills, excellent public speaking abilities, and writing attributes that will allow you to adjust your tone or language depending on your point of contact.

Every great product lifecycle manager has an extensive way with words—in every situation and across all platforms. Work on these skills and you will accelerate your success in the fast-paced world of PLM.

Sales skills

As a product lifecycle manager, you will need to be able to sell a vision to potential partners throughout every project.

Naturally, having a way with words will help you sell your vision to potential engineers, manufacturers, marketers, stockists—the list goes on. But in the digital age, having digital selling skills is also imperative. These competencies include the following:

Targeted content creation to engage specific users and generate leads
Building trust through social media engagement
The ability to optimize conversions through innovative promotional campaigns
Superior digital research skills to understand your target sector on a deeper, more meaningful level

To generate and nurture leads across a host of touchpoints—from social media and email to mobile applications and beyond—you will need to have an astute ability to be persuasive and build relationships both in person and in a virtual sense. Acquiring this attribute will boost your career prospects, exponentially.

Accountability and the ability to lead

As a product lifecycle manager, the ability to take accountability and lead a project with respectful authority is perhaps the most important soft skill you can possess.

Not only will you have to take the helm concerning strategic decisions at every stage of the journey, but you will also need to guide each entity within any given project towards one common goal.

If a roadblock presents itself or an issue occurs, you must be accountable and take ownership. And, if you believe that individuals require additional support or guidance, it will be up to you to listen and offer mentorship—well, you will if you’re a great product lifecycle manager.

Moreover, at the growth and maturity phases of the lifecycle, you will need to display powerful leadership skills to spearhead new commercial relationships and reach bold new marketplaces.

Product lifecycle management: Unlock better & higher value products

Bringing an idea to life is no easy feat, and that’s an understatement. But with the passion, drive, and commitment to acquiring the right attributes, it is more than possible.

Expectations and demands for better products continue to grow and as organizations work fast to keep up, their product portfolio also grows and becomes more complex.

The product manager’s work is never truly done but having the right PLM system in place will help them meet these demands by ensuring that the entire organization is focused on producing high quality products that ensure customer satisfaction.

The whole process of PLM should primarily revolve around providing better value for your customers to truly have a successful product in your hands.

To deliver better value, it’s also important to collect feedback at each stage of the product management lifecycle as it helps teams to continuously validate and optimize their products and to reveal hidden possibilities and ideas for a product.

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1000 Experiments Club: A Conversation With Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia of Product School

AB Tasty

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia is equipping the next generation of product leaders with data-driven strategies powered by experimentation.

Experimentation has paved the way for Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, founder and CEO of Product School. Faced with a long career in coding after completing his degree in computer science, Carlos opted instead to continue his education at business school in Silicon Valley only to discover it lacked the hands-on practicality that he so enjoyed.

With his engineering and business school experiences, Carlos saw an opportunity to fill the skills gap between the two and launched Product School in 2014. Today, Product school is a leader in product management training with a community of over one million product professionals and a network of instructors from top global organizations such as Google, Meta, Netflix, Paypal, Uber and Amazon.

AB Tasty’s VP Marketing Marylin Montoya spoke with Carlos about the purpose, accessibility and implementation of experimentation as well as the growing need for product managers (PM) within organizations and how to succeed in this role.

Here are some of the key takeaways from their conversation.

Normalize experimentation within company culture

When we break experimentation down to its most basic level, we see that its purpose is to understand each user and provide a personalized experience that caters to their needs. There are no limits to this quest. Once you start experimenting, you can continue to refine the process, learn about different users and leverage the data to improve their experience.

This mindset should apply to the entire company culture, with both a top-down and bottom-up approach. Experimentation is not only reserved for engineers, designers and product managers. High-level executives should also be experimenting with business models, new offerings and new markets.

Being a data-driven company which supports experimentation at all levels is important because most experiments will fail. While that might sound intimidating, it’s actually necessary to embrace failure during the experimentation process in order to gather valuable feedback and improve.

Carlos suggests running multiple experiments simultaneously over a short period of time, as it allows you sift through the results and double down on the ideas that are working.

Having the support of the organization’s leadership team offers the psychological safety necessary for employees to really experiment. This sense of freedom is what enables the best ideas to surface and leads to better products and overall business results.

The democratization of experimentation

The scope for digital experimentation has expanded. Once reserved for engineers, experimentation is now accessible to product, marketing and content teams with the help of simplified tools.

With the rise of product tech came an increased need for product management and a greater demand for low-tech tools to facilitate independent experimentation. This advancement in technology means that various teams within an organization can run small sets of experiments without involving engineers and data teams.

While some scenarios may require a deep dive with the help of engineers, others may just call for minor tweaks and these low-code or no-code tools allow non-technical teams to advance autonomously. When teams are empowered in this way, they are able to ship a better product, faster.

