In 2024, product development is poised for an exhilarating transformation. As product teams navigate the interplay of innovation, strategic foresight and the ever-evolving demands of a digitally empowered customer base, a broader shift is brewing in the tech sector.
This shift entails moving towards solutions beyond technological advancement, integrating deeply into everyday life and corporate strategy. Artificial intelligence is at the heart of this transformation. AI now stands as a cornerstone of productivity and ethical responsibility.
Meanwhile, product teams face the challenge of harnessing AI to create swift, cost-effective solutions that cater to the nuanced needs of diverse industries, such as healthcare and finance. The aim is to delve beyond the mere wow factor of AI and meaningfully integrate it into customers’ professional and personal lives.
Similarly, in building user experiences, the focus has shifted from mere functionality to creating immersive, intuitive and seamless solutions. This encompasses not only how users interact with technology but also how they access and utilize services in their daily lives.
Product teams strive to turn ordinary interactions into extraordinary experiences, where every interaction becomes more than just a transaction. As such, the coming year is shaping up to be memorable for product teams across the globe. At RingCentral, Taskrabbit, Ascend and Domino Data Lab, product developers shared what they are looking forward to in 2024 and how they’ll achieve their goals.
RingCentral provides cloud-unified communication and collaboration solutions to support the increasing mobile and distributed workforce.
What projects does your product team have lined up for 2024, and how do they fit into your company’s strategic goals for the year?
2023 was an important year, setting the foundation for our goals in 2024. Our product and technology teams have been hard at work developing cutting-edge new AI technologies and enhancing our cloud communications suite.
To name a few, RingSense enables the power of conversational intelligence to enhance sales productivity. RingCentral Events is an all-in-one hybrid and virtual event management tool, and RingCX is our native, AI-powered contact center.
2024 will be even more exciting as the RingCentral AI story continues to develop and all key products in our portfolio intelligently coexist on one unified app.
As we evolve into a multi-product company, so do the customers’ needs. Starting with video meetings, serving one-to-one and small group collaboration, we have scaled to webinars and events, focusing on one-to-many communication. RingCentral Events and RingCX really complete the full suite of AI and video communication experiences that a company can offer. We’re excited in 2024 to continue doubling down on our strengths by providing engaging, studio-quality experiences and reshaping and innovating the continuously evolving events space.
We’re excited to continue doubling down on our strengths by providing engaging, studio-quality experiences and reshaping the events space.”
What makes these projects particularly interesting, challenging or exciting for product professionals to work on?
Steve Jobs once famously said: “You’ve got to start with customer experience and work backward to the technology.”
Building products in highly competitive and fast-paced markets where cutting-edge technologies play a key role is an exciting thing to be around. Nonetheless, how product teams can connect the technology back to solving real customer needs of today and tomorrow is what makes what we are doing at RingCentral exciting. We are laser-focused on how people will work in the future, a perfect example of this being conversational intelligence. This idea is still in the early stages, but we’re confident this will see widespread adoption across all types of businesses and industries.
RingCentral Events opens doors for us to an entirely new market: marketers and event organizers. RingCentral Events — formerly Hopin Events — has been a market leader in the events space, with many known brands using the platform. It’s exciting to learn about what makes RingCentral Events so great and understand marketers’ and event organizers’ different goals and needs as we continue to make our product even better.
How is your team growing to help meet those goals?
We’ve significantly grown our team by onboarding talented engineers, product managers and experts from Hopin who have built and led the Hopin business. We’re excited to learn from them in the events space as we continue to build out the future, vision and roadmap, expand to new customers and integrate RingCentral Events into our full suite of product offerings.
We work hard to ensure our innovative spirit stays alive as we scale. While focusing on key deliverables is critical, focusing on cutting-edge projects that inspire creativity and innovation is equally important. A lot of that is discipline and focus; some is just being passionate about what we do. Our whole strategy is to focus on areas that will bring the greatest benefit to the highest volume of customers. It will be exciting to see the impact our product improvements have in 2024.
Our constant growth and adaptation to this ever-changing environment fuels our innovative spirit. We are focused, collaborative and passionate about the technology we build and are excited to continue growing and creating intelligent communication that transforms how the world works.
Taskrabbit is a platform that matches users with help on furniture assembly, moving and other services.
What projects does your product team have lined up for 2024, and how do they fit into your company’s strategic goals for the year?
Taskrabbit’s mission is to transform lives, one task at a time. In the next three years, we aim to become the leading platform for home services across the globe. To achieve the vision, in 2024, we are kicking off three big multi-year initiatives: Build a next-generation booking experience that enables our clients to easily book a job with a high-quality tasker; provide a seamless experience through multiple well-known branded partnerships, including our parent company, IKEA; and build a modern technical foundation.
