Contribute to Research on Product Management Career Outcomes

A study on outcomes of popular Product Management certifications and certificate programs.

Productside and AIPMM are teaming up to once more bring you an analysis of career outcomes from upskilling efforts such as on the job training, courses, and certification. Whether you are just starting out or have already passed a certification exam, submit your answers to be part of this study. Participants will get early access to the report and be entered for a chance to win one of four $50 Amazon gift cards. Entries in September will be entered twice to win. Entries identified as false entries (bots or fake) will be excluded.

Participation in this survey is voluntary. The survey is used for research purposes only. We never share your data. All entries will be anonymized in this study.

Survey will be open until October 18th

Report will come out in November.

The post Product Management Certification Outcomes Survey appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

Why Every Product Manager Must Become an AI Product Manager

Introduction to AI Product Management

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, AI has moved from a buzzword to the boardroom, asserting its role as a cornerstone in product management. Product managers find themselves in a tech whirlwind with customer expectations evolving at the speed of a page refresh. Here’s the not-so-secret secret: mastering AI is not just for the self-proclaimed AI Product Managers; it’s a must-have skill for all to stay relevant and ingenious in navigating the future in AI Product Management.

The Ubiquity of AI in Product Management

Generative AI has swiftly moved from the “maybe AI one day” shelf to the “here and now” toolkit across the product management spectrum. It’s threading through the lifecycle of products, from the spark of ideation to the glory of launch and beyond. This is not just for AI product managers; it means all product managers must roll up their sleeves and get cozy with AI. Understanding its capabilities, limitations, and ethical dimensions is now part of the job description.

The Shifting Landscape of Customer Expectations

Last year’s Generative AI paradigm shift has become this year’s need to rewrite the rulebook on customer expectations. Today’s customers aren’t just hoping for products that understand their needs—they’re expecting experiences that predict their future desires with the finesse of a mind reader. Product managers are now tasked with leveraging AI to unlock these insights, ensuring that products don’t just respond but intuit, adapt, and enhance over time.

The Redefinition of Competitive Advantage with AI

Gone are the days when the biggest brand or the lowest price tag won the market. In the age of AI, the new currency of competitive advantage is a company’s ability to innovate with AI at the helm. Product managers with the savvy to integrate AI into their strategies are the new vanguards, setting the pace for market capture and growth.

Core Skills for Every AI Product Manager

1. AI Literacy:

Understanding AI is now table stakes for product managers. This isn’t about mastering the code but about grasping the concepts, from machine learning to data analytics, well enough to lead discussions with the tech team and guide the ethical compass of AI implementation.

2. Data-Driven Decision Making:

In the AI era, data isn’t just king—it’s the entire kingdom. AI Product managers need to wield data analytics like a scepter, making decisions that are not just informed but prophetic, turning insights into actions that keep products at the cutting edge.

3. Ethical AI Considerations:

As AI entwines more deeply with products, navigating its ethical landscape becomes paramount. Product managers must champion responsible AI, ensuring that the products of tomorrow are built on the principles of privacy, fairness, and societal benefit.

4. Collaborative Innovation:

Creating AI-powered products is a team sport that requires AI product managers to be the ultimate team players. It’s about rallying data scientists, engineers, and designers around a shared vision, fostering an environment where innovation thrives on collaboration.

5. Adaptability and Continuous Learning:

The AI field is a moving target, constantly evolving with new breakthroughs. For product managers, staying ahead means being perpetually curious, ready to learn, and agile enough to pivot strategies in lockstep with AI’s rapid advancements.

Master AI Product Management Today with Productside

Integrating AI into product management isn’t just on the horizon — it’s already here, reshaping the landscape and setting the stage for the next generation of products. As AI continues redefining what’s possible, product managers are called upon to broaden their skill sets, embracing AI as a tool and a transformative force. The future is bright for those ready to journey into the AI realm, blending technology with vision to create products that are not just smart but also intuitive and impactful.

The time to transition from product manager to AI product manager is not tomorrow—it’s today. Because in the fast-evolving world of AI, staying ahead doesn’t just mean keeping pace; it means leading the charge.

Get ahead of the AI curve with our new course, AI Innovation for Product Managers. In this course, you’ll learn how to effectively implement AI technology into your product or workflow and the tools and skills to make better decisions. Reserve your spot today!

TL;DR? The dirty little secret is out, AI is no longer a specialization but a fundamental aspect of product management. Those who recognize this reality and proactively adapt their skills will be well-positioned to thrive in the AI-driven future of their profession. The time for every product manager to become an AI product manager is now.

The post The Future of AI Product Management appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

Agile software development has transformed how we approach software product development. It has delivered some enormous benefits for efficiently delivering software products to the market but oftentimes the strategic thinking of Product Management has been overlooked. The practice of Agile Product Management is integrating traditional Product Management concepts into organizations doing Agile development. In order to do this the organizations must implement a way to translate these long term business strategies into shorter development cycles. This can be done by a Product Manager, a Product Owner or someone that performs both roles although this is not a desirable situation because the workload will quickly become overwhelming.

Agile development methodology grew out of a desire by software programmers to create better working code faster and with a more reasonable work-life balance. Because the focus of Agile was on the programmer, the role of the person defining the requirements was created from the perspective of the developer. In Agile, this role is called the Product Owner. In contrast, the Product Manager’s role is often defined as outward facing especially focused on talking with customers about their needs. Thus, the role of the Product Manager versus that of the Product Owner has been problematic because they have had a different focus from the beginning. While there mindsets and strategies may differ ultimately they both have the same larger goal of a delivering a product that meets the customer and company’s needs.

In Agile Product Management, certain tasks and strategies need to be put in place so that development is working on the most important, customer-focused items. Agile Product Management provides the strategic context to make sure developers are working on the most valuable aspects of the problem. The tasks listed here are what Agile Product Management uses to guide their work:

• Product vision: The essence of your product shared with your team to give them a shared direction.
• Product roadmap: A time-based view of the different product versions your team will create as they deliver increasingly valuable product to customers.
• Product Lifecycle: The stage in your product and industry lifecycle each of which has key success drivers.
• Prioritized Product Backlog: prioritization is discussed further down this page.

Agile Product Management and the Product Lifecycle

The product life cycle indicates which types of products are more likely to be successful in your market. With Agile Product Management, you’ll want to have guidelines as to the types of product lines you want to have at each stage of the product life cycle. Beware. Although this is called the product life cycle, it is more accurately known as the industry life cycle.

Introduction: When a product type is introduced, you may only have one version of your product. For example, early on in the smartphone market, each company offered one version of their product.

Growth: During the growth phase of a market, more versions become available. Larger, smaller, more and less powerful for example. During this phase, companies work out the boundaries of the most common customer types.

Maturity: In a mature market, your product is available anywhere that it makes sense. It is packaged so that it’s easy for virtually anyone to get it working. And you create the broadest product line possible. You want to avoid product holes where competitors can sneak in and take market share.

Decline: As demand for your type of product declines, you take a hard look at every model. Which models make the most money. Which have the bulk of the profits and revenue. And you cut the ones that are not very popular. You can see this with telephones.

Does the stage your product is in change the product vision for this development cycle or sprint? Does the stage your product is in change the way your product backlog is ordered?

Agile Product Management: Prioritization

Choices, choices. Inevitably there are a lot of great ideas and not enough time or money to create everything. You have to make the hard tradeoffs. You have to prioritize. In Agile Product Management, the five inputs to prioritization are as follows:

Customer: Who are the customers? What are they looking for in a product?

Market: How many people are looking for this product solution? What do they expect to pay for it? How do they expect to buy it?
Competition: Who else is in trying to sell to the same customers and markets? Why are people selecting their offering? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Technology: What are the trends in the underlying technology in your product? Are there other technologies that will change the playing field? How will my company compete as and when the technology shifts?

Strategy: What business, market and differentiation strategies can I implement via my product?

