Product Management plays an essential strategic role in product-driven manufacturing businesses, yet it is often held back by outdated processes and tools.
This article will cover important topics that every product manager, CEO, and team member involved in product planning should be familiar with. We’ll explore Product Management as a discipline, evaluate current frameworks and tools, and provide guidance on how to navigate today’s environment while preparing for the future.
The Role of Product Management Inside the Organization
Manufacturing is a demanding industry and companies that operate in this space face constant pressure to keep up with technological advancements and ever-evolving consumer and B2B client expectations. Enterprises that fail to adapt risk falling behind, losing market share, or worse. Product Management is vital for driving growth and achieving strategic market advantages in product-driven companies.
The role of Product Management is deeply connected to a company’s growth strategies, often guided by the vision of executive leaders. The Product Management function is responsible for encouraging innovation, expanding into new markets, reaching new audiences, improving existing products, and creating entirely new products that offer a competitive edge. However, despite its strategic importance, Product Management often lacks a direct seat at the C-suite table.
The 5 Steps of Product Management
Product Management acts as the nucleus of a product-driven company, linking development, marketing, sales, and customer success teams while ensuring alignment with the company’s vision. Externally, it focuses on customer needs and market forces to guarantee product/market fit, guiding teams through five key stages to ensure the product’s specifications are correct, viable, and actionable.
Step 1: Opportunity Identification
Product Managers assess customer needs and market demands to identify product opportunities. This involves:
Customer Knowledge: Collect insights through surveys, CRM, and internal teams.
Market Knowledge: Analyze product/market fit, competitors, and pricing.
The goal is to define initial product requirements that address market problems and confirm a strong product/market fit.
Step 2: Product Definition—Viability and Planning
In this phase, insights about the target customer are used to create a detailed product plan. The product is mapped to Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD), identifying customer needs and translating them into development requirements. The team evaluates options, considering market needs, revenue impact, and brand perception, ultimately creating a comprehensive product plan that guides the entire process.
Step 3: Product Development
This step focuses on validating the product through internal and external sources like Finance, Engineering, and focus groups. The goal is to confirm the opportunity to deliver the product and refine its requirements. The team also finalizes the release timeline, considering product complexity and the degree of innovation involved.
Step 4: Product Introduction
Next up involves preparing for and executing the product launch, with Product Management leading the way. Key activities include planning for market assortment, securing regulatory approvals, and ensuring production capacity. Additionally, team training across affected departments like Sales and Production seeks to confirm an easy launch. All these efforts come together to bring the product to market.
Step 5: Ongoing Management
Post-launch management is vital for guaranteeing the long-term success of a product. This step involves measuring performance, gathering customer feedback, monitoring competitor actions, and continuing product promotion. Ongoing analysis can uncover new opportunities, inform product improvements, and guide decisions as the product reaches the end of its lifecycle.
The State of Product Management
Product Management has struggled to keep up with changing customer expectations and technological advancements. Key challenges include:
Legacy infrastructure: Product management has often been undervalued, with managers overtaxed by product definitions and project management duties.
Lack of clarity: Confusion between Product Management and Project Management creates inefficiencies and limits strategic focus.
Outdated tools: Despite technological advances, Product Managers still rely on tools like MS Excel and PowerPoint, which hinder data management and collaboration.
Data silos: Multiple spreadsheets prevent a “single source of truth,” making analysis difficult.
Lack of flexibility: Excel’s static nature limits the ability to quickly assess scenarios.
Unwieldy volumes: Managing large data sets manually is time-consuming and inefficient.
Collaboration challenges: Without centralized tools, team collaboration suffers, often leading to lost information and missed opportunities.
These challenges make it harder for Product Managers to be strategic and innovative.
Product Portfolio Management vs. Product Management
Product Portfolio Management focuses on overarching strategic planning and market disruption, analyzing a full product portfolio and looking for opportunities to innovate, predict competitive movements, and phase out outdated products. Their role involves scrutinizing the market and considering more radical changes.
On the other hand, Product Management targets specific product vision and incremental improvements. Product Managers track the market and competition for a single product and ensure it aligns with customer demand.
Requirements for an Effective Product Portfolio Strategy
To realize a culture of successful product creation, companies must have:
Strategic Focus: Honest evaluation of current products to ensure alignment with market needs.
Transparency: Open conversations across teams about product relevance and required changes.
Team Unity: Unifying the team around the need for change, explaining the benefits of evolving, and addressing the risks of stagnation.
Agility: A fast response to market changes, adapting quickly and efficiently.
The goal is to create a culture where change is seen as normal and the team understands its place in the evolving product strategy.
Continuous Growth Framework
Companies must assess whether their current Product Portfolio Management process enables a pioneering mindset. A successful strategy requires the right elements, known as The Three Ps:
Process: Continuous improvement through the Deming Cycle—plan, do, check, act. It includes defining the product portfolio, ideating new products, tracking performance, and identifying growth opportunities.
People: A dedicated Product Portfolio Manager is key to leading the process, aligning teams, and ensuring focus on business goals. Other critical team members include general management, product marketing, sales, engineering, finance, and compliance.
Platform: Product Portfolio Management requires a comprehensive platform that connects strategy with tactics. This platform must scale with the organization and serve as a "single source of truth," facilitating collaboration and streamlining tactical tasks while enabling strategic activities. It should support planning, forecasting, competitive analysis, and market segmentation.
The Path Forward
Innovation doesn’t always need to come from top leadership. Empowering employees across the company to bring disruptive ideas is crucial. This involves providing the right product portfolio management software, training, and culture to this approach.
Product Managers should be given ownership of their product lines, acting as the CEOs of their products to maintain accountability, relevance, and growth.
