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PRINCIPLES OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Product Management is defined as an innovative business structure to support and manage all the developing, marketing, and selling activities of a product throughout its lifecycle.

Product Management Process

Companies introduce the best product in the market for business growth. But how do they do this?

Idea Management
Idea Management is the first step where the management locks new suggestions, creative ideas, and requests for new features for the product. These help as a good source of inspiration for your product’s evolution, and the right plans are often locked down and developed further.

Specifications
During this phase, to understand the impact and effort expected for each product, the ideas, and feature requests are elaborated.

Road Mapping
Here, the whole strategy and vision are taken into consideration, and more concentration is on the initiatives to line up with the launch and life of the product. A roadmap is a tool that helps communicate where you are, where you are heading, and how you expect to get there.

Prioritization
This phase studies the roadmap of the product in detail and sets priorities on a variety of inputs. The process of prioritization involves what value of a product to build when delivering a product. Here, the product manager works in tandem with the support teams to deliver high-quality features and specifications to the product.

Analytics & Experiments
To improve the product and understand it’s value, the management run experiments and track analytics to test and improve the product continually

Customer Feedback
Throughout the cycle, customer feedback plays a vital role in validating and improving on proposed features of the products. It offers direct insight and suggestions for you to understand your progress at solving the problems you’re already trying to address, and discovering new issues that were not known.

Every product has a specific lifecycle, and some considerations have to be made for the product to last for long. A successful product manager is always vigilant to do what’s best for the product they’re selling.

Keeping Track of Competitors
Whenever a product is in high demand, there will naturally be a large number of competitors trying to bite off a slice of the market share. It’s usually best and wise to look at what the competitors are doing to incorporate the best in the business. Organizations have to also be careful during this phase since they might lose track of losing their identity.

Focusing on Data
There is a lot of data surrounding a surprising product. The quantity of data collected is of no use if you are not able to study and do anything with it. You need to look at facts and figures to see how the numbers fit into the framework of things and make sure that the product is scalable.

Importance of Customer Needs
A customer is always right and is the one who goes out to buy your products in bulk. You must keep their needs in mind since you are designing a new product. Your investment in the needs of customers will pay dividends in the future.

Dedication To Quality Products
During the production process, cutting costs to maximize profits is a common practice. It’s crucial to avoid cutting costs so much that you diminish the overall quality of the product. You have to have a product that is affordable to buy. Customers have so many options out there that it’s only right that your product ranks at the top of their list.

Product Management Approach

The three approaches to product management are:

Capturing the Voice of the Customer

This approach relies on what the customer wants. The Workflow Analysis approach focuses on the observation of customer’s work. Whereas the Outcome driven approach concentrates on what the customers’ demands are to accomplish success.

The best approach is combining the methods. In deciding on which process to use in your organization, restudy the organization’s business plan and review the company’s objectives. Once done, then layer that information with the company’s in line existence towards raising the standard of existing products vs. innovating and introducing an improvised version.

Drilling Down on the Approach of Product Management

Voice of the Customer.

“Customer is the King,” and this approach supports the fact that if you follow your customer’s demands, you will be successful.

Product Managers and the Customer’s Voice

Different organizations respond to this approach in a different manner. You can seek Customer insights from the following:

  • Individual Conversations
  • Online Communities
  • Sales Organizations
  • Customer Service Databases
  • Site Visits
  • Client Conferences
  • User Meetings

It can be challenging to collect and organize the customer’s input into something beneficial. Once you know which option to choose from the collected and organized information, the priorities will rise to the top, and you will need to establish a framework for prioritizing the inputs. It is vital that information is proactively collected and processed through your structure.

The process of collecting and filtering is very challenging, and the results are well worth the effort. They will reveal how to enhance your existing product to benefit to the fullest. It will provide logical reasoning for why your company has made this choice of innovating the product.

For someone new to the product management position, the Voice of the Customer approach will help gather information regarding the market. This information may help to decide how best to adjust the direction you are heading. It takes long to collect data to make significant changes. In the meantime, you’ll receive information you can use to make positive tweaks to products without slowing down your company’s momentum.

Limitations to Capturing the Voice of the Customer Approach
The Product Manager should follow several assumptions he manages this approach. This approach will include the assumption that the customers know what they want; they can spell out those needs and will be happy to pay for the enhancement of the product. Unfortunately, customers only see things from their limited perspective. Customers may not be able to speak for your entire market adequately. Gaining a broader perspective requires you to employ other means of data collection.

You, as a product manager, are in a stronger position to see the global needs of the market. It is necessary to reserve part of your development budget for innovation that addresses the latent needs in the market explicitly.

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