Once all these inputs are understood, strike a balance in determining what is most important to do next. Then explain it to your team and move forward. Agonizing over small differences in prioritization vs getting something into customers hands isn’t worth the wait.

Mindset of an Agile Product Manager vs. an Agile Product Owner

Product Managers and Product Owners have a different mindset when they approach their work. Given a certain set of resources (money and people) Product Managers want to deliver a certain business result. They might say: “Give me $200,000 and I will make you $1 million in revenue.”
Product Owners mindset is subtly different and definitely reduced in scope. “Give me $200,000 and I’ll make sure that the development team will deliver the most value for that investment.”

If you are both a Product Manager and a Product Owner, be conscious whether at this moment you are focusing on the business result or the maximizing the value of development investment. Your decision could change according to which hat you have on.

Next Steps

Agile Product Management is a topic that is too broad and complicated for this guide to fully cover. You can dive deeper in our online and in-person training. To get your feet wet even more learn about Scrum development cycles and key terms as well as the members of Agile and Scrum teams.

The post Agile Product Management appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

It’s a question we hear all the time… What is Product Management? So we created this guide to help individuals, teams and companies answer that question.

What is Product Management? A Guide for Individuals, Teams, and Companies

We created this guide to help individuals, teams, and companies answer the question: “What is Product Management?” If you can successfully understand, articulate, and define the goals of a healthy Product Management function, you will dramatically increase your ability to introduce and optimize Product Management.

This Guide Will Be Useful for:

• New and experienced Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, and Product Owners
• Those who want to become Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers, and Product Owners
• Those who interact with the Product Management function in their company

We hope that this guide helps you explain Product Management as a function, clarify roles and responsibilities, understand key deliverables, define core skills and ship some great products!

So Really… What is Product Management?

Product Management is a critical strategic driver in a company. It can make a huge impact in terms of whether products, as well as the entire company, succeed or fail in both the short and long term. It’s the only role in a company that grasps all aspects of the business, including customers, the market, competition, trends, strategy, business models, and more. As such, great Product Management makes great companies.

The Benefits of Having a Great Product Management Organization:

• 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 due to solid product strategy (which drives overall company efforts)

High-performing organizations value the contribution and direction that strong Product Managers bring to the company – that’s the bottom line.

What is Product Management’s Function in the Company?

Central Point of Communication

Think about it this way: Product Management is in contact with all company departments—as shown above—as well as external entities such as customers, press, analysts, and partners. Although each of the other groups understands its roles 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 to bring great products to market.

Watching the Whole Product

Product Management focuses on not only the product’s features and benefits, but the role expands to look at how the customer understands product value. This includes how a product is sold, supported, financed, and anything else that the customer could consider as part of the product. While driving delivery of the “Whole Product” is not strictly identified as a Product Management job description, wise Product Managers reach beyond their official responsibilities to make sure that a customer’s needs are met through all departments in the company.

Defining Product Strategy

Product Managers are responsible for defining product strategy. They understand the relative position of their product in today’s market and what tomorrow’s product should become so that it can compete in the future marketplace. Product Management constantly tracks how fast they are making progress as they execute against a defined product strategy.

Defining Go-To-Market Strategy

Product Management knows that products are only successful if bought by customers. A go-to-market strategy means that the right pieces are put in place so that a successful product is marketed and sold effectively.

Gathering Requirements

Product Managers are responsible for gathering customer-focused requirements. Their job is to correctly collect and analyze customer input.

Guiding Engineering

In line with gathering requirements, the next step is for Product Managers to translate that into product requirements, which engineering uses to create the final product. This translation of “the customer said” to “the product does” is a core Product Management function, which involves immense effort and tact in guiding engineering to the best solution.

Guiding Sales and Marketing

Finally, Product Managers are responsible for guiding sales and marketing to use the best messages when promoting products. In some cases, Product Marketing Managers take on this role. Sales and Marketing use the information given to them by Product Managers to best communicate the value of the product and complete the sales process.

Project Management

Companies have project managers to keep the process of product development on track. Project Managers coordinate different departmental tasks and schedule concurrent activities so that a product is released to market in as short a time as possible.

Marketing

In the sequence of getting product into customer’s hands, Marketing is the next function over from Product Management and Product Marketing. The marketing role includes generating customer demand, helping Product Marketing and sales respond to competitive moves, taking care of public relations, planning events, and creating material that supports the sales force and channel.

Sales

The overall goal of a sales function is to facilitate the sales process. A sales process is one in which customers conclude that they should purchase your product—and then do so. Aside from the traditional salesperson who has a direct relationship with the buyer, Sales Engineers or Technical Sales Managers are involved in more complex sales situations, too. This technical sales function dives into the proposed solution, including a demonstration of the product in action. They ensure that once purchased, the product will do what it’s supposed to do.

Product Development

Product development or, as it is sometimes called, engineering, is the organization that creates your product. Many specialties fall under this one title, including (but certainly not limited to) the following categories:

• User experience or interface designers
• Software Developers
• Hardware engineers
• Quality Assurance

Your relationship with product development is key to your success as a Product Manager. The product developers translate customer problems that you define into real products that address those needs. The quality of your communication and influencing skills are critical in guaranteeing you have a good relationship with product development.

The Finance department will be highly focused on keeping the numbers straight and ensuring the company is making more than it spends. You will collaborate with this department on the cost of development, revenue and profits, pricing, and—sometimes—forecasting.

The Operations team streamlines task sequences to deliver products and services. They also manage many critical company processes. You need to convince them to implement as simple a process as possible so that your customers can easily buy your product. Conversations with operations are often very detailed; hang in there. These details can make or break the success of your product.

The Service and Support team provides the after-sales support that keeps your customers satisfied as they use your product. Talk to Support folks to discover customer issues and train them on new products and changes to existing ones.

In Summary…

A well-oiled Product Management function can deliver amazing products that customers understand, buy, and use. Becoming great at Product Management requires focusing on the product and marketing side of the business. Every day brings a variety of challenging and exhilarating situations that Product Managers face and find solutions to. Are you ready to dive in and learn more?

If you would like to learn more about Product Management, see the roles, skills, and documents needed.

The post What is Product Management? appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

It’s a question we hear all the time… What is Product Management? So we created this guide to help individuals, teams and companies answer that question.

Product Management Glossary: A Guide for PMs

We created this guide to help individuals, teams and companies answer the question: What is Product Management? If you can successfully understand, articulate and define the goals of a healthy Product Management function then your ability to introduce and optimize Product Management will be dramatically increased. We hope that this guide helps you explain Product Management as a function, clarify roles and responsibilities, understand key deliverables, define core skills and ship some great products!

A

Agile

Agile is a project management and product development approach characterized by iterative development cycles or incremental “sprints.” Agile development can accommodate frequent changes without slowing down the project timeline, helping teams deliver innovative products to customers faster. In contrast to the discrete development phases of the “Waterfall” approach, Agile development encourages feedback. Requirements, plans and test results are continuously evaluated, enabling teams to pivot as needed, and keep pace with changing priorities and customer needs.

Agile Framework

An Agile framework outlines a specific approach to planning, managing and executing work related to a project or product development effort. They outline a set organization and workflow patterns to help guide teams as they work within the Agile methodology. Three popular Agile frameworks are Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming (XP).

Agile Product Manager

An Agile Product Manager is responsible for guiding the product development team through Agile development cycles. They must maintain the product vision, solicit and integrate feedback, set product strategy and encourage an Agile approach to product planning, development and execution.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

ARR is a company’s expected annual revenue from customers in exchange for providing them with products and/or services. Unlike revenue from single sale, ARR refers to predictable, stable revenue that’s expected to continue into the future.

B

Product Management is a critical strategic driver in a company. It can make a huge impact in terms of whether products, as well as the entire company, succeed or fail in both the short and long term. It’s the only role in a company that grasps all aspects of the business, including customers, the market, competition, trends, strategy, business models, and more. As such, great Product Management makes great companies.

