We were thrilled to bring together more than 50 Chief Product Officers and VPs from leading tech companies at our recent Dawn Product Summit in London, hosted in partnership with Riviera.
The summit included five in-depth conversations, during which panellists explored the challenges and opportunities faced by product teams today, and shared their insights on how to create a winning product strategy in a rapidly evolving landscape.
These wide-ranging conversations covered how to leverage AI and approach tooling, the relationship between product and tech teams, how to hone product-led growth, the right time to go multi-product — and much more.
In the piece below, we share just some of the actionable insights we took away from the summit.
But first, we would like to thank all our panellists again for their time and thoughtful contributions. Special thanks go to: Sophie Krishnan, CEO of Lokalise; Patrick Wyatt, CPO at Varjo; Lindsey Jayne, Former CPO at The Financial Times; Valentin Vincendon, CPO at Copper; Matt Fenby-Taylor, CPO at Unobravo; Hao Zhou, VP Product / Growth at GoCardless; Shaun Shirazian, Former CPO at Pipedrive; Tony Grout, CPTO at Showpad; Tanya Cordrey, CPO at Motorway; Serge Kruppa, CTO at Sylvera; Nima Vali Rajabi, CEO & Co-founder of Magic Feedback; Mathieu Ayel, CPO at Synthase; and Mason Edwards VP Product & Commercial at Conjecture.
- Never lose sight of your core goal — solving customer pain points
One theme emerged from every single panel discussion at the summit: product leaders have to be laser-focused on solving real pain points for customers, because if companies lose sight of this core goal, it’s game over. Discussions even explored the idea of framing your strategy as “customer-led growth” over product-led growth or sales-led growth, as this helps to avoid falling into the trap of focusing too heavily on feature development to the detriment of customer experience.
Our panelists agreed that companies should focus their product strategies on the shared needs of their customers and how those needs are changing. They also suggested treating tools like product playbooks as a means to connect with customers, not as an end goal in themselves.
2. Embrace the ‘fix, modernise, scale, and fix again’ cycle of re-platforming
Our panellists said that the days of building a platform and coasting are well and truly gone. Instead, CPOs can expect re-platforming to be a constant as new tools and capabilities emerge at a faster rate than ever thanks to GenAI. They recommended that product leaders continuously re-evaluate their tech foundations and act accordingly. This looks like the following process: 1) identify outdated infrastructure 2) modernise the infrastructure 3) scale up the new technology, and 4) repeat the entire process frequently.
These overhauls can undoubtedly be a pressured and sometimes costly process, but our experts suggested that it helps to see them as an essential part of operations. In today’s market, companies will have to see disrupting their products and processes as foundational for success.
3. Use AI tools to help understand your customer needs faster, and turbocharge smaller teams
Our panellists explored how product leaders can use AI to improve product management and rollout, emphasising the technology’s impact on user experience, decision-making, and team structures.
They highlighted how AI has dramatically decreased the cost and speed of both understanding customer needs and prototyping. For example, new tools allow for more widespread and accurate customer feedback analysis, and reduce the cost of building new products. The panellists suggested that CPOs find AI use cases, and then seize on the efficiencies they deliver to enable smaller teams to innovate faster.
However, the panellists also cautioned that it is essential that companies “engineer-in humans as much as possible” to processes when implementing new AI tools with their customer data, as mistakes can damage brand reputation long-term.
4. Not sure whether to go multi-product? Base any decision on your core product, not shiny distractions
The Product leaders on our panels stressed that the decision to adopt a multi-product strategy should be based on in-depth analysis of when the competitive edge of your company’s core product is likely to decline, rather than on “shiny” but potentially short-term opportunities.
The panellists also stressed that if you do opt for a multi-product strategy, you should proactively invest in managing the synergies and potential conflicts between different products and features. Otherwise, they have seen that uncoordinated actions between teams responsible for different products can lead to mistakes creeping in, and potentially to devaluation of a company’s core product.
5. Don’t get stuck in silos — try to share ownership of product success across multiple functions
Another strong recurring message throughout the panel sessions was that the best product strategies are formed collaboratively, not in silos. The panellists shared that they tend to see the most success when product and engineering teams work closely together and take responsibility for different parts of execution.
The experts suggested taking a fairly traditional approach, one where product leaders give engineering teams clear priorities based on in-depth knowledge of customer needs (the “what and why”), and then allow engineering teams to take charge of capacity planning (the “how”). They said this type of task-splitting and collaboration can help ensure cross-company buy-in, and avoid pipeline bottlenecks.
The idea here is that Product Managers/ CPOs bring the “problem”, based on evaluating customer needs, and everybody else helps come up with a solution. However, the panellists noted that it is equally important not to get “stuck” in these roles, and to ensure that your teams remain flexible enough to pitch in wherever needed. They explained that it is vital that team members across functions feel they share joint accountability for the outcome of a product launch.
A huge thank you again to our panellists from everyone on the Dawn team. If you have any questions, or would like to attend a Dawn summit, please contact chloe@dawncapital.com.
