Product Management plays a key role inside companies driven by their products; it’s instrumental for organizational growth and strategic market advantages. 

Product leaders as revenue growth drivers

The function of product management is evolving within manufacturing companies.  Senior leadership is pressing for more growth, more innovation, more diversification, more market expansion.  All of this falls in the lap of product management to figure out the path forward. It is more important than ever for product management to revisit the tools in their proverbial toolbox.

Product Management has a strong strategic role within product-driven organizations. And yet, it is fraught with archaic processes and tools. Here, we discuss topics that every Product Manager, CEO and any team member contributing to product planning should be familiar with. The content is meant to spotlight Product Management as a discipline, examine existing frameworks and tools, and suggest how this functional area can succeed in today’s environment while setting up for the future.

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).