Beta Plan

A beta plan is a set of tests designed to determine if a completed product fulfills the value proposition that it was designed to deliver. Beta Plans are executed following product development but prior to launch, and requires collaboration between the Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Project Manager/Administrator and Engineering team.

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a fictional character that exhibits the characteristics, attributes, demographics, motivations, and preferences as your target customer. Marketers leverage buyer personas to assist with market segmentation and messaging. Buyer personas are based on market research and customer data.

Buyer Behavior

Buyer behavior refers to the actions an individual, group or organization takes prior to deciding to purchase a product or service. It includes all activities related to the evaluation, purchase, use, and disposal of a product or service, and encompasses a customer’s emotions and preferences, and how they impact the decision to buy.

Business Case

A business case is the justification or reasoning behind initiating a project or activity. In many cases, the business case is formalized in writing or a presentation but can also be communicated verbally.

C

Certified Product Manager

According to the AIPMM, a Certified Product Manager has completed a set of AIPMM credentials that indicate a thorough understanding of product manager functions and responsibilities. Obtaining these credentials indicates that the individual adheres to standards of excellence in Product Management. Certified Product Managers excel in a wide range of product management skills, including market planning, writing business plans, competitive analysis, product specifications, product launch plans, product lifecycle modeling and management, phase-gate process modeling, product/Market data modeling, and more.

Certified Product Marketing Manager

According to the AIPMM, a Certified Product Marketing Manager has completed a set of AIPMM credentials that indicate a thorough understanding of the product marketing functions and responsibilities. Obtaining these credentials indicates that the individual adheres to standards of excellence in Product Marketing Management. Certified Product Marketing Managers excel in strategic and tactical marketing functions throughout a product’s lifecycle and are proficient at creating and executing the marketing plan and budget, marketing deliverables and campaigns, assessing the marketplace and competition through research and analysis, and translating insights into business opportunities.

Chief Product Officer

The Chief Product Officer (CPO), sometimes called “Head of Product,” heads up the product department, is responsible for the product discipline, and acts as a strategic leader and visionary for an organization’s product team. As part of the executive team, the CPO’s goal is to facilitate the development of products that deliver value to customers and the business.

Churn

Churn, sometimes referred to as attrition, refers to the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company.

Competitor Analysis

A competitor or competitive analysis is the process of identifying companies that offer products and/or services similar to yours and conducting an analysis of their relative strengths and weaknesses. It involves assessing competitors’ products, services, and sales and marketing tactics and strategies to identify opportunities for your business to differentiate your offerings.

Continuous Deployment

In product development, continuous deployment is an engineering approach in which new features and functionalities are delivered frequently through automated deployments.

Cross-Functional Team

A cross-functional or “multidisciplinary” team is made up of people from different business units or functional areas of an organization. For example, a cross-functional team may include people from marketing, engineering, operations, and customer service.

Customer Retention

Customer retention is a company’s ability to attract repeat business and retain customers over time. A high customer retention rate indicates a product or service is in demand and satisfying customer needs. A low retention rate indicates a need to refine the product, service or strategy to better meet customer needs. In essence, customer retention is a metric that helps to measure customer loyalty, which is important, because the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher than retaining existing customers.

Customer Advisory Board

A customer advisory board or product advisory counsel is a group of customers that an organization invites to meet on a regular basis and provide insights and feedback about the company’s products, services, roadmap and go-to-market strategy. Members are often executives in their companies. Most customer advisory boards have 10-12 members, each bringing unique backgrounds and perspectives to the table.

Customer Validation

Customer validation is an essential part of product development. The validation process tests assumptions and hypotheses about the customer problem, target market, and product attributes, and enables teams to gather evidence for a product’s potential market success before investing too much money in development.

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map tells the story of your customer’s experiences with a brand across all channels throughout the customer lifecycle. It’s often visual in nature, providing business leaders insights into customer pain points and helping to fine-tune the customer experience.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is the amount of money required to attract and convert a new customer. It’s used to help companies measure the return on investment on their customer acquisition efforts and includes the cost of all time, resources, and materials used in the process.

D

Daily Scrum

In Agile development, the daily Scrum is a 15-minute event during which a product development team synchronizes activities and creates a plan for the next 24 hours.

Design Thinking

Design thinking represents the cognitive, strategic, and practical processes used to come up with design concepts for development. It involves problem-solving based on prioritizing customer needs, and leverages an iterative approach that spans five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Differentiation

In Product Development, differentiation refers to what makes a product or service different from a competitor’s product or service. It helps the product or service stand out to the target audience and increase brand loyalty. Achieving differentiation requires introducing unique or distinctive characteristics, features, or capabilities that add value.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the process of integrating digital technologies into various areas of the business to improve the way the business operates and deliver additional value to customers. The goals for digital transformation include improving operational efficiency, enabling rapid innovation, improving the customer experience, and reducing costs. Four target areas for digital transformation are technology, data, process, and organizational change.

Digital Product Manager

A Digital Product Manager oversees the digital product lifecycle, from inception through development and market launch. They are responsible for driving market success of digital products, such as SaaS offerings, websites, apps, and tools. 

E

Epic

In Agile product development, an “epic” is a large amount of work that can be broken down into smaller pieces called “stories.” Epics help product teams organize tasks and prioritize activities throughout product development. Epics can span across sprints, teams, and projects.

F

Feature

A product feature is a piece of functionality a product offers that delivers a benefit or value to the customer.

Feature Flag

A feature flag, or feature toggle, is a software engineering technique that’s used to turn functionality on or off during runtime, without having to deploy new code. This enables software companies to gradually roll out new features or fix bugs without having to redeploy the software. Using feature flags streamlines development and enables teams to roll back code when needed, quickly and easily.

G

Go-To-Marketing Strategy

The Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is an organization’s plan to deliver a product to market in a way that’s intended to achieve competitive advantage. It includes numerous tactics and activities, including defining pricing, branding, messaging, marketing campaigns, sales outreach, channel distribution, and more.

I

Iteration

In Agile development, an iteration represents a single development cycle. It’s a small section of the overall planning and development process that enables development teams to gain insights and feedback that help guide the next step in product development.

Innovation

According to ISO TC 279, innovation is “a new or changed entity realizing or redistributing value.” In other words, it’s the process of applying a new idea or set of ideas that result in the introduction of new products or services, or improve existing products or services, adding value by enabling new solutions to a problem or market need.

Integration

In Product Development, integration refers to combining smaller components or separate systems into a single system that functions as a whole. Links between the two components enable data to be shared, with the goal of providing enhanced functionality and value for customers.

J

Jobs to be Done (JTBD)

JTBD is a framework that helps organizations understand the jobs customers are trying to get done by using your product or service. It’s the starting point for innovation and product strategy, and the basis for the product roadmap. Consider it a lens through which you view and observe your market, your customers and their needs, and your competitors.

K

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that help you evaluate the success of an organization, or its products and services. Examples of KPIs include customer lifetime value, customer satisfaction score, or revenue per customer. KPIs should be defined in alignment with a company’s business goals and objectives.

L

Lifetime Value (LTV)

The Customer’s LTV represents the amount of revenue a customer will deliver to an organization over the course of the business relationship.

Lean Canvas

Adapted by Ash Maurya from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas is a one-page business plan that helps to deconstruct a business idea into key assumptions, to help teams validate their ideas. Lean Canvas is intended for use by startup companies.

Lean Product Development

Lean product development is a methodology that focuses on a lean approach to developing products, with the goal of reducing waste, accelerating market delivery, and increasing customer value.

M

Markets

A market is a place where buyers and sellers come together to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. It comprises systems, institutions, processes, and procedures, and the infrastructure in which such exchanges can take place.

Marketing Plan (Template)

A marketing plan provides a high-level view of the tactics and strategies used to deliver a product to market. It includes a strategic roadmap that the business can use to organize, execute, and track its GTM strategy over time.

Market Validation

The market validation process helps determine if there’s a need for a product in the target market. It’s the process of validating a product or business idea to gauge whether the target audience will like the product and want to purchase it.

