Product Management – what is it?
This is not new, but when it comes to product management there is always someone who is ‘ in the dark’. The question is not trivial because, especially in Italy, product management is a phase that is often not given due attention. So it happens that those who do product management are not completely aware of its usage. Or not fully aware of the specific phases, resources involved, and different areas of responsibility.
Definition of product management
The most delicate aspect from a terminological point of view is that of the different areas that product management covers and therefore of the different functions that a product manager can cover within different organizations. There is indeed a common basis, which concerns the strategic guidance of the product in the different phases (development, launch, continuous support, and constant improvement). And then, there are specific variations, depending on whether the product is dish soap, a mobile operating system, or the engine that moves Tesla’s electric cars.
Are you interested? Would you like to know more about this? Ok then, in this article we will try to understand how the product manager moves from the strategic and more abstract plan to the operational and more concrete one, working within different teams. We will also try to understand how it can delegate some of its functions.
What is product management?
Tactics, strategy, management, supervision. There are many functions required within the product management process and most product managers cannot take on all these responsibilities alone. Thus the functions related to product management are often distributed within the company, as part of a broader path of accountability.
Basically, we can identify a series of activities that are always present in product management:
Analyses
Whether it is a startup or a large company well positioned on the market, analyzing is always a useful activity that has an impact on the success of the final product. Understanding the size of the market, the players involved in the value creation chain, analyzing purchasing habits to identify buyer personas is essential.
Strategy
Once you have some knowledge of the industry, it is time to develop a preliminary strategy. The strategic plan must not be limited to a few stages (for example, the advertising launch) but must include the different phases of the product life cycle. The strategy is also an indirect way to make the achieved objectives clear to the internal teams and stakeholders. Finally, through the strategy, we begin to define an approximate time schedule.
Communication
The next phase of strategic development is that of communicating the plans. It starts with planning the roadmap, which must be presented internally to executives, investors, developers, and externally, to anyone with a connection to the product.
Development coordination
When the strategic plan has received the okay from all the interested parties, the task of product management is to coordinate all the teams involved – from development to product marketing, and to the preliminary work of preparing the sales funnels.
Receive feedback and data analysis
Once the product has been developed, tested, and launched on the market, it is time to collect the first feedback, set up an aggregate analysis of the data based on the metrics of interest. It is at this stage that you understand what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be added. Present and future iterations are the essential elements in the process of continuous product improvement.
What product management is not?
Sometimes we tend to consider the figure of the product manager as a project manager with a specific focus on the product. This is a wrong interpretation – the two figures differ distinctly at the level of functions and daily operations. The product manager does not take care of the weekly plan, nor does he follow the daily details of product development. These activities are specific to the project manager.
When is Product Management applied?
The discipline of product management, established within the application development methodologies, has recently diffused in different sectors. On the other hand, it is a broad field of action, with a great deal of room for growth in various industries in the near future. Although in Italy it sounds a bit like a novelty to many, the success of a business and the growth of a brand often depends on the quality of the work of a product manager and on the ways in which the product management process is distributed within the organization.
Within those organizations that do not have one, there is a tendency to consider hiring a Product Manager in the first twelve months of development, to maximize the benefits and the chances of long-term success. In general, however, when you want to go to the market to stay there, you cannot make well-defined forecasts for a time-limited period. It is certainly true that in all sectors the main responsibility of the product manager is to supervise the path that leads to the success of the product on the market. However, depending on the industry of reference, product managers have different specific responsibilities – this means that they take charge of some essential aspects of a company’s business on an ongoing basis.
What are the industries in which product management is used?
Looking at the hiring offers, many of the required product management figures are related to the technology industry. As we said, however, the trend is that of constant expansion: from cars to medicines, to the most common products on supermarket shelves.
To understand more about the diffusion of product managers in different industries, a study by ProductPlan.com comes to our aid. For the uninitiated, since 2013 the Product Plan types manage a platform that helps anyone involved in product management in creating roadmaps. The analysis, published in autumn 2021, collected data from a sample of over 2,200 product managers, interviewed through a questionnaire. From a first look at the table below, it is clear that it is the Tech industry that dominates the scene with 51% of the companies involved, followed by 11% by Financial Services. In third place, the Health tied with the Retail sector on 6 % (relating to the development of online commerce products). In fourth place with 5% another draw: Manufacturing and Education, followed by Media & Entertainment, Transport, Communications, and Non-Profit.