These tools are also bridging the gap between large and small companies. It’s no longer necessary to employ an entire team of data scientists or engineers to run experiments. Technology enables creators to be self-sufficient and make changes of varying complexities from color and copy to page formatting in order to offer a personalized experience to the user, gauge their response and continue to adapt accordingly.

The key to success as a product manager

Product management is a multi-faceted leadership role, whose key responsibility is to hone in on the best ideas to improve a given product. Rather than conjuring the idea yourself, this involves gathering data and facilitating conversations within your team to bring these ideas to the surface.

With an increased demand for data products, there have never been more product management roles to be filled. Product managers find themselves positioned at the intersection of business, design, engineering, customer success, data and sales. If you’re looking to succeed in this role you need to be competent across the board.

Experimentation is a key skill to master as a product manager, alongside road mapping, data, analytics and prototyping. With a cohesive plan, the engineering and design teams can advance while you prepare the next iteration.

When considering which company to join as a product manager, there are a few factors to consider. What is the structure of the product team? What are their biggest experimentation failures or successes? What is the CEO’s attitude and background? How are business decisions made? Is the company data-driven?

Asking these questions will help you gather an understanding of the company culture, find out whether experimentation is supported by the top levels of management and identify how you can make an impact within the organization.

What else can you learn from our conversation with Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia?

Build vs. buy: how to allocate your resources for internal collaboration tools.
How Product School teaches experimentation.
How the integration of specialist tools in the tech ecosystem improves user experience
The future of product management: the next generation of PMs.

About Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia has been building global companies and digital products for the past 12 years. Following his higher education in Global Business Management and Marketing, Computer Science and Industrial Engineering, he founded Floqq, which was the largest online education marketplace in Latin America. In 2014, he founded Product School, the global leader in Product Management training.

About 1,000 Experiments Club

The 1,000 Experiments Club is an AB Tasty-produced podcast hosted by Marylin Montoya, VP of Marketing at AB Tasty. Join Marylin and the Marketing team as they sit down with the most knowledgeable experts in the world of experimentation to uncover their insights on what it takes to build and run successful experimentation programs.

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How to Calculate, Track, and Analyze Conversion Rates

AB Tasty

What’s one of the most important metrics to keep track of when building your business online and watching it grow? Conversions.

In an increasingly competitive digital world, it’s tough to know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to conversions.

As each e-commerce site is unique, there’s no “one size fits all” for setting and achieving your goals. So, whether you’re just starting out, scaling up, or expanding quickly, there is a lot to understand when it comes to prioritizing, tracking and tackling your conversations in order to optimize your website and know your customers better.

In this article, we’ll look into how to calculate conversion rates and discuss some helpful tracking methods and benchmarks for conversion rates. We will then provide some tips on how to increase your conversions.

How to calculate conversion rates

Before discussing the formula, let’s define what we mean when we say conversion.

This is a broad term that could refer to anything from newsletter signups, buying a product or service, downloading an e-book, completing a form and so on.

Basically, a conversion occurs when a website visitor completes a desired action.

What does this mean? To calculate a website’s conversion rate, you need to know exactly what you’re trying to measure. It’s a matter of having clearly established business goals and being able to translate those into quantifiable website metrics.

To determine a conversion rate for your website, divide the number of goals achieved in a given time frame by the total number of visitors to your website, then multiply that number by 100.

Conversion rate = (Conversions or goals achieved / Total visitors) * 100

So if your landing page had 16,982 visitors and of those, 3,604 took the desired action, then your conversion rate is 21.22%.

Once you understand how to calculate the website conversion rate, you should think about how you can track the conversions that you receive.

How to track conversions

You can set up a system for tracking conversion rates with the help of one or a combination of the following tools:

Google Analytics and AdWords

These two tools collect large amounts of raw data. With so much data available, it’s important to set filters so you can focus on specific data sets to avoid missing key insights related to your goals.

Heatmaps

These maps capture users’ eye movements and clicks on your website. With this information, you can identify top-performing or weaker elements on pages to help steer your optimization strategy.

heatmap visual on a website — Heatmaps highlight user engagement and interest on web pages

Session recording and replay tools

Replaying user sessions shed light on how visitors navigate and interact with your website on their digital customer journey. Seeing the user experience in action can help to identify bugs that were missed or understand bounce rate fluctuations at specific sections in the funnel.

Customer satisfaction surveys or Net Promoter Scores

Both customer satisfaction surveys and NPS measure how happy your customers are with your business and in what areas you can improve. Focusing on the customer experience is essential for retention and driving more conversions.

