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.

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.

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.

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.

To meet your customers' demands as a discrete manufacturer, you need to create a product line with various products and options with many possible configurations. Designing your product line for your customers in a way that is not confusing and in the same time meets their personalization needs can be a challenge. Visualizing entire product lines is a way to ensure it is serving the market needs and is easy to understand from a customer's perspective. It is also an essential tool to strategically communicate what is being built and how it serves the market, enabling everyone inside the organization to stay aligned and informed.