Market Requirements Document (MRD)

The MRD is a document that outlines customer requirements for a particular product or service. It may contain information about the product’s vision, the competitive landscape, a business analysis and market opportunity, as well as a high-level overview of key features and capabilities.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

An MVP is a version of a product in development that has just enough features to be introduced to the market and used by early customers. The MVP helps teams collect feedback for future development cycles, and it also serves to validate customer needs prior to investing in developing a full-featured version of the product.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is a calculation of predictable total revenue generated by your business from all the active subscriptions over the period of one month.

Mockup

In product development and manufacturing, a mockup is a scaled down or full-size model of a product or service for use in design evaluation, promotion, or other purposes. It may be a prototype that includes part of the functionality of the finished product.

O

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs provide a framework for collaborative goal setting and defining measurable outcomes. Teams use OKRs to align teams around goals, and measure and report on their progress toward accomplishing them.

P

Positioning

Product positioning is the process of defining where a product or service stands in relation to other competitive offerings in the marketplace and in the minds of consumers. It helps to establish the image or identity of a brand or product to shape consumer perceptions.

Prioritized Product Backlog

In Agile development, the product backlog is a prioritized list of work derived from the product roadmap and requirements document, with the most critical items at the top. The product backlog helps teams understand and align on what to work on first.

Pricing Strategy

A pricing strategy is a model for establishing the best possible price point for a product or service, in order to maximize profits while meeting customer demand. Pricing strategies consider the consumer’s ability to pay, market conditions, and competitor pricing, as well as costs associated with developing and distributing the product.

Product

Simply put, a product is an item, service, or system that a business sells to satisfy a customer’s need or want.

Product Adoption

Product adoption describes the extent to which a target user becomes aware of and uses a product. Once they discover the product’s value, product adoption may expand as they begin using more features and capabilities.

Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit is the degree to which a product or service addresses a need or solves a problem for the target market.

Product Launch

A product launch describes all of the plans and activities around bringing a new product or service to market. It’s a multidisciplinary endeavor with the goal of making a product generally available for purchase. A product launch encompasses activities leading up to the product’s market introduction, the introduction itself, and how the product performs in the months that follow.

Product Life Cycle (PLC)

The PLC represents the time period between introducing a product to market and removing it from a portfolio offering. It consists of four stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. Product Managers use the PLC to make decisions about advertising investments and timing, pricing, packaging design, growth and channel strategies, target audiences, and other key factors involved in marketing and selling a product.

Product-Led Growth

Product-Led Growth is a model focused on the end-user that relies on a product itself to drive customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. In the Product-led Growth model, the product becomes a marketing channel, allowing customers to try it out, assess its value, purchase the product, and tell others about it, without the traditional interaction with a salesperson or a marketing campaign.

Product Strategy

A product strategy is a high-level plan for a product that defines what a business wants to achieve with the product and how it will accomplish those goals.

Product Ops

Product Ops is short for Product Operations and refers to the operational function in an organization that facilitates communication between various teams involved in product development, including product, engineering, customer success, and others. The job of Product Ops is to help these teams work together effectively and reduce friction that could delay product development.

Product Manager

The Product Manager is responsible for delivering a differentiated product to market that addresses a market need and represents a viable business opportunity. A key component of the Product Manager role is ensuring that the product supports the company’s overall strategy and goals. They are responsible for managing the product throughout its lifecycle and working with designers, developers, quality assurance engineers, supply chain and operations experts, manufacturing engineers, Product Marketing Managers, Project Managers, sales professionals, and others to make that happen.

Product Marketing Manager

The Product Marketing Manager is responsible for creating demand for products through effective positioning, messaging and marketing programs. They must be experts at marketing and market strategy, and able to collaborate with the Sales team to generate revenue from the product. Launch plans and marketing campaigns are key deliverables for this role.

Product Vision

Your Product Vision describes the essence of a product, including the problems it solves, the target audience, and the product-market fit. It provides the product development team with a broader understanding of the overarching, long-term mission for the product and the ultimate purpose behind their work.

Product Differentiation

Product differentiation is the process of distinguishing a product or service from competitive offerings. It includes identifying features, functionality, and capabilities that set the product apart in the market and makes it more appealing to the target audience.

Product Management

Product Management is the function within an organization responsible for a product’s overall success. Product Managers work with groups inside and outside of the company to build and execute a plan to make sure the product best meets its financial and strategic goals. Their role encompasses business justification, planning, verification, forecasting, pricing, product launch, and marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.

Product End of Life (EOL) Plan

The EOL plan is put in place when a product is retired from the market. Retirement can involve completely pulling the product from the market without replacing it or, in many cases, replacing it with a new version.

Product Backlog

In Agile product development, a product backlog is a prioritized list of deliverables – a to-do list of sorts – and is considered an “artifact” within the Scrum framework. The product backlog helps teams decide how to proceed with their work to best meet the needs of customers.

Profit and Loss Statement

A profit and loss (P&L) statement is a financial document that shows a company’s revenue and expenses over a specific time period, usually a fiscal year.

Q

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is the process of determining whether a product or service meets standards for quality and usability, to avoid problems that may arise from a low-quality product being delivered to customers.

R

Release Management

In Product Development, release management is the process of planning, scheduling, managing, and deploying product releases. The goal is to ensure that a product release is delivered efficiently while meeting business objectives and maintaining integrity of the production environment.

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI is a performance metric that measures the difference between what a company has invested in a particular project, product, or service and its value to the organization.

S

Segments

A market or target segment is a group of consumers who share one or more characteristics, such as industry, role, age, gender, lifestyle, or others. Product and marketing teams typically create segments within their target audience in order to market and sell to them more effectively.

Sprint Planning

In the Scrum framework for Agile product development, sprint planning encompasses activities around kicking off a sprint. During sprint planning, teams define the objectives, deliverables, and schedule for the sprint, as well as what product backlog items will be worked on during the sprint.

Sprint Goal

In Agile product development, a sprint goal is the specific and measurable objective for a sprint. Determined by the Product Owner and development team, it describes what you plan to achieve during the sprint.

Sprint Cycle

In Agile product development, a sprint cycle is a time-boxed period during which the development team works toward a sprint goal. As part of the process of continuous development, sprint cycles are typically two to four weeks in duration, and when one ends, another begins.

Sprint Review

In Agile product development, the sprint review is a working session during which the development team gathers actionable feedback on work completed during a sprint.

Sprint Retrospective

The final step of a sprint, the sprint retrospective, is an opportunity for the Scrum team to evaluate itself and the work completed during a sprint and devise a plan to implement improvements during the next sprint. 

Stakeholder

A stakeholder is any person or group of people who may be impacted by the activities or decisions of an organization or team within the organization.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning and management technique used to help a business identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to the competition. It can also be used for strategic short- or long-term business planning. 

T

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

TAM is a metric that represents the revenue opportunity and potential for a product or service. Defining the TAM helps businesses prioritize opportunities and activities and narrow their focus about which market segments to target.

Technical Debt

In software product development, technical debt refers to the implied cost of rework that results when a team places more importance on development speed over quality. Similar to monetary debt, technical debt can accumulate “interest” if not addressed, which makes it more difficult to implement necessary changes over time. 

U

User Story

In Agile product development, a user story is an informal description of the features of a product and represents an end goal from the user’s perspective.

Use Case

A use case describes how an end user will use your product or service. A single product may have multiple use cases.

UX Designer

A UX designer focuses on the user experience, with the goal of making a product or service accessible and enjoyable to use. UX designers care about the design, usability, function, and presentation of a product or service, and are interested in optimizing the user experience with the product or service.

V

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a promise made by a business to its customers about the value its product or service will deliver to a particular market segment.

Voice of Customer (VoC)

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is both a process of gathering customer feedback and information about customers’ perceptions about a brand, product or service, as well as the body of feedback itself. It describes how customers think and feel about their experiences with a business and its offerings. 

