No matter which company I came to work for: foreign or local in Russia – everywhere I was always surprised by the fact that I look and analyze, so to speak, “beyond the line”. This includes the analysis of foreign colleagues, supervisory training on examples of applications from other industries and detailed analysis of direct local competitors. And this applies to both specific features and user UX, as well as broader things like display advertising or links in paid media and sites.

My name is Olena Gladylina, I am a product manager of credibility at Tinkoff Investments and an ex-Basepaws (Zoetis) product growth manager at an American startup, as well as a product growth mentor on the Growth Mentor platform. In this article, I want to share my experience of trendwatching and pervasive analytics as a way to grow and generate endless ideas.

In my work, I like to follow a double approach: analysis from below and analysis from above. The first means that I conduct qualitative and quantitative research, build user journey maps and identify levers for growth based on pain points and numbers. When the pain is identified and all solutions have been tried, or the fantasy has failed, I turn to seeking ideas from the outside through the tools mentioned above. The second is the opposite. Without being tied to any specific problem, I analyze colleagues, competitors and cool guys for aha-moments or wow-effects. And then I try it on problems. So, what follows is the second approach. What is its advantage?

First, you don’t act like a horse with blinders on. This allows you to notice small interesting details and monitor your user behavior from a slightly less expert position. Moreover, you are not limited to a specific narrow need, which means that you are not limited to studying only some part of the application – for example, the application process.

Secondly, this is the same way to improve your product skills as taking courses. In addition to the banal “I like the way it looks”, I like to dig into the company’s reports, if it is public, or read articles about how the feature was invented, or simply ask “How did they come up with this?”. Here, I immediately want to share a cool resource that has already done all this for us study health. But even if the program you need is not there, go through the same path yourself.

Thirdly, as the title of this article says, this is a way to keep your finger on the pulse and not focus on how and what you know, but to analyze the answer to the question “And how and what else is possible?”. Moreover, sometimes something new and interesting is born at the junction of industries or ideas. And the analysis of completely different niches such as pet-tech for fintech is also brain ventilation.

Where to upgrade the trendwatching skill?

TrendHunter – probably one of the most interesting aggregators of product and marketing solutions. But I ask you to pay more attention to their mechanics of evaluating trends according to the scale of uniqueness, novelty, coverage and the overall approach to finding trends. Moreover, children have interesting webinars several times a year and there is a free report with explanations of examples of trends in practice.

ProductHunt – rather a place where users can vote for innovative products. Knowing how to rank with your audience, I don’t put much faith in rankings, but I also study what seems interesting to me.

TrendWatching – Weekly analytics with examples of innovations and implementation of trends in practice. I like how the editors try to back up each example with numbers. And a separate pleasure is magazine layout.

TechCrunch – I read the mail to keep up with the latest news. This is exactly a newspaper-like portal to study some numbers, releases and get insights quickly.

Adsoftheworld – It differs from all previous resources in that there are no trends or ready-made analytics. This is simply a collection of all ads, broken down into categories. This is where I most like to watch a series of videos and unravel the story – what insight did they start from, what need do the videos fill and what purpose do they have.

Where else to look? It is often useful to subscribe to specialized newsletters – Business of Fashion, Vogue Business for fashion, Business of Wellness – for the health & wellness industry, or Robinhood Snacks and Money Scoop for finance.

The last – and not the obvious one – is to watch and learn apps on your phone. Why did you choose and use Flo instead of thousands of other programs for tracking women’s health? Do you constantly click on the cross in the upper right corner to close the paywall? Do you for some reason incredibly love Nike Run Club even after being removed from the Russian side? Life hack – get yourself several accounts (especially relevant for apple owners) to download any programs from the world. Even if a red passport becomes an obstacle to successful authorization, at least you will reach an unauthorized zone, where it is very interesting to live. So, for example, from studying Public.com alone, I put dozens of ideas in the backlog to improve the user journey and loyalty.

I hope this article will help you replenish your already full backlogs, but with slightly fresher, more interesting and ambitious ideas. And maybe someone will get cosmic results thanks to their insight. Good luck!