For example, OUI.sncf, France’s national railway company, focused on their user behavior and noticed a low click-through rate on their ticket information page. To fix this problem and increase their client satisfaction and optimize the user experience, they used Flagship (AB Tasty’s server-side platform) to run an A/B test that quickly led to a 61% increase in their conversion rate.

What’s considered a good conversion rate?

Is there a benchmark for conversion rates? The best answer to this popular question is that a “good” conversion rate varies considerably from industry to industry.

As you can see in the image below, Unbounce analyzed over 44,000 landing pages across popular industries and found that each industry has a different average, with the catering and restaurant industry having the highest one.

Conversion rates by industry

While these stats can be helpful in establishing a baseline, they shouldn’t be treated as the only element of importance for your business.

Even comparing conversion rates within the same industry is not a fair measurement. Different sites are working with different traffic sources, visitor volume, brand perceptions, UX design and CTAs. It’s easy to get carried away with vanity metrics, but the quality of traffic to your website really makes all the difference in your conversion rates.

So, what’s the way forward?

Don’t follow accepted figures blindly. Stay in the know, but remember the only thing you have to do is outperform the conversion rates you achieved last month. That’s how you become better.

How can you increase conversion rates?

There are multiple tactics to boost conversion rates on your landing pages and website. Let’s look at a few popular and effective methods:

A/B testing

A/B testing compares two different versions of a web page or an app to see which performs better. From a conversion point of view, it gives you room to be creative and explore new and better ways to capture leads.

To get started with A/B testing, try focusing on the main elements of the page, such as:

Headlines and copy – A headline should be convincing and directly linked to the main offer on the page. Experiment with long and short headlines, with or without subtitles. Keep the copy simple and scannable.
Value proposition – Refine and articulate your offer so it resonates with prospects. As an example, WiderFunnel helped the Sims 3 team boost their game registration and achieve a conversion rate of 128% by improving their value proposition.
Visual media – Humans are very visual. Adding images and videos can help you find out what’s a hit among your customers.
Call to Action – Test the color, copy and CTA placement to see which version drives the most conversions.
Page layout – Every page must be well-designed, aesthetically appealing and functional. Work on visual hierarchy and make use of white space and colors. These take away the cognitive load for the visitor.

Want to get started on A/B testing for your website? AB Tasty is a best-in-class A/B testing tool that allows you to quickly set up tests with low code implementation of front-end or UX changes on your web pages, gather insights via an ROI dashboard and determine which route will increase your revenue.

Build trust

This idea might seem a bit basic, but it’s one of the most important things you can achieve with your customers. One of the first steps to gaining trust with your visitors is by showcasing your site’s security.

If you are on a website where you don’t feel secure entering your payment information, are you going to complete your transaction?

Chances are, you said no. If your site doesn’t appear to be trustworthy, it will cost you. Consider incorporating the following into your site:

Add security seals on checkout pages to assure customers’ confidential data and information is in safe hands.
Don’t ask for too much information on form fields. Ask only what’s required.
Be accessible. Respond to incoming queries (the sooner the better).

After displaying that your website is trustworthy and secure, it’s time to focus on your products/services and customer satisfaction. A few ways to do this include:

Add customer reviews. Studies show that nearly 95% of customers go through reviews before making a purchase. As you can see, displaying reviews makes a huge difference in gaining your visitors’ trust rather than only displaying a product description written by the manufacturer.
Publish client stories and case studies. Businesses want to see your past successes before they invest in your product or service.

Personalize

Customers are more motivated to complete a transaction while shopping online if you offer a personalized experience. According to a study done by Forbes, 66% of consumers share that coming across communication or other content that isn’t personalized deters them from purchasing.

In other words, to increase conversions, you need to deliver contextually relevant offers.

Personalize customer experiences through behavioral targeting (segmenting audiences based on their online behavior). To establish behavior personas, you should collect the following metrics:

Browsing history
Type of device used
Session behavior (page views, on-site searches, etc.)
Geographic location
Purchase history

You can then use this data to:

Cross-sell and upsell products. An easy way to cross-sell is by showing customers items that are frequently purchased together. Segment’s research found that 49% of consumers have purchased a product they didn’t initially set out to buy after receiving a personalized recommendation.
Use dynamic content. This is called adaptive content marketing. Based on your customers’ history/location, you can show content that might interest them. (For instance, fashion retailers can showcase outfits that match the weather at a user’s location.)
Reengage to reduce cart abandonment. Incentivize shoppers on your checkout pages with pop-ups, reminders and so on. Create a sense of urgency by adding social proof to your checkout pages because the fear of missing out is real.

Live chats

We’re constantly talking with our family and friends via messaging apps. Why not do the same for the brands we interact with?