A value proposition is a promise made by a business to its customers about the value its product or service will deliver to a particular market segment.

W

Waterfall

The Waterfall methodology is an approach to Project Management that takes a linear progression from beginning to end. It depends on careful planning and detailed documentation. In Waterfall, tasks are executed sequentially in phases, including conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Each phase is dependent on the previous phase, unlike the Agile methodology, which is characterized by iterations and flexibility.

Whole Product

The Whole Product concept is an adaptation of Harvard Business School professor Ted Levitt’s  total product concept. Whole Product is centered around the fact that consumers purchase everything they need to get a job done, and not just the core product.

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The post Product Management Glossary appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

It’s a question we hear all the time… What is Product Management? So we created this guide to help individuals, teams and companies answer that question.

When and Why ProdOps is Important to the Product Team and to the Company as a Whole

As successful products and product management teams grow, they must service the demands of many more customers and internal partners. The workload of each Product Manager can literally more than double. Despite – or perhaps, as a result of – this growth, many product teams begin to experience far greater friction in getting things done, not to mention getting them done correctly, completely, and consistently. This affects product management team performance.

The need for a ProdOps team includes these common indicators:

• Ad Hoc Use of Data: Data-gathering, in-product and elsewhere, is done differently for every product or service. This is also the case for your data curation, analysis, reporting, and decision-making. The various Product Managers use data differently, and some don’t use it at all.
• Inconsistent Testing and Learning: You know you should practice continuous discovery, experimentation, and validation, but you’re simply too busy to do this consistently. It feels like you’re not learning about changing customer and market needs quickly enough.
• Getting Lost in the Feature Requests: You’re getting buried in product feedback and feature requests from actual customers, as well as many internal teams and proxies. You’re losing your ability to acknowledge, prioritize, and position those requests.
• Confusion in Commitments: Your team is conveying different messages and roadmap commitments to other stakeholders. Some decisions are made through back–channels, while other decisions are “unmade.” Savvy colleagues on other teams are lobbying certain Product Managers to make commitments for others.
• Messy Processes: Your pre-release and release processes are getting sloppy, and you don’t always meet your release criteria or fully enable your customers and internal teams for product success.
• Pricing and Value Misses: Your pricing is haphazard or stale. You’re not sure if you’re overcharging or leaving money on the table.

In short, Product Operations is essential wherever and whenever product management is gathering customer knowledge, researching market data, prioritizing, making decisions, and releasing products. In other words, it’s essential throughout the product and customer lifecycle. A ProdOps team can provide consistent and higher-quality processes that benefit the product management team and the organization as a whole.

What Do ProdOps Teams Do?

Given the challenges of a growing product management organization, ProdOps is inherently multidisciplinary. The ProdOps team is responsible for driving customer engagement as well as gathering, curating, and exposing data for better decisions. ProdOps leverages your tool stack, templates, and best practices across the product and customer lifecycles, working to reduce the friction and barriers to scaling your organization.

The image below illustrates the many responsibilities of the ProdOps team:

• Customer Enablement & Onboarding: ProdOps is responsible for ensuring users are able to discover new product capabilities, adopt new features, and get value. They ensure self-service documentation, guided tours, and help are available for your users. They might work closely with your implementation, onboarding, or professional services teams, depending on who else in your organization serves those customer needs.
• Roadmap Process: Your roadmaps will vary across your products, with each Product Manager owning the actual roadmap. But their use, formatting, and interpretation should be consistent! ProdOps ensures your roadmapping tool is used consistently and that all roadmaps are updated and communicated periodically.
• Pricing Governance: As part of the ProdOps team, the Pricing Manager plays a vital role in ensuring pricing governance. Like roadmaps, each Product Manager typically owns their own pricing (and value proposition!) – but the methodology must be consistent, and there must be a regular cadence of pricing reviews and adjustments.
• Product Performance: This ProdOps role can also be considered User Engagement. ProdOps ensures that your products are fully instrumented so that your team can really understand your in-product user journey. Where are your users spending their time? How often are they using your product? How long are they staying? Which features are they using the most or the least?  What are they abandoning? (Note this is very different than the engineering view of product performance, which is focused on server workloads, network performance, and the like.)
• Internal Enablement: ProdOps is all about enabling the other teams that touch customers, including marketing, sales, customer success, support, and others. They ensure all of those groups have the information they need for end-to-end readiness for releases, updates, or new features.
• Customer Outreach: ProdOps facilitates contacting customers and getting information from them. This must be done thoughtfully and consistently, so customer-facing teams are not disrupted.

The remaining responsibilities are typically handled by individual Product Managers. With ProdOps handling the other responsibilities, your Product Operations Manager can focus on doing their best possible work in these areas. 

What’s the trigger for establishing your ProdOps practice and team? In our experience, there are several indications that it’s time to invest in ProdOps:

1. You have more than six Product Managers.
2. You have more than three product lines.
3. Your Product Managers can no longer respond in a timely or consistent manner to your internal stakeholders.
4. Providing a high level of service is disrupting your Product Managers from doing their primary work. 

What is a Product Operations Manager?

The ProdOps team is, by charter, multidisciplinary. To that end, the Product Operations Manager role requires a deep understanding of the full product lifecycle and a talent for developing, deploying, and maintaining many services that bring efficiency and consistency to the whole team. Product Operations Managers are responsible for ensuring that the various functions work together effectively and meet the needs of the rest of the product management team.

How ProdOps Teams and Product Operations Managers Work Together

The ProdOps team will have the greatest impact when handling the responsibilities denoted by the dark blue circles in the image above. Those are the essential, often repetitive tasks that product management teams must perform consistently. Taking on these tasks frees Product Managers to concentrate on the items denoted in the light blue circles, where they can provide the most value.

While a ProdOps practice can deliver numerous benefits by aligning common practices and making them consistent and scalable, remember that, ultimately, the responsibility for product strategy, decision-making, and execution success rests with individual Product Managers. These roles of the Product Manager and ProdOps team are intended to be symbiotic. The product management team should embrace the ProdOps team as a capability that serves them, protects their time, and increases their efficiency. The ProdOps team and Product Operations Manager should look for examples of Product Managers modeling how various tasks can be done most effectively – then standardize and align the rest of the group with best practices. 

What ProdOps is NOT

The “Ops” part of ProdOps can be a bit confusing. Now that you know what the team does, let’s clarify what it doesn’t do. ProdOps is not responsible for implementing or operating your product – that’s the job of the DevOps team. What’s more, ProdOps is not responsible for operationalizing tasks owned by other groups such as marketing, sales, finance, customer success, and others.

Start Building Your ProdOps Team

If you’re looking to start building your Product Operations team, identify concrete ways you can model the ROI of building a ProdOps team.

Here are some best practices to follow:

• Have credible, quantitative data to support product management and engineering prioritization to “build the right thing.”
• Accelerate adoption of product features that deliver value to your customers.
• Reduce documentation and other communications workloads for new product releases.
• Pre-empt support tickets by notifying in-product users about changes or defects.
• Reduce and pre-empt churn with in-product user engagement and automate intervention when needed.
• Increase in-product up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

When you get the green light to invest in Product Operations, follow these steps:

• First, create the role for a dedicated Data Analyst to standardize how you gather and manage in-market and in-product data.
• Ensure your entire product management team knows how to use your standard tool stack and get the most value from it.
• Consolidate your multiproduct release management efforts into a core group with at least one Project Manager.
• Capture the ROI data above, as well as additional data as your savings accrue, and communicate those wins to your executives.

Learn More

Take Productside’s Digital Product Management course, which focuses on how to optimize the ProdOps function so that your Product Managers can focus on building better products. Contact us for an assessment of your product management team to help guide you on skill-building in preparation for your ProdOps practice.

The post What is Product Operations (ProdOps)? appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

What Is Product-Market Fit?

