Product Management Is Taking Care of The Company's Competitiveness!
What Is Product Management?
Product management in short is taking care of the competitiveness of the product or service. The things that it requires, depend entirely on what stage of the product’s life cycle we are in. When developing new products, product management emphasizes itself into product design, in other words understanding the needs of the market or the customer and strategic decisions on what the company should develop. For products that already exist, marketing is essential for success, to which product positioning, strategic pricing and understanding customer buying behavior belong into.
Creating a business strategy, taking care of different versions of products and many other things that are related competitiveness that we go through in this page all belong to product management.
Product design is done for the user
What happens to the product in development when the user is not defined? Yes: the designer or coder decides the solutions to as they best see fit (i.e. prepares the product for himself). Well, does the designer represent typical users with his needs or technical knowledge? In the B2B business we can generalize that they never really do. Product management brings a systematic way to deal with customers problems or needs, and gives communication tools to better understand the customers. Customer understanding allows us to confirm the easy use of the product with the point of view from the users.
With product design we confirm that the product in development meet the expectations of the customers.
Product marketing is done for the buyer.
Even the world’s best product won’t sell if the customers don’t know about it. Even if the customers were to be reached, they wouldn’t buy the product if they wouldn’t understand what value it brought to them. Product management methods set the base for product marketing: What does the product do = Value proposition, who is it sold to = Customer segmentation and how are we positioned compared to our competitors = positioning. When product marketing has been done accordingly it is quite easy to do marketing: the message is just sent to the correct channels where it is best suited. Making buying easy also increases sales.
Product marketing makes buying easy.
Product management should always be business-oriented. The underlying purpose of products and services should be to provide the customer with value that is financially measurable.
Product Management Fields
The house of product management is a reference model for product management
Product management consists of a multitude of activities, that normally tie themselves to the life cycle of the product and market. Only in the case of some products do people think if the product should be developed at all (market opportunity), In the case of others, people wonder what should they be developed to (product design) and in the third case, the focus is on taking over a share of the market (product marketing). Every single product that has made its way in to the market requires life cycle management to optimize the value provided for the company (life cycle management). So that you will succeed as a whole, all this should be managed with product strategy.
The house of product management describes all these different fields of product management and the most important tasks related to each field.
Product Strategy Paves The Way
Product strategy is a concrete plan on how to develop the offering, so that companies can achieve their goals strategically. The product strategy should be in line with other strategy components like: technology strategy, market strategy. The product strategy can be depicted in the long run roadmap (link to a short video about the subject).
Product strategy paves the way for the future and opportunity to achieve the set goals.
Market Opportunity
Market opportunity includes work upon which best ideas are evaluated for business opportunity assessment. Market opportunity depicts the rationality of the product idea for example in the form of business cases. The most important fields for market opportunity analysis are market understanding, customer understanding, customer value validation and business model.
A market opportunity always has its uncertainties, and our source data isn’t even 80% correct. Therefore finding out the market potential experiments and active learning are highlighted. The Lean start-up movement has brought us good models for market opportunity analysis.
Product marketing
The goal of product marketing is to message the target group about the product, in other words the buyers, in an interesting way. A value promise is a concrete output of product marketing that often has to be tailored to different target groups. To make the actual marketing easier, product marketing also includes segmenting customer groups so that the same message can be replicated to a large number of eager buyers. In any slightly larger organization, product marketing first needs to be done internally to get stakeholders, such as sales, interested in the new product. Product marketing is emphasized during the launch phase, but continues throughout the lifetime of the product. When product marketing is done correctly, products are easy to find and buy.
Product design
Product design as part of product management focuses on finding a solution to a given problem or need. Products are designed for their users. All products must solve a need or problem, in other words, produce value. They also must be usable and possible to implement. Often, development resources are limited, so prioritizing product features becomes an important part when not everything can be delivered at once. When talking about product management, the most important part of product design is to understand who the users are, what problem is being solved for them, and in what situation. Product design begins before the actual start of product development and continues throughout the active development of the product.
Lifecycle management
The goal of product lifecycle management is to maximize the value of a product or service to a company. Lifecycle management is in practice supporting the existing products, maintaining their competitiveness and activities that support sales. Product lifecycle management begins at the latest at launch and continues until the product is discontinued. A good grip on product lifecycle management can be gotten by looking at lifecycle models, for example Geoffrey Moore has written a classic book called Crossing the Chasm.
Antti’s briefings on the aspects of product management
Antti Suvanto, Senior Consultant at Contribyte, is a veteran of product management. See Antti’s briefings on various aspects of product management.
On Contribyte’s Youtube channel, you’ll find a Product Management playlist and dozens of product management videos from webinars to hands-on lessons
And the best way to gain a strong foundation in product management skills is to participate in Product Management 2.0 training.
Product management is teamwork. The product manager takes responsibility and shows direction and example.
Successful product management is based on:
- Effective cooperation with stakeholders. The product manager has no formal power, but motivates by example and by helping others as needed.
- Customer-orientation, the product manager keeps the customers in the organization. Customers are the part of the market that the company has chosen as its target group.
- Business orientation. Your own business and finances need to be kept in order, otherwise there won’t be enough money to develop products.
- An agile and experimental operating culture, where answers are sought from information sources and you are not left to think about them in your own foxhole.
Whose job description is product management?
In a small company (e.g. start-up, small family business), product management is on the shoulders of the CEO or some founder. As a company grows, responsibility can be distributed into product development, technology and marketing according to the sub-area. Before long, a product manager will be hired to take responsibility for product management. When there are many product managers, a head of product management may be appointed. However, the title of head of product management is rare, as many product managers report to those in charge of the business. See here what the product manager does.
How do you learn the basics of product management?
The skills of a product manager can be learned at work, by reading literature and participating in industry events. The fastest way to learn the role, the necessary skills and tools is to attend a time-intensive Product Management 2.0 course.
Product management 2.0 course introduction
Product manager’s key stakeholders
Company management
The product manager assists the top management by making a product strategy and sharing his customer/market knowledge to be used in the company’s strategy work.
Product develoment
To product development, the product manager clearly communicates the customer/market needs (what problem is being solved) and helps to prioritize development. Product development is responsible for technical solutions and implements the products.
Marketing
The Product Manager is an expert in the market for his product and produces the raw materials (segments, positioning, value proposition) for the use of the Marketing Team. Marketing adapts the material to the needs of the target group and duplicates the message to appropriate channels.
Sales
The product manager produces the tools needed by sales to sell their own product. They can be e.g. brochures, counters (to show product benefits), product cards, customer reference stories, and demo videos.