From the data of the Product Plan study, profiling of companies also emerges mostly large companies with over 1000 employees and in part also medium-small companies. And profiling of product managers: mostly (41%) in the 30-39 age group, but also younger, with 18% of the sample in the 18-29 age group. Overall, only 43% of the interviewees were over 40 and consequently have an advanced seniority profile.
What is the Product Management Process?
When it comes to product management, there is no single way to do it – it is, therefore, more appropriate to consider not a single process, but the processes. The processes are built, activated, and modified within the company organization. The preferences of managers and operators are taken into account, processes are adapted according to the moment relative to the product life cycle. Product management also serves to activate processes that are useful for empathizing with the end-user. The product manager must work closely with designers and other business functions to create something unique that is relevant to the end-user. The greater the identification with the user, the greater the likelihood that the product will be successful.
Define the problem
We start by identifying a pain point on the customer’s side: a high value can be collected here. The public expresses itself with requests or complaints regarding a single product category or a specific point of the market. The product manager must capture these iterations, seize the opportunity and search for solutions.
Quantify the opportunity
Once defined, the problem is only the spark that triggers the process. The development does not stop at the resolution of the single request but tries to include more functions. In this phase, it is the task of the product manager to filter and limit the requests to be included in the development plan to those that can be fulfilled on the basis of their commercial value.
Define the market
What is the total market area which we are going to impact? The logic is based on the assets already present within the organization: if the company has developed specific know-how or proprietary technology in a particular area of expertise, it will certainly have to take advantage of this.
Building buyer personas
Once the market has been defined, personas can be built on the basis of verified data. In this way, we will understand if there is an actual interest within those specific groups, cohorts.
This phase, which is often not given due attention, is essential in the process of adapting the product-market development path.
Launch an MVP: Fail and Learn
Now everything is ready, the development team got the OK to proceed to include the minimum set of features and create a working and salable version of the product. The Minimum Viable Product must offer the basic functionality for the go-to-market. It is accompanied by the positioning of the value proposition in the processes related to product marketing.
But be careful: the MVP is not destined to stay! In a certain sense, its goal is also to fail fast in order to obtain feedback on the market as soon as possible. The smallest possible product is therefore what is created, launched, and tested, so it can fail and we learn from it.
Create a cycle of iterations
The purpose of the MVP is to obtain feedback. This is where you begin to understand what customers really want. In this phase of the process, product management is essential to define the best feedback collection strategies. Soliciting multi-level iterations to actively engage the user base.
However, it is not enough to receive feedback – we need to filter it, process it, and include it in the product roadmap. Once that’s done, it’s time to close the loop: let customers know that their requests have been considered.
Setting the strategy
Thanks to the MVP, the development team is now aware of the levers that the product has activated in the public. Now it is possible to improve some features, but before doing so it is advisable to set an incremental strategy based on achievable goals by defining KPIs and metrics.
At this stage, the strategy ensures alignment between stakeholders and the buy-in.
Lead the executive phase
Everything is ready to be accelerated. There is a shared strategy, the continuous feedback management system as well. It’s time to define the roadmap. Here, specific prioritization frameworks will be used based on the specific needs of the organization. These frames are important in large organizations, as well as in the small ones, to provide a visual substrate related to tasks, objectives, and progress to the members of different teams.
What methodologies does Product Management use?
There are management methodologies – agile, lean, waterfall, and product methodologies – such as design thinking, sprint, and others to which we have dedicated, and will dedicate a specific focus on these pages.
B2B vs B2C Product Management
Basically, the role, tasks, and demands that product managers have to fulfill in the B2B and B2C fields are identical. The substantial difference lies in the types of impacted users, in their purchasing behavior (a product manager in the B2B field does not buy compulsively), and in the high specificity of B2B products. Unlike B2C, they are used to responding to requests made by a specific niche of users.
In the B2C field, there are open data, aggregated and pre-processed data, free and paid tools for carrying out research. In the B2B area, the issue is a bit more complex.
What changes and defines the two areas of intervention is therefore the reference vocabulary and the techniques to achieve the objectives. In the B2B field, product management requires a constant flow of interviews, inspections, and visits to follow the trends in the sector. Only by communicating directly with the professionals, earning their trust, will it be possible to report useful feedback to our development teams.
Product Lifecycle
To learn more about some of the essential concepts and aspects we talked about in this article, we invite you to read our product lifecycle guide. Only by fully understanding the phases that a product/service goes through, from its initial conception to success on the market and eventual decline, can we understand the role and frameworks of product management.