Strategic Product Management according to Open Product Management Workflow

The book on Product Management that explains the Product Managers tasks step by step and provides useful tools as applied in practice

Frank Lemser

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783749448999
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9783749426607
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

The book »Strategic Product Management« is the introduction to the topic of Product Management according to Open Product Management Workflow. Note: the tools and templates, which are mentioned in the book, are deliberately not included, but will be issued in the trainings, as their application needs to be explained and exercised under guidance in practical examples. Additionally the book can be downloaded as PDF for free on the proProduktmanagement website.Besides general questions about tasks and how to organize Product Management as well as roles in Product Management, the book offers a step by step explanation of how to get to a decision proposal or business plan, which is based exclusively on market facts. This way bad investments are avoided and discussions about strategies and future products are reduced. The exemplary product called »SelfBackup« shows comprehensibly, how you develop an innovative product on the basis of market facts. Starting from interviews with market participants, identifying problems and persona and simple analyses you are enabled to derive all strategies required for the consolidated business plan which is the end result of the workflow. In addition, the book »Strategic Product Management« contains numerous other tips and practical examples. This book is the first one in the series and the basis for the subsequent books »Technical Product Management« and »Successful Go-to-Market« according to Open Product Management Workflow.As mentioned above you can download the book »Strategic Product Management« on the proProduktmanagement website for free and read about the importance of strategic and market-driven Product Management. Thus, you create the basis for further steps such as Technical Product Management as well as Successful Go-to-Market.

OPEN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT WORKFLOW ^TM

In all my years as a consultant in the area of Product Management I, Frank Lemser, have been asked time and time again by Product Managers which steps to do in which sequence, where to begin and what to do next. From my own practical experience, I have developed step-by-step instructions for Product Managers - the Open Product Management Workflow. I published this under a free licence so that everyone can use the Open Product Management Workflow free of charge and is free to change it.

The unique thing about the methodology of the Open Product Management Workflow is that with the help of our templates and tools, a data stream is created based on market facts which is also analysable. This data stream is used in various places with the product management tools we created, such as the Positioner, Agile Business Plan™, Requirements rating formula etc.

You can download and print out the Open Product Management Workflow here:

https://www.pro-productmanagement.com/docs/public/Open-Product-Management-Workflow.pdf

How is the Open Product Management Workflow structured and understood?

At the very top there are the different areas of product management: the Strategy, Innovation and Business section, the Technical section and at the end the Go-To-Market section. These are followed by the individual work steps which Product Management carry out.

Then at the very bottom there are the individual phases of Product Management, such as the Interview phase, the Identify phase, the Analyse phase, the Review phase and the Consolidate phase which pulls all the previous information together into a business plan, and so on.

When all phases have been completed, you will hopefully have documented all work steps in order to make any improvements later on. In this way, any improvements or optimisations you make can be incorporated during the next iteration of the product life cycle.

We read the Open Product Management Workflow from left to right, so the strategic tasks are on the left-hand side. This means that these tasks are necessary for strategic planning. The further to the right we move, so into the Technical area and ultimately to the Go-To-Market area, the more it becomes about the tactical implementation, meaning that the strategic planning is implemented here.

It’s about realising that the better you work in the strategic section and ultimately derive the strategies, the easier it is for you to do the implementation in the Technical and Go-To-Market areas.

Or in other words, without strategic planning you’ll move along like a snail in a hamster wheel.

Product Managers always tell us that they are like the fire brigade and are always only there to put out fires. If you are one of these Product Managers, then you’ve neglected to do your job in fire prevention. Because the real fire brigade is actually mainly concerned with preventive fire protection measures, and therefore only deals with putting out fires in the worst-case scenario.

When you invest more time in preventive fire protection measures, in your case in strategic product management, then you need to spend less time on putting out fires on the tactical side of things.

Without strategic planning...

