Keep up with Trends!

Imagine what would happen if your skills or product strategy stayed the same for next 10 years.

In an ever-changing environment it’s becomes essential to reassess strategic decisions & make sense of latest happenings. At the same time, the difficult part is trying to figure out when to jump aboard to trend or when to sit it out to see what happens next.

For a product role technology, business & design are primary focus areas. Following are some resources I use to keep myself updated & adopt some of the best practices.

For technical trends following some technical blogs such as Hackernoon or The Pragmatic Engineer or Future from Andressen Horowitz. Another good source is blogs from top product companies — Netflix Tech blog, Shopify Engineering, Spotify Engineering, SWIGGY bytes etc.

On the business side of things, it’s important to have macro view of the market — to zoom out of your focus areas & gain a better understanding of what’s shaping the world technologically, economically & politically. Some of my favorite sources for constant stream of updates are Trends, The Information, Wired, Trends.VC newsletter, Harvard Business Review & some Twitter threads.

On the Design side, there are some common principles that have been shared by some UX peers. For example, sticking to universal, fundamental UX principles such as make a button look like a button, make the text easy to read. Make primary use case intuitive enough etc. There are some good design blogs such ABDZ, Designer news, HeyDesigner, UXDesign weekly to follow.

Along with it some great product companies have design blogs that are worth reading- Adobe’s creative magazine, Google Design, Facebook Design, Figma Design Blog etc.

Lastly, it is not worth following all trends as most will fade without much. More important question is to understand that if this trend will affect your customers(both existing & new) & are you competitors benefiting from this trend. Best thing is if one can experiment & create new trends of your own.