Countless companies have put together great teams, who built great products that never found the success they anticipated. Why? Because they weren’t rigorous enough at establishing product-market fit, which is what we are really seeking when we explore any new opportunity.

Startups often use the “lean startup” methodology to try to achieve and validate product-market fit, but the methodology is applicable to any product or service. This methodology investigates three dimensions that make up product-market fit:

• Is the product valuable?  First, you must determine if your product is valuable. In other words, “Do customers want this product?”
• Is the product viable? Is this opportunity economically attractive?  What’s the appropriate business model?  “Should we do this?”
• Is the product feasible? What technologies are needed, what are the support requirements to deliver the desired quality, what people and partners should be involved, and how much time and money will it take to develop the product? “Can we do this?”

For internal products or IT projects, “Problem/Solution Fit” is probably a much better term, but regardless of what type of product we deliver, we must iterate through each of the three dimensions quickly and frequently, because this is the crux of product management.

Why is Product-Market Fit Important?

To help illustrate why Product-Market Fit is important, let’s use a well-known example of a product that failed.

Remember when 3D televisions hit the market? 3D movies made a big comeback in theaters around the world about 15 years ago, and consumer electronics companies made a bet on increasing demand for this type of content at home. They saw some early adoption by tech enthusiasts, but the technology never penetrated into its target market.

In other words, 3-D television never achieved product-market fit.

Why? It was mostly feasible – decent libraries of content already existed, and content providers like ESPN and BBC made commitments to produce more. The technology existed to support home viewing, and the electronics companies could manufacture 3D televisions at scale, with some seemingly minor compromises to the viewing experience.

But the product was neither valuable nor viable.

• Why wasn’t it valuable? Many consumers primarily watch TV casually, often in the background while multitasking. With 3D TV, they needed to wear special glasses and sit at certain optimal viewing angles, which was unappealing, especially with a hefty price premium attached. Some early adopters complained of eye strain and headaches due to the use of active shutter glasses, which made consumers even more skeptical of the technology. Essentially, 3D television was not that much more valuable than existing TV.
• Why wasn’t it viable?  Suppliers drastically misjudged market demand. 3D television was only valuable to a relatively niche group of home theater enthusiasts who were willing to pay high prices for an incrementally better viewing experience. Sustained demand never materialized, and content providers such as ESPN and BBC, who had launched 3D content with much fanfare, began to quietly withdraw their offerings.

In retrospect, it’s clear why 3D television failed. It was a solution in search of a problem — and it never found one. But it serves as a good example of common mistakes even large companies and entire industries can make when bringing products to market. 

So, how do you achieve product success, and avoid making the same mistakes with your products? You need to become an expert at establishing product-market fit and be willing to accept what the research and data tell you, if the results don’t show a good fit.

How Do You Determine Market Fit for a Product?

The Product-Market Fit Pyramid

When evaluating potential ideas, the problem must be worth solving and developing, it should align with your business and brand, with enough people willing to pay for it. The product-market fit pyramid is a useful tool to start with.

Each element of the triangle depends on the others. Think of it as spinning three plates: one in each hand and one on your foot. It’s hard to keep everything spinning and balanced at the same time!

Market Opportunity Hypothesis

Let’s explore another familiar example in the consumer electronics space – the introduction of the iPhone. Back in the mid-2000’s, leaders within Apple developed a Market Opportunity Hypothesis: “smartphones” existed in the form of predominantly business-focused devices designed for managing email and a limited number of specialized software applications.

There was room for disruption in the consumer mobile phone space, where most people still used basic flip phones or messaging phones with inadequate internet browsing capabilities. But consumer phones also posed an existential threat to the iPod’s dominance – as technology improved, their media playback capabilities could begin to compete with stand-alone media players. And who would want to carry two devices if they didn’t have to?

Since the iPod accounted for nearly half of Apple’s revenues, would they eventually be forced to venture into the wireless business?

Screen

When you’ve identified a problem, it’s important to determine whether developing a new product in that space aligns with your corporate vision and strategy. Apple wasn’t just a computer company by this time. They had developed one of the most popular consumer devices ever created – the iPod. And not only did they build the device, but a whole new music distribution platform to go with it, in iTunes. If they built a phone that’s also an iPod, it aligns perfectly with their strategy.

However, it’s possible for a new product to align with your corporate strategy, while being a poor fit with your brand. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case for Apple. By this time, they were already masterful at advertising to consumers. They understood how to make technology fashionable – a status symbol – which they leveraged perfectly as part of the iPhone marketing strategy. This was a fairly easy fit for them.

You also need the internal competencies necessary to enter a new market. And this is where Apple faced most of their early challenges and criticism. They had brilliant people who knew how to develop computers and music players, but what did they know about the mobile phone space? There were dominant players like Motorola and Nokia with decades of experience building consumer phones.

And the “smartphone” arena was already crowded with the likes of Blackberry, Palm Treo, T-Mobile Sidekick, and Windows Mobile devices, all of whom had existing platforms to support their devices. Apple would need to invest in order to build this muscle.  

So far, this is a good idea, with reasonable alignment. But it still needs to be validated.

Validate Market Problem

Once you have identified a problem worth solving, it’s tempting to move directly into the solution space – but remember! The critical next step is testing your ideas with customers. To that end, Alberto Savoia introduced the concept of “pretotypes” in his book, The Right It.

You’ve probably heard of “prototypes”, but what’s a “pretotype”?

Pretotypes help you gather qualitative data on product value and viability at a much earlier stage in the development process. Pretotypes help determine whether anyone wants to solve this problem you’ve identified, and what they will pay to solve it. They answer the question: “SHOULD we make this?”

Prototypes come much later, and they answer questions around product feasibility: will it work, and what will it cost to make? They help answer the question: “CAN we make this?”

Here is a sample of the techniques that can help you pretotype quickly, without having to invest much (or at all) in new technology:

• Concierge Test: Concierge testing is a service offered manually to validate the value of solving a particular problem. Wealthfront, for instance, initially created a concierge test to provide wealth management advice and portfolio management. They would sit with customers, pen and paper in hand, and figure out solutions to wealth management issues, step by step. They added scalability through technology later in the process, but this test proved that the concept was valuable.
• Wizard of Oz: Similar to a Concierge Test, the Wizard of Oz method expects that the humans performing the service are hidden such that the user believes the service is automated. Zappos validated their service using the Wizard of Oz method.
• Landing Pages: Web pages can be set up to help gauge interest around a particular product or solution that isn’t yet available, so potential customers can interact with them. The people testing an idea can collect data on searches, page clicks, and/or registrations, without an actual product to back it up (yet).
• Explainer Videos: These videos describe the value of a potential product and can be used to help solicit feedback on how well the idea resonates with its target market.
• Crowdfunding: Potential customers are given an opportunity to invest up-front based on a future value proposition.
• Storyboards: Storyboards can be similar to explainer videos in that they illustrate how a product will solve a customer problem. They are quick and easy to create and can be used internally to gain alignment and buy-in, or externally to ask potential customers “Does this describe your problem and a solution that you might want?”

Remember that as you are using these techniques, you are trying to prove that the product is valuable to your potential customers, and that they’re willing to pay enough to make your investment worthwhile.

Once you confirm that the market is large enough to be viable and that customers will find your solution valuable, you can return to building prototypes or basic services to confirm that the product is feasible for your company to build profitably.

TAM/SAM/SOM model

Now you’ve validated the market problem qualitatively, and you’ve decided you can and should build a product! But how do you quantify the market opportunity? This is where TAM, SAM, and SOM are helpful.

When Apple first introduced the iPhone, they sought out to capture just 1% of the mobile phone market. Now they are a clear leader in the smartphone space domestically and internationally, with millions of new iPhones shipped each year. So why did they start so conservatively?

Apple evaluated the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for cellular phones, and they quickly came to the conclusion that they couldn’t tackle all of it at once.

They lacked the scale to service the entire market. Not everyone would be able to purchase an iPhone because Apple didn’t have the capacity to churn out enough of them. This is called the Serviceable Available Market (SAM) – the portion of the TAM your company can reasonably expect to serve.

