Product Management – Eventually, It’s About Your Products

Success in product management and product marketing is first and foremost about understanding what your target customers want to accomplish and why it’s a priority. Then and only then are products relevant.

Here’s one line of thinking to put it into perspective.

1. Market Dynamics – Market dynamics ultimately drive organizations from the top down. Take healthcare for example. Some of the top trends influencing healthcare organizations are an aging population, nursing shortages, declining payments and growing numbers of uninsured patients. The key point is that markets do what they do and have no correlation to any product or service.
2. Target Customer Strategy – These macro level market dynamics ultimately shape the overall strategy and spending priorities for healthcare organizations because they create both issues and opportunities. For example, increasing numbers of uninsured patients may drive a strategic initiative to offer high volume, low cost, low margin health services and/or it may postpone capital purchases due to declining payments. The strategic direction of any company targeting healthcare should align with these influencing factors collectively. Products aren’t relevant yet.
3. Operational Impact of the Strategy – Following the healthcare example above, market-minded product management and product marketing should determine the operational impact of the strategy. What are the goals and objectives being imposed on department heads because of the strategy and spending priorities? How can products or services support this agenda? This big picture perspective not only drives new product innovation, it can vastly improve the relevance quotient of all marketing and sales efforts to boost revenue of existing products. 
4. People & Work Processes – How are the work routines of people at all levels changing as a result of new operational initiatives mandated by the strategy? What problems do people now have that didn’t matter before? Why are these problems occurring? Which problems if solved make the biggest impact or contribution to the overall strategy? Answers to these questions are mandatory for those leading the product charter as they become driving forces behind all products, features, marketing and sales initiatives.
5. Products - Finally products are relevant. It’s much easier at this point to determine the products and features required to support the healthcare industry on a broad scale. More importantly, product leaders should compare the strategic relevance of their products in healthcare to other segments and invest more heavily in products for those segments where strategic initiatives and spending priorities are better aligned to the things they do well.

The bottom line - product management and product marketing aren’t as much about products as they are about the factors influencing the products. Market-leading organizations spend as much or more time understanding things that influence products as they do designing and building the products themselves. It’s how ground breaking products like TiVo and the iPhone are born. Any company can do it if they align their thought process to that of their target customers first, and think about products second.

If your product management and product marketing teams are too focused on products and features, sign them up for Product Management University where they’ll learn a no-nonsense approach to understanding the market and a product delivery process that delivers what people want to buy most.

2009 Incentive

Attend a 2-day Product Management University public workshop in any city between July 1 and December 30, 2009 for $995 (normally $1495). If you don’t find Product Management University more practical and more useful than comparable training courses from other providers, we’ll refund your registration fee.

Product Management University Schedule & Registration

• Tampa July 14-15
• Boston July 22-23
• San Jose Aug. 4-5
• Atlanta August 12-13
• New York City Sept.1-3
• Los Angeles Sept. 15-17
• Boston September 24-25
• San Jose October 7-8
• Atlanta October 14-15
• Boston November 12-13
• Atlanta December 3-4

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