Product people

This week, I wrote about why we live in the golden age for product people. Even if your job isn’t in a product group, you still want to be a product person, trust me. Also: the WSJ’s audience-first strategy. First up, a message from The Rebooting supporter Outbrain about its new brand advertising platform, Onyx.

These days, brands nurture multiple touchpoints throughout the digital journey, with each moment influencing their impact with consumers. Easier said than done, with the average time spent on a digital ad being just 0.7 seconds. It means brands need to win attention.

Onyx by Outbrain™ is a new branding platform, attentive by design. It offers an environment brands can rely on to drive incremental, high-attention video and display moments across the world’s premium publishers, for stronger brand impact.

Onyx is third-party verified through our partnership with DoubleVerify, and analyzed by leading Attention Measurement firm, Adelaide.

Product people

In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman’s young character is taken aside at his college graduation party and given a piece of career advice by Mr. Maguire: “One word: Plastics.” The point was the world then – pre-paper straws – needed a tremendous amount of plastics, so going into that field was a reliable route to a comfortable life. It wasn’t a spiritual journey, but you might get a pool.

These days, Mr. Maguire would likely answer: Product. For all the grief that the tech industry gets, it has replaced the automobiles as the totemic industry of American ingenuity and economic prowess. There are fewer sure paths into a comfortable life. The problem was the need to grind through computer science and engineering courses – and it’s only a matter of time before “copilots” take the controls – but product is the most attractive tech field because it doesn’t require doing any of that.

The product management field has exploded. It’s no mistake that former Airbnb product manager Lenny Ratchitsky has one of the most popular Substacks with over 500,000 subscribers and a multimillion dollar solo business.

But here’s the thing, you don’t need to be a product manager or a product marketer to be a product person. Being a product person is a vibe that means you can connect the dots within a business to apply technology to a business challenge and create new value. Being a product person is an identity. Product people usually can’t code a lick. At best they’re the tech industry’s Rick Rubin, who told Andersen Cooper he could “barely” play an instrument, adding, “I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.” At worst, they’re middle managers pretending to be “men in the arena.”