Product Management For Dummies

Brian Lawley, Pamela Schure

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119264026
• eBook ISBN: 9781119264033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Your one-stop guide to becoming a product management prodigy

Product management plays a pivotal role in organizations. In fact, it's now considered the fourth most important title in corporate America—yet only a tiny fraction of product managers have been trained for this vital position. If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who hold this essential job—or simply aspire to break into a new role— Product Management For Dummies gives you the tools to increase your skill level and manage products like a pro.

From defining what product management is—and isn't—to exploring the rising importance of product management in the corporate world, this friendly and accessible guide quickly gets you up to speed on everything it takes to thrive in this growing field. It offers plain-English explanations of the product life cycle, market research, competitive analysis, market and pricing strategy, product roadmaps, the people skills it takes to effectively influence and negotiate, and so much more.

• Create a winning strategy for your product
• Gather and analyze customer and market feedback
• Prioritize and convey requirements to engineering teams effectively
• Maximize revenues and profitability

Product managers are responsible for so much more than meets the eye—and this friendly, authoritative guide lifts the curtain on what it takes to succeed.

Part 1

Getting Started with Product Management

IN THIS PART…

Discover what product management is all about and what critical role it takes in delivering successful products to market.

Find out about the wide range of job functions you’ll be working with and bring to your team.

Understand the complete process of bringing a product to market.

Determine what information you need to compile to keep a product on track to achieve market success.

Chapter 1

Welcome to the World of Product Management

IN THIS CHAPTER

Grasping the vital part the product manager plays in product success

Previewing typical product management responsibilities

As a product manager, you have one of the most rewarding, challenging, interesting, difficult, and important jobs in the business industry. You get to step up and be a product leader for everyone on your team and throughout your company while learning how to influence and lead usually without any formal authority or people reporting to you directly. You get to be responsible for every aspect of the product offering and for the overall success and failure of your product. This position provides one of the best training grounds for moving onward and upward into roles like vice president, general manager, and CEO. And if you’re lucky and choose carefully, you get to work with some pretty talented engineering and development teams to create products that delight your customers, make a huge difference in your customers’ lives, and help achieve profits and strategic objectives that propel your company to success.

Understanding the Need for Product Management

The corporate world has recently gained a deep understanding about why product management is the best choice for driving products strategically to ensure companies’ customers are delighted and their businesses are growing. According to Aegis Resources companies that empower product managers are shown to be 50 percent faster to market. And in a 2013 CBS News MoneyWatch article, product management was listed as the fourth most important role in corporations, behind only the CEO, general managers, and senior executives. You’re part of a select and important crowd.

The benefits of having a great product management organization are hard to ignore:

• Delivering products that better meet customer needs
• Increasing revenues and profitability
• Creating delighted customers who generate positive word-of-mouth referrals
• Capturing and owning markets long-term as a result of solid product strategy which drives overall company efforts

These are just a few of the benefits. No other group in the company understands all aspects of the business the way that product managers do, and thus they become the central point of responsibility for product success or failure.

YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY

Many CEOs started in product management as their training ground. Some notable examples include Marissa Mayer (who started at Google, moved into product management, and became CEO of Yahoo!), Steve Ballmer (who started as a product manager at Proctor & Gamble and became CEO of Microsoft), and Scott Cook (who started as a product and brand manager at Proctor & Gamble and later founded Intuit, the maker of Quicken, Mint, QuickBooks, and Turbo Tax). In fact, the last seven CEOs at Proctor & Gamble started as product managers or brand managers, as they are known in the packaged goods industry.

Recognizing the Critical Role of Project Management

Companies with great product management have a much higher degree of success. But what is product management? The following sections shed some light on what a product manager actually does.

Defining product management

You can think of product management as the function in a company that is ultimately responsible for making sure that every product the company offers to the market is as successful as possible both short-term tactically and long-term strategically. In other words, the buck stops here. You, as a product manager, must own everything about product success. Product managers rarely, if ever, have any formal authority or people reporting to them, so they must lead and influence in subtle yet effective ways.

Serving as a strategic driver for business

In a company each functional group has expertise and strives to be the best it can possibly be at what it’s responsible for. Engineers, also known as developers, build great solutions for customers. Marketing maximizes awareness and interest in products and services. The marketing folks ensure that the market knows the product differentiation and is enticed to consider purchasing. Sales is responsible for closing the sale with customers that are already enticed. Operations makes sure that the solution is delivered efficiently and at a low cost and that the company is operating as cost effectively as possible. Technical and customer support ensure the customer’s problems, if any, are resolved.

The role of product management

So how does product management fit in? One way to think about it is that product management is in the center of all company departments, as shown in Figure 1-1, as well as external entities such as customers, press, analysts, and partners. Although each of the other groups understands its role in making the company successful, product management is the only group that has a holistic point of view and understands how all the pieces fit together.

© 2017, 280 Group LLC. All Rights Reserved.

FIGURE 1-1: The role of product management.

Without great product management, no one can take responsibility for all aspects of customer success. After all, someone has to make sure that the short-term tactical work gets done to make the product successful. Someone also has to set out and drive the product strategy so that success is ensured longer-term. This is the role of product management (see Chapter 2 for more on what the product manager role covers).

Owning the whole product

When customers think about your product, they have a mental pro and con list that includes items that have nothing to do with product and feature benefits. Does it meet industry standards? Who will install it? Do I trust them? Who do I call if I have a problem with it after I buy it? Will they pick up the phone? Can I purchase it in a way that is convenient and familiar to me? Can I finance it? If the product lasts many years, who is going to support it for all that time? These additional aspects of your product are called the augmented product. You can see how the core product, actual product and augmented product are related to each other in Figure 1-2.

© 2017, 280 Group LLC. All Rights Reserved.

FIGURE 1-2: The whole product offer.

The augmented product is the additional parts of your overall solution that support the customer’s experience with your product, such as warranty, support, purchase process, and many other factors beyond just the product and its features. A product promise is the implied guarantee of what kind of experience you’re offering to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Started with Product Management
• Part 2: Discovering, Evaluating, and Planning for Great Products and Services
• Part 3: Building and Maximizing Product Success: From Development to Retirement
• Part 4: Becoming a Phenomenal Product Manager
• Part 5: Part of Tens
• Glossary
• About the Authors
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• End User License Agreement