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What does product management do?
Product management has a big job in any organization. These individuals are often responsible for the health and on-going maintenance of a company’s products as well as for launching new products that can serve as new sources of revenue for the firm. Often what is asked of them is to be creative, innovative and strategic.
However, some product management teams struggle to deliver on these three functional requirements. In attempting to deliver on organizational objectives, product managers may sometimes fall into these common traps:
- Me-Too Products: While ensuring a company remains competitive means providing similar but better products, developing a like-for-like “me too” product is not very innovative. It may help to fill a gap in the company’s portfolio but product managers should really seek to limit “me-too” products as they tend to be a follower, rather than a leadership strategy.
- Failure to Let Go: The inability to remove underperforming or outdated products from a portfolio can be overly taxing to organizations. There are many reasons for not doing so sooner, however an effective product manager knows that it is easier to manage 10-100 products rather than 200-2000 products in his/her portfolio.
- Dry Pipeline: A dry pipeline occurs when there is a dearth of innovation and New products being developed in the pipeline. This severely limits a firm’s ability to grow organically and forces companies to think about purchasing innovative companies, technologies and teams. While a healthy corporate strategy should balance organic and inorganic growth, a dry pipeline forces organizations to be more heavily reliant on acquisitions for growth.
- Differentiation: One substantial pitfall that many product managers fall into is the inability to differentiate the firm’s products relative to the competition. This may occur because the product manager is too close and has been throughout the development of the product and as such has lost the initial fresh perspective. Alternatively, it may be a systemic inability to differentiate the product because of an overabundance of confidence in the firm’s brand to carry the product.
- Cost & Risk Management: One of the crucial requirements of product development is the management of costs and risk associated with the development of that product.
- Tunnel Vision: When product managers focus on only a few products in the portfolio or a few customers to target, they create blind spots to various other possibilities.
- Loss of Objectivity: When any one person stays in a role for too long, he/she inevitably will lose objectivity that comes from unbiased perspective of the issues and needs. This loss of objectivity may make it difficult to make the tough decisions necessary to ensure the ongoing health and wellness of an organization’s portfolio of products.
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