As your business grows and starts to offer new products or services, the function of product management becomes more important. To help you along the pathway to perfect product management, we’re going to delve into what the function is designed to do, and how doing it well can have a lasting impact on your business.
So, you have a business that produces organic cleaning materials. You’ve been growing steadily and have introduced a few new products to your line and now things are starting to pick up, how is effective product management going to benefit what you do?
What is “product management?”
It’s probably useful to determine this before we start to unpack how applying it to your business is going to make a difference.
The term product management is an umbrella term that covers all the processes and strategies that you will employ when bringing a new product into your line or starting a brand new one. It discusses and establishes the idea of your product and how your customers are going to engage with that product, then it monitors the performance of your product post-launch.
So there’s a fair amount of planning, strategizing, testing and inter-departmental cooperation within your business that’s going to be needed to bring the fullness of the product management process to fruition. You will be working very closely with your marketing team from the very start of this process and even though product management remains a unique function of marketing pretty much unlike any other marketing function, it is still the expressed intention of the marketing department.
The Priorities Of Good Product Management
The role of your product manager (or in some cases, you) can be summed up in three key elements:
Product Strategy: What fields are we operating in, and how do we know how well we’re doing?
What are our priorities: Which market are we serving? How are we getting our products there? Who do we appeal to most in that market? Why are they buying our products or consuming our services and if not, why should they want to?
Execution: How are we getting our product to the shelf? How do we analyze its performance? What are doing with that data to make improvements?
When you know the answers to these questions, and you’ve used that intelligence to formulate your planning, strategy, and execution — you have squarely entered into the field of effective product management.
So back to the example of your “organic cleaning product” company. Put into practical terms, what you want to know is this: what product are you going to develop next and why? What data have you mined that empowered that decision? What is your product going to look like — the packaging, the marketing plan and budget, and when those units start flying off the shelves, how is that going to determine your next move?
The Fun Stuff
Although a lot of product management is rooted in research, planning and strategizing, not exactly what dreams are made of, the fun part of product management leads you to the more creative strategies that you get to enjoy.
What is your product going to look like? How will it be placed in retail spaces or online, and how will that look if your product is a service? How will you use brand differentiation techniques to give your product the edge, and how will it be packaged? What materials will you use? Are you going to use Shrink Sleeves to create sizzling labels and tamper-proof security?
Creative thinking is not a singular inspired moment, it’s a process. It’s a collective of experiences based intelligence that leads to that “Eureka” moment, and smart product managers know to lead with a combination of practical solutions as well as creativity.
“The Strategy” - in 5 Simple Steps
So let’s break it down. The larger your business or company is and the greater your product line or service offering, so to will your product management strategy need to be more sophisticated and “scientific” but even if you’re on the smaller side of business, this 5 point guide will give you a good foundation from which to build upon.
#1 - Involve your potential clients and customers.
Good product management strategies don’t just rely on internal think tanks and intelligence, they also call in the feedback of the markets they intend to serve. A simple question like “what do you wish our products did that they don’t do now?” will reveal much.
#2 - Develop the vision for your product - all the way through.
Your “vision board” should include things like the type of clients you want to target for your product, how you are going to use marketing to get your brand noticed, what are you intending on doing to ensure continuity? When all of these questions are answered, they form part of how you mean to articulate this vision and plan to your teams, or just to you.
#3 - Set goals - clearly. This one's pretty self-explanatory, but it’s still necessary to mention. Be specific about what you want to achieve out of your plan and what the result is going to look like.
#4 - Use your goals to develop your “roadmap”. This means that once you know exactly what your endgame is going to be, reverse engineer that process and that becomes your plan.
#5 - Conduct regular audits. Revisit your plan regularly and test where you’re at in terms of its execution. Where can you be doing things better and to what end? How is your budgeting and pricing schedules working out, and how is the data you're gathering along the way benefiting the entire process?
A thorough and detailed product management plan need not be wrapped up in endless files of data and forecasting - unless you’re planning on launching a new wonder drug, then you may want that sort of due diligence but for most small to medium-sized businesses, keeping a living document that charts your product management journey from conceptualization to launch is going to be sufficient.
But the singular most important task out of this entire process is to have as much fun as you possibly can. The more positive and creative energy that you can work into this process, the better, and you’ll soon discover why.