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?

Product Managers wear many hats… researcher, business manager, financial analyst, strategist, project manager, product tester, customer service rep, spokesperson… honestly the list is endless.   

Staying competitive means keeping an eye on your competitor’s products and ensuring that your products have a clear differentiating feature against them. Competitor’s products go through changes. Keeping your records up-to-date and regularly revisiting your side-by-side comparison charts is essential in ensuring your product is still staying ahead of its competitors.

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?

Product Managers play a critical role in balancing what customers want with their company’s objectives when identifying products that will be successful. Once these projections are made, they then need to drive the team responsible for turning this vision into reality. However, successful product ideation is not a Product Managers’ only purview. Product Managers also help facilitate or make decisions on what the next generation of products and features should be.  

Competitive analysis is a common practice to ensure your product is unique and competitive compared to others in the market. Once you have the breakdown of each product's differentiating features, you can perform an initial assessment on what price you could offer your product to the market using Economic Value to the Customer (EVC).

Deciding what products and features to offer to your customers requires a clear understanding of your markets. Once you identify market segments, you can propose different product configurations to meet each segment's needs. You can perform an analysis of your products side-by-side against your competition in each segment to see how the segment is being served and find opportunities for new and improved products.

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.

As a product manager, you go through many communication channels to understand your market's needs and define the future product. You collect the information, formulate the product, and complete the product plan, representing many days and months of work. The work doesn't stop there though! Once the product is defined, the product managers face the challenge of communicating the product plan with the broader organization and keeping everyone informed of any changes.

At Gocious, we realize that providing easy access to a central repository, where your stakeholders can get the information they need, about the product's future with a click of a button is essential. From leadership to marketing and engineering, many stakeholders need to always have ready access to the product information without the need or fear of making adverse changes to the product plans.

Now with Gocious, you can invite your stakeholders into your workspace as a viewer. The viewer role allows the user to view the product configurations, features, and reports. They can also export reports in PDF and Excel. However, they would not be able to edit or change any information in the system.

We are excited to announce that we now provide unlimited viewer roles free as part of our Portfolio+ offering subscription.

The success of product teams can boost the performance of a business. Providing the capability to enable and speed up communication provides a powerful way to align the organization and receive valuable feedback from all parts of the company.

Get started with our free trial and boost your product communication power.

Our previous article, we explained how Gocious' Weighted Product Score can help you determine how well your product meets market and business constraints. With our new release, you can now identify how specifications are impacting your overall product score. With this new feature, you can detect and address underperforming specifications to improve your overall product fit.