The Covid-19 pandemic is for sure gonna be “the” most defining moment of most of our lives. It has forced us to change/rethink every big and small aspect of our life. However, here i am just gonna focus on how Covid-19 has permanently changed the course of Product Management.

Work From Home

This is one of the biggest impact Covid-19 has made on almost every business and profession across the world. Pre Covid there was more or less a general consensus that work from home decreases productivity. Many companies as a policy didn’t even allowed work from home for its employees.

However, due to Covid-19 and the worldwide lockdowns that followed, companies were forced to allow extended work from home policy.

And just like that, the myth got busted. Companies realized that there is no significant impact on productivity due to work from home. This was even more prominent in the Tech domain and as a result, some companies like Twitter and Slack have even gone ahead with the bold move of permanent work from home.

With everyday commute time saved, employees now have more time at hand which they can (or should) use in all sort of productive ways – spend more time with family, pursue a hobby, learn a new skill and the list goes on.

However, life is not all roses and work from home also come with its own set of disadvantages. The lines between weekdays and weekends have blurred. Employees are complaining of increased workload and even more stress than before (contrary to the popular belief that work from home reduces stress). A recent study on ~3 million people also revealed that employees actually end up working more during the pandemic than before it.

Poor Product Quality/Differentiation

Though Covid-19 has negatively impacted majority of the industries, a select few have massively benefited from this. OTT, Video Communication and Edtech are a few such examples in the tech industry. Companies like Netflix and Zoom have witnessed unprecedented growth during the pandemic.

And when any industry witnesses such insane growth, everybody just wants a share of that pie irrespective of whether it is their forte or not. This has led to a flood of apps in such industries as everyone is trying to quickly capture the market.

Companies are churning out full blown apps in just a matter of days or weeks. And though they need to be commended for their brilliant pace of execution, product quality or user experience takes a backseat at such fast pace.

As a result, we have a lot of copy cats and half baked products in the market now. Almost all competing apps have similar UI and same set of product features. Jiomeet, with it’s blatant copy of Zoom is one such example

Halted Innovation

The future is uncertain and there are just too many unanswered questions which no one seems to have an answer for –

• Will there be a second wave of Coronavirus?
• Will we ever go back to the previous normal or is this the new normal?
• How would the users behave in a post Covid era?
• Will the decades worth of user and market research knowledge still be relevant post Covid?

With so many unknowns, most companies are just choosing to stay wherever they are and not go ahead with any ambitious (read risky) projects. This phenomenon is not just limited to small companies and even companies like Google are also treading with extreme caution before launching anything new.

The stakes are just too high and no one can afford to make any mistake. The good old product management philosophy of “launch and iterate” (which also happens to be one among the famous Google’s 9 Innovation Principles) seems to be on indefinite hold for now.

Cost Cutting

Covid-19 has already driven companies to bankruptcy and as famously mentioned by Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, decades worth of hard work is wiped off in a few weeks. With sales impacted worldwide, cost cutting is the need of the hour for almost every industry.

And as mentioned above, since most of the companies have halted innovation for the time being, what it means for Product management specifically is that there are –

• Layoffs
  Though layoffs have happened across domains but some companies have laid off a good part of their Tech & Product team and have probably gone into maintenance mode in the short term.
  
• Pay cuts
  If not layoffs, then companies across the industries are going ahead with Pay cuts. And just like tech employees saw some of the steepest salary growth during the boom phase, their fall too is among the steepest.
  
• Discontinued productivity tools
  Companies really struggling with funds had to take a very hard look at their each and every expense and at times even basic product management tools like JIRA, Invision, Zeplin have to be discontinued. Now with the teams working remotely these tools are all the more important and absence of these would thereby lead to poor product quality. But then again, there will be no product if there is no company. For some, survival is all that matters right now.

Thus, Product management, as we know it, will undergo a lot of changes (or updates) during this Covid era. But, at the core, Product management is all about finding innovative solutions to problems and in the long run i’m sure that much more advanced Product management 2.0 practices will emerge out of this pandemic.