Introducing the Product Cloud Alliance: An Integrated Toolstack Transforming Product Management

What’s in your product stack? Until recently this question was met with blank stares. Today, there is broad ecosystem of purpose-built tools emerging for product teams. As product management becomes more and more data-driven, a core set of solutions is coming together bound by a shared layer of data.

This is the new Pendo product cloud.

Why product cloud? The product manager role in technology companies is quickly becoming one of the most influential in modern tech. This is because great products are a company’s best marketing. Product teams bring together the design, engineering, customer success and marketing teams to ensure products are both functional and delightful for end users. These days, product managers are also rising in influence and responsibility, entering the C-suite and building out teams of their own.

A functional cloud for this role is the natural outcome of the intersection of software, marketplace changes, and shifting or emerging job roles. A product cloud is coalescing around a set of specific changes taking place for digital product teams.

Pendo CEO Todd Olson recently sat down with investor and Megan Quinn at Spark Capital in San Francisco to discuss the evolving role of the modern product manager. Key questions included, how is the role changing? Why is it becoming so influential in modern tech companies? What are the key tools this role needs to build exceptional products for their users? They answer all of these questions and more in the interview series below.

How Product Management Has Evolved:

“A major shift that has taken place in product management is a shift away from intuition-based building to data-based building. Product managers now have tools to understand not just what their customers say that they want, but also to see what they are doing, and using that information to empower the roadmap.”

Product Management Becomes Data-Driven

“Budget is increasingly going to tools and tool sets that enable product managers to leverage engineering and design resources in a much more efficient way.”

Why Product Needs a Cloud

“The product cloud was born based on the increased importance of product itself. You need a system of record for what’s going on inside your product, how are you increasing engagement within it. It’s all about ways to drive and improve the product experience.”

Spotlight on the Product Cloud Alliance

“The product cloud and Pendo’s piece of it is just the start. I see a whole ecosystem growing up serving interesting use cases for product teams that didn’t exist before. ”

The Power of the Product Cloud

“Any cloud should be automating challenging, difficult things that people don’t want to do.”

Why Other Functions Need the Product Cloud

“Product managers will have influence through the data because anybody can access the data. The data that Pendo captures is relevant to functions across the organization. So, it’s not just data that PMs alone use to decide what to build and why, but it is what all functions can leverage to better understand the customer.”

Read the Book

Authored by leaders in each category, this new eBook explores key workflows that are part of the new product management and how a product cloud supports them. Download it here.