A live chat tool can provide personalized and timely customer service. It can also boost conversions by moving potential clients into the fast lane. According to Intercom, website visitors are 82% more likely to become customers if they’ve chatted with you first.

Moreover, another survey found that 63% of customers are likely to return to a website that has a live chat option, increasing customer loyalty and revenue.

However, simply having a live chat tool isn’t enough. Here are a few best practices to follow:

Place the tool on high-intent pages. This way, customers are likely to ask for a real-time response. For e-commerce brands, this would be on the checkout page where customers may have last-minute questions on delivery, returns, etc. For B2B companies, placing the tool on pricing pages are most likely the best option.
Use real names and faces. This gives your chatbox a human touch and makes virtual conversations more personal.
Respond quickly. The main reason people click the live chat option is that they expect immediate answers. If someone contacts you outside of office hours, use a bot to show the average time you’ll take to respond or ask for their contact information so you can follow up at a later time.

Reaching your website conversion rates

Reaching your conversion rate goals starts with having clarity on your business goals. The precision of your goals will determine what metrics you track and what optimization strategies you employ.

Remember, while it’s important to stay updated on your industry’s conversion rate benchmark, don’t fall into the trap of implementing blanket advice from experts.

Above all, use various tools and data points to understand your customers’ motivations and always put their needs first. Listening to your customers is the best way to drive conversions.

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2022 Product Review: Your Year With AB Tasty

AB Tasty

This was another exciting year for AB Tasty users! Our team worked hard to implement 50+ features and 100+ improvements. Thank you, as 25% of these were suggested by you! As a result, you unleashed your creativity easier than ever before. During the 2022 Black Friday period, 71% of our customers had at least one live campaign. Pop-ins and banners were your favorites among the thousands of live personalizations and experiments using widgets.

And we can’t wait to see how creative you’re going to be in your next campaigns using Custom Widgets, the first 2022 feature we’re going to dive into!

Engagement

Custom Widgets & the Widget Library

That’s the innovation of the year! Now you can create and customize your own widgets to scale your best ideas! Inject your code to create your own ready-to-use widgets and use them in any campaign you want. Or browse through the new Widget Library to find the perfect widget for your customer scenario. We also brought lots of improvements to the ready-to-use widget configuration, such as the way they appear and disappear or the way to trigger them. You can always customize these and turn them into your own Custom Widget!

New audience segments

The segment builder was enriched with ROI-driven audiences this year. Remember the AI-powered Content Interest that enables the identification of consumers who share an interest in your products or services? You can now see the most relevant topics – including view and transaction rates – linked to each keyword directly in the builder.

Also, easily target low-hanging fruit using the Abandoned Cart segment and choose to address only those with a certain amount or number of items in the cart.

Ecosystem fit

This year we developed a new set of full-circle data flow integrations with the best-of-breed solutions we encounter in our customers’ tech stack. Now, you can analyze the entire customer journey in your favorite solution: Google Analytics 4, Segment, Mixpanel, and more. Expose your audiences (or cohorts, traits, segments) to campaigns and send results back into your tools. Stay tuned – more integrations coming your way in 2023.

Campaign insights

In 2022, the reporting page was enriched with all kinds of filters: device, date, geography, transaction, loyalty, attributes, action from visitors…the list goes on! Use them to analyze audience behavior on specific dates or compare results between two segments. For example, you might want to check if your experiment has a different impact on mobile versus desktop users.

Performance

Speed matters! In parallel to continuous improvements on our tag, you can now find out whether and why your campaigns might affect your website’s load time on the new campaign performance center page. All details about performance are visible here and you can navigate directly to where in AB Tasty you need to go to solve the issue.

Privacy & compliance

What happens with your campaign when a visitor declines cookies? Ally, our virtual assistant has your back! She will guide you through campaign behavior settings and explain all the details about the choices you have to make to meet requirements around consent and privacy.

Make your life easier

We got used to it so quickly that we almost forgot it’s recent: the new intuitive interface is really easy to use, with the main menu on the left and the drop-down settings on the top right. Continuous dashboard evolutions now let you see what’s essential for you: you can personalize your view and see campaign readiness status right away.

1:1 Personalization and intelligent search

Last but definitely not least, in 2022 we acquired Epoq, adding to our portfolio to better serve brands on their mission to build 1:1 customer journeys from search to cart. Our solution set now includes:

Intelligent search: a fast, powerful search engine that gets customers straight to the product they want to buy.
Intelligent recommendations: an AI-powered recommendation engine that surfaces new revenue opportunities.

Check out this webinar to get more details about recommendations and site-search for your business!

More exciting features are currently a work in progress for 2023! Do you have suggestions for our roadmap? Connect to your AB Tasty account and send or vote for upcoming features using the “submit feedback” link. We can’t wait to see what YOU will build in 2023!