Even in a crowded market, there is typically room for disruptors, and in a market with no commercial solutions, people have likely developed an internal solution or workaround. As such, you are unlikely to obtain all of the SAM.

As a new manufacturer of mobile phones, a key constraint for Apple was finding a cellular network partner who would grant them a great deal of flexibility. They launched in the US with an exclusive agreement with AT&T Wireless that limited them to that one carrier for the first three years. This reduced their Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), which is the slice of the SAM a company will initially target. It may grow over time, but it’s wise to make a conservative estimate at first.

As you develop your own TAM/SAM/SOM model, you will need to take many internal and market constraints into account, and make a number of assumptions. Be as conservative as you can, so that if your results show a profitable opportunity, you can be confident in the estimate.

Ideate

Now it’s time to transition into the solution space. Based on what you’ve learned, further flesh out and refine your ideas. Apple took several years – between 2004 and 2007 – to ideate before releasing the iPhone. They also ran some experiments.

For example, as they didn’t yet have any experience in the mobile phone space, they first approached Motorola, and co-developed the ROCKR E1, which was a fairly basic cellular phone with a key feature – integrated iTunes support. This early “iPod Phone” essentially built the capacity of an iPod Shuffle into a consumer-focused phone.

It didn’t achieve broad consumer success, but it wasn’t really meant to.  This was part of the ideation process that ultimately helped Apple confirm that making “dumb” phones play media wasn’t enough. Consumer phones also couldn’t access the internet well – a problem which had no compelling solution. This is what Apple ultimately solved for. 

After several rounds of ideation, Apple didn’t end up building a “phone” at all. Instead, they set out to build a tiny computer that could also make phone calls.

Develop & Validate a Product Concept

Apple knew how to build full-featured computers, and they knew how to build small consumer devices like iPods. But they had never attempted to build something both as small and as powerful as the iPhone would need to be.

They went through many product concepts before settling on a single pane of durable glass, with a multi-touch interface. They knew it solved the problem, and it was delightful to use. But it wouldn’t be cheap.

So how could they validate customers’ willingness to pay?

They built a hypothesis based on their research during the validation stage. Clearly, they couldn’t target broad market adoption initially. But if their Serviceable Obtainable Market was only 1% of the total mobile phone market, they could focus on consumers with sufficient disposable income.

After multiple rounds of market testing, they targeted consumers who were fashion-forward, cared about convenience, and likely already owned both a mobile phone and an iPod. This put the iPhone’s $499 and $599 price tags within reach of the target market.

Finding Your Product-Market Fit

All the recommendations we covered here can provide a framework to help you gather and analyze this data. To achieve Product-Market Fit, remember that your product must be valuable, viable, and feasible.

Develop a market opportunity hypothesis, screen for fit, validate the market problem, ideate, and finally, develop and validate your product concept.

At the heart of product-market fit is listening to the Voice of the Customer: observing their behavior and determining what problems they are looking to solve when they purchase your products and services.

The rest is up to you.

The post What is Product-Market Fit and How Do You Determine it? appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

Learning how to price a product is more art than science. Product pricing often involves gauging market demand, competitive landscape, and consumer perception. An effective pricing strategy can significantly influence how a product is received in the market, directly impacting a company’s profitability and brand positioning. We created this pricing strategy guide to help individuals, teams, and companies answer that question.

Sometimes product pricing seems so difficult that you just want to put a dart board filled with different prices up on the wall and see what number you hit. Okay, maybe that’s being cavalier about a topic that makes the difference between a profitable product and one that doesn’t quite hit the mark in the market. The truth is that product pricing isn’t about just pricing your product but the strategy involved. You will be much more successful if you use product pricing strategies as a starting point.

Strategy turns pricing into a deliberate process in which the company strategy dictates both the set of product features, as well as the value customers associate with them and the brand. In this scenario, product pricing is a natural outcome of the discussion, not a starting point. For example, does your company create luxury products with a high-end brand? If so, product pricing strategy almost dictates that you set your price very high to convey the fact that your brand is very exclusive and that not everyone can afford it. For low-cost brands, like Walmart, the pricing model indicates that you keep your price low and sell on volume.

Common Product Pricing Strategies – Choose Wisely

Cost Plus

Calculate a product’s costs and add a markup. This internal method of focusing on pricing doesn’t really take into account what the value is to the customer, but it’s a way to ensure the profit you desire for each unit of the product sold. This is NOT the best product pricing strategy.

Value-Based Pricing

The value-based pricing strategy focuses on what the product is worth to customers. Determining value-based pricing can be complex. A general rule is that you break down each piece of the additional value that you provide over and above today’s solutions and then calculate what the total adds up to. Then you test it with various audiences to see what happens when customers are faced with a buying decision at that price. If you get stuck, bring in a pricing strategy expert.

Pricing Strategy Examples: Cost-Based vs Value-Based Pricing

Here’s a simple value-based pricing example:

You take a small child to a petting zoo, and she wants to feed the goats. You put a quarter in the goat food dispenser. From a pricing perspective, there is the cost of the goat food — about two cents. Then there is the amazing value you get from watching your child grinning as she feeds the goats. You take pictures. It’s so cute. Okay, what was that worth? $5? $10? You’re going to show this picture at her wedding reception 20 years from now, right? $100? The petting zoo charges you 25 cents. It’s a deal.

The petting zoo is most likely using cost-plus-based pricing when it could charge a much higher amount because the value of that particular moment is very high for parents.

Now, think of your product and the problem it solves or what it provides to the customer. Does the customer get to go home earlier at night? Does she not worry about her work so much? If you sell security software to an IT manager who is then able to manage the software more easily and work shorter hours, then the value to her may be very high. What value does your product provide? It isn’t in a list of features; it’s in the benefits (often defined in emotional terms) that your product provides to your customers. How much is each benefit worth compared to what the customer does now?

Product Pricing Based on Market Position

The fundamentals of pricing strategies are based on how your product is perceived in the market. Are you a market leader with a differentiated product? If so, your price most likely sets the benchmark for the market. All other products will be valued against yours. If you have a less dominant position, you may find that lowering the price below that of the market leader is the only way to compete. If you have a specialized niche, you may be able to charge even more than the usual rate because the value is so much more. For example, think of products for the military. If your company builds products that can handle harsh conditions such as extreme heat and sandy environments and there aren’t that many specialized suppliers of the product, the military is going to be willing to pay you a higher price.

Your Price and the Price to the Customer

When you create a product, you’re often not the one selling it directly to customers. Customers are often getting it from resellers who buy from distributors. Each step along the chain between the producer and the consumer takes a cut of the money that eventually comes from the customer. The table shows you what this pricing stack looks like for a 25-pound bag of goat food.

As a Product Manager, you need to understand not only your price but also the price up and down the line of your distribution channel – and in some detail. What margins can each channel partner accept and still have a viable business? If you don’t know it today, go and do this research. You’ll need it soon enough.

Gotchas to Avoid in Your Pricing Strategy

While there are many pitfalls in product pricing, here are a few to keep in mind.

• It’s hard to hold the course on your pricing strategy when you’re scared that you won’t make the sale.
• Keep pricing across the product line consistent.
• It’s virtually impossible to raise your price after the product has been released. The market will rarely accept it. The opposite, however, is true. You can always lower your price if need be.
• Most pricing decisions are made on a gut-feeling basis. By applying some strategic thinking you’ll be ahead of many companies as well as your competitors.

Good luck with developing and keeping consistent with your product pricing strategy.

The post What Are Product Pricing Strategies? appeared first on Productside | Product Management Courses & Training.

Product Owner

The primary responsibility of an Agile Product Owner is to represent the customer to the development team. Product Owner Responsibilities include:

• Managing and visualizing the product backlog or the prioritized list of requirements for future product development.
• Changing the order of items in the product backlog.
• Being available to the development team at all times to answer any questions team members have regarding the customer’s needs and the customer’s views of how the team is implementing a product feature.

