Launching a new product can be a bit like a science experiment. You have made observations and created a hypothesis with data that supports your claims. Next, the hypothesis gets approved so you launch the product thus testing it.

Now its time to draw conclusions and refine the hypothesis.  

But this presents you with a problem. Your original hypothesis data is not the same as that returning from the real world. So what can you do?

If you want your company to grow and expand, the key to success is a solid product strategy. Your product strategy must be flexible and nimble to quickly react to changing market conditions. Our research has found that product managers rarely use specialized tools to set the strategy of their portfolio. Today’s general productivity tools make it difficult for companies to track and make changes and set their product strategy to adapt to the changing market needs in an agile and efficient way.

As a manufacturer of products, you will ultimately need to set the price for your product in the market. There are pricing methodologies which exist to help you in your quest for the optimal price that the customer is willing to pay while maximizing your revenue and profit. Two straight forward examples are cost + or pricing vs. your competition models. 

However, they do not always fully highlight your true business goal or intended outcomes; are you going to maximize your profits? You might in fact be leaving money on the table. 

Value-based pricing models can help you realize the full potential price of your product. They can also be very confusing to understand or even to put into practice.

Product management teams rely on competitive intelligence and market research to plan out their product lines. But what happens when you try to line up your internal product definition with third-party market research. The data schemas don't match, so what do you do? How do you effectively analyze and compare your own products to your competitors’ when the data is different?

The Product Managers toolkit has traditionally relied primarily on general productivity tools like Excel, Word and PowerPoint. What happens when you make the change to something that has been specifically designed to help Product Managers?

An integrated approach to product management will increase collaboration between team members, data and software systems. Doing this helps to lower the risk of a product failure, while raising your teams efficiency and reducing your organizations time to market.

Doing an analysis on your competitive products is essential to making sure your planned products have the best chance of success in the marketplace. You must identify your strategic advantage and leave the competition in the rear-view mirror.

Do you use weighted scoring today to make product and feature decisions?  Do you use your own scoring model?  or a simple Pugh analysis? How do you factor in innate bias in the decision-making process of what products and features to build?

Gocious recently held a webinar to discuss why integrating product planning with PLM is essential. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, presented the benefits of integration for PLM and product planning. We discussed how Gocious can help with that integration and also digitally transforming the product planning process.

Gocious recently held a webinar to discuss the results and insights of a recent industry market research study that we conducted. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, presented some of the key insights that we uncovered. We ultimately discussed the ways manufacturers can optimize their product launch cycle times.