• No basis for decisions -> infinite discussions
• Failure to comply with the time-to-market -> loss of time and money
• Frequent changes in the project -> reputation of the PM suffers
• Micro-management of top management
• Incorrect marketing communication

• Only features
• No added values
• Wrong target group and channels
• High costs, low return

INNOVATION

Almost all companies want to be innovative nowadays, that’s why we experience again and again that they start at exactly this point, without carrying out the above steps beforehand. Often in a room you will see index cards filled out and stapled to pinboards. Would they develop market-oriented products in such a way?

Look at the Open Product Management Workflow and start right at the Innovation point... How do you know which is the problem to solve? How do you know who you’re solving this problem for? i.e. Who will create the innovation? Is the market potential sufficient? Are there are already competitors that dominate the market?

You are therefore very unlikely to be successful with a product if you start directly at the point of innovation.

Definition:

Only if you know the problem can you think about the problem and develop an idea for its solution. And if nobody has solved this problem, the solution is automatically an innovation.

STRATEGY

What we also experience again and again are companies that start with the subject of strategy, without having carried out the previous steps from the Open Product Management Workflow. This is similar to the procedure on the subject of innovation. Index cards are filled out and stapled to pinboards.

Without the initial information it is impossible to derive product strategies, because it is very difficult to answer the following questions:

• What does the market message look like? i.e. hard to communicate which problems the product will solve for customers
• Who is the target group, actually?
• How big is the market potential and is it worth the investment?
• Where and over which channels does the target group buy?
• Where and in which media are the target group informed?
• How is the price perception or is the product worth it for the target group?

At this point we would like to point out that we always talk about deriving strategies. How they are derived and what relationships there are between the individual points, we will illustrate later in the "Strategy” phase.

PRIORIZE REQUIREMENTS, ESTIMATE TIME AND COSTS

Of course, there are also the really hard cases. These start in the Technical phase, which means you develop the products first and look for a market afterwards. This is not a joke, unfortunately we have experienced such practices.

We are then always asked whether there could be a market for the finished product. It is certainly possible to save something here and to carry out so-called reverse engineering in the area of product management, but it is very difficult and also very expensive. Because in such cases, we are missing, as previously shown, the problems, the scenarios in which the problems occur or even also the persona for which we are developing the product.

Therefore, you should always start with the interview and then identify the market problems, the persona and scenarios.

TYPICAL APPROACH OF PRODUCT MANAGERS

Very often we see in practice that Product Managers take care of the following points from the Open Product Management Workflow during their daily work.

If we are lucky, Product Managers check the product profitability with the help of KPIs, which we will look at later in more detail.

One point which Product Managers very often take care is the roadmaps, i.e. the plans of what will be delivered when. We have met Product Managers who have an insane dedication to this step.

A further aspect of the workflow which is very time-consuming is the Requirements Rating, because it sparks many discussions. Several weeks can go by here in which the manager from Development, as well as the Product M...

Table of contents

• Notes
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Product Management Responsibilities
• Product Management in the organisation
• The Product Management Dilemma or how Product Management should build the future with a hammer and chisel
• Use free software as Product Manager
• Open Product Management Workflow TM
• Business Plan
• Definition of Customer Types
• Conducting Interviews (Interview Market)
• Identifying the market problems (Identify Problems)
• Identifying personas (Identify Persona)
• Identifying the scenarios (Identify Scenario)
• Win/Loss Analysis – Document 6
• Competence Analysis - Document 7:
• Competitive Analysis, SWOT Analysis - Document 8
• Market Potential and Market Segmentation (Market Potential)
• Buyer Persona Analysis - Document 5
• Technology Benefit Analysis (Technology Analysis) - Document 10
• Product Profitability, KPI's (Product Profitability)
• Innovation
• Buy, Build or Partner
• Market strategy
• Portfolio strategy
• Distribution Strategy
• Pricing strategy
• Product positioning, Market message (Positioning) - Documents 13, 14
• Communication strategy
• Product roadmaps
• Open Product Management Workflow TM as software
• Product Management Dashboard® - Produktmanagement Software Plugin for JIRA®
• Further support for you
• Open Product Management Workflow TM Licence
• Copyright