The Product Owner Role is an essential member of any agile scrum team.

Navigating Common Pitfalls as a Product Owner

• A Product Owner shouldn’t be a Scrum Master. The Product Owner role is entirely separate from the Scrum Master, and both need to be separate people to make sure that responsibilities are not muddled.
• On many teams, the Product Manager also fills the Product Owner role. This situation leads to a crushing workload and difficult-to-manage expectations because Product Managers should be spending a fair amount of time understanding customers’ needs by stepping outside of the office.
• The need to be in the office as a Product Owner while still having a deep understanding of customers is a conflict that continues to create great difficulty for approximately 70% of Product Managers and Product Owners in Agile development organizations.
• Product Owners are placed in the engineering organization, while their Product Manager is part of Marketing or Product Management. Trying to please two different departments can create conflict between the two roles. The solution? Move Product Owners out of the engineering department so that the customer value is agreed upon before it’s presented to developers.

Product Owner Responsibilities

Here are some bullet points you may find in your Product Owner job description outlining a Product Owner’s responsibilities:

• Ensures user stories are “ready” for development to start work.
• Ensures each story has the correct acceptance criteria.
• Gathers, manages, and prioritizes the product backlog.
• Ensures close collaboration with the development team.
• Works closely with engineering and quality assurance to ensure the right customer problem is solved. This can involve sharing market research and competitive analysis with the team to best focus their efforts.
• Has technical product knowledge or specific domain expertise.
• Contributes to the work of the Product Manager as they define a product differentiation strategy.
• Tracks progress towards the release of a product.

The Product Owner MAY be asked to work on some or all of the following tasks:

• Create the product vision and roadmap that accomplishes the goal of the vision.
• Develops positioning for the product.
• Work with a cross-functional team in planning a product release.
• Develops personas either alone or in conjunction with a team including user experience experts.
• Define customer needs and the associated features to meet those needs.
• Advocates on behalf of the customer for the development team.
• Prioritizes defect or bug resolution.

If you also have Product Management responsibilities, check the list above and look at the image to determine how your actual role lines up. Is there any task that isn’t currently assigned to someone?

Product Owner Key Deliverables

Product Owners maximize value through careful selection of what developers work on next. Here is a list of the most comment documents or deliverables that you may be asked to create and manage. Be aware that each company has its own specific list and terminology.

• Product vision
• Problem statements and scenarios
• Product roadmaps
• Epics and User Stories
• Supporting documents, images, and possibly rough wireframes for user stories

While the list of deliverables is short, it is the Product Owner’s responsibility to create many, many user stories as part of their work.

Product Manager Responsibilities vs Product Owner Responsibilities

The key difference between a Product Manager and a Product Owner revolves around their mindset when approaching a problem to be solved.

Given a task or funding, the Product Manager responds, “If you give me this resource, I will deliver you this business result.” The Product Owner, on the other hand, says, “If you are going to spend this money, I will make sure you get the most value from your development investment.”

Look at our Agile Product Management guide for further information on how Agile and Scrum work.

Required Experience and Skills in the Product Owner Role

Product Owners call on a range of influencing and technical skills. Here is a list of what managers look for when filling a Product Owner role.

• Demonstrated success in releasing products that meet and exceed business objectives.
• Excellent detailed written and verbal communication skills, possibly including some user interface documentation skills.
• Subject matter expertise in the particular product or market and how to develop solutions for this market. Subject matter expertise should include specific industry or technical knowledge.
• Excellent teamwork skills especially with people less skilled in communication.
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority. The ability to influence and work collaboratively with development teams is especially important.

Many Product Owners have a bachelor’s degree in the industry that their product serves or is in development. Some also have additional business training. Even after completing their undergrad education, many Product Owners go on to receive additional product management certifications.

What are you most likely to hear a Product Owner say?

“My development team and I worked closely to make sure that each of the user stories was completely understood. I am confident that they will deliver what we agreed on at the next product review.”

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Plotting Your Product’s Path to Success with a Product Roadmap

Products evolve over time and Product Managers need to get agreement on how the product evolves. Product roadmaps are a great way to document planned changes for product strategy, direction and features. Documenting your plan to deliver product features over time is critical for getting management buy-in, project funding, and customers who agree to buy it before it comes to market.

Where will you use your Product Roadmap?

Product Roadmaps are used virtually every time you present to an audience about your plans for the future for your product, product line or even loftier company goals. The timelines that you choose to show reflect the cadence of new or revised product releases. And if you’re releasing products every few days, then your roadmap will show the direction of development rather than stakes in the ground by which time different features are available.

Before You Start Your Product Roadmap: High-level Roadmaps

High-level roadmaps give context to your product roadmap. You’re not just releasing a product. You are releasing it into a market that has:

• Technology transitions
• Market changes
• Competitive forces
• Platforms to support the product
• Your own company strategy to support

Make sure that you give the context for your product proposal and you’ll have a lot more buy-in to proceed.

An Eight Step Process for Creating a Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps are a core deliverable for Product Managers. Here is a simple eight step process to make sure that you don’t miss a step along the way.

1. Decide the detail level and amount of time to spend depending on your audience and the purpose of the roadmap. Should this be a “quick and dirty” roadmap that you create in half an hour, or is it something that warrants you spending many hours on? How much detail do you want to include? Does it need to include details on all of the features in each release or can it be more high-level?
2. Assess the competitive moves, market and tech trends that are the background into which you are developing your product. This will help you as you plan your product strategy and determine what a winning roadmap will look like.
3. Gather and prioritize your product requirements.
4. Decide on the appropriate timeframe. Will your roadmap be short-term and just showing three, six or twelve months? Or is it a longer-term roadmap that is one, three or five years?
5. Choose an organizing strategy. Are you organizing around customer-focused themes or are you releasing product at a regular cadence?
6. Build an internal roadmap. This should include enough details to help educate your team and others about where the product is headed and what to expect in the future in terms of product releases.
7. Get buy-in and finalize your roadmap. Share the roadmap with your team and executives as you are developing it. Make sure they understand your logic and thinking using the organizing strategy and other data. Once you have a final draft get sign-off from the main stakeholders.
8. Create an external roadmap. Use the internal roadmap as a basis and then remove the appropriate level of detail and specifics so that it can be shared more widely outside of your company to give major customers, the press and industry analysts an idea of how you will achieve your vision.

Eight steps seem so simple. In practice each step may involve a lot more in-depth thought.

Product Roadmap Templates

Product roadmaps help to organize and plan out the future of products, show the team and others how the product will achieve its vision, and serve as a way to communicate with internal and external stakeholders. They can be a highly effective tool for a Product Manager.

Theme-Based Product Roadmap Template

You create this roadmap by grouping your potential prioritized feature list into themes. example, a theme could be performance, usability, or competitive parity. The beauty of a theme-based product roadmap is that it makes creating marketing messages and plans for communicating clearly with customers easier. Without a theme, you may be delivering customers a bunch of features and then leaving them to decide why they should buy.

Golden Feature Product Roadmap Template

Golden feature roadmaps use a simple concept: Choose one critically important feature for each release; the product can’t be released until this golden feature is completed, and only very minor other features can be added. This approach can be a good strategy because it provides focus for product development and makes marketing messaging very clear.

Timed Release Product Roadmap Template

Timed release roadmaps are based on the concept that new versions of the product will be released on a consistent schedule that doesn’t change. For example, a new product would be released every 6 months – no matter what. To create this roadmap, you list your features in priority order for the next release, estimating what can be done in the time frame. If a feature slips and doesn’t make it into this release, it simply goes into the next release. A consistent release cadence like this one works well if your team is doing Agile development and is either releasing after every sprint or combining every few sprints and releasing on a regular schedule.

There are lot of suggested roadmap formats. If none of them work to tell your product, technology or market story use these ideas as a starting point for illustrating what you have to say. Have fun!

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