🌍 1990: Tim Berners-Lee tests the software that later became the World Wide Web.

🎮 1993: The PlayStation is released, launching a new era of home console gaming.

🛒 1994: eCommerce sites (Amazon, eBay) become popular.

👨‍💻 1995: Microsoft launches Windows 95, and Internet Explorer makes the internet more user-friendly.

📼 1997: Netflix is launched in its original version, mailing videos to customers in their own homes

🎧 1998: The first portable MP3 player was released

📧 Email takes off, changing communication.

🎉 Y2K is expected to bring the new online world crashing to a halt. It didn’t!

2002 saw the start of the APM program, which Marissa Mayer introduced at Google. Soon after tech companies adopted the program.

In the early 2000s, we also got the Agile Manifesto, which was set to replace waterfall as the defacto method for building software products. Without agile, there would be no MVPs, no Product-Led growth, and the overall landscape of the tech industry would look different.

👾 2004: The video game industry’s profits officially overtook the movie industry

🗣 People started using the word Google as a verb

👋 Peer-to-peer technology took off, leading to big debates on the ethics of filesharing

🤓 Smartboards were more widely adopted and installed in schools, and eReader sales became as important to the publishing industry as paperback/hardback sales

📢 The Agile Manifesto was launched.

Product school was founded in 2014, from a small coworking space in San Francisco.

This is also the decade where product leaders realized that they could give back to the product management community, volunteering their time to give talks, write books, appear on podcasts, and attend conferences.

💻 2012: Google Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the most used web browser

🚀 2012: SpaceX’s Dragon became the first private commercial spacecraft to reach the International Space Station

👩‍💼 Virtual assistants became more widely available, including Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa

🖨 The 3D printing industry gained $7 billion in sales

📺 Streaming sites rose in popularity, eclipsing traditional television.

🌏 2018: The number of global internet users surpassed half the population of the world.