These three initiatives will be hugely transformative in becoming the household name for any home service task on a global scale.
In the next three years, we aim to become the leading platform for home services across the globe.”
What makes these projects particularly interesting, challenging or exciting for product professionals to work on?
Taskrabbit was acquired by IKEA in 2017 and operates globally across North America and Europe. Apart from having a deep empathy to understand our user needs, PMs at Taskrabbit must also understand the marketplace dynamics across different regions and how that impacts our user behaviors. Given our ambitious vision, we are embarking on a journey to build an industry-leading booking experience while also re-platforming and modernizing our technical infrastructure. Our initiatives have a broad scope, and we need PMs with a growth mindset who excel in high-growth, high-impact environments and are willing to take on big challenges.
How is your team growing to help meet those goals?
Taskrabbit is actively hiring talented product managers and engineers across different teams, including payments, services and partnerships. Our teams conduct robust new hire onboarding programs and multiple learning and development trainings throughout the year. Additionally, each employee will receive an annual education stipend to continue to develop their skills. With many exciting projects on the horizon, Taskrabbit is committed to providing employees with internal and upward mobility opportunities throughout their careers here at Taskrabbit.
Ascend’s mission is to enable every organization to innovate faster by harnessing the power of automation.
What projects does your product team have lined up for 2024, and how do they fit into your company’s strategic goals for the year?
With the continued innovation in the data and AI space, there’s an abundance of opportunity to bring increased capabilities to every data and analytics engineering team across industries and geographies. At Ascend, we are introducing higher levels of automation to data teams, helping developers spend less time on low-impact maintenance of their data operations and more time building high-impact data assets that drive their organizations forward. In 2024, we’re committed to bringing the power of automation and generative AI to the fingertips of these data teams so that they can accomplish more powerful work than ever before.
In 2024, we’re bringing the power of automation and generative AI to data teams so that they can accomplish more powerful work than ever before.”
What makes these projects particularly interesting, challenging or exciting for product professionals to work on?
The answer is twofold. First, our technical team is tapping into the latest and greatest technologies, driving innovation in the market. Even more exciting, we’re doing this to bring tremendous benefit to our users — giving data teams more hours back in their day so that they can achieve more with less. Our product team is full of people passionate about the opportunities to innovate and create impact.
How is your team growing to help meet those goals?
We’re looking for the best, brightest and most creative to continue expanding the Ascend platform. We’re extremely passionate about harnessing the capabilities of automation and AI to impact our users.
Domino Data Lab powers model-driven businesses with its leading Enterprise AI platform trusted by industry leaders.
What projects does your product team have lined up for 2024, and how do they fit into your company’s strategic goals for the year?
In 2024, Domino will help enterprise customers achieve more with AI via three key focus areas: boosting productivity through an AI Factory, ensuring responsible AI by default and establishing Domino as the primary AI Hub for enterprises. This is possible via our ongoing commitment to being open and interoperable, integrating the best innovation from the open-source community and our close partnerships.
First, the AI Factory enables enterprises to create AI solutions swiftly and cost-effectively. For next year, we’re excited about enhancing automatic reproducibility for assets, which is crucial for many use cases, including pharmaceutical trials and model governance.
Second, delivering AI responsibly is a challenge for our enterprise customers. Our improvements will aid in managing and enforcing responsible AI policies, expediting model deployment while minimizing risk.
Our improvements will aid in managing and enforcing responsible AI policies, expediting model deployment while minimizing risk.”
Third, our intensified knowledge-sharing and reuse efforts aim to scale AI across enterprises.
This involves preserving and versioning data and AI assets for streamlined innovation and learning from collective experiences.
What makes these projects particularly interesting, challenging or exciting for product professionals to work on?
There has never been a more exciting and challenging time to help enterprises leverage AI to solve the world’s most important problems. The rate of innovation in the open-source community over the last 18 months has been incredible, and we are all learning how to wield these new powerful techniques safely, responsibly and cost-effectively.
At Domino, we are incredibly fortunate to have enterprise customers in highly regulated industries who push the boundaries of what these innovative tools and technologies can do on their own. However, our unified AI platform was designed from the ground up to be open and interoperable, and this has enabled us to pivot quickly with the community as a whole to integrate the best tools and services in a cohesive, secure and scalable platform.
How is your team growing to help meet those goals?
We are excited to continue to create and fill strategically important roles across every part of the company. However, we are laser-focused on efficient growth given the ongoing market conditions. One of our critically important approaches to addressing this challenge is ensuring that everyone in our company feels aligned and accountable for achieving our strategic goals. The clarity and energy this creates for every single person helps us execute with purpose and urgency together.
