Hello, welcome to the bottom up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of quality Qualitance. And today we're going to talk about emerging trends. In fact, today is the start of an entirely new series talking. In depth about emerging trends for 2021. And boy, I mean, the reason we really needed to do an emerging trends report was it just feels like things are changing so quick.

And I know you're thinking, yeah, we say that every year, Mike, but I really did feel after 2020 kind of a year to forget in many respects, it really felt that we needed to get the pulse of what's happening. So I'm so delighted to share with you an eight part series. In fact, I [00:01:00] think I'm going to go further than eight.

I'm going to go nine or 10 episodes where we're going to go really deep into the trends. That are happening in the tech design product world. Um, and this will help us work out what's happening. This will help us if we know what's happening, we'll know what to do. And that's really the whole aim of bottom-up is to bring to you a podcast that really highlights to you.

Sort of a snapshot of what's happening in the world with product, how to think about it and how to take action. And today we're going to start with the big picture and obviously the way we kind of orientate ourselves here is understanding kind of where things are at and we're going to stop blowing them up.

So, uh, you will enjoy that, but here's the other important thing I'm going to. Touch upon not only technology trends, but also collaboration [00:02:00] trends. And this is really new for us because we've been doing this trends report for five years now. And this is the first time that we've had a collaboration section to this report.

And we really felt that if you want to build great product with great technology, you need to understand how to collaborate, how to work together, how to get everyone on the same page. So that's why we have both trends in the technology world and in the collaboration world. So let's start by kind of trying to grab the moment the here and now the present.

And I would propose to you that having studied the responses of over a hundred people from all around the world, experts, product people, entrepreneurs, you name it. There was a really big starting point to which everybody had the same experience. It didn't matter what industry, what role. What geography.

[00:03:00] And that is what I call the complexity conundrum. The reality is no matter whether you're a startup scale up or enterprise. Everybody is facing a level of complexity, which is really unheard of. And we were able to kind of grab this moment, the here and now that is really, there's a lot of complexities and interdependencies.

When we're trying to launch new products, trying to do a big upgrade to an existing product. It really is a question of sorting through the complexity and it comes from everywhere. It's like data insights, you know, analytics, uh, customer feedback, you know, stakeholder management. There's just a lot of things happening when we talk about the big trends of how we build brand new products that truly make a difference in the world.

So this complexity conundrum is. The starting point. It's the complexity engine that you [00:04:00] experienced when someone says, Hey, let's do something new and you instantly have this. This feeling, Oh, a new product or a new feature on a product. And you're like, Oh, that means we're going to have to do all this stuff with, uh, customers.

Then those we're gonna have to change the marketing. Then we're going to have to work out what customers want. We have to do the UX and the wire frames. And we got to look at the data and make sure that that matches to the qual. So we got a quote-unquote match. Oh. And then we have to like, think about the integrations that we have.

What do we need to update? In our analytics, is it mix panel? Is it Google analytics? Oh, by the way, then there's other content that we need. Then we need to do business process design. You kind of get where I'm going. I could go on, but you kind of get the, the sort of complexity that if you're a product owner, that's really all landing at you.

So for this, uh, trends report, we really wanted to capture where we're at, but also bring a message of, Hey, don't worry. It's okay. Uh, take a breath. It'll be all [00:05:00] right, because we broke the world down into tech and collaboration, and we've got a ton of answers for you. I think the next thought I want to go to.

So if the first one is look everyone's at this complexity situation, the complexity conundrum. This really marks a very new distinct chapter of digital transformation. If the first era of digital transformation was all about exploring, well, now we are definitely in the second wave of digital transformation, which is about.

Execution. So there, you've got this second idea that we took from the trends report. We're no longer in exploring we're now in the sort of execution ear of digital transformation and obviously 20, 20 COVID quarantine that really has forced a lot of big picture trends that we've seen. Um, And this is kind of accelerated things a lot.

So there's no more time for exploration. This [00:06:00] is all about execution. Customers want to be serviced in all channels. And there's another group of stakeholders that have come along just to make it more complex. But I'm going to get to those guys in a second. So first idea, look, we're facing complexity without a doubt.

If you want to build a product it's just complex, complex. Number two. We're now really under the pressure to execute at a huge scale at a huge speed. Um, and really omni-channel multi-channel whatever the word that you'd like to use is to describe being everywhere for your customer and, um, Really interesting thought here.

This is probably the third thought that big picture thought that we got from the, from the report is that you really need to have this idea of continual learning. And for those of us that are not engineers by birth, we don't need to become engineers, but we need to have the basic [00:07:00] ability to understand and think.

Like engineers in order to interface with them and the products, the platforms that they build. So we, uh, we did an expert interview with Marie and ignite, who is the head of retail distribution. At the bank BCR out of stir. And he talked about this idea, you know, code has to become a language in teams.

Everyone's got to understand these basic principles of how we build software in order to come together. So this was really interesting, particularly for those of us who are business stakeholders, who are maybe not engineers by birth. It really means we have to do this continual learning to get our skills into the right place.

Okay. So. Let's now kind of frame, uh, before we get to the, uh, for technology trends in the, for collaboration trends, let's understand why these trends exist. And I want to touch on some key points here. Now [00:08:00] earlier, if we look at the factors, the environmental conditions that are really affecting us as product creators, designers, builders, entrepreneurs.

I talked a lot about omni-channel the multichannel for your customers? I think that was something that was happening well and truly before last year, but what will did that get accelerated? You know, particularly when people can't go to the store, then obviously you really need to be, omni-channel all the digital touchpoints, but here's the one ...