The Practice of Product Management

A few months back, when I started writing these articles on product management, some of you tried to find out what made me write those articles. Someone asked me if the concepts of product management are domain-specific. Or they are learnings that one can apply to other domains. Is the Product Management discipline a new paradigm, which is different from traditional management principles? While trying to mull over some of these thoughts, I felt at least the PM literature I have read or the activities I have exposure to in my 16 years of PM experience: can be broadly classified into ten broad processes. Aggregated, I will like to call them The Practice of Product Management. The practice is not entirely different. It’s centered around the Industry Analysis framework by Michael Porter. Though proposed in the 80s, the framework remains one of the most promising, researched, and often challenged. A generation of managers and MBA graduates grew up with it. The strategy consultants still vouch for it and use the tools as part of their analysis. Secondly, I intend to bring PM discipline within the purview of other management processes for business managers to understand what PMs are supposed to do.

PPM Processes

1. Strategy: Everything emanates from the organization’s strategy: choosing your industry, the industry players, their interactions, and the organization’s response. Change your strategy and your battleground and domain changes. Small organizations will have product managers and senior management determine their strategy. Larger ones will induct strategy consultants and managers to help them with the process. more…
2. Product Vision: A non-delegatable responsibility of the PM organization to deliver to promises made to customers. Not only it defines the customer value, but also it creates the tone and messaging in the market. Your competitors will respond to the execution of your vision. more…
3. Customer: If you deal with commodities, you will be facing the challenges of an ever bargaining buyer. You will need to create the value drivers with users and influencers to move away from the buying mindset to a mutual success-oriented customer mindset. more…
4. Pricing: is not about offering the best discount to the buyer but creating a value perception and taking your rightful share of the perception. Once you moved the customer from a buyer mindset to a trusted advisor mindset, you can negotiate for the right price. more…
5. User Experience: This is part of the value drivers for the influencers. A good user experience will compel the customer to pick up a product even if the price is a bit on the higher side. They will start perceiving a better value. more…
6. Contracts: No business operates in isolation. If you are offering a service to your customers, you also need downstream services fulfilled by your vendors. You will need well-defined contracts and service level agreements for the proper execution of the same. Even contractual relationships are essential for your customer engagements as well. more…
7. IPR: Your business is always under the threat of new entrants. Having the intellectual properties protected to ensure there are barriers created for such entrants. more…
8. Compliance: Every industry needs one or more compliance requirements. While there are cheaper alternatives offered as substitutes, compliance requirements ensure gating criteria and protection against such alternates. more…
9. Agile Process: All these activities need to meet the changing needs of the business processes. Agile processes provide a transparent process of communicating across the team the overall progress in a consistent manner. The estimation, reporting, and release processes are generally simpler and frequent. more…
10. People: Product Managers are not substantial people management roles. They essentially are capable matrix managers, who pretty much are competent in operating through unknowns with ease. Mostly KPI-driven and numbers-oriented, a few process frameworks like RACI are good tools for PMs. more…

Next Steps

How is the Practice of Product Management implemented in your organization? As you can see, it is a continually improved process. You need to set up a regular cadence across all these processes. If you need to have a conversation around any of these processes, contact me.