Product Management: An Insight

Products are everywhere, some succeed and some fail. To create a successful product, it needs to follow a structured approach which is the product development process. Product development is the process of designing, building, operating, and maintaining a good product or service. Software and Internet companies use a product development process to ensure that they are not just manufacturing a technology, but creating a product that people will want to buy and continue to use. Product development adds things like pricing, marketing, and customer support to the technology to create a complete product. Without a product management philosophy and discipline, an IT organization becomes focused on the technology instead of the customers and is often organized along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer.

This article is dedicated to few common product pitfalls which lead to a product disaster which are listed below:

Confusing product requirements with customer requirements.
Confusing innovation with value.
Confusing yourself with your customer.
Confusing the customer with the user.
Confusing features with benefits.
Confusing building right product with building product right.
Confusing good product with good business model.
Confusing Inspiring features with “Nice-to-Have” features.
Confusing adding features with improving product.
Confusing impressive specifications with an impressive product.

To briefly explain the first point, it’s not always wise to look forward to your marketing team, sales or customer for knowing about the kind of product you are working on. Sometimes, the customers don’t understand or know the kind of similar products available in the market and sometimes they don’t have the expertise on the technology and don’t understand the possibility of developing the product. Hence, Product management is responsible for defining the right product. It is the job of the product manager to deeply understand the target market and their needs, and then to work to combine what is possible with what is desirable, to create products that solve real problems. This is why top product managers often come from the engineering ranks; they understand what is possible, and when they see an unmet need they can often envision new and innovative solutions. Product marketing is also very important, just very different. Product marketing is all about communicating what the product does to the target market, and supporting the sales channel with the tools they need to effectively sell. Good product marketing is difficult and critical, but it is not at all the same thing as inventing the actual product.

Interesting, more in the next post….