How Product Management helps your Business Attain Success
What is Product Management ?— Should it mean anything to you?
“According to statistics from Nielsen, each year over 30,000 new products are launched and 85 percent of them fail…too many products are not thoroughly prepared for the market…With proper product management, it’s possible to evade such consequences and increase chances of the product succeeding in the market.”
Product management is the job of looking after a product(s) within a business. As simple as this sounds, I find that organizations still struggle with what Product Management brings to the table. The discipline has definitely seen more acceptance, but it remains obscure, a bit of mystery, as traditional enterprises wrestle to extract significance.
Product Management has seen some major advancement in the last decade, and received growing interest to push Commercial goals. It is an extremely complex — multidisciplinary process — and is typically applied differently from one organization to another. You would see product professionals blend activities across research, design, development, marketing, and even sales of the product(s) throughout the product lifecyle. It is a team sport that frames the product vision within the corporate vision. It is a toggle between strategic and tactical that spans: (1) Vision, (2) Strategy Development, (3) Product Development, and (4) Marketing & Sales.
Product Management transforms an idea into a viable business model (Product). It is most effective when customer driven, allowing product teams to consistently ship better-designed and higher performing products. The striking goal for entrepreneurs and businesses during product building is growth — increase company’s results — and this happens through proper customer development — cyclically satisfying your customer’s ever-changing demands. More than ever product/market realization requires an intimate understanding of customers. This is where product management is most spirited.
“A market-driven focus is important because companies that have one are proven to be more profitable than those driven by other factors (31% more profitable, according to George S. Day and Prakash Nedungadi).”
Product Management is entrenched in business performance with the singular imperative to deliver value to the business. Product people play a strategic role in determining the necessary actions for achieving these goals. The PM discipline is at the heart of an organization balancing profitability’ with customer’s finished story benefit, and technical feasibility.
If you want to be profitable, build better products, the right products, Product Management is not an option. It makes a whole world of difference, accurately articulating the problem being solved and establishing shared understanding amongst critical stakeholders, managing a breadth of activities (Intent, Discovery, Research, Customer Validation, Prototyping, Survey, Data Insights, Marketing etc) to drive success. Product Management engenders the differentiation in a product, the intelligence it rallies into the project strengthens against product failure, and its processes secure longstanding sustainability for your businesses and